Stern, Elizabeth Gertrude Levin
STERN, ELIZABETH GERTRUDE LEVIN
STERN, ELIZABETH GERTRUDE LEVIN (1889–1954), social worker and author of 13 books that received much popular and critical attention. Details of Stern's birth remain uncertain. Although she consistently maintained that she was born in Königsberg, Prussia, and came to the United States in 1892 with her parents, Sarah Leah (Rubenstein) and Aaron Kleine Levin, a cantor and rabbinical assistant, her oldest son later revealed that while raised by the Levins, his mother actually had been born out of wedlock in Pittsburgh to Lillian Morgan and Christian Limburg, a store owner and merchant.
After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 1910, Stern moved to New York City and enrolled in the New York School of Philanthropy (later renamed the New York School of Social Work) where she met, and in 1911 married, fellow student Leon Stern. From 1912 to 1913, they lived in Galveston, Texas, assisting Jacob Schiff 's efforts to reroute American Jewish immigration from New York to the Southwest. A decade later, they co-authored My Friend at Court (1923), a "casebook" of a female probation officer based on cases with which they were familiar. The mother of two sons, Stern was an active professional and a writer. Her social work achievements were recognized with an honorary master's degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1918.
Stern, who began writing for local newspapers as early as 1908, began to publish feature articles in The New York Times in 1914. By 1926, she was writing for the New York Evening World and the Philadelphia Public Ledger, for which she assumed the pen name Eleanor Morton. In 1926, she adopted the pseudonym Leah Morton for the popular and critically acclaimed I am a Woman – and a Jew (rep. 1986, with a new introduction by E.M. Umansky). This book purports to be the autobiography of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant who comes to America as a child and spends her youth in the Jewish section of a small city along the Ohio River. The focus is on the author's struggle to meet familial and professional demands while she struggles to come to terms with her Jewish identity. Contemporary reviewers assumed the book was Morton/Stern's personal story. However, Leah's struggle to establish a career despite her husband's objections and the conflicts created by marrying a non-Jew were fictional. Still, like Stern's earlier autobiographical novel, My Mother and I (1917), this book illuminated the spiritual journey and generational tensions experienced by many modern Jews, especially women.
Stern's religious attachment to Judaism remains unclear. By 1928 she had joined the Philadelphia Ethical Society, a branch of Ethical Culture, and she later became a member of the Religious Society of Friends, devoting much of her time and energy to Quaker organizations.
bibliography:
T. Noel Stern, Secret Family (1988); E.M. Umansky. "Representations of Jewish Women in the Works and Life of Elizabeth Stern," in: Modern Judaism, 13 (1993), 165–76.
[Ellen M. Umansky (2nd ed.)]