Sex, Fascism, and So Forth

Master Lovers, biography by David Winner, Outpost 19 Books, paperback, 260 pages, $18.50

Dorle Jarmel Soria, who lived from 1900 to 2002 in New York City, had a full and interesting life. Born to an affluent Orthodox Jewish family named Jarmulowsky, she graduated from Columbia University. She worked as a journalist and as a publicist for performing artists and the New York Philharmonic. In 1942, she married Dario Soria, an immigrant from fascist Italy. They distributed Italian opera recordings, and in 1953 they co-founded Angel Records. Dorle continued to write on music and opera for magazines and Metropolitan Opera publications through 1982. All the while, she traveled in Europe and the Mideast, carried on some major love affairs, and had a number of flings.

David Winner, born in the mid-1960s, often visited his great aunt Dorle in New York as a boy with his parents, and later as an adult living in Brooklyn. After she died, he discovered a great cache of papers in her apartment, including hundreds of love letters. Over a decade or more, he read them, did research on people mentioned in them, and uncovered the secret history of his family, especially the banker Sender Jarmulowsky, 1840-1912. Based in the Lower East Side of New York, the Jarmulowsky Bank failed in 1917, and the scandal alienated the family from Jewish society. It also freed Dorle from a traditional role as wife and mother. In her teens, she wrote a collection of stories titled Master Lovers of the World, based on the lives of historical figures like Parnell, Gauguin, and Liszt. Winner found the stories among her papers. Since her own love-life played out like her fiction, he gave that title to his book, Master Lovers, with the subtitle “a twisted puzzle of love and fascism.”

The subtitle refers to a 1930s lover, John Franklin Carter, who was a minor figure in the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and before that a Nazi sympathizer with ties to Joseph Goebbels. Winner finds the connection of his Jewish great aunt with a Nazi incredible: the awful fact echoes throughout the book. But people are full of contradictions, they change over time, and many upper-class Brits and Americans in the early 1930s shared an interest in Hitler and fascism. Carter was needy and married, and Dorle ended the affair after meeting his wife.

As a sophisticated woman of the world, Dorle may have shrugged off Carter’s Nazi past. She must have been fascinating, since her men kept coming back for more. Winner quotes letters to her, but not from her. He does not quote any of her journalism. He does quote her diary, and here is a rare instance in which we hear her voice:

“One of the reasons I would have liked to have married John has very little to do with him personally. I have a terrible need to do something vital in the world before it is too late, and I thought through him and his political knowledge and connections I could be of some small use.”

Winner did not set out to write a conventional biography. Instead, it is as much a personal memoir, an account of his impressions of Dorle, her sister Faie (his grandmother), other family members, his gradual discovery of the papers, and with his wife Angela, their joint discovery of the family history. Events are out of chronological order, with jumps backward and forward in time, and many repetitions. The project started as an essay published in Kenyon Review in January 2017, and apparently it grew like Topsy.

The shipboard scenes on the North Atlantic and Mediterranean conjure up a bygone era of drinks at the bar, walks around the deck, meals at the captain’s table, and sex in tight quarters. A lover in this period was Bill Barker, a stalwart British soldier and policeman who served in Turkey, Ireland, and Palestine. A little later, Dorle met the suave Syrian merchant Georges Asfar in Damascus. Georges spoke French and he was Christian, but he wanted her to be his Muslim slave girl. They hunted gazelles in the desert and dined sumptuously. There is a batch of love letters from Albert Coates, a British composer and conductor. Later came J. B. S. Haldane, a British-Indian scientist who worked in physiology, genetics, and evolutionary biology. The supporting cast includes a Jamaican servant named Novelette. Yes, Novelette.