“Antoinette Spitzer’s heroine in Life Comes to Judith belongs to a comparatively new and, if one may judge by the book sales, an increasingly popular type of amorous adventuress: the young woman on her own,” declared the New York Times’ review. As the novel opens, Judith Zorn is on her own in more ways than one. She’s headed for the Brooklyn jail to interview a woman just arrested for the murder of her husband. She’s left her husband for a lover of uncertain reliability and fidelity. And she’s just found out she’s pregnant.
Life Comes to Judith is, I’ll be frank, of far greater historical than literary interest. By 1931, there had been dozens fictional accounts of abortion, almost always depicted as a desperate step taken to avoid the shame and economic hardship of single motherhood, as detailed in Lesley Hall’s Literary Abortion page. And Judith not only contemplates but seeks out a doctor willing to undertake the illegal procedure and is about to be wheeled into the makeshift operating room when she changes her mind.
If you stick with Judith to the end of this book, you’ll encounter a fair number of mind changes. She falls in love with Denis, a composer with a taste for the extravagantly romantic (he reads to her from Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam) but little appetite for commitment. “I don’t believe in marriage,” he tells her. “I only believe in love.” She marries her safe childhood sweetheart, David, who appears to offer security, but then Denis keeps popping up with some beautiful words and enough money for a hotel room. She falls for Anton, a music critic, whose words are even more hyperbolic than Denis’s: “You are my love. You are everything to me. My wife, my mistress, my mother, my child. You are earth and sea, sky and woods.” But like most 1920s New York artistic types with a bit of spare change, Anton wants to spend a year in France. One can’t be too harsh with Judith, however: she is just twenty, after all.
Life Comes to Judith suffers from typical autobiographical-ish first novel problems. Far too much space devoted to tracing Judith’s comings, goings, and soul-searching, space that neither adds to our insights nor moves the story along. I’ve come to feel a certain dread whenever I encounter a midcentury middlebrow novel of 300+ pages: it’s no secret that publishers (or book buyers, or both) felt that a novel had to be that length to give value for money, but in too many cases, it led to wordy peregrinations without the charm of the detours in 18th and 19th century novels. Describing things happening is not the same thing as advancing the plot.
What’s most remarkable about Life Comes to Judith, though, is the memory triggered as she’s being pushed into the operating room:
It came up of the past like a bad nightmare. The time her mother had an abortion. She had come home from High School and heard her mother talking on the phone to Aunt Lila.
“Tonight at nine,” her mother said. “Yes, he’s coming here, he won’t do it at his office. I don’t know why. Of course not, Lila. Why should I be nervous? I couldn’t have it, you know that. He says I’m two months gone. Yes. Come over early. Good-bye, dear.”
She remembered wondering what was happening at nine and why her mother was so pale. She asked her mother: “What’s up, mumsey? Tell me, I’ve a right to know.”
“Nothing for you to know, darling.”
“But there is something. What is it?”
“I’m pregnant, Judith. That’s the trouble.”
“Oh mumsey, how wonderful. But why are you crying? Oh, I’m so happy for you. What do you want, a boy or a girl?”
“I’m not going to have it, darling.”
Judith didn’t understand. She was only fifteen at the time.
“No, I’m not going through with it, Judy. It would be wrong to bring another child into the world. I’m not at all well. Bringing you into the world was torture for me. It almost cost me my life. And then, we never have had enough money to live on, so why bring another one into the world to feed? I can’t, Judith, I can’t. I’m tired.”
This recollection defies the fictional trope that abortions were just for unmarried women. Judith decides to keep her baby and try to live as a single mother, but for Judith’s mother, abortion is both a form of birth control and a way to escape years of economic privation and slavery. This may be more representative of the reality of abortion than anything in Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which is often (mistakenly) cited as one of the first fictional representations.
Although censorship laws and mechanisms had relaxed a bit by 1931, a few municipalities still retained enough teeth in their laws to punish Life Comes to Judith. In January 1932 (nine months after the novel’s publication, purely coincidentally), the District Attorney for Washington, D.C. prosecuted six retailers for selling the book, along with The Constant Sinner by Mae West and Ballyhoo, Slapstick, and Hooey magazines, for violating the city’s obscenity law. It was too late to help the book’s sales, however, and Life Comes to Judith quickly slipped out of print.
Antoinette Spitzer’s own story was likely not that different from Judith Zorn’s. Born in Brooklyn in 1907 (cousin of Marian Spitzer, whose own first novel, Who Would Be Free (1924), was featured here back in 2020), she went to work for the Brooklyn Citizen in 1925 as their society columnist, then moved to Manhattan to work for the New York American as a feature reporter. She covered a wide variety of stories, from fluff stuff like the visit of the Crown Prince and Princess of Norway to murders and political scandals. In late 1926, she earned brief nationwide notoriety for being arrested for violating the blue laws of Irvington, New Jersey prohibiting just about anything other than going to church and sitting still.
Soon after being released from jail, she married Sidney Braunstone, but the marriage was annulled in March 1931, just days before Spitzer married reporter turned dentist(?) Archibald Winick. Ironically, one of her most popular stories, from 1928, reported on a study by the Federal Council of Churches of America that “Appeals to young people to exercise voluntary restraint against sex indulgence.”
Spitzer divorced Winick eight years later, after publishing a second novel, These Are My Children, (sparsely reviewed) and setting up her own public relations company. Spitzer’s premiere client was Walt Disney Studios, for whom she designed the campaigns for Fantastia, Bambi, and other hits of the 1940s. Spitzer added two more husbands before settling in Miami in the 1950s, where she handled PR for the Eden Roc Hotel. She died in Miami in 1977 at the age of 70.