One of the darkest and best kept secrets of modern
Jewish history is the fact that a prostitution industry involving Jewish
women and pimps in several parts of the world flourished in the late
19th and early 20th centuries.
Isabel Vincent in this book makes an admirable effort to
shed light on this tragic chapter in the story of the Jewish
diaspora.
She does so by detailing the lives of three Jewish
women, all of them forced by cunning, deceitful men into leaving their
East European homes and entering a miserable
life of prostitution in the Americas. The main focus of the book is on
brothels in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, but a similar situation in
New York is discussed briefly - one of the women spent time there as
well.
Vincent has done a great amount of research on the subject, but the book
comes up short in several ways. For one, the narrative is somewhat
disjointed - at times, the reader is uncertain of whether it deals with
Buenos Aires or Rio. And the accounts are fragmented, picking up the
story of one woman, then digressing to other subjects for several pages
before resuming the original story, leaving the reader to pull the
threads together. And, perhaps most important, there are gaps that
surface every sooften in the narrative. The author asks questions
or writes suppositions or surmises, for there are no records or other
definitive proofs.
The latter shortcoming is certainly to be expected, for
the records on prostitution in general and these unfortunate
victims in particular are sketchy at best. The
mainstream Jewish communities of the cities wanted absolutely
nothing to do with these women of ill-repute and
ostracized them to the point of refusing to bury them in their communal
cemeteries. And most of the women were, at best,
barely literate and unable to record their stories for posterity.
The three women spotlighted are named Sophia Chamys,
Rachel Liberman and Rebecca Freedman. While they all suffered similar
fates, at least to some degree, their stories differ in significant
ways. Chamys' story is the most tragic - her short life was marked
by violent acts on the part of her "husband," a pimp named
Isaac Boorosky. She died young and was buried in a Catholic cemetery. Liberman,
on the other hand, managed to start an antique business and gain some
respectability. When her former bosses refused to
leave her alone, she went to the Buenos Aires police and brought about
at least a measure of reform. But unfortunately,
she too died young, as she was about to visit her family in Poland.
Rebecca Freedman went from prostitution, in both New York and South
America, to become a sort of one-woman chevra kadisha
(burial society), caring for the bodies of her fellow prostitutes after
they had established their own cemetery in Rio de Janeiro. Unlike the
others, she lived to the age of 103, dying in 1984.
The stories of other women, and the male sex traffickers
who ran the operations, also are recounted briefly. But reading about
this tragic situation is more difficult than it should be, as the
narrative at times is quite confusing. Also, there are a couple of
errors in discussing Jewish rituals and customs: the ritual of putting
on teffilin takes place in the morning, not on Friday evening, and the
well-known Jewish dance is the hora, not the tora.
While the significant presence of prostitution
represents a blot in modern Judaism, it was probably inevitable that,
given the extreme difficulties faced by East European Jews in the late
19th and early 20th centuries, some would turn to this disreputable
occupation. Their story merits being brought to light, for the bad must
be told along with the good. Despite its flaws, this book constitutes
a significant addition to modern Jewish historical scholarship.