Introduction

JESSICA KIRZANE

Monday, April 24, 1916. Boldly stretched across the front page of the socialist and nationalist New York Yiddish daily newspaper Di varhayt is a story about the conflict between the United States and Germany over Germany’s methods of warfare against passenger- and freight-carrying vessels.¹ Inside the newspaper, among editorials, memoirs, and poetry, is the third installment of Miriam Karpilove’s novel Tage-bukh fun a elende meydel (Diary of a Lonely Girl), entitled “It’s Spring Again.”

On the face of it, the excerpt has nothing to do with the current events that fill the front page of the newspaper—war, diplomatic relations, labor disputes. In this installment, a lovelorn woman laments that her lover has left her. She goes to his apartment to see him and spies through his window the silhouette of a man and woman embracing. Such a narrative may even appear to be intentionally apolitical, providing an escape from the realm of world events into the personal, intimate, and emotional experience of a woman’s desires and despair. But Karpilove’s irreverent and melodramatic work of entertainment fiction is, at moments, intensely political from within the limits of its form as a romantic serial diary novel.

Indeed, Karpilove’s melancholic “lonely girl” offers a political critique in this very moment of desperate longing. She argues that the romantic aphorism that “the youth of the woman is the springtime of her life” is true only for the youth of a wealthy woman, but not for that of the poor, lonely girl who lacks the resources that would make her desirable for social-climbing young men. The narrator is an object of sexual desire lacking in social capital, and politically radical men repeatedly take advantage of her, indulging their own hedonistic springtimes at her expense. These men claim that an ideology of free love goes hand in hand with their liberatory agenda, but when they jilt her and move on, she is left powerless on the sidelines of their political concerns. The moment when Karpilove’s narrator is depicted as a spurned lover is not only a timeless motif of the romance genre, but also a sharp commentary on the political and social context of the novel, shedding light on how modern politics entered into, transformed, and disrupted intimate gender relations in turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban America in ways that were often harmful to women.

The author of this deceptively political text was Miriam Karpilove (1888–1956), a prolific Yiddish writer and editor whose work has received little scholarly attention. She was born in Minsk, in what is now Belarus and was then in the Russian Empire, and immigrated to America in 1905, settling first in Harlem in New York City; later in the Seagate neighborhood of Brooklyn; and then in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where several of her brothers lived. She was among the very few women who made their living as Yiddish writers, and she supplemented her income working as a retoucher, hand coloring photographs. Karpilove wrote hundreds of short stories, belles-lettres, plays, and novels and served as a staff writer for the Forward in the 1930s.² Family lore and photographs depict her as a colorful character with a sharp tongue who “brought us stories from a world of travel and famous people.”³

Dozens of photographs and picture postcards of Miriam Karpilove show her as alternately romantic, flamboyant, and studious. At times she appears with her hair tidily pulled back in a bun, pearls around her neck, and a pince-nez perched on her nose, looking pensively past the camera. Some images show a glowering, tight-lipped young Karpilove, her hair long, straight, and parted down the middle; another shows her wearing a gauzy veil, her face softly turned to the side; an undated family photograph from the 1920s features Karpilove playing guitar for a circle of female friends. Each of these images shows her deliberately fashioning herself as artistic and rebellious—the kind of self-portraiture that she accomplishes in her narrative Diary as well.

In one stunning portrait, Karpilove, draped in a luxurious robe, lounges on a divan, her long hair laying loose across her back. Through her glasses, she peers into a book as though too engrossed to notice the photographer. Here, Karpilove displays herself as a woman with the room of her own in which to pursue her intellectual interests without interference from prying neighbors or demanding suitors and away from the poverty her readership experienced. Unlike the working-class narrator of the Diary, in the photograph Karpilove enjoys fine furniture and clothing; her raiment suggests the kind of figure who would have soaringly passionate love stories to tell. Posed seductively, she directs her attention away from any potential admirer, defiantly turning it toward books and reminding the onlooker to consider her mind as well as her body. The photograph celebrates women’s sexual and intellectual freedom—freedom that the narrator of the Diary strives to attain with great difficulty.⁴

Diary of a Lonely Girl was one of Karpilove’s most popular novels. It was serialized in Di varhayt in 1916–18 and published in book form by S. Kantrowitz in 1918. A novel of love and passion, intimate feelings and scandalous behaviors, Karpilove’s novel slyly attacks the economic and political inequities that women face. In doing so, it reveals the hypocrisies of the societal expectations that the narrator be at once sexually available to freethinking young men and maintain her respectability according to the mores of nosy landladies. The novel offers a raw, intimate, and personal critique of radical urban Jewish society’s complicity in a young woman’s vulnerable circumstances: the narrator is struggling to figure out whether and how she can participate in a culture of free love in which she is undervalued, used, and discarded. The novel’s insight and wit expose and comment upon the precarious status of women in radical American Yiddish youth culture during World War I.

Miriam Karpilove ca. 1920. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

Though the tone of Karpilove’s novel is typical of the wry, removed stance and social criticism of the Greenwich Village authors of the New Yorker in the same period—the dialogue-heavy novel is reminiscent of the work of Dorothy Parker—it is unusual within the realm of American Yiddish literature, especially in writings that have received critical attention. While women wrote in Yiddish in significant numbers, their stories were often dismissed, received little attention, or were assumed to be the work of male authors. As Faith Jones explains, newspapers reviewing or advertising writing by women “preferred women in traditional roles,” celebrating cookbooks and books of beauty advice rather than literary writing.⁵ Women writing from within Yiddish radical secular politics and society were rarely treated as equals to their male counterparts. Women often experienced intellectual and social isolation, in contrast to the friendships and community that male writers enjoyed as part of a male-dominated literary and café culture.⁶ Karpilove’s narrator, though herself not a professional writer, experiences a similar loneliness as an avid reader and intellectual without peers.

As Norma Fain Pratt has noted, Yiddish newspapers sometimes demonstrated how modern and forward-thinking they were by publishing writing by women.⁷ Therefore, Diary of a Lonely Girl would have been understood as an emblematically modern piece of writing simply because it was a woman’s novel in print. The novel seemed even more shocking because the subject matter of the sexually liberated young woman was so controversial, exemplifying the changing roles and expectations for women in a dangerously modern era. However, Karpilove’s novel is more than a scandalous or lighthearted romance; the few scholars who have referenced it have noted that it is radical because of its courtship plot, for which it might otherwise be dismissed as mere entertainment. Irena Klepfisz explains that women writers in Yiddish leftist circles such as Fradl Shtok, Yente Serdatsky, and Miriam Karpilove wrote with deeply personal awareness of “the unfulfilled promises of secular liberation” in which women were expected to perform domestic roles and obligations even as they fought alongside men for a theoretical world of egalitarianism and freedom.⁸ As Jones has described, Karpilove “exploited social anxiety about women’s liberation in the modern era, and her own status as a young woman, by writing about young women in sexually fraught situations,” and in so doing she used the current conventions and expectations of women’s writing to participate in the culture of radical leftism.⁹

Karpilove’s confidence in shedding light on the challenges facing single women in the courtship scene of Yiddish New York was particularly significant, given the broader, changing sexual culture of America during this period. Scholars recognize the 1910s as a pivotal moment in American gender relations. At the close of the suffrage movement, women moved into professional roles that popular culture decried as unfeminine and feared would disrupt American masculinity and a proper gender balance. In an age the cultural journal Current Opinion declared to be “Sex O’Clock in America,” a revolutionary shift was underway in American sexual mores, and immigrants took part in and shaped that culture.¹⁰ Due to changes in labor and consumer markets, the growth of leisure time, and rapid urbanization, young men and women also experienced a growing autonomy that was alarming to many of their parents’ generation. Participating in a “heterosocial leisure world geared toward youth and vitality,” young men and women argued against what they felt were the strictures and double standards of Victorian sexual morality. They saw themselves as participating in revolutionarily new and rebellious behavior in their sexual lives.¹¹ As historian Kathy Peiss explains, East European Jewish immigrants, along with other working-class immigrant populations, participated in this culture of leisure and social and sexual experimentation as part of their efforts to become American.¹²

Yet, as Karpilove’s narrator reveals, concomitant with this loosening of sexual mores came an increased danger of nonconsensual sexual contact. Karpilove’s narrator finds herself particularly vulnerable to young men’s sexual advances because she is a young woman alone, an ocean away from her family. By necessity she lives by herself in furnished rooms, which had become a cultural symbol for the sexual permissiveness of the era. Rented rooms were a space away from parental authority, where sexual experimentation seemed newly possible.¹³ Without parental supervision, she associates freely with young men, and her only protection against their unwanted advances is her own quick thinking. Karpilove’s novel reflects the excitement, anxieties, and intergenerational conflicts of the moment. Rather than reveling in their newfound freedoms, the book exposes the not-so-hidden dangers of women participating in a sexually permissive youth culture that had emerged from the more restrictive environment of the sexual propriety of the past. Karpilove demonstrates the double standards to which women are held even as they desire the status and economic stability of marriage while trying to navigate the uncharted dating scene that included extramarital and premarital affairs.

Karpilove’s Diary is surprising for its rejection of free love, an ideology that radical leftists touted as relieving women from the slavery of subservience to a husband in marriage. The famous anarchist activist Emma Goldman, whose fiery political rhetoric earned her fame within and far beyond the American Yiddish scene, was an outspoken opponent of state- and religion-sanctioned marriage and a proponent of free love. She insisted that marriage, like capitalism, is a bourgeois “paternal arrangement” in which women are forced to sell their sexual and economic freedom in exchange for financial security and social position.¹⁴ Goldman called for a radical rethinking of love, demanding that women be free to claim the full range of their economic and social independence, including love and motherhood outside the patriarchal structure of marriage. Goldman’s discussions of the subject were widely publicized and read by the Yiddish public, and Yiddish newspapers were replete with articles and advice columns that took up the question of free love.

However, even Emma Goldman recognized women’s potential vulnerability within a free love value system, acknowledging that true equality requires systemic economic and social reform and cannot be accomplished by a handful of enlightened individuals acting in isolation.¹⁵ Karpilove’s Diary takes this caveat as a starting point, offering a cynical vantage point from which to view the enterprise of free love: until such systemic reform is accomplished, Karpilove argues, free love is just another way for men to exploit women’s bodies and leave them emotionally, economically, and physically vulnerable. For all that Karpilove’s narrator radically centers women’s experiences and writes frankly about racy subjects for the newspaper-reading public, her conclusions appear to be—perhaps counterintuitively—aligned with traditional values. She rejects the assertions of radical thinkers with regard to free love, arguing that such love is in fact harmful to women, given the realities of the society in which they live. Karpilove’s work identifies a truth lurking in Goldman’s own lived experience of radical politics: that the men who professed commitment to absolute freedom for the individual could not release themselves from sexist ideas about women.¹⁶ In light of these inequities, Karpilove suggests that free love becomes a socially manipulative tool that activist men use against women to deprive them of the economic and social protections of marriage.

The novel accomplishes its relevant and important social task through the conventions of its genre; the work is a characteristic example of the diary novel in which a woman confesses her feelings, sets up and measures herself against goals for self-improvement, and offers readers a peek into a “real-time” unfolding of the most personal aspects of her life. Since Samuel Richardson’s iconic eighteenth-century epistolary novel Pamela and Sei Shōnagon’s medieval Japanese court musings in The Pillow Book, diary novels have long been received as a venue for women’s perspectives on anxiety about sex and gender roles. The genre was a staple of popular literature at the turn of the century, providing Karpilove an attractive medium with which to engage her audience. For example, the sensational German bestseller Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl) by Margarete Böhme (1867–1939), first published in 1905, sold more than 1,200,000 copies by the end of the 1920s. The novel, about a young woman’s descent into prostitution, was translated into fourteen languages and was adapted into a stage play and made into a silent film, and, due to its popularity, it is likely that Karpilove was aware of and perhaps drew upon its fame in composing her own work.¹⁷ The genre continues to play a significant role in popular culture today. Karpilove’s Diary is a forerunner to Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and to the hit romantic comedy television series Sex and the City (1998–2004), in which protagonist Carrie Bradshaw narrates her friends’ sexual escapades through a confessional, diary-style newspaper sex column.

In Diary of a Lonely Girl, the narrator describes the emotional exhaustion and longing of a young woman who falls victim to the promises of free love. In the opening chapters the narrative voice of the novel is heavy with the raw emotion of a lovestruck, desperate, needy young woman. But Karpilove soon thwarts the genre’s typical tone and the expectations that the novel sets up at the beginning. As the novel develops, so too does the narrative voice, which is at times distanced and wry, at times self-consciously modern, and at times punctuated with assertive, clipped, fast-paced, cinema-style dialogue to match the narrator’s growing defiance and confidence.

Writing within the limits of a serialized novel, focused on courtship, that readers might have predicted to be lowbrow entertainment fiction, Karpilove challenges the reader with an educated, sophisticated female narrator who uses her wit to joust with and fend off her male suitors, even as they exert power over her. She participates in what Lauren Berlant has deemed the essence of “female complaint” literature, lamenting, testifying to, judging, and expressing women’s disappointment in “the tenuous relation of romantic fantasy to lived intimacy” and blaming “flawed men and bad ideologies for women’s intimate suffering.”¹⁸ In this way, Karpilove’s writing echoes better known English-language women writers of the period, such as Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, and Anzia Yezierska, who lodged similar complaints about the unstable and vulnerable place of women in the changing sexual norms of urban American life.¹⁹

Like all serial fiction, Karpilove’s Diary of a Lonely Girl also plays with the line between fiction and reality through its use of the present tense and the expectations and experiences of readers who are encouraged to understand the story as unfolding in real time, and by its very appearance in a newspaper alongside the day’s news.²⁰ Likewise, its presentation as a diary, told in the first person, increases the apparent urgency and believability of the narrative.²¹ Many times readers wrote to the editorial pages of the newspaper to comment on Karpilove’s novel. In a letter dated September 11, 1916, a reader writes in praise of the novel and thanks Karpilove for writing on behalf of “us young people.” Several months later, on February 13, 1917, a reader writes in praise of Karpilove’s “very interesting series of articles,” referring to the Diary, demonstrating the way genres bleed into one another in readers’ minds. He explains, “Such a demonstration of the danger and absurdity of our so-called free-love-niks is long overdue. . . . [T]he writer of this remarkable diary deserves praise and thanks for her logical arguments and beautiful writing.” He goes on to assert that the ideology of free love has “ruined” many a Yiddish working girl and says he will be grateful “if this Diary helps our sisters come to see the absurdity of the ‘free-love-niks.’” In a letter dated March 2, 1917, a reader praises Karpilove’s “true to life” characters: “What woman has not experienced such things?”²² In each of these cases, readers interact with the text, offering opinions of the novel as it unfolds and asserting its relevance not only as entertainment but also as a document that exposes social problems of the day. Karpilove writes for what Berlant has termed an “intimate public” of women’s literature, a commodified genre of intimacy sometimes characterized by complaint and sentimentality, which provides “frames for encountering the impacts of living as a woman in the world.”²³ Contemporaneous readers acknowledged the novel as doing important social and political work, exposing disparities and dangers in gender relations in the Jewish youth culture. They are also likely to have experienced it, in Berlant’s terms, as “juxtapolitical” literature that validates “the expression of emotional response and conceptual recalibration as achievement enough,” talking back to a male dominant culture that devalues these modes.²⁴

Through her narrator, Karpilove exposes readers to an intimate and immediate women’s perspective on topics of relevance to contemporaneous newspaper readers. Readers receive social commentary in the voice of a marginalized, lonely, yet observant and articulate diarist. The remainder of this introduction focuses on three key issues that appear throughout the novel: World War I, birth control and free love, and women’s vulnerability under the law.

World War I

Particularly because of its publication in a newspaper, in its serialized version the novel asserts itself as more than escapism. Rather, it is subtly a form of editorial writing about events reported on in the newspaper itself. Appearing alongside pieces such as Y. Podruzhnik’s “War Diary (Togbukh fun der milkhome)”—a firsthand account of a Belgian resident at the outbreak of World War I—the Diary is a personal commentary on life on the home front. It offers reportage from another kind of battlefield, distant but not disconnected from the theater of war. Introducing readers to the perspective of a woman in the heat of romantic battle—the published version of the novel is subtitled Der kampf gegen fraye liebe (The Battle against Free Love)—the novel brings readers into single female life in the city to experience its dangers firsthand.

Although the narrator rarely mentions World War I itself or the devastation of Jewish communities caught in the midst of war, hers is very much a wartime novel, written with an underlying acknowledgment of the turmoil of its time. In one key moment, the plight of Jewish communities in Europe is called to mind as the narrator abruptly shifts to thinking about the Old Country in its present upheaval:

“I can see the sky from here,” I answered. “And I love to watch people walking in the street after midnight. They look so mysterious, each like he’s going to a secret meeting. It reminds me of my old home where nowadays people must walk around like this, like shadows, even in the daytime.”

He begged me to stop. “My dear, don’t think of your old home. The Old Country isn’t a home anymore. Our home is here, where we are. We are citizens of the whole world. The Poland that I once passionately championed no longer belongs to us. Right under my own eyes they turned me into a German. Fine, so let me be a German, a Frenchman, a Turk, even an Eskimo, as long as I can be alive. Life, in the fullest sense of the word, is the most beautiful and precious thing that we have. Looking at you now, I see how beautiful you are. The pale glimmer of electric streetlamps falls on you and lights up your eyes as they gaze upon me, warming my soul. I feel as though my soul will sprout wings and fly to the highest heavens leaving me here, at your feet.”

“My feet would trample a man without a soul.”

“Let them!” he cried out passionately. “Go on and take a step! Step, step, step! I myself will place your foot on my neck, on my head! Don’t you see, my love, I lay myself at your feet! I give myself over to you. You can do with me what you will.”²⁵

In this passage, the narrator fleetingly turns her thoughts to the violence facing Jewish communities in Europe, but she is quickly and frantically discouraged from these thoughts. For her lover, C., the role of a young woman is not to even think of the war, or destruction, or the affairs of the world. She exists for him only as a sex object. C. forcefully insists on the limits of the narrator’s thoughts and of the novel itself; as a male, he polices the boundaries of the female mind and relegates it to the body, love, sex, and entertainment. This explains and even excuses why the novel has so little to say about the events on the front page of the newspaper—such events are outside the scope of what is acceptable for the genre, and for women’s concerns. In this moment, Karpilove briefly rebels against these strictures and then demonstrates through C.’s voice how such rebellions are quelled by the force of male desire and women’s immediate need to fend off these advances rather than to focus on distant events.

Moreover, when the narrator does turn her mind to the violence facing Jews in Europe, it is to consider that Jews must now walk around as though they are concealing secrets, because they are in danger. Although she ascribes such behavior to Jews in Europe, this is precisely the kind of activity that the narrator herself engages in throughout her novel: trying to avoid the prying eyes of landladies and other people in positions of authority who might endanger her well-being if they knew that, for instance, she was alone in her room with a man. By suggesting parallels in the experiences of young women battling free love in New York and Jews battling antisemitism in Europe, Karpilove draws the sympathies of her audience toward her narrator. She equates the urgency and importance of women’s inequality and lack of agency in their romantic relationships with the situation of individuals in war-torn Europe, elevating these issues from the realm of private, emotional, frivolous fiction to the realm of world politics, violence, and injustice.

Although the novel rarely directly mentions the war, Karpilove fills her discussion of love with metaphors of war, insisting on the urgency and relevance of women’s disempowerment in sexual relationships even in a time when men are dying by the thousands on battlefields. Over and again, the narrator insists that she is engaged in a battle of the sexes to preserve her own dignity and her virginity in the face of lovers who believe in free love and who demand it from her. When C. decides to stop listening to her refusals or trying to reason with her and insists on kissing her instead of debating, the narrator refers to this behavior as a new “tactic” in his efforts to awaken her desires. When she is unresponsive to his kisses, he tells her that she is either made of wood or is a “skilled diplomat” who knows how to fend off his advances by feigning indifference. Nevertheless, he refuses to be discouraged in his new “strategy” that he’s taken on in their love war.²⁶ When the narrator at last runs into the street to escape being alone in her room with C., she thinks to herself that “in love, as in war, it’s very nice to win.”²⁷ In this way, Karpilove accentuates the precariousness of her narrator’s situation and demonstrates its relevance to the broader newspaper-reading audience. Here and elsewhere Karpilove further enlists her narrator in a battle against free love through military imagery, and in a larger battle to preserve the dignity of all women that takes place bedroom by bedroom. This aligns with the heightened attention during World War I to women’s sexual morality as a requisite for preserving the moral fabric of the society on the home front that men were fighting to defend on the battlefield, where civility was shattered by bombs and bullets.²⁸

Birth Control and Free Love

In the years that Diary of a Lonely Girl was serialized, birth control was a subject discussed with frequency in Di varhayt in editorials and news articles, sometimes on pages adjacent to the novel itself. In April 1916, Di varhayt conducted a contest in which it offered readers prizes for the best answer to the “birth control question,” or the question of whether contraception should be legally available and if individuals should use it. The announcement for the contest called the debate around birth control “one of the most important social problems of our time,” offering the winner of the contest two volumes of the Yiddish playwright Dovid Pinski’s work. Readers wrote from conflicting perspectives. Some argued that birth control is a crime against humanity that prevents it from multiplying in its natural way while others advocated for birth control on social grounds; they saw it as a form of social protection for the poor, who suffer from too many children and whose children are the cannon fodder for wars that benefit only the rich.²⁹ The newspaper also printed a review of the representation of the birth control debate in moving pictures, with a tagline: “If the ‘movies’ can agitate for or against the war, why shouldn’t they do the same with the question of birth control?”³⁰ Above all, the newspaper was filled with articles about the exploits of Emma Goldman, a proponent of free love and of birth control, including advertisements for her collected writings; reporting on her arrest and trial; descriptions of dinners given in her honor; and frequent letters to the editor, expressing opinions about Goldman’s political stances.³¹ The newspaper had a veritable love affair with the shocking and politically salient ideas of this public figure.

Characters in Karpilove’s Diary interact with the issue of birth control in multiple ways. In one scene, in which C. is (again) trying to convince the narrator to have sex, he argues that women are only really concerned about the “results” of sex and aren’t scared of sex itself. He reassures the narrator that he has a “way” of preventing those “results” (i.e., birth control) and she needn’t be concerned.³² The narrator is not reassured by this declaration, as pregnancy was not the only danger for a young, unmarried woman having sex in early twentieth-century New York. She is keenly aware that such a misstep could have serious social as well as physical consequences.

C. frequently expresses disdain for the idea of having children, claiming that modern people should not desire procreation and should save childbearing for the unenlightened. In the following passage he explains this as a cornerstone of his definition of the modern woman:

“Does the modern woman have children?” I asked hurriedly, seeing that he’d paused to catch his breath.

“Children?”

“Yes, children. You know, regular old children.”

“What do they need children for?”

“So they can have pride and pleasure from them, for instance.”

“They have no use for children! Leave childbearing to women who don’t know how to avoid having children. Women who know how to get out of it can be happy without children. And if a woman decides that she wants to have a child, then let her have one! Who cares? I’m all for a matriarchy: let her have the kid if she wants it, and let it be her choice. His responsibility goes no farther than whatever he agrees to. If he wants to have a child, then he can care for it. Right?”

“Sure, sure. I hardly know how it could be any other way. If a man wants a child, he should care for it. That’s only right.”

C. didn’t notice my sarcasm, or at least he pretended not to. He just squeezed and kissed my hand as though to thank me for agreeing with him at least on one point, when it came to children.³³

In this passage, C. defines the modern woman in a remarkably antifeminist way—her modernity is predicated on men’s freedom from social responsibility. C.’s despicable attitudes about sex, which repeatedly force the narrator into situations in which she is uncomfortable, rely on the idea of sex without consequences for men. Birth control is an avenue toward that goal rather than social reform for women and families burdened by too many children they are unable to care for. Karpilove uses his reprehensible behavior to argue against birth control, showing it to be a tool that empowers attitudes harmful to women.

Characters in Karpilove’s Diary also interact with birth control as part of their consumption of popular culture. In one installment of the novel, published on February 3, 1917, the narrator and her friend Rae propose to their lovers an outing to see Where Are My Children?, an anti–birth control film.³⁴ This suggestion places them in the center of trendy popular culture as well as indicates their position on the birth control debate to the reader who has been paying attention to the newspaper as a whole. Elsewhere in the newspaper, this film received critical attention.³⁵ Characters desiring to see this film position their personal decisions about sex and birth control as part of the national conversation.

The most sustained treatment in the novel of the political and social scene of the birth control debate occurs when the narrator attends C.’s public lecture about free love and birth control, in which he is explicitly compared to Emma Goldman; an audience member boasts that C. is such a superior speaker that he “could fit Emma Goldman in his back pocket.”³⁶ In the scene, the boisterous audience eagerly listens to and cheers at C.’s repetitive calls for free love, using the language of science and politics as he publically argues for the narrator, who is in attendance, to privately oblige his so-called political desires for sex.³⁷ His arguments against marriage as a tether for men fall short of the analysis of Emma Goldman’s Marriage and Love, in which she argues for free love as a replacement for the unequal, exploitative structure of economic and sexual relations between men and women in marriage. Instead of arguing for freedom of love outside the bounds of the law, C. argues specifically for freedom of sex, debasing Goldman’s elevated claims and expressing that lawless love may be just as dangerous for women as lawful marriage in a society in which women enjoy less power and respect than men.³⁸

In the scene, Karpilove skewers C. as a self-righteous political activist whose vapid, unsophisticated ideas about sex and sexuality are couched in educated language, and who uses his radicalism in order to ruin a woman who knows that her ability to rent rooms in reputable households, to be viewed as respectable among friends and neighbors and in society, and perhaps one day to marry are all dependent on her virginity. Certainly his advances—forcing the narrator into precarious situations and insisting that she have sex—are as much “love by force” as the marriage he decries. By placing his arguments in this public world of politics, and positioning them in a newspaper next to descriptions of and advertisements for lectures, Karpilove offers a cynical feminist lens through which to view the broader political landscape of the radical Yiddish world. She argues through her novel that Jewish men’s politics overlook women’s experiences and that Jewish men with radical politics exploit women’s bodies, and she implicates free love as a tool for this exploitation rather than a liberation from women’s subservient status within traditional marriage. While a political theorist like Emma Goldman might imagine free love to be a solution to women’s subjugation, Karpilove’s wry, realist novel about the lived experience of radical Jewish youth culture reveals the genuine risks women face in a culture of free love.

Women’s Vulnerability under the Law

In an installment that takes place shortly after the narrator has moved to new rooms after being caught by her landlords in a compromising position alone with C., the narrator contemplates her own vulnerability. Rather than expressing this through reflection or speculation about the ways in which she is alone and powerless, she does so by reflecting on news items that are discussed elsewhere in the newspaper. She writes:

I read in the newspaper today that respectable women are being sentenced for street prostitution. A report from a women’s prison association demonstrates that many respectable women and girls are arrested illegally on charges of immorality, simply because policemen, or whoever else, feels like it. The policeman or detective is always believed over the person he’s sending to jail, even if the woman accused of immorality is the picture of respectability. . . .

I’d started reading the newspaper to dispel my instinctive fear of my surroundings, but now I only felt more frightened. I was even more afraid than I had been before to make any noise in my room, to open the door, or to go out into the street. I was afraid someone might approach me and ask why I left the other rooms so quickly.³⁹

The narrator refers to the effects of the activities of the Committee of Fifteen, a vice commission created by the New York Chamber of Commerce, who turned their attention to the problem of prostitution in tenement houses and apartment buildings. Among the stipulations of their Tenement House Act of 1901 was that a woman caught in the act of prostitution in a tenement house could be arrested and imprisoned for up to six months. In this passage, the narrator reads the newspaper, much like the readers of her own novel, and relates it to her life, speculating on how she is vulnerable to the changing law and social climate of moral panic over changes in American sexual culture.⁴⁰ C. later references this when the narrator threatens to protest against his unwanted advances. “Oh, so you want to be famous, do you? You want your name in all the newspapers?” He laughed out loud. “Or maybe you want to spend the night in a police station?”⁴¹ C. makes this bold statement as he and the narrator are outside together in the evening, when she tries to escape him by fleeing her room. His attitude demonstrates his awareness of the narrator’s precarious position under the law as a victim who will be perceived as a prostitute, a criminal, and a social outcast in an environment of increasing surveillance of women’s private and public conduct.⁴² By foregrounding the sympathetic narrator’s profound worry and distress, despite her proven and hard-fought virginal innocence, that she will be arrested for untoward behavior, Karpilove makes the theoretical problem of vice policing much more real for her readership, allowing them to experience as though firsthand the narrator’s fears relating to her vulnerability under the law. She offers through entertainment fiction an editorial on the legal status of the single woman living alone in a tenement apartment in the early twentieth century.

Despite its political agenda and social awareness, for today’s readers Karpilove’s novel may at times feel narrow and restricted in scope: we never read of the narrator’s work, though we know that she is an independent, wage-earning woman. We learn little about the labor conditions, family relationships, leisure activities, or Jewish communal organizations that readers of American Yiddish literature may be accustomed to reading about in more widely anthologized and translated works and expect to see depicted here. Instead, we find ourselves confined within the narrator’s relationships to at-times-insufferable men speaking at a whisper in her tiny rooms so as not to be overheard by her landlords or other residents. Nonetheless, Karpilove’s Diary displays the political nature of women’s intimate lives and relationships, demonstrating that young women’s lives, like novels themselves, should not be dismissed as frivolous.

This English translation is offered to bring a new sense of the urgency and importance of the gender anxieties of the period as part of the political landscape of early twentieth-century urban American life, in addition to entertaining readers with its humor and suspense. It should inspire the reader to view historical and contemporary representations of women’s struggles within and beyond romantic relationships as an important topic for political and literary study.

Bibliography

Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2008.

Brody, Richard. “Lois Weber’s Vital Films of the Early Silent Era.” New Yorker, July 19, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/lois-webers-vital-films-of-the-early-silent-era (accessed September 9, 2019).

“Der kontrol fun gebort: a debate far di lezer fun der varhayt.” Di varhayt, April 7, 14, and 26, 1916, 5.

“Editorials fun folk: vos di leyzer zogn.” Di varhayt, September 11, 1916, 5; March 2, 1917, 5; February 13, 1917, 5.

“Emma Goldman lektshurt haynt.” Di varhayt, February 8, 1916, 2.

Falk, Candace. Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman: A Biography. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990.

Fried, Trevor. Form and Function in the Diary Novel. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989, 54.

Fronc, Jennifer. New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009.

“Froyen protestirn farn aynloden Emma Goldman tsu redden far zey.” Di varhayt, January 10, 1916, 5.

“Geburt-kontrol onheynger giben a diner Emma Goldman.” Di varhayt, April 19, 1916, 8.

Goldman, Emma. Marriage and Love. New York: Mother Earth, 1911.

Grayzel, Susan R. Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999.

“Haynt der miting in karnegi hall.” Di varhayt, March 1, 1916, 2.

Hayward, Jennifer. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1997.

Hopper, Briallen. “Pandora in Blue Jeans.” In Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions, 59–66. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.

Horowitz, Rosemary, ed. Women Writers of Yiddish Literature: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015.

Jones, Faith. “Criticizing Women.” Bridges 13, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 76–81.

———. “Everybody Comes to the Store: People’s Book Store as Third Place, 1910–1920.” Canadian Jewish Studies 18, no. 19 (January 2010): 95–119.

Karpilove, Miriam. A provints tsaytung. New York, 1926.

———. Tage-bukh fun a elende meydel oder der kampf gegen fraye liebe. New York: S. Kantrowitz, 1918.

Kellman, Ellen. “Miriam Karpilove.” In Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, Jewish Women’s Archive, March 2009, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/Karpilove-miriam (accessed March 8, 2018).

Keire, Mara Laura. For Business and Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890–1933. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010.

Kim, Grace. “Where Are My Children?” The Embryo Project Encyclopedia, May 26, 2017, https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/where-are-my-children-1916 (accessed September 10, 2019).

Klepfisz, Irena. “Queens of Contradiction: A Feminist Introduction to Yiddish Women Writers.” In Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, edited by Frieda Forman, Ethel Raicus, Sarah Silberstein Swartz, and Margie Wolfe, 21–64. Toronto: Second Story, 1994.

Manor, Ehud. Louis Miller and Di Warheit (“The Truth”): Yiddishism, Zionism, and Socialism in New York, 1905–1915. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2012.

McCarthy, Margaret. “The Representation of Prostitutes in Literature and Film: Margarete Böhme and G. W. Pabst.” In Commodities of Desire: The Prostitute in Modern German Literature, edited by Christiane Schönfeld, 77–97. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 2000.

McGraw, Eliza. Edna Ferber’s America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2014.

Meyerowitz, Joanne. “Sexual Geography and Gender Economy: The Furnished-Room Districts of Chicago, 1890–1930.” In Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, edited by Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki Ruiz, 307–23. New York: Routledge, 1990.

“Milkhome un geburth kontrol in di moving piktshurs.” Di varhayt, April 8, 1917, 12.

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1986.

Pinsker, Shachar. A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture. New York: New York Univ. Press, 2018.

Pratt, Norma Fain. “Culture and Radical Politics: Yiddish Women Writers, 1890–1940.” American Jewish History 70, no. 1 (September 1, 1980): 68–91, 82.

Reyzin, Zalmen, “Miriam Karpilove.” Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye 3 (1929): 575–76.

“Sex O’Clock in America.” Current Opinion 55 (August 1913): 113–14.

Warnke, Nina. “Immigrant Popular Culture as Contested Sphere: Yiddish Music Halls, the Yiddish Press, and the Processes of Americanization, 1900–1910.” Theatre Journal 48, no. 3 (1996): 321–35.

Waterman, Willoughby Cyrus. Prostitution and Its Repression in New York City: 1900–1931. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1932.

White, Kevin. The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1993.

Woodford, Charlotte. Women, Emancipation, and the German Novel. London: Routledge, 2017.

1. At the time of the publication of Karpilove’s novel, Di varhayt was published by Louis Miller, who had broken from the more widely known socialist Yiddish newspaper Forverts. This break was not only due to his personal conflict with its editor, Abraham Cahan, but also because of Miller’s agenda of promoting Jewish nationalism within the context of radical leftist politics at a time when Cahan and the Forverts insisted that there was no such thing as a “Jewish nation.” Ehud Manor, Louis Miller and Di Warheit (“The Truth”): Yiddishism, Zionism, and Socialism in New York, 1905–1915 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), 3.

2. Her writing has never been collected. She lists a sampling of titles at the end of her novel A provints tsaytung (1926), with a note stating that she has published over three hundred stories and novels in journals and newspapers and is considering publishing them in book form but would like input from her readers about which pieces they would like to see in print. A handwritten bibliography of her printed works can be found in her archive at the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research. See Miriam Karpilove, A provints tsaytung (New York: s.n., 1926); and “Gedrukte verk” (manuscript), Miriam Karpilow Papers, RG 383, Box 5, YIVO, New York.

3. Little has been written about Karpilove’s life or writing. Those wishing to learn more about her work may consult the following encyclopedia entries: Ellen Kellman, “Miriam Karpilove,” in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, Jewish Women’s Archive, March 1, 2009, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/Karpilove-miriam (accessed March 8, 2018); and Zalmen Reyzin, “Miriam Karpilove,” Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye 3 (1929): 575–76. I am also grateful to Karpilove’s nephew, David Karpilow, for sharing his recollections of Miriam as well as pages from a book of Karpilow family history compiled by his cousin, Arno Karlen.

4. For a further discussion of author photographs that captivate by bending gender conventions or posing a challenge to readers, see Briallen Hopper, “Pandora in Blue Jeans,” in Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 59–66.

5. Faith Jones, “Criticizing Women,” Bridges 13, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 76–81, 79.

6. Norma Fain Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics: Yiddish Women Writers, 1890–1940,” American Jewish History 70, no. 1 (September 1, 1980): 68–91, 82. See also Shachar Pinsker, A Rich Brew: How Cafes Created Modern Jewish Culture (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2018).

7. Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” 77.

8. Irena Klepfisz, “Queens of Contradiction: A Feminist Introduction to Yiddish Women Writers,” in Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers, ed. Frieda Forman et al. (Toronto: Second Story, 1994), 21–64, 51.

9. Faith Jones, “Everybody Comes to the Store: People’s Book Store as Third Place, 1910–1920,” Canadian Jewish Studies 18, no. 19 (January 2010): 95–119, 106.

10. “Sex O’Clock in America,” Current Opinion 55 (August 1913): 113–14; Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1993), 13.

11. White, The First Sexual Revolution, 2.

12. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Pres, 1986); Nina Warnke, “Immigrant Popular Culture as Contested Sphere: Yiddish Music Halls, the Yiddish Press, and the Processes of Americanization, 1900–1910,” Theatre Journal 48, no. 3 (1996): 321–35.

13. Joanne Meyerowitz, “Sexual Geography and Gender Economy: The Furnished-Room Districts of Chicago, 1890–1930,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in US Women’s History, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1990), 307–23.

14. Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love (New York: Mother Earth, 1911), 11.

15. For Goldman, free love will be part of a revolution that will upend the political and social status quo. She writes, “Some day, some day men and women will rise . . . they will meet big and strong and free, ready to receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden rays of love.” In the meantime, however, she acknowledges that “if . . . woman is free and big enough to learn the mystery of sex without the sanction of State or Church, she will stand condemned as utterly unfit to become the wife of a ‘good’ man.” Here she recognizes that practicing free love could be detrimental to women in a society that relies on patriarchal state-sanctioned marriage and thereby ensures women’s economic vulnerability, forcing women to submit their sexual and domestic labor strictly to conventional marriage. See Goldman, Marriage and Love, 15, 7.

16. See Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman: A Biography (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990), 20.

17. Early twentieth-century Viennese bestseller Eine für Viele: aus dem Tagebuch eines Mädchens (One for Many: From a Girl’s Diary) likewise generated public debate about prostitution and sexual morality, and inspired several parodies. See Margaret McCarthy, “The Representation of Prostitutes in Literature and Film: Margarete Böhme and G. W. Pabst,” in Commodities of Desire: The Prostitute in Modern German Literature, ed. Christiane Schönfeld (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 2000), 77–98; and Charlotte Woodford, Women, Emancipation, and the German Novel (London: Routledge, 2017).

18. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2008), 1.

19. For more on Edna Ferber, see Eliza McGraw, Edna Ferber’s America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2014). Berlant’s The Female Complaint provides a compelling analysis of Parker’s relationship to the aesthetic conventions of “female complaint” literature.

20. See Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1997), 26, in which she writes about the serialized fiction in newspapers and the disruption of boundaries between fiction and real life.

21. Trevor Fried, Form and Function in the Diary Novel (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 54.

22. “Editorials fun folk: vos di leyzer zogn,” Di varhayt, September 11, 1916, 5; March 2, 1917, 5; February 13, 1917, 5.

23. Berlant, The Female Complaint, x.

24. Berlant, 10, x.

25. Karpilove, Tagebukh, 148; pp. 149–50 in this translation.

26. Karpilove, 236–38; pp. 223–24 in this translation.

27. Karpilove, 282; p. 258 in this translation.

28. Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999), 122.

29. See “Der kontrol fun gebort: a debate far di lezer fun der varhayt,” Di varhayt, April 7, 14, and 26, 1916, 5.

30. “Milkhome un geburth kontrol in di moving piktshurs,” Di varhayt, April 8, 1917, 12.

31. For a few examples, see “Froyen protestirn farn aynloden Emma Goldman tsu redden far zey,” Di varhayt, January 10, 1916, 5; “Emma Goldman lektshurt haynt,” Di varhayt, February 8, 1916, 2; “Haynt der miting in karnegi hall,” Di varhayt, March 1, 1916, 2; and “Geburt-kontrol onheynger giben a diner Emma Goldman,” Di varhayt, April 19, 1916, 8.

32. Karpilove, 230; p. 217 in this translation.

33. Karpilove, 188; p. 184 in this translation.

34. See p. 248 of this translation. Where Are My Children? (Universal Films, 1916) is a silent film directed by Philips Smalley and Lois Weber. Based on the obscenity trial of Margaret Sanger, it tells the story of an attorney prosecuting a doctor for illegal abortions who learns that women he knows, including his own wife, procured abortions from the doctor. At the start of the film a doctor makes a convincing case for legalizing contraception to prevent unwanted births in poor families, but as the film progresses it makes a case against wealthy women having abortions on a “whim.” As one woman dies from complications from a botched abortion and the attorney and his wife resign themselves to being childless as a result of numerous previous abortions, the antiabortion message of the film becomes absolutely clear. The film was widely viewed throughout the United States. See Grace Kim, “Where are My Children?,” The Embryo Project Encyclopedia, May 26, 2017, https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/where-are-my-children-1916 (accessed September 10, 2019); and Richard Brody, “Lois Weber’s Vital Films of the Early Silent Era,” New Yorker, July 19, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/lois-webers-vital-films-of-the-early-silent-era (accessed September 9, 2019).

35. “Milkhome un geburth kontrol in di moving piktshurs,” Di varhayt, April 8, 1917, 12.

36. See p. 191 of this translation.

37. In its political dimensions, free love is a cultural component of anarchism, motivated by a desire to separate the state and other forms of social authority and control from sexual matters. In the social environment of secular Yiddish-speaking immigrants, many of whom were engaged in radical political movements, and for whom the language of radical politics trickled into popular culture, the term “free love” also became a euphemism for sexual permissiveness without these theoretical and political underpinnings. While C. claims ideological commitment to radical politics through free love, Karpilove suggests that his interests lie primarily in the sex act itself.

38. Goldman, Marriage and Love.

39. Karpilove, 166; pp. 162–63 in this translation.

40. One of the major reforms of the Progressive Era, the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901 is best known for banning the construction of dark, poorly ventilated tenement buildings in the state of New York. The legislation also included penalties for prostitution in tenement houses. Enforcement of this legislation involved a policy of vice districting, as judges sentenced vice offenders more harshly in tenement houses than in regular houses of prostitution. Mara Laura Keire, For Business and Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890–1933 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010), 10; Jennifer Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009), 43.

41. Karpilove, 282; p. 258 in this translation.

42. Under New York City’s prohibition against “disorderly conduct,” police were charged with the responsibility to keep prostitutes from loitering in public places for the purpose of prostitution. C. is threatening here to inform a nearby police officer that the narrator is a prostitute soliciting him as a customer. See Willoughby Cyrus Waterman, Prostitution and Its Repression in New York City: 1900–1931 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1932), 12–13.