Marie Syrkin: Values Beyond the Self

by Carole S. Kessner

Overview

A compelling biography of an important eyewitness to the twentieth century.

Marie Syrkin’s life spanned ninety years of the twentieth century, 1899-1989. As a polemical journalist, socialist Zionist, poet, educator, literary critic, translator, and idiosyncratic feminist, she was an eyewitness to and reporter on most of the major events in America, Israel, and Europe. Beautiful as well as brilliant, she had a rich personal life as a lover, wife, mother, and friend. During her lifetime Syrkin’s name was widely recognized in the world of Jewish life and letters. Yet, since Syrkin’s death, recognition of her name is no longer quite so immediate. Carole S. Kessner’s biography restores Syrkin’s fascinating life and legacy for a new generation.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684580729
Publisher:	Brandeis University Press
Publication date:	10/08/2021
Series:	HBI Series on Jewish Women
Pages:	504
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Carole S. Kessner is professor emerita, Department of Comparative Studies, SUNY Stony Brook. She is the recipient of the Marie Syrkin Fellowship for 1994, and the winner of the 2009  National Jewish Book Award for Biography. The author of many essays and articles ranging from "Milton's Hebraic Herculean Hero" to "The Emma Lazarus-Henry James Connection: Eight Letters," she is the editor and contributor to The "Other" New York Jewish Intellectuals (1994) and is the co-editor of  and contributor to Studies in American Jewish Literature: vol.29, 2010. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. 

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition: Remembering Marie xi

Acknowledgments xix

Introduction 1

Part I

Chapter 1 Marie's Birthright 11

Chapter 2 A Bronx Adolescence 49

Chapter 3 That Fabulous Summer: Maurice 71

Chapter 4 Elopement and Annulment 91

Chapter 5 Marriage, Motherhood, and Tragedy 121

Chapter 6 David, Divorce, and the Death of Nachman 159

Chapter 7 A New Life: Charles 183

Part II

Chapter 8 An Unorthodox Marriage: Palestine and Hollywood 217

Chapter 9 At the Nexus of the "Jewish Problem" 241

Chapter 10 On the Jewish Frontier: The Twenty-First Zionist Congress 262

Chapter 11 The War, the White Paper, and the Rescue of the Jews 290

Chapter 12 Wartime Horrors: Personal Unhappiness 320

Chapter 13 Postwar Projects: DP Camps, Blessed is the Match, Israel 353

Chapter 14 Academia at Last: The Brandeis Years 395

Epilogue 433

Notes 447

Index 459

Illustrations follow page 234

What People are Saying About This

Cynthia Ozick

"Carole Kessner restores to us a brilliant and valiant figure: poet and polemicist, lover and wife, heroine of a people's striving for historic justice. In Kessner's informative, clarifying, and devoted rendering, Marie Syrkin is revealed as a robust and pragmatic idealist creatively responsive to the exigencies of her time, and a courageous model for ours."
— Cynthia Ozick, author of Art and Ardor and Dictation

Editorial Reviews

Finally, Zionist thinker Marie Syrkin gets the recognition she deserves. . . . It is not sentimental overpraise to say that Marie Syrkin deserves a place at the roundtable of great intellects who helped shape contemporary Jewish-American liberalism.

Haaretz