Introduction

Barbara Cantalupo and Lori Harrison-Kahan

My purpose in writing . . . is to give genuine pleasure to my readers. But one must not place heart before art. I try to paint the subject as truthfully as possible in the colors in which I see it myself mentally. Truth-telling should be an author’s religion. It is mine, and because of it I have caused considerable discussion among my own people. But all that I have written has been said in the spirit of love—the love that has the courage to point out a fault in its object.

—Emma Wolf, 1901

Making available an important and influential novel by Emma Wolf (1865–1932), this edition of Heirs of Yesterday (1900) fills a significant gap in American literary studies, Jewish studies, and women’s writing. Although Wolf has received little notice by literary scholars and historians, the Jewish press in her time bestowed attention and praise on the work of this San Francisco writer, who, in 1900 at age 35, was publishing her fourth novel.1 In its front-page review of Heirs of Yesterday, the Jewish Messenger labeled Wolf “one of the rare exceptions to the general rule” in the recent explosion of Jewish fiction. “She is expressly omitted from the category of Jewish novelists who exploit their religion and special class of people and call the result literature,” the reviewer stated.2 During the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, a period of Jewish American literary history dominated by the genre of the New York–centric ghetto tale and by Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European immigrant writers, Wolf’s Heirs of Yesterday offered a very different representation of Jewish life in the United States. Set far from the sweatshops and tenements of the New York ghetto, the novel takes place in the Reform Jewish community of San Francisco’s Pacific Heights. Its central characters, physician Philip May and pianist Jean Willard, are not striving immigrants in the process of learning English and becoming American. Instead, they are cultured, middle-class, native-born Americans who interact socially and professionally with their gentile peers. Overturning readers’ expectations of Jewish American identity and Jewish fiction, as well as complicating well-engrained narratives about US immigration and religious minorities, this edition of Heirs of Yesterday brings a forgotten novel to the attention of twenty-first century readers and scholars. Our introduction expands upon the current scholarship on Wolf, offering biographical background based on new research findings. It also explores key literary, historical, and religious contexts for Heirs of Yesterday, thereby opening avenues for further research on a writer who has been called the “mother of American Jewish fiction.”3

“A Jewish Girlhood in Old San Francisco”: Emma Wolf’s Life and Times

On June 15, 1865, Simon and Annette (Levy) Wolf, Jewish immigrants from Alsace who had settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, welcomed a new daughter. The fourth of eleven children, Emma was to grow up in a family dominated by girls. The Wolfs’ first child was a son, Morris, who was born in 1858 when Annette was twenty years old but died at age four, before Emma was born. Emma joined her older sisters, Florence and Celestine, who were born in 1861 and 1862, respectively. A year after Emma’s birth, in May 1866, another son, Julius, arrived. He was followed by six more girls: Alice in 1869, Isabel in 1870, Mildred in 1873, May in 1875, Estelle in 1876, and Esther in 1879. On September 12, 1878, while Annette was pregnant with Esther, Simon Wolf died unexpectedly on the way home from a routine business trip, leaving his wife to raise ten children on her own. Thirteen-year-old Emma was profoundly affected by the sudden loss of her father; as an adult, she continued to revisit this loss in her fiction (including in Heirs of Yesterday), where the death of a loving paternal figure bears symbolic weight and marks a turn in her protagonists’ fates.

Simon Wolf’s financial success as a businessman meant that the family, with some economizing and despite its size, had the resources to maintain a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. But at a time when most women of their class would not have sought employment, even prior to marriage, their father’s early death impelled Emma and several of her sisters to work, albeit in suitable jobs for women of their social standing. Two of Emma’s sisters, Isabel and May, were employed as schoolteachers, while Alice found work as a private secretary. Like Emma, Alice was also a writer, publishing short stories as well as one novel, A House of Cards, in 1896. Most of the Wolf sisters married out of the wage-earning labor force. Alice, for instance, discontinued her writing career following her marriage to her employer, Colonel William MacDonald, in 1898. Emma, however, remained single, due in part to a congenital physical disability, possibly exacerbated by polio.

Emma’s status as a single woman and her limited mobility freed her from domestic duties and allowed her to devote her time and energy to writing. While remaining involved in the lives of her siblings and their children, Emma continued her lucrative career as a writer until age fifty-one, publishing her last and longest novel, Fulfillment: A California Novel, with New York publisher Henry Holt and Company in 1916. As a review of Fulfillment in the Overland Monthly makes clear, Wolf’s fiction had not faltered in style or content: “In the locale, San Francisco, where she lives in real life, the author has woven a web of interesting temperaments in such a manner that the ensuing developments grips [sic] the reader to the last page. . . . the story is told crisply and with artistic restraint.”4 Given such praise from reviewers for the quality of her late work, it is likely that Wolf’s retirement from writing and public life was driven by ill health. When she died in 1932, her obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle noted that she had spent the last fifteen years of her life “virtually confined to her room.”5

Emma Wolf was born at a moment in US history when the Civil War had just come to an end, ushering in a new order with the abolition of slavery in the Southern states. Like the rest of the nation, which was undergoing industrialization and modernization, the West was experiencing rapid development, and Wolf’s hometown of San Francisco was well on its way to becoming a cosmopolitan city, a destination for migrants from around the world. The seeds of the coming era’s progressive reforms were beginning to have an impact upon women, many of whom were demanding rights of citizenship and seeking alternatives to conventional lives of marriage and domesticity. The end of the nineteenth century would prove an especially fertile period for women writers, with the expanded growth of periodical culture and an ever-increasing audience of middle-class female readers. By the time Emma reached adulthood, American Jewish life was also undergoing radical change, as the Reform movement took hold in cities across the nation and middle-class Jewish women formed communal organizations at the local and national levels. The influx of new immigrants led to a dramatic increase in the country’s Jewish population. Hailing from Eastern European countries such as Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Romania, these new immigrants changed the face of American Jewry, reshaping and supplanting religious and secular forms of Jewishness established by previous immigrants from France and Germany and by Sephardic Jews who dated their lineage in the United States back to the colonial era.

Part of a wave of Jewish immigration from Western and central Europe, Wolf’s parents immigrated to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, fleeing religious prejudice in Alsace-Lorraine, a French territory bordering on Germany. Although the French Revolution had officially “emancipated” Jews in France in the late eighteenth century, promising equality and opportunity for all, “the situation of the Jews in Alsace was by no means comfortable.” As historian Paula Hyman has documented, “Anti-Jewish hostility,” including “anti-Jewish remarks by government officials or in public courtroom proceedings[,] . . . remained a regular feature of Alsatian life into the 1860s.”6 Reports from the Bay Area informed Alsace’s marginalized Jewish population that Jews were an integral part of San Francisco’s cultural and business communities and that economic opportunities would be available upon their arrival in California. Ava Kahn describes Jewish immigration to the West Coast “as part of a chain or family migration [in which] families and friends from the same homelands settled together in the Golden State.”7 For Alsatian Jewish immigrants like the Wolfs, settling with friends and families meant they could live in proximity to other Jews; just as importantly, however, it allowed them to be part of a community in which they could continue to speak French and celebrate their French culture.8

Jews were among the pioneering settlers in the Bay Area during the Gold Rush, and their businesses helped grow and sustain the city of San Francisco. What began as a “population of 462 people ‘living in tents, shanties and adobe huts’ in 1847” became, in three years’ time, a city of 21,000 people.9 Marc Dollinger describes the historical conditions that enabled Jewish integration into the life of the developing city: “The rapid population growth, lack of preexisting Anglo power structure, and trade skills enjoyed by Jewish arrivals combined to create unprecedented Jewish social mobility. . . . San Francisco Jews counted the ‘City by the Bay’ as one of this nation’s most friendly. Jewish residents tended to resist the temptation to live in cloistered Jewish enclaves, enjoying instead the opportunity to live and socialize among the larger non-Jewish community.”10 A firsthand account by Daniel Levy, a friend of the Wolf family and a lay leader at Congregation Emanu-El, confirms Dollinger’s description. In a letter to the editor of the French journal Archives Israélites, dated October 30, 1855, Levy relates: “Among all the areas of the world, California is possibly the one in which the Jews are most widely dispersed. . . . [In San Francisco] the French, for the most part from Alsace or Lorraine, do not actually form a real group and are integrated into the mass of their nearest European neighbors. . . . [Jews] of San Francisco are estimated at more than three thousand. There may be as many as that scattered about in the interior.”11 This number represented about 9 percent of the population at that time, yet despite that small percentage, Jews had a strong influence on the city’s commercial well-being. For example, in 1858 when the much-awaited day that marked the arrival of steamships bringing goods to San Francisco Bay fell on Yom Kippur, the city postponed “Steamer Day” so that “Jews were not forced to choose between commerce and their faith.”12 As San Francisco historians have noted, the “first generation of Jews in the Bay City” were granted such regard because they were “twice as likely as non-Jews to remain in the area permanently . . . [and] were a stabilizing, civilizing influence.”13

In the mid-nineteenth century, Jews began to establish secular and religious roots in the Bay Area, founding philanthropic organizations like the First Hebrew Benevolent Society and the Eureka Benevolent Society and congregations such as Emanu-El and Sherith Israel. As early as 1856, two Jews were nominated for public office in San Francisco and a Jewish judge held a seat on the California Supreme Court.14 Wolf herself described how Bay Area society was relatively free of caste distinctions in a profile of San Francisco that appeared as part of the series “Social Life in American Cities” in The Delineator:

For many years a common hazard and uncertainty of fortune threw down any possible social barriers and prevented the formation of anything suggesting caste. It was in these young days that the seed was sown for that free-and-easy, hail-fellow well-met spirit which characterizes the San Franciscan of to-day. The zest of adventure or the necessity of venture had brought with it a heterogenous agglomeration of all sorts and conditions of men, which accounts for a certain Bohemian tone and mellow worldliness not generally possessed by cities of such recent growth.15

The acceptance that Jews found in San Francisco during Wolf’s lifetime was clearly evident with the election in 1895 of Adolph Sutro, a German American Jew, as mayor. As Edward Zerin explains, “Because Jews were pioneers among pioneers [in the West,] there was little overt anti-Semitism. . . . [T]hey were welcomed into the social life of the community, winning the respect of their fellow citizens.”16

Yet Wolf acknowledged the tentative nature of such social acceptance. In her article in The Delineator, she went on to observe that as “order slowly grew out of chaos . . . society began to evolve with the usual demarcations and distinctions of latter-day living.”17 Heirs of Yesterday similarly reveals how ethno-racial and religious prejudices undergirded the city’s social hierarchy by the late nineteenth century. While Wolf depicts Gilded Age San Francisco as a fairly inclusive environment, she does not shy away from exposing some of the subtler effects of individual and institutional anti-Semitism. In alluding to the differences between Philip May’s experiences in New England and on the West Coast, however, the novel suggests that San Francisco was, comparatively, a haven for members of the minority religion, a place where they could be integrated into the social, economic, political, and cultural life of the city while openly identifying as Jews.

Although New York has now eclipsed all other cities as the locus of Jewish life in the United States, in the nineteenth century, San Francisco was well on its way to becoming the Jewish diaspora’s West Coast counterpart. In her introduction to Jewish Voices from the Gold Rush: A Documentary History, 1849–1880, Ava Kahn details the vibrancy of Jewish life in San Francisco:

San Francisco became the center of Jewish life, as it did of California life. By the 1870s, a distant, drowsy California outpost had become “the City,” a center of Jewish journalism and publication second only to New York City, as well as home to debate and literary societies, clubs, libraries, an orphan home, and a host of fraternal and benevolent organizations. . . . [S]ynagogue leaders in California became more independent than their eastern counterparts and had no inhibitions about speaking up or standing out. At times the community was nonconformist in its practices. Such anomalies as the recitation of the Kaddish, or mourner’s prayer, in tribute to the memory of an admired non-Jew reflected an ability to synthesize Jewish traditions with a new, American way of life. . . . They joined with coreligionists to form the Concordia and other social clubs, to found literary and debating societies, and to establish B’nai B’rith and Kesher Shel Barzel lodges, among other fraternal organizations. In these associations, small merchants could meet independent of the religious and family constraints of the synagogue.18

Kahn’s description affirms a vision of San Francisco not only as a welcoming environment for Jews but also as a place of “nonconformist” innovation where a synthesis between American and Jewish life could be forged, opening the way for new formulations of American Jewishness as a distinct cultural and religious identity. Wolf’s congregation, Emanu-El, founded as an Orthodox synagogue in 1850, soon changed course and “endorsed . . . resolutions” spearheaded by leading Reform rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who initiated the creation of a uniquely American prayer book, Minhag America, at the Cleveland Conference of 1855; Wise’s goal was to unify American Jews, who adhered to different religious customs due to their diverse national backgrounds.19 In his role as leader and teacher at Emanu-El, Daniel Levy “favored sweeping reforms for the Jews of the West [and concluded that] ‘the future belongs to Reform’” Judaism—a vision espoused by the characters of Jean and Daniel Willard in Heirs of Yesterday.20 As Shari Rabin asserts, Jews on the frontier created flexible and adaptive versions of Judaism and Jewishness in which religion became “a mobile assemblage of resources for living.”21

Scholars of California Jewish history have emphasized the symbolic nature of the West Coast in American Jewish life of the period. Moses Rischin characterizes California as a place that “more than any other appeared from the outset to project—as seen from a Jewish perspective—a sense of America at its most promising, open, and refreshing.”22 The city of San Francisco embodied this openness, allowing “Jews of all origins and persuasions . . . to enjoy the freedom to pursue varied opportunities and lead vibrant lives, to assimilate the best of modern America and the modern world, and to satisfy their special needs as Jews.”23 The majestic Emanu-El, which originated as a small congregation of traders and merchants during the Gold Rush of 1849, stood as a visible testament to all that San Francisco represented for the Jewish residents who had claimed the West Coast city as home. “Like no other building in the nation, the region’s cathedral synagogue dramatically came to symbolize the freedom, equality, openness, and fraternity of America and of the West for Jews and others,” Rischin observes of the centrally located temple whose twin domed towers were a visible feature of the city’s skyline.24 Temple Emanu-El projected a vision of San Francisco Jewry as “progressive” and “open-minded,” according to Judith Pinnolis; as early as the 1880s, for instance, the congregation invited a woman vocalist to serve as cantor.25 If Temple Emanu-El signaled the emergence of modern, urban Jewish society in the new West, the building’s destruction in the 1906 earthquake and fire was a shock and temporary setback for the community, although the temple was subsequently rebuilt and remains an important landmark today. Along with Harriet Lane Levy’s memoir 920 O’Farrell Street: A Jewish Girlhood in Old San Francisco (1947), Wolf’s Heirs of Yesterday is the rare creative work that captures the vitality of Jewish life in Gilded Age San Francisco. Published six years before the earthquake, Heirs of Yesterday stands as a lasting monument to a time and place in American Jewish history that are often overlooked.

As members of Emanu-El, the Wolfs were at the center of cosmopolitan Jewish life in Old San Francisco. But when Annette Levy and Simon Wolf first made their separate ways to the Bay Area, San Francisco was still a rough and rowdy Gold Rush town with a small Jewish population. Born in 1838 in Alsace-Lorraine, Annette grew up in San Francisco, arriving in the city at the age of five with her parents, Jonas and Amelie Levy. Simon Wolf, sixteen years Annette’s senior, was also born in Alsace, in 1822, and spent his childhood and early adulthood there before immigrating to the United States. He arrived in New York on January 9, 1851, at the age of twenty-nine, before migrating westward. Several years later, Simon was followed by his sister, Clemence Wolf (1839–1924), who landed in New York before moving to San Francisco to be near her brother. By then, Simon and Annette were married, and Simon arranged for his sister to live with his in-laws. Although the exact story of how Annette and Simon met is not known, Emma’s parents were part of a tight-knit French-Jewish immigrant community where marriages remained endogamous. For the next generation, however, that practice was to change, as evidenced by their daughter Alice’s marriage to the gentile Colonel MacDonald in 1898. Though Emma did not wed, her fiction suggests that she was a careful observer of the courtships and marriages that took place around her. In all of her novels, including Heirs of Yesterday, Wolf makes symbolic use of the marriage plot, with debates over interfaith unions providing the subject matter for her first novel, Other Things Being Equal, in 1892.

In addition to marrying those who shared their faith and background, pioneers like Simon Wolf formed business partnerships with fellow Jews, and these familial and professional worlds often intersected. Simon established a number of general merchandise stores throughout Contra Costa County, working with Jewish partners, including his brother-in-law, Mark Kline (1835–1900), another Alsatian immigrant, who married his sister, Clemence, in 1862. In 1865, the year of Emma’s birth, the brothers-in-law opened a store called Wolf & Kline Merchandise in the mining town of Somersville, now one of many unpopulated ghost towns, remnants of the Gold Rush past. With other businesses in Alamo, Danville, Antioch, Point of Timber, and Brentwood, Simon spent his week traveling from store to store to visit his partners, relying on three modes of transportation (ferry, train, and horse and buggy) and returning to his family in San Francisco on the weekends. In the mid-1860s, he also owned and operated a cigar and tobacco shop in the Russ House in San Francisco, the city’s first three-story grand hotel. By the 1870s he had opened an office for the operation of his Contra Costa stores in San Francisco—an indication that his various business ventures were consistently profitable.26

As part of a Jewish mercantile class that profited from California’s mining boom, the Wolfs lived a comfortable middle-class existence in San Francisco’s fashionable neighborhoods. They employed servants, Irish immigrant women and a Chinese cook, to help care for the large family, including Annette’s parents, who lived with the Wolfs during Emma’s childhood. The deaths of Emma’s maternal grandparents—Amelie passed away when Emma was seven and Jonas when she was eleven—were followed by the unexpected death of her father at age fifty-six. Simon Wolf’s death was also a loss for the larger Bay Area community. “Mr. WOLF during 20 odd years that he was engaged in business in our county, and at times doing a large trade, proved himself an honest, conscientious, upright man and citizen,” read the notice of his death in the Weekly Antioch Ledger. “Always kind and obliging, he had the respect and esteem of an extended circle of friends and acquaintances. To his family he was always kind and affectionate.”27 This description could easily be applied to the Jewish paternal figures in Wolf’s novels, self-made family men like Jules Levice in Other Things Being Equal and Joseph May in Heirs of Yesterday, whose sacrifices and hard work eased the way for their children.

Following her husband’s death, Annette did not remarry and raised her ten children with the help of live-in servants. Although relatively secure due to Simon’s business investments, the family did experience the constraints of a limited income and the fear of economic vulnerability, especially during the panic of 1893 and the subsequent depression. In Wolf’s fiction, monetary concerns emerge even among members of the upper class and upper-middle class, and her bourgeois female characters remain aware of the way their economic circumstances confer a privileged status. After Simon’s death, the Wolf family moved often, partly to accommodate changes in the family’s size and partly due to financial needs. Nonetheless, most of their homes were in what are now known as the Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights, and Laurel Heights neighborhoods of San Francisco—all beautiful locales overlooking the San Francisco Bay. As an adult and a successful author, Emma contributed to the family income and continued to live with her mother and some of her siblings. In 1898, for instance, 2105 Pine Street in Pacific Heights was home to Emma, her mother, three of her unmarried sisters, and her brother, Julius (1866–1923), a businessman who became president of the San Francisco Grain Exchange. In 1901, the family moved to Presidio Heights, today still one of the most prosperous neighborhoods in the city. The Wolf sisters also vacationed at summer resorts, such as the Hotel Ben Lomond in the Santa Cruz mountains, likely the inspiration for some of the natural settings in which Wolf’s characters take temporary reprieve from urban living.28

Emma and her sisters attended the California public schools, completing their education at San Francisco Girls’ High School, which was founded in 1864. In 1882, at the age of seventeen, Emma graduated from Girls’ High School, which meant that her time there coincided with the principalship of John Swett, an educational reformer who has been described as the “Horace Mann of California.”29 As principal of the school from 1876 to 1889, Swett imposed high standards upon the curriculum with the goal of professionalizing teaching for the current instructors and for the female graduates, more than half of whom would end up in charge of their own classrooms. By graduation, the girls would have obtained

the ability to read and spell well; a fair knowledge of English grammar; some knowledge of the meaning and use of words, of etymology and synonyms; a fair knowledge of algebra and geometry; some knowledge of physical and political geography; a general outline of the history of the world; some knowledge of what to read in English literature, and how to read it; the ability to express their thoughts in correct English, gained by actual practice in composition, rather than by study of technical textbooks on rhetoric; an elementary knowledge of physics, botany, and zoology; some knowledge of physiology and of the laws of health; some training in vocal culture and vocal music; [and] a course, for those who desired it, of Latin, French, or German.30

Believing in a strong link between reading and morality, Swett held particular views about how to promote literacy among youth, including limiting homework for high school girls in order to allow them time to read for pleasure. “From ten to sixteen is the golden period for the reading of good books,” he wrote, “and any course of school-work that deprives pupils of time to read by keeping them all the time at the drudgery of text-book lessons is a mental wrong and a physical sin.”31 He also had particular ideas about the kinds of books that would enrich the minds and moral characters of young people. Recommending writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and—especially influential for Wolf—Louisa May Alcott, he advised teachers to “see to it that [their pupils] do not poison themselves with sensational and trashy stories and novels,” such as “the sentimental love-stories devoured by too many girls.”32 Harriet Lane Levy, valedictorian of Emma’s class at Girls’ High School and one of the few graduates to continue her education at the University of California Berkeley, described in her memoir how the girls began the school day by reciting lines of verse they had selected, with poets ranging from Shakespeare to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant. When she became a famous writer, Wolf credited the education she received in the San Francisco public schools. In a 1901 interview in the San Francisco Examiner, for instance, she recalled “a valuable lesson” that she learned in grammar school when a teacher “corrected a tendency to the use of superfluous language in my composition. ‘Emma,’ said she, ‘your balconies are bigger than your houses.’ Ever since,” Wolf concluded, “I have tried to avoid verbiage.”33

Wolf’s education thus lay rich ground for her career as a writer, even as her experiences at Girls’ High School reinforced traditional ideas about gender. Among his sample composition assignments, Swett specified that the prompts “A Fairy Tale” and “How to Make Bread” were for girls and the prompt “Going a-Fishing” was for boys, while sample grammar exercises asked students to identify parts of speech in sentences such as “The boys read well, and the girls sing sweetly.”34 If the school’s educational philosophy reinforced gender divisions, Swett’s experience teaching in the San Francisco public school system, with its large number of Jewish and Catholic students, made him a strong advocate for religious liberty and the separation of church and state. Explicitly defending the rights of his Jewish students, he eliminated the practice of devotional prayers and the use of the Bible in daily reading exercises. Levy’s reminiscences of her high school years confirm that the school’s Jewish students would not have experienced significant ostracism due to religious difference. Instead, as Levy relates, social hierarchies were based on the conflation of class and national origin. Levy, whose parents were Polish immigrants, “pretended to be of German origin in school to avoid being considered lower class.”35 As descendants of French-Alsatian immigrants with Germanic backgrounds, the Wolf sisters would have been secure in their social status, although it is unclear whether and to what extent Emma would have been stigmatized for her physical disability. Her friendships with girls of Eastern European descent, including Levy, indicate that she was admired for her studiousness and that she was immune to the snobbery that infected some of her classmates, instead seeking out like-minded peers who shared her intellectual proclivities.

At Girls’ High School, Emma developed a close friendship with a fellow Jewish student, Rebekah Bettelheim (1864–1951), a Hungarian immigrant who arrived in San Francisco from the East Coast at age ten. The daughter of Aaron Bettelheim, a progressive rabbi who left Hungary in protest over some of his colleagues’ religious fanaticism, Rebekah would go on to marry Rabbi Alexander Kohut and become a leader in the American Jewish community in her own right, publishing two autobiographies that document her life experiences on both coasts. Writing in 1925 of her childhood friend, by then a “brilliant authoress,” Kohut remembered Wolf as a strong student. She “was handicapped from birth by a useless arm, but there was no defect in her mentality,” Kohut wrote admiringly. “Her memory was the most remarkable I have ever encountered. She could quote with equal facility the texts of long poems or the fatality statistics of each of the world’s great battles.” Kohut described Wolf as serious and sensitive, a lover of natural beauty. During botany excursions in the California sandhills, the two girls collected “new specimens of flowers” to mount and display at home, “v[ying] with each other . . . to get . . . the largest and best collections.”36

These walks also provided the girls with opportunities to discuss their shared religious background. Like most thoughtful adolescents, they struggled to define their still-forming identities, openly debating whether it was better to identify as Jewish or to assimilate fully. Their conversations continued to have a profound influence on the two friends, even as they ended up on diverging paths. From her adult standpoint as a distinguished communal leader, having married a widowed rabbi with eight children and devoted herself to the cause of Jewish education, especially for women, Kohut reflected on her conversations with Wolf in her 1925 memoir, My Portion:

But what meant most of all to me, perhaps, in those impressionable days of adolescence, was the exchange of innermost thoughts with my classmate. I had begun to doubt the worthwhileness of all the sacrifices it seemed to me that my father and his family were making for Judaism. What was the use of it all, I questioned. Why make a stand for separate Jewish ideals? Why not choose the easier way and be like all the rest? The struggle was too hard, too bitter. Emma Wolf was undergoing much the same inner conflict. It meant real suffering to both of us. The spiritual growing pains of adolescence are hard to bear. They cannot be laughed out of existence.37

Despite claims from historians that the Golden State removed the restrictions that Jews faced in Europe and on the East Coast, Kohut’s declaration makes clear that prejudice against Jews did exist in California. The effects of anti-Semitism may have been minor compared to those experienced by Jews in other regions; nonetheless, these two young Jewish women struggled with, and were shaped by, their sense of difference. Here, Kohut notes the “sacrifices” her father made for Judaism. Elsewhere in her memoirs, she discusses Rabbi Bettelheim’s efforts to forge alliances across religious lines and befriend clergymen of various faiths. Kohut inherited her father’s “desire for the understanding and amity of those outside the family, the tribe, the religion, the nation,” writing that “my father’s attitude about people outside the creed is also my attitude.”38

Judging by Wolf’s fiction, these conversations with Kohut about religion left a long-lasting impression on her heart and mind as well. In Other Things Being Equal, for example, Wolf’s Jewish heroine, Ruth Levice, learns from her father that friendships between Jews and Christians are natural outgrowths of “fellow-feeling,” echoing the worldview that Kohut inherited from Rabbi Bettelheim. “I’ve always been led to believe that a broad-minded man of whatever sect will recognize and honor the same quality in any other man,” states Ruth, asking, “Why shouldn’t I move on an equality with my Christian friends?”39 The tension between “mak[ing] a stand for separate Jewish ideals” and being “like all the rest” is also at the center of Heirs of Yesterday. While Philip May takes assimilation to the extreme, going so far as to pass as Unitarian, most of the other Jewish characters, including the heroine, Jean Willard, find ways to maintain their Jewishness without significantly jeopardizing their place in mainstream American society. Importantly, it is the institution of Reform Judaism that allows Wolf’s Jewish-identified characters to negotiate a middle ground and, by the novel’s end, to begin bringing Philip back into the fold.

Wolf and her family made similar negotiations. As early members of Temple Emanu-El, they were at the vanguard of significant changes in American Judaism, with a new generation of spiritual and lay leaders pushing to modernize a religion that was associated with stagnant Old World values. In 1885, a group of rabbis, led by Kaufman Kohler and Isaac M. Wise, convened a conference in Pittsburgh, where they adopted a set of principles that became the basis of Reform Judaism until 1937, when the Central Conference of American Rabbis implemented revisions. Known as the Pittsburgh Platform, the 1885 document held that Jews are “no longer a nation, but a religious community”; that “the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domains of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism”; and that “Judaism [is] a progressive religion, ever striving to be in accord with the postulates of reason.” The articles also addressed the outdatedness of “Mosaic and religious laws [that] regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress,” noting that such rigid observance “is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.”40 As one of the earliest American novels to engage with Reform theology and practice, Heirs of Yesterday can be read productively alongside religious documents like the Pittsburgh Platform as well as subsequent literary works depicting America’s Reform Jewish community, such as Sidney Nyburg’s The Chosen People (1917), whose protagonist, Philip Graetz, is a Reform rabbi of a Baltimore congregation.41

In the late nineteenth century, Wolf’s congregation, Emanu-El, became one of the nation’s leading Reform synagogues. Under the leadership of Rabbis Elkan Cohn and Jacob Voorsanger, it initiated looser interpretations of religious law in order “to remake the Jewish liturgy, ritual, and credo to suit the values of the New World.”42 For instance, in an egalitarian attempt to “remed[y]” “the evil” that “excluded women from . . . many privileges to which they are justly entitled,” all congregants were seated together during services, whereas traditionally women were relegated to a separate gallery.43 Emanu-El was one of the first synagogues in the country to prioritize Friday evening services above Saturday morning, thus leaving Saturday open for business or leisure. As Marc Lee Raphael has demonstrated, Voorsanger, who was appointed rabbi of Emanu-El in 1886, one year after the Pittsburgh conference, strongly emphasized the progressive potential of Reform Judaism by drawing links to the American belief in “manifest destiny” and its implied assumption of white superiority. A proponent of assimilation in all matters but religion, Voorsanger was concerned that the influx of newly arrived Eastern co-religionists with their “‘meaningless, Oriental rites’” would “chain Jews to the ghetto,” going so far as to support immigration restrictions to ensure that Jews who were already settled in the United States would not be deemed backward and racially inferior by association. According to Raphael, Voorsanger’s convictions resulted in a “general rejection of all which stood between Judaism and the non-Jewish world” for many Emanu-El members.44 Thus, in accordance with the Pittsburgh Platform, practices that would have interfered in Jews’ ability to socialize and conduct business with their gentile counterparts, such as kosher dietary laws or strict Sabbath observance, were largely abandoned.

While these reforms created a version of Judaism that more closely resembled the practices of their Christian neighbors, many late nineteenth-century Jewish families in San Francisco went a step further, nominally observing holidays like Christmas and Easter to better fit in with the nation’s religious majority. Though these holidays primarily served as yearly occasions to bring family together, rituals like gift giving, Christmas tree decorating, and Easter egg hunts were adopted as part of the festivities, though stripped of their religious significance. In her memoir, The Haas Sisters of Franklin Street, Frances Bransten Rothmann recalls how her German Jewish grandparents “assimilated the customs and rituals of Christian Americans” after immigrating to San Francisco in the nineteenth century.45 At Christmas, the Haas family’s opulent Queen Anne home (today one of the only Victorian mansions in San Francisco that functions as a tourist attraction) was transformed into a “winter wonderland,” complete with a “centerpiece [that] featured a plump suckling pig with a shining red apple protruding from its open snout” and a “ceiling-high tree [that] shone as it revolved slowly on a music stand.”46

The Wolfs appear to have incorporated aspects of Christmas into their practice as well, especially as the family expanded through intermarriage to include gentile spouses and children who were not raised as Jewish. One of the rare mementos of Emma saved by her descendants is a rhyming poem that she composed for a niece as part of a Christmas celebration. In the twenty-four-line poem, “a little girl” laments that her friend does not have a “blue wrapper” like her own. Instead of going to a “plain everyday store” to purchase “a plain everyday wrapper / just like plain everyday people wore,” the girl finds a solution by running “to the phone on tiptoe” and putting in a call to Santa: “‘Hello,’ she said, ‘Santa! That you? / There’s something I want for my Sweetheart: / Just a wrapper, please—warm and blue.’”47 As sweet and simple as it is, the poem betrays a deeper meaning that resonates with Wolf’s symbolic use of the intermarriage plot in Other Things Being Equal: it suggests an ideal of equality (“two little girls in blue”), but, notably, outward sameness is achieved through the accumulation of luxury goods, available not to “plain everyday people” but to those for whom material means can override other obstacles of difference. In Other Things Being Equal, Wolf uses class signifiers—including fashionable clothing, elegant decor, educated speech, and cultured mannerisms—to indicate “that religion is the sole factor differentiating” Jews from their gentile neighbors; the 1892 novel employs “genteel realism” to “create believable upper-middle-class [Jewish] characters and to convince . . . readers that an interfaith union based on the principle of sameness—‘other things’ . . . ‘being equal’—is realistic as well.”48

In explaining the often radical reinvention of religious and familial traditions on the Western frontier, historian Ava Kahn notes that San Francisco Jews were “able to participate more effectively in the development of [the city’s] Jewish communities” because they did not have “to accommodate themselves to a preexisting Jewish social and religious structure” as Jewish immigrants did in the East. As Kahn writes, “In the Pacific West, all was their own creation.”49 This proved especially true for the elite group of entrepreneurs who had built wholesale empires and whose children became the scions of Jewish high society in the Gilded Age. In addition to witnessing the formation of Jewish religious institutions like synagogues, nineteenth-century San Francisco saw the creation of Jewish secular institutions, including social clubs modeled on the gentile club system. Emma’s brother, Julius, for instance, was a member of the all-male Concordia Club, which was founded in 1864 by denim manufacturer Levi Strauss and other German American Jewish merchants.50 To maintain the clubs’ exclusive status, initiates were nominated and voted on by existing members.

In Heirs of Yesterday, Philip May rejects his father’s suggestion that he try to get into a Jewish club like the Concordia or the Verein, another fraternal club, which originated as a paramilitary group to safeguard the German Jewish community in the aftermath of the Gold Rush. Instead, Philip believes that a Christian club “will prove more congenial than would a club composed entirely of Jews, from whom I have become estranged both socially and sympathetically” (101).51 That Philip ends up blackballed from the Christian club by an anti-Semitic member proves that economic and professional status still could not trump prejudice, serving as an important reminder that Jews created their institutions not only out of a sense of ethno-religious camaraderie and separatism but also because of gentile society’s exclusionary practices. Interestingly, Wolf not only reflects on how anti-Semitism restricts participation in the city’s social life but also shows that blackballing can occur within the ranks; in a turning point of the novel, Philip is rejected from his father’s club as well. By including both instances of rejection, Wolf demonstrates her unwillingness to settle for an easy critique. Whether she is writing about religious exclusivity or changing gender roles, she maintains a nuanced ideological stance and examines sociopolitical issues from multiple angles.

With the formation of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) in 1893, the late nineteenth century also became an especially active period for Jewish women’s organizations around the nation, and San Francisco was no exception. As a member of the Philomath Club, the Bay Area’s first secular organization exclusively for Jewish women, Wolf was part of an emergent San Francisco literary scene that coincided with the rise of the women’s club movement in the 1890s. Founded by Bettie Lowenberg, a prominent member of Temple Emanu-El, the Philomath Club drew upon the synagogue’s sisterhood for its membership, gathering together intellectually minded, affluent women who were interested in “literary and educational pursuits and [the promotion of] civic ideals.”52 Lowenberg was a socialite and philanthropist who later became a published author—her first novel, The Irresistible Current (1908), like Wolf’s Other Things Being Equal, took on the subject of Christian-Jewish intermarriage—and under her leadership, the Philomath Club had a strong literary bent. True to its name, the club’s primary mission was study and learning. But through members’ specific choices of “literary and educational pursuits,” coupled with a collaborative enactment of upper-class mores, the club accomplished a secondary mission: it made Jewish women an integral and visible part of San Francisco’s secular, bourgeois culture.

Despite the shared ethno-religious background of their club’s membership, the Philomath women rarely addressed Jewish texts and topics. Instead, they undertook a course of study that “foster[ed] the neo-colonialism of Anglo-Saxonism,” in Anne Ruggles Gere’s words.53 English literature was a frequent topic in the Philomath’s early years, with lectures on writers such as Tennyson and Carlyle. In addition, the women studied topics such as the German legend of Faust, American history, and transcendental philosophy. In the refined comfort of the club’s meeting space at the luxurious Palace Hotel, Wolf was thus able to extend her high school education, engaging in discussion with Jewish women of various ages, attending lectures by professors from nearby Stanford University, and delivering papers herself. Both Wolf and her former classmate Harriet Lane Levy were listed on the program for the Philomath’s first open meeting on January 14, 1895, which featured musical and oratorical performances by club members. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported of the event, “There was a large and distinguished audience present. . . . Miss Emma Wolf’s essay, ‘The Passing of the Ideal,’ a protest against the masculine woman, Miss Harriet Levy’s satire and Miss Florence Prag’s paper showing that intellect is always appreciated by great minds, irrespective of nationality or religion, were all heartily applauded.”54

Like women’s clubs around the nation, the Philomath fostered an environment in which women flourished, creating opportunities for members to display their artistic and intellectual talents. While some outside commentators at the time viewed women’s clubs as covers for suffrage activism, historians have shown that the club movement was largely a conservative force, especially among upper-class and upper middle-class women. Wolf’s presentation, which voiced fears about the “passing” of feminine ideals, demonstrates that the club was devoted to the maintenance of women’s domestic sphere and the cult of true womanhood. In deference to Lowenberg’s beliefs that direct participation in government would corrupt women, the Philomath Club took an anti-suffrage stance, avoiding the topic of the woman’s vote at club meetings.55

Still, by participating in the city’s cultural and intellectual life in a public setting, the Philomath women were contributing to a shift in gender norms. Karen Blair has argued that club activities can be understood in terms of “domestic feminism”—the notion that the woman’s sphere of the home could be extended further to have a positive moral influence on public affairs.56 The Philomath Club supported and nurtured its members’ efforts to enter public life, as suggested by the paths of the three women whose presentations at the first open meeting were singled out by the Chronicle. Florence Prag (1866–1948), who was one year behind Wolf and Levy at Girls’ High School and whose mother was a beloved teacher at the school, would go on to break gender and religious barriers in national politics, making history as the first Jewish congresswoman when she replaced her deceased husband, Julius Kahn, as one of California’s representatives to the House of Representatives in 1925. (By then, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, even the club’s staunchest anti-suffragists had conceded the value of women taking more active roles in public affairs.)

Though Prag’s fame would come later, by the time of the 1895 meeting, Wolf and Levy were already rising literary stars. Having earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at the University of California Berkeley, Levy wrote regularly for The Wave, where her short stories, society pieces, and dramatic criticism made her one of the San Francisco journal’s most promising young writers.57 Wolf, too, had published in The Wave. One of her earliest short stories, “Brissac’s Little Debt,” appeared in the journal in February 1892. In the same year, Wolf published her first novel, Other Things Being Equal, with A. C. McClurg to critical acclaim. Due in part to its controversial intermarriage plot, the book became a popular success. It continued to be read and discussed, including by other women’s clubs, well into the twentieth century and was published in a revised edition in 1916. As evidence of Wolf’s national reputation, the American Jewess, the journal founded by editor Rosa Sonneschein to serve as an unofficial promotional organ for the NCJW, profiled her in 1895, noting that Other Things Being Equal “had already reached the third edition and is read by Jews and gentiles with equal interest.”58

It is no accident that Wolf’s most prolific period as a writer occurred in tandem with the golden age of the women’s club movement and during a formative period for women’s rights in the United States. Against the backdrop of shifting gender ideologies, Wolf published five novels between 1892 and 1916, as well as short stories and poems in magazines such as the American Jewess, the Smart Set, and Century. The terms of gender, class, and religion that Wolf negotiated in her own life also played out in the pages of her fiction. These negotiations are further evident in the permutations of her literary career; expanding her oeuvre to include works absent of Jewish characters and themes, Wolf explored a writerly persona unconstrained by ethno-racial difference. But if Wolf’s representation of middle-class Jewish life on the Western frontier in her first book, Other Things Being Equal, made her one of the earliest Jewish women novelists in the United States, her fourth novel, Heirs of Yesterday—with its nuanced treatment of religious, cultural, and familial identity—solidified her status as one of the mothers of American Jewish fiction and positioned her as a pioneering figure in women’s writing and American literary history.

A “Mother of American Jewish Fiction”: Emma Wolf’s Writing

In an article that appeared in the San Francisco News in the “Who’s Who in San Francisco” column in 1930, two years before her death, Wolf recalled having her first short story published when she was twelve years old. “There was no joy in the experience. I cried bitterly over the affair,” Wolf told reporter Helen Piper, explaining that the piece of juvenilia was not published under her own free will. Instead, “a daring cousin,” thinking “the tale a work of art” and “prompted by the noble purpose of presenting [her] to the literary world[,] . . . stole the manuscript and gave it to the village paper.” The story’s publication proved a source of humiliation for Wolf. “Too ashamed to face anyone,” she “imagined that all the townsfolk were laughing at” her “little love story.”59 The anecdote may not seem like the auspicious beginnings for a literary career, but years later Wolf made an even more dramatic—and this time voluntary—literary debut. In 1892, she published her first novel, Other Things Being Equal, with A. C. McClurg, as well as the short story “Brissac’s Little Debt” in The Wave.

Together, these two publications establish cultural identity as a central theme for Wolf and indicate that her material was often based on astute observations of real people, places, and events. While Other Things Being Equal tells the story of Ruth Levice, the daughter of middle-class Jewish immigrants from France now living in San Francisco, Wolf drew primarily upon her French heritage for “Brissac’s Little Debt.” Demonstrating her connections to her birthland in the American West and to her parents’ homeland of Alsace-Lorraine, the frame narrative of the story is set at the Cercle Français, a private men’s club for French merchants founded in San Francisco in the 1880s and to which Wolf’s brother, Julius, belonged. Arriving late to a reception at the club after a tiring journey, the story’s main character, Josef Brissac, interrupts his friends at a game of cards to tell them of a “little adventure” that “began about twenty years ago and ended last week.” Brissac begins his tale by recalling a traumatic event that occurred in France when he was seventeen years old: his witnessing of the sexual assault and violent death of his mother at the hands of German soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War. He explains to the men that, just the week before, while “riding alone across the plain” in Arizona, he finally had the opportunity to avenge his mother’s murder when he came upon a wounded German in the “scorching” desert. Instead of offering the parched man a drink from his full canteen, Brissac “laughed gayly” and “slowly, very slowly . . . poured the water, drop by drop, upon the blistering sand.” The story’s ending returns to the frame narrative, where Brissac elicits his friends’ responses to his actions, “curious to have [their] verdict of the means [he] took of discharging” the “debt.” The group of friends—which includes a fierce French patriot named Little Chalmont, who had also seen the horrors of war up close—does not respond with words. Instead, Wolf writes, “There came a sound not often heard in the gathering of men,” and she concludes the story with this line: “Little Chalmont was crying.”60

In this provocative treatment of masculinity that captures the deep and lingering emotional effects of war, the brutal death of Brissac’s mother stands in for the men’s loss of and distance from their motherland—a loss that they continue to mourn, even as immigrants in a new land. In this respect, “Brissac’s Little Debt” shares with Wolf’s Jewish-themed novels, Other Things Being Equal and Heirs of Yesterday, an interest in exploring the relationship between familial ties and cultural heritage. But, in other ways, the 1892 short story is atypical for Wolf. “Brissac’s Little Debt” is her rare work of prose without female characters at the center.

Wolf’s five novels and most of her short stories are works of domestic fiction, focusing on young, white, middle-class women whose lives are typically moving in the direction of marriage. Wolf’s reference to her youthful publication as a “little love story” indicates her long-standing inclination toward plots that center around courtship and marriage. As literary critics such as Nina Baym have shown, most nineteenth-century American fiction written by women and for female audiences relied on domestic plots. A novel that ends happily with a Jewish-Christian couple overcoming their religious differences in order to marry, Other Things Being Equal might be labeled a “love story,” though it could hardly be described with the diminutive “little.” Rather, Other Things Being Equal uses its intermarriage plot to tackle big questions about class and gender, faith and secularism, modernity and assimilation, religious pluralism and bigotry, charity and familial obligations—not to mention its more straightforward but equally weighty probing of why people from different backgrounds fall in love and what makes for a successful union.61

If Wolf experienced embarrassment about the publication of her first story, she appears to have grown a thicker skin by the time her first novel was published. Certainly, it would be difficult to imagine anyone laughing at Other Things Being Equal. This accomplished debut, which reads as a work by a mature writer, garnered almost universal praise for its style.62 However, in her willingness to challenge cultural and religious norms through a favorable portrayal of intermarriage, Wolf risked a different kind of negative response. Not surprisingly, her work was a frequent target of criticism within the Jewish community, and the novel continued to be a source of controversy and debate more than a decade after its initial publication. A 1904 article in the Los Angeles Herald, for instance, reported that Rabbi Sigmund Hecht of Congregation B’nai B’rith in Los Angeles opened a talk on intermarriage and apostasy by discussing the “mild sensation” caused by Wolf’s novel. Counterintuitively trying to downplay the impact of Wolf’s novel with the word “mild” and the false claim that her book was now gathering dust “upon the topmost shelves” of libraries (a claim that his own invocation of the text as a means of connecting to his audience immediately belies), Hecht summarized the controversy: “There were those among the readers of her book who roundly denounced the spirit in which it was conceived and written and declared that the author had broken with her ancestral religion and was trying to undermine the faith of her co-religionists,” while “others . . . hailed the sentiments expressed in that book as the powerful manifestation of the progressive spirit of Judaism.”63 Despite the controversy, Wolf did not appear to experience shame about her religious beliefs or regret about her positive representation of intermarriage. When Other Things Being Equal was republished in a slightly revised edition in 1916, she doubled down on the importance of her theme, writing in a new foreword: “In presenting this revised edition to a new generation, the author feels that the element of change has touched very lightly the romantic potentialities obtaining at the time of the original writing. . . . Christian youth still chances upon Jewish youth, and with the same difference of historic background, the same social barriers and prejudices—the same possibilities of mutual attraction. The humanest love knows no sect. . . . It is the story of that beauty, which the author, in this revised edition, for a new generation, has not cared to revise.”64

The existence of the revised edition of Other Things Being Equal further disproves Rabbi Hecht’s assertion that the novel had “seen its day.” If this had been the case, Wolf’s publisher, A. C. McClurg, would not have continued publishing editions of the novel. Yet Hecht’s critique of Wolf is worth serious consideration. It speaks to the ways that the male-dominated American Jewish establishment subtly suppressed the influence of a Jewish woman writer whose progressive ideas, and means of conveying them, were likely to reach a broad audience and have popular appeal.

Even when she was not writing about intermarriage, Wolf’s adherence to a “progressive spirit of Judaism” would continue to dog her throughout her career. The larger questions of how to define Jewishness and whether to maintain orthodoxy or modernize religious practice would shape the works she wrote and determine the stories she chose not to tell. These questions would also dictate which of her writings were published and by whom—and, in turn, who her readers were. The story of how Wolf came to write and publish Heirs of Yesterday—her only extant work with explicitly Jewish content besides Other Things Being Equal—is also a story about the cultural institution of publishing and the gatekeeping role played by the Jewish publishing industry in shaping mainstream representations of Jewishness. The novel’s publication history and reception—from initial responses to its decades of obscurity and up to its recovery today—have much to tell us about which, and whose, versions of Jewish identity hold the greatest weight. In contrast to works by writers like Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska, which have dominated university syllabi and scholarship over the past fifty years, Heirs of Yesterday has remained out of print in part because of the way it challenges conventional understandings of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish identity, ethnicity, and Jewish American fiction. As a novel set in San Francisco that grapples with secularism, Reform theology, and genteel anti-Semitism, Heirs of Yesterday moves us beyond fairly narrow and geographically confined notions of American Jewish identity.

In the years after publishing Other Things Being Equal, Wolf continued to dedicate herself to fiction writing. Previous research has suggested that Wolf turned away from Jewish themes with novels like A Prodigal in Love (1894) and The Joy of Life (1896), both of which revolve around characters who are siblings. Inspired by Wolf’s own large, female-dominated household, as well as by classic works about sisterly relations like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the family in A Prodigal in Love consists of six girls, while The Joy of Life uses two brothers—and the women who enter their lives—to, in Wolf’s own words, “contrast the materialist with the idealist.”65 Even the short story that Wolf published in the American Jewess, “One-Eye, Two-Eye, Three-Eye” (1896), is absent of Jewish themes, with Wolf again using the contrasting experiences of three sisters to offer a critique of marriage. On the surface, then, the body of work that Wolf published in the 1890s suggests that she left behind the themes of cultural and religious heritage to center on class, gender, and family dynamics. But new research informs us that there is more to the story.

During the period of the 1890s that saw the rising popularity of the ghetto tale, heralded by the Jewish Publication Society’s (JPS) release of British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto in 1892, Wolf was actively writing Jewish fiction. The records of the JPS, now housed at Temple University, reveal that they rejected three works by Wolf between 1894 and 1900: a lost manuscript titled A Dreamer of Dreams; a children’s story, “Little Jaffa,” which she submitted for a literary contest; and a manuscript that became the novel Heirs of Yesterday. It is not that Wolf took a hiatus from Jewish content; rather, it appears that she was having more difficulty getting her Jewish-themed material into print. When Heirs of Yesterday finally appeared in 1900, it was published by A. C. McClurg, the Chicago-based firm that had previously taken a chance on Wolf with Other Things Being Equal and subsequently published The Joy of Life.66

The idea to publish her work with the JPS, the nation’s first Jewish publisher, did not originate with Wolf herself. In 1893, the society, in search of “native talent” and aware of the popularity of Other Things Being Equal, contacted Wolf to inquire whether she had a manuscript for their consideration.67 She did. Wolf was working on A Dreamer of Dreams, a novel whose title, taken from a line in Deuteronomy, signaled a theme of spiritual struggle: “If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, ‘Let us go after other gods,’ which you have not known, ‘and let us serve them,’ you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams.”68

With the original manuscript now lost, the little we know about A Dreamer of Dreams comes from JPS records, including letters Wolf exchanged with JPS chairman Judge Mayer Sulzberger and the minutes from meetings in which the publication committee discussed and evaluated her manuscript. Based on Wolf’s correspondence, her interactions with the JPS’s leadership appear at times fraught, and her ability to work with them was perhaps doomed from the outset. A letter from Wolf to Sulzberger dated May 8, 1893, though respectful, contains hints of her frustration. “As my two last letters to you have received no response, I am in a somewhat unsettled frame of mind in regard to the work upon which we have been corresponding,” she begins, explaining that she was waiting for Sulzberger to confirm that he wanted the book by October in order to “apply myself as I must” to meet the deadline. If the letter begins with a complaint, going so far as to evoke Sulzberger’s guilt for failing to respond in a timely manner, it concludes with a politely worded demand: “Now, would it be too pressing to ask you to answer this question by return mail in some manner? At any rate it is asked and I trust you will be as kind as heretofore and set me right.”69 Even if lightened at the end by a mild compliment (i.e., noting Sulzberger’s previous kindness), the letter reveals an impatient and assertive side to Wolf’s personality. Although others who knew Wolf have portrayed her as retiring, gentle, and even “saintly,” she was not simply a passive and compliant woman.70 Her tone in this letter helps contextualize choices she made throughout her career. These are the words of a dedicated and ambitious writer who was willing to stand by her convictions and ruffle feathers rather than readily comply with the literary establishment’s expectations for her.

Subsequent letters from Wolf show that she did finally receive the requested response from Sulzberger, and on November 14, 1893, Wolf mailed the JPS a copy of her manuscript. “I herewith submit for your kind consideration, the MS. entitled ‘A Dreamer of Dreams,’ sincerely trusting it will meet your requirements and approval,” Wolf wrote to Sulzberger. “Should you find any objections upon points which you think I could remedy, I trust you will not hesitate to mention them.”71 Though more deferential in tone than her previous correspondence, this confidently worded letter indicates that Wolf viewed Sulzberger as a professional equal; in requesting his feedback and expressing her willingness to revise the manuscript, she also shows that she saw book publishing as a cooperative venture between writer and publisher. From Wolf’s reference to “objections upon points,” we may further infer that she anticipated pushback. Given the response to Other Things Being Equal, Wolf was well aware that her own religious principles would meet with opposition from others in the Jewish community, especially from an institution like the JPS, which toed the line between orthodoxy and reform to maximize its audience in the interest of revitalizing Jewish American culture.

The JPS’s deliberations on her manuscript confirm its desire to steer clear of overly controversial material, as the “objections” were entirely focused on content rather than style or aesthetic value. Soon after receiving Wolf’s manuscript on November 24, 1893, the society sent it out to a series of readers: Dr. Marcus Jastrow on November 27; Rev. Dr. Joseph Krauskopf on December 11; Mr. Simon A. Stern on January 8; Mr. A. L. Isaacs on January 15; and finally, on February 7, Dr. Cyrus Adler, a leading Jewish scholar and editor who was one of the founders of the press as well as of the American Jewish Historical Society.72 On February 28, 1894, the publication committee met to discuss Wolf’s novel among other agenda items. The minutes reveal that they were unable to arrive at a decision due in part to “slim attendance” at the meeting. According to the minutes, Isaacs’s “favorable report” met with strong opposition from Adler: “Dr. Adler agreed with Dr. Isaacs in thinking the story good from a story-teller’s point of view, but considered some of the characters immoral, and the Rabbi hero impossible. In his opinion, the fact that whenever a traditional Jewish custom is discussed in the book, the Rabbi declares himself conscientiously unable to observe it, ought to suffice to prevent the publishing of the book by the Society.” Isaacs, in turn, “thought that the Society would be missing a fine opportunity to make itself popular . . . and that the Committee ought to avoid judging” Wolf’s manuscript “from any but the literary point of view.”73

The minutes offer only a tantalizing glimpse of Wolf’s lost manuscript. Like Heirs of Yesterday, the book appears to deal with the modernization of American Judaism. But unlike Wolf’s other fiction, in which none of her Jewish characters are clergymen, Dreamer apparently featured a rabbi as its main character. From the sound of it, Wolf was using fiction—one of the few public forums available to women in the nineteenth century—as a means of grappling with the important theological questions of the day. That her “rabbi hero” chooses to forego traditional observance implies that the book was written in a “progressive spirit” and was sympathetic to Reform Judaism, with its initiative to modernize Jewish religious practice as an “alternative to assimilation.”74 Although the brief summary of the meeting offers no details about the style of Dreamer, its high literary quality was undisputed. The writing was likely artful and accessible, drawing upon the principles of realism as her other novels did. In Isaacs’s opinion, the work would attract a popular audience, perhaps even because of its controversial subject matter; the popularity of a work of fiction by a homegrown American author would be a real boon to the JPS, whose reputation at that point rested largely on historical texts, with the exception of Zangwill’s book about Jewish life in the London slums, Children of the Ghetto.

If the minutes are too spare to shed substantive light on Wolf’s manuscript, they do succinctly capture the competing demands on the JPS and the factors that went into the production of Jewish American fiction at the turn of the twentieth century. Even as the society was committed to publishing works of high quality, artistic value was not the dominant criteria for all of its board members. Many believed the publications should serve political and didactic functions. Given its mission of unifying the Jewish people through shared culture, the press feared alienating readers. Adler’s concerns about immorality and the “impossible” rabbi character stem from the press’s commitment to “Jewish pluralism and doctrinal neutrality.”75 Most, but not all, of the publication committee may have taken issue with Wolf because they opposed radical Reform Judaism, but their objections were born less from personal ideologies and more from pragmatism. On the one hand, for Isaacs, the controversial nature of the work that bothered Adler would boost the book’s popularity. On the other hand, Adler felt that the work would prove too divisive; like Other Things Being Equal, it would highlight ruptures within the Jewish community.

Although the committee adjourned the initial meeting, deferring the decision about Wolf’s manuscript so that more members could be present for the discussion, Adler’s argument was ultimately to win out. On March 28, 1894, a special meeting was convened at the JPS office in Philadelphia with two objectives: to arrive at a final decision about whether to publish Wolf’s novel and to consider the report of the Bible translation committee. The minutes of the meeting, again, reveal a mixed response to A Dreamer of Dreams. On one side, Jastrow and Stern advised against publication. On the other, Isaacs was joined in his support for publication by Reform rabbi Joseph Krauskopf. Krauskopf’s support for Wolf’s novel is not surprising; as leader of the Philadelphia synagogue Keneseth Israel and champion of Reform innovator Isaac Mayer Wise, Krauskopf had openly expressed his concern that the JPS held an anti-Reform bias.76 It was Adler who broke the tie, “mov[ing] that it is not expedient to publish the novel ‘Dreamer of Dreams.’”77 Since the JPS was a subscription service, with all members automatically receiving copies of the society’s published works, Adler was not simply motivated by marketability in making his tie-breaking decision. Unlike Isaacs, who insisted that the JPS would benefit from Wolf’s popularity even if readers did not need to be enticed to purchase the book, Adler feared that the novel would tarnish the JPS’s reputation. While the brief minutes intimate that some members of the committee may have been offended by Wolf’s novel, Adler’s use of the word “expedient” presents us with an incontrovertible fact: despite the quality of Wolf’s writing and her skill as a popular storyteller, a significant portion of the JPS’s readers would have found the novel’s liberal stance offensive and held the society, not just the author, accountable.

However Wolf responded to the news, the JPS’s rejection of A Dreamer of Dreams did not affect her productivity or dampen her aspirations to further her career as a writer. Her second published novel, A Prodigal in Love, appeared in 1894 with New York publisher Harper & Bros. Especially productive throughout the 1890s, the decade that saw the publication of four of her five novels, Wolf attributed her success to hard work and determination. “Inspiration,” she explained, “was an illusion that I once believed in, in common with most younger beginners. Perspiration has much more to do with it.”78 Nor did the JPS’s rejection deter Wolf from trying to publish with them again. Fewer than three years after they passed on A Dreamer of Dreams, Wolf entered her story “Little Jaffa” in a literary contest sponsored by the JPS. In an effort to reach the youngest generation of American Jews, the JPS promised a prize of one thousand dollars, a large sum for 1896, to the writer who submitted the best children’s story.79 In this case, we have even less information about the content of Wolf’s manuscript and the prize committee’s deliberations, but it is clear that the debate was contentious and that some of the contention was sparked by Wolf’s writing.

Among the twenty-seven manuscripts received by the JPS, Wolf’s story was preferred by one vote to the other top-rated story, Louis Pendleton’s Lost Prince Almon. Wolf again had won the support of Rabbi Krauskopf, as well as Simon Stern, a Reform lay leader who had opposed publication of A Dreamer of Dreams. According to Jonathan Sarna, when the committee reached an impasse in its deliberations, they decided to follow “the Solomonic suggestion” of one of the members that it was best not to award a prize if they could not arrive at a consensus.80 The contestants were subsequently notified of the JPS’s decision to refrain from selecting a winner. Wolf never knew that her story was one of two considered the best of the twenty-seven submissions, nor did she know that the vote was so close. She received the same form letter as all of the contestants, informing her that the committee decided not to award a prize because “no story of Jewish interest suited to young readers and satisfactory to the Judges” was “offered.” The letter complimented the “competitors on the ability and taste displayed in many of the stories submitted” and “expresse[d] the hope that works from their pens may someday be added to the Society’s list”—words that may have given Wolf partial encouragement to submit one more manuscript, Heirs of Yesterday, to the JPS soon after.81

The content of “Little Jaffa” remains a mystery, and events that transpired after the contest at once heighten the mystery and offer potential clues about Wolf’s lost work. Eager to bring out quality children’s literature, the JPS decided to publish two of the works submitted for the contest. One was Sara Miller’s Under the Eagle’s Wing (1899), a piece of historical fiction-cum-adventure story about a teenage boy who becomes a disciple to Moses Maimonides in Egypt during the Middle Ages. The other, Louis Pendleton’s Lost Prince Almon (1898), turned out to be the story that deadlocked the committee, rivaling Wolf’s “Little Jaffa” as a top contender for the literary prize. What makes the decision to publish Lost Prince Almon and not Wolf’s story especially curious is its author background. Despite the JPS’s mission to publish and promote Jewish writers, Pendleton was not Jewish. He was a Southerner whose previous works for children included a Civil War adventure, In the Okefenokee: A Story of War Time and the Great Georgia Swamp (1895), and a story of postbellum race relations, The Sons of Ham: A Tale of the New South (1896). Marketed by the JPS as an illustrated gift book for Jewish children, Lost Prince Almon follows the adventures of a young Prince Jehoash, later to become king of Judah, and was drawn from the Old Testament. Combining religious and historical content with the exotic veneer of Orientalism, Miller’s and Pendleton’s stories share the didacticism common to nineteenth-century children’s literature. Based on the JPS’s decision not to publish “Little Jaffa,” despite the fact that more than half of the members of the prize committee saw value in it, we can assume that the text defied expectations for religious children’s literature of the time. Given the committee’s responses to this and other works by Wolf, it is exceedingly unlikely that the decision reflected on her capabilities as a writer.

Thus, a published work of Jewish children’s literature from Emma Wolf was never to be. Interestingly, however, her story “One-Eye, Two-Eye, Three-Eye,” which appeared in the American Jewess in 1896, engages with the tradition of didactic children’s literature, especially its effect on girls; the story takes its title from a Grimm brothers’ fairy tale to offer a critique of gender relations and the institution of marriage. The year 1896 was to prove an important one for Wolf. In addition to seeing this story and her poem “Eschscholtzia (California Poppy)” printed in the American Jewess, she published The Joy of Life with A. C. McClurg and began a correspondence with Zangwill, the JPS’s star author of Jewish fiction, which would last for four years and have a strong influence on both their careers.82

Wolf initiated the correspondence with Zangwill when she sent him a copy of The Joy of Life. The act of reaching out to “a fellow Jewish writer, the best-known in the Anglo-Jewish world,” indicates that Wolf “saw herself and her writing as part of a Jewish literary tradition.”83 Zangwill became an important supporter of Wolf’s writing, praising it in his letters and in published reviews. In his review of The Joy of Life, for example, he wrote that her work “stands out luminous and arrestive amid the thousand-and-one tales of our over-productive generation.”84 Privately, he called her “the most promising Jewish writer of the younger generation” and “the best product of American Judaism since Emma Lazarus.”85 Although only Zangwill’s letters to Wolf survive, it is likely that she shared with him her aspiration to continue publishing Jewish fiction, if seemingly without mentioning the fact that the JPS had rejected her work. In a February 1897 letter to Wolf, Zangwill encouraged her to write “the Jewish story which is stirring in your subconscious” and to submit it to the JPS; he later stated that he “had been in correspondence with Judge Sulzberger of Philadelphia about you.”86 Zangwill believed that his recommendation would hold sway with the publication committee based on their regard for him and the popularity of Children of the Ghetto, a work that the JPS had commissioned him to write. Zangwill’s endorsement of the JPS as a suitable publisher for Wolf’s writing was not unequivocal. As Edna Nahshon explains, Zangwill had questioned the JPS’s position when they offered him a contract to write the work that became Children of the Ghetto, “fear[ing] that by taking the commission he could be subject to pressure that might compromise his artistic freedom.” Zangwill’s hesitation, it turns out, was justified, as his “correspondence with Sulzberger reveals that the Americans were pressing for validation of their ideals and sensibilities.”87 In his letter to Wolf advising her to send a “Jewish story” to the JPS, he allowed that the publisher’s imprimatur might “cramp” her and urged her not to compromise her principles. “You must say exactly what you think about Jews & Judaism,” he wrote.88

Wolf ended up taking Zangwill’s advice, despite his cautionary note. In 1897, she submitted Heirs of Yesterday to the JPS. Zangwill’s influence, however, was to prove slight. The JPS publication committee rejected Wolf’s work for the third time. The minutes read, “Messrs. Stern, Adler, and Berkowitz reported concerning ‘The Heirs of Yesterday,’ by Miss Emma Wolf, that it was an admirable piece of work from a literary point of view. But Drs. Adler and Berkowitz thought it inadvisable for the Society to publish the novel as submitted on account of the treatment of its subject. Discussion showed that in view of the division existing in the Committee, the publication of Miss Wolf’s novel was impracticable.”89 Once again, the committee praised Wolf’s artistry while questioning whether the content of her novel fulfilled the JPS’s mission. Adler was this time joined in his opposition by Henry Berkowitz, a Philadelphia Reform rabbi who had replaced Krauskopf after he resigned from the society due to theological disagreements. Though the committee now used the descriptors “inadvisable” and “impracticable” rather than “not expedient,” the reasons are similar to those behind the rejection of A Dreamer of Dreams. The division within the publication committee that led to the decision not to publish Heirs of Yesterday reflected larger schisms in the Jewish community. The JPS was apprehensive that Wolf’s subject matter would stoke that divisiveness rather than bring American Jews together through common culture and tradition.

Despite the vagueness of the JPS records, the published text of Heirs of Yesterday, in conjunction with Sarna’s overview of the “fiction debate” in his history of the JPS, illuminates the ways in which Wolf’s writing troubled expectations for Jewish American literature. In addition to debating whether “standards for selection be primarily artistic or didactic,” JPS publication committee members asked questions such as, “Should authors be encouraged to strive for reality, even if sordid, or should they be encouraged to idealize Jewish life by putting the best possible face on it, in the hope that one day that would become reality?”90 Given that realism was the prevailing literary movement of the time, this question proved especially trenchant. The work of ghetto writers like Abraham Cahan was praised for its gritty realism, yet many believed it imprudent to depict Jewish “low life” in such a manner, fearing that such representations would have a negative effect on Jews, potentially fueling anti-Semitism. A review in the Bookman, for instance, conceded that Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) may be “realism in the narrowest sense of the term,” but questioned “the work’s realism in a wider sense,” asking, “Does Mr. Cahan wish us to believe that the types and phases of the life of the Ghetto thus presented by him are truly representative of his race? That it is as sordid, selfish, as mean, as cruel, as degraded as he has here shown it to be? . . . It is a hideous showing, and repels the reader, who misses . . . that dignity of faith which compels respect from Christians. . . . If, then, these likenesses and these views are reproduced from life, was it wise to develop the pictures?”91 Cahan himself decided against publishing with the JPS due to “Sulzberger’s injunction against . . . ‘ugliness as an ideal.’” When the press offered him a contract following the success of his early ghetto fiction, he, like Zangwill, was wary of compromises to his artistic freedom, writing to Sulzberger that “the gulf between the tastes and views of your organization and my own seems to be impassable.”92

In view of such concerns about realistic representations of Jewish immigrant life in the New York ghetto, we might think that Wolf’s genteel realism and portrayal of the middle-class Jewish community in San Francisco would win preference as an alternative. But if Wolf’s portrayal of reality was not “sordid,” neither did her works uncritically idealize Jewish characters and traditions. In the quotation that serves as the epigraph to this introduction, Wolf stated her philosophy as a writer: “One must not place heart before art. I try to paint the subject as truthfully as possible. . . . Truth-telling should be an author’s religion. It is mine, and because of it I have caused considerable discussion among my own people.” Acknowledging the controversial nature of her work among her fellow Jews, Wolf claims “truth-telling” as her religion, professing an allegiance to the realism of her art above her faith. Her resistance to idealizing Jewish life is evident, for example, in Heirs of Yesterday, and particularly in the character of Philip May, who is repelled by traditional religious practice and believes Judaism to be “a dead letter, a monument to the past” (101–2). Adler’s comments on the “immoral” characters and “impossible” rabbi in A Dreamer of Dreams hint at his possible objections to Heirs of Yesterday. The JPS may have been uneasy with the moral conundrums presented by Wolf’s text. Philip, for example, could be read as an “immoral” character, in part because of his attitude toward Judaism but even more so because his dismissal of Judaism translates into disrespect for, and estrangement from, his elderly father, Joseph. Even though Philip and his father eventually reconcile, the prodigal son continues to face the repercussions of his callous actions. He is most severely punished by the loss of his father; when Joseph hears that his own Jewish social club has rejected Philip, whose reputation was tarnished in the Jewish community when others learned of his attempt to erase his Jewish background, Joseph resigns his membership on the spot, but his anger proves too much for him to bear, and he dies of a heart attack. In addition to raising questions about the morality of Philip’s repudiation of his heritage, the novel also asks readers to consider what it means that father and son reconcile even before Philip begins to reclaim his Jewishness.

Heirs of Yesterday is not a didactic text—in fact, its ambiguities are what make it so rich for readers today—yet it does hold Philip accountable for his actions and offers a solution to the dilemma of tradition versus full assimilation via a revitalized Judaism. Again, we might think this message would appeal to the JPS’s desire to represent the dignity of Jewish life rather than its sordidness. Furthermore, Philip’s willingness to sacrifice family ties in his selfish desire to get ahead finds a foil in the admirable character of Jean Willard with her strong sense of morality and familial loyalty. Although Jean’s commitment to religious practice is minimal at first, her loyalty to her heritage grows as she is confronted with Philip’s outright rejection of his Jewishness. Jean’s pride in her Jewish identity and belief in the “progressive spirit of Judaism” force Philip to reconsider his position. But the means of revitalizing Judaism and bringing Philip back into the fold must have proved problematic for the JPS and especially for a historian like Adler. In the willingness of Wolf’s characters to forego tradition in order to reinvent their religion as ever evolving, free of “provincialisms and anachronisms” (212), they embrace radical reforms that sever Judaism from the past, and the Jewish past was a key component of the JPS’s vision, as evidenced by its many publications on Jewish history.

Indeed, the JPS seemed more comfortable with fictional texts set in the past. As Sarna notes, in addition to “immigrant uplift,” one of the key themes emphasized in JPS fiction was “the beauties and terrors of Jewish life in the Old World, with special emphasis on the charms of Jewish tradition and the horrors of anti-Jewish attacks.”93 By setting works in the past, Jewish fiction writers could negotiate the JPS’s seemingly competing demands, simultaneously portraying the real horrors and violence of anti-Semitism and idealizing Jewish people and customs by presenting them as quaint and charming. Thus, the fiction that the JPS published at this time may tell us something about the content of Wolf’s lost writings and why publishing Heirs of Yesterday was seen as “inadvisable.” In preferring ghetto fiction set in Europe—either in Victorian-era London (like Zangwill’s) or in bygone eras—rather than in America, the JPS aimed to forge ancestral spiritual ties that transcended the geography of the diaspora. This objective is evident, for instance, in the work of another Jewish American woman writer and JPS author, Martha Wolfenstein. Prior to her untimely death in 1906, Wolfenstein published two books with the JPS, including the novel Idyls of the Gass (1901), which, interestingly, was reviewed by Wolf. According to Sarna, Wolfenstein’s work pleased the JPS publication committee because it successfully negotiated the terms of the “fiction debate,” offering a “brighter picture” of Jewish life in the Old World, “full of obvious sympathy for ghetto folk and their traditional, highly ethical way of life.”94

Wolf’s ambivalence about Wolfenstein’s work is evident in her 1901 review of Idyls of the Gass, which was published in the Jewish Comment, a Baltimore weekly. With measured praise, Wolf calls Wolfenstein an “aspirant for Jewish literary honors.” She criticizes her “ubiquitous use of the question-mark and the familiar ‘I,’” while suggesting that despite these flaws Wolfenstein’s work “bears none of the ear-marks of the novice.” Through the deft placement of positive regard in a nonrestrictive clause in her next sentence, Wolf continues her critique: “They are simple tales, told with a simplicity appropriate to the material, which is art.”95 In other words, they are simple tales written in a simple style devoid of nuance. The rest of the review reveals similar sleights that can be read as either praise or criticism. Wolf subtly implies, then, that Idyls of the Gass is the work of a novice. The review may reflect not only Wolf’s evaluation of the book but also her critique of the JPS’s publication committee and its prioritizing of content over style. Given what we now know of Wolf’s own attempts to publish with the JPS, at the back of her mind in reviewing Idyls of the Gass must have been the niggling question of why Wolfenstein’s work was accepted and her own was rejected.

The lukewarm review of Idyls of the Gass may be Wolf’s means of questioning the narrowness of ghetto representations and what it would mean for Jewish fiction if all writers continued to work in this mode. Wolf’s admiration for Zangwill’s work indicates that she did not necessarily object to ghetto fiction as a genre, but her review of Wolfenstein contains an interesting subtext: the suggestion that she saw Wolfenstein as derivative of Zangwill. Wolf mentions Zangwill’s work several times in the review, comparing him favorably to Wolfenstein in this sentence: “Like her famous contemporary, Israel Zangwill, she has found the poetry that lurks in a mean street, but unlike him, she has failed to observe, or chosen to pass by, all that is ugly and sordid therein, thereby illustrating again the idealizing, eternal feminine as distinguished from the more robust masculine instinct.”96 The line offers a critique not just of Wolfenstein but of other women writers for their tendency to idealize; it alludes to Wolf’s own attempts to counter such idealization via a genteel realism that aligns her work with contemporaries like Edith Wharton.

In the age of the ghetto tale, a genre that would continue to dominate Jewish American literature for many years to come, Wolf’s writing stands out for its originality. This originality is due in part to her circumvention of the ghetto and her offering of San Francisco as an alternative site of Jewish American culture. Interestingly, Wolf was not the only San Francisco author whose work was rejected by the JPS. In 1935, Wolf’s former Girls’ High School classmate Harriet Lane Levy submitted 920 O’Farrell Street, a memoir about growing up Jewish in San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake, for an award named in honor of Edwin Wolf, the JPS’s president from 1903 to 1913. Perhaps because Levy’s work was autobiographical when the JPS was soliciting “novel[s] of Jewish interest” for the prize, 920 O’Farrell Street was not chosen, losing to Beatrice Bisno’s labor novel, Tomorrow’s Bread.97 When Levy’s memoir was finally published in 1947 by Doubleday, Allen Lesser’s review in the Menorah Journal praised it for avoiding the “stereotypes of conventional post-Ellis Island stories.” He concluded that “the many publishers—including the Jewish Publication Society of America—to whom it was submitted during the last decade, and who rejected it, might well profit by a few moments’ reflection on the reasons why they missed up on a best-seller.”98 The JPS’s rejections of San Francisco–based works by writers like Wolf and Levy beg the question of what “counted” as Jewish American literature in the early twentieth century. Works with middle-class San Francisco settings were deemed “impracticable” by the JPS because they did not comply with the society’s notion of literary Jewishness, which, at the time, was defined primarily as lower class and Eastern European. In rejecting Wolf’s work, then, the JPS may have missed an opportunity to expand the regional parameters of Jewish fiction and to contribute to a pluralistic Jewish culture that extended beyond the ghetto, in this case to the West Coast.

In other ways, too, the JPS seems to have missed an opportunity when they rejected Wolf’s work. Sarna’s history reveals that the JPS was actively courting a female audience, since women made up a significant base of novel readers in the nineteenth century. As domestic fiction, Wolf’s work held particular appeal for women. If her “progressive spirit of Judaism” proved alienating to some, her representations of women occupied an ideological middle ground that captured a broad range of women readers. Female characters like Jean Willard and Laura Brookman in Heirs of Yesterday are intellectual and independent-minded, but they are not radical. They are characterized by their middle-class refinement and engagement with art and culture. Wolf’s Jewish female characters were a source of identification for an important group of readers and book buyers at the time: middle- and upper-class members of Jewish women’s clubs, like Wolf’s own Philomath in San Francisco. As we know from Anne Ruggles Gere’s research on the literacy practices of turn-of-the-twentieth-century clubwomen, Wolf’s Other Things Being Equal was read and discussed by Jewish women’s clubs around the country.99

The JPS’s inability to capitalize successfully on the potential of Jewish women as readers of fiction was due to the gender makeup of its publication committee. Although the secretary who kept the minutes at the meeting was Henrietta Szold, who played a key editorial role at the press before moving on to found Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, her own opinions were not recorded, and the decisions appear to be made solely by men. The little we can glean about Wolf’s lost works hints at an unstated gender bias behind the JPS’s decisions. From the title of “Little Jaffa,” for instance, we can infer that the story featured a female protagonist; “Jaffa,” which means “beauty” in Hebrew, was probably being used here as a girl’s name, a reference to a main character. Meanwhile, the children’s stories that the JPS published—including the one written by a woman, Sara Miller’s Under the Eagle’s Wing—featured boys. Given that all of Wolf’s novels contain significant female characters, we can safely assume that A Dreamer of Dreams did too. But the only character in Dreamer mentioned in the JPS publication committee’s discussion is a man (the “impossible” rabbi hero), which speaks to the implicit biases of the all-male committee, for whom women and gender issues were incidental.

Ultimately, the loss for Jewish fiction was not that the JPS failed to publish Wolf’s work; as Zangwill warned, a contract with the JPS would have undoubtedly “cramped” her style. Instead, the loss is that two works by Wolf—clearly well written and provocative in content—were not published elsewhere. Fortunately, Wolf persevered in placing Heirs of Yesterday with another press, and in 1900 the novel was published by the prominent Chicago-based firm A. C. McClurg. Wolf was far from the only writer to find her work welcomed by other publishers after being rejected by the JPS. As Sarna notes, many of these authors had difficulty “understand[ing] why their work met with a warmer reception from Gentiles than from their own fellow Jews.”100

That Heirs of Yesterday was ultimately published by McClurg is notable in light of Lucas Dietrich’s recent scholarship on the publishing house, whose list included groundbreaking works of ethnic American literature such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), the first collection of fiction by an Asian American writer. According to Dietrich, McClurg developed a track record for its ability “to mediate between an ethnic author and a mainstream, predominantly white literary readership,” positioning these works so that they simultaneously “express[ed] interracial sympathy and sentiment in an effort to bridge cultural divisions” and “reinscribe[d] existing social hierarchies.”101 The first edition of Heirs of Yesterday bears evidence of such mediation. On the book’s cover, the title and author appear at the top in black lettering against a greyish green background. Below Wolf’s name, and taking up more than half the cover, is an abstract floral design, vaguely reminiscent of Orientalist arabesques, bordered in black. One of the vine-like flowers, however, bleeds over the border into the top section of the cover, coming in close proximity to the name “Wolf.” With the lone flower creating a bridge between the staid upper half of the cover and the lusher, more exotic imagery below, the design at once signals containment and crossover.

Based on the cover alone, there is nothing to mark Heirs of Yesterday as an explicitly Jewish book. Even Wolf’s name does not identify her as a Jewish author, and the book’s title and cover presentation hint only obliquely at the book’s themes. Inside, however, the book’s initial paratexts disclose what is obscured by the cover, establishing the novel’s Jewish content. The epigraph is a quotation from Zangwill’s Dreamers of the Ghetto, a book that was published by the JPS in partnership with Harper & Bros. in 1898 and that Wolf reviewed for the American Jewess. The epigraph, which is attributed simply to “Zangwill,” reads, “For something larger had come into his life, a sense of a vaster universe without, and its spaciousness and strangeness filled his soul with a nameless trouble and a vague unrest. He was no longer a child of the Ghetto.”102 With that quote, the cover design takes on new meaning; the flower that intrudes upon the upper half of the cover symbolizes the characters’ transcending the borders of the ghetto, its proximity to Wolf’s name suggesting her own transcendence of the confining genre of ghetto fiction. The page with the epigraph is followed by a short, single-page foreword, which contains the first explicit reference to Jewishness. The foreword sets the scene as upper-class San Francisco, where “the tide of Jewish social culture runs its mimic parallel alongside” gentile social culture, “mounting hill for hill, matching inadequacy with inadequacy.” The foreword also introduces one of the main characters, Philip May, with his “contemptuous” cry of denial: “Bah! . . . What have I to do with Ghettoes!” (85). Through these paratexts, Heirs of Yesterday is placed in dialogue with Zangwill and ghetto literature—and, by extension, with the kind of literature published by the JPS. In this introductory moment, Philip may even be said to represent Wolf herself. If Wolf’s character rejects the idea that anyone born a Jew must be defined by the ghetto, Wolf is rejecting the idea that Jewish fiction needs to be circumscribed by the ghetto genre. Thus, the text mediates between Wolf as a Jewish author and gentile readers via references to more familiar representations of Jewish identity. But the main narrative itself overturns Zangwillian representations of Jews as a “peculiar people” through its representation of Jewish characters as well-off, cultured Americans who are, in most ways, indistinguishable from their gentile counterparts.

As Dietrich demonstrates, when McClurg published The Souls of Black Folk, the book’s paratexts “reappropriated white fascinations with the racial other.”103 As a result, the text was often misread by its white audiences, who saw in it a confirmation of accepted racial ideologies. Heirs of Yesterday was subject to similar misreadings. One reviewer, for example, came away with the perception that “the Jews are in a very special sense Heirs of Yesterday, inasmuch as they have retained their racial characteristics almost unimpaired, and even in the United States, with its enormous power of assimilating all peoples and races, remain what they have always been—‘a peculiar people.’”104 The review is not unsympathetic to Wolf’s Jewish characters and praises Wolf’s literary skill, describing her style as “clean, strong and fervent,” yet somehow it finds previous ideas about Jews confirmed rather than challenged.105

Other reviewers of Heirs of Yesterday offer a more accurate view, describing Wolf’s work as a “picture of modern Jewish life” and her Jewish characters as “people of wealth and culture.”106 A piece on Wolf in the Mechanics’ Institute Library Bulletin similarly identified her central theme as “modern Jewish life . . . especially the relations of Jew and Christian developed by modern quality of intercourse.” The reception of Wolf’s novels tends to be mixed, neither raves nor pans. Several identify Wolf as a writer of great promise, imagining the heights she might achieve in future work. The piece in the Mechanics’ Institute Library Bulletin, for instance, concludes: “There is nothing to be gained by asserting that these books prove Miss Emma Wolf to be one of the world’s great novelists, but those who care for sincerity, dignity and human insight will appreciate her work and look forward with keen interest to the further development of her undoubted genius.”107

Jewish readers were more attuned to the ways Wolf’s work negotiated debates about representation in Jewish fiction. As the front-page review in the Jewish Messenger stated, Wolf did not “exploit [her] religion and special class of people,” further noting that “her delicacy, spirituality, [and] intellectuality are not restricted to Jewish subjects.”108 This reviewer and others saw Wolf’s work as an important counterpoint to ghetto fiction. In 1902, for instance, the “Library Table” section of The Menorah, the organ of the Jewish Chautauqua Society, responded to an article titled “The Attitude of the Jews Toward Jewish Fiction” by Bernard G. Richards in The Reader. Observing that Richards restricted his analysis largely to ghetto writers, The Menorah chided him for “shut[ting] out of his purview the novels of Emma Wolf, which, in our opinion, rank high, if not in present value, at least as evidence of a tendenz.”109 Similarly, in the American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger, Joseph Lebowich singled out Wolf as the rare case who does not suffer from “that fatal disease known as Zangwillitis,” referring to the tendency among Jewish writers to imitate Zangwill’s style and perseveration on the ghetto. Even so, Lebowich, exposing his own gender bias with his use of the word “virility,” compares Wolf unfavorably to Cahan. “Although lacking the virility of Mr. Cahan’s work,” Wolf’s novels, he writes, “are polished and more carefully thought out” than those of Zangwill’s imitators.110

The literary relationship between Zangwill and Wolf was based on dialogue and reciprocity, not imitation. Despite some reservations about the ambiguous ending of Heirs of Yesterday, Zangwill saw the work as an important step forward from her previous Jewish-themed novel. In a letter dated December 12, 1900, he wrote to Wolf that he had read her new book “with much pleasure, not only on account of its art but of its information. . . . There is a great tragic-comic mine for you in the States, & you are sinking your shaft much deeper than in ‘Other Things Being Equal.’”111 If Zangwill provided inspiration for and helped promote Wolf’s fiction, she played a similar role for him. The influence of Other Things Being Equal and Heirs of Yesterday can be traced to Zangwill’s 1908 play about intermarriage and Americanization, The Melting Pot. In this play, which popularized the concept of the “melting pot” as an enduring metaphor for American identity, Zangwill used an interfaith union to represent America as a “fusion” of different races. Wolf’s Jewish-themed works helped stir the pot that produced that potent metaphor.112

After Heirs of Yesterday, Wolf wrote only one more novel, Fulfillment, which was published by Henry Holt in 1916. She also published two novellas and a number of short stories, most of them in the Smart Set, a popular magazine with high literary standards commonly considered a precursor to the New Yorker.113 None of these works contain Jewish characters or content. The introduction to Emma Wolf’s Short Stories in “The Smart Set” notes how the magazine stories demonstrate that Wolf was “operating outside the commonly-held paradigm that early twentieth-century Jewish American women writers were concerned primarily with poverty, politics, class struggle, and ardent discrimination.” Instead, these stories, written for an educated, professional, and affluent audience, “address the intimate struggles of upper-class life.”114

Still, Wolf continued to be associated with Jewish literature. From 1903 to 1911, Heirs of Yesterday was included as “required reading” for the Jewish Chautauqua Society’s course called Jewish Characters in Fiction, alongside works such as Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto. For the author of the list, Rabbi Harry Levi, the value of Wolf’s novel lay in her treatment of aspects of the Jewish American community absent from narratives of “ghetto life.”115 In his supplementary list of “recommended reading,” Levi included not only Other Things Being Equal but also Wolf’s works without Jewish themes, as if to emphasize her ability to branch out beyond the narrow parameters that tended to circumscribe the literary careers of minority writers.

Non-Jewish readers also appreciated Wolf’s writing and her range. In a full-page profile in the San Francisco Examiner, reporter Lillian Ferguson noted that Wolf’s novels, including the two that “deal with Jewry, present . . . powerful studies that appeal with almost equal force to Gentile and Jew.” Describing Wolf as “that uncommon production among novelists, a woman of sound, sane, purposeful thinking—a philosopher,” Ferguson admiringly observes that her interviewee has gained “literary recognition on two continents without stirring from her own fireside.” Wolf’s literary reputation both at home and in London, Ferguson asserts, was earned by her work not through self-promotion: “She has not elected to pave her way to popularity by the mercenary means that others with better business acumen and less ability have employed.” Ferguson further alludes to Wolf’s reclusiveness when she states that “[n]o woman novelist in California has kept herself so closely in the shadow of retirement as Miss Wolf.”116

By circumstance and nature a private person, Wolf may have become more reclusive with time. Yet there is evidence that she maintained her connection to Jewish life and culture. In 1920 she presented on the topic of literature at the Western Assembly of the Jewish Chautauqua Society, and as late as 1922 she continued to be listed as an associate member of the Philomath Club.117 As noted in the preface, when Wolf died in 1932, she was buried in Home of Peace Cemetery in Colma, California, originally established by Congregation Emanu-El. Like her grave marker, Wolf’s fiction has long been hidden from sight. This edition of Heirs of Yesterday helps her assume her rightful place in Jewish American literary history. The story of how Wolf came to publish the novel has much to tell us about the interplay between Jewishness, class, gender, and region, demonstrating that the agenda of the male-dominated, East Coast–based Jewish book publishing industry was often at cross-purposes with the artistic and social ideals of Western, middle-class Jewish American women writers.118 Especially when read with attention to its varied historical, literary, and religious contexts, Heirs of Yesterday broadens and complicates existing narratives about Jews, immigration, religious minorities, and Jewish American culture at the turn of the twentieth century.

Countering Jewish Stereotypes: Anti-Semitism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture

As previously discussed, historians agree that anti-Semitism was much less a factor in San Francisco compared to other parts of the country. Peter Decker, for example, argues that the city’s Jewish merchants and businessmen translated their wealth and financial security into social capital that extended to fellow Jews who were not part of the mercantile class. “Led by their respected merchants, the Jews of San Francisco probably faced less prejudice and carried forth into future decades the memory of fewer unpleasant experiences than the Jews of any city in the nation at midcentury,” he hypothesizes.119 Still, significant undercurrents of prejudice remained. Precisely because so many Jews were successful in business in San Francisco, prejudice often manifested in terms of economic stereotypes that depicted money-hungry Jews as untrustworthy in their financial dealings and especially eager to take advantage of Christians. In one instance cited by Decker, “A credit report on two German Jews who owned rather substantial assets warned: ‘They are Hebrews. May be good [for credit] if well watched; they are tricky.’”120

In American history, anti-Semitism has fluctuated with the times, its rise corresponding with increases in anti-immigrant sentiment, nativism, and white nationalism. Just as anti-Semitism has become more noticeable since the 2016 US presidential election (from so-called dog whistles and subtle uses of imagery to vandalism of Jewish sites and violent acts of hate), historians documented a significant uptick in anti-Semitism across the nation by the end of the nineteenth century. Late nineteenth-century anti-Semitism coincided with the mass migration of Eastern European Jews to the United States and with calls for more restrictive immigration policies. The general rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric revived old racial and religious stereotypes that portrayed Jews as dirty, alien, and biologically inferior to Anglo-Saxons. San Francisco was not immune, especially because anti-Semitism insinuated itself into so many aspects of the national culture. Jewish caricatures and stock characters were ubiquitous in the theater, for instance. From British imports like Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice with its portrayal of the notorious usurer Shylock to the distinctly American dialect comedy that was a centerpiece of vaudeville, the stage Jew, whose hooked nose portended the evils of unchecked materialism, was easily recognizable to American audiences.121

Anti-Semitic representations were also pervasive in print culture. Popular periodicals regularly published dialect stories and ghetto tales in which Jews appeared as one-dimensional caricatures, as well as cartoons and jokes whose punchlines depended on the audience’s knowledge of Jewish stereotypes. While some gentile American writers voiced respect and sympathy for Jews, leading at times to complex literary portrayals, scholars such as Donald Pizer have exposed the extent of anti-Semitic representation in the work of canonical turn-of-the-twentieth-century writers—including, notably, San Francisco’s own Frank Norris.122 In his 1899 novel, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, Norris describes the character of Zerkow, a Polish Jewish junk dealer, in demonic and animalistic terms: “a dry, shriveled old man” with satanically red hair; “eager, catlike lips of the covetous; eyes that had grown keen as those of a lynx from long searching amid muck and debris; and clawlike, prehensile fingers—the fingers of a man who accumulates, but never disburses.” Zerkow’s “inordinate, insatiable greed” leads him to marry a poor Mexican charwoman, Maria, in order to get his hands on a set of gold dishes that her family once purportedly owned.123 By the end of the novel, Zerkow’s lust for gold turns murderous, and he kills his wife in pursuit of the illusory dishes. As Elisa New writes, “Norris’ depiction of the greedy Jew reflects a particularly American anti-Semitism that was very much of the 1890s and was shared by other naturalist writers.”124

Throughout Heirs of Yesterday, Wolf refers to common Jewish stereotypes in an effort to counter them, and she fully develops her Jewish characters as individuals in response to depictions that appeared in the work of her contemporaries. Whereas anti-Semitic discourse relayed Jewishness through a character’s outward appearance, Wolf’s Philip May is visually indistinguishable from his gentile counterparts; he is able to pass as non-Jewish because his “features are . . . silent” (99). When the novel states that Jean Willard’s “religion had always lain lightly upon her,” it refers at once to her relationship to spirituality and the fact that she is not readily identifiable as Jewish based on her appearance (117). Wolf’s attention to the visual signifiers of Jewishness is especially evident in the plotline involving Jean’s refusal to model for the anti-Semitic painter Stephen Forrest, who is enamored with her “shadowy dark” beauty (90). Although Forrest attempts to reassure Jean that her “sex unsects” her when she reminds him of her Jewish background, his view remains circumscribed by the archetype of la belle juive, or the beautiful Jewess, an image of erotic fascination for Christian men (114). The beautiful Jewess’s Orientalized femininity serves to render the Jewish woman as exotic and different, while also bringing into relief the repulsive physical features that marked Jewish male difference in anti-Semitic representations.

That Jewish men bore the brunt of anti-Semitic stereotyping in the late nineteenth century helps explain why Philip, the male protagonist of Heirs of Yesterday, is the one who decides to disassociate from his Jewish background and pass for gentile. In his analysis of cartoons that appeared in the American press between 1877 and 1935, Matthew Baigell observes that Jewish men are depicted as “money-hungry Shylocks and thieving Fagins, social climbers, arsonists ready to claim insurance for property loss, and disagreeable, scheming parvenus who would take advantage of any situation in which they found themselves.”125 Among the periodicals that Baigell analyzes is the popular humor magazine Puck, which is specifically referenced in Heirs of Yesterday. In a conversation with friends about whether Philip deserves condemnation for his decision to distance himself from the Jewish community, Jean quietly rises to his defense, wondering about the effect of “those diverting Jewish stories in Puck and other witty periodicals” (137).

In the 1890s, Jewish stereotypes and caricatures were a regular textual and visual feature of Puck. Throughout the pages of the magazine, men with overdetermined Jewish names like Isaacstein and Cohenstein spoke in English-language-mangling dialect; intended to suggest a Yiddish accent, the improper speech reminded readers of the immigrant’s inability to master the national language and thus his unassimilable foreignness. If an illustration accompanied the joke, the cartoonist drew the men as corpulent to signify their greed. Most of the humor was associated with “peezness,” Puck’s Yiddish-inflected bastardization of the word “business,” reinforcing assumptions about Jews’ miserly unscrupulousness in dealing with gentiles. In a dialogue sketch titled “No Means of Support,” for instance, a boy asks his parent if there are any Christians in Jerusalem; when the parent replies in the negative, the boy wonders “what the Hebrews” will “live on” when they move there.126 As indicated by the dual meaning of “live on” to suggest both exploiting for financial gain and consuming, Puck often pushed the stereotype beyond economic threats to evoke and stoke religious fears—in this case, the long-standing myth of the blood libel, the belief that Jews ritually murdered Christian children and used their blood for ceremonial purposes. Reminded by a “prospective victim” that “you boarded at my house when you attended the World’s Fair,” a cannibal in a joke titled “Unprejudiced” assures his former host that he will not eat him, asking “in some surprise; ‘you don’t take me for a Hebrew, do you?’”127 At other times, Jewish religious practice such as kosher dietary laws became a source of mockery. In “Strictly Orthodox,” for example, two Jews, Rosenbaum and Epstein, gossip about a third, Ikey Jacobs, who is “such a strict Hebrew dot he von’t efen blay foot-ball” to avoid “chasing der pigskin.”128

As the last example suggests, Jews themselves were sometimes in on the joke. (Puck’s first editor, Sydney Rosenfeld, was himself Jewish, and the magazine sardonically referred to Jews as “Our Hebrew Friends.”) In Heirs of Yesterday, the character of Paul Stein admits to laughing “over the wit of Puck’s stories when our shrewdness, or features, or mannerisms are the point of ridicule,” viewing his “good-natured” response as superior to that of “the cultured Irishman who sets his teeth at the sight of printed brogue” (140). Unlike in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League would take action to defend Jews against attacks in the press, many nineteenth-century Jewish Americans, including religious leaders, believed it best not to protest anti-Semitic humor and caricature; they feared that a direct response could draw more attention to the offensive representation and lead to accusations of oversensitivity. In the case of Puck, when any minority group objected to being lampooned in the magazine’s pages, the editors “invariably responded with: ‘Can’t you take a joke?’”129

In the absence of direct, organized protest against cultural anti-Semitism, Wolf’s fiction takes on even greater potency. Heirs of Yesterday can be read as an indirect response to anti-Semitic stereotypes in American culture and their increasing virulence at the end of the nineteenth century. Wolf strategically deploys literary realism as well as narrative conventions of plot and character development to create counter-representations. In an interview in the San Francisco Examiner that appeared shortly after the publication of her fourth novel, Wolf explained her approach to realism (what she calls “truth-telling”) when it came to crafting her characters. “To me there is a fascination in character development—the gradual unfolding of an individuality until it has attained its full mental and moral growth. No character is complete without both the spiritual and material elements,” she stated.130 Wolf’s skill at character development allowed her to defy Jewish stereotypes and caricature, producing an array of cultured, refined, individualized, middle-class characters. They are, as Wolf writes in Heirs of Yesterday, “a representative group whose blended characteristics would scarcely have produced that legendary composite—the ‘typical’ Jew” (161).131

Even a cursory overview of nineteenth-century Jewish stereotypes helps readers contextualize Wolf’s approach to anti-Semitism in Heirs of Yesterday. Philip’s decision to pass as gentile cannot simply be understood as an act of Jewish self-hatred or a selfish attempt at social climbing. Instead, readers are asked to connect the dots between anti-Semitic thought as manifest in Jewish stereotypes and real-world consequences. Explaining his decision to pass as gentile, Philip begins by narrating a formative incident from his childhood when he was taunted at school with the slur “Christ-killer” (99, 174). In addition to resisting long-held religious stereotypes charging Jews with deicide, Philip also refuses to allow social, economic, and racial stereotypes to define him personally and professionally. “To be a Jew,” he asserts, “is to be socially handicapped for life” (101). Although Jean does not condone Philip’s decision to pass as gentile, especially given the emotional pain it causes his father, she does understand what would drive someone to make this choice, recognizing that Philip’s actions are rooted in the anti-Semitism responsible for creating social handicaps and fostering Jewish shame and self-loathing. By incorporating anti-Semitism into the novel in this way, Wolf conveys an understated but powerful message about the harmfulness of stereotypes to individuals and to the future of the Jewish community.

Complicating the Coupling Convention: Emma Wolf and Women’s Literature

In the introduction to a special issue of MELUS entitled “The Future of Jewish American Literary Studies,” the editors note that scholars of Jewish American literature have overlooked Wolf’s work, favoring instead the fiction of Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970), who has become one of the field’s token women writers. “Because her work speaks simultaneously to the politics of immigration, feminism, and labor,” they write, “a writer such as Yezierska has become the subject of near-constant scholarly scrutiny, but the works of equally interesting Jewish women writers such as Emma Wolf, Fannie Hurst, and Vera Caspary remain largely unknown even to many specialists in the field.”132 As we have thus far shown in this introduction, commentators in Wolf’s own time noted a similar tendency, among both publishers and critics, to “center . . . their attention on the poor or the unassimilated,” thus “shut[ting] out of . . . purview” writers such as Wolf.133

Jewish literary studies is not the only field to neglect Wolf’s contributions, however. She has also been overlooked by scholars of American women’s writing. In the last few decades of the twentieth century, when women’s literature became a distinct area of study at universities, including in courses devoted solely to women’s writing, literary academicians gravitated toward late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women authors like Kate Chopin (1850–1904) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), whose radical critiques of marriage and gender roles fit with the ideological stance of the second-wave women’s movement. Unlike Gilman’s explicitly activist writings or Chopin’s provocative depictions of women struggling to free themselves from patriarchal oppression in texts like The Awakening (1899), Wolf’s domestic fiction does not read as a call to feminist action. She does not level a wholesale attack on patriarchy or unequivocally advocate New Womanhood as a form of liberation from the constraints of traditional femininity. Instead, her fiction gently probes notions of gender equality and questions about whether marriage and motherhood need be the only options for middle-class women. That Wolf’s work often adheres to bourgeois values does not make it less worthy of study. Instead, heroines such as Jean in Heirs of Yesterday—described in the text as “one of those modern anachronisms, a woman with ideals”—add to and complicate literary portraits of women from the era (112). In the final section of this introduction, we consider how Heirs of Yesterday can be read in relation to various traditions of women’s literature, situating Wolf’s work in the context of domestic fiction and the marriage plot; turn-of-the-twentieth-century movements such as realism and regionalism; and transatlantic, cross-cultural, and comparative ethnic networks.

In employing the underlying structure of the marriage plot, Wolf participated in one of the longest-standing conventions of the Anglophone novel, one that was profoundly shaped by the contributions of Victorian women writers such as George Eliot, Jane Austen, and the Brontë sisters. In nineteenth-century American literature, the marriage plot was also closely associated with women writers whose popular novels were often derided by their male counterparts for their sentimentalism. On the surface, Wolf’s reliance on the timeworn tradition of the marriage plot marks her as a fairly conventional writer, but a closer look indicates her careful displacement of earlier romantic conventions with depictions of love and marriage grounded in realism. Her short story “One-Eye, Two-Eye, Three-Eye,” for example, acknowledges and then rejects the fairy tale on which it is based in order to circumvent the idealized love of the happily-ever-after ending. “Fairy tales are impossible nowadays,” the story begins. “Fact is quite interesting enough at this epoch. . . . Formerly we saw as through a glass darkly, now face to face.”134 In addition to placing her within a long tradition of women’s literature, Wolf’s use of the marriage plot also helps to situate her among women writers of her era (most famously, Edith Wharton) who used realism—or, seeing “face to face”—to hold the marriage market and the bonds of matrimony up to scrutiny.135 As scholars such as Clare Eby have observed, the marriage plot did not become passé at the end of the nineteenth century; instead, it continued to have relevance for Gilded Age and Progressive Era writers, many of whom used it to explore gender and class politics, to mark the breakdown of separate spheres ideology, and to agitate for marital reform.136

Wolf’s symbolic deployment of marriage as a consensual union between equals in her Jewish-themed novels, Other Things Being Equal and Heirs of Yesterday, and the influence of these novels on theories and representations of ethnic American identity such as Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (1908) have received in-depth treatment elsewhere.137 But Wolf’s Jewish twist on the marriage trope becomes even more intriguing when considered as part of a broader transatlantic tradition of women’s literature in the long nineteenth century. As exemplified by George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1904), both British and American gentile women writers similarly introduced Jewish difference as a complicating factor in the marriage plot. These examples further demonstrate that Anglophone texts traditionally foreclosed the possibility of interfaith union between gentile women and Jewish men, whether it be the case of a noble character like Deronda or an opportunistic one like Simon Rosedale, Lily Bart’s nouveau riche Jewish suitor in The House of Mirth. As Elizabeth Ammons succinctly described the plot of Wharton’s novel, “The book is about the snow-white heroine, the flower of Anglo-Saxon womanhood, not ending up married to the invading Jew.”138 Novels such as Eliot’s and Wharton’s can be read productively alongside Wolf’s work. Her first book, Other Things Being Equal, for example, stands out for its positive portrayal of intermarriage; in it, Wolf’s Jewish-Christian couple successfully overcomes the obstacle of religious difference. In Heirs of Yesterday, the obstacle to marriage is not Jewish difference—Jean and Philip are both Jews by birth—but different views of Jewishness, familial loyalty, and professional ambition. As a courtship narrative set in a middle-class, Reform milieu, Heirs of Yesterday extends the work of British Jewish writer Amy Levy across the Atlantic. Levy’s 1888 novel, Reuben Sachs—written in response to Eliot’s philo-Semitic, romanticized portraits in Daniel Deronda—used the marriage trope to explore Jewish life among the upwardly mobile class in late Victorian London and to expose limitations placed on women.139 Like the connection between Wolf and Zangwill, the commonalities between Wolf’s and Levy’s works provide evidence of transatlantic networks of exchange among Jewish writers in the late nineteenth century.

Debates in African American literary studies about the uses of domestic fiction in black women’s writing also provide a useful comparative framework for evaluating Wolf’s work and her obscurity. In The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction, Ann duCille challenges earlier critics who had “marginalized” late nineteenth-century black novelists like Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper “for their alleged assimilation of so-called white values.” As duCille shows through her recuperation of such writers, their use of light-skinned heroines and the bourgeois conventions of the marriage plot functioned as a means to “rebut . . . the racist imaging of black women.”140 Heirs of Yesterday makes an especially provocative pairing with Hopkins’s class-conscious depictions of family life among black professionals and intellectuals in Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, also published in 1900. Through her novel’s domestic setting and refined female characters, who conform to traditional ideas about femininity, Hopkins mobilized the politics of racial uplift and respectability.141

Well-educated and well-mannered characters like Jean and Philip in Heirs of Yesterday similarly serve to portray Jews as upright citizens and respectable members of middle-class society, making an argument for equality by emphasizing their shared social mores with gentiles. Wolf makes clear her intent to overturn exoticized images of Jewish women through Jean’s encounter with the artist Stephen Forrest. Correctly intuiting his desire to fix her as a “type” and refusing to be hemmed in by romanticized notions of Jewish womanhood, Jean declines to pose for him. Later, without her consent, Forrest transforms his memory of her into a portrait titled “The Jewess” and attempts to further exert his power by claiming the painting as his property rather than putting it up for sale.142 As a pianist, Jean is an artist in her own right, determined to use her music to control her self-representation and to assert her individualism. Wolf, as a novelist, uses her art in much the same way.

As duCille illustrates, middle-class black protagonists were often juxtaposed with, and seen as less authentic than, dialect-speaking folk characters, like those who inhabit the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, one of the first black women writers to be reclaimed by feminist scholars. Similarly, Wolf’s characters provide a sharp contrast to Yezierska’s heroines, who were also claimed by early scholars of American women’s history and writing. Whereas the poverty, Yiddish-inflected dialect, and sensuality of Yezierska’s ghetto folk heighten—and at times exuberantly celebrate—Jewish difference, characters like Jean and Philip, who are “endowed with . . . name[s]” and “features” that “tell . . . no tales” (99), may be viewed as inauthentically whitewashed, scrubbed clean of all outward markers of difference. Yet, much like domestic fiction by black women writers, Heirs of Yesterday takes a stance against ethno-racial assimilation, and it does so, interestingly, by incorporating a passing narrative, a genre most often associated with African American literature. Philip’s decision to pass for gentile to avoid being “socially handicapped for life” (101) echoes the choices made by light-skinned black protagonists who cross the color line and pass for white in fiction by black women writers such as Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset, as well as in works by men such as Charles Chesnutt and James Weldon Johnson. While the ease with which Philip sheds his ethno-religious heritage challenges pseudo-scientific notions of Jewish racial difference, it is equally important that Heirs of Yesterday—like many of the black passing narratives that have entered the American and ethnic literary canons—rejects passing as a means of attaining equality. As argued elsewhere, in supplanting the passing narrative with a marriage plot, Heirs of Yesterday redefines Jewishness in terms that privilege consent over descent.143

Wolf’s redefinition of Jewish identity in Heirs of Yesterday is further enabled by the novel’s Western setting, which positions her depiction of fin-de-siècle Jewish life beyond the confines of the East Coast urban ghetto and within the woman-dominated movement of late nineteenth-century literary regionalism. Wolf, whose novels are all set in her home state and whose final work, Fulfillment, was subtitled A California Novel, belongs to a group of women writers that includes Helen Hunt Jackson, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Gertrude Atherton, whose writings explore the history and culture of the Golden State. As discussed earlier, Wolf’s views on Judaism and Jewishness were very much shaped by the distinctness of the California Reform movement. Sketching the novel’s setting with a regionalist’s attention to time and place, Wolf links her vision of progressive Judaism to the expansive geography of the American West. The novel opens with Jean “making her way westward along Pacific avenue,” walking “swiftly, lightly, the joyous wind of motion in her going,” and taking off her jacket in the warm February sun “to enjoy the freedom” (87). This opening image of Jean’s westward movement sets the stage for her embrace of Reform tenets later in the novel. In marked contrast to Philip’s association of his abandoned religion with the cramped confinement of the ghetto, Jean views Judaism as “singularly free, unhampered, broad, open to the light of day”—a vision that draws upon the language of the frontier and makes within it a space for Jews and for women (162). Due to the specificity of its Northern California setting, this edition of Heirs of Yesterday contributes to ongoing efforts to recover nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women authors such as Atherton, Ruiz de Burton, Mary Austin, Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), Sarah Winnemucca, and Miriam Michelson, whose work engages with—and often provides alternatives to—white masculinist myths of the West.

Given the specific temporal context of Wolf’s novel, whose ending coincides with the Spanish-American War in 1898, Heirs of Yesterday offers new opportunities to consider how women writers addressed US expansionism and empire, lending further credence to Amy Kaplan’s claims that white, middle-class American women participated in the imperial project through the rhetoric of “manifest domesticity.”144 In considering Wolf’s complications of the coupling convention, it is important to keep in mind that the onset of the war interferes with the neat resolution of the marriage plot. At the very moment that Philip reconsiders his renunciation of Judaism through his love for Jean, telling her, “You have become my religion,” and asking, “If you are Jewish, must I not too be Jew?,” the novel zooms outward from its domestic narrative and the quiet intimacy of the couple’s romance (240). Ripping her story straight from bold newspaper headlines, Wolf describes the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor. The historical backdrop of the war thus overtakes the lives of her fictional characters, with Philip deciding to enlist as an army surgeon and Jean devoting herself to volunteer work for the San Francisco Red Cross.

Like so many of Wolf’s portrayals, her characters’ patriotic responses to the war correlate with the historical narrative. The first man to enlist in the army following the attack on the Maine and in the face of the United States’ impending declaration of war on Spain was a young Jewish physician, Colonel Joseph M. Heller, whose “fighting spirit” and “eagerness to serve [his] country” roused pride among his co-religionists.145 Meanwhile, the San Francisco Call, in an article titled “Israel’s Tithe to America,” reported on how Jewish women, including members of Wolf’s own Philomath Club, supported the war effort through their involvement in the Red Cross.146 As historian Jeanne Abrams has shown in her research on the Reform community’s investment in the Spanish-American War, military service abroad and Red Cross service at home became a means for Jewish men and women to show the “compatibility of Jewish and American ideals in matters of government and humanitarian diplomacy,” to answer anti-Semitic attacks by illustrating “that Jews were just as brave and patriotic as any other group of Americans,” and to ensure that Jews would take part in the bounty of manifest destiny.147 The historical event of the Spanish-American War offered yet another way for Wolf to portray the Americanness of her Jewish characters while also demonstrating, in Kaplan’s words, how “the female realm of domesticity and the male realm of Manifest Destiny were not separate spheres . . . but were intimately linked.”148 The novel’s final pages depict the departure of the Manila expedition with Philip on board and Jean standing with the crowds in a farewell salute. As in William Dean Howells’s classic story “Editha” (1905), which is similarly set during the Spanish-American War, the man’s military enlistment disrupts the marriage plot. Rather than resolving with the union of its two main characters, Heirs of Yesterday concludes with narrative ambiguity.

While she was in the process of working on Heirs of Yesterday, Wolf wrote to Zangwill of her plan to end the novel “happily for love’s sake”—a plan that met with the British writer’s approval.149 But as the events of the Spanish-American War unfolded, Wolf apparently altered her course, ultimately deciding to end the narrative on a much more ambiguous note than she initially proposed. Upon reading the finished novel, Zangwill was not wholly satisfied with Wolf’s ending. He hypothesized that Wolf was “emulat[ing] the ambiguity of Charlotte Bronte in ‘Villette’ with an even greater uncertainty,” stating, “I don’t know if it is a good plan.”150 For today’s readers, the ambiguity of Wolf’s unconventional ending is likely to add to the novel’s richness while also providing evidence of Wolf’s increasing commitment to realist aesthetics. Even more so than Other Things Being Equal, which concludes with the couple’s marriage while hinting at the uncertainty of the future, Heirs of Yesterday closes on a note of open-endedness.151 This uncertainty reflects the sociopolitical and global changes taking hold at the turn of the new century as America’s path through modernity became intertwined with its status as an imperial power.152

The ending also serves as a potent reminder of the ways that women writers complicated the coupling convention, varying the underlying structure of the marriage plot to serve a range of aesthetic and ideological purposes. The ending may leave us with uncertainty about Philip’s fate at sea, but it also reinforces the dominant image of Jean as an unconventional heroine whose identity rests on her individuality rather than matrimony. In this regard, too, Jean may resemble the woman who created her. Relegated to almost a century of obscurity, despite a well-hidden gravestone, and in the absence of a substantial archival record, Emma Wolf’s identity resides in the body of fiction she produced.

Notes

Epigraph quoted in Lillian Ferguson, “Leading Epigrammist in Recent Fiction is a California Girl: Great English Critics Have Given High Praise to Miss. Emma Wolf’s Novels,” San Francisco Examiner, December 1, 1901, 25.

1. One of the few scholarly monographs to consider Wolf’s writing is Diane Lichtenstein, Writing Their Nations: The Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). There is some evidence of increasing attention to Wolf’s work since Barbara Cantalupo’s republication of Wolf’s 1892 novel Other Things Being Equal in 2002. For an overview of some of the current scholarship on Wolf, see Barbara Cantalupo, “Emma Wolf,” in Oxford Bibliographies, Oxford University Press, March 30, 2015, www.oxfordbibliographies.com. Nina Baym also includes a brief discussion of Emma Wolf’s fiction, as well as the writing of her sister, Alice Wolf, in Women Writers of the American West, 1833–1927 (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 77–79.

2. “Miss Wolf’s New Story,” Jewish Messenger 88, no. 24 (December 1900): 1.

3. D. J. Myers, “Emma Wolf’s Stories,” A Commonplace Blog, May 30, 2010, http://dgmyers.blogspot.com/2010/05/emma-wolfs-stories.html. This designation has recently been challenged by Jonathan Sarna’s recovery of Cora Wilburn’s work, especially her novel Cosella Wayne (1860). See Jonathan Sarna, “The Forgetting of Cora Wilburn: Historical Amnesia and The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 37, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 73–87.

4. Review of Fulfillment: A California Novel by Emma Wolf, Overland Monthly, Second Series 67, no. 5 (1916): ix–x.

5. “Emma Wolf, Beloved S. F. Author, Dead,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 31, 1932, 9. In her entry on Wolf in Jewish American Women Writers, Cantalupo assumed that Wolf had lived her last fifteen years in Dante Sanitarium, since a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle on August 31, 1932, by Rebekah Godchaux notes that Wolf “rarely left her room,” and her obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle on August 31, 1932, stated that she died in Dante Sanitarium. Further research revealed that her death certificate stated that Wolf died on August 29, 1932, from a postoperative embolism that occurred after a minor surgery to remove an orbital tumor, and the 1930 census indicates that Wolf resided at 2100 Pacific Avenue with her sister Celestine (“Linnie”).

6. Paula Hyman, The Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace: Acculturation and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 20.

7. Ava Kahn, “Joining the Rush,” in California Jews, ed. Ava Kahn and Marc Dollinger (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press / University Press of New England, 2003), 29.

8. See Annick Foucrier, “. . . To Divide Their Love’: Celebrating Frenchness and Americanization in San Francisco, 1850–1909,” in Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Jurgen Heideking et al. (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 140–56. An early history of French immigrants in California was written by Daniel Levy, a friend of the Wolf family and a lay leader of Temple Emanu-El; see Daniel Levy, Les Français en Californie (San Francisco: Gregoire Tauzy, 1884), and “Letters about the Jews of California, 1855–1858,” trans. Marlene Rainman, Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly 3 (January 1971): 86–112.

9. Ava Kahn, “Introduction,” in Jewish Voices of the Gold Rush: A Documentary History, 1849–1880, ed. Ava Kahn (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 38.

10. Marc Dollinger, foreword to Jewish San Francisco by Edward Zerin (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2006), 7.

11. Levy, “Letters about the Jews,” 93.

12. Jackie Krentzman, American Jerusalem: Jews and the Making of San Francisco. Waltham, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 2013, DVD.

13. Fred Rosenbaum, Visions of Reform: Congregation Emanu-El and the Jews of San Francisco, 1849–1999 (Berkeley, CA: Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2000), 4. Originally noted in Peter Decker, Fortunes and Failures: White Collar Mobility in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 21.

14. Levy, “Letters about the Jews,” 100.

15. Emma Wolf, “Social Life in American Cities: San Francisco,” Delineator, September 1897, 343.

16. Edward Zerin, Jewish San Francisco (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2009), 19.

17. Wolf, “Social Life in American Cities: San Francisco,” 343.

18. Kahn, “Introduction,” 39–40.

19. See “Cleveland Assembly of 1855,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, Case Western Reserve University, https://case.edu/ech/articles/c/cleveland-assembly-1855.

20. Rosenbaum, Visions of Reform, 29. San Francisco Jews took the Reform movement further than many of their co-religionists. For instance, Emanu-El instituted various innovations to the musical component of its religious services, bringing in a Catholic opera singer for the high holidays in the 1860s, introducing a choir of non-Jews because they wanted to have the best voices possible, and replacing the shofar with a trumpet played by a member of the symphony. That Wolf admired Levy is evident from the tribute she wrote in the March 4, 1910, issue of Emanu-El:

Once upon a time, there lived a very good man, and he was much beloved. And when he was very old, a great nation pinned a ribbon upon his breast and called him Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, because he had been a loyal and loving son to his adored country. But all the while he had been marching with another legion as well. And the men who march with this legion wear no ribbon upon their breasts that men may gaze upon, but deep down and hidden within their hearts there lies a wondrous Decoration. And though we may not see it, we know when it is there. For wherever one of his sweet legion passes, that place is made the better and happier thereby. And to whomsoever one of this sweet legion speaks, that person has known something beautiful that cannot be taken away. And though, perhaps, you may never have heard of this legion, and may not believe what I have told you of it, yet it is true,—you may be very sure that it is true. Because Daniel Levy belonged. Daniel Levy, nobleman—chevalier of the legion of the honor of God.

Dena Mandel suggests that Wolf modeled the character of Daniel Willard in Heirs of Yesterday on Daniel Levy. See Dena Mandel, “A World of Difference: Emma Wolf, A Jewish-American Writer on the American Frontier,” PhD diss., University of Alaska, 2008, 136–37.

21. Shari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 7.

22. Moses Rischin, “The Jewish Experience in America: A View from the West,” in Jews in the American West, ed. Moses Rischin and John Livingston (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 32.

23. Rischin, “Jewish Experience in America,” 34.

24. Ibid., 36.

25. Judith Pinnolis, “‘Cantor Soprano’ Julie Rosewald: The Musical Career of a Jewish American ‘New Woman,’” American Jewish Archives Journal 62, no. 2 (2010): 2.

26. “Simon Wolf & Associates, Master Pioneer Jewish Merchants of Contra Costa County, California,” Jewish Museum of the American West, www.jmaw.org.

27. “Death of Simon Wolf,” Weekly Antioch Ledger, September 14, 1878, 3.

28. See “City Dwellers Make Their Summer Holidays by Mountain, by Stream and by Sea: Santa Cruz, San Mateo, San Jose, Ben Lomond . . . ,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 12, 1896, 3.

29. See Nicholas C. Polos, “A Yankee Patriot: John Swett, the Horace Mann of the Pacific,” History of Education Quarterly 41 (March 1964): 17–32.

30. John Swett, Public Education in California: Its Origin and Development with Personal Reminiscences of Half a Century (New York: American Book Company, 1911), 222.

31. John Swett, Methods of Teaching: A Hand-Book of Principles, Directions, and Working Models for Common-School Teachers (New York: American Book Company, 1880), 35.

32. Ibid., 51.

33. Ferguson, “Leading Epigrammist,” 25.

34. Swett, Methods of Teaching, 296.

35. Charlene Akers, introduction to Harriet Lane Levy, 920 O’Farrell Street: A Jewish Girlhood in Old San Francisco (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 1996), ix.

36. Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut, My Portion: An Autobiography (New York: A. & C. Boni, 1925), 60–62.

37. Ibid.

38. Rebekah Kohut, More Yesterdays: An Autobiography (1925–49), A Sequel to My Portion (New York: Bloch, 1950), 38, 40. Readers who are interested in drawing comparisons between Wolf’s and Kohut’s differing religious trajectories can consult Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: Jewish Women in the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997), 40–54, in addition to Kohut’s autobiographies.

39. Emma Wolf, Other Things Being Equal, ed. and with an introduction by Barbara Cantalupo (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 66.

40. “Pittsburgh Platform,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., vol. 16 (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2007), 190–91.

41. On The Chosen People, see Adam Sol, “‘I Shan’t Let You Shirk!’: Sidney Nyburg’s The Chosen People and Reform Judaism of the Early Twentieth Century,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 27 (2007): 56–64.

42. Rosenbaum, Visions of Reform, 16.

43. Ibid., 46. For more on women and Reform Judaism, see Karla Goldman, “The Ambivalence of Reform Judaism: Kaufman Kohler and the Ideal Jewish Woman,” American Jewish History 79, no. 4 (1990): 477–99.

44. Marc Lee Raphael, “Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger of San Francisco on Jews and Judaism: The Implications of the Pittsburgh Platform,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 63, no. 2 (1973): 191, 192, 203.

45. Frances Bransten Rothmann, The Haas Sisters of Franklin Street: A Look Back with Love (Berkeley, CA: Judah Magnes Museum, 1979), 70.

46. Ibid., 11.

47. Courtesy of Donald Auslen’s private collection.

48. Lori Harrison-Kahan, “Ghetto Realism—and Beyond,” in The Oxford Handbook to American Literary Realism, ed. Keith Newlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 201–18.

49. Kahn, Jewish Voices, 36.

50. On the history of the Concordia Club, see House of Harmony: Concordia-Argonaut’s First 130 Years (Berkeley, CA: Judah L. Magnes, 1983).

51. All citations from Heirs of Yesterday refer to the page numbers in this edition and will be indicated parenthetically.

52. “Philomath Club,” in Who’s Who Among the Women of California: An Annual Devoted to the Representative Women of California, with an Authoritative Review of Their Activities in Civic, Social, Athletic, Philanthropic, Art and Music, Literary and Dramatic Circles, ed. Louis S. Lyons and Josephine Wilson (San Francisco: Security Publishing Company, 1922), 199.

53. Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880–1920 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 80.

54. “Affairs in Society. Preparing for the Murphy Ball. Several Recent Engagements and Weddings—Interesting Notes,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 21, 1895, 5. See also “The Philomath Club: Its First Open Meeting at the Palace Yesterday,” San Francisco Call, January 15, 1895, 12.

55. See “An Anti-Suffrage Club,” San Francisco Call, November 25, 1895, 16.

56. See Karen Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (London: Holmes and Meier, 1980).

57. Although Levy was well known in San Francisco in the 1890s as a contributor to The Wave, the journal that also gave Frank Norris his start, her most significant role in literary history occurred in the early twentieth century when she and Alice B. Toklas, her O’Farrell Street neighbor, traveled together to Paris following the 1906 earthquake and became part of the Stein circle. When Levy returned to San Francisco, Toklas stayed on to make a life with Stein.

58. “Emma Wolf,” American Jewess 1, no. 6 (1895): 295.

59. Helen Piper, “Interview with Emma Wolf,” San Francisco News, December 2, 1930, 5. In previous publications on Wolf, when this article was quoted, it was inaccurately cited as from the San Francisco Examiner on December 3, 1930.

60. Emma Wolf, “Brissac’s Little Debt,” The Wave: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century San Francisco, February 27, 1892, 13.

61. Naomi Seidman’s The Marriage Plot: Or, How Jews Fell in Love with Love, and with Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016) demonstrates that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish literary works that took up questions of erotic love, courtship, and marriage played an important role in “constitut[ing] the cultural character of Jewish modernity” (82). Seidman’s argument that Jewish “literature . . . created new social practices” (4) might be fruitfully extended to Wolf’s work, with its depictions of couples negotiating secularization and modern marriage. As Seidman suggests, readers received a “sentimental education” through literary representations of marriage, learning new rituals for love and courtship while also maintaining aspects of Jewish tradition.

62. For more on the reviews of Other Things Being Equal and its positive reception in the American press, see Cantalupo’s introduction to Other Things Being Equal, 33–34.

63. “Spoke on ‘Apostasy’: Rabbi Hecht Discusses Intermarriage of Jews and Christians,” Los Angeles Herald, March 6, 1904, 6.

64. Emma Wolf, foreword to Other Things Being Equal, 61.

65. Emma Wolf, “The Author’s Purpose by the Author,” Book News 15, no. 175 (March 1897): 342.

66. It is possible that Wolf did not completely abandon Dreamer of Dreams and that The Joy of Life was a revision that stripped the text of Jewish content. We suggest this possibility based on the publication timeline and the fact that references to the biblical phrase “dreamer of dreams” appear throughout the novel. The JPS publication committee rejected Dreamer of Dreams in November 1894, and The Joy of Life was published in 1896. In the published edition of The Joy of Life, the third-person narrator notes that “the dreamer was left to his dreams” (250) when one of the brothers, Cyril, dies. Furthermore, the novel concludes with these lines: “Thus Antony Trent emerged from his short excursion into the Gardens of Paradise, where after all only they who ‘know’ not—Youth and dreamers of dreams—may tarry; and the man, touched with knowledge and sorrow, came again into the tangible world of Fact, and bowed once more before its ancient sovereign, Mammon, called The Great. The gods, in their love for him, had flung him the Philosopher’s Stone,—a hope” (253). A review of the novel in the San Francisco Call on October 25, 1896, titled “New Novel Full of Human Interest by a Clever Young San Francisco Girl,” describes the two main characters as follows: “Antony possesses, in addition to his money-getting ideas, something of a soul. His brother, Cyril, must be assisted through the world, and here is the difficulty. In sharp contrast to his brother, Cyril is a philosopher, a thinker, a ‘dreamer of dreams’” (21).

67. In Jonathan Sarna’s JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888-1988 (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), the author reveals that the JPS was first instituted in Philadelphia in 1845 with the following aims: “self-defense against Christian proselytization and the furtherance of Jewish literature” (2). For many reasons, by 1851, the society was dismantled. It was reconstituted in 1871, although the members of its board were mostly New Yorkers with the exception of a couple of Philadelphians and Simon Wolf of Washington, DC. In the late 1870s, the organization dissolved again. According to Jonathan Sarna, the third iteration of the JPS, founded in 1888, survived and experienced its “golden years” between 1888 and 1893: “For most publishers, the first five years are critical ones—the years in which they set forth their aims, find their niche, establish their reputation, and seek to become financially secure. For the Jewish Publication Society these turned out to be golden years, filled with excitement and success. The books it published achieved widespread notice, won considerable critical acclaim, and secured for the Society a respected position in the field of Jewish publishing” (Sarna, JPS, 29).

68. Deuteronomy 13:1.

69. Letter from Emma Wolf dated May 8, 1893, written from 1711 Geary Street, San Francisco, to Mayer Sulzberger, chairman of the publication committee of the Jewish Publication Society of Philadelphia. Held by the National Library of Israel’s Schwadron Autograph Collection.

70. Martin Meyer, Western Jewry: An Account of the Achievements of the Jews and Judaism in California, Including Eulogies and Biographies (San Francisco: Emanu-El Press, 1916), 14.

71. Letter from Emma Wolf dated November 14, 1893, written from 1711 Geary Street, San Francisco, to Mayer Sulzberger, chairman of the publication committee of the Jewish Publication Society of Philadelphia. Held by the National Library of Israel’s Schwadron Autograph Collection. Wolf ends her letter with the following: “Awaiting an acknowledgement of receipt, in which I wish you would kindly inform about when I may expect your decision.”

72. Henrietta Szold, Manuscript Book, Jewish Publication Society of America, November 20, 1890—July 24, 1911, Jewish Publication Society Archives, Temple University Libraries Special Collections Research Center, 21. Since it appears that most JPS manuscripts were reviewed by three readers, it is unclear why Wolf’s manuscript was sent to five different people. Perhaps the JPS enlisted extra readers to ensure that Wolf’s novel would be given serious consideration.

73. Henrietta Szold, Minutes of the Publication Committee of the Jewish Publication Society of America, 1888–1905, Jewish Publication Society Archives, Temple University Libraries Special Collections Research Center, 37.

74. Alan Silverstein, Alternatives to Assimilation: The Response of Reform Judaism to American Culture (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1994).

75. Sarna, JPS, 20.

76. See Ibid., 53.

77. Szold, Minutes, 39.

78. Quoted in Ferguson, “Leading Epigrammist,” 25.

79. The minutes read,

A regular meeting of the Publication Committee of the Jewish Publication Society of America was held Sunday, October 24, 1897, at 8 P.M., in the office of the Society, 1015 Arch Street, Philadelphia, Pa., the Hon Mayer Sulzberger in the chair, and Messrs. Adler, Amram, Cohen, Jastrow, and Stern of the Committee present.

. . . .

The written reports of Messrs. Adler, Krauskopf, Landsberg, Philipson, Stern, and Straus, and the verbal report of Mr. Amram recommended the awarding of the $1000 Prize, if awarded at all, to Miss Emma Wolf for “Little Jaffa.” The written reports of Messrs. Cohen, Eisenthal, Gross, and Liepziger, and the verbal reports of Messrs. Jastrow and Sulzberger recommended the awarding of the same, if awarded at all, to Mr. Louis H. Pendleton, for “Little Prince Almon.” By the vote of the members present, it was decided not to award the prize. (Szold, Minutes, 100)

80. Sarna, JPS, 86.

81. Szold, Minutes, 100.

82. See Cantalupo, “Letters,” 121–38.

83. Lori Harrison-Kahan, “‘A Grave Experiment’: Emma Wolf’s Marriage Plots and the Deghettoization of American Jewish Fiction,” American Jewish History 101, no. 1 (January 2017): 21.

84. Israel Zangwill, “A New Jewish Novelist,” Jewish Chronicle 1.453 (February 5, 1897): 19.

85. Zangwill to Wolf in Cantalupo, “Letters,” 128–29. Letter dated December 2, 1896, from 24 Oxford Road, Kilburn, N.W.

86. Zangwill to Wolf in Cantalupo, “Letters,” 129, 130. Letter dated February 5, 1897, from 24 Oxford Road, Kilburn, N.W., and letter dated July 2, 1897, from 24 Oxford Road, Kilburn, N.W.

87. Edna Nahshon, From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 20.

88. Zangwill to Wolf in Cantalupo, “Letters,” 129. Letter dated February 5, 1897, from 24 Oxford Road, Kilburn, N.W.

89. Szold, Minutes, 136.

90. Sarna, JPS, 79.

91. Nancy Huston Banks, “New York Ghetto,” Bookman, October 1896, 157–58. For a fuller discussion of this debate, see Harrison-Kahan, “Ghetto Realism—and Beyond.”

92. Cited in Sarna, JPS, 80.

93. Sarna, JPS, 235, 81.

94. Ibid., 82.

95. Emma Wolf, Review of Idyls of the Gass by Martha Wolfenstein, Jewish Comment, December 6, 1901, 2–3.

96. Ibid.

97. Sarna, JPS, 207.

98. Allen Lesser, “Life with Mother Too: Review of Harriet Levy’s 920 O’Farrell Street,” Menorah Journal 35 (1947): 322. On Levy’s submission for the JPS award, see Sarna, JPS, 207–8 and 337n72.

99. Gere, Intimate Practices, 220-221.

100. Sarna, JPS, 53.

101. Lucas Dietrich, “‘At the Dawning of the Twentieth Century’: W. E. B. Du Bois, A. C. McClurg & Co., and the Early Circulation of The Souls of Black Folk,” Book History 20 (2017): 315.

102. Israel Zangwill, Dreamers of the Ghetto (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1898), 20.

103. Dietrich, “‘At the Dawning of the Twentieth Century,’” 310.

104. Review of Heirs of Yesterday, Current Literature: A Magazine of Record and Review 30 (January–June 1901): 122.

105. Ibid.

106. “Books and Authors,” Review of Heirs of Yesterday, The Living Age, December 22, 1900, 792.

107. “Miss Emma Wolf,” Mechanics’ Institute Library Bulletin, September–October 1901, 1, 5.

108. “Miss Wolf’s New Story,” 1.

109. “The Library Table,” The Menorah Journal, Vol. xxxiii, no. 5 (1902), 350.

110. Joseph Lebowich, “Contemporary American Jewish Writers,” American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger, December 2, 1904, 15.

111. Zangwill to Wolf in Cantalupo, “Letters,” 134. Letter dated December 12, 1900, from 5 Elm Tree Road, St. John’s Wood, N.W.

112. See Harrison-Kahan, “‘A Grave Experiment.’”

113. Wolf’s relationship with the monthly New York magazine the Smart Set began in 1902 when they published two of her stories: “A Study in Suggestion” in March and “A Still Small Voice” in October. Her stories and novellas appeared in the magazine under four different editors. The other stories in the Smart Set include “The Courting of Drusilla West” (February 1903), “The End of the Story” (December 1904), “Tryst” (July 1905), “Farquhar’s Masterpiece” (March 1906), “The Conflict” (November 1906), “Louis d’Or” (August 1907), and “Father of Her Children” (June 1911). Throughout the seven years that Wolf published in the Smart Set, she addressed the intimate struggles of upper-class life and supplied the “cleverness” the magazine promised its readers while maintaining the integrity of her beliefs about the power of love and the importance of family life. In February 1909, the Century Magazine published Wolf’s short story “The Critical Miss Devine” in its memorial issue honoring Richard Watson Gilder, poet and long-time editor of that magazine.

114. Barbara Cantalupo, introduction to Emma Wolf’s Short Stories in “The Smart Set” (New York: AMS, 2010), xiv.

115. Harry Levi, Jewish Characters in Fiction: English Literature (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Chautauqua Society, 1911), 142.

116. Ferguson, “Leading Epigrammist,” 25. In a review of The Joy of Life (1896), a New York Times reviewer echoes Ferguson’s praise, noting Wolf’s “want of pretentiousness” and describing her method as “singularly unassuming” and “highly philosophical.” See Review of The Joy of Life, New York Times, June 5, 1897, 18.

117. American Hebrew, July 30, 1920, 275.

118. The American Jewess, the journal founded and edited by Rosa Sonneschein and published from April 1895 to August 1899, did attempt to fill this gap by appealing to an audience of middle-class Jewish American women. Unsurprisingly, then, the journal not only published some of Wolf’s writing but also profiled her in its September 1895 issue and featured her on the cover of the March 1896 issue. For more on the American Jewess, see Jack Porter, “Rosa Sonnenshein [sic] and the American Jewess, the First Independent English Language Jewish Women’s Journal in the United States,” American Jewish History 68, no. 1 (September 1978): 57–63.

119. Decker, Fortunes and Failures, 117–18. For further discussion of anti-Semitism in the United States and particularly in San Francisco, see Tony Fels, “Religious Assimilation in a Fraternal Organization: Jews and Freemasonry in Gilded-Age San Francisco,” American Jewish History 74, no. 4 (1985): 369–403; Naomi Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830–1914 (Philadelphia: JPS, 1984), 224–31; Naomi Cohen, “Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age: The Jewish View,” in Essential Papers on Jewish-Christian Relations in the United States, ed. Naomi Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1990); Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Ralph Mann, “Frontier Opportunity and the New Social History,” Pacific Historical Review 53, no. 4 (1984): 463–91; and Michael Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979).

120. Decker, Fortunes and Failures, 100. For further discussion of such prejudice, see Peter Decker, “Jewish Merchants in San Francisco: Social Mobility on the Urban Frontier,” American Jewish History 68, no. 4 (1979): 396–407.

121. See Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). In a pivotal scene in Wolf’s first novel, Other Things Being Equal, the characters attend a performance of The Merchant of Venice, starring Edwin Booth as Shylock. This episode in the novel was based on Booth’s famous 1889 performance as Shylock at the California Theater, which Wolf attended.

122. See Donald Pizer, American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

123. Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (New York: Signet, 1981), 37–38.

124. Elisa New, “My Favorite Anti-Semite: Frank Norris and the Most Horrifying Jew in American Literature,” Tablet, October 24, 2013, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/mcteague-frank-norris.

125. Matthew Baigell, The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877–1935 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 3.

126. “No Means of Support,” Puck, January 17, 1894, 379.

127. “Unprejudiced,” Puck, May 2, 1894, 166.

128. “Strictly Orthodox,” Puck, October 17, 1894, 131. For more on Puck, including on the magazine’s treatment of race and religion, see Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West, What Fools These Mortals Be! The Story of Puck: America’s First and Most Influential Magazine of Color Political Cartoons (San Diego, CA: IDW, 2014).

129. Kahn and West, What Fools These Mortals Be!, 207.

130. Quoted in Ferguson, “Leading Epigrammist,” 25.

131. It is worth noting that other early Jewish American novels depicting genteel, acculturated Jews are similarly understudied. Wolf’s work makes for a compelling comparison, for example, with Nathan Mayer’s novel Differences (1867), which is set during the Civil War and features a prosperous Jewish family who lives on a Southern plantation and owns slaves. Mayer’s plot, too, depends upon courtship and marriage, including Jewish-Christian intermarriage.

132. Lori Harrison-Kahan and Josh Lambert, “Finding Home: The Future of Jewish American Literary Studies,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 37, no. 2 (2012): 13.

133. “Library Table,” 350.

134. Emma Wolf, “One-Eye, Two-Eye, Three-Eye,” American Jewess 2, no. 6 (1896): 279–90.

135. Wolf’s short story “The Courting of Drusilla West,” published in the February 1903 issue of the Smart Set, is another strong example of this tendency. As Cantalupo discusses in the introduction to Emma Wolf’s Short Stories in “The Smart Set,” “The main character is a determined, single, professional woman who rejects all social expectations placed on her, especially marriage. . . . The story confronts the feminist call to the ‘New Woman’ to free herself from the bonds of marriage yet provides an alternative, if not altogether conventional, conclusion” (xi).

136. See Clare Virginia Eby, Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

137. See Harrison-Kahan, “‘A Grave Experiment.’”

138. Elizabeth Ammons, “Edith Wharton and Race,” in The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, ed. Millicent Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 80.

139. Levy’s Reuben Sachs also puts an interesting twist on the intermarriage plot. When the novel forecloses marriage between the Jewish couple Reuben Sachs and Judith Quixano due to differences of class, Judith ends up married to Bertie Lee-Harrison, a convert to Judaism.

140. Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 33, 31.

141. On the politics of respectability, see, for example, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

142. The depiction of Forrest, who is lame in one foot, is one of several, often subtle representations of physical disability in Wolf’s oeuvre. Given the ways that her own physical disability contributed to her career as a writer, Wolf’s work offers intriguing source material for scholarship in disability studies.

143. See Harrison-Kahan, “‘A Grave Experiment.’”

144. See Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), especially chapter 1.

145. Joseph M. Heller, “Forty Years Ago,” Jewish Veteran, June 1939, 15. On Heller as a source of pride in the Jewish community, see Seymour Brody, Jewish Heroes and Heroines of America (Hollywood, FL: Frederick Fell, 2004), 104; and “Col. Joseph M. Heller Dies,” Washington Post, October 12, 1943, 8.

146. “Israel’s Tithe to America,” San Francisco Call, July 24, 1898, 19.

147. Jeanne Abrams, “Remembering the Maine: The Jewish Attitude toward the Spanish-American War as Reflected in The American Israelite,” American Jewish History 76, no. 4 (June 1987), 440, 444. In Jews on the Frontier, Shari Rabin notes a similar impulse among nineteenth-century Jews, especially in the West, who “benefited from Manifest Destiny and . . . applied its language and concepts towards their own religious ends, mixing and matching it with Jewish diasporic and messianic traditions” (124).

148. Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, 18–19.

149. Zangwill to Wolf in Cantalupo, “Letters,” 133. Letter dated May 14, 1898, from 24 Oxford Road, Kilburn, N.W.

150. Zangwill to Wolf in Cantalupo, “Letters,” 134.

151. It is worth noting that when Wolf published the revised edition of Other Things Being Equal in 1916, she added a final line: “And so the future took them.” This change from the first edition leaves readers with an even greater sense of uncertainty about the couple’s future.

152. For more on the ending of Heirs of Yesterday in relation to realism, see Harrison-Kahan, “Ghetto Realism—and Beyond.”