The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams

by Jonathan Ned Katz

Overview

“On these pages, Eve Adams rises up, loves, rebels—her times, eerily resembling our own.” —Joan Nestle, cofounder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives and author of A Restricted Country

• 2022 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist

Historian Jonathan Ned Katz uncovers the forgotten story of radical lesbian Eve Adams and her long-lost book Lesbian Love 

Born Chawa Zloczewer into a Jewish family in Poland, Eve Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912,took a new name, befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York. Then, in 1925, Adams risked all to write and publish a book titled Lesbian Love.

Adams’s bold activism caught the attention of the young J. Edgar Hoover and the US Bureau of Investigation, leading to her surveillance and arrest. Adams was convicted of publishing an obscene book and of attempted sex with a policewoman sent to entrap her.

Adams was jailed and then deported back to Europe, and ultimately murdered by Nazis in Auschwitz. In The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams, acclaimed historian Jonathan Ned Katz has recovered the extraordinary story of an early, daring activist.

Carefully distinguishing fact from fiction, Katz presents the first biography of Adams, and the publisher reprints the long-lost text of Adams’s rare, unique book Lesbian Love

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781641605168
Publisher:	Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/18/2021
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Ned Katz is the author of four pioneering books on the US history of life, sexuality, and intimacy. He is the founder of outhistory.org, and he has taught and spoken at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. He's also the recipient of the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for outstanding contributions to sex research and Yale University's Brudner Prize, among many other accolades.

Table of Contents

Searching for Eve
1. Eve Speaks
2. Lesbian Love
3. Departure, Arrival
4. 1912
5. War Clouds and a Fan Letter
6. Spied On
7. Chicago, The Grey Cottage, Ruth
8. Greenwich Village, Eve’s Place, Trouble
9. The Bureaucrats Attack
10. Eve in Exile
11. The Crash
12. Fascism
13. War
Epilogue: Eve Then, Us Now
 
Lesbian Love by Eve Adams
 
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
 

Editorial Reviews

"This is an impressive feat of research as well as a fascinating and important story about an unsung and, until now, invisible figure in gay history.” — Booklist, STARRED review

From the Publisher

Historian Jonathan Katz has provided a welcome and nuanced biography of an early-twentieth-century lesbian activist and author who has been almost forgotten except by archivists. Sadly, this revelatory account of Eve Adams (née Chawa Zloczower) and her roles as Emma Goldman’s friend, Henry Miller’s associate, a Polish-Jewish immigrant, and an anarchist suffers in this audiobook edition. Narrator Romy Nordlinger's overly bright tones, audible breathing, and odd pacing, which renders sentence clauses emphasized in odd ways, can't seem to get a handle on the narrative’s parts or its elegant whole. While pronunciations of names that range from Yiddish to New York state's anglicized Dutch place names are largely correct, the overall effect disappoints. F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

JULY 2021 - AudioFile