Zelda Popkin by Jeremy D. Popkin

Author:Jeremy D. Popkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Left Behind in the Golden Age

Zelda Popkin’s novel about the creation of Israel was not as complete a failure as she made it out to be in her contribution to Harold Ribalow’s forum for Jewish authors. Quiet Street went through at least three printings and, in May 1953, it was adapted as a radio play on the Jewish Theological Seminary’s weekly Eternal Light broadcast.1

She was invited as a headliner at a major United Jewish Appeal fundraising dinner in Pennsylvania in 1952, where she told the audience that “what is happening in Israel is one of the greatest human adventures in the history of man.”2 Nevertheless, my grandmother’s life definitely took a downward turn after Quiet Street’s appearance. From 1938, when her first Mary Carner mystery appeared, until 1951, when Quiet Street was published, she had written ten book-length works of fiction, one of which had been a genuine best-seller. In her four “serious” novels, The Journey Home, Small Victory, Walk Through the Valley, and Quiet Street, she had tackled major themes that more celebrated authors avoided: the place of women in a wartime society, the aftermath of the Holocaust and the issue of American antisemitism, the fate of widowed women, and the creation of an independent Jewish state. After 1951, however, Zelda would not publish another novel for seventeen years. Her hopes of finding another husband slowly faded, her confidence that she could show other single women how to make careers for themselves dissolved, and her conviction that she had her finger on the pulse of her times gave way to a sense of alienation from the world around her. Although I did not realize it at the time, the grandmother I was coming to know in the 1950s and 1960s was a frustrated and unhappy woman who was, at times, truly living in poverty almost as dire as that her immigrant family had experienced during her childhood.

Figure 6.1. Zelda Popkin at her typewriter (1940s?): Although she never had a success like The Journey Home again, Zelda considered herself as a writer above all else. Her heavy-duty typewriter dominated the small New York apartments where she lived for the second half of her life. Ironically, the most difficult years of Zelda’s adult life were a time of prosperity for American society in general and a “golden age” for American Jews in particular. After 1945, the United States was the world’s most powerful nation. For more than two decades, a growing economy provided a rising standard of living for most of the population. The antisemitism that Zelda had denounced in The Journey Home and Small Victory seemed to have disappeared, and most American Jews became comfortable members of the middle class, concerned at most that affluence might be diminishing their ethnic and religious distinctiveness.3 While Zelda lived in a succession of small Manhattan apartments, her Bronx-reared sons joined the American Jewish migration to suburbia—my uncle Roy to Long Island and the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, my father and our family to academic communities in Iowa and Southern California.

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