Diary of a Lonely Girl by Miriam Karpilove
- Yiddish Shmoozers in Translation
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SUNDAY, MARCH 29, 202 3:00-5:00 pm
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Miriam Karpilove's novel, Diary of a Lonely Girl portrays a self-supporting, secular Jewish immigrant woman's search for a love match on New York's Lower East Side. The unnamed narrator seeks a modern Jewish man to match her intellect and desires.
What she finds, instead, are men--including married men--whose interest lies in sexual conquest masquerading under the left-progressive banner of "free love."
Subtitled The Fight Against Free Love, Karpilove's novel examines the intrusion of state control and the blatant social and economic inequality between Jewish immigrant men and women in this period. As a byproduct of housing reforms meant to drive prostitution from the tenements, single women like the unnamed narrator, an Everywoman, lived under the threat of arrest. New York City police could accost them for appearing unaccompanied in public. A busybody of a landlady could summarily evict her unmarried boarder for entertaining a man in her room. In other words, women's sexual activity was everywhere policed.
Karpilove accomplishes much as a writer through the first-person format of diary entries. The entries allow for a realistic unfolding of events with close descriptions of characters, settings, speech, behavior, and consequences of earlier actions. At the same time, the diary creates a kind of split screen, disclosing the narrator's private view of what is taking place. She freely compares the three men in her life--identified as A, B, and C--at the same time as engaging in dialog with any one of them. For example, as the narrator fends off the sexual advances of A, B, or C, she does more than recount what an observer or even what her would-be lover sees. Rather, she reveals to the reader her strategies as she plays the long game. In the forefront is the narrator's intelligence and assertion of power.
The diary format also facilitates Karpilove's sophisticated intervention in the debates about free love that circulated in the early 1900s. Although various mid-19th century utopian, socialist and anarchist communities took up the free love banner, its reemergence flared after anarchist Emma Goldman published her essay Marriage and Love in 1911.
Goldman wrote: "Marriage and love have nothing in common; they are as far apart as the poles; are, in fact, antagonistic to each other. No doubt some marriages have been the result of love. Not, however, because love could assert itself only in marriage; much rather is it because few people can completely outgrow a convention. There are to-day large numbers of men and women to whom marriage is naught but a farce, but who submit to it for the sake of public opinion. At any rate, while it is true that some marriages are based on love, and while it is equally true that in some cases love continues in married life, I maintain that it does so regardless of marriage, and not because of it."
Goldman characterized marriage as "primarily an economic arrangement, an insurance pact" that "condemns a woman to lifelong dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness." This debasement and dependency, she argued, is enforced by the coercive role of the state.
Karpilove's own perspectives on free love are astute and courageous, coming from her positionality on the ground. In conversations with C, the narrator acknowledges Emma Goldman's ideas and shows that she understands them very well. But she's not fooled by the facile arguments of A, B, or C who employ Goldman's reasoning as they badger the narrator for sex.
For these suitors, as Goldman's anti-socialist critics claimed, the banner of "free love" is a license for multiple sexual adventures without commitments and consequences for the man. This is not to say that the narrator's views about love, sex, desire, and marriage fit a conventional or repressive mold. In her experience as a foot soldier in this new battle of the sexes, giving in to sexual desire without love is not freeing. In practice, free love is another name for sexual exploitation.
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