Every March brings us Women’s History Month. Among this year’s highlights is the publication of a new biography of an American Jewish woman — Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp — by another American Jewish woman, Ann Kirschner.
If the Earp name sounds familiar, that’s because Josephine’s common-law husband, Wyatt, has occupied the limelight of American Old West mythology. Remember that famous shootout in Tombstone, Ariz., in 1881? The one dramatized in films such as “My Darling Clementine,” “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” “Tombstone,” and “Wyatt Earp”? Turns out that the fight had something to do with a certain Jewish girl. In her new biography, “Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp,” Kirschner restores Josephine to her rightful historical place. (In her previous book, the acclaimed “Sala’s Gift,” Kirschner explored her mother’s Holocaust story.)
Kirschner, whose career began as a lecturer in Victorian literature at Princeton University, currently serves as University Dean of Macaulay Honors College of The City University of New York. In a recent interview with The Sisterhood, Kirschner discussed what’s remarkable about Josephine — and what it was like to research her story.
The opening scene of Anna Solomon’s new book “The Little Bride” is one of the most harrowing that I’ve read in a novel.
The reader meets 16-year-old Minna Losk in a dank basement where she is ordered to undress and then inspected like an animal. Orphaned at 11 and sent into indentured servitude to a cousin in Odessa, Minna — who is the ultimate survivor — applies to Rosenfeld’s, an agency sending Jewish brides in Russia to Jewish men who have gone ahead to settle in America. Minna is matched (a generous description of the transaction) with Max, a pious man twice her age and father of two sons who are his new wife’s contemporaries
“The Little Bride” captures a lesser-known chapter of Jewish American history, giving it a dramatic arc replete with a love triangle. Some 8,000 Jewish immigrants settled in the vastness west of the Missouri River at the end of the 19th century.
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