Jonathan Ned Katz - The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams

I BEGAN TO INVESTIGATE EVE Adamss life on December 1, 2016, the day I read a reference in the New York Times Book Review to a Polish-Jewish immigrant accused of a homosexual advance toward an undercover cop. I wondered why I didnt recall having heard a thing about the intriguing Eve. My interest increased when I learned that, in 1925, Eve had published a book titled Lesbian Love, a book that sounded like no other of its time, a book no researcher had seen.

My ignorance of Eve startled me because forty-five years earlier, in 1971, as a tracer of missing persons, I had begun to seek evidence of a then-invisible US lesbian and gay male history. I would go on to publish four books on sexual and gender history, so I thought I knew the names of the pioneers.

Never wanting to reinvent the wheel, I began to ask, Whats already known about Eve Adams? I was greatly aided in answering that question by the earlier, extensive research and thesis of Martha Lynn Reis; the detailed investigation and generosity of playwright Barbara Kahn and her co-sleuth, the late librarian and archivist Steven Siegel; and the support of Eran Zahavy, in Israel, whose grandfather was Eves brother. Eran provided a valuable file of documents and led me to Daniel Olstein in Basel, Switzerland, the nephew of Eve Adamss companion Hella Olstein Soldner. Daniel Olstein generously shared a file of Hella and Eves letters, cards, and photos saved by his father, Hellas brother Andr. Thanks to Nina Alvarez, for the first time I could read, analyze, and present Eves book, Lesbian Love, a copy of which Alvarez found twenty-plus years ago in the lobby of her building in Albany, New York. The one copy held by an archive, Yales Sterling Library, disappeared mysteriously as of July 3, 1998.

I learned that Eve had immigrated from Poland to the United States in 1912 and joined the political work of anarchist activists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Eve had also become friends with Goldmans romantic partner, the larger-than-life Ben Lewis Reitman. Eves association with anarchist leaders, and her work as traveling saleswoman for radical periodicals, resulted in her being spied on by the young J. Edgar Hoover and the agents of the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner of the FBI.

Claims about Eve Adamss life, some true and many false, now circulate untamed on the Internet. Today, as the mass media daily relay false fact claims to millions, its important to examine the evidence that documents Eve Adamss poignant, intriguing, disturbing life. Most people dont leave substantial records, but in Eves case just enough documents exist to provide us with her words, and a sense of her character.

Despite that evidence, information about Eves life is fragmentary. I have filled in Eves story with relevant information about her closest friends and lovers, and the social and historical eras she inhabited. But I suspect that Eves self-described wanderlust will always lead her off again just as were getting to know her better. The surviving evidence about Eve Adams will, I suspect, always leave us wanting more.

As I began to investigate Eves life (for an article, I first thought), it seemed obviousit went almost without saying: Eves history sounded an all-too-pertinent warning. Just a month earlier, Donald J. Trump, scandal sheet playboy, reality show star, real estate mogul, woman groper, and con man, had lost to his opponent by 2.87 million votes and yet been elected US president. His racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric spoke to White voters angered by the failure of their American dreams, a loss blamed not on an unjust system but on Black and Brown people and immigrants.

An active animus directed at immigrants desperate for a better life was once again surfacing in the United States and many other countries. Authoritarian dictators and outright fascist leaders were on the rise again around the world. The servants of surveillance states were once more searching out, jailing, torturing, and sometimes killing critics and organizersliberals, leftists, socialists, social democrats, communists, anarchists, left libertarians, democracy activists. Anti-homosexual groups were spewing hate, often religiously rationalized, that led sometimes to murder.

Anti-Jewish groups were on the march again, when once wed thought them vanquished, or at least marginalized. Deep into my research on Eve, an anti-Jewish terrorist invaded the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven old Jews as a they prayedone of the deadliest attacks on the Jewish community in US history.