Eva Kotchever, born Chawa Zloczower and also known as Eve Adams, was born in Mława, Poland, on June 27, 1891. She was the author of Lesbian Love and founder of Eve’s Hangout, a lesbian literary salon in Greenwich Village. On June 27, 1926, she was arrested for obscenity and disorderly conduct.  

Kotchever was the oldest of seven children and spoke seven languages. When she was twenty, she moved to the United States and started going by Eve. She began wearing men's clothing and involved herself in the anarchist movement, attending rallies and distributing publications. The Radical Division of the Bureau of Investigation soon began surveilling her.  

For eight months in 1922, Kotchever and her partner Ruth Norlander ran a tearoom in Chicago named The Grey Cottage, which served as a safe haven for the LGBTQ community. In 1925, Kotchever wrote Lesbian Love, a collection of short stories about the lives of lesbian women, under the alias Evelyn Adams. The New Yorker later described Lesbian Love as perhaps the first ethnography of lesbians in America. Only 150 copies were circulated privately.  

In March 1925, Adams opened a lesbian nightclub called Eve’s Hangout in the basement of 129 MacDougal Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Poetry readings, discussions, and live music entertained the club’s bohemian crowd. The club had a controversial reputation. In 1926, an article was published in Variety which accused Kotchever’s club of allowing manly women to prey on girls.  

Margaret Leonard, an undercover detective, visited Eve’s Hangout and met Kotchever. The next day, Kotchever and Leonard went to see a play in Times Square together; that night, Kotchever gave Leonard a copy of Lesbian Love. Leonard claimed that during the taxi ride to Times Square Kotchever made sexual advances towards her. On June 17, 1926, Kotchever was arrested for obscenity and disorderly conduct; the obscenity charge was for the publication of Lesbian Love and the disorderly conduct for Kotchever’s supposed sexual advances towards Leonard. After spending a year and a half in jail, Kotchever was deported to Poland.  

In 1930, Kotchever moved to Paris, where she worked as a street vendor, selling books to tourists. She wrote a collection of stories in prison that The New Review intended to publish, but the journal closed before it could do so.  

In 1943, Kotchever and her partner Hella Olstein Soldner, a Jewish singer, were arrested in Nice. They were deported to Auchwitz on December 17, 1943. Kotchever died in Auchwitz two days later.  

Sources: 

Downs, Jim. “Rediscovering Eve Adams, the Radical Lesbian Activist.” The New Yorker, June 26, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/rediscovering-eve-adams-the-radical-lesbian-activist.  

“Eva Kotchever.” Wikipedia, February 25, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Kotchever. 

“Eve's Hangout.” NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. Accessed April 14, 2023. https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/eve-addams-tearoom/.