Rebel Cinderella From rags to riches to radical, the epic journey of Rose Pastor Stokes

Review by Choice Review

Rose Pastor, an impoverished Russian Jew, emigrated to the US in 1890 at age 11. With little formal education, she wrote articles and poetry while working as a cigar maker, eventually gaining a position as a reporter for a New York Yiddish newspaper. When assigned to interview Graham Phelps Stokes, a settlement house volunteer and a member of one of America's oldest, wealthiest families, the two fell in love, married, and lived out the American Dream, with houses in Connecticut and Manhattan. Both became socialists, working with and entertaining a wide range of radical, non-violent reformers, including Emma Goldman, Upton Sinclair, Margaret Sanger, Jacob Riis, W. E. B. DuBois, and Big Bill Haywood. Though both were committed, Rose's speeches, writings, and political activity overshadowed Graham. During the Great War Graham lost interest in radical endeavors and joined the New York National Guard, while Rose became a staunch supporter of Bolshevism. Diverging political philosophies led to divorce. Graham later became more conservative, living an opulent life, while Rose remained radical, lost economic security, and died in penury. This Cinderella-Prince-Charming metaphor, which does not end well, represents the widening divide the US faces today. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through graduate students. --Duncan R. Jamieson, Ashland University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

While names like Emma Goldman and Eugene V. Debs might have a familiar ring to history fans, Rose Pastor Stokes is one of the less-remembered figures of early twentieth-century America. Her rags to riches tale captivated her time, as this Russian Jewish immigrant living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan met and married James Graham Phelps Stokes, the son of one of New York's wealthiest families. With the sure hand of an experienced guide, award-winning author Hochschild (Spain in Our Hearts, 2016) takes readers through the socialist circles of New York City in the Progressive Era, from madcap heiress Mabel Dodge's salons to union leader Big Bill Haywood's multiple arrests, while chronicling the rise and fall of Rose Pastor Stokes' celebrity. United in their commitment to socialism, the Stokeses went on speaking tours across America, as Rose attempted to balance her newfound wealth with her intense empathy towards the working class she had so recently departed. Hochschild's captivating and fast-paced biography is a true delight and an excellent addition to women's history shelves.--Alice Burton Copyright 2020 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Historian Hochschild (Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays) delivers a polished and accessible biography of early-20th-century radical Rose Pastor Stokes. A Russian-Jewish immigrant, Rose went to work in a Cleveland cigar factory in 1890 at age 11. The experience sparked her interest in writing about labor rights and socialist politics, and in 1903 she took a newspaper job in New York City, where she met and married James Graham Phelps Stokes, a millionaire involved in the progressive settlement house movement. The couple's social circle included left-wing activists Eugene Debs, Margaret Sanger, and Upton Sinclair, and Hochschild provides captivating details about the 1909 N.Y.C. garment workers' strike, the International Workers of the World, and the American Birth Control League. Though Graham stood by his wife when she was convicted in 1918 for violating the Espionage Act (she claimed the U.S. government served "profiteers" rather than "the people"), disagreements over the Soviet Union (Rose was a founding member of the Communist Party of America) and American involvement in WWI caused the marriage to unravel. The depth and richness of Hochschild's portrait is somewhat compromised by his commitment to the reductive Cinderella trope, but few histories capture the era's combustible mix of idealism and inequality better. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt. (Mar.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

With his latest work, Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost) brings us the life of Rose Pastor Stokes (1879--1933). A Russian Jew, Pastor immigrated to the United States as a child with her destitute family. She started working in cigar factories at 11, but her love of poetry eventually led to a career writing a women's column for a Yiddish newspaper in New York. On assignment to interview Graham Phelps Stokes, a millionaire dabbling in social work at settlement homes, she fell in love and the two quickly married, stunning the nation. The firestorm of publicity followed the couple for years as they became involved in socialism and progressive causes. Pastor was a leading speaker and writer who raised significant funds and attention to causes such as immigrant poverty, labor unions, birth control, and women's suffrage. During World War I, Graham's politics veered to the right and the couple eventually divorced. Pastor's career ended, and she died of cancer in poverty. VERDICT Lucidly written and painstakingly researched, this is a joy to read, cementing Pastor in her rightful place with other progressive figures of the time.--Kate Stewart, Arizona Historical Soc., Tucson

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 Tsar and Queen Until the First World War redrew national borders in Europe, Augustów, a trading center for cattle and the region's small, wiry horses, lay in imperial Russia. Today it is in the far northeast corner of Poland. Augustów was a garrison town when Rose--​Raisel in Yiddish--Wieslander was born there in 1879. "I slipped into the world," she would later claim, "while my mother was on her knees, scrubbing the floor." One of her earliest memories was of the clatter of iron horseshoes on cobblestones as the tsar's cavalry swept across the town's wide market square. "One voice, ringing steel, commands. Men and horses swing and whisk and turn and gallop, stop suddenly, race, and disappear with a cra-kerra! Kerreka-Kerreka!  " Throughout the sprawling Russian Empire, there were often more troops in places with restive populations that were not ethnically Russian. In Augustów, that meant Poles and Jews. The latter had long been the officially sanctioned scapegoats for all the ills of the creaky realm of the Romanovs, with its corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy. Famine deaths? Jewish grain dealers hoarding all the wheat. Debt? Jewish moneylenders. Disease? Spread by the Jews, of course. Defeats on the battlefield? The Jews were spying for the enemy. Though they often prospered in business, Russia's Jews faced almost insuperable barriers to obtaining a university education or a government job. Only one of the empire's five million Jewish citizens, for example, managed to become an army officer. With rare exceptions, Jews were restricted to the Pale of Settlement, a swath of territory spreading mostly across parts of what today is Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. And even there, they were banned from certain districts and cities without special permission. Augustów lay in a region of lakes, rivers, and a long canal. On these waters Rose's grandfather, known as Berl the Fisherman, plied his trade. She remembered his "thinly-bearded rugged face, with its high cheek-bones, generous mouth, and kindly grey eyes." He lived near a public well in a hut with a thatched roof, which held the traditional large Russian tiled oven used for both cooking and heating. "Some of my earliest recollections," Rose wrote, "are of a boat and oars and a wide expanse of shining water." She recalled her grandfather fishing from the boat with nets, women dressed in soft white muslin laughing as they bathed and washed their sheets in a river, and more women chatting as they rolled loaves of dough at a bakery. In the town's synagogue, there was "sunlight streaming in through a tall, high window, and a bird flying in the rafters." When her grandmother died in a typhus epidemic, her body was laid out on the dirt floor of Berl's hut, under a Persian shawl that had once been a wedding gift. Despite those kindly grey eyes, Berl seems to have been a tyrant to his family of six children. He rudely broke up a romance between his daughter Hindl and a young Pole, forcing her instead to marry a Jewish bootmaker, a widower with a small child. The 17-year-old Hindl resisted ​-- ​dirtying her face and dress when the bootmaker came courting, and fleeing to her father's hut when it was time to stand under the huppah , the wedding canopy, already surrounded by waiting guests. Berl slapped her face and dragged her to the ceremony ​-- ​or so Rose heard. It was this loveless union that produced Rose. Before long, the bootmaker departed for America, leaving behind his resentful wife, their new daughter, and the small son from his previous marriage. From New York, he finally agreed to a divorce. Above the bed where Rose's beloved grandmother died hung the only piece of artwork in the hut, a portrait of Tsar Alexander II. He was the reformer tsar, the emperor renowned for liberating Russia's serfs, millions of peasants who had been living in a state akin to slavery. Making a few additional cautious moves to modernize his country, he had shown considerably more tolerance for Jews than his predecessors, ending some anti-Semitic measures including the harshest, a decree that sent tens of thousands of Jewish boys away for 25 years of military service. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli called him "the kindliest prince who has ever ruled Russia." The Pale of Settlement and most other restrictions on Jews, however, remained in place. In 1881, the year Rose turned two, on the very day he put his signature to a new set of reforms, Alexander was being driven along the embankment of a canal in St. Petersburg, the capital, when a revolutionary threw a bomb at him. The tsar was not harmed, but the bomb killed or wounded several Cossack guards and bystanders. Excerpted from Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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