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Lost Love: The Untold Story of Henrietta Szold : Unpublished Diary and Letters
Henrietta Szold was a brilliant Jewish scholar who became a voice for the Zionist movement. She is best known as the founder of Hadassah, today the largest Jewish organization in the world. Yet in her earlier years, when she was editor of The Jewish Publication Society, she fell in love with the respected scholar Louis Ginzberg with whom she collaborated on a multitude of projects. This book tells the story of Szold's lost love in her own words through a previously unpublished private journal that expresses longings and passions Szold kept secret from the world.
382 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1997
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January 9, 2013
I have yet to read fiction that captures even remotely as vividly the passion, intensity, obsession and "insanity" of love. This is a magnificent work; the diary and letters of Hadassa women's organization founder Henrietta Szold during her unrequited love affair. I could not put it down.
Szold's love for a man who did not reciprocate her passions bordered on obsession. But her diary entries are so elegant and eloquent, her intellect at war with her emotions, she captures her uncontrollable emotion and pain so that the reader wants to yell with her as she runs in the park and screams with the howling wind. You get to understand how irrational and unintelligent love is; yet how much leverage over the most sophisticated people.
Whereas her letters to Dr. Ginzberg, the object of her love, are often so submissive and eager to please that they seem childish, her diary explodes with her own intelligent understanding of her tragic predicament. She reproaches herself for her "extravagant" emotions but she has no control over it. She tries to distance herself from him and stop caring about him, but her heart had made up its mind. She writes: "Once, for no particular reason, I saw the inroads he had made into my fortress, built up by my years and the constant recollection of them on my part, and I sat down resolutely to drive him out... You must stop thinking of him! I wrote out for myself, on little slips of paper.."
Yet she couldn't stop and this accomplished woman's rejection ended up being a public spectacle when Ginsberg returned from Berlin and abruptly announced his engagement to a much younger girl (and asked her: you ARE happy about this, right?) In the second half of the book her pontification and over-analyzation of what was going on (did he love me? did he really not know I loved him over all these years? was it deception or self deception?) gets so repetitive its hard to listen to her whine and cry and oscillate between idolizing him and putting him down over and over again. Look, she was a woman with a broken heart and she could not collect herself.
There's a lot of backdrop to the story that will take you into the historical setting of Jewish America (especially NYC -- JTS) in the early twentieth century. Some of it fascinating (Dr. Schechter's role quite interesting) some of it tedious.
The book is in an excellent format, as much thanks to the author Shargel as to Szold and Ginsberg for having perserved the writings. The introduction by Shargel is proceeded by Szold's diaries (with dates) of the "four prostituted years" to Ginsberg, which Szold recounts in chronological order. Wherever she mentions correspondences between the two, the correspondence itself is inserted to interrupt the monologue. You get to see not only how she perceived what had happened, but also how Ginsberg and Szold interacted. The introduction and epilogue, I think, was more generous to Ginsberg than he deserved. To my modern mind he seemed like a classic s.o.b., who exploited Szold's love, adored the attention she lavished him, commissioned more of it, exploited her editorial help, and then feigned complete ignorance of her emotions. Ginsberg was hardly giving her the "friendly advice" that Shargel claims he gave; he seemed more intent on throwing a bone at Szold to keep her idolatry coming his way than he seemed genuinely interested in her welfare. He was also impatient with the gender norms she had to fight, and often expressed his assumption that she is weak because she did not fight as aggressively as he assumed he would -- conditioned in masculinity as he was. In short, the intro and epilogue of the book are good, but I didn't agree with all of the analysis.
However, while in the epilogue we learn that after Szold recovered from her heartbreak she went on to become a world Jewish figure, we do not know if she and Ginsberg ever crossed paths again and if they ever reconciled any part of their friendship. It seemed like a loose end that made the book incomplete. What did Szold think of the whole saga when she was in her old age, successful and "over it"? Inquiring minds pine to know.
PS: pp 99 in the "reform synagogues they have three years' cycles for the Pentateuch"?
Szold's love for a man who did not reciprocate her passions bordered on obsession. But her diary entries are so elegant and eloquent, her intellect at war with her emotions, she captures her uncontrollable emotion and pain so that the reader wants to yell with her as she runs in the park and screams with the howling wind. You get to understand how irrational and unintelligent love is; yet how much leverage over the most sophisticated people.
Whereas her letters to Dr. Ginzberg, the object of her love, are often so submissive and eager to please that they seem childish, her diary explodes with her own intelligent understanding of her tragic predicament. She reproaches herself for her "extravagant" emotions but she has no control over it. She tries to distance herself from him and stop caring about him, but her heart had made up its mind. She writes: "Once, for no particular reason, I saw the inroads he had made into my fortress, built up by my years and the constant recollection of them on my part, and I sat down resolutely to drive him out... You must stop thinking of him! I wrote out for myself, on little slips of paper.."
Yet she couldn't stop and this accomplished woman's rejection ended up being a public spectacle when Ginsberg returned from Berlin and abruptly announced his engagement to a much younger girl (and asked her: you ARE happy about this, right?) In the second half of the book her pontification and over-analyzation of what was going on (did he love me? did he really not know I loved him over all these years? was it deception or self deception?) gets so repetitive its hard to listen to her whine and cry and oscillate between idolizing him and putting him down over and over again. Look, she was a woman with a broken heart and she could not collect herself.
There's a lot of backdrop to the story that will take you into the historical setting of Jewish America (especially NYC -- JTS) in the early twentieth century. Some of it fascinating (Dr. Schechter's role quite interesting) some of it tedious.
The book is in an excellent format, as much thanks to the author Shargel as to Szold and Ginsberg for having perserved the writings. The introduction by Shargel is proceeded by Szold's diaries (with dates) of the "four prostituted years" to Ginsberg, which Szold recounts in chronological order. Wherever she mentions correspondences between the two, the correspondence itself is inserted to interrupt the monologue. You get to see not only how she perceived what had happened, but also how Ginsberg and Szold interacted. The introduction and epilogue, I think, was more generous to Ginsberg than he deserved. To my modern mind he seemed like a classic s.o.b., who exploited Szold's love, adored the attention she lavished him, commissioned more of it, exploited her editorial help, and then feigned complete ignorance of her emotions. Ginsberg was hardly giving her the "friendly advice" that Shargel claims he gave; he seemed more intent on throwing a bone at Szold to keep her idolatry coming his way than he seemed genuinely interested in her welfare. He was also impatient with the gender norms she had to fight, and often expressed his assumption that she is weak because she did not fight as aggressively as he assumed he would -- conditioned in masculinity as he was. In short, the intro and epilogue of the book are good, but I didn't agree with all of the analysis.
However, while in the epilogue we learn that after Szold recovered from her heartbreak she went on to become a world Jewish figure, we do not know if she and Ginsberg ever crossed paths again and if they ever reconciled any part of their friendship. It seemed like a loose end that made the book incomplete. What did Szold think of the whole saga when she was in her old age, successful and "over it"? Inquiring minds pine to know.
PS: pp 99 in the "reform synagogues they have three years' cycles for the Pentateuch"?
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