Passing for Jewish: the life and writings of Adah Isaacs Menken

Infelicia and Other Writings. By ADAH ISAACS MENKEN, edited by Gregory Eiselein. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Literary Texts, 2002.

Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity. By RENEE MARIE SENTILLES. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Adah Isaacs Menken (1835-1868) may have been America's earliest internationally-known Jewish media celebrity and is still included in such reference sets as Guess Who's Jewish in American History (Shapolsky, 1978) and Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Women Writers (Indiana University, 1992). She earned her living on stage by dancing, singing, and miming in the raucous nineteenth-century "Sensation Drama." Simultaneously, she hobnobbed with the literati of her day, wrote feminist, literary, religious, and philosophical essays and poetry, engaged in serial monogamy, and affected the Bohemian lifestyle (smoking in public, wearing pants on occasion, and hosting soirees for the artsy crowd). Once she reached stardom, she promoted a wide variety of stories about her origins and experiences, including great success in Cuba, descent from French aristocracy, captivity by the Indians, and being born into the Jewish faith.

Though Menken's life and career are well-documented once she became famous, it has only recently become accepted that she was born in Memphis in 1835. Once she became famous, her audience, influenced no doubt by her own fanciful stories, came to perceive her as sensual and exotic, though, as Sentilles points out, none of her contemporaries thought she was an African-American passing as white, as some of her biographers believe to this day. Wrong-headed though that theory may be, neither Eiselein nor Sentilles comment on why her parents were drawn to Memphis, near the site of Frances Wright's famous Nashoba settlement, which was dedicated to enabling slaves to earn their emancipation. Likewise, they do not address the question of whether Wright's attacks on racially segregated schools and racial taboos in sex relations and marriage, as well as her illicit romances and progressive views on sexual relations might have influenced Menken in her earliest years. So far as having a Jewish background is concerned, Sentilles stresses there is no evidence to support Menken's claim, though it is certain that she became a serious student of Judaism while married to Alexander Isaac Menken. Indeed, her interest in being considered Jewish was so strong that, after their divorce, she kept her husband's surname and Biblical middle name (adding an "s" to Isaac) and made her own name more Biblical by adding an "h" to her own name Ada. So far as one supposed inconsistency is concerned, Sentilles demolishes the common claim that George Sand persuaded her to baptize her short-lived child into the Catholic faith; Sentilles found no evidence that Menken was even on close personal terms with Sand. Whatever her birth, Menken was attended by a Rabbi at her death and her good friend Ed James, honoring her request, had her disinterred from her first burial site and reburied in the Jewish section of the Montparnasse cemetery. I discovered a few years ago that her remains were transferred to the Pere LaChaise ossuary on 16 April 1991, "chambre 20, galerie H, biere n[degrees] 7363."

Information about Menken's childhood remains scant. Sentilles assumes that, after her father died when she was very young, her mother took her from Memphis to New Orleans. She also assumes that, as a teen-ager, Menken may have performed as a dancer in the New Orleans area and may have honed her equestrian skills by playing in hippodrome shows in Texas and Louisiana. Things became somewhat certain by 1855, when we find a public record that she was doing Shakespeare readings and publishing essays and poetry; by 1856, it is certain that she was appearing in theatrical performances in Louisiana. The external facts of her life are fairly clear thereafter. She moved with her husband to Cincinnati, where she studied Judaism under Rabbi Mayer Wise and eventually obtained a rabbinical divorce, after which she became a headliner in the theatrical circuits of the era. Her seemingly-nude performance in a stage production of Byron's Mazeppa brought her infamy and a series of lucrative box office engagements, which she follows with a very successful trip to California and Nevada in 1863/64, thence to England, France, and Germany, where she generally met with a great popular success. She was certainly married to at least four different men after the public record of her life began, but there may have been earlier marriages, with the Cuban romantic poet Juan Clemente Zenea being the most prominent of her subset of possible husbands.

Menken's verse was popular enough that Infelicia, the only previously published collection of her poetry, remained in print well into the twentieth century. Because Infelicia included only a small number of her poems, Gregory Eiselein's collection, which includes all the poems in Infelicia as well as a generous selection of other previously uncollected poems and essays, is an invaluable addition to Menken studies. Menken herself chose what was included in Infelicia, but surviving correspondence suggests that she did not have easy access to what she herself had published. Her scandalous reputation distracted biographers so much that more than 60 years passed before Allen Lesser identified more Menken poems in the 1930s, though he was not able to find a publisher for an expanded collection of her poetry. Since then, Eiselein and others have found additional poems; researchers think it likely there are more.