Translation and a working literary life
Born in Baltimore in 1876, Adele was the youngest daughter of Rabbi Benjamin Szold and Sophie Schaar, and a sister of Henrietta Szold. She studied for a year at the University of Wisconsin before moving to New York, where she worked on the Jewish Encyclopedia for Funk & Wagnalls. There she met Thomas Seltzer; they married in 1906. Literary work initially had to fit around paid employment. She worked as social secretary to Therese Loeb Schiff and as executive secretary of the Federation of Child Study, while reviewing and translating books in her remaining time.
When the Seltzers established their publishing business in 1919, Adele worked on translation and editing. Her versions of Bonsels’s Maya the Bee and Heaven Folk appeared in 1922 and 1924. Letters to Jane Addams show her handling another side of the business. In January 1926 she asked whether an American audience or sponsors could support Aletta Jacobs’s memoirs; by May she reported discussing the project with Margaret Sanger. These letters record active editorial judgement and efforts to secure a readership. She died in 1940.
The English Atlantis
The held New York edition of Atlantis was published by B. W. Huebsch in 1912. Its title page names Gerhart Hauptmann as novelist and Adele and Thomas Seltzer as translators. The novel begins with a steamship’s departure from Bremen in January 1892. Its central traveller, Frederick von Kammacher, is a German physician leaving behind damaged professional hopes and a painful family situation. His journey towards America brings medical observation, emotional uncertainty and the unsettling force of dreams into the same narrative.
