Rounding up from 3.5. When it's good, it's good, but it definitely drags on around 1927 with New York political machinations.
Thank you to Doubleday and NetGalley for the ARC!

A great read with well developed story lines. This is a refreshing take on an old profession. Enjoy!

While I am not a fan but by no way judging what Pear Adler did, I can appreciate the detail the author goes into to make her somewhat "relatable" and show how much she accomplished in a time when women were not known to wield power. I enjoyed the book but was not a fan of Pearl.

As an author of several works of nonfiction as well as novels about various scandalous figures who’ve walked the earth over the past couple of millennia, I’ve had the privilege of reading hundreds of biographies. Some are written from the perspective of the outside peering in on the subject’s world. Others tend toward hagiography, as if the subject, however flawed, can do no wrong in the biographer’s eyes.

Yet I have never read a biography so fantastically immersive in both the subject and her world as Debby Applegate’s MADAM, the not-quite Cinderella story of Russian immigrant Polly Adler, New York City’s hostess who offered the mostest to the Jazz era’s swellest swells. [Even in Netgalley’s 1427-page digital ant-sized font, and a layout that compels the reader to frustratingly flip one’s Ipad vertically and then horizontally on nearly every page in order not to miss a number of sentences of the text], I wanted to dive into Polly’s world and rub elbows with her and her clientele, from the seedy and seamy to the sensational.

To say that MADAM is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read is the greatest understatement I’ve written all year.

If I hadn’t looked up the author’s own biography, I would have sworn she was a landsman, so well versed is Applegate in the haimishe yiddishkeit of Polly’s background and ethos. It’s not merely the author’s appropriate use of words and phrases, it’s in the melody of her wordsmithing, that so completely brings to life every aspect of Polly’s world: from her childhood in the Belarus shtetl of Yanow—so much like the Anatevka of Fiddler on the Roof, with the anti-Semitic violence of the Russian Cossacks a virulent breath away—to the various New York neighborhoods of pre-and post-WWI.

Polly Adler is a survivor in every way. Arriving alone (as Pearl Adler) in New York at age 13, she’s dispatched to live with relatives who have no use for her unless she earns her board. When she escapes to Brooklyn, her situation is much the same until she discovers the bright lights, glad times, and seedy underbelly of Coney Island. Her taste for the high life lands her in the worst way for a young girl. Raped and pregnant by her boss at the uniform factory where she works, she survives an abortion, but is booted onto the streets of Brownsville by yet another distant relation.

On the streets of Second Avenue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, then notorious not only as the Jewish Rialto for all the local Yiddish cafes and theatres, but as the nexus for Jewish pimps and crime bosses (even the local police knew to steer clear), Pearl meets Abe Shornik, known in the trade as a “cadet” or in Yiddish, a zushiker. Not exactly a pimp, but a sort of confidence man—gaining her trust and showing her what a life might look like for her on “Allrightniks Row” (Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side) overlooking the Hudson River. In essence, Abe was softly recruiting her for a life in The Life. Pearl had literally been starving for a year, out of a job at the garment factory due to strikes. And what kind of a life was it working herself to death when she could make in a single night what she’d earn in five or six weeks in a factory? She’d tried “respectable” and it had gotten her kicked out of her family’s homes. Was this much worse that going on dates in Coney Island with guys who expected a little something-something in return?

Back in Belarus, Pearl’s father, a tailor, had raised her to be a smart cookie, educated with the boys in their large family. She knew bookkeeping. And even though she’d come to America without a word of English, she was a fast learner. Her new goal, the Goldine Medine (golden land) that every Jewish immigrant dreamed of, was her own digs on Riverside Drive—on the Upper West Side—artsy, raffish, and, oh yes, the den of bordellos and love nests! Polly had no intentions of marrying a pickle factory foreman, or returning to work in the corset factory for $3/week. She wanted the gracious life for herself. She rooms with a glamorous showgirl whose theatre pals bestow her with the American moniker “Polly” and it sticks. Polly is soon shedding her greenhorn ways for the gaudy gaslights of the Broadway pleasure palaces as fast as she can roll down her stockings and bob her hair.

Perhaps in defense of her lifestyle choices, Polly later wrote: “There is more than one kind of poverty. There is emotional poverty and intellectual poverty and poverty of spirit. As well as material lacks, there can be a lack of love, a lack of education, a lack of hope.”

In 1919, the Jewish elders in Yanow were rounded up and assassinated in an act of terror that shocked the world—at least those who were paying attention. Polly’s father and oldest brother finally saw the writing on the wall and decided it was time to immigrate to America; her mother doggedly remained in the Old Country. Polly had been sending her father massive amounts of money, lying by saying she earned it as the manager of a corset factory. Adding fat to her lie, she claimed to be engaged to the son of a rabbi. What would she tell Papa when he arrived in New York? Yet he was only able to do because of her lifestyle—which she chalked up to his sending her off to a strange country all alone at the age of thirteen!

By 1923, having notched too many personal and professional failures, Polly was determined to become the best Madam in America. The Jazz Age and Prohibition were in full swing. She was tight with the crooked Tammany Hall politicians, and the A-list NYC gangsters who bootlegged booze, ran drugs, and peddled nubile flesh: Arnold Rothstein, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Benjamin—“don’t call me ‘Bugsy’”—Siegel, Dutch Schultz, and Legs Diamond, who in turn were tight with the high-hatters of the city’s social register, and the A-listers of the Main Stem—better known to civilians as Broadway. Polly also numbered higher minds among her pals: the hard-partying literate wits of the Algonquin “Round Table,” including Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman—and Edna Ferber, and Dorothy Parker—frequent customers for her houses’ lively chat and all-night booze.

Polly charged the highest prices, hired the most beautiful girls, kept the swankiest houses, and was quick with a quip, unlike some of her competition, who retained the stench of the shtetl or Little Italy about them. This made her clientele feel even more special—like they hadda be “someone” just to afford Polly’s; but most important to them was her discretion, as rare as honesty in this racket. If Polly or one of her girls happened upon a client’s secret, it “wasn’t going nowhere,” and he could be sure of it.

Applegate’s masterpiece has been hailed as depiction of the world of “real Jay Gatsby” by other reviewers—but in this reviewer’s opinion, that optic misses the mark entirely. The fictional Gatsby is a thoroughly American reinvention of WASP striver-dom—the Prairie youth seeing to claim a place amid the Andover-Yale set of white privilege who cringes at the need to sully his hands with a Jewish business associate. Polly Adler and those of the New York City underbelly with whom she associated personally and professionally were largely immigrants from impoverished, often violent, areas of Europe that wanted nothing more than to wipe their kind from the planet. Most were Jewish, and their idea of the American dream was to get the gelt paving the streets here by any means possible. They are consciously flawed and don’t give a crap about hiding their origins. In fact they flaunt their immigrant successes in the face of American WASP-dom. Applegate’s writing, smart, fast, delightfully conversant in the vernacular of Polly’s era, is much more of a kindred spirit with Damon Runyan’s chorines and race touts who don’t speak the king’s English properly or pretend they attended Oxford. In fact, the lingua franca in Polly’s world was Yiddish—the better to talk behind the backs of the Irish beat cops on the take—whereas those who ran with Jay Gatsby were pointedly, then-fashionably, repugnantly anti-Semitic!

MADAM is not merely the biography of an individual; it’s the biography of an era. But that’s as it should be. It’s impossible to separate Polly Adler’s life from her times. To understand the zeitgeist of the roaring twenties in NYC, is to understand what made Polly Adler such a roaring success. She knew what men wanted in a man’s world; but precisely because the era WAS a man’s world, when her houses were raided (as they so frequently were—and often by corrupt cops who were also her clients), the men got off scot-free, while the women were hauled downtown and booked on solicitation charges. Nu? (as we say in Yiddish), meaning “so what else is new?”

The book’s final third traces Polly’s life from the Great Depression onward, through her exhaustive bouts with law enforcement to her decision to go West and go straight by publishing her memoirs—an equally exhausting battle that took years to come to fruition, as those who hadn’t thought twice about availing themselves of the services Polly provided suddenly became both prudish and gun-shy at the merest thought of seeing even a sanitized version of Polly Adler’s life and times in black and white.

But Polly’s ghostwritten autobiography, A House Is Not a Home, published in the mid-1950s, failed to capture her personality. In MADAM, Debby Applegate captures Adler’s myriad facets in their gloriously shimmering contradictions: the immigrant striver; the haimishe yiddishe ballabuste (warm and friendly Yiddish homemaker); the café society regular; the hard-bitted businesswoman; the protective den mother; a hostess worthy of Perle Mesta; and a wisecracker worthy of Fanny Brice. During a raid of one of Polly’s houses in the early 1930s, the police discovered a prominent Madison Avenue ad man and his client, a top executive at the McCall’s Magazine company (which published squeaky clean periodicals geared to the middle-class housewife). “What are they doing in this joint?” demanded one of New York’s finest. Incensed at the insult, Polly blurted out the truth after years of denying her profession. “Joint! You call this a joint? You have some nerve. This is an A-number-1 house of assignation. The girls are first class.”

Applegate has already notched a Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Henry Ward Beecher. After that, it took her well over a decade to complete her research and writing for MADAM. I’ve never read another bio the size of a doorstop and wished it had been longer. This year’s Pulitzer panel would be meshuganeh not to hand Applegate a second prize. Savor every bite of this biography like a pastrami sandwich from Katz’s with a hot potato knish from Yonah Schimmel and a Dr. Brown’s cel-ray tonic or a cream soda on the side and an entire Junior’s cheesecake for dessert.

[I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchanged for my review. Everything I have written is my own opinion. *Netgalley errata p. 859: I’m assuming this was corrected in the final: the female cosmetics mogul who first made a splash in the 1920s was Elizabeth Arden: “Eve Arden,” as referred to in the galley copy, was a wisecracking comedic actress.]

Who knew a book about a woman I had never heard of would be so compelling and bring together famous people we all know
(FDR, Milton Berle, Desi Arnez) into this incredible picture of life in the early-mid 20th century. What an amazing, complex, relentless woman Polly Adler was! I loved this book. So well researched! I love when I’m reading and learn new things yet am reintroduced to familiar names and events tying them all together. This book is long - and packed with details and info - I found all of it captivating. This is the book I didn’t know I needed to read and am so glad I did! Highly recommend! Heartfelt thanks to Doubleday for the advanced copy. Go read this book! So fascinating!

I enjoyed this book, although it was really less of a personal bio of Adler and more a generalized history of Jazz Age New York with a focus on the vice trades. Interesting, but I didn't truly get the feeling that I got to know Adler as much as I would prefer in a biography. That said, I have read Adler's autobiography (written and published in the late '50s - early '60s, so it was very nice to read a less sanitized and curated version.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC copy for my review.

This is not only a fascinating biography of Polly Adler, but also an insightful history of the Jazz Age. Polly Adler was once one of many young immigrants to come from Eastern Europe, but the path her life took was anything but expected.

Born in Yanow, Russia, in 1900, Pearl Adler's early life was very circumspect due to her gender and the anti-Semitic restrictions of the Russian Empire. Nevertheless, throughout her childhood, Pearl exhibited intelligence and was determined to get an education, even though that was unheard of for a girl.

At just thirteen years of age, she landed at Ellis Island, all alone, to meet relations who were strangers. When this arrangement turned out to be less than desirable, she was forced to live on her own at a very young age. Her intelligence and determination would be put to many a test in the coming years.

How Pearl became Polly Adler, the most well-known madam and a legend in New York City, is a long story, and very much worth reading.

Boxers, gangsters, politicians, entertainers, cops, judges, writers, and reporters. High brow, low brow, and everything in between. She met them. Some came for drinks and games, some for sex, some to hide out. She had her finger on the pulse of the current culture for years.

I was shocked at the depth of corruption in NYC during Polly’s lifetime. It was truly wild, as was her existence. The tenacity and stamina it took to hold on to her livelihood is unimaginable.

Author Debby Applegate has used the language of this time period, and it effectively creates an atmosphere that transports the reader to another era. I am impressed with the extensive research this volume required and was captivated by its style.

I haven’t given away any details in this review, in the hope that some of the surprising facts--and there are many--will amaze and enthrall someone else in the same way.

Many thanks to Doubleday Books and Netgalley for this mesmerizing experience.

I felt that the book was based more upon US history and not of Polly Adler I was quite disappointed. I'm sure however that many people will enjoy this book. I had to put it down. Could not keep my interest.

The life of Manhattan bordello madam Polly Adler comes alive in this wonderfully written biography by Debby Applegate.
Adler, a Russian immigrant worked the sweatshops of New York City as a seamstress, survived the horror of rape and eventually found a job working for Nick Montana procuring women for his ‘sex trade’. She opened her first bordello in 1920 and catered to patrons in the arts, bookmakers, bootleggers and politicians. She had an iron will, a sharp mind and an eye for marketing and drawing attention to the beautiful girls she employed. Her flamboyant style and nightclub appearances garnered attention, publicity and notoriety leading to vice raids and time behind bars.
Throughout the Roaring Twenties and the Depression days of the thirties, Polly ran brothels throughout Manhattan. Protected by mobster Dutch Schultz, her private life was one that revolved around her girls and their customers.
In the 1940’s her madam days were in the past and she retired to Los Angeles. Still ambitious, she returned to school, earned a degree and wrote her best selling memoirs.
A remarkable read about a remarkable woman.
Highly recommended.

This is so much more than a biography of the infamous MADAM, Polly Adler, it is a social history of the era in which she reigned. The author has blended in so many of the important political, sports figures and other celebrities, that I found it a joyful learning experience.

I know I will use this material in my seminars. This book is well written and filled with the fascinating story of an era.

Thank you Netgalley for sending me this remarkable book

Debby Applegate, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, has written a fascinating biography of Polly Adler, a jazz-age madam, referred to as the "Jewish Jezebel." At age 13, she came to the United States by herself from a shtetel in Russia, and eventually became a notorious madam, catering to society men, gangsters, and the literati of 1920's New York. In Polly's rags to riches story; the author tells of life in the shtetl, Polly's experience as a new immigrant, and the reality of running an illicit business in 1920's Manhattan, replete with police payoffs, bootleggers, drugs, and the constant demand for attractive women. (I kept wondering if she would get caught, as did so many of the gangsters of the era, for tax evasion.) Recommended for anyone with an interest in women's history, or the history of the Roaring Twenties.. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Previously I had only knew very little about Polly Adler but by the end of this comprehensive book I had the complete picture. She was the queen of madam's and her life was fascinating as one of the countries best known women of her times. This is a very detailed, long book that gives you a real glance of her profession and the early days of this past century. I look forward to more books by this author.

A fascinating and thorough look at the life of Polly Adler. She came to America alone from a shtetl in Janow, Russia. After being kicked out of two different relatives homes, she moved to New York City and got some work in a corset factory. She learned the ropes in the prostitution game and set up her first brothel in 1920, the same year as Prohibition came into existence as a moral ban on alcohol. She ran her brothels well for someone in her 20s, but paid a lot of money in bribes and still got busted at times. That cost her a lot in having to relocate, bail everyone out and hire lawyers. Polly built up a following of famous people, wealthy patrons, and underworld figures. She allowed just about anyone with a large bankroll to hire the services of her whores. Polly Adler soon became so well known that there were few who didn’t recognize her name. Advance electronic review copy was provided by NetGalley, author Debby Applegate, and the publisher.