Diary of a Lonely Girl by Miriam Karpilove
- Yiddish Shmoozers in Translation
- Mar 18
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 24
SUNDAY, MARCH 29, 2026 3:00-5:00 pm
WITH SPECIAL GUEST
TRANSLATOR JESSICA KIRZANE
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Miriam Karpilove's novel, Diary of a Lonely Girl, portrays a secular Jewish immigrant woman's search for a love match on New York's Lower East Side. The unnamed narrator, a single and self-supporting worker without family in America, seeks a modern Jewish man to match her intellect and desires.
The narrator wants a love match with a man called "A" for whom she professes true love. If only he were willing to commit to marry her! What she finds, instead, are men, including "B," a married man, whose interest lies in sexual conquest masquerading under the 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.
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 and punished.
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--"A," "B," and a third, "C"--at the same time as engaging in dialog with any one of them. They are types. Fending off their sexual advances, she does more than recount what an observer or even what her aspiring lover would see. Rather, she reveals to the reader her dynamic strategies as she manages his advances and plays the long game. Always in the forefront of the narrative are the narrator's perceptive intelligence and assertions of autonomy.
The diary format also facilitates Karpilove's sophisticated intervention in the debates about free love associated with Emma Goldman that were circulating in the early 1900s. Although various mid-19th century utopian, socialist and anarchist communities had taken up the free love banner, its reemergence flared most brightly after anarchist Emma Goldman first published her essay Marriage and Love in 1911. The full text online makes an invaluable companion to Karpilove.
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."
For Goldman, marriage was "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. In contrast to Goldman's abstractions, Karpilove's perspectives on free love are astute and nuanced, coming from her positionality on the ground. With her most constant, annoying, but unmarried suitor, C, the narrator shows that she is familiar with Emma Goldman's arguments and that she understands them very well. But she's not fooled by the version spouted by A, B, and C.
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