Marie Syrkin: Values beyond the Self (review)

Marie Syrkin was a public intellectual force to be reckoned with in American Jewish life. Prominent Zionist, journalist, poet, literary critic, teacher and professor, she made a name for herself as a well-traveled, well-read observer of contemporary world Judaism and occupied a position of some influence as editor of the Jewish Frontier. Yet she is less known today than she was during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and she certainly deserves the full biographical treatment afforded her in Marie Syrkin: Values beyond the Self. Carole S. Kessner is a particularly appropriate biographer, not only because Syrkin was in a way one of the "other New York Jewish intellectuals" about whom Kessner has previously written, but also because Kessner had a deep and abiding relationship with Syrkin, who died in 1989. Kessner has done a great service for the history of Jewish women and the history of Zionism by exploring the dimensions of Syrkin's life, a life lived large and, at times, amidst personal and professional controversy.

The daughter of prominent Labor Zionist Nachman Syrkin and his activist wife Bassya, Marie was born in 1899 and had a peripatetic childhood before her family arrived in the United States in 1907. She was a precocious child who imbibed Zionism early and deeply and grew up in an environment conducive both to intellectual development and to political awareness. Bassya Syrkin died when Marie was in high school, while Nachman Syrkin exerted a tremendous influence over Marie's life until—and probably after—his death in 1924.

The young Marie attended Cornell University and carried on a series of ill-advised relationships, including an early elopement and annulment with Maurice Samuel and then a rapid marriage to Aaron Bodansky. Marie and Aaron's first child died, and they separated soon after the birth of their second son, divorcing some years later to allow her to marry poet Charles Reznikoff. That marriage lasted for decades but endured long separations, emotional upheaval and at least a few more encounters between Marie and Maurice Samuel.

Through much of her life, Marie taught high school English, but she was also an active Zionist, and she traveled a great deal for various Jewish causes. She became a faculty member at Brandeis University in 1950 and was perhaps best known for her books Blessed is the Match, about Jewish resistance during World War II, and Woman of Valor, a biography of her longtime friend Golda Meir.

Kessner's biography has much to recommend it. Her personal intimacy with Marie Syrkin allowed her to conduct in-depth interviews, supplying details and insights that would otherwise have been impossible to find out. She also did a thorough job of piecing together both sides in threads of correspondence found in disparate collections of letters. This deep knowledge of her subject leads to a lively narrative, one that recently won the Jewish Book Council's award for biography, autobiography and memoir.

However, Marie Syrkin: Values beyond the Self also suffers from the same difficulty that hounded the various versions of Syrkin's biography of Golda Meir: lack of critical distance. Marie Syrkin was a complicated, sometimes contradictory figure who did not always treat the people in her life very well or act consistently; yet Kessner takes great pains to explain all these very human foibles away, as if it would be impossible to appreciate Syrkin otherwise. The book also needed much more editorial guidance than it received. In many instances, the same quotes and information are repeated so often as to be downright annoying. To cite just two examples, the explanation that Goldie Myerson was later known as Golda Meir makes at least five appearances; and Marie's description of the young Maurice Samuel as akin in his nobility to Joan of Arc, at least three. At times the book takes on a tone of armchair psychoanalysis of its subject, while at others Kessner provides...