American Jewish History

In 1960, the remnants of San Francisco's turn-of-the-century literary scene gathered in Sonoma Valley to dedicate the Jack London State Historic Park.¹ Reporting on the event, the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) took the opportunity to resurrect a long-since-forgotten part of London's story.² At a San Francisco commemoration of the Paris Commune hosted by the Socialist Labor Party in December 1899, the young author met a twenty-two-year-old East European Jewish immigrant—an aspiring writer and rising figure on the radical left by the name of Anna Strunsky.³ A tumultuous love affair ensued, spanning more than two years and spawning a semi-successful joint literary venture, a string of broken hearts, and a scandalized public.

The Forverts explained that Anna was one of a large Jewish family of budding intellectuals and writers from Babinots, a small village in what is today Belarus. The celebrated New York Times editor and author of No Mean City, Simeon Strunsky, was a first cousin. Ira Gershwin and playwright George S. Kaufman married into the family. It was the "San Francisco Strunskys," the Forverts noted, who boasted two main "attractions": the young and charismatic sisters Anna and Rose. In recounting the love affair between London and Anna and its unhappy ending, the Forverts underscored London's foray into eugenics and explained that while "he was madly in love and had wanted to marry [Anna], he [End Page 323] wouldn't because she was not of Anglo-Saxon descent."⁴ While a bit of an oversimplification, the author is correct that modern ideas about race, gender, and love figured prominently in their story.

Eight years after London and Strunsky's affair came to an end, Rose Strunsky found herself being courted by a young and volatile writer, new to Greenwich Village. A recent arrival to New York, Harry Sinclair Lewis attempted to integrate himself into a number of literary and political circles, and it was around this time that he began to pursue a number of romantic interests that proved rather disappointing.⁵ It is unclear how Rose and Lewis first became acquainted. She had only recently arrived in New York after an extended stay in Europe.⁶ Both were active in the same political and literary circles, suggesting they met through mutual acquaintances. That winter, Lewis asked Rose to accompany him to the Anarchists' Christmastime Ball, an invitation she declined.⁷ He continued to pursue her until she returned to Europe in January 1911, after which he quickly directed his interests elsewhere. A more complex portrait of their relationship emerges, however, from the more than thirty unpublished poems he wrote for her during this time. They suggest he was a periodic presence in her life—although ironically, her absence is a pronounced theme in the poetry—juxtaposing the futile pursuit of a young American man with the larger-than-life persona of an East European Jewish revolutionary.

Although almost a decade separated London's and Lewis's romantic interests in the Strunsky sisters, both men at the time were unsettled in life, love, and their careers, and they were contemplating many of the same social, political, and cultural questions preoccupying other young thinkers at the turn of the century. The story of intimacies and desires between London, Lewis, and the Strunsky sisters, in addition to the unpublished literary depictions of Jewish femininities that these women inspired, speak to larger questions about the image of the East European Jew in early-twentieth-century American thought, particularly within progressive circles and on the radical left.

Scholars have long noted how Anglo-American intellectuals and writers were drawn to East European Jewish immigrants because of their ties to the revolutionary centers of Europe and the vibrant cultural world they [End Page 324] established on the Lower East Side. Rejecting the Victorian sentimentality of a previous generation, American thinkers were eager to explore new meaningful forms of expression, representation, and association, a quest they characterized as a search for "authenticity." As cosmopolitan and urbane denizens of the working class...