Born in New York City

Alice Elizabeth Kober was born on December 23, 1906, in New York City, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants. Her early life in an immigrant household instilled in her a strong work ethic and a deep appreciation for education as a path to opportunity.

Kober grew up in modest circumstances but excelled academically, eventually attending Hunter College, a public women's college that offered a rigorous education to young women of limited means at a time when higher education for women was far from guaranteed. Her aptitude for languages, mathematics, and meticulous analysis emerged early, foreshadowing the extraordinary analytical career she would later pursue in classical philology and the decipherment of ancient scripts.

The circumstances of her birth—an immigrant family in early twentieth-century New York—place her among the generation of first-generation American women who used education as a means of professional advancement in fields that had historically excluded women, particularly in the male-dominated academy of classical studies and archaeology.