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

Abstract

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