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Book Review  by Ida Nasatir

Enchanting Rebel by Allen Lesser
December 16, 1949—Ida Nasatir book review—Enchanting Rebel by Allan Lesser—Southwestern Jewish Press, page 3 : This is a book about an amazing Jewish woman. In the middle of the 19th century, an actress named Adah Isaacs Menken, was a sensation every where beyond Virginia City (Nevada) and Paris. She was an extraordinary creature. A lively portrait of her is given in this book. Adah Menken discovered early in life that the less people knew about her, the more she could impress them.  While she did not deny her Jewish faith, she purposefully posed as a character of mysterious origins. It seemed to work, since audiences in San Francisco, New York and London raved about her as an actress. She was  the forerunner of the musical comedy entertainment which was to reach its peak in the Eighties and Nineties. She possessed a magnetic charm; not only the undiscriminating crowds, but the old Alexander Dumas surrendered to her charms, and so did Dickens. Her life was a series of scandals interrupted by four marriages which also ended in scandals. When her first husband Alexander Isaac Menken (from a prominent Jewish family in Cincinnati) lost his money she talked him into becoming her manager—an affair doomed to failure. Then, wrongly assuming that her rabbinical divorce was legal, she married Tom Heenan, the heavyweight boxing champion of America, who, in the belief that he was being cheated, allowed his lawyer to call her a prostitute. She pretended to commit suicide but soon carried on with more gusto than ever before.  Married or not, Adah Menken insatiably consumed what life offered her of friendships, amorous intermezzi, extravagances and other pleasures. She mingled with Bohemian set in San Francisco's infamous Barbary Coast, she frequented gambling haunts and spiritualist sessions, and drove through London in a brogham that sparkled with silver-plated nails and gold foliage. Her lovers ranged from shady characters to shining celebrities, one of them was the poet Swinburne. The newspapers gloated over these goings-on, and Adah saw to it that they had always something to gossip about. What seemed abandon on her part often sprang from an acute sense of publicity. She lavished favors on those who knew how to pull strings, and advertised herself with the skill of a born huckster. However, in spite of her sham aspirations and staged eccentricities, this amazing woman was by no means devoid of genuine dreams and emotions. Rather, she was a mixture of deceit and sincerity so well fused, that probably she herself was unable to distinguish between them. She was not all gold foliage and mere pretense.  Throughout her short life, she was only 33 when she died, she felt attracted by literati, who in turn eagerly sought her company. The young Mark Twain asked her to criticize his sketches. While no one will think of comparing Adah Menken with Sarah Bernhardt and Rachel (Both lived in her time), yet she shared with them the burning desire for blazing a trail through which may well have been their life—an all-devouring intensity, common heritage.  This biography of a rising Jewish actress also gives a good picture of the rise of all Jews in America, released from the ghetto during that nineteenth century. It makes for interesting reading.