The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum

Today marks an auspicious occasion – BookishlyJewish’s first audiobook review! Why did it take so long? I have attempted to read many audiobooks and found my brain unable to process them. However, they were all fiction. When I recently tried to listen to The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum written by Margalit Fox and narrated by Saskia Maarleveld I discovered I am completely capable of reading non fiction via audio. In fact, I’m better at reading it that way than on paper. It just goes to show, a person can always discover new bookish joys. 

I think Mrs. Mandelbaum herself would approve of this discovery. As the first organized crime boss in America, she was a fan of enjoying life’s pleasures. She’s also a character that is widely unknown in the public consciousness even while other infamous figures of the time – like the Tammany Hall politicians – are the subjects of numerous books, college courses, and even high school curricula in NYC. Perhaps this is because “Marm” Mandelbaum’s version of crime – she was a fence that helped plan many of the robberies that fed her inventory – mostly involved theft and property reassignment rather than the drugs and violence of later crime bosses that receive most of the criminal limelight. 

Indeed, Mrs Mandelbaum was practically a Robin Hood of sorts, beloved by a community that refused to testify against her and even posted her bail. She was a deft climber of the “the crooked ladder,” where immigrants and minorities barred from entering traditional professions by rich elites who guard those gates fiercely, turn to crime to amass enough wealth or power to muscle their way in. Make no mistake – this is shady underworld stuff. But considering the only other options available to a poor immigrant woman at the time were prostitution or factory work which paid less and had conditions even more dangerous than those of prostitution, is it any wonder that legions of NY pickpockets and thieves sought something else?

While The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum provides a fascinating historical account of the title character, her various criminal predecessors, and the corrupt politicians and warring police factions of late 1800’s New York City, it truly shines in the epilogue where the circumstances that could have produced such a woman are discussed. America is known as the land of freedom and it offers many (including myself) shelter from religious persecution. But as history shows, women were often oppressed more severely here than in other countries. As a Jewish German woman, Marm Mandelbaum did not think it odd for women to earn money outside the home. She was accustomed to her community banding together in the face of wealth hoarding by a privileged elite and government sponsored pogroms. That ethos was familiar to her neighbours in little Germany. It wasn’t until the rich she was robbing used American moral purity wars to portray her as an uppity woman that she met her downfall. They came after her hard and heavy, seemingly more for the crime of being a woman who dared to boss around men and rise above hr immigrant station than for the actual robberies themselves. It’s a familiar story, a ruling class subverting religion to other a minority and paint them as evil in order to obfuscate their own heinous crimes and greedy avarice. This is not to say Mrs. Mandelbaum wasn’t a criminal. She most definitely was. But so were the people prosecuting her. The Pinkerton Detective Agency? Talk about thieves who used that crooked ladder to amass wealth and then legitimate themselves. They were just as shady as the criminals they were catching.

Marm Mandelbaum is a character for the ages. She refused to stay defeated. During her exile in Canada she was still running her fencing business. If she were alive today I’d like to think she’d be some big CEO tycoon, managing her employees as efficiently as she managed her fleet of pickpockets and bank robbers. Or Maybe not. There’s still plenty of “upper class” criminals who like to demonize Jewish female immigrants in order to push focus from their own inequities. Hopefully, by reading The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum people can learn how to spot them.

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