Zoe Anderson Norris

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. Zoe Anderson was born on February 29, 1860, on a farm in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, the 11th of 13 children born to Henry and Henrietta Anderson. Henry also had two older children from an earlier marriage. Henrietta had her hands full raising children, while Henry preached to Disciples of Christ congregations, wrote for religious periodicals, and toiled away at translations of the New Testament. When Henry died in 1872 and Henrietta moved to Kansas to Homestead, Zoe was sent to Daughters College, a boarding school in Harrodsburg. She later described the school as, "a magnificent college of rare stateliness, of colonial build, of Doric columns, much be-ivied, of sloping lawns, richly carpeted with grass of a velvety green." There, she was taught subjects, including zoology, constitutional law, and philosophy, and she was encouraged to think for herself. On June 11, 1878, days after she graduated from Daughters College, Zoe married Spencer William Norris, who was then working as a confectioner. Less than a year later, Zoe gave birth to a son, Robert. Zoe, Spencer, and Rob lived with Spencer's mother and grandmother. In 1881,  Zoe gave birth to her second and last child, a daughter named Mary Clarence, who went by Clarence. The family of four moved to Wichita, Kansas, where Spencer worked as a grocer and Zoe was hired as an art teacher at Lewis Academy after apparently inflating her credentials to do so. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Zoe and other members of Wichita's ceramic club displayed their painted porcelain. In late 1893, Zoe, writing under the pen name Nancy Yanks, started contributing a regular column to the Wichita Eagle. That was only the beginning of her writing career, and soon Zoe was publishing poems and short stories in various publications. Her depictions of Wichita and its residents were unflattering, and she had her share of critics. In January of 1898, Zoe and Spencer divorced due to Spencer's infidelity. Zoe was granted custody of Clarence. Spencer went bankrupt later that year and never paid Zoe the alimony she'd been awarded in the divorce. Zoe's son Rob, stayed in Wichita, where he worked for a railroad. Clarence headed to a Catholic boarding school in Kentucky, and Zoe moved to Manhattan, where she joined the Women's Press Club of New York and wrote for several different periodicals. As the 19th century drew to a close, Zoe and Clarence, whom Zoe claimed was her sister, headed to London and then to Paris, during its 1900 exhibition. At the fair, Clarence met Harold William Morris, whom she married in July, 1900. Within months, the marriage failed, and a pregnant Clarence sailed back to the US with Zoe in January, 1901. Back in New York, Zoe published her first novel, "The Color of His Soul," with Funk and Wagnalls, where Zoe was friends with the literary advisor. The cover of the book was illustrated by Jack Bryans, whom Zoe was dating. The book was marketed as, "brilliant sketches of newspaper and bohemian life." The novel was widely reviewed and may well have been a success, but an acquaintance of Zoe claimed that he had been Zoe's inspiration for a very unflattering character, and he threatened a libel suit. Funk and Wagnalls reacted by pulling the book and destroying the warehouse supply. It was later reissued by another publisher, but it never found success. In March, 1902, Zoe and Jack married, Zoe lying about her age on the marriage certificate. Jack was 12 years her junior. Zoe began undercover reporting, working as a servant and writing about it for American Agriculturalist, a sister publication of Good Housekeeping. She was not well paid for the pieces, though. In 1902, Zoe also published her second novel, which was widely ignored. Jack, again, provided the cover art, but their marriage ended soon afterward. It's unclear if they actually divorced, but since Zoe never remarried, it didn't matter. As Zoe turned to newspaper reporting, she increasingly focused on the plight of immigrants and the poor of New York. However, she also did a series in the New York Sun where she imagined interviews with animals like the Central Park hippos and the Bronx Zoo giraffes. In 1908, Clarence remarried to Fletcher Chelf, a Kentucky farmer, and she and her son moved to Harrodsburg, where Zoe had grown up, leaving Zoe alone in Manhattan. After a false accusation of anti semitism, editors were wary of employing Zoe, and it became harder to find writing work. After a magazine accepted a report of undercover work from her, but changed it without giving her credit or pay, Zoe launched her own magazine, the "East Side" in 1909, where she wrote nearly all of the content and served as the  "office boy, business manager, editor in chief, managing editor, and owner."  The East Side ran until 1914, with William Oberhardt providing artwork in exchange for the free theater tickets Zoe had for review purposes. In 1910, Zoe launched the "Ragged Edge Klub," a way to socialize with her magazine's subscribers. The club met in various restaurants around New York, with everyone paying their own way. Zoe dubbed her friends with royal titles, calling herself "The Queen of Bohemia." In 1914, Zoe dreamt that her mother's ghost arrived, and when she asked her mom, "Am I next?" her mom answered, "Yes." In issue 29 of the East Side, Zoe predicted her death, and indeed, on February 13, Zoe died at the age of only 53. Her death certificate listed her as 47 years old. After a funeral in New York, her children, Rob and Clarence buried her back in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Joining me in this episode is Eve M. Kahn author of, "Queen of Bohemia Predicts Own Death: Gilded Age Journalist Zoe Anderson Norris."

Kelly Therese Pollock  9:25  
 Hi Eve, thanks so much for joining me today.

Eve M. Kahn  9:30  
It's a thrill to be here, Kelly. Thank you for inviting me.

Kelly Therese Pollock  9:33  
I was so excited to learn about Zoe Anderson Norris, and it was really fun to read the book. I wanted to ask you how you came to know who she was and got started on this project.

Eve M. Kahn  9:46  
So I am a member of an organization called the Grolier Club. It is a hybrid club, museum and library on 60th street between Park and Madison. Our members include some of the most rarified niche collectors of the printed word and image on earth, and one of them is Steve Lomazow, who's got the world's great collection of American magazines. He has 83,000 at last count. He signs his emails "periodically yours." So I went to visit him with a Grolier group in the fall of 2018, and we were in a house piled with magazines, and he pulls out a magazine called "The East Side," a bound volume, six issues. And I said, "Who's this woman who published this in the 1910s, who put her own name huge in spiky letters, "Zoe Anderson Norris," on every page that she could? And how is it possible that this is obviously not a Jewish person, but she is sympathetically describing my mother's parents and aunts and uncles who were recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe?" And Zoe hauntingly, beautifully described their not their specific sufferings, but the sufferings of the people they got on the boat with in Ukraine at a time of virulent anti semitism. And I pulled out my phone while I was still in Steve Lomazow's basement, and I scrolled for any scholarship about her. And there was nothing out there, nothing substantive.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:15  
So you decided to write a book, obviously.

Eve M. Kahn  11:18  
Yes. Well, you never know what's going to be a book. You need an ocean of material. And it wasn't clear that I had an ocean of material till a few months into the journey when I realized how many millions of words she had published in newspapers and periodicals.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:33  
And you did a lot more than look at just her written words. So could you talk some about what your process was to research her thoroughly and write this book?

Eve M. Kahn  11:44  
So if you've ever been in a maybe 1920s ish building where there's an elevator dial ditch with an arrow moving to show where, what floor the elevator is on, your listeners cannot see that I am making the dial motion, sorry about that, the fan shaped dial motion. So in my head, when I research, almost invariably research women, and they almost invariably are circa 1900, and they almost invariably have three names, Zoe Anderson Norris. So in my head I said, let's see if I can sort of feel like I've really completed my research and what I've got at the end of it, and I watched the elevator dial move and move and move while I dug into every imaginable aspect of her life, going back into her family story as deeply as I could. We're talking centuries back to her British ancestors and then her contemporary legacy. I found her family members all around. My process, oh, Kelly, this will scare away future biographers if I explain how I don't watch TV, and while my family's watching TV, I'm there poking around newspapers.com intentionally misspelling Zoe Anderson Morris, to see if I could find more references to people. I don't watch TV. That's really, really, really key. And the only podcasts I listen to are the ones like yours about forgotten women and the ones my daughter makes. She works for Freakonomics. She's a podcaster. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:17  
Yeah, that is a little scary. I'm sure people will still want to write biography.

Eve M. Kahn  13:24  
Okay, good, good, good, phew. Okay.

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:26  
One of the challenges in writing about anybody, but especially someone like Zoe, is teasing apart, what about her self- presentation is true, accurate, what is presentation. She, you know, obviously wanted to hide things like her age and her true relationship with her daughter. How do you approach that as biographer?

Eve M. Kahn  13:53  
So at one point, I was literally thinking to myself, I have to somehow find a publisher that will publish this in three different colors of ink, where the I'm making this up, black would be the stuff that we know is documented that she that she just said about herself, that's accurate, and pink is fiction that reflects her true story, and green is journalism that distorts her true story. And then I realized it's even more fun that she lied, in a way, because I get to say we don't know if X or Y happened, but we know that she fictionalized a story like this. We don't know what happened to her when she ran into her estranged second husband on the street. But we do know that she wrote a short story about a woman like her who runs into her estranged second husband on the street and says, "I bless the gods that you know the hand of God that took you from me," basically, so relieved to have him out of her hair. I ended up really happy with interweaving fiction and journalism and saying, "We know this, I know for sure that she's lying here. But isn't it fascinating that she's lying here?"

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:08  
Yeah, yes, definitely. So let's talk some about her background then, the stuff we do know about her background, or maybe the stuff she presented to us, and how that shapes who she becomes, or doesn't shape who she becomes. So she grows up in Kentucky, and you know what, what does that look like?

Eve M. Kahn  15:30  
So she's born and raised. She's born in 1860 as you've already said, and she is raised in what she later calls "a little old dog kennel town." And again, your listeners can't see the air quotes I'm making, "a little old dog kennel town" called Harrodsburg. It's about a half an hour by modern standards, from Lexington, Kentucky. She her father was an impractical theologian who brought the family to the brink of poverty by spending his time unprofitably translating the New Testament, again from ancient Greek sources, through the lens of his evangelical faith the Disciples of Christ. He published a couple editions of it. He never made any money at it. She would have grown up at what she would later describe as the ragged edge of poverty. I think that shaped her work ethic. Definitely, it shaped her sympathy for the poor when she lived on the Lower East Side. And I also think that it her parents, her father's religion was so rigid that he spent much of his time arguing in print with other theologians. He had 15 children, and what he did with his time was to argue with other theologians in in mind numbingly boring religious periodicals. I think that she developed a distaste for wordiness that way, and a distaste for rigid dogma and hypocrisy that way.

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:59  
And she became relatively well educated for a woman of the time, especially one who, as you say, was on the ragged edge of poverty.

Eve M. Kahn  17:07  
Yes, I don't know who, how she managed to afford going to such an elite girls boarding school in her hometown, the little old dog kennel hometown, but it was an excellent school, and she prided in it. She prided in it to the point that when she moved with her first husband to Wichita, Kansas, she looked down on so many people who hadn't had the kind of broad and deep education that she had somehow been able to to either pay for or it had somehow been fine. It was financed by relatives, or it was financed by friends somehow.

Kelly Therese Pollock  17:43  
And her siblings didn't all have that same kind of education, right?

Eve M. Kahn  17:47  
No. Two of her sisters went to art school. I can't find any record of any other form of higher education for any of her siblings. And a lot of them would have been born and raised, some of them, you know, they spent time in Louisville, they spent time in cities. They spent time in the countryside. I can't find any trace of of any higher level education for any of them.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:07  
You mentioned that she moves then to Wichita with her first husband. She's got terrible taste in men.

Eve M. Kahn  18:16  
Her descendants will agree with you, yes.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:20  
So can you talk some about that? Like, how what her marriages look like? And you know, it's clear from her later writing that, you know, she was like marriage was bad. I shouldn't have done that.

Eve M. Kahn  18:34  
Yeah, so her father was sick, was poor her entire life, and sick for much of her life, and and she would have grown up in the chaos of all those siblings. And I think she saw marriage as a form of stability. That her first husband, he was a storekeeper. He seemed like a solid young man. He must have seemed like that was going to be a lifesaver for her, and she married at 18 days after graduation from the school where the head of the school had specifically told the girls, do not marry until you have developed enough professional skill, perhaps as a teacher or a stenographer, that you can support your family if the male breadwinners you're counting on fail you somehow. He was, he was, by all accounts, brutally handsome, and he was, by Zoe's account, incredibly spoiled by his mother. And he had his own traumas to deal with as well. It's not clear how much of his behavior was shaped by having an absconded father who died young. He he went through a lot. Spencer, her first husband went through a lot as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:42  
But she did then end up with children from this marriage.

Eve M. Kahn  19:47  
Yes, yes. So she had a son named Rob and a daughter named Clarence. And her second husband hated children, so she it's it. I. Imagining that that was never even on the table between them when they when they married as a possibility.

Kelly Therese Pollock  20:07  
Yeah, and motherhood and grandmotherhood eventually seem like they're so important to her, but yet she becomes estranged from her son. Could you talk some about the the relationship she has with her kids and how that develops?

Eve M. Kahn  20:24  
So we know that she threw herself into motherhood that be because, at least in Wichita, it's documented because the newspapers constantly reported on the parties she was throwing and the costumes she was stitching for her children. It was a provincial town, and she stood out as this, she was an excellent seamstress and very sociable. She really stood out there. So I don't know what her children's early lives with her were like, but I can tell you that she made them gorgeous costumes for all kinds of costume balls and recitals, this sort of thing. When she and her husband divorced on the grounds of his admitted adultery, caught in flagrante with a blonde, apparently, her son, Rob, was so distraught that he ran away for a while. How mortifying in a small town for him to have parents who divorced. It was so unusual, and he was not a minor anymore at the time of the divorce, Rob so he could choose his own fate. And for whatever reason, he chose to stay in Wichita. And he ended up working for railroad lines. And her daughter, Clarence, was a minor. It's I'm assuming Clarence did want to go, but she certainly didn't have a choice in that matter. And Zoe pitilessly wrote about her children by the time she became a writer. So by the time of the divorce, 1898 when the when the fire hose of words is really going strong, both her children appear in her writing, and sometimes it's unkind. I love her anyway, but I'm not sure I would have wanted her as a mother, but her passion for motherhood and grandmotherhood in her writing and her admiration for how the poor mothers of the Lower East Side sacrificed everything for their children, she beautifully, hauntingly documents in her work.

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:21  
So you've mentioned her writing several times now, and she writes both fiction and then for newspapers and then eventually for this magazine. How does this career develop?

Eve M. Kahn  22:35  
So when she first started working at all, she was teaching art at her own her alma mater, the boarding school that she had gone to back in Harrodsburg. That's the first kind of work I can find out that she did, and she continued to teach art briefly when the family moved to Wichita. I have no idea why this housewife, this bored, restless, ignored, housewife who had excellent stitching talents and art talents, decided that putting words on the page was going to be her calling. There's she doesn't really write about what when it clicked, but she writes vividly that once it did click, she had no choice in the matter, that everything she saw just was annealed in her, that it had to be processed somehow for her writing. Once it, once it clicked, it, it, she, she was so so, so determined from the moment it clicked to keep churning out words. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  23:40  
So you mentioned her kids might have had a difficult time, but it's not just her kids. She she writes about everybody she encounters. How in the world did she maintain any friendships?

Eve M. Kahn  23:54  
You know, I read her eulogies. I quote most of her eulogies in my book, Kelly. People loved her. Oh, if she were my friend in New York, oh, she would have been a blast to hang out with. Oh, even if she had a sharp tongue. I mean, she parodies her friends in print, but they are all at her funeral. They came back for more, people that I know that she had made fun of for being boring or gossipy or adulterous. They're all there at her funeral, and they all try to keep her, her friend group going after her, after her death. They hang out with each other, after her death.

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:30  
She did make a few enemies from her writing, though.

Eve M. Kahn  24:33  
Yes, along the way, definitely, yeah. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:35  
Let's talk then about her novel that ends up because of an enemy that she makes with her writing, ends up basically getting pulled and never has the success that it might have otherwise had. 

Eve M. Kahn  24:50  
So she took an actual person that she knew from Wichita, who had moved to New York at around the same time that she did. She took an actual person that she knew named Courtenay Lemon, who was a socialist orator in Harlem, and she turned him into the villain of her first novel, and she named him Cecil Mallon. And there's so much that she wrote about him that by archival searches and that all back up exactly how she wrote about him, accounts of him by his friends. He was, in fact, a drunk and a predator and a hypocrite preaching sympathy for the wage slaves of the world. Although he has a teenage mistress, and when she gets pregnant, he abandons her and she dies in childbirth. We don't know that Courtenay Lemon actually impregnated anyone, but when he came forward after the novel debuted to rave reviews and said, "She's modeled this horrible man, Cecil Mallon, on me," he literally had to say, "I guess I never impregnated anyone that I know of who ended up dying in a charity hospital," this kind of thing. He exposes himself to the most, to the most awful comparisons just by coming forward.

Kelly Therese Pollock  26:01  
You obviously have read all these words that she's written. What is, if anything is stylistically different about her fiction writing, her newspaper reporting, her magazine columns like, what does she have a voice that goes throughout those? Is it just the subject that's different?

Eve M. Kahn  26:21  
Oh, her style is pretty consistent. She is not flowery. She's not wordy. She loves vivid word pictures of the skyline, the prairie, the lights on the building windows, the streetcar light, the passing streetcar lights, this kind of atmospheric detail. It's not that different in her fiction or and her journalism. What the beauty with which she's writing made pot boilers for newspaper syndication, stories that would appear in hundreds of newspapers nationwide, it the quality of the prose is is consistent. So there's a lot of women writers of her time who are forgotten, but they are not as vivid. I don't find their descriptions as vivid. I don't find their dialog as witty. The other consistent thing, even in her fiction and her journalism is that much of it is first person, right? So she's describing the experience of living in a Paris boarding house, and she's describing the experience of the farmer's wife struggling to keep the corn crop from getting destroyed by drought. There's often a for either the subject, those the central characters are speaking in the first person, or there's a narrator saying, "I know this. I knew this woman, and this is what happened to her." There's this wry, slightly distant voice explaining unfolding the plots. And her journalism is hilarious because it's first person. There's a ton of her journalism that's not signed, and you asked about my process earlier, a ton of her journalism isn't signed, right? The New York Sun, etc, these places would run features that weren't signed. So all you have to do is go on newspapers.com and figure out, okay, her short stories almost invariably appeared on Sundays. And here's the date range in which they appeared on Sundays. Like you can limit your searches by by day of the week. And then you can put in phrases," I'm from Kentucky," or "in Kansas," or, you know, "cyclones," these kinds of telltale words that made me that enabled me to identify her unsigned, unbylined work. Yeah, bless her.

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:40  
And then eventually she starts this magazine. And you know, a lot of people at the time, even now, start magazines, and they go nowhere. But hers lasted a long time, and she was really successful at it. Could you talk some about the magazine itself, but then also, like, Why? Why did this resonate with people?

Eve M. Kahn  29:02  
So there are literally hundreds of dreamers in her time who found their own under financed, understaffed magazine told from the viewpoint of one strongly opinionated owner or editor. There's literally hundreds of them in her time, and the ones that survive, it's, it's a it's often a fluke of some kind that they happen to have a rich significant other of some kind, or, you know, some, some, some subgroup of enthusiasts glommed on to the magazine and were able to keep it going. Her magazine was so, it's her, her presence in her own magazine is so powerful. And I think people really appreciated hearing this unfiltered, raw woman telling you what, how, through her own lens, what the world looked like. I think there were so few people writing with a sense of humor and a sense of perspective about the slums. She was not a shrill reformer. She didn't simply produce a magazine that gave a list of all the ills that she was seeing. She produced a magazine that that just resonated these vivid word pictures of particular incidents of joy and misery on the Lower East Side. And also her illustrator, William Oberhardt, surpasses, his work surpasses anything that I've seen in any small magazine of her time. And also she was, I think people appreciated that she was quite committed to it and fairly reliable. Most of her competitors, their magazines came out so erratically that they are known in among scholars today, not as periodicals, but as sporadicals. Why would you pay $1 a year for a magazine that promised you six issues, but actually only two or three managed to actually reach your mailbox? She was she was pretty steady within her limitations,

Kelly Therese Pollock  31:00  
And she even went undercover sometimes to develop some of these stories.

Eve M. Kahn  31:06  
Yes, so she is so she describes in such vivid, memorable detail how she made herself look poor. She describes, you know, tearing her gloves and, you know, putting on a downcast face, and, you know, realizing that her clothes weren't dirty enough in one case, right? So she wasn't actually being persuasive. She describes getting used to lying to some extent, and then feeling terrible because people are being nice to her, and she knows that she's pretending to be poorer than she is, but she was pretty close to the poverty line. So the stories came easily to her. She would say she would tell a charity worker, you know "I've been living with a friend who can't support me anymore," and "It was close to the truth, because the friend I was talking about was myself," she writes.

Kelly Therese Pollock  31:58  
So another thing that recurs throughout her life and right up to her death is her premonitions that she has, and her belief that she's got, like a connection, a psychic connection, to her daughter and to other people in her life. Could you talk some about that? It's a really interesting aspect of her biography, and you know, it seems to, at least in in the end, been pretty reliable, her premonition.

Eve M. Kahn  32:29  
From the beginning of her writing career, she is documenting having vivid premonition dreams and vivid telepathy. From the beginning of her career, she's describing getting telepathic messages from her daughter, having a bad feeling about things, you know her that seeing her mother's spirit at at her at her bedside in Wichita, when her mother was dying in Kentucky. She writes about, she interviews other people about their accurate their their dreams that turn out to be accurate from the beginning. And I've had descendants of hers and collateral descendants of her joke around that, "Oh yeah, we're a spooky bunch," this kind of thing.

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:10  
Zoe is not the first woman you've written a biography of, as you mentioned in this time period even. Do you see yourself doing more of this kind of work? Are you thinking about other women of the time period who might be interesting to write about?

Eve M. Kahn  33:26  
Oh, sure. She had a friend named Mabel Herbert Erner, who was a newspaper woman, a short story writer, a novelist. Mabel went on to become a screenwriter, and also a massive collector. She married, her second husband was a very wealthy antiquarian book dealer, and she amassed an enormous collection of among other things, among all other kinds of antiques, embroidery samplers. And her collection survives at the at the Met Museum, and I am trying to dig into her story. It's not clear it's going to be a book, but it's, it's just funny, Kelly, how these you know? So I start researching one of Zoe's subscribers, just to make sure I've got her name spelled right. Her name is Donna Rita Cole, and I realized, "Oh my God, her daughter, Averill Cole became briefly the most famous woman bookbinder in America." This has nothing to do with Zoe, but while I'm Googling around to make sure I've got Donna Rita Cole described accurately, then I've got to tell Averill Cole's story. So that turned into articles, and I'm not sure there's a book lurking in Averill Cole and I'm not sure there's a book yet lurking in Mabel Herbert Erner, but yes, as I said, it's usually women with three names.

Kelly Therese Pollock  34:50  
So speaking of Zoe's friends, she forms this club, I think you mentioned earlier, the Ragged Edge Klub. And this is when she dies, it is many of the members of this club that that are mourning her, that come to the funeral. So can you just talk a little bit about what, what is this club? And you know, clubs, it seems, were fairly popular at the time, but hers is perhaps a little bit different than a lot of the others.

Eve M. Kahn  35:15  
So in her day, you could, if you were upper crust, and in with the right crowd, join some of the and a man, you could join the Century Association, the Metropolitan Club, this sort of thing. There were formal men's clubs with gorgeous standalone buildings. There were co-ed clubs beginning to form that didn't have a particular space that they owned or rented. They just they were nomadic, and they were of different political stripes. And there were a bunch of them that were progressive, and Zoe thought those were rather dull. What she wanted from her club with a K was to dedicate itself to nothing but the killing of care with a K, with comfortable with a K, exclusiveness with a K. She didn't want any rules. She didn't want any membership directories, no constitutions, no motions, no motions to adjourn, just the killing of care. Yes, no. The rules were no rules. And it's a fascinating group of people. It's physicians and filmmakers and writers and artists and posers and liars and and businessmen just curious about life on the Lower East Side. It's a fascinating group of people, and so so many of them didn't use their real names. That's that, you know, when I dig deeper, so mentions them in her magazine, and then I dig deeper, I realize, "Oh, they're on the run from a scandal back in their conservative background somewhere." And Kelly, I'm having so much fun talking about the book, because everywhere I go and I talk about her, sometimes I get a new insight. So I gave a talk on her at the University of Louisville in the Judaic Studies Department, and I described some of the restaurants that Zoe frequented, including a place called Joel's Bohemia near Times Square, run by a guy named Joel Rinaldo, and a woman raises her hand and says, "I'm directly descended from one of his sisters and Rinaldo, that's not their real name." It's, there's a family legend that's something along the lines of, they named themselves after a circus strong man. They were Polish Jewish immigrants, and they loved the name Rinaldo because it made them sound so much tougher than their actual you know, Polish name that ended in whatever off or ski, Rinaldo.

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:37  
That's wonderful making discoveries. Yeah. So there is so much in this book. Her story is so fascinating, we're not going to get a chance to talk about all of it. So I would like to encourage people to read the book. Can you tell them how they can get a copy of the book?

Eve M. Kahn  37:53  
So buy it from bookshop.org which means you'll patronize whatever independent bookstore is in your neighborhood, but then go on Goodreads or Amazon and give me a good review. If you're going to give me a bad review, just don't review it. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:08  
Good advice. Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about?

Eve M. Kahn  38:14  
Oh, so I can't encourage budding historians more strongly to contact descendants of the people that you're writing about and the people that they knew, because this is a very mobile and constantly disposing country, and yet you can't imagine how often I find a direct male descendant, because the name hasn't changed, and he inevitably says, "Oh yeah, call my sister. You know she's got boxes of paper." You can't believe how many people have stuff in the garage or the attic, and it's as if they've been waiting to hear from a historian. The ones who don't call me back, I'm just assuming they don't have anything. The worst that happens is, if you call and email these people, is that they don't contact you back. But you can't imagine how many people are thrilled. Just the other day, I heard from direct descendants of Zoe's friend Leita Kildare, who had finished a book that she had started with her with her husband, Owen Kildare, and they were thrilled that I was interested. Her grandson is in his 90s, and he was thrilled to talk about her. She was one of Zoe's classic colorful characters, telling lies all the time, lying about her age, this kind of thing. Zoe's friends had a lot of fun.

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:35  
Amazing. Well, Eve, thank you so much for speaking with me. This was really fun to learn about Zoe.

Eve M. Kahn  39:40  
I could go on for another hour Kelly and scare all your listeners away. This was wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. This is such a delightful time. Thank you for everything.

Speaker 1  39:50  
Yeah, thank you.

Teddy  41:03  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistoryPodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistoryPodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistoryPodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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