Preface

My work on Emma Wolf began in 1992, when I was asked to write an entry for Ann Shapiro’s proposed book on Jewish American women writers. Of the two nineteenth-century writers on Shapiro’s list, I chose to write about Emma Wolf rather than Emma Lazarus since I had never heard of Wolf, and I wanted the experience of discovery. Having been trained in a theory-based PhD at SUNY Buffalo, I had no idea what I would be tackling. Naively, I thought it would be an easy enough task: I would simply read what had been written about Wolf and then compose my essay. However, it turned out that only short encyclopedia entries on Wolf and her work existed; all I learned from them was that she had written five novels, she was from San Francisco, and her father’s name was Simon Wolf. That was enough to take me to the Bay Area, where I began to piece together what became a short biobibliographical essay for Shapiro’s book.1

As the years went by, I kept discovering more and more about Wolf, helped especially by two of her relatives, her great-nephew Donald Auslen and her great-niece Barbara Goldman Aaron. I had just missed meeting Barbara’s father, Robert Goldman, who had passed away two years before I contacted the family. Both Robert Goldman and his father, Louis Goldman, Emma’s brother-in-law, held her work in high regard. In an effort to preserve his aunt’s legacy, Robert had, in fact, compiled letters from Israel Zangwill to Wolf, which his daughter generously shared with me.2 Had I been able to speak with Robert, I might have found out even more about Emma than what his daughter knew. My research on Wolf had many such misses. For example, the relevant records at San Francisco’s Temple Emanu-El, the synagogue to which her family belonged, had been destroyed in the great earthquake and fire of 1906. And, recently, the seemingly straightforward task of finding her gravesite almost proved to be a miss as well.

In 2015 I visited the Home of Peace Cemetery in Colma, California, where members of San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El were buried after 1888.3 Before traveling to California, I had written to Carmen Cisneros, the office manager at the cemetery, and she had confirmed that Emma Wolf was buried there. When I arrived at the office that afternoon in March, the rabbi affiliated with the cemetery happened to be present. As I told him a bit about Wolf, her literary career, and her life in San Francisco, he was particularly interested because the cemetery offers guided tours for school groups that point out prominent people who are buried at Home of Peace Cemetery—including, for example, Wyatt Earp, the famous gunfighter who is buried beside his Jewish wife, Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp;4 Levi Strauss, the originator of the blue jean;5 and Adolph Sutro, San Francisco’s first Jewish mayor, who served from 1895 to 1897.6 I was pleased to hear the rabbi say he would include Wolf on the tour list. After our conversation, I set off to find Emma’s plot, armed with a map of the grounds and the set of coordinates I had been sent.

But when I got to Plot G, Section 8, Lot 1, there was no Emma Wolf. Instead, I found monuments to a Wolfe family who were not related to the Wolfs. Dismayed, I returned to the office, and at first Ms. Cisneros was sure that she had given me the correct coordinates. However, she decided to recheck the big, bound book for 1932 under “W.” She opened to the relevant pages and drew her finger across the line from Emma Wolf’s name on the left-hand page to the line with the plot designation on the right-hand page. Sure enough, it read Plot G, Section 8, Lot 1. Puzzled but determined, she tried another strategy. She counted down the lines from the top of the left-hand page to Emma’s name and then from the top of the right-hand page to the same line. It was then that she realized the stitching on the binding had loosened over time, and when she straightened the pages out, the line connecting Emma Wolf’s name to her plot actually was G-3, not G-8. So, I set off again.

As I approached the G-3 area of the graveyard, I was happy to see from a distance a large stone marker with “WOLF” on it. However, when I got closer, it became clear that this was not Emma’s gravesite. Instead, it belonged to her parents: Simon Wolf (1822–78) and Annette (Levy) Wolf (1838–1929). No Emma in sight. Discouraged and preparing to leave, I happened to notice nearby a large, rectangular, raised stone about a foot high from the ground with the name “Goldman” in large letters. I knew that Isabel Wolf, one of Emma’s sisters, had married Louis Goldman, so I decided to stop and look at the Goldman stone. At the top, I saw the names of Louis Goldman (1868–1921), Isabel Goldman (1870–1943), and Georgiana Howard (1911–58). About two feet below these inscriptions, to my surprise, I discovered what I was looking for: Emma Wolf (1864 [sic]–1932). Yet, even here, there was an unsettling oversight from years ago: Emma Wolf was born in 1865, not 1864. Her date of birth had been incorrectly engraved, just as it had been incorrectly noted on her death certificate. Even more striking is that her death certificate lists her “trade, profession or kind of work” as “housewife” although Wolf was a well-regarded, unmarried author when she died.

Just as Wolf’s work had been overlooked for decades, I had almost overlooked her place of rest. Nonetheless, despite near misses and after more than twenty years of research, I was gratified to have found not only her place of rest but more and more about Wolf’s writing life.

Barbara Cantalupo

Notes

1. See Barbara Cantalupo, “Emma Wolf,” in Jewish American Women Writers, ed. Ann Shapiro (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), 465–72. As my continuing research revealed, some assumptions I made in this initial effort proved untrue, such as the belief that Wolf spent her last fifteen years at Dante Sanitarium. For further discussion of my efforts to recover Wolf and her work, see Barbara Cantalupo, “Discovering Emma Wolf—San Francisco Author,” CCAR Journal (Winter 2004): 77–84.

2. See Barbara Cantalupo, “The Letters of Israel Zangwill to Emma Wolf: Transatlantic Mentoring in the 1890s,” Resources for American Literary Study 28 (2002): 121–38.

3. “Shortly after the first Jewish settlers joined in San Francisco’s Gold Rush era, they purchased land for a cemetery on Vallejo Street. In 1860, Congregation Emanu-El dedicated its second cemetery in the area that is now Dolores Park. When San Francisco’s booming growth encouraged relocation outside the city, Congregation Emanu-El dedicated Home of Peace Cemetery in Colma in January 1889.” “Home of Peace Cemetery,” Jewish Cemeteries of San Francisco, https://www.jewishcemeteries-sf.org/contact-us/home-of-peace-cemetery.

4. On Josephine Marcus, see Ann Kirshner, Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marchus Earp (New York: Harper, 2013). According to Harriet Rochlin, Josephine Sarah Marcus was the daughter of German-Jewish immigrants who moved to San Francisco when Josephine was seven. She met Wyatt Earp in Arizona, and they lived together, traveling throughout the various “boom towns” of the West until settling in San Francisco. As Rochlin writes, “Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp died in 1944, and her remains now rest with his. But the collision of Jewish and cowboy cultures that epitomized their union goes on. Wyatt Earp enthusiasts have made the gravesite the most visited in that Jewish cemetery and once even stole the tombstone.” Harriet Rochlin, “Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp, 1861–1944,” in Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/earp-josephine-sarah-marcus.

5. See Lynn Downey, Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016).

6. See Eugenia Kellogg Holmes, Adolph Sutro: A Brief Story of a Brilliant Life (San Francisco: Press of San Francisco Photo-Engraving Co., 1895), which is available at the “Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco,” http://www.sfmuseum.net/sutro/bio.html.