Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas, by Isabel Vincent, documents an overlooked chapter in the histories of Jewish, Latin American, European, and women’s history, and one epoch in which they all intersected. Documenting the lives of Eastern European Jewish forced sex workers in the 1860s to 1930s, Vincent describes the women’s political organizing as well as the social and religious community they established.
Vincent animates three women, one of whom was tricked into prostitution by the man who sought her hand in marriage, one who organized the ritual purification of the bodies of dead prostitutes in preparation for burial, and another, whose police testimony was critical to enabling the raids of 1930 against the pimps and brothels of Buenos Aires.
Whole communities were deceived to transform young shtetl girls into tools of a worldwide Jewish prostitution ring that stretched through North and South America, South Africa and India. Vincent describes the initiatives of the enslaved women to create a support system and even to establish the religious institutions from their pasts. She describes the prostitutes’ main adversary, the pimps’ powerful monopoly, initially known as the Warsaw Society. The organization, which had Argentine government officials and local police forces in its palm, virtually precluded escape by prostitutes. Live escape, that is. Suicide by carbolic acid was a more popular option.
Bodies and Souls calls into question many of the assumptions we have about the arrival of Jews to the Americas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It suggests that a considerable number of Jewish families began their American legacies with prostitution, about which most relatives in the know were loathe to discuss.
Such reticence is, unfortunately, overcompensated by Vincent’s proclivity for overwriting. An historical phenomenon this tragic need not be further dramatized. The most powerful expression of these stories is in the facts themselves. In one site of embellishment, Vincent writes, “The traffickers thought nothing of selling and reselling human beings, of raping and brutalizing women to force them to submit in the brothels.” Such speculation does little to serve the narrative.
Vincent muddies and crosses the line between imagination and sensationalism several times over, and has a similar tendency towards rhetorical repetitions of italicized phrases and ubiquitously speculative language. Chapters are riddled with imagined scenes about sobering events that end up sounding downright kitschy. For instance, about the Buenos Aires police commissioner who resisted bribery and fought against prostitution, she writes: “Alone in his office, Alsogaray may have chuckled as he recalled such ridiculous rationalizations. Or perhaps he wasn’t in the mood for humor as he reflected on the ugly side of this immoral mentoring program” (176-77).
The best section of Bodies and Souls is the last. The epilogue describes the man who tends the abandoned prostitutes’ cemetery and gave Vincent the critical bits of information that lay the foundation of her project. She brings him to life by letting his words speak for themselves. It is a beautifully written, informative chapter, and gives us a taste of the style that would have been well used throughout the book. Unfortunately, the import of Vincent’s topic and the fruits of her terrific research are too often muddled by her hyper-dramatization of a subject that’s better off left to speak for itself.
