Zelda Popkin: The Life and Times of an American Jewish Woman Writer by Jeremy D. Popkin (review)

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• Zelda Popkin: The Life and Times of an American Jewish Woman Writer by Jeremy D. Popkin
• Jessica Kirzane (bio)

Zelda Popkin: The Life and Times of an American Jewish Woman Writer. By Jeremy D. Popkin. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. xx + 277 pp.

Zelda Popkin is an author whose writing should be recognized as having major significance for American Jewish literary studies, gender studies, and beyond. As her biographer Jeremy D. Popkin explains, her writing was groundbreaking for its attention to major events in twentieth-century Jewish life, combining her early journalistic experience with her role as a popular middlebrow novelist, and is further distinguished by its dogged insistence on centering women's perspectives—especially those that corresponded closely to the experiences of the author herself.

Popkin's biography offers descriptions of several of Zelda Popkin's novels as well as archival evidence that describes a broader context for the author herself, including her approach to work and to parenting. Her mid-century detective novels featuring female protagonist Mary Carner showcased a woman's ingenuity early in the inception of the popular genre. Her World War II novel The Journey Home (1945) was a bestseller significant for exploring the experiences not only of combat veterans but also of civilian women. Her Small Victory (1947) was a very early depiction of European Holocaust survivors in DP camps, and she continued to engage with the subject of the Holocaust and Jewish and life more broadly. Her novel Quiet Street (1951), a very early novel about the creation of the State of Israel, was an assessment of Jewish characters not as the romanticized, exotic figures of Leon Uris's Exodus, but as everyday men and women who exhibited courage and toughness both in fighting and in everyday life during extraordinary circumstances. Her novel Herman Had Two Daughters (1968) a multigenerational saga of American Jewish life, depicted Jewish women as independent individuals and was singular in its critique of American Jewish institutions and their relationship to philanthropy.

Jeremy D. Popkin demonstrates that Zelda Popkin's writing and work covered a wide swath of American Jewish history and illustrates with particularity and intimacy some of the trends that writers of broader histories have explained on a large-scale level, such as changing roles of women in the workplace and domestic life and American Jewish perspectives on the Holocaust and Israel. Additionally, scholars working in the field of Jewish organizational life will find much to explore in his descriptions of the professional lives of Zelda and her husband Louis Popkin as public relations professionals working for the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Conciliation Board, and others in the early twentieth century, and scholars of Jewish American journalism [End Page 798] will appreciate the coverage of her writing for American Hebrew and elsewhere. Those with an interest in histories of women's family roles and relationships will appreciate the treatment of Zelda Popkin's frustrations with rapidly changing expectations for motherhood and her writing about her experiences as a widow.

Most importantly, Jeremy D. Popkin makes a strong case for the significance of this author as a pioneering writer whose work has been understudied. Writing as a historian, he focuses less on the texts themselves than on the histories of their writing and publication, as well as their (sometimes underwhelming) reception. The biographer accounts for her writing having fallen out of favor as a result of its popular, middlebrow orientation and because of the author's desire to normalize her Jewish characters as ordinary everyday Americans, rather than offer myths of Jews as exceptionally heroic or tragic. He helpfully compares Zelda Popkin's work to that of writers such as Philip Roth, Leon Uris, and Laura Z. Hobson in order to better situate its themes among the work of these better-known contemporaries.

This biography is somewhat unusual because of the author's closeness to the subject—she was his grandmother—and because of his inclusion of his personal memories and family archive in his accounting for her life story and its significance. This offers the reader intimate insights into Zelda Popkin's personal life, especially in her old age. The insertion of his personal...