Marilyn Monroe was the woman on the screen — hardly even real, so exalted was her public image.
But she was also a person of the book, as some Jews call themselves. The actress converted to Judaism in 1956 when she married the playwright Arthur Miller, who was of Polish-Jewish descent. Now, more than a half-century after Monroe’s death in 1962, her personal prayer book — known as a siddur, derived from the Hebrew for “order” — is going under the hammer in New York. It could be worth thousands.