Heirs of Yesterday

Praise for Heirs of Yesterday

This book returns to print a revealing novel by the foremost American Jewish woman novelist of her time, Emma Wolf. In their remarkable introduction, Cantalupo and Harrison-Kahan disclose new details concerning Wolf’s life and career in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, her creative circle of Jewish women friends, the subtle antisemitism that she experienced, and her complicated relationship with the men of the Jewish Publication Society. A wondrous contribution to early American Jewish literature.

—Jonathan D. Sarna, University Professor and Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University

"Cantalupo and Harrison-Kahan have crafted an impressive volume on the work and import of Emma Wolf. More than just an excellent description of Wolf’s contributions to literature, Heirs of Yesterday shows us the important intersections between gender, region, and history. Only a woman such as Emma Wolf, writing as she did during San Francisco’s early history, can offer us perspectives and understandings all too often missed in scholarly writing. The footnotes themselves offer an extraordinary tutorial for those interested in a nuanced understanding of Wolf’s extraordinary work."

—Marc Dollinger, professor at San Francisco State University and author of Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s

A powerful corrective to common historical narratives of Jewish American identity and prevailing conceptions of turn-of-the-century Jewish fiction, this beautiful edition is also a substantial work of scholarly recovery. The thorough and rigorous introduction is a valuable resource, giving Emma Wolf the attention she richly deserves.

—Jennifer S. Tuttle, Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health, University of New England

Heirs of Yesterday

Emma Wolf

Courtesy of Donald Auslen

Heirs of Yesterday

Emma Wolf

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY BARBARA CANTALUPO AND LORI HARRISON-KAHAN

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2020 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

ISBN 978-0-8143-4668-6 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-8143-4667-9 (hardback); ISBN 978-0-8143-4669-3 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948586

Wayne State University Press

Leonard N. Simons Building

4809 Woodward Avenue

Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface

Barbara Cantalupo

Introduction

Barbara Cantalupo and Lori Harrison-Kahan

A Note on the Text

Heirs of Yesterday (1900)

Emma Wolf

Notes

About the Editors

Illustrations

Emma Wolf’s parents’ gravestone

Emma Wolf’s gravestone

Simon Wolf, Emma’s father

Wolf family portrait

Emma Wolf’s handwritten poem to her niece

Emma Wolf on the cover of the American Jewess (March 1896)

Emma Wolf’s letter to Judge Mayer Sulzberger, chairman of the Jewish Publication Society (May 8, 1893)

Cover of Heirs of Yesterday (1900)

Acknowledgments

The late Donald Auslen (1932–2018), great-nephew of Emma Wolf, shared Wolf family history and photographs, and we are very grateful for his generosity. We were helped in our research by Tim Wilson, librarian, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library; Jeff Thomas, San Francisco Public Library; Rachel Misrati, archivist, National Library of Israel; Meri-Jane Rochelson, professor of English, Florida International University; Susan Bernstein, research professor, Boston University; Jennifer Tuttle, professor of English, University of New England; Lucas Dietrich, adjunct professor of humanities, Lesley University; Kimberly Chabot Davis, professor of English, Bridgewater State University; Elif Armbruster, associate professor of English, Suffolk University; Carmen Cisneros, office manager, Home of Peace Cemetery; Jessica Lydon, associate archivist, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University; and the Boston College Interlibrary Loan staff, especially Anne Kenny and Shannon McDowell. Thanks go to Doug Hochstetler, director of academic affairs at Penn State Lehigh Valley, for his support of the project. For their help in transcribing the novel, we thank Maggie McQuade, undergraduate research fellow, Boston College; Sara Roth, administrative assistant, Penn State Lehigh Valley; and Liu Tingu, student, Penn State Lehigh Valley. We also thank Anne Taylor for her careful copyediting of the manuscript and Sophia Pandelidis for double-checking the transcription. We are grateful for the translation expertise of Jessica Kirzane, who assisted with footnotes and offered feedback on the introduction. Finally, we thank Kathy Wildfong, Annie Martin, Kristin Harpster, Kristina Stonehill, Emily Nowak, Jamie Jones, and the rest of the staff at Wayne State University Press for their commitment to publishing works by Emma Wolf and other Jewish women writers.

Preface

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

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

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

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

Emma Wolf’s Parents’ Gravestone.

Photo by Barbara Cantalupo.

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

Emma Wolf’s Gravestone.

Photo by Barbara Cantalupo.

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

Barbara Cantalupo

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Simon Wolf, Emma’s father.

Courtesy of Donald Auslen.

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