Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

"Yiddish Culture in Immigration Era New York City"

2017; Volume: 98; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nyh.2017.0010

2328-8132

Timothy Quevillon,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Reviewed by: "Yiddish Culture in Immigration Era New York City" Timothy Quevillon The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal. By Alan Robert Ginsberg. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016, pp. xxiv, 363, $65 Cloth, $34.95 Paper. New York's Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway By Edna Nahshon. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016, pp. 327, $40 Cloth. A continuing trend in recent scholarship immigration has been to look at immigrant life rather than the process of immigration. Before the mid-1990s, scholars focused on how Europeans immigrated and how the United States responded to them, thereby often ignoring the establishment of cultural and social institutions by immigrants. When scholars finally discussed immigrant culture, they did so through a lens of "whitening." In other words, immigrant culture was a steady process of assimilation and adopting dominant American ideals. This trend has been especially prominent in New York Jewish immigration history. Bucking these conventions, Alan Robert Ginsberg and Edna Nahshon have authored new books that offer a bright picture of a distinct Yiddish culture in New York during the first decades of the 20th century. [End Page 496] In The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal, Alan Robert Ginsberg discusses four Jewish women in New York in the 1920s tied together by the novel, and later a Hollywood movie, Salome of the Tenements. Rose Pastor Stokes was the inspiration for the titular character, Anzia Yezierska wrote the novel, Sonya Levien wrote the screenplay, and Jetta Goudal played her on the silver screen. In a work that is a hybrid of historical analysis and literary critique, Ginsberg examines how each of these women added aspects of their own lives and identities to the character. The lives of these four individuals, Ginsberg argues, also expose the broad contours of the social and cultural landscape in which they lived. Ginsberg's opening chapter delves into this, exploring the methods, motivations, and resources these women drew upon to build personal identities. Each woman embraced the right to choose how to live her life, approached and reacted differently to similar challenges of self-creation, and infused those differences into the heroine of Salome of the Tenements. Building on this, chapters two through five offer biographical sketches of each woman, with attention focused on their connections and their collaboration on Salome of the Tenements. Ginsberg turns to literature review in chapter six, providing a close reading and describing the literary, cultural, and personal influences of the novel Salome of the Tenements. Acknowledging the novel's recent return from obscurity, Ginsberg examines how the book's rejection of the totalizing identity thinking that oppressed women and immigrants in the 1920s continues to attract readers nearly one hundred years after its first edition. His seventh chapter addresses the transformation from novel to movie and the challenges, opportunities, and compromises that arose. Ginsberg ends his book with a final chapter that explores the historical, social, and cultural milieu in which the women of the Salome Ensemble worked. Though the bulk of Ginsberg's book is devoted to biography, he offers compelling evidence that their lives were indicative of the Jewish immigrant experience in the opening decades of the twentieth century. By tackling Jews' common political and social realities, such as communism, nativism, and activism, he suggests that one of the true gifts of these women is their representativeness. However, at the same time, I found myself wanting more context. Though he discusses the larger world around these [End Page 497] women at the beginning and the end of the book, the biographical chapters felt somewhat insular. Nevertheless, Ginsberg's book is a fascinating examination of gender, ethnicity, and community. Well written, and accessibly organized, he offers a vibrant portrait of four women whose lives remain intertwined with one another, successfully arguing that their importance and brilliance cannot be understood apart from each other. The Yiddish theater scene in Manhattan serves as the backdrop for Edna Nahshon's book New York's Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway. Released with an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of the City of New York...