In her day, she may have been Wisconsin’s most famous Jew.
Her once-popular books appeared on high school reading lists and were made into Broadway musicals, Hollywood movies, and even remakes, starring such famous actors as Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Robeson, Rock Hudson, and James Dean.
On the 125th anniversary of her birth, however, she is nearly forgotten.
She is Edna Ferber, author of the novels “Cimarron,” “So Big,” “Saratoga Trunk,” “Giant,” “Show Boat,” “Ice Palace,” “American Beauty.”
She also was co-author (with George S. Kaufman) of the hit plays “Dinner at Eight” and “Stage Door,” member of the famous Algonquin Round Table of literati, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Born Aug. 15, 1885, she was the child of a Milwaukee-born Jewish mother. Her grandparents had come to Milwaukee from Germany in the 1840’s. Edna’s father (also Jewish) was born in Hungary.
The family lived for a while in Chicago; Kalamazoo, Mich., (where both Edna and her older sister were born); and Ottumwa, Iowa. But Edna’s home during what she considered the happiest years of her youth was Appleton, Wis., which she renamed Winnebago in her loosely autobiographical 1917 novel “Fanny Herself.”
She graduated from high school in Appleton and worked as a reporter for the Appleton Daily Crescent before taking a job at the Milwaukee Journal. These marked the beginning of her career as a writer. In fact, she began writing her first novel while recovering from a health breakdown produced by the pressures of her Milwaukee Journal job.
The title character of Ferber’s one novel that treats Judaism, Fanny Brandeis, attributes her success in life to her Wisconsin girlhood. But Ferber, in her 1939 memoir, “A Peculiar Treasure,” attributed her own success to being Jewish.
“All my life I have been inordinately proud of being a Jew. But I have felt that I should definitely not brag about it. My Jewishness was, I thought, something to wear with becoming modesty, calling attention to it no more than to my two good physical points, which were a fine clear skin and an abundant head of vigorous curly hair. …
“But I have felt that to be a Jew was, in some ways at least, to be especially privileged. Two thousand years of persecution have made the Jew quick to sympathy, quick-witted (he’d better be), tolerant, humanly understanding… It may be that being a Jew satisfied the frustrated actress in me. It may be I have dramatized myself as a Jew… [Jews have] acquired great adaptability, nervous energy, ambition to succeed, and a desire to be liked.”
A different Judaism
Ferber admitted that “Fanny Herself” is not an exact autobiography. Like the Ferbers, the Brandeises operate a general store, but while the Ferbers had two daughters, Fanny Brandeis has an older brother, Theodore.
But unlike Ferber’s parents, Fanny’s father dies when the children are young, and her mother dies when they are still approaching adulthood. Theo goes to Europe to study violin. Fanny sells the family’s store and leaves town, but instead of becoming a writer like her creator, she fends for herself in the business world.
Fanny rises to wealth and prominence, eventually becoming something of a female David Levinsky, the immigrant hero of Forward editor Abraham Cahan’s famous novel. Ferber herself never married or had children (or had a recorded romance with anyone), but she gives Fanny a love interest.
What may be most interesting to Wisconsin Jews today is Ferber’s description of how her fictionalized Appleton community practiced a different Judaism than most of us would recognize today.
In “Winnebago” in 1898, “Congregation Emanu-el’s” sermons are in German, “full of four-and five-syllable German words like Barmherzigheit and Eigentümlichkeit.”
The congregation’s first families — the Reitmans, Weinbergs, Pereleses — sit in the front pews, while the Brandeises sit “third from the last, behind which sit only a few obscure families branded as Russians, as only the German-born Jew can brand those whose misfortune it is to be born in that region known as hinter-Berlin.”
Music, both the “first hymn” and the “second hymn” were provided by organ and choir. On Yom Kippur, the program includes Robert Schumann’s “Traümerei,” performed by Theodore Brandeis on the violin. Confirmation takes the place of bar mitzvah ceremonies.
The Brandeis family is not religious in the traditional sense. They work in the store on Saturdays. When on a business trip, Mrs. Brandeis encourages Fanny to order something “that we never have at home,” a meal that includes oysters, chicken, and ice cream. Later in the book, Fanny has no qualms about eating bacon or lobster.
Fanny seems throughout the book to care little about religious differences between people. The Catholic priest in Winnebago is one of her best friends.
Nevertheless, when Fanny takes her first job, her boss asks her whether she is Jewish. Fanny tells him she is not, and thereafter feels horrified and haunted by this lie.
And at the first anniversary of her mother’s death, Fanny, who is no longer in Winnebago, does something that could be considered an anticipation of modern Jewish feminism.
She goes to a small “orthodox Russian Jewish synagogue,” only to be herded into the separate women’s gallery. “And when the patriarchal rabbi began to intone the prayer for the dead, Fanny threw the gallery into wild panic by rising for it — a thing that no woman is allowed to do in an orthodox Jewish church.”
Yom Kippur challenge
Ferber described in “A Peculiar Treasure” something that child Edna and child Fanny both did, apparently as a self-challenge: fast on Yom Kippur.
“The spiritual side of [Fanny, and perhaps Edna] was groping and staggering and feeling its way about as does that of any little girl whose mind is exceptionally active, and whose mother is unusually busy. It was on the Day of Atonement known in Hebrew as Yom Kippur, … that that side of her performed a rather interesting handspring.
“Fanny Brandeis had never been allowed to fast on this, the greatest and most solemn of Jewish holy days. [Her mother’s] modern side refused to countenance the practice of withholding food from any child for 24 hours. So it was in the face of disapproval that Fanny, making deep inroads into the steak and fried sweet potatoes at supper on the eve of the Day of Atonement, announced her intention of fasting from that meal to supper on the following evening.”
“In fact, the thing she had set herself to do … had in it very little of religion… This was a test of endurance, as planned. Fanny had never fasted in all her healthy life. She would come home from school to eat formidable stacks of bread and butter, enhanced by brown sugar or grape jelly, and topped off with three or four apples from the barrel in the cellar… She liked good things to eat, this sturdy little girl…”
Nevertheless, and despite teasing and temptations from friends and family members, Fanny (Edna) managed to fast the entire day. In the novel, Fanny sits through the concluding service with new understanding. Shaken, her head aching, and her face white, she returns home with her family.
“She had intended to tell” her family of her successful struggle against the temptation to eat. “But now something within her — something fine, born of this day — kept her from it.”
The episode clearly affected Ferber profoundly. If she didn’t find religion, as theologian Franz Rosensweig did on a fateful Kol Nidre night in Berlin, Ferber found something in herself that she had not known was there.
Milwaukeean Susan Ellman, MLIS, has taught history and English composition at the high school level and is a freelance writer at work on a historical novel.
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