Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle against Free Love by Mariam Karpilove, first 1918 - translated from the Yiddish and with an Introduction by Jessica Kirzane - 2019 is a valuable edition to Yiddish Literature in Translation, set in New York City in the second decade of the 20th century.
The narrator moved to New York City from Minsk, she is fluent in Yiddish, Russian and is advancing rapidly in her English. She is single and there alone with no relatives. She faces a lot of challenges from numerous categories of people she encounters. She rents a series of rooms, some landladies are suspicious of single female renters and some act as substitute mothers. Most landlords seem to prefer men renters. She has to move several times because of issues. Every move means new people in her circle.
In this sort of Sex in The NYC Yiddish community circa 1913 or so things are changing. Emma Goldman is speaking out on Women’s rights, the oppresiveness of conventional marriages and political anarchism. Our diarist is approached by several suitors. Men use the notion of “free love”, meaning sex outside of marriage, to suggest she is hiding from life when she declines their propositions, trying emotional manipulation to get her in bed. Landladies don’t normally approve male visitors. Birth control methods are being openly talked about, a forbidden topic back in Russia. One of her suitors, she meets him at a library, is very intellectual and they have interesting conversations.
One of her landladies in a very entertaining interlude decides to find her a husband. She tells her she needs to “take herself off the market”.
Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle against Free Love by Mariam Karpilove conveys the life of a single woman marvelously. You can see all the different directions in which tradition versus modernization and assimilation are pulling her.
I greatly enjoyed this novel. I hope a collection of her short stories, she wrote hundreds, will be published soon.
From The Encyclopedia of Jewish Women
Miriam Karpilove was one of the most prolific
widely published women writers of Yiddish prose. Her short stories and novels explore issues important in the lives of Jewish women of her generation. Frequent themes are the upbringing of girls and women in Eastern Europe, the barriers they encounter when they seek secular education, and the conflicts they experience upon immigration to North America... Born in a small town near Minsk in 1888, to Elijah and Hannah Karpilov, Miriam Karpilove and her nine siblings were raised in an observant home. Her father was a lumber merchant and builder. Karpilove was given a traditional Jewish and secular education, and was trained as a photographer and retoucher. After immigrating to the United States in 1905, she became active in the Labor Zionist movement and spent the latter part of the 1920s in Palestine. She resided in New York City and in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where several of her brothers had settled.
One of a handful of women who made their living as Yiddish writers, Karpilove debuted in 1906, publishing dramas, feuilletons, criticism, sketches, short stories, and novellas in a variety of important Yiddish periodicals during her fifty-year career.
Jessica Kirzane.
https://jessicakirzane.com/
Jessica Kirzane teaches Yiddish language as well as courses in Yiddish literature and culture. She received her PhD in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University in 2017. Kirzane is the Editor-in-Chief of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies. In addition, she has held several positions at the Yiddish Book Center: Translation Fellow in 2017-18, Pedagogy Fellow in 2018-19, and as an editor and contributor to the Teach Great Jewish Books site of the Yiddish Book Center. Her research interests include race, sex, gender, and regionalism in American Jewish and Yiddish literature.
The publisher is Syracuse University Press
Mel u
Ambrosia Bousweau
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