Great Jewish Women-3

Lina Abarbanell

1879 – 1963

Credit: Eric A. Gordon

Lina Abarbanell was born on January 3, 1879, in Berlin, Germany, to Paul and Marie Abarbanell. A descendant of an eminent Sephardi family, Paul Abarbanell was a leading theater conductor. His daughter first sang in public at the age of seven. She later received both dramatic and vocal training, and appeared in numerous civic theaters in Germany. At fifteen, Abarbanell made her debut with the Berlin Court Opera, where she sang the role of Adele in Die Fledermaus over a hundred times. She performed all over Europe and gave command recitals before Austrian, Bavarian, and Persian royalty.

Though she sang but one season and one role at New York’s Metropolitan Opera—Hänsel, in the company’s first staging of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (premiere: November 25, 1905)—Lina Abarbanell’s place in American opera was secured when Leonard Bernstein dropped her name in the scat chorus of his one-act Trouble in Tahiti. This opera is dedicated to fellow composer and mentor Marc Blitzstein, who had married Abarbanell’s daughter Eva in 1933. After becoming the best-known exponent of Viennese operetta style in America, Abarbanell made an effective transition to American theater, contributing to it every talent for which her thorough European training had prepared her.

Her success lay in lighter musical fare and operetta. Composers such as Oscar Straus, Franz Lehár, and Edmund Eysler wrote for her expressive soubrette voice. She made about twenty recordings in 1903 and 1904, only four of which appear to have survived. In 1905, Heinrich Conried, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, invited her to sing the role of Hänsel and to perform at his Irving Place Theater, where she delighted his German-speaking audiences.

After that season, Abarbanell and her husband, journalist Eduard Goldbeck, settled in America with their daughter Eva (b. 1901). For a time she flirted with Christian Science; from a Jewish point of view she can be considered totally assimilated.

She toured the country for almost thirty years, singing her way though frothy Viennese-inspired confections such as The Geisha, Madame Sherry, The Red Canary, The Silver Swan, Flora Bella, The Grand Duke, Enter Madame, and The Student Prince. Sheet music publishers placed her photograph on the covers of numbers such as “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own,” which she had popularized. Her greatest triumph came in the role of Hanna in Lehár’s The Merry Widow, which she played for weeks on end, the press doting on her at every turn.

Abarbanell stopped singing in 1934 after the death of her husband, but she did not leave the theater. She became a well-known casting director, Broadway producer, and occasional director, for years as partner to Dwight Deere Wiman. Among the shows she cast were I Married an Angel, Street Scene, the famous Porgy and Bess that toured the world in the early 1950s, and the film version of Carmen Jones.

Marc Blitzstein and Abarbanell remained close friends long after Eva, Blitzstein’s wife and Abarbanell’s daughter, died in 1936. Abarbanell cast Blitzstein’s opera Regina in 1949 and his musical Juno in 1959, when she had already passed the age of eighty.

Lina Abarbanell continued working in the theater almost until the day she died, on January 6, 1963. Thus a sweet singing nightingale went silenced

Great Jewish Women-2

Sarah Aaronsohn

1890 – 1917(Nili activist Sarah Aaronsohn Institution: Tamar Eshel)

Refusal to adopt prescribed roles

Credit : Billie Melman

“Believe me I no longer have the strength to suffer and it would be better for me to kill myself than to be tortured under their bloodied hands…if we do not remember, you should [illegible]. As heroes we died and did not confess. … I aspired for my people and for my people’s well-being, and if my people is base—so be it.”

These fragments from the 1917 suicide note of Sarah Aaronsohn, nationalist activist, coordinator and later local leader of the Jewish pro-British underground “Nili” (established to liberate Palestine from Ottoman rule), represent a new interpretation of the role of women within the national project of resettlement and regeneration in Palestine after 1881.

The semi-military role Sarah carved for herself in the underground, her activity and her voluntary death made her an icon and a model of a new “Hebrew” femininity, a model especially cultivated within the so-called civic sector of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine (defined as distinct from the socialist labor sector, dominant throughout the period before the late 1970s).

Sarah Aaronsohn was born on January 5, 1890, in the agricultural colony (moshavah) of Zikhron Ya’akov on Mount Carmel, the fifth of six children and older daughter of Efraim Fischel (1849–1939) and Malka (née Glatzano) of Baku, Romania. Her father, a prosperous grain-merchant, fell under the influence of Hovevei Zion, joining its first group of settlers together with his family, setting out from Galatz in Romania in 1882 to purchase and inhabit lands in Arab Zemerin and found the new colony of Zikhron.

The Aaronsohns became one of the colony’s most prominent families, not least because of the career and reputation of Aaron (1876–1919), Sarah’s eldest brother and mentor, a world-famous agronomist and botanist. Sarah and her siblings belonged to and characterized the second generation of the First Aliyah (1881–1904), the native-born and Hebrew speaking youth in agricultural settlements (moshavot) based on privately owned property and organized around a family economy.

The native generation fashioned themselves as a new “Hebrew” elite, establishing a plethora of youth organizations aimed at the revival of Hebrew and of a national culture, as well as clandestine semi-military organizations whose aim was the defense of Jewish property and honor, notably the Gideonim (after the biblical Gideon), founded in Zikhron in 1913 by Sarah’s brother Alexander (1888–1948).

The evolving civic elite posited itself against the Zionist labor-oriented leadership in Palestine, developing a distinct anti-socialist agenda and a nationalist activism, especially after the outbreak of World War I. The social networks which they and their leaders forged were buttressed by family relations and networks.

The social-familial network which sustained Sarah throughout her youth and adulthood included the older Aaron Aaronsohn and the younger Aaronsohn siblings, the charismatic Avshalom Feinberg of Haderah (1889–1916), described as “the first native-born man,” with whom Sarah most probably had a love relationship and who later co-founded Nili; his younger sister Zila (1894–1988), and the Belkind brothers, Eitan (1897–1979) and Na’aman (1889–1917) of Rishon le-Zion. Sarah and other members of her milieu used a familial vocabulary to describe these relations, referring to themselves as siblings and to the nation as a family of brothers and sisters, thus ignoring their elders and parents.

Elite women of the native generation forged their own nationalist language, set of mannerisms, dress and forms of social conduct which created a place for them within the Zionist project, a place which was not necessarily maternal and which was non-domestic.

Sarah herself never completed her formal education. However, encouraged by her brother Aaron, she studied languages and was fluent in Hebrew, Yiddish, Turkish and French, had reasonable command of Arabic and taught herself English. She was also apprenticed in agronomy and botany, often accompanying Aaron on his travels through Palestine, collecting flora, minerals and soils for his accumulating collection, cataloging it and supervising the experimental agricultural station and farm which he established in Atlit, near Zikhron, with the support of American Jewish leaders such as Henrietta Szold.

Like other women in her native milieu, Sarah became an accomplished rider and shot, conducting an active outdoor life. Traveling through the land developed her sense of territoriality, so central to the make-up of the national identity of the native Hebrews and their notion of activism. In the spring of 1914, probably following the rift between herself and Feinberg and his engagement to her younger and less dynamic sister Rivkah (1890–1981), Sarah married the affluent and older Bulgarian merchant, Chaim Abraham (n.d.–1954), and followed him to Istanbul. The marriage quickly foundered both because of a lack of shared interests and due to the impact of world and regional events on the couple’s private life.

The outbreak of World War I, Turkey’s joining of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria) in the autumn of 1914 and declaration of war on the Allied Powers, propelled the men and women in the Aaronsohns’ milieu to embark upon a route of action designed to benefit from the war by aiding the British to oust the Turks from Palestine.

They thought that a new order in the Middle East, under the rule of Great Britain in place of a corrupt Turkey, would help achieve degrees of autonomy for Jews in Palestine. Following a short period of cooperation with the Turkish authorities, which came to an end in mid-1915, Aaron Aaronsohn and Feinberg decided on an active anti-Ottoman policy and established an espionage network, Nili (an acronym for Nezah Israel lo yeshaker, “The Glory of Israel does not deceive,” 1 Samuel 15: 29), known to British intelligence as “A Organization.” Nili developed into the largest pro-British espionage network in the Middle East.

Upon her return from Istanbul to Zikhron in November 1915 Sarah joined the underground. From at least the end of 1916 until her capture and death in October 1917 she coordinated and virtually conducted its activities in Palestine and the Lebanon area, handling Nili’s core of about forty agents, its larger circle of supporters and informers and the organization’s finances. She decoded and sifted information, encoded it and communicated with British intelligence headquarters in Cairo, making contact from the Atlit station with the British warship Managam.

She also supervised the transmission by Nili of Jewish American money converted to gold to aid the Jewish population, which was suffering destitution, hunger and dislocation. In addition she liaised with the Turkish authorities (who were unaware of the underground until late 1917), the increasingly hostile community of her native colony and the formal leadership of the Yishuv which distanced itself from the organization. Though Hebrew sources compiled during the aftermath of the war present her leadership as familial, drawing on her position as the sister of the powerful Aaron Aaronsohn, British and Turkish intelligence sources never regarded her as a strong man’s aid and proxy.

She alone of Nili’s top hierarchy stayed on in Palestine (Aaron traveling between Europe and Cairo and Feinberg having disappeared in 1916, in an aborted expedition to Egypt). She refused the advice of British intelligence to leave Palestine by sea to save herself, remained in Zikhron after Turkish intelligence uncovered Nili’s activities, dispersed the network and was arrested on October 1, 1917. During rigorous interrogation and torture she did not disclose any information. Having learnt that she would be transferred to Damascus prison and fearing she would break down, Sarah committed suicide, using a pistol hidden in the washroom in a wing in her parental home which Aaron occupied. She lay dying for nearly four days before expiring on October 10, 1917.

Her correspondence with her siblings and with other members of Nili reveal her independent thought and refusal to adopt prescribed roles for women. She cross-dressed, occasionally referred to herself in the male gender and admonished underground members for their attempt to idealize her as a female saint. Her pre-meditated and staged suicide constitutes the first example of a secular, active death of a Jewish-Zionist woman for the nation, unprecedented in both religious martyrdom and in the Zionist tradition established in Palestine.

In the latter, women were excluded from full participation in the nation in its ultimate manifestation: a violent sacrificial death, buying the land in blood. Following her death, Sarah became the center of a cult of commemoration. Annual pilgrimages to her tomb in Zikhron’s cemetery started in 1935. The cult, idealizing her as the “hero of Nili” (rather than its heroine), elevated Sarah to a symbol of an activist nationalism and initially blurred her femininity, representing her as a soldier-saint.

She was routinely described as a Jewish Joan of Arc. The analogue with the virgin peasant of Lorraine, liberator of France from foreign rule and burnt by the English in 1431, struck a chord in the same milieu from which Sarah herself emerged: the civic circles. Her myth was also adopted by the Jewish Right in Palestine, serving as a counter, or opposing myth, to that of Yosef Trumpeldor (1880–1920), the “Hero of Tel Hai.” The legend of Sarah proved exceptionally resilient. After the Six Day War of 1967 she and Nili were incorporated in the central state-sponsored cult of heroism, officially recognized by Labor and perpetuated in children’s literature.

Great Jewish Women-1

Gerty Theresa Cori

1896 – 1957

In the radio series This I Believe, Gerty Cori, the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel prize, which she shared with her husband and lifelong collaborator, Carl Cori (1896–1984) in 1947, stated, “Honesty, which stands mostly for intellectual integrity, courage and kindness are still the virtues I admire, though with advancing years the emphasis has been slightly shifted and kindness seem more important to me than in my youth. The love for and dedication to one’s work seem to me to be the basis for happiness.”

Gerty’s interest in studying medicine was sparked by her maternal uncle, a professor of pediatrics. Born on August 15,1896 in Prague (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) to an upper middle class Jewish family, Gerty was the oldest of three daughters of Otto Radnitz, a chemist who was a manager of sugar refineries, and Martha Neustadt. Initially tutored at home and then graduating from a girls’ finishing school, Gerty was ill-prepared to study medicine.

At the age of eighteen, after making up her academic deficiencies in two years of concentrated study at a gymnasium, she successfully matriculated at the medical school of the German University in Prague. In her first year at medical school she became a constant companion of fellow student Carl Cori, with whom she shared many interests, love of the outdoors and fascination with basic scientific research. While students, Gerty and Carl published their first joint research paper on immune bodies in disease and thus began a most productive collaboration. World War I interrupted their medical education; Carl was drafted into the Austrian army in 1916, while Gerty spent the next two years as an assistant at the medical school, doing routine work.

Resuming their medical studies after the war, they received their medical degrees in 1920 and married, in spite of the opposition of his family, who were convinced that her Jewish background would hamper Carl’s career. Though Gerty converted to Catholicism, she was unsuccessful in assuaging their fears.

Turning to research careers, they found positions in Vienna, Gerty at the Karolinen Children’s Hospital and Carl at the University of Vienna. Both managed to do research with minimal facilities. Carl moved on to the University of Graz, but Gerty, unable to obtain a position there, remained in Vienna. Their decision to leave Europe was fueled primarily by rampant antisemitism. Fortunately Carl was offered a position as a biochemist at the State Institute for the Study of Malignant Disease in Buffalo, New York, which he accepted with alacrity. Gerty followed six months later when an assistant pathologist position became available there. They never regretted their decision to emigrate. Enthusiastically embracing American culture, they became United States citizens in 1928.

Their research focused on carbohydrate metabolism and the bulk of their eighty publications between 1922 and 1931 were joint. With a couple interacting so intimately, it is difficult to divide credit between them and no attempt will be made to do so. The question they addressed was what regulates blood sugar levels. Balance experiments on glucose metabolism in rats demonstrated that the breakdown of muscle glycogen as modulated by insulin and epinephrine, led to formation of blood lactic acid which then forms glycogen in the liver.

The liver in turn releases glucose to the blood, which transports it to the muscle where glycogen is reformed. Their formulation of the Cori cycle of glycogen metabolism answered the question they had posed. Their success resulted from their development of precise analytical methods for the determination of glucose, glycogen, lactic acid, inorganic and organic phosphates—a strength and hallmark of all their future work.

In 1931, after refusing a position at a university which would prohibit Gerty from working with him, Carl accepted the chairmanship of the Pharmacology Department at Washington University in St. Louis, where Gerty was given a research assistantship at a nominal salary. Their research on glycogenolysis flourished. In 1936, extending their quantitative analytical methods to hexose monophosphates in glycogenolysis, they discovered a new intermediate, glucose-1-phosphate, the Cori ester. That same year Gerty gave birth to their only child, Thomas Carl, an event which did not change her dedication to her work.

The Coris launched a full-fledged effort in enzymology, concentrating on phosphorylase, the enzyme which converts glycogen to glucose-1-phosphate. The formation of glycogen in the reverse reaction was the first demonstration of synthesis of a macromolecule in a test tube, contradicting concepts then current. Reporting two forms of phosphorylase and their interrelationships, the Coris foreshadowed regulation by protein phosphorylation, now known to be a major regulatory mechanism of numerous cellular processes.

Recognition by the Nobel committee in Physiology or Medicine followed, citing “their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen.” The award was shared with Bernardo Houssay. Unfortunately 1947 was also the year when Gerty was diagnosed with myelosclerosis, a debilitating bone marrow disease. Nevertheless, her dedication to science continued unabated.

In 1946 Carl was appointed chairman of Biochemistry at Washington University and Gerty was promoted to associate professor. Shortly before receiving the Nobel Prize, she reached the top of the academic ladder, full professorship. Scientists from all over the world flocked to this Mecca of enzymology to work with the Coris. Among those mentored by them, six subsequently received the Nobel prize.

In the last decade of her life Gerty continued to do groundbreaking research. She discovered the branching and debranching enzymes which catalyze the formation and breakdown, respectively, of branch points in glycogen. In her last research project, Gerty identified the individual enzyme defect in various forms of inherited glycogen-storage diseases in children, establishing for the first time that the lack or impairment of a single enzyme activity could cause a disease.

Among the many honors which Gerty Cori received were: American Chemical Society: Midwest Award and Garvan Medal; National Academy of Sciences: Sugar Research Prize; Borden Award: Association of Medical Colleges; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

On October 26,1957, at age sixty-one, Gerty Cori succumbed to her illness. It was difficult to accept that this vivacious, outgoing person with her quick, sharp mind and her passionate love of science—an inspiration to all who spent time in the Cori lab—was gone.

Credit : Mildred Cohn