MASTER LOVERS

Winner chronicles the extraordinary life of his great aunt, a woman who had numerous affairs with powerful men of dubious political attachments.

The author didn’t realize how little he knew his beloved great aunt, Dorle Jarmel Soria, until she died in 2002 at the age of 101; then he found evidence, in her correspondence and effects, of a woman who led a cinematically eventful life. Her grandfather, Alexander “Sender” Jarmulowsky, an Orthodox Jew who fled Lithuania for the land of opportunity in Manhattan, owned a bank that suffered such an “ignominious collapse”—many of its immigrant depositors lost their savings—that Dorle, now all but impossible to marry off, was essentially released from all the duties, expectations, and prohibitions of her religious faith. She was a fiery, independent woman: Dorle was one of the first female students at the Columbia School of Journalism, managed the New York Philharmonic, and played a major role in the art scene of the time. What was even more startling, as Winner discovered in his impressive feat of investigative journalism, was Dorle’s inclination for romantic affairs, including those conducted with married men. A romantic at heart, she had numerous relationships with men before she married Dario Soria, a Jew who fled Italy in advance of the Holocaust. She was attracted to a very specific type: men who were as powerful as they were morally suspect. One of these, American reporter John Carter, best known for his strident support of The New Deal, was almost certainty recruited by Nazi Hermann Goering to push a “Hitlerist” party in the 1932 election. Like a private detective, the author endeavors to pin down precisely who these shady and shadowy lovers of Dorle were, and why she was so inexorably drawn to such characters. Even her husband had a politically nefarious past—he served as an officer in Italy’s fascist army in Eritrea.

For all of Winner’s herculean efforts, Dorle remains a tantalizing puzzle who defies solution. The author discovered she wrote a book of fictional romantic stories as a teenager entitled Master Loversof the World, which imagines the amorous escapades of great historical figures like Paul Gauguin and Franz Liszt, a narrative that seems to prefigure her own infatuation with powerful men: “As for her master lovers, both real and fictional, they came from different locales and cultures but had one thing in common—strength and dominance. She would have it no other way.” This is a refreshingly original book, an eclectic melange of disparate elements—the author chronicles his aunt’s life, patches together the lives of her lovers and professional associates, and reflects candidly on his own experiences with Dorle and other aspects of his life as well. A reader might not expect an aside regarding Winner’s own “physical and sexual awakening” while in college, but he includes it nonetheless, and, counterintuitively, it fits seamlessly into the narrative as a whole. This work is a fascinating blend of the personal and the historical, and a provocative comment on the ways in which both resist interpretive finality.

A peculiar but mesmerizing work of biography.