Marie Syrkin: Values Beyond the Self (review)

Marie Syrkin, journalist, Zionist, editor and longtime friend and biographer of Golda Meier, was the daughter of Nachman Syrkin, the very famous socialist Zionist theoretician. Twenty seven years after his 1924 death in New York, he was reburied in Israel. "The true moment of the memorials," Marie wrote, "came…when Ben-Gurion stepped out of the shadows on the shore of Kinnereth and vowed, 'Syrkin, your vision shall be fulfilled.'" In retrospect, it can be said that her father, until recently, was better known than Marie Syrkin. Her reputation flourished, mostly in Israel. Carole Kessner's magnificent, magisterial biography and study remedies that. "She needs to be restored to American Jewish Consciousness," said Kessner. This work, this biography, based on her long friendship, since the days when she was a student of Syrkin's at Brandeis, does just that.

Marie Syrkin was born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1899. In her early years, because of her father's work, she had lived in Switzerland, Germany, France, and Russia. In 1908, the family moved to New York City where Nachman spent most of his time doing research in the New York Public Library's Jewish Room. Nachman's circle of friends and acquaintances included Mordecai Kaplan, the inspirational founder of Reconstructionism, and Sholem Aleichem, and Sholom Asch, the famous Yiddish writers. Marie, a beautiful and talented student, interested in literature, wrote poetry and translated Yiddish poetry. But in her twenties she had married multiple times, seeing her first marriage to Maurice Samuel annulled, her second to Aaron Bodansky end in divorce after the death of her first child and the birth of her second, and her third marriage to the poet Charles Reznikoff endure happily though they rarely lived together.

Marie went to Palestine first in 1933. Though she never mastered Hebrew (although she knew several languages), she gushed to her third husband, "I have never seen such Jews before." In 1936, she went on a return trip; remembering years later, she was more explicit: "those who now proclaim that the 'myth of Israel is dead are mistaken. Israel is an exemplar of what can be done. Even if it lasts only forty, fifty years, what that State achieved can never be erased because it shows the potential of idealism…The adaption of the dream to realities is merely the price of survival."

Marie, unlike some, wrote passionately of the plight of the Jews in Europe as they faced the Holocaust. She advocated aliyah to Palestine. At the same time she explained that the United States did too little to help the Jews in the path of the Nazis to escape. In 1945, after returning to Palestine, she translated Hannah Senesz's poem "Ashrei Ha Gafrur" into English and pointed out that every Jew in Palestine can recite the four lines Senesz wrote just before she was executed by the Nazis:

Blessed is the match that is consumed in kindling flame.

Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.

Blessed is the heart with the strength to stop its beating for honor's sake.

Blessed is the match that is consumed in the kindling flame. (Blessed)

In Kessner's words, Marie Syrkin was a "rational romantic." But when you take note of what she wrote at the 22^nd Congress, arguing for Jewish sovereignty in an "adequate" part of Palestine, that the subject was "too grave to admit of a rhetorical maximalism which has no prospect of realization within the predictable future," she can also be called a "pragmatic realist." Golda Meier, a friend from the 1930s, once invited Marie to come to Jerusalem to become either editor of the Jerusalem Post or take a position in public relations in the ministry of Foreign Affairs, but Marie demurred, it is thought, because she never learned Hebrew well enough. What she decided to do, however, was to take up a tenure line professorship at the new Brandeis University. Although Irving Howe and Philip Rahv were critical of her...