Lou & Zena Shumsky

Louis Shumsky was born into a large family on January 9, 1919, in Norma, New Jersey. His parents, Joseph and Esther Shumsky, were Russian-Jewish immigrants. At age twenty-one, Lou Shumsky was already at work as a photographer, and that's the job he did in the U.S. Army during World War II. He enlisted on November 26, 1940, more than a year before his country entered the war.

Lou Shumsky served at least part of his tour of duty in London, England, and that's where he met his future wife. Her name was Zena Feldman, and she was born in Hackney, Greater London, on January 21, 1926. Zena had an unsettled family life. Her parents, Barnet Feldman and Rebecca Karpinski, divorced in 1937. Zena attended a girls' school in London on a scholarship but had to end her studies and go to work when her father left. She first worked in a law office. Recognizing her talent, her employers offered to pay her way through law school if she would return after graduating to work for the firm. But Zena wanted to be a writer, and so she declined. Instead she went to work for Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in London. On May 3, 1945, Zena Feldman and Louis Shumsky were married in London. The war in Europe ended just five days later.

The Shumskys returned to the United States in the late 1940s and settled in New Jersey. They had two sons together and moved to Rochester, New York, in 1954. They collaborated on two books, First Flight, illustrated by Ernest Kurt Barth and published in 1962, and Shutterbug, illustrated by Vic Donahue and published in 1963. Zena Shumsky also wrote books on her own, under her own name and two pen names, Jane Collier and Zena Collier. These include:

• The Year of the Dream (young adult fiction, 1962), illustrated by Harper Johnson
• A Tangled Web (young adult fiction, 1967)
• Seven for the People (young adult nonfiction, 1979)
• Next Time I'll Know (young adult fiction, 1981)
• A Cooler Climate (adult novel, 1990)
• Ghost Note (adult novel, 1992)

She also wrote short stories for popular magazines, including:

• "Family Affair," Canadian Home Journal (Nov. 1957)
• "The Innocents," McCall's (Aug. 1964)
• "Trial by Night," Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (Jan. 1974)
• "Accomplices," Alaska Quarterly Review (Fall/Winter 1985)

Louis Shumsky died on May 6, 1968, in New Jersey. Zena remarried in 1970 and was also known by her second married name, Zena Hampson. She lived a writing life and was a member of writers' groups and participated in writers' events. Described as a "small, pretty woman with a soft voice and a delightful English accent,"* Zena Feldman Shumsky Hampson died on October 5, 2016, in Rochester, New York. She was ninety years old.

*From the Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY), September 22, 1962, page 8.

I will write a Book Jacket Bio on the illustrator of Lou and Zena Shumky's book, Ernest Kurt Barth, in the next installment of this blog.

Original text copyright 2021 Terence E. Hanley

Iris Owens (1929-2008)

Iris Owens was born Iris Klein on November 25, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York. Her father, Max Klein, was born in Austria. Klein was a professional gambler and his family's life unsettled as a result. In 1940, when the census enumerator found him, he was driving a fruit delivery truck. Iris' mother, named Rose, was a native of Russia and bore three children, of whom Iris was the youngest.

Iris Klein attended Barnard College and is supposed to have graduated from Brooklyn College. She was married twice before age thirty and divorced in pretty short order. She never again married and died without having any children of her own.

Iris moved to Paris in the 1950s and wrote or co-wrote five pornographic novels for Olympia Press under the name Harriet Daimler, what reviewer and novelist Herbert Gold called her nom de cochon ("pig name"). She returned to the United States in 1970 and took up residence again in New York City. Just two more books flowed from her pen, After Claude, from 1973, and Hope Diamond Refuses, from 1984. In 1975 she taught a creative writing workshop at Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, New York. As the years went by, Iris Owens made fewer and fewer forays from her apartment. Late in life (or maybe not so late) she was, according to accounts, a shut-in. Even the New York Times failed to take note of her death, which came on May 20, 2008. Described during her life and afterwards as ageless, timelessly beautiful, even Junoesque in her stature and appearance, she was seventy-eight years old when the end came.

The narrator of After Claude is a young woman writer who has returned to New York after having lived in Paris. Her name--or maybe we can call it a meta-name--is Harriet Daimler. Herbert Gold (who is still with us) reviewed After Claude for the San Francisco Examiner (July 1, 1973, p. 188), writing: "Owens Qua Daimler [has] proved one of the most important triple-headed theses of modern times: That at one and the same time a woman writer can be (1) funny, (2) pornographic and (3) ladylike." The book is indeed funny--hilarious might be a better word for it--until it isn't anymore. Like Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969), it is a funny book about serious things and ends in a kind of sadness and loss. Mr. Gold wrote: "This book dissolves finally in hysteria, the satire troubled by real pain, and the curious abandon at the end of the book adds a dimension of pathos which is against the principles of your standard black humorist."

I snapped this book up when I saw it because of the blurbs on the cover, because it is a fairly short novel (only 219 pages), but mostly because of the cover with its classic 1970s photo illustration and typography, more so because of the classic 1970s look of the cover model. The photographer is Neal Slavin, who is also still with us. I wonder if we'll ever know the name of his subject (although she looks a little or a lot like the actress Jenny O'Hara).

If you would like to read more about Iris Owens, try "Iris Owens: Wit of the Bitch," by Izabella Scott, by clicking here. A list of books by Iris Owens, from the website Wikipedia:

As Harriet Daimler:

• Darling (1956)
• The Pleasure Thieves, with Marilyn Meeske, who wrote under the pseudonym Henry Crannach (1956)*
• Innocence (1957)
• The Organization (1957)
• Woman (reissued as The Woman Thing) (1958)

As Iris Owens:

• After Claude (1973)
• Hope Diamond Refuses (1984)

*To read about Marilyn Meeske, see "Memoirs of a Female Pornographer" in Esquire, April 1, 1965.

Iris Owens (1929-2008)

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley