Eve Adams Pictures
Last edit: Feb. 11. 2023, at 5:14 PM ET
ABOVE: 1925: Eve (center), Yerachmiel (her brother), and (probably) her sister Tobe. This photo was taken during Eve's trip from the U.S. back to Poland to visit her family. Note Eve's pants suit and white shoes --"oxfords"? On her US entrance document Eve's occupation was listed as "tailoress," so perhaps she made the pants suit herself (the visible hems look a bit homemade). If you have more information or insights email outhistory@gmail.com
CREDIT: Eran Zahavy Collection.
ABOVE: Eve's fingerprints.
CREDIT: NYPD photo no. 8785, copied February 24, 1927, courtesy of the NYPD, Photo Unit Collection, New York City Municipal Archives.
Jonathan Katz is grateful to Elizabeth Evens for discovering this document and providing OutHistory with a photo.
ABOVE: Closeup from the photo above of two of Eve's fingerprints, with a date of February 1927. "The unique twirls on Eve’s fingertips provide an oddly intimate image, an eerie artifact of her physical existence." Jonathan Ned Katz, The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams,(Chicago Review Press, May 18, 2021) p. 68.
ABOVE: Two pages from Eve's Polish multi-page passport dated November 27, 1928. Eve mentioned this passport in her letter to Ben Reitman on February 15, 1929, saying that she had stayed in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) longer than she had wanted in order to get it (Katz, Daring Life, p. 106). After the passport expired and was useless to Eve she probably gave it as a memento to Hella Olstein's brother, Georges, who visited the two women in the summer of 1939 (Katz, Daring Life, p. 135).
CREDIT: Daniel Olstein Collection
ABOVE: Eve Adams, an affectionate drawn portrait that appeared in The Chicago Tribune (published in Paris), on January 3, 1933, page 4.
CREDIT: Wambly Bald, "Le Vie de Boheme (As Lived on the Left Bank)," Chicago Tribune and the Daily News, New York (Paris), January 3, 1933, 4, via Gallica,
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k47768609/f2.item.
ABOVE: Eve in Paris, September 1934, photographer and setting unknown. Eve sent this photo to her brother Yerachmiel Zahavy, in Tel Aviv, Israel, and in 1972 he gave it to the Ghetto Fighters' House Archive in Lohamei HaGeta'ot, Israel. (“Chava Zloczewer, a Jewish Woman from Mława,” France, September 1934, via Ghetto Fighters’ House Archive, https://www.infocenters.co.il/gfh/notebook_ext.asp?book=91378.
ABOVE: “Eve Zloczower,” as Eve Adams spelled her original Polish surname on a passport photo that she had made in October 1941. The anchor images on Eve’s scarf are fitting, since this photo was for an international steamship trip back to the US for which Eve was yearning. Eve sent this photo to her friend and correspondent Ben Reitman in her four-page letter of September 1, 1941, from Nice, France, imploring him to find a way for her to legally return to the US.
CREDIT: Ben Reitman Papers, University of Illinois, Chicago, Archives.
ABOVE: Eve and her companion Hella Olstein, date and place unknown. Since Eve and Hella made several summer visits to Saint-Tropez, in southern France, this may be the locale.
CREDIT: Daniel Olstein Collection.
ABOVE: Eve, left, Hella, center, and an unidentified man and woman, date and location. One guess is that the man is Duncan Grinell-Millne and the woman his wife of that time. On April 18, 1934, Eve, in Paris, wrote to Alexander Berkman: “Well to do English friends of mine Mr. and Mrs. Duncan Grinell-Milne, author of 6 novels are looking for a villa in the South. I heard from a friend here that E. G. [Emma Goldman] wants to rent her cottage at St-Tropez for month. I am getting them interested – They are rich people and both charming good friends. . . . They have the most gorgeous town house and I am trying to convince them that they will like the place in spite that there is no bathroom."
If you can help identify the man and woman please write to outhistory@gmail.com
SOURCE OF QUOTE: Alexander Berkman Papers, International Institute of Social History. The Worlds Leading Institute in Socio-Economic History. 66, Correspondence by first name, “Eve. 1934” [three pages, letter 15-16 in file https://search.iisg.amsterdam/Record/ARCH00040/ArchiveContentList].
PHOTO CREDIT: Daniel Olstein Collection.
ABOVE: A youthful photo of Hella Olstein used by her professionally as a singer Nora (or Norah) Waren. She sent this photo to her brother who replied that she looked sad. She responded that she did, indeed, sing sad songs. Some French newspaper ads billed her as a réaliste singer—a performer of tough, down-to-earth tales of Paris’s poor working class. Anais Nin described her as "a sad little singer." But other photos (below) show Hella as Nora in a very different professional presentation.
CREDITS: Photo: Daniel Olstein Collection; Nin: Katz, Daring Life, p.136; réaliste singer, p. 144.
ABOVE: Hella Olstein (using professional name Nora or Nora Waren), singer, three professional portraits.
CREDIT: Daniel Olstein Collection.
ABOVE: Eve's longtime companion, Hella Olstein, singing under the name of Nora (or Norah) Waren), center, wearing a French tricolor ribbon and patriotic cap, probably representing Marianne, personification of liberty, equality, fraternity, and reason in a big, most probably pre-Nazi occupation revue featuring eighteen saluting chorus girls and scenery displaying the French tricolor and the Gallic rooster.
CREDITS: Jonathan Ned Katz is grateful to theater historian Laurence Senelick for information about the likely character of this performance.
PHOTO: Daniel Olstein Collection.
ABOVE: Eve's longtime companion Hella Olstein performing as Nora (or Norah) Waren), in dark dress, seemingly in the role of a good woman imploring the return of her bare-chested man, torn between love for her and the charms of a bare-breasted woman, in a revue perhaps inspired by the Folies Bergere, popular in France in the 1920s and ’30s.
CREDITS: Jonathan Ned Katz is grateful to theater historian Laurence Senelick for information about the likely character of this performance.
PHOTO: Daniel Olstein Collection.
ABOVE: Emma Goldman speaking, May 21, 1916.
CREDIT: Corbis Images for Education, Public Domain, Wikimedia.jpg
ABOVE: Emma Goldman, deportation portrait, 1919.
Credit: Emma Goldman Papers. University of California, Berkeley.
ABOVE: Ben Reitman, Eve's friend and correspondent.
CREDIT: New York Public Library.
ABOVE: Ben Reitman, Eve's friend, sitting.
Credit: Pinterst.com
ABOVE: Ben Reitman, center, with Joe Edelson and Ben Capes, adverting Emma Goldman's public talk in Butte, Montana, June 24, 1912, twenty days after Eve arrived in the US.
Credit: Courtesy of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Jewish Women's Archive Jewish Women's Archive. "Ben Reitman with Joe Edelsen and Ben Capes, Butte, Montana, June 24, 1912." (Viewed on May 11, 2021) <https://jwa.org/media/ben-reitman-goldmans-lover-and-manager-center-with-joe-edelsen-and-ben-capes-butte-montana>.
ABOVE: Alexander Berkman, 1912.
CREDIT: Forthcoming.
Actress Fania Marinoff, to whom Eve wrote a fan letter in 1918.
CREDIT: Courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library Digital Collections.
ABOVE: Eve met Mae West in the workhouse on Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island) when West was sentenced for presenting an obscene Broadway play, Sex.
CREDIT: "Ten Days and Five Hundred Dollars, The Experiences of a Broadway Star in Jail,” Liberty (Rye, NY), August 20, 1927, 53–56. 2020 The Liberty Library Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Apply to The Liberty Library Corporation for permission to reproduce.
ABOVE: Newspaper coverage of Mae West's play Sex on Broadway.
Credit: New York Evening Graphic, December 30, 1926, New York Public Library Digital Collection.
ABOVE: 1948: Eve's brother Yerachmiel Zahavy, who changed his last name from Zloczewer when he moved to Palestine.
CREDIT: Eran Zahavy Collection.
ABOVE: Eve's brother Yerachmiel Zahavy. No date.
CREDIT: Eran Zahavy Collection.
ABOVE: Robert Edwards, the politically conservative bohemian artist, responsible for an ad in the Greenwich Village Quill: "Eve’s Hangout—129 Macdougal St., Where ladies prefer each other. Not very healthy for the she-adolescents nor comfortable for he-men."
CREDIT: forthcoming
ABOVE: Official photo of the young Policewoman Margaret Leonard that appeared in a 1954 paper when she was retiring.
CREDIT: New York Daily News, August 8, 1954, via Newspapers.com.
Jonathan Ned Katz is grateful to Elizabeth Evens for discovering this photo.
