Anne Bishop has just taken her place among her group of friends at the Vassar College daily tea when the others start in on another girl who lives on their hall: Delia Goldhush, an American raised in Paris.
“There’s something different about her. Something not quite right,” one says. “Everyone knows they’re a bit devious. And that they keep to themselves,” another one chimes in. Then Virginia, the leader of the pack, weighs in with her own cutting remark: “Exclusive. And superior. Like they think they’re better than other people.”
So begins the opening chapter of One of Them, a new novel by Kitty Zeldis about two Jewish women at the exclusive, then all-women’s college in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the years just after World War II. Both are forced to grapple with the casual antisemitism of their non-Jewish classmates but choose to do so in dramatically different ways.
Anne, who was Miriam growing up with her widowed father in New York City but decided to go by her more Anglo-Saxon-sounding middle name when she arrived on campus, simply allows her WASP friends to assume that she isn’t Jewish so as not to endure the snubs and slights she might otherwise face. Delia, on the other hand, proudly presents herself to the world as who she is, seemingly indifferent to her status as an outcast, content to dine, study, and partake of all the college’s intellectual riches alone.
At the beginning of the novel Anne and Delia seem to be on the verge of becoming friends, drawn together by their shared love of art, architecture, and stylish clothing, until a scandal engulfs Delia and, almost inexplicably, Anne sides with the mean girls against her. In subsequent chapters, each woman must deal with the consequences of her actions and undertake a journey of self-discovery that will wind through Paris, take a detour to Palestine just as it is about to be partitioned into a Jewish and an Arab state, and end up in the cosmopolitan yet very tribal city of New York.
Zeldis — whose previous novels Not Our Kind and The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights also explored aspects of Jewish life in America just before and after the world wars — has constructed an intricate plot with echoes of Gentleman’s Agreement, Laura Z. Hobson’s 1947 bestselling novel about “genteel” antisemitism in America, and Exodus, Leon Uris’s blockbuster about the founding of the state of Israel that came out about a decade later.
At its heart, though, One of Them is a coming-of-age story about Delia and Anne — two smart, talented, and sexually adventurous protagonists who face hardship and discrimination for being both women and Jews. Not only must they contend with the antisemitic slights of their classmates, but they also must figure out how to navigate the sexist double-standard that reigned on college campuses and in society in the era before second-wave feminism transformed higher education and every other facet of American life.
Ann Levin is a writer, book reviewer, and former editor at The Associated Press. Her memoir and nonfiction have been published in numerous literary magazines and she has read her stories on stage with the New York-based writers group Writers Read.
