True story: Jonathan Ned Katz brought me out as a queer historian. As a baby dyke, I read his “Gay American History — Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.” (1976), sat back, and said “hole-lee sheet!” How was this info never accessible before now? I’d stumbled upon a treasure chest, running my hands through the riches.
Fortunately, Katz has never ceased to research and write, which is how we get Eve Adams.
I’d been seeing little articles about Eve for a while. Turns out, much of Eve’s info published online is derived from Katz’s amazing book, “The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams” (2021).
Eve’s story is both fascinating and hard to bear. Born Jewish in (now) Poland, Eve was unusually well educated for a girl in traditional Jewish small-town life and spoke six languages, including Yiddish, French, and English.
Feeling the effects of pogroms and official antisemitism, not to mention misogyny, the diminutive 21-year-old made it to New York in 1912 with passage paid by an uncle. She joined the massive influx, which meant 40 percent of the people living in New York at that point came from elsewhere.
The official U.S. Immigration intake form had a category for “Race or People.” Eve was assigned “Hebrew.” More accurate would be “lesbian crossdresser who would craft her own life as best she could amid the ferment of the times.”
And that ferment boiled with the constant movement of peoples, passions and ideas: Communists, Socialists, anarchists, suffragists, militant laborites, feminists, Jews, Catholics; activists in anti-militarism, anti-racism, and anti-lynching; those who espoused birth control, free love, and anti-marriage; Yiddish and Italian activists.
And the dreadful nativist Protestant Evangelicals, aligned with KKK terrorists, Southern Redeemers (the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause” continued), and Prohibitionists — all of whom viewed the incoming immigrants as a huge river of murderers, thieves, rapists, drunkards … all foreign, hostile, dirty, with ways that must be extirpated.
Well, new world, new life. Wearing men’s clothes and chopped-off hair, the former Chawa Zloczower claimed her name: Eve, first woman. And then, whimsically, Adams.
Now, how to make a living? First, hang out with all the anarchists, including Emma Goldman. Provide language lessons? Tedious and not so remunerative. Less respectable but more fun? Go on the road, becoming one of the many “tramps” who crisscrossed the U.S.
Eve supported herself by selling subscriptions to radical magazines, even way out west.
Returning to New York, in 1925 Eve self-published “Lesbian Love,” a slim collection of her short stories describing real women’s erotic lives, with companion drawings. Printed just for friends, or as a gift.
She opened “Eve’s Place,” a tea room in the Village. For a couple of decades, Greenwich Village had been part of the real stirrings of public queer life. Men, of course, had bathhouses and bars, periodically facing official scrutiny.
“Sapphists” lived in the Village, and ladies from elsewhere gathered in spots like Eve’s Place for tea, setups (customers supplied the illegal alcohol), and a sense of community. Intermittently, such places were subject to official harassment.
Regrettably, Eve was on the police’s radar. A distinctly disagreeable, self-aggrandizing male “artist” betrayed her to Immigration in mid-1925, charging that young girls were being seduced at her place. A policewoman was sent to entrap Eve. The unsatisfying encounter meant confiscated copies of “Lesbian Love” and proof of Eve’s moral turpitude and dissemination of obscene literature.
Eve endured multiple hearings, spent 18 months in prison for her “crimes” and was deported to Poland in 1927. No place for this Jewish, crossdressing Anarcho-Dyke. Thankfully Eve made it to Paris by 1929. While eking out a living, she unexpectedly found love with performer Hella Olstein Soldner.
When the Nazis appeared in 1940, the couple fled to southern France, where Eve worked with the Resistance, according to Jude Cramer for Into.
They didn’t have enough money to leave France, and the Nazified Vichy government began rounding up “nonnative” Jews for transports headed east to concentration camps. The couple’s luck ran out with arrests and deportation in December 1943. They never returned.
Today, we have Eve’s remarkable story: a woman who lived fiercely on her own terms, and she is now receiving the attention she deserves. In Paris, there is an “Eve Adams” street in the 18th arrondissement, acknowledging her as a “pioneer activist for women’s rights.”