Shmooze who.

JEWISH WOMEN AND THEIR SALONS: THE POWER OF CONVERSATION

BY EMILY D. BILSKI AND EMILY BRAUN

NEW HAVEN, CT: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 280 PAGES. $50.

Don't call them yentas--they're salonnieres. While others were serving up chicken soup and guilt, these Jewish ladies were incubating and promoting practically every significant cultural movement since the Enlightenment--in their living rooms, often while reclining on divans. From Felicie Bernstein, who imported French Impressionism to Berlin, to Berta Zuckerkandl, journalist-midwife of the Vienna Secession; from Ada Leverson and Genevieve Straus, who reigned over Belle Epoque aesthetes in London and Paris, to Gertrude Stein and her Cubists; from the Stettheimer sisters in New York to Salka Viertel's emigre circle in Hollywood, vivacious Jewesses fertilized the flowers of modern culture with conversation and contacts. Drawing on the letters, memoirs, and artifacts they compiled for an exhibition on the subject at New York City's Jewish Museum, authors Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun present a compelling archaeology of the salon as oral subculture. The salon, the authors argue, was an arena of self-promotion and social mobility: a setup that was democratic rather than elitist (in spite of the frequently cushy mise-enscene), allowing minds to meet according to mutual interests, and kibitz.

The first salonniere in Bilski and Braun's account is Henriette Herz, a tall and stunning "Jewish goddess" who optimistically affirmed, "The mind is a powerful equalizer." An intimate of the leading Lutheran theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, Herz had a salon that thrived in 1780s and '90s Berlin at the height of the Jewish Enlightenment movement, which sought to reconcile Jewish life with contemporary German culture. Of Herz's contemporary Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771-1833), the authors poignantly observe: "In her struggle to be taken seriously as a human being and as an intellectual--despite being a woman and a Jew--Rahel Levin mobilized two weapons: the gatherings she hosted and her writings, consisting primarily of thousands of letters." As one of her guests marveled to a fellow aristocrat: "I can assure you that in the presence of this Jewish sofa, more wit, understanding, and flashes of brilliance are squandered in an evening than in three of our gatherings." Meanwhile, in Vienna, the fabulously rich "Jewess Fanny von Arnstein introduced the northern German Protestant custom of the Christmas tree to Catholic Vienna in 1814." Not to worry: Herz and her sister salonniere, Cacilie, did not convert; they remained big givers to Jewish philanthropies, entertained royals, and were admired by Goethe and Beethoven.

As cultural bumblebees, Jewish salonnieres scattered avant-garde product across national lines, acting as unofficial powerbrokers. The wealthy Francophile Felicie Bernstein (nee Rosenthal) brought the first Impressionist pictures to Germany in 1880. In Vienna, Berta Zuckerkandl was a modern-art evangelist who knew everyone from Krafft-Ebing and Klimt to Schnitzler and Mahler. Her modernist fervor inspired Karl Kraus's impish observation that, as the authors put it, "Vienna's Jews were adopting the new style to promote assimilation ... remaking the 'ghetto'--by commissioning Secession and Wiener Werkstatte interiors; yet by supporting this style, they continue to mark their difference--or as the architect Adolf Loos commented, they merely replaced the old caftans of the ghetto with the new caftans of the Werkstatte." So what's a cultured Jew to do?

The literary salonnieres of the Belle Epoque were formidable wits. Ada Leverson, a confidante of Oscar Wilde's whom he nicknamed Sphinx, contributed droll sketches to the satirical weekly Punch. Proust's lifelong pal Genevieve Straus was a second-generation salonniere and depressive: "While some women hosted salons out of social ambition or professional need, for Genevieve it was a question of survival, of warding off [her] psychological demons." She was also motivated by a need to break free of her identity as Georges Bizet's widow. "Tell him to wait five minutes--I'll be down in half an hour," was one of her many good one-liners. To friends dismayed that she had agreed to marry a rich but dreary suitor, said Straus: "What else can I do? It's the only way to get rid of him."

So why were so many salonnieres Semites? Was there an international conspiracy of Jewish ladies behind modern art? (Just kidding!) While the authors historicize each hostess with great nuance, they offer various reasons for the phenom. The women's high level of education and well-to-do backgrounds, the Talmudic tradition of debate combined with a feminine propensity for chat, the long-standing function of Jews as financial (and cultural) middlemen, and the Hebrews' habit of "surviving by wit, negotiation, and improvisation" together yielded a striking number of turbo-shmoozers and culturistas. Most important, though, "holding a salon, like being baptized, was the ticket to the mainstream." By the late nineteenth century, salonnieres were most often artists, thinkers, or political activists in their own right. Each salon was custom-tailored for the tastes of its mistress: Some were haut bourgeois; others, bohemian. There was a left-wing salon around Anna Kuliscioff, the "subversive salonniere" who, as chief strategist of the Italian Socialist Party, practiced "salon egalitarianism, receiving anonymous members of the lower class as well as parliamentarians and upper-class Milanese women" while seated under a large image of Karl Marx ("There is only one man in Italy--and she is a woman," wrote a comrade of Engels's who soon became Kuliscioff's pen pal). There was even a fascist salon around Margherita Sarfatti, a well-connected shanda and Futurist whose twenty-year affair with Mussolini likely began at Kuliscioff's salon. Sarfatti helped orchestrate Il Duce's ascent to power, only to be treated as a pariah under the country's racial laws instituted in World War II; she nevertheless remained an indefatigable Italian nationalist. Florine Stettheimer, whose insular New York circle included Marcel Duchamp, had a pickier door policy: "The world is full of strangers/They are very strange/I am never going to know them/Which I find easy to arrange."

Rhonda Lieberman is a New York-based writer and artist. (See Contributors.)