Sonya Levien (born Sara Opesken; 25 December 1888 – 19 March 1960) was a Russian-born American screenwriter. She became one of the highest earning female screenwriters in Hollywood in the 1930s and would help a number of directors and film stars transition from silent films to talkies. In 1955 she received an Academy Award for her screenplay Interrupted Melody.
Early life
Sara Opesken (Sonya being the Russian diminutive) was born in Panimunik, a small village, now part of Kaunas, Lithuania, in the Pale of Settlement on 25 December 1888 (later changing the date to 1898.) The oldest child to parents Julius (b. ca. 1863) and Fanny (b.ca. 1865), Sonya had two brothers, Arnold and Max.
During this period, Russian authorities kept a watchful eye over citizens, especially Jewish people with radical affiliations. Sonya's father had a remote connection with a radical newspaper as well as agreeing with the anarchist ideas of Prince Peter Kropotkin. Julius Opesken also joined a Narodnik study circle before being arrested and put to work in the Siberian mines. While their father served his time, the Opesken family moved in with Julius' father, a rabbi, who stressed the importance of language to a young Sonya. Her grandfather instructed her in Russian, French, German, and Hebrew as well as encouraged her to read from the Talmud and the Shulhan' Aruk on a daily basis.
In 1891, her father escaped exile and made his way to America, choosing to take on the surname of his German rescuer, Levien. He brought the rest of his family over in 1896, where they joined him on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. They were not the only Russian Jews between 1891 and 1900, in these nine years over 150,000 Jews came to New York alone. Once settled in America, her parents had two more sons, Edward and Nathan. The family received their naturalization papers in 1905.
All of the children in her family worked through school to help with expenses. Sonya worked in a feather-duster factory throughout her teenage years, making four dollars each week. During her formative years in America, having grown up in poverty, she joined a group of socialists. Sonya, like many other European immigrants in America, went to a public grammar school. After she finished in 1901 or 1902, she was unable to continue to high school due to financial issues. She took out a loan for $36 in order to learn stenography and get a job as a secretary. It took her four years of work to repay this loan. During her time as a secretary she also became acquainted with settlement work and labor unions. Sonya also managed to take some classes at the Educational Alliance where, in 1903, she met Rose Pastor. Not only did Pastor hire her as a secretary, she was also a member of the Socialist Party and the Women's Trade Union League, giving Sonya access to a whole library of texts on these subjects she could read.
Levien began to write her own work by sending in short comedic squibs to Life and with these earnings was able to contribute to her college tuition and her family's well-being. By fall 1906, she enrolled at New York University Law School for a Certificate of Law, seeing it as a more practical job option than writing, however she still wrote short scenes for productions at her university. Just a year later, she was hired as a secretary to the editor of Success, Samuel Merwin. Here, her duties began to span more than secretary jurisdiction. She also read manuscripts, rewrote articles, sometimes even collaborated with an author.
In 1909, she went for admission to the New York State Bar Association, but discovered she was too sympathetic in character to work in a court of law. Instead she chose her work at Success and received a promotion to fiction reader. Success had its last publication in December 1911 and Levien's next employment came from The Woman's Journal, a publication interested in the women's suffrage movement. She worked there in 1912 as an assistant editor and business manager. Towards the end of 1912 she sent a short story to Carl Hovey, who was a co-editor at the time, and began work at The Metropolitan.
Having retained a connection with her roots, Sonya helped out at the People's Institute, an organization which helped supply immigrants with the skills they might need to join the workforce in America. She also worked on the National Board of Censorship as an Educational Secretary. However, when World War I commenced, Levien was working in London covering the British Suffragist movement for fourteen months in 1913 and 1914. Here she wrote editorials urging women to demand for more than just suffrage and ask for education, as well as other institutional reforms and better living conditions.