I’ve put a link to the Nin blog in my sidebar. Some very interesting posts there and it’s great to see all of those original documents coming online. I just may take you up on writing for A Cafe in Space! — and will be ordering the new issue soon.

Wow – thanks so much for your fascinating notes on Eve Adams! This information helps fill in a lot of holes. The interesting thing I noticed about Eve Adams is that a full picture of her life doesn’t seem to exist. I came across fleeting references to her while researching Henry Miller. But the folks who write on Miller seem to know nothing about her life outside of Paris. I was able to trace back to her life in New York. But the references I found are from people writing on the history of sexuality in New York and who seem to know nothing of Eve outside of that city. Your material provides a connection to her life prior to New York as well as a clue to what happened to her after Paris. Great stuff and very helpful!

I’ve sent you an email with a few other comments on Eve…

Eve Adams wrote in desperation from Nice in September 1941: “I need not tell you what life has become here in Europe and I want to desperately come back to the States. I must!” Eve provided detailed instructions to her old friend Ben Reitman in hopes that he would personally make her case to the authorities in Washington. She was broke, and promised to work hard to repay money raised in the states on her behalf.

Best known as a lover and promoter of Emma Goldman, Ben Reitman was also the circus showman of radical bohemia flowering in Chicago before much of its momentum and personalities relocated to Greenwich Village in the 1920′s. According to Kenneth Rexroth, Eve Adams was among them. In his Autobiographical Novel, Rexroth identifies Eve Adams before her departure for Greenwich Village as a proprietress of a bohemian establishment, the Grey Cottage, with painter Ruth Norlander. Rexroth describes Eve as a nomadic book seller who “for years traveled about the country selling Mother Earth, The Masses, and other radical literary magazines.” Eve reminsces in another letter to Reitman of serving virtually as “master of ceremonies” at birthday parties in Chicago for his son Brutus at age four or five. Brutus was born in 1917.

In an unpublished manuscript on “social outcasts,” Ben Reitman included a profile of “Olga,” who was deported from Blackwell Island prison after publishing her “illuminating little booklet called Lesbian Tales.” A (not utterly reliable source) pickpocket in Reitman’s correspondence, May English, wrote Ben from prison that “they led her [Eve Adams] a hell of a life.”

Reitman’s daughter Helen also changed her name (she became known as Jan Gay and her female companion as Zhenya Gay). And she compiled a manuscript with hundreds of case histories of lesbians. Her work inspired the 1941 study, Sex Variants, ascribed to psychiatrist George Henry. Unfortunately, this study pathologizes its subjects to some degree and presumably mangled Jan Gay’s intent.

I do not have Reitman’s response to Eve’s poignant request in 1941. One wonders: What became of her? Of her writings?

Thanks for sharing your interesting work. Best wishes, Martha

Out of their big family (7 kids) only my granfather and his brother Eliezer survuved the holocaust.

Thanks so much for posting your comment. Eve / Chava was certainly a fascinating woman. Martha Reis, who posted above had informed me that Eve’s name was found on the transport list to Auschwitz in the book, “Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, 1942-1944″ by Serge Klarsfeld. I had no idea though that Eve was involved somehow in the Spanish Civil War or that she studied at the Sorbonne.

It’s also quite interesting to learn something of Eve’s surviving family and to know that photos of her may still exist. I have never seen a picture of Eve and the published information on her background is quite sparse. Again, thank you very much for taking the time to fill in some of the missing information about your family member.