The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal by Alan Robert Ginsberg (review)

Alan Robert Ginsberg’s The Salome Ensemble investigates the intertwined lives of four women, all Jewish immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, who were instrumental in creating the 1922 novel and subsequent silent film Salome of the Tenements. These women—Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal—were prominent figures in turn-of-the-century journalism and the nascent arts and entertainment industry, and their lives deserve much more attention than they have thus far received. Alan Robert Ginsberg’s book, a collective biography and cultural history in one, succeeds in bringing their stories more fully into the public eye; however, the book suffers from the challenge of balancing exhaustive research with engaging storytelling.

These four women undoubtedly led fascinating lives, and Ginsberg’s biographical chapters sketch the outlines of their experiences as individuals before addressing their work on Salome of the Tenements. Rose Pastor immigrated to the United States from the Russian Pale of Settlement via London with her family, and began working in a Cleveland cigar factory at the age of eleven, an experience that drew her to socialism and labor activism. A letter describing her experiences, published in the Yidishes tageblatt (Jewish Daily News) in 1901, led to an invitation to write for the paper, and her subsequent career in journalism resulted in an interview with James Graham Phelps Stokes, a wealthy and progressive philanthropist whom she married in 1905. The Stokes’s fairy-tale marriage—which ended in divorce twenty years later—formed the inspiration for the novel written by Yezierska and brought to life on the screen by Levien and Goudal. Stokes’s life reveals much about the xenophobia and enforced patriotism of the United States during and immediately after World War I: although she initially supported the war, her letter to the Kansas City Star criticizing the U.S. government as “for the profiteers,” not for the people, resulted in her indictment under the Espionage Act of 1917. Although she won her case on appeal and never served the ten-year sentence she originally received, this was certainly a formative experience in the life of an activist who later went on to co-found the Communist Party of America, and who knew personally such key figures as Eugene V. Debs, Claude McKay, and John Reed, as well as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, and other politically engaged women authors of the period.

Rose Pastor Stokes met Anzia Yezierska during her early years in New York, when she became involved in the settlement house movement. At a club sponsored by the Jewish Educational Alliance and the University Settlement, Stokes served as a counselor for Sonya Levien (née Sarah Opeskin). Both Yezierska and Levien were, like Stokes, Russian émigrés whose families fled Eastern Europe in search of religious freedom and a better life for their children. Gaining a degree in domestic science at Columbia Teachers’ College, Yezierska met the educator and pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who encouraged Yezierska’s self-conception as a writer and assisted her in publishing her first story in the New Republic. Yezierska went on to publish her fiction in Metropolitan magazine (where Sonya Levien had become an editor), and is best known today for her 1925 novel Bread Givers. Levien, who was hired by Stokes to serve as her husband’s secretary, was one of the first female graduates of New York University Law School. She edited the work of fellow writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Bernard Shaw, and Israel Zangwill, and took Theodore Roosevelt on a tour of the Lower East Side in an effort to publicize the hunger and poverty of poor immigrant families, an experience she described in her 1918 essay “Milk.” She wrote film scripts for Hollywood studios including Universal Pictures, Pathé, MGM, and Fox, and won an Academy Award for Interrupted...