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In honor of International Women's Day, 'IJ' takes a fresh look at Zelda Popkin's nearly forgotten novel, 'Quiet Street.'
In October 1948, as Israel's War of Independence ended, American- Jewish writer Zelda Popkin left New York to visit her sister Helen Rossi Koussevitzky, a Palestine Post editor, living in Jerusalem.
A widow, Popkin had worked in public relations and journalism but had remade herself after her husband's death into a writer of fiction. By the time she visited Israel, she had already written a series of successful detective novels featuring Mary Carner, a female detective, as well as several novels, including The Journey Home (1945), which focuses on the relationship between an American soldier returning from World War II and a young career woman and Walk Through the Valley (1949), the story of a woman who creates a new life for herself following the death of her husband.
For half a year, Popkin lived in the Koussevitsky home on Rehov Abarbanel in Rehavia, soaking up the local atmosphere and thinking about the great moral questions of the Jewish people's fight for a national identity.
The result of her visit is Quiet Street, a novel about the war told from the point of view of Jerusalem's many colorful characters, chief among them an American-Israeli homemaker living in Rehavia.
The first American novel about the War of Independence, the book was not a commercial success and was reviewed negatively in the New York Times, among other publications.
In a positive article entitled "A Forgotten Forerunner: Zelda Popkin's Novels of the Holocaust and the 1948 War," Popkin's grandson, history professor Jeremy Popkin, notes that the public embraced an American novel about the war, Leon Uris's Exodus, only a few years later. Exodus has a similar setting and some of the same themes, but Jeremy Popkin suggests that readers may not have been ready for Popkin's realistic version and preferred Uris's more idealized version of Jews...