The Salome Ensemble and the Dialectics of Visibility: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien and Jetta Goudal
The Salome Ensemble takes a look at four Jewish women who, during the 1920s in New York City, manage to work together, inspiring one another and challenging each other to create Salome of the Tenements, which was first a novel, then a film. The model for Salome was Rose Pastor Stokes; Anzia Yezierska wrote the novel; Sonya Levien wrote the screenplay and Jetta Goudal played Salome on the silver screen. Ginsberg looks at each woman separately, but then examines the way these women influenced each other. All Jewish immigrants, these four women were able to escape the ubiquitous sweathouses and the ghetto to pursue their own American Dream. This is a scholarly work filled with analyses of the social mores of the time and how women fit into those cultural expectations. It is a study of gender, culture and art and how these elements mix to produce four women who managed to find the real American Dream—self-realization.
