Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal

The Salome Ensemble probes the entangled lives, works, and passions of a political activist, a novelist, a screenwriter, and a movie actress who collaborated in 1920s New York City. Together they created the shape-shifting, genre-crossing Salome of the Tenements, first a popular novel and then a Hollywood movie. The title character was a combination Cinderella and Salome like the women who conceived her. Rose Pastor Stokes was the role model. Anzia Yezierska wrote the novel. Sonya Levien wrote the screenplay. Jetta Goudal played her on the silver screen. Ginsberg considers the women individually and collectively, exploring how they shaped and reflected their cultural landscape. These European Jewish immigrants pursued their own versions of the American dream, escaped the squalor of sweatshops, knew romance and heartache, and achieved prominence in politics, fashion, journalism, literature, and film.

Author: Alan Robert Ginsberg
Publisher: Syracuse University Publications in Continuin
Published: 04/01/2016
Pages: 376
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.21lbs
Size: 9.09h x 5.95w x 1.01d
ISBN: 9780815610656

About the Author
Alan Robert Ginsberg is a visiting scholar and board member at the Center for American Studies at Columbia University. He has contributed as a freelance writer to periodicals, including the Columbia Journalism Review, worked as a research analyst in financial institutions in New York, Los Angeles, and London, and served as a program director at a United Nations nongovernmental organization promoting women's rights in developing countries.