Greta Garbo of the Law Fanny Holtzmann 's career took an entirely different direction. Her association with Keppler and Hochman, the firm she worked for as a law student at Fordham, turned out to be serendipitous. On her own, she undertook to collect a number of unpaid bills for one of the firm's clients, The MorningTelegraph; in the course of this work she came in contact with the British actor and writer Edmund Goulding, helping him to manage his complex financial and legal matters. Goulding sang the praises of the second-year law student to Broadway notables and introduced her to the writers who lunched at the Algonquin Roundtable Alexander Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, and Robert Benchley. Though still a law student, Holtzmann seemed to Goulding "the greatest lawyer in the world man or woman," combining an imaginative mind with the interpersonal skills of a psychiatrist and intimate friend. It was "not only my business coups,"Holtzmann recalled, "but what he portrayed as my saintliness. I was different, according to Goulding: incorruptible, untouchable."

It was not long before the Roundtable members and other of Goulding's theatrical acquaintances (including Gertrude Lawrence, Noel Coward, and Coward 'producer, Charles B. Cochran) sought the services of the fledgling lawyer.Holtzmann ' s success came despite the formidable obstacles of her sex and ethnicity. When, just after she completed law school, Goulding offered to pay her an annual retainer of $15,000 (a substantial sum for the time), brother Jack told Holtzmann that she should join his firm, since it wouldn't look right for Goulding to be represented by "a little girl."

When the state Court of Appeals denied her application for immediate admission to the bar, the family suspected an anonymous letter written to the court's Character Committee, complaining of the fact that she was a "little Jew-girl." To Holtzmann's relief, the taint of scandal caused the cautious Jack, concerned about the effect of anti-Semitism on his own career, to withdraw his offer. Taking matters into her own hands, Holtzmann argued her case before the Appeals Court, which reversed its decision. The head of the court, Benjamin Cardozo, was so impressed that he became Holtzmann's backer when she took the unprecedented step of applying for an office in the Bar Building in New York. Cardozo became a lifelong mentor, her "guardian angel."

At the time, the Bar Association had no women members and few Jews (her brother Jack, partner to a New York City congressman, did not belong). Appearing before the association's Character Committee, Holtzmann argued her case eloquently: Gentlemen, women have the vote. Further progress is inevitable. Our common concern should be to attract the best types of women to the law, to set honorable standards. Why admit a woman to the practice of law if you're going to ban her from the Bar Building? A tolerant approach will reflect greater dignity on all of us.

Holtzmann won her argument and moved into the building that would house her offices for the next five decades; Cardozo was also a tenant and she visited him frequently, listening to his views on many subjects, particularly Jewish history,philosophy, and the law. Cardozo's views on the law seemed to have "the weight of Mosaic pronouncements" for the young woman. "In his piety and dignity," she recalled, "he was a throwback to the rabbinical sages of antiquity." Along with Aides ideas about mitzvoth, Cardozo's credo use the law to remedy wrongs, even when precedent and statute seem contrary, and "above all, stick to your own beliefs, your private values no matter what people say" became her ethical guide. Years after Cardozo had become a Supreme Court justice, Holtzmann mused, "If there was any man in the world I would like to have married it was Cardozo."

Within a few years, Fanny 's career had more than fulfilled its promising start.Adding such clients as George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy,John Gilbert, Fred Astaire, and Ina Claire, she shuttled between London, the WestCoast, and New York, her comings and goings a matter of press attention. A big boost came from Edward Marshall, an English journalist who frequently put out stories about Holtzmann through his news syndicate. Not only her legal skills but also the fact that she reminded him of his dead daughter, who "resembled herJewish mother," endeared Fanny to this newest male mentor. By 1932, a rising Hollywood film star had cause to wonder "how famous one must become to be able to qualify as one of Fanny Holtzmann's clients."

It was the sensational Rasputin trial of 1934, however, that catapulted Fanny Holtzmann to international fame. Holtzmann's client was Princess Irina Alexandrovna Youssoupova, wife of Russian nobleman Felix Youssoupoff, who in1916 had killed Rasputin, the "mad" monk who had exercised a sinister influence over the pre-Revolutionary Romanov court. The princess alleged that MGM's film,Rasputin, the Mad Monk (released in America as Rasputin and the Empress), implied that she had been intimate with the monk; now living in England, where the picture was about to open, Irina wanted Fanny to sue MGM. Although few thought Holtzmann had the slightest chance of success against the corporate giant, who claimed its representations were clearly fictional,she agreed to take the case after receiving assurances that the princess and her husband had played no part in any anti-Semitic actions of the Romanov family. To everybody's surprise but Holtzmann 's, she won the case, along with $125,000 in damages for the princess and the possibility of an additional financial settlement. The greatest sensation of the trial was when Prince Youssoupoff took the stand to tell how he had poisoned, shot, clubbed, and drowned Rasputin in Petrograd; Holtzmann herself became a cause celebre when the barrister defending MGM portrayed her as an American intruder forcing the case down the throats of the reluctant Youssoupoff's. With the Court of Appeals also deciding against the appellants, the trial became a landmark case on defamation, cited in legal texts; never before had victory in a libel case been achieved through a deliberate confession of murder. Holtzmann was adopted enmasse by British royalty and the British press. The Daily Sketch reported that she was the wealthiest woman lawyer in the world; the Paris Herald Tribune told of a victory party at her London apartment where "more than one hundred members of the English aristocracy and the Hollywood screen world mingled." One of the guests was another immigrant daughter, Sophie Tucker, who like Holtzmann had become a celebrity in Britain.

Those who knew her well recognized that Holtzmann 's achievements were a consequence of her fierce determination. Despite the impression she gave of"wistful helplessness," playwright Moss Hart said, Holtzmann was as helpless "as the Bethlehem Steel Company and as delicate as 'Jack the Ripper."' Her bold and inventive tactics, her ability to put her contacts to work in a seemingly unending pyramid of influence ("I've never met a stranger," she once observed), and her talents at negotiating made her, according to Louis Bittayer, a "female Solomon." To ohers she was a "Greta Garbo of the law," the "most unpredictable, brilliantly accomplished woman lawyer in American history."

Prophetic Judaism

Although she did not attend synagogue or share her father's personal faith in God, Justine Polier considered herself a religious person. To Polier, religion meant "righteous action in the tradition of the prophets" rather than prayer.She considered justice more important than mercy. While transgressions before God could be atoned for through religious ritual, she explained, wrongdoing could only be forgiven when the injustice was rectified. Polier liked may lead to errors of judgment," Polier once said, "but the lack of passion in the face of human wrong leads to spiritual bankruptcy."

Although Fanny Holtzmann did not become active in Jewish organizations, according to her biographer and nephew, Edward Berkman, she "gloried in mitzvoth," consciously using her influence to promote "the good deeds prescribed by the Talmudic sages" and Jewish causes. Chief among these was the rescue of children from fascist regimes in Europe and, after the war, helping to negotiate a favorable vote at the newly established United Nations on the question of Israeli statehood. Because the British held her in high esteem, she was able to obtain British visas for hundreds of European Jews seeking to escape the Nazis; she was aided in this work by Joe and Jack Kennedy, then in their early twenties, the sons of the anti- Semitic United States Ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy. Holtzmann also used her contacts, including Justice Felix Frankfurter, to try to persuade President Roosevelt that extraordinary efforts were required to rescue Jews from the Nazis; Fanny's idea was for the United States to settle half a million refugees in a sparsely populated area either in southern California or the Nevada desert. Discouraged byRoosevelt's lack of commitment to rescuing Jews after a personal meeting, she gathered support from leading Republicans. The scheme, which she incorporated as the Association for the Resettlement of Oppressed Peoples, eventually came to naught, but Holtzmann continued her mission of helping refugees and families on an individual basis. She also played a leading role in bringing dozens of children from an Actors' Orphanage in Britain to the United States, and worked with Jewish leaders in an unsuccessful campaign (in which Justine Wise Polier also participated) to secure the passage of the Wagner-Rogers bill to admit 10,000 refugee children to the United States.

Her crowning achievement was her work on behalf of Israeli statehood. Asked by Ambassador V. K. Wellington Koo of China (whom she had represented in other matters) to be his special counsel at the founding session of the United Nations inSan Francisco in 1945, Holtzmann accepted at the urging of her mother. Still a passionate Zionist, Theresa Holtzmann had foreseen that Koo, a widely admired senior diplomat who had been at the League of Nations, would be deeply involved in the Palestine question. An expert on trusteeships, Koo was besieged by lobbyists; Holtzmann relieved him of some of this burden, meeting with Stephen Wise and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, who were representing American Jewry, and setting up secret meetings between American Zionists and the British, with whom her ties remained excellent.

Holtzmann's participation averted several confrontations and allowed proponents of Israeli statehood time to make their case. When the issue came to the United Nations in New York, she continued to set up secret meetings in her apartment between Arthur Creech Jones, the British colonial secretary, and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, the American Zionist. ("I felt like Mata Hari Holtzmann," she recalled.) Her influence extended to theChinese, probably the single most important vote at the U.N. With its large Muslim population, China had been expected to vote against the creation of an Israeli state. According to Berkman, Ambassador Koo, because he owed Holtzmann a debt from San Francisco, cabled Chiang Kai-shek, asking permission to abstain, which was granted. China's abstention led the way; when six Latin American countries followed suit, the vote on behalf of statehood was ensured. Though she received no public recognition for her contribution, Holtzmann's strategic position gave her a pivotal influence on the course of Jewish and world events. Holtzmann's negotiations in this matter and her involvement in Jewish refugee questions reveal that, despite her celebrity practice, her Jewish identity remained strong. Yet she claimed that she had few, if any, Jewish clients. Jews didn't need her services, she quipped, since every Jewish family raised its own lawyers; in her own family, not only Holtzmann, but also two younger sisters (another was a teacher) and three brothers became attorneys: "I gave birth to a bar association," her mother used to say. Her younger brother, David, eventually practiced with her, and her sister Stella joined the practice for a time as well.

Holtzmann believed that being a Jew was not a "handicap"; in fact, she had earned her international reputation "as a Jewess. Always a Jew, you know, that smartJewish lawyer." Never a "smart American girl" but "that smart Jewish girl."The "Jewish" was an "extra compliment," she claimed. Holtzmann ' s powerful clientele and her worldwide network of influence suggest that her practice did not suffer from anti- Semitism despite such labeling. Late in her life, Holtzmann acknowledged that she had never socialized with clients because she considered their social status far above her own. Despite her fame and power, inside she remained the Jewish girl from Brooklyn, different and other. Never forgetting that she was "an outsider in a man 's profession" a woman as well as a Jew Holtzmann tried "to dress as inconspicuously as possible, not to be strident . .. to tone down my femininity and not to try to be masculine." 115 She did not associate herself with women's causes and expressed feminist feelings infrequently, like the time she wrote to her parents of her outrage that women had to be seated separately from men in the Orthodox shul she visited in Poland in the early 1930s.

While Holtzmann downplayed the importance of gender barriers in the law, she acknowledged that her success scared away "the right kind of mate." Her sisterStella managed to combine legal practice with marriage and children, but this goal proved unobtainable for Holtzmann. Yet Holtzmann pronounced herself satisfied with the family life she did have; after her siblings married, she continued to live with her parents, whom she "worshiped," in an apartment on East64th Street in Manhattan.Holtzmann ' s parents passed on the notion that "the American flag was what one worships. . .. God gave us America." While Fanny became a faithful Republican, it was not party politics or religious ritual that held her deepest loyalty, but "myAmerican heritage, my birth as an American." She had been taught this lesson mostly by her father, the former rabbinical scholar who had become a completely assimilated Jew. Practicing the Jewish faith in America, he told his daughter, was not "what you mumble" or "what you eat," but "how you think and how you help your fellow man." When in the 1930s Holtzmann returned to her father's birthplace in Austrian Poland, the elder Holtzmann was annoyed. "I've spent a lifetime trying to forget them," he confessed to Holtzmann, warning her not to be sentimental about her roots. Holtzmann needed to do what he told his immigrant students, to "shake off all memory."

To Holtzmann, however, forgetting was impossible. Like her father, she lived an assimilated life; indeed, she greatly surpassed her parents in integration into middle-class, professional culture. Yet unlike some of the "lost generation" of immigrant children, her bonds to culture and heritage remained vibrant. When, in her late forties, she took up painting, she found herself possessed by a "dybbuk,"which made her draw "from an inner memory." Among her most admired works was a series of portraits of immigrant women on the stoops of the Lower East Side ghetto where her family had once lived.

Although Holtzmann had abandoned the Jewish rituals she had shared with her beloved Zaida, at her bedside she kept a well-worn Book of Psalms, crammed full of personal notes. Like Yezierska, another assimilated immigrant daughter with a bedside Bible, Holtzmann helped pioneer a new path for Jewish women. Yet each took with her an older part of her culture. In Holtzmann's professional life, the teachings of Zaida and her parents remained formative. While she did not associate herself with a specifically Jewish imperative for social justice, Holtzmann nonetheless drew on the Jewish values she imbibed from her family to guide her work. As her most important mentor, Cardozo also provided crucial professional support and reinforced the tradition of righteous action. As she matured into a creative, unconventional lawyer, she became, according to her nephew, a "preeminent Jewish" attorney, known for her compassion and fairness. But empathy may not have been a common trait among Jewish attorneys at the time. According to historian Jerold Auerbach, "Within elite circles, one looks almost in vain beyond the examples of Louis D. Brandeis for any model of professional responsibility that elevated the social good above a client's needs." Assimilation into the profession was usually accomplished "at the expense of independent moral vision and any sustained commitment to social justice."