Zelda Popkin

  1. Home
  2. Wiki

Zelda Popkin (née Feinberg; 5 July 1898 – 25 May 1983) was an American novelist best known for her contributions to mid-twentieth-century detective fiction and her later works exploring Jewish identity and family life. Over a career spanning four decades, she wrote fourteen books, including seven mystery novels and several works of general fiction. She gained early recognition for creating Mary Carner, a department-store detective who debuted in Death Wears a White Gardenia (1938) and is regarded by scholars as one of the first professionally competent female sleuths to appear in American popular fiction. Popkin’s mysteries were noted for their clear prose, believable characters, and depictions of women’s workplace networks, while her later novels, such as Small Victory (1947) and A Death of Innocence (1971), shifted toward psychological and social themes. Her work has since drawn renewed attention from literary critics for its portrayal of women’s autonomy and its engagement with Jewish American experiences.[1][2][3]

Early life and education

[edit]

Zelda Popkin (born Jennie Feinberg in 1898) was the daughter of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. She was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where her father operated a series of unsuccessful small businesses. Like many American-born children of East European Jews, she broke decisively with her parents’ religious orthodoxy, which she later dismissed as “medieval dogmas,” and sought full integration into American society. In reshaping her identity, she adopted the name “Zelda.” At age sixteen, she graduated from Wilkes-Barre High School and became the first woman reporter hired by the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader. Two years later, she moved to New York City, where she would live for the rest of her life. While rejected by the Columbia University School of Journalism and by Barnard College, she did take some classes at Columbia's Extension program.[4][5]

Marriage and public relations career

[edit]

In New York, Popkin met and married Louis Popkin, himself an American-born child of East European Jewish immigrants and an active Zionist. Their wedding took place at the Broadway Central Hotel in October 1919, performed by Rabbi Joseph Silverman. Both Zelda and Louis wrote articles for the American Hebrew as well as the American Israelite, and later Louis worked for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (“the Joint”). After World War I the couple founded one of the United States’ first independent public-relations firms, the Planned Publicity Company. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Popkins represented political candidates from both major parties, supported Spanish Loyalist causes, and assisted Jewish communal initiatives, including fundraising efforts for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.[4][5]

Popkin developed a strong reputation as a writer of press releases and magazine pieces, placing stories in publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times. The couple even succeeded in circulating a fabricated story about a group called “the Shifters,” which fooled major newspapers, including the Times, when it resurfaced decades later.[4][5]

Awareness of Nazism and wartime activism

[edit]

Through her and her husband's deep involvement with Jewish causes, Popkin became aware of the dangers posed by Hitler and rising antisemitism as early as the 1930s. Her preserved personal files include documents relating to anti-Nazi rallies, refugee sponsorship efforts, and campaigns against the antisemitic radio priest Charles Coughlin.[4][5]

After Louis Popkin’s sudden death in 1943, Popkin closed their public-relations firm and returned to work for the Joint, assisting in efforts to rescue the remaining Jews of Europe. A memorandum she drafted that year emphasized the need to focus on survivors who might form the basis of a rebuilt European Jewry.[4]

Early writing career

[edit]

Popkin began publishing fiction in the late 1930s, writing six detective novels between 1938 and 1945, five of which featured Mary Carner, a department-store detective later recognized by critics as one of the earliest fully independent female sleuths in American mystery fiction.[4][1]

Her 1945 novel The Journey Home, inspired by a wartime train accident she had personally experienced, became a bestseller, appearing shortly after V-J Day and selling nearly a million copies. Its success allowed her to secure an assignment from the American Red Cross to travel to Europe and report on relief work in the devastated cities and displaced persons (DP) camps.[4][5]

Postwar trip to Europe

[edit]

During the winter of 1945–46, Popkin visited bombed-out cities in Germany and Austria, traveled extensively under difficult conditions, and observed Jewish survivors living in Displaced Persons (DP) camps. Her letters to her family from this period reveal both her early, evolving understanding of the Holocaust (before the term was in common use) and her sometimes critical reactions to survivors, influenced by her dislike of religious orthodoxy and her personal struggle to rebuild her life after widowhood.[4][6]

Although she expressed sympathy for orphaned children, she was often impatient with camp residents whom she believed were insufficiently proactive in their rehabilitation. She also attempted to intervene in relief policy, famously threatening to expose inequities in the distribution of aid to Jewish children unless administrators took action.[4]

Postwar fiction

[edit]

Popkin’s experiences in Europe formed the basis of her 1947 novel Small Victory, one of the earliest American fictional treatments of the human consequences of the Holocaust. Although Jewish survivors appear only peripherally in the story, the novel condemned what Popkin viewed as indifference or hostility within American occupation policy toward Jews. Her depiction of survivors as traumatized and morally damaged reflected early postwar stereotypes and contributed to the novel’s mixed reception.[4][6]

She continued to write fiction rooted in contemporary history. Walk Through the Valley (1949) explored midlife widowhood, while her 1951 novel Quiet Street, the first American novel about the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, was based on several months she spent in Israel visiting her sister, a journalist for the Palestine Post. Although later readers praised its nuanced portrayal of Jewish women, the novel was a commercial failure, leading Popkin to conclude that “Jewish books do not sell.”[4][6]

Autobiography and later perspective

[edit]

Popkin published her autobiography, Open Every Door, in 1956. In it, she chronicled her childhood, life with her husband, and life after his death. She also reframed her wartime and postwar experiences in universalist terms, focusing on human compassion and moral recovery. She recounted her encounters with survivors and Germans as part of a personal journey out of grief and toward a broader understanding of humanity. Her description of embracing a German child and hearing the story of a Christian woman who saved a Nazi soldier illustrated her belief that forgiveness was necessary to retain one’s humanity.[4]

At the same time, Popkin incorporated more graphic descriptions of wartime atrocities than in her earlier works, and she acknowledged how personal encounters with survivors had forced her to reconsider the distance between American Jews and European Jews who survived the Holocaust.[4]

Another book written later in her career, Herman Had Two Daughters (1968), which is a novel about two young Jewish women growing up in a small Pennsylvania town, is also largely autobiographical.[4][5]

Later years

[edit]

Despite the limited commercial success of her postwar novels and autobiography, Popkin continued to view herself as a writer. She spent years attempting to complete a novel about the Molly Maguires, though it remained unpublished. In 1965, she held a residency at the Yaddo writers’ colony, where she interacted with Alfred Kazin and Philip Roth and reportedly bested Saul Bellow (who had once panned her work) in a game of Scrabble.[4]

Popkin’s career is remembered for its early feminist elements, its engagement with Jewish identity during a transformative period in American and world history, and its blending of personal experience with major historical events.[4]

Personal life and death

[edit]

Zelda Popkin was married to Louis Popkin, and together they ran a small public relations firm until his death in 1943. They had two children, Roy and Richard.[1][5] She died on May 25, 1983.[5]

Awards

[edit]

Books

[edit]

Mary Carner Crime Series

[edit]
  • Death Wears a White Gardenia (1938)
  • Time Off for Murder (1940)
  • Murder in the Mist (1940)
  • Dead Man's Gift (1941)
  • No Crime for a Lady (1942)

Novels

[edit]

Non fiction autobiography

[edit]

Collections

[edit]

Popkin's professional archives are preserved at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.[5][8] Much of her personal correspondence is retained by the Popkin family.[9]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ a b c DeMarr, Mary Jean (April 1982). "The Mysteries of Zelda Popkin". Clues. 3 (1): 1–8.
  2. ^ Klein, Kathleen Gregory (1988). The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. University of Illinois Press. pp. 143–146.
  3. ^ Uffen, Ellen Serlen (1994). Strands of the Cable: The Place of the Past in Jewish American Women’s Writing. Peter Lang. pp. 95–109.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Popkin, Jeremy D. (2018). "From Displaced Persons to Secular Saints: Holocaust Survivors, Jewish Identity, and Gender in the Writings of Zelda Popkin". Studies in American Jewish Literature. 37 (1): 1–20. Retrieved 2 December 2025 – via JSTOR.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i Popkin, Jeremy D. (2023). Zelda Popkin: The Life and Times of an American Jewish Woman Writer. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
  6. ^ a b c Selengut, Suzanne (3 March 2006). "Quietly Ahead of Her Time". The Jerusalem Post. p. 14 – via ProQuest.
  7. ^ "Past Winners". Jewish Book Council. Retrieved 2020-01-19.
  8. ^ "The Inventory of the Zelda Popkin Collection" (PDF). Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. Boston University.
  9. ^ "Zelda Popkin, An American Jewish Author". University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences, Department of History. Archived from the original on 29 October 2024. Retrieved 3 December 2025.

Further reading

[edit]
  • Popkin, Jeremy D. (2023). Zelda Popkin: The Life and Times of an American Jewish Woman Writer. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
[edit]