Heirs of yesterday

Author / Creator

Wolf, Emma, 1865-1932 author

Available as

Online

Summary

"This edition of Heirs of Yesterday (1900) fills a significant gap in American literary studies as well as American Jewish studies by making available an important and influential novel by Emma Wol...

"This edition of Heirs of Yesterday (1900) fills a significant gap in American literary studies as well as American Jewish studies by making available an important and influential novel by Emma Wolf (1865-1932), a San Francisco writer who has been called "the mother of American Jewish fiction." When Wolf published Heirs of Yesterday, her fourth novel, in 1900, the Jewish press immediately took notice. In its front-page review of the novel, 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 article stated. During 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 offers a very different narrative about turn-of-the-twentieth-century 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, comfortably middle-class, native-born Americans who interact socially and professionally with their gentile peers"--Provided by publisher.

Show More