A Romanioti Legacy:
Adam J. Goldwyn’s RAE DALVEN
THE LIFE OF A GREEK JEWISH AMERICAN
and
MARRIAGES ARE ARRANGED IN HEAVEN

Who was Rae Dalven? And why does she merit a biography? There are thousands of scholars like her, people who further our knowledge about the world in any number of academic specializations, yet we know little of their lives. They write, they publish, they may win awards, but engage with other scholars, not the general public. Exposure to a broader audience may eventually arrive in the form of an exhibition, a book review, a popularized history, or an announcement of a scientific breakthrough. And then it’s the work itself that captures our attention, not the person who created it. However, when Adam Goldwyn, an Ashkenazi Jewish classics scholar, happened upon work by the Greek Jewish poet, Joseph Eliyiah, he was intrigued. Surprisingly, he was intrigued by the translator, Rae Dalven, a minor figure in literary and historical circles. Wanting to know more about her, he set out to research the life of the only Romanioti (Greek Jewish) female immigrant scholar in the United States with a scholarly and literary legacy. Dalven left no journals to document her inner musings or other details of her private life. Nonetheless, Goldwyn’s diligence and persistence led to his discovery of just enough material in a collection of letters, unpublished plays, interviews, and Dalven’s own scholarly output to flesh out her personal and professional obsessions. The result is Rae Dalven: The Life of a Greek Jewish American and publication for the first time of her play, Marriages are Arranged in Heaven.

The biography, with a text in both English and Greek, is marred somewhat by typographical errors and occasional infelicitous phrasing. Overall, however, it is a fine achievement, revealing that what made Dalven interesting to Goldwyn also drives our interest. Though not well-known outside a small circle, Dalven was a ground-breaker with a distinguished series of firsts to her name: the first Greek Jewish immigrant woman in the United States to attend college, the first to earn an MFA from Yale Drama School, the first to complete a PhD in English from New York University, and the first to translate both Jewish and non-Jewish Greek poets, among them, Joseph Eliyiah, Cavafy, George Sefiris, and contemporary Greek women such as Olga Vosti.

Dalven, translator, playwright, and English professor, was so unlikely to emerge from the milieu she was born into that Goldwyn has set himself up for a risky undertaking in uncovering how she did it. Yet he manages to tease out at least a partial answer, emphasizing the surprising ways her biography meshed with the path she determined to take.

Rae Dalven arrived in the United States with her family in 1909. She was four years old, a member of the tiny, mostly poor and unskilled Romanioti contingent to come to America during the great migration of 1880-1924. Scholarly attention to Romanioti (as well as Mizrachi) Jews in the United States has been subsumed under the rubric of second-wave Sephardi immigration, a disparate group of fewer than 300,000 from territories once part of the Ottoman Empire. Ashkenazi Jews, primarily from the Pale of Settlement, arrived in vastly larger numbers, more than 2.5 million by 1924. The size of this group as well as the swift rise of a small intelligentsia within it has dominated our understanding of Jewishness and Jewish achievement in America. Goldwyn deserves praise for bringing the life of a Romanioti out from the margins and into the light.

Dalven’s parents were among the many Jewish groups who arrived at Ellis Island, dispersed across the United States, and subsequently created distinct enclaves of synagogues, communal associations, social clubs, and small businesses. Despite what one might assume to be the unifying trait of Jewishness, little interaction among these groups took place in the years of immigration. Goldwyn acknowledges this, noting Dalven’s status as a member of a minority within a minority. I’d go further. She was a minority within a minority within a minority. Indeed, what marked the American Jewish collective was a lingering distrust among these Jews about their co-religionists. Yiddish speakers doubted the Jewishness of the Ladino-speaking Sephardim, who in turn doubted the Jewishness of their many fewer Greek-speaking counterparts.

Isolation and loss, frequent descriptors of the immigrant experience, were particularly salient for those like Dalven’s parents who suffered the triple burden of minority status, poverty, and lack of education. Adjustment to their new country was eased somewhat through strict adherence to familiar cultural and religious norms they expected the next generation to perpetuate. Dalven, however, had other ideas. She chafed under a regime that confined women’s aspirations to the domestic sphere. She was intent, of all things, on getting a college degree. Her family was opposed, demanding financial help. She responded with equal parts loyalty and resentment. When I interviewed her in 1985, she praised her brother who was in medical school for inspiring her. But the story she went on to tell about working long hours in a private kindergarten while pursuing advanced study at Hunter College emphasized her grit and determination. Her triumph was personal but remained incomplete, she claimed, until she forced her parent’s recognition by converting the first paycheck she received into single dollar bills, which she threw at them, declaring, here’s your money for you.

Enrollment at Hunter College was transformative. It marked the beginning of her self-identification as one born to a theatrical career. After graduation, she married, traveled to Greece with her husband where she met a relative of the poet, Joseph Eliyiah, who urged her to translate his poems into English. From there, Goldwyn’s biography recounts her experiences at Yale Drama School, where her professors found her ambition exceeded her ability, her divorce, her trips to Greece to meet with poets and other writers, her completion of a PhD at NYU, and her professorships at Fisk and Ladycliff College. Often plagued by financial woes, anti-Semitism, sexism, and neglect from her own community, she didn’t achieve stability until the late 1960s when she became a professor of English and then chair of the department at Ladycliff College.

As a teacher and translator, Dalven was well-regarded. NYU created an annual Rae Dalven prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Work in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. But what she most craved was an elusive theatrical success. In his discussion of her plays, Goldwyn admits their artistic deficiencies but finds value in the way they express her enduring commitments to feminism, to democratic values, and to memorializing her heritage.

Goldwyn’s edition of Marriages Are Arranged in Heaven is the first publication of a Dalven play. It is part of Goldwyn’s longer term project to usher several others into print. His introduction provides a concise summary of the plot, and notes explain historical references, religious customs, and culturally specific words. I would add one more note, an explanation of the jelly that’s mentioned in Act II when guests arrive to the family home. Most readers will be unfamiliar with the custom of serving a sweet as a welcoming gesture. The jelly is fnaroh, a confection made of scrambled eggs and sugar with whole blanched almonds scattered across the top. The matriarch of the household places the jelly into a bowl set on a tray with glasses of water and long handled spoons and passes the tray, offering each guest a taste and symbolically setting the tone for the visit. I witnessed this practice in New York in the homes of my Romanioti grandmother and aunts. It’s a lovely custom that should be better known.

Eugene O’Neill was the subject of Dalven’s PhD dissertation, and she may have drawn on his family dramas for inspiration in writing Marriages are Arranged in Heaven. For material, she drew on her parents’ unhappy marriage and her own. Goldwyn tells us that Dalven’s mother endured a largely loveless marriage to a much older man whom she accepted because he required no dowry. In Dalven’s case, the dowry was not a factor. Instead, she accepted her mother’s counsel and married a Romanioti man with whom she shared little other than ethnicity. Whether her husband’s infertility or his antipathy to his wife’s accomplishments doomed the relationship we can’t be sure. But she believed the marriage “ruined her life” and she never remarried.

The narrowing of women’s agency forms the backdrop of the play. Its ironic title expresses a bleak truth: The play’s marriages are arranged not in heaven but here on earth and subject to the demands of poverty, patriarchy, and the dowry system. O’Neill may also have been the model for the play’s restricted setting. The five scenes take place entirely within the family home, and their sole purpose is to explore the marriage prospects of the three daughters, Esther, Amelia, and Rachel. The home is poor but adorned with colorful tapestries made by one of the daughters. Her talent later becomes a bargaining chip in marriage negotiations.

Act I opens on a hopeful note. The two eldest children, Esther and Joseph, have left for the United States, the land of economic opportunity and a wider array of marriage prospects for Esther. Hope is dashed, however, when the two return home, having been denied entrance to America. Esther’s future is the one now most constrained, and by her own father. Impervious to his daughter’s wishes, he schemes to marry her to someone she despises precisely because he will forego the dowry. Marriage, after all, is a business proposition, not a love match. Its transactional nature gets another dramatic airing in Act II when Stamou, the matchmaker, relates the back and forth negotiations for Rachel’s betrothal. Even after a deal is finally struck, money overshadows marriage joy as the final task of pricing the value of the family goods Rachel will take with her spoils the celebratory mood.

Overall, Marriages are Arranged in Heaven offers a socially realistic portrait of intergenerational and gender conflict that shape the children’s future lives. Dialog moves the story forward efficiently, with characters alternating their frustration, anger, affection in somewhat varying emotional registers. But the absence of speech pattern and tonality variation means little distinguishes one personality from another. It’s impossible to know whether Dalven’s neglect of character development was intentional, the result of a conscious decision to put her social concerns center stage. Nonetheless, her failure to learn from O’Neill how to use the monologue to suggest complexity in individual psychology or philosophical outlook leaves us with a play that is rather flat. We may understand the limits of what is possible for Dalven’s characters, but without being given access to the insight necessary to capture their inner selves, we won’t be moved as Dalven wants us to be.

Despite this weakness, the play delivers an emotional impact through its historical setting, the decade 1929 to 1939. Dalven creates a disconnect between the characters’ preoccupation with their immediate circumstances and the audience’s awareness of the catastrophic world events that will soon overwhelm them.

As early as Act I, Scene 1, which is set in 1929, Dalven establishes the characters’ isolation from those events. As mentioned above, Esther and her brother Joseph return home after having been denied entrance to the United States. Since this is five years after Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, effectively ending Jewish immigration, we feel the futility of their effort even more fully than they do. Scene 2 jumps ahead to 1933. Again the characters are focused on domestic arrangements, a second daughter’s marriage and a younger brother’s conflict between familial obligation and disdain for his father’s meddling. Dalven widens the focus slightly to offer greater insight into the class differences roiling the community. Yet this is still the insular world of the play’s beginning, with the characters oblivious to the larger forces closing in on them. The audience remains one step ahead in knowing that Hitler has taken the reins of power and installed what will become an exterminationist ideology. Act II takes another leap forward to the summer of 1938. Rachel marries and in 1939 gives birth to a daughter. As has been true throughout the play, Dalven leaves the audience to fill in the facts about Kristallnacht and the opening salvos of war that devastatingly undercut this happy ending. When war did come to Greece, Nazi terror all but wiped out the centuries old Romaniote community. When Dalven wrote this play in 1983, Holocaust scholarship had exploded, but the Shoah’s impact on Romanioti Jews was little known in this country. Dalven was determined to pay tribute to those from whom she descended.

Taken together, Rae Dalven: The Life of a Greek Jewish American and the play, Marriages are Arranged in Heaven are worthy contributions to the scholarship and literature of marginalized Jewish communities. They should be of interest to general readers less familiar with the multicultural nature of the Jewish experience and to an academic audience. Courses in Jewish immigrant literature are almost exclusively dependent on work by Ashkenazi Jews. They would be invaluably enriched by including minority perspectives. In interviews, Dalven talked more about her struggle against her parents’ expectations than about her accomplishments. Goldwyn’s work has done us, and her, a service by shining a light on this Romanioti legacy.

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¹ Diane Matza taught twentieth century American Literature at Utica College for more than thirty years. She is the editor of Sephardic American Literature: 200 Years of a Literary Legacy and the author of articles and reviews that have appeared in publications such as Studies in American Jewish Literature, MELUS, American Jewish History, The Forward, and Congress Monthly.