By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

Jennifer Brown will speak about her book “The Whisper Sister” on Tuesday, October 21, at 10:30 am, at the Temple Concord Social Hall. The event is free and open to the community. It is not necessary to have read the book to attend. To read The Reporter’s review of Brown’s book, visit CJL: Jews and crime: fact and fiction.
Jennifer Brown, author of “Modern Girls” and “The Whisper Sister,” didn’t have to look far to discover what topics and time periods to feature in her novels: her family history inspired both. “‘The Whisper Sister’ started with questions I had about my own family,” she said in an e-mail interview. “My great-great grandparents immigrated from Ukraine to the Lower East Side of New York in 1906. The whole (large) family lived in one apartment, and my great-great grandfather worked at a newsstand.” 
That means her family lived in New York City during the 1920s, a time period Brown finds fascinating. “The glamor! The excitement! Flappers and speakeasies!” she said. “So much of what I read or saw about the 1920s focused on the seductive charms of the Jazz Age.” 
However, Brown also realized that that glamour was not reflected in the lives of the poorer, immigrant population, which led her to ponder what her family’s life was really like. “My immigrant family. In a small apartment. The work at the newsstand,” she said. “Other family members worked as iron molders, seamstresses, painters. Money was tight. These folks weren’t drinking it up at secret bars. What was life like for those who weren’t part of the swell life? How did immigrants fare in the 1920s? What were the less enchanting parts of life during Prohibition? These are the questions I asked myself as I conjured up the premise of ‘The Whisper Sister.’”
To Brown’s surprise, she learned that women were actively involved in bootlegging during Prohibition. “I hadn’t realized just how many women were involved in the liquor business,” she noted. “Whisper sisters were women who operated drinking establishments. Speakeasies could be anything from a swanky hidden bar to someone’s apartment where alcoholic drinks were served in teacups. Some were teeny tiny; others quite elaborate. Women tended to run the apartment and tearoom speakeasies more than the bars, but that doesn’t mean women were absent from the bigger places. Texas Guinan, an actress, was a well-known hostess at the El Fey Club. She was famous for her greeting to customers: ‘Hello, Sucker! Come on in and leave your wallet on the bar.’”
Running speakeasies was not the only aspect of bootlegging in which women were involved. “”Lady-leggers’ were also a problem,” she added. “Female bootleggers often made deliveries because police rarely suspected them of illegalities. Women were also used as screens; they were placed in the rear of a car so that police wouldn’t shoot. I read one article that mentioned in a small town in California, in 1926, 60 women were arrested. If there were 60 lady-leggers in a small town, you can imagine how many might be working in a city.”
An additional surprise came when Brown learned that a major figure in the fight against illegal liquor was also a woman: “The person responsible for enforcing the Volstead Act – which declared the selling and buying of alcohol to be illegal – was the U.S. assistant attorney general, who, at the time, was a woman, Mabel Walker Willebrandt. While she personally didn’t support Prohibition, she took her job seriously and enforced it with determination. The press nicknamed her Deborah of the Drys, as well as Mrs. Firebrand. I love that women worked both sides of Prohibition.”
The main character in “The Whisper Sister” faces some very difficult personal choices. While Brown didn’t want to give away details that would spoil plot surprises, she was willing to talk in general about the problems women faced during that time period. “I will say that I wanted the problems Minnie [the main character in ‘The Whisper Sister’] had and the decisions she had to make realistic to the time period,” she said. “Life could be quite ugly in those days (well, in many days, but I was focused on this time period).”
Brown noted that Anzia Yezierska, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, also touched on some of the same material. “Her writing was heart-breaking, rarely was there a happy ending,” she said. “In ‘The Lost Beautifulness,’ she writes of a woman who saves and saves to paint her kitchen white, so when her son comes home from the army, he’ll have a beautiful home to return to. She’s so proud of what she’s done and insists that everyone comes to look at it. Even her landlord comes, who agrees the apartment is greatly improved and, therefore, he’s raising her rent. The story ends with the son returning to see his mother and all her belongings on the street, having been evicted for not being able to afford the rent increase.”
It wasn’t possible for Brown to capture all the difficulties women and immigrants faced in that time period in “The Whisper Sister.” She did note that authors who wrote in the 1920s offer additional insight. “In Yezierska’s stories, babies are left locked in apartments so mothers can do shopping,” she said. “Immigrants are humiliated by those meant to help them assimilate. Boarders pay too much for rooms with only an airshaft window. In her novels [and those of] Henry Roth, Michael Gold [and] Abraham Cahan, life is usually bleak with only glimmers of hope. These books were the basis for my imaginings of life in the tenements. Honestly, what I wrote didn’t touch many of the horrors of the time period, but I tried to capture what I could.”
She believes that contemporary women and immigrants still face some of the same difficulties. “Unfortunately, some of what contemporary women can learn is that not much has changed,” she said. “Women still face difficulties in the workplace. Good childcare can be near impossible to find and afford. Immigrants face prejudice and hostility. I wish that historical fiction was just that – something left to history – but these issues come up time and time again. I would like to think we can learn from the past, but based on current news, I don’t think we have learned much.”
Even though the tone of “The Whisper Sister” is serious, Brown mentioned that the writing process had its pleasures. “Writing ‘The Whisper Sister was great fun, learning about Prohibition, gangsters and speakeasies,” she noted. “My husband and I did a great deal of ‘research’ at home that involved many cocktails (and mocktails for the kids) as well as the baking of the dishes [the characters] make. I’m happy to report I can make a pretty decent knish now!”