Contributed by Michael Sampson Sweeney

Ninth Avenue is about a poor hard-ass Irish-Catholic family in Hell’s Kitchen New York, who’s daughter, through all the racist trials and tribulations, falls in love with a black man and they go off to marry and live happily ever after. This is a charming and flattering review in The Pittsburgh Courier, on April 16, 1927, by Geraldyn Dismond, the famous African-American journalist, editor, critic, author and community leader. She was born and raised in Chicago and graduated with a degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1915. She frequented some of the same venues as Bodenheim in his early Chicago days. She, like Bodenheim, moved to New York in the early 1920‘s where she became a prominent Harlem Renaissance figure. At the time of this review she was the New York correspondent for The Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper.

The review shines light on what I have come to believe is the importance of Bodenheim’s novels; the day-to-day life of people born into confusing and difficult circumstances; the unfulfilled upper class, over-worked middle class, the lower class, minorities and the disenfranchised. With all the unresolved racist shit that has bubbled up through the Obama presidency, and Donald Trump’s bigoted pandering hypocrisies, this seems like an article about a book that should be released today; 2018, remarkably, instead of 1927 when such talk was absolute anathema in most parts of America!

“It was with the keenest interest that I approached Ninth Avenue. Not because I heard a gentleman of color was woven into the plot or that studio parties with which I am familiar filled a chapter or two, but because Maxwell Bodenheim has always come in for a good bit of hero worship from me and because I associate him with Chicago. My native lazyness and my sense of my literary short-comings restrained me so I never met Bodenheim. Anything that Bodenheim wrote I would enjoy. With me he is the teacher’s pet. He describes emotions which I have experienced; paints situations with which I am familiar; he knows women as women know each other and better than they know themselves; and he has the fearlessness of a fool. He writes about life as it actually exists all around us but as most of us don’t care to admit. I will confess that my reading is sandwiched between a cocktail and a dance, but I have yet to find a book or play in which a white woman of any superior character or intelligence loved, respected and married a black man and came to any good end. Yet it happens!

“White men through the ages have been permitted full sway with dusky heroines. Of course the most popular type of fiction leaves the lady deserted, but faithful, or sacrifices her to poison. But as Mr. Bodenheim so aply expresses it, “ since Shakespeare’s Othello, the idea that colored and white people weren’t meant to get along with each other has been going strong.”

“The most unusual thing, therefore, about Ninth Avenue to my mind, is that a young white girl, the pick of her lowbrow family, charming, sought after by men of her own group, intelligent, ambitious, clean minded, and in no way a degenerate, selects of her own free will, ponders over the outcome and decided to love, honor and obey a Negro and considers herself darn lucky. 

“That is unusual. But what is almost beyond belief, that Bodenheim does not have the lightning strike her dead rather than see white womanhood so outraged, or punish her by linking her to a beast, but gives her a man you would love for your very own–restrained, a poet, handsome, the perfect lover, thrifty, a fine gentleman.

“Bodenheim isn’t lying or exaggerating. He has been on the same parties that we have. He knows the people that we know. His Negroes are our every day friends. They are intelligent, physically attractive and creative, possessing the same weakness and strength as their white companions and differing not even so very much in appearance. We know that racial antipathies exist but he puts forth the idea that exceptional men and women can rise above them, and that what starts as a fad can end as an avalanche. 

“His humor and slang are delightful. I was annoyed however by the fact that the expressions absolutely familiar to me were explained and unusual words surrounded by quotation marks instead of being permitted to enter naturally into the description or conversation. Of course I may be exceptionally well up on current bad english and studio parlance and no doubt Bodenheim hopes to have his books read in the jungles of Georgia, but God help him if he is ever recognized in those parts!”