Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle Against Free Love: Reading Resources

Background: Miriam Karpilove

Miriam Karpilove (1888–1956) was a prolific Yiddish writer and editor with a sly, sarcastic humor whose work focused attention on women’s lives and the inequality they experienced in the workplace and in romantic relationships. She was born near Minsk in what is now Belarus (then in the Russian Empire), a middle child in a family of ten children, and immigrated to America in 1905, settling in Harlem and later in the Seagate neighborhood of Brooklyn, then in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where several of her brothers lived.

Her first published work appeared in print in 1906 when she was eighteen years old, and she continued her publishing career until the mid-1940s. She was among the very few women who made their living as Yiddish writers, and she supplemented her income as a photo retoucher, hand-coloring photographs. Karpilove wrote hundreds of short stories, plays, and novels and served as a staff writer for the Forward in the 1930s.

Karpilove started her career by publishing a handful of pieces—short stories and humorous sketches—in newspapers. Her first major success was her 1909 play In di shturm teg, about a Jewish family during the Russian Revolution. That play was performed by the Yidishe Folks-Bihne in New York in 1912, bringing new attention to Karpilove and her work.

In 1914 her writing career appears to have taken off. She started publishing short stories and sketches for the newly founded literary-oriented newspaper Der tog and other leading newspapers like the Fraye arbeter shtime and the Forverts. When she began serializing Diary of a Lonely Girl in the newspaper Di varhayt in 1916, she gained recognition of a wide audience and the stability of a regular income.

The novel itself was widely popular, and as a result she became a regular contributor to Di varhayt, the Ladies Garment Worker, and other New York papers. This was her first foray into writing serialized novels, which became a specialty of hers. As early as 1917, before Diary appeared in book form, Karpilove had already begun her second serialized novel, Di farfirte, about a woman who was led astray.

She continued publishing short stories, reportage, and serialized novels in Di varhayt until 1920, when her situation appears to have become more tenuous. From 1921 to 1925 she did not get anything published except for 1922’s melodramatic book Brokhe, about an ill-fated shtetl romance.

In 1925 she left New York for Boston in search of work. There she published about fifty editorials for a newspaper that she thought provincial, and her work did nothing to bolster her reputation or readership. As a result, she published her slapstick novel A Provincial Newspaper, about a woman writer-editor who is hired as a staff writer for a poorly managed provincial newspaper, where she is exploited and ill-treated; one might assume there’s some autobiographical content in the novel, though it was likely exaggerated for comic effect.

With no opportunities for stable employment on the immediate horizon, she left Boston for Palestine, hoping she could write about her experiences for the American Yiddish press. A devoted Zionist, she wanted to remain in Tel Aviv, but she could not sustain her career there and returned to America in 1929.

Back in New York, without a sustained source of income or reliable publishing opportunities, Karpilove managed to publish several novels and short stories in newspapers. She also tried to break into English language publishing, self-translating to seek new audiences but with no success. In 1934 Karpilove was hired as a staff writer for the Yiddish daily newspaper the Forverts, where she once again had a steady income as a writer, and for several years she edited others’ writing and published her own novels and observations.

In 1938 she left the Forverts for Bridgeport, Connecticut, to take care of her brother Jacob and his ailing wife, Annie. After Annie’s death, and facing her own health issues, Karpilove continued to live in Bridgeport, although her letters to friends demonstrate that she disliked living there and felt removed from the lively world of Yiddish letters.

Until her death in 1956 she maintained correspondence with many friends in the Yiddish writing world and planned to publish her collected works, to improve and publish several novels, and to write her own life story, but her poor health made it difficult for her to realize these projects.

In some ways, Karpilove’s story is one of remarkable success—a tenacious woman who used her sharp, sarcastic pen to win fame and financial independence despite the lack of opportunities for women in the Yiddish press. Diary of a Lonely Girl is an example of this success because it was so widely read and enjoyed. But Karpilove’s story also concerns her need to hustle and her concern and anger about the public’s lack of interest in her writing; her writing remained largely unread and unexamined until a recent uptick in interest in Yiddish literature by women in general, and by Karpilove in particular, brought her work to new audiences.

Marketing and Reception

There was little criticism of Diary of a Lonely Girl outside the pages of Di varhayt itself, in which the line between reviews and advertisements was rather thin. The following excerpts of paratextual material help us understand how the novel was marketed to the reading public.

Appealing to the sensibilities of an audience of sympathetic women who might share in the protagonist’s experiences or be curious about them, Esther Baltik, in her review/advertisement printed in Di varhayt itself, writes:

In the Jewish ghettos of America there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of lonely girls like this one. You meet them everywhere you go. . . . Would you like to meet this lonely girl? Would you like to know what goes on in her soul? Would you like to meet her friends and acquaintances, the people she gathers with? We are sure that you do; we are sure that each one of us has much to learn from her life and experiences.

A second review/advertisement, also published in Di varhayt, by A. Ostrovski, gives another angle, one that gives a masculine, and conservative, imprimatur to the novel:

It’s remarkable how logically, cleverly, and concisely the facts [of the novel] are related. Openly. But at the same time it rings with touching modesty. No writer has ever written the absolute truth the way our “lonely girl” does. And never has the truth, and the warning within it, been so urgent as it is now. . . . I, as a man, give my blessing to it: “may there be many such as you in Israel.” Let this message grow, so that we will return to our purity, body, soul, and family.”[1]

Diary appeared in installments in Di varhayt, and one of the goals in printing it was to increase the sales of the newspaper as a whole. It is useful, therefore, to think about how the novel worked to appeal to, and retain, a variety of audiences. What other review/advertisements can you imagine for this book, and what particular audience would such a review/advertisement appeal to?

Themes

The Pitfalls of Free Love

At the turn of the twentieth century, “free love” had significant political and ideological currency. It referred to the notion that legal marriage was a form of sexual slavery in which women were forced to sell their sexual and economic freedom in exchange for financial security and social position. Advocates of free love, such as Emma Goldman (1869–1940), one of the most influential radical speakers and thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, called for a reimagining of love, free from patriarchal structures.

Emma Goldman’s speech “Against Marriage as a Private Possession,” delivered in New York City in July 1897, illustrates this idea:

. . . whether legal or illegal, prostitution in any form is unnatural, hurtful, and despicable, and I only know too well that the conditions cannot be changed until this infernal system is abolished, but I also know that it is not only the economic dependence of women which has caused her enslavement, but also her ignorance and prejudice, and I also know that many of my sisters could be made free even now, were it not for our marriage institutions which keep them in ignorance, stupidity, and prejudice. I therefore consider it my greatest duty to denounce marriage, not only the old form, but the so-called modern marriage, the idea of taking a wife and housekeeper, the idea of private possession of one sex by the other. I demand the independence of woman; her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.[2]

Karpilove’s novel is written against the idea of “free love”—she takes a cynical stance at the notion of free love, highlighting the ways in which engaging with relationships outside of marriage disempowers women given the social realities in which they live. According to Karpilove’s narrator, women forced to engage in such relationships outside of the protections of marriage find themselves devalued and taken advantage of. Traditional social structures, such as marriage and procreative sex (Karpilove’s narrator is also opposed to birth control), serve as guardrails that allow women the stability and respectability they are denied in the dating world of free-love radicals. Nevertheless, traditional arranged marriages are portrayed throughout Karpilove’s novel as placing independent-minded women in the unhappy circumstance of being possessions of undesirable men. Karpilove’s novel seems to be a refusal of both free love and arranged marriage, groping toward some as-yet-undiscovered middle ground.

Vice Policing

Free love is not only problematic for the protagonist insofar as it precludes the protections and comforts of marriage; it also makes her vulnerable to punishment by the state. In several moments in the novel, the narrator indicates the role that vice policing has in intensifying her own vulnerability as she is squeezed between desiring men, judgmental landladies, and a punitive state that frowns upon single women.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which recounts the intimate histories of Black women during in the early twentieth century, Saidiya Hartman explains how “progressive” reforms failed to address the real causes of vice:

The Tenement House Act (1901) was crafted by Progressive reformers. . . . From its inception, the effort to protect tenement dwellers from decrepit and uninhabitable conditions was linked inextricably with eradicating crime and social vice. The Act took for granted the criminality of the poor and identified the diseased home as the incubator of crime. Progressive intellectuals and reformers believed that social evils emanate from the slum rather than the structural conditions of poverty, unemployment, racism, and capitalism. While the Act was designed to prevent the overcrowding that was the prolific source of sexual immorality and to improve the housing conditions of the poor . . . the benefits and protection provided by the law were overshadowed by the abuse and harassment that accompanied the police presence inside private homes. (251)

The 1909 Tenement House Act defined vagrancy as follows:

A woman who knowingly resides in a house of prostitution or assignation of any description in a tenement house or who commits prostitution or indecently exposes her person for the purpose of prostitution or who solicits any man or boy to enter a house of prostitution or a room in a tenement house for the purpose of prostitution, shall be deemed a vagrant, and upon conviction thereof shall be committed to the county jail for a term not exceeding six months from the date of commitment.[3]

Hartman explains that under the law, any young woman residing in a tenement who invited a man into her home risked being charged with prostitution. Under the guise of housing reform, the police were given the power to surveil and arrest tenement residents, even on suspicion of prostitution. While these laws had a significantly outsized impact on Black communities, they pathologized and criminalized the urban poor writ large, Jewish immigrants among them.

In this context, Karpilove’s argument against free love becomes a call to protect single women from the brutalities of a state that criminalized their very existence as potential prostitutes and threats to the social order. Men insisting on free love in such circumstances were subjecting women to the possibility of arrest. Moreover, knowing that the police viewed single women as morally suspect gave men enormous power over women who resisted their free love advances, as they could easily turn the women over to the police as vagrants.

An Economic Argument

The question of the role of the single woman in the early twentieth century was not only a political or a moral one—it was also one that reached into the realm of economics.

At one point in the novel, the narrator accuses her suitor, C., saying: “You came here with a bargain in mind, a sale.” (142)

In her economic framing of their relationship, which recurs in several instances, the narrator suggests that her suitor—himself a radical leftist—is operating under capitalist assumptions about her sexual labor. He wants to enjoy the woman’s sexual labor without paying the higher price of marriage and ultimately threatens to cheapen her value on the marriage market itself. This economic framing of single women and the saturated marriage market was commonplace in early twentieth-century discourse about modern sexuality.

In 1916 utopian feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, best known for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1890), published a story in her literary magazine The Forerunner titled “Surplus Woman,” in which she decried the conditions of women living in cities where women outnumbered men—a situation exacerbated by casualties during the First World War. Women were unable to enjoy the security, respectability, or (in her mind) the morality of proper marriage because of this gender imbalance. She writes:

As there had already been a large majority of surplus women in her country, even before the wholesale destruction of a whole generation of masculine youth, the result was as plain as an example in simple arithmetic; there now were over a million women who could not marry . . .

You know what they say about us—call us “surplus women,” say we are “denied our natural functions,” and have become an “economic burden on the state,” call the men “producers,” and us “consumers” . . . we are a vast mass of enforced celibates.

In the story, the protagonist proposes that these single women organize in mutual uplift and shared economic activity, supporting themselves through productive labor and gaining rights as workers by banding together. Such a plan demanded celibacy of women so as to avoid the supposed immorality of promiscuity or the muddying of “productive” labor with sexual labor.

Reading Karpilove alongside Gilman, we begin to see the discourse surrounding the single, or “surplus,” woman as an economic problem for which several solutions are proposed: if women are to live outside of marriage, either their love should be free (and not paid for by marriage) or they should not “sell” it at all and rather use their bodies differently—to contribute to the economy. To a certain degree, again, Karpilove’s narrator seems to refuse both of these proposals. We rarely see her narrator engaged in the activities by which she earns her wages, and she is not motivated by the need to be “productive.” She wants to love, but she is also not convinced that her love needs to be “free” (in the sense of provided without benefit to herself).

[1] Both of these advertisements can be found at the back of this book: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/yiddish-books/spb-nybc204731?book-page=104&book-mode=1up
[2] From Jewish Women’s Archive, reprinted in How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish, p. 31
[3] Cited in Hartman, 251

Reviews and Reflections on the Book:

An interview with Jessica Kirzane for The Shmooze podcast.

Jessica Kirzane discusses Diary of a Lonely Girl with Sasha Senderovich for Borderlines Open School.

Suggested resources

Biographical:

Other works by (and about) Miriam Karpilove in translation:

  • “Freydl,” trans. Kirzane in Columbia Journal. In this story of homoerotic longing and privilege, a girl admires her family’s maid and aspires to arrange a match between the maid and a young man from her own social circle, learning a lesson about class status and about meddling.
     
  • Chicago, trans. Kirzane in Another Chicago Magazine. In this feuilleton, Miriam Karpilove (derisively) describes the Yiddish literary scene in Chicago in the early twentieth century.
     
  • New York’s First Time Women Voters, trans. Kirzane in Jewish Currents. In this feuilleton, Karpilove describes her impressions of New York women in 1918 voting legally for the first time.
     
  • “Theatre: A Sketch,” trans. Kirzane in Digital Yiddish Theater Project. In this short story, until recently unpublished, Karpilove harpoons the business of Yiddish theater for its formulaic and insubstantive content, misogyny, and lack of attention to cataclysmic world events.
     
  • Excerpt from A Provincial Newspaper, trans. Kirzane in Pakn Treger. In this excerpt, a newspaperwoman is hired to work for a poorly run startup Yiddish newspaper.
     
  • Excerpt from Yudis, trans. Kirzane in Pakn Treger. This epistolary novella follows the protagonist, Judith, and her melodramatic, tumultuous romance with Joseph, a Jewish intellectual from a well-off family. In this excerpt, Judith writes to her lover from across the ocean after she has emigrated to America and expresses her longing for him even as her doubts about his fidelity leave her feeling helpless. 
     
  • “In a Friendly Hamlet,” trans. Myra Mniewski in Have I Got a Story for You (W. W. Norton, 2016). In this story, a bride is forced into an unwanted arranged marriage in a shtetl setting.
     
  • Elyash, “Father of the Whole World,” trans. Kirzane for Jewish Currents. In this humorous story, after all the men in the world have killed each other through warfare, Karpilove takes over as president of the United States as the author, Elyash, finds a role for himself as a lonely man in the new world order.

Discussion Questions

  1. In Diary, the tone shifts between melancholic/lovelorn and ironic, with the narrator at times invested in, and at times aloof from the romantic relationships she is involved in.  How would you describe the narrator's overall attitude toward romance?  Does it change over time?
     
  2. Diary at times makes political and economic arguments about women's roles in love, free love, and marriage.  Do you see these arguments as central to the novel?  How would you describe the politics of the novel?
     
  3. The narrator rarely references to her Jewish identity, yet she writes and speaks in Yiddish and her social group is entirely Jewish.  To what extent, and how, does the novel feel "Jewish" to you?
     
  4. The novel was initially published serially.  How do you think your reading experience would be different if you were reading it in short installments each week?  In what ways do you think the novel might be different if it had been composed to be read all at once?
     
  5. The suitors in Diary are named according to letters of the alphabet.  Do you experience these suitors as interchangeable?  Are there differences in the way they treat the narrator?
     
  6. How would you describe the role of female friendship in the narrative?
     
  7. How do the attitudes and concerns of this novel resonate with contemporary issues concerning sexual consent and romantic relationships?
     

—Jessica Kirzane