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:	9781684580736
Publisher:	Brandeis University Press
Publication date:	10/08/2021
Series:	HBI Series on Jewish Women
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	501
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Carole S. Kessner is professor emerita of comparative studies at SUNY, Stony Brook. She was the 1994 recipient of the Marie Syrkin Fellowship.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

PART I
Chapter 1. Marie’s Birthright
Chapter 2. A Bronx Adolescence
Chapter 3. That Fabulous Summer: Maurice
Chapter 4. Elopement and Annulment
Chapter 5. Marriage, Motherhood, and Tragedy
Chapter 6. David, Divorce, and the Death of Nachman
Chapter 7. A New Life: Charles

PART II
Chapter 8. An Unorthodox Marriage: Palestine and Hollywood
Chapter 9. At the Nexus of the “Jewish Problem”
Chapter 10. On the Jewish Frontier: The Twenty-First Zionist Congress
Chapter 11. The War, the White Paper, and the Rescue of the Jews
Chapter 12. Wartime Horrors: Personal Unhappiness
Chapter 13. Postwar Projects: DP Camps, Blessed is the Match, Israel
Chapter 14. Academia at Last: The Brandeis Years

Epilogue
Notes
Index

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