A Lonely Girl in New York

Every day, the unnamed narrator of Miriam Karpilove's novel Diary of a Lonely Girl writes in her diary about her struggle with her current lover. In sequence, the lovers are named A., B., C. (for Cheek), Davis, Eshkin, and F. Almost, but not quite interchangeable. They all want the same thing. They refer to it as "happiness" but she can tell what's really in their minds, and she resists, refuses, rejects them, and even insults them, despite their eloquent pleas that cite all sorts of intellectual and political reasons why she should give in to them. Sometimes they suggest marriage or living together, but she either doesn't trust them or doesn't love or even like them. Other times she says she doesn't believe in marriage. She always says she doesn't believe in "free love." She and her prospective lovers constantly talk about the nature of women, of men, and of love. And it all takes place in New York of course.

As a reader, I found Karpilove's novel a little repetitive, but repetition seems inevitable when I think about the fact that it was published one diary-entry at a time over the course of a couple of years. It reads a little like a blog – but in fact, it dates from 1916 to 1918, and was published serially in Yiddish in a newspaper called Di varhayt. The translation that I read was the first English-language version: published in 2020.

Most of the episodes of the novel take place in a sequence of rented rooms in the households of various, mostly busy-body landladies. The poor furnishings, floor coverings, threadbare blankets, poor heating, and dim gas lights in each room are described in some detail, but we learn absolutely nothing about what the narrator does to earn a living, where she eats her meals (though it seems to be assumed that they are provided by the landlady), or other details of her daily life. Just once, a landlady offers her some borscht and teygkhts (kugel). Once there were some refreshments at a party. Sometimes she goes to a coffee shop. 

The narrator's age is never specified, except that she is embarrassed by it, which suggests it's somewhere near 30. She has a few woman friends, who are also her rivals for the love of A., B., C, and D. She evidently left all of her family behind in Minsk when she emigrated to New York, but she maintains her Jewish identity along with speaking and writing in Yiddish. Language is a topic of discussion with her friends and lovers, who sometimes say a few words in English or German or Russian.

A single woman in the narrator's position in that era had to worry that the landlady would accuse her of immorality because she sometimes has innocent conversations with these lovers that last the entire night. The laws on the books allowed a policeman (who could be called by the landlady) to arrest a woman accused of what the characters in the book called free love. And send her to "the Tombs," which was a big prison (a predecessor to the prison called the Tombs today). In sum -- there's lots of drama, but not much action.

A recent article about this and other neglected Yiddish books by early 20th century women brought this interesting book to my attention, and so I bought and read it. The article describes the novel thus:

"In 'Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love,' a sendup of the socialists, anarchists and intellectuals who populated New York’s Lower East Side in the early 20th century, Miriam Karpilove writes from the perspective of a sardonic young woman frustrated by the men’s advocacy of unrestrained sexuality and their lack of concern about the consequences for her."

The article quotes Yiddish scholar Anita Norich, who has translated another of the forgotten women's novels:

"'This literature has been hiding in plain sight, but we all assumed it wasn’t there,' said Norich, a professor emeritus of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. 'Novels were written by men while women wrote poetry or memoirs and diaries but didn’t have access to the broad worldview that men did. If you’ve always heard that women didn’t write novels in Yiddish, why go looking for it?'" (source)

I think I'll read another one of these newly accessible novels soon.

Blog post © mae sander 2022.