53. Emma Wolf — Other Things Being Equal with Sarah Seltzer

AMY HELMES: Hey, everybody, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW: ...and I’m Kim Askew. Earlier this year we did an episode on Amy Levy, a British writer who is described as “the Jewish Jane Austen.” Almost 30 years later, an American named Emma Wolf was also writing about “the marriage plot” from the standpoint of a Jewish heroine. By depicting her characters within a more diverse and secular, upper-middle class society (rather than within the confines of tight-knit Jewish communities, or ghettos, as many other Jewish writers were doing) Wolf offered a different perspective on Jewish people in America at the turn of the 20th century.

AMY: She wrote five novels, all of which are set in the San Francisco Bay Area. And that alone really intrigues me, actually, because you just don’t often find books set in San Francisco in that time period.

KIM: Yes, having lived in San Francisco, I love that aspect of it, too. (It’s also actually reminding me of Sui Sin Far, the Chinese American author we did an episode on last year  -- many of her stories were also set in the Bay Area, and she was writing around the same time as Emma Wolf. I wonder if they knew each other?

AMY: Yeah, I don’t know, but they did, at one point, have the same publisher, A.C. McClurg and Co., so it’s possible? Wolf’s books were published by the most popular presses of her day, thereby earning her the nickname, “the mother of American Jewish fiction.” (Why does nobody know of her?

KIM: Right?

AMY: Crazy.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: An esteemed friend also called her “the best product of American Judaism since Emma Lazarus,” (and Lazarus, of course, wrote “The New Colossus” which is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty). So sadly, this Emma, Emma Wolf, is not at all well-known today, and after reading one of her most popular novels, Other Things Being Equal, it seems quite surprising and unfortunate that she’s been completely forgotten.

KIM: Yeah, absolutely. I really loved this book, so I’m glad that we’re going to be able to shine some light on it today. And I also love that we have a special guest to discuss it with us! It’s someone from our distant past, right, Amy?

AMY: Yeah, I can’t wait to reconnect with her and see what she thought about this book also — so let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[introductory music]

KIM: We first connected with today’s guest, Sarah Seltzer, back in the Aughts when Amy and I were writing a blog together about book-to-film adaptations. It was called Romancing the Tome, and she was one of our guest bloggers (having her own very popular blog at that time). Since then, she’s been writing up a storm for MUCH bigger outlets. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal, Jezebel, Rolling Stone and Salon among many others. She also has served as deputy editor at Flavorwire, and she was editor of the Jewish parenting online outlet Kvellar, and these days, she’s the executive editor at Lilith magazine, an online magazine that amplifies Jewish feminist voices. Sarah, welcome to the show!

SARAH: Thank you so much for having me on! And it's so wonderful to reconnect with you both after all these years and our time together on the early days of the book blogosphere.

KIM: Yes.

AMY: Okay, so when we initially discussed having you on the show, we were going back and forth, trying to figure out which author we might feature, and Emma Wolf’s name eventually came up because you had retweeted an article on her that was written for Lilith by Josh Lambert. And Kim and I had never heard of her before, so we thought, “Hey, she might be a good choice.” Had you known of Emma Wolf prior to Josh’s article? 

SARAH: I hadn't at all. And you know, Lilith does a lot of the same kind of excavating that you do on this podcast, where we're always looking for stories of political figures, feminist figures, artists and literary figures, who have kind of been forgotten by time who were may have been, you know, important during their time. (Women, of course, and for us, usually Jewish women), and who are going to be really interesting to our readers. So when Josh approached me (Josh was my teacher at a writing retreat years ago) about Emma Wolf, I was so so excited because not only am I always looking for Jewish heroines who have been lost to time, but I love (as you both know so well) I love novels of manners. I love Jane Austen. I love Edith Wharton. And the idea that there was this young Jewish woman who was kind of a prodigy writing in the style of these writers and whose books were really good and really popular was just so exciting to me.

KIM: During Wolf’s lifetime, the Chicago Daily Tribune had prophesied that she might “someday rank high among American writers of fiction.” Any idea as to why she’s not more known?

SARAH: I think there are a bunch of reasons. So one of the things that Josh really highlighted well in his piece was that she she kind of doesn't fit any of the expected categories. So during this ’70s when all these feminist writers were being rediscovered, she was kind of overlooked because she wasn't writing radical feminist work. She wasn't uppending notions of class and gender at all. And also her characters aren't Jewish (as he said) in a way that fits neat Jewish Studies narratives. They're not new immigrants ... they don't eat pickles ... they are more likely to use French Phrases than Yiddish ones. So that's one reason that she might be overlooked. Another is that, you know, I think that her books are really, really lovely and I really have enjoyed her prose style and her storytelling, but they are sort of small in scope. And so as we all know (and you know from this podcast and the work that you do) that sometimes when women write novels that are small in scope, they don't get seen as really important, and so they get lost to time. 

AMY: Exactly. Getting ready for this episode, it’s always hard to find information on the lost ladies that we feature on our show, but Emma Wolf, I thought, was even harder to sort of pin down. There wasn’t a wealth of information on her on the internet. Luckily, literary scholars Barbara Cantalupo and Lori Harrison-Kahan did a lot of legwork to uncover more details of her life. (And most of the things we’re going to be mentioning about her bio are, thankfully, you know… they did the research on this.) So what we do know about Emma is that she was born in 1865, the fourth of eleven children. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from the Alsace region of France and they were doing quite well for themselves by the time they were living in the Bay Area. Her father owned several cigar and general merchandise stores in San Francisco, and business was booming thanks to the gold rush. So they got to live in very fashionable neighborhoods (at various points they were living in Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights and Laurel Heights). They vacationed at summer resorts in the Santa Cruz mountains and they had servants running the home. But when Emma was around 13 years old her dad died unexpectedly while away on a business trip. So Emma’s mother (who had 10 surviving children at that point) she was able to fall back on the wealth from her late husband’s businesses, but even still, there was less financial stability for them after that.

KIM: Wolf attended the San Francisco Girls’ High School and one of her childhood friends was Rebecca Bettleheim who would go on to become an important Jewish feminist leader. The two girls often confided in one another about the difference they felt being Jewish in upper-class San Francisco society. Sarah, do we know anything else about what it would have been like for Wolf as a Jew in San Francisco in the late 19th century? 

SARAH: So in a lot of ways, and one of the things that Josh touches on in his piece, is that this pocket of society back then mirrors what a lot of other Jews would have experienced sort of later in the 20th century, including like my grandparents. It seems very familiar to me where they're, you know, in separate social circles, but their social lives imitate and are similar to non-Jews. So they have their clubs and their social events, and you know, they have the servants and they have the social world. Wolf was part of this women's club movement, which enabled her to meet with other women, and they could talk about ideas and books, and they went to synagogue and these German synagogues … this is something that if you live in New York, you can sort of recognize the difference between like, there are Sephardic synagogues and German synagogues. They were these beautiful early American synagogues that were started by Jews who came from German-speaking countries in Europe and they were more church-like, to put it bluntly, than you might expect. They had organs, they had stained glass. So again, another way that sort of the Jewish sphere is similar to the Christian sphere, and there's social mixing, but there's also social antisemitism. And I think that's probably what Emma Wolf and her friend Rebecca Bettelheim are talking about at school where, you know, there's a level of equality, but it only goes so far. And there's probably a lot of casual social antisemitism that they have to deal with. And that's where the stigma around intermarriage would come up.

AMY: Also, I never had really equated San Francisco with necessarily having this thriving Jewish community.

SARAH: Me neither, I had no idea.

AMY: In 1895 they had already elected their first Jewish mayor.

KIM: That does seem incredible.

SARAH: Yeah.

AMY: And Jews were making up nine percent of San Francisco’s population by 1855. So you know, you think about the Gold Rush, and I just didn’t factor Jews into that equation.

KIM: Nope.

Sarah: Nope.

AMY: So another factor worth noting about Wolf: she had a congenital physical impairment of some sort (and it was exacerbated by polio). It limited her mobility. So she was confined to the house more than other young women of her day, and so reading and writing was something she was more at liberty to focus on. One of her other seven sisters, Alice, wrote also and had a novel published, but once she got married, her writing career effectively ended. So Emma, who never married, was able to make her writing career a priority.

KIM: Oh, I’m curious about the sister’s novel too now!

AMY: Yeah.

KIM: Emma’s first short story was published when she was only 12 and she recalled in an interview later, “There was no joy in the experience. I cried bitterly over the affair.” (So apparently it was not her decision to have it published… a very bold cousin stole the story and gave it to the neighborhood paper thinking she was doing Emma a favor.” Emma, though, actually found it humiliating and thought her neighbors were probably laughing at “her little love story.” 

AMY: It does seem like a bit of a violation, you know, as if somebody took your diary. I can see why that would be embarrassing.

KIM: It could go either way. I guess it depends on the person.

AMY: And the story.

KIM: And the story, that’s true.

AMY: But that said, by the age of 27 she was feeling a lot more confident about putting her “love stories” out into the world. Her first novel, Other Things Being Equal, (the book we’re discussing today) was originally published in 1892 and you could say the controversial plot may be one of the reasons it was quite popular at the time. So Sarah, we always give this hard part to our guests, but would you like to give a quick, spoiler-free summary of what the book’s about?

SARAH: Sure, so it's in some ways a classic love triangle with all these social elements thrown in. The heroine’s name is Ruth. She's a young, only child, a Jewish girl living in in San Francisco in the milieu that we've just discussed, and she discovers early on that her mother is a hysteric, and this very handsome kind Christian doctor, Dr. Kemp, comes in and takes on her mother's case, and they form a friendship and an attachment at the same time. Ruth also has a cousin named Louis, who is very urbane and intelligent, and the family had kind of always assumed that they would be a match eventually. And Ruth grows torn (over a series of social events and excursions) between her attachment to her family and making her parents — particularly her father, who really raised her — her loyalty to them and her interest in this new doctor figure in her life.

AMY: So getting back to the mom’s hysterical...I don’t know what you would call that. She reminds me a lot of the Jane Austen metaphor…

SARAH: Mrs. Bennett.

AMY: Mrs. Bennett, yeah! Maybe not quite so comical.

KIM: And not quite so irritating.

AMY: Yeah. But I do think it’s interesting that she starts off with the mom basically having a nervous breakdown or whatever, because that particular malady feels so insulting to women, traditionally, and yet, in this main heroine, Ruth, the daughter, we see somebody who’s much more in command of herself. 

KIM: It’s a good contrast, yeah.

AMY: So what do we think of Ruth in general?

SARAH: I think she's kind of this very classic, romantic heroine. She's a bit independent-minded, but she's not a real rebel. And she, you know, is very, very caring towards her family, and she takes her mom's hysteria very seriously. Also being kind of sweetly teasing to her and saying, like, “You're gonna be the baby now and I'll be the mom.” She's a very appealing character. She sometimes verges a little bit close to being what we would call now I guess, a “Mary Sue” — being a little too precious. She doesn't quite get there, which I like. Wolf was writing for the sensibilities of her time, but I think it's interesting that even in our time, she manages to keep her grounded enough that we really like her and sympathize with her.

AMY: I think that's key. She's like the dutiful daughter, which can be so annoying in some contexts, but she's got just the right amount of gumption, and she does disobey them periodically throughout the book. She will be sneaky and you know, do things that she knows that they kind of wouldn't want her to do. She has great little retorts. She can hold her own.

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: And she's funny at times, but I don't know if it's that she's funny or that Emma’s funny. I think some of the exposition .. there are some little snarky things in there that I did love. 

KIM: Mm-hmm.

SARAH: There are those little, you know, sunbeams of humor that, you’re right, kind of fall throughout the whole book.

AMY: One of my favorite Ruth scenes is actually towards the beginning when her cousin Louis (who's one part of the love triangle) he insists on walking her home, walking her to her door, and she just takes a stand against that. “I can get myself there.” Like, “No, thank you.” And especially back then when you did have a chaperone…

KIM: Yeah, she’s very independent.

AMY: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, let’s not waste any more time before we get into Dr. Kemp.

KIM: Yeah!

AMY: He is the O.G. McDREAMY. (I would say Patrick Dempsey has some competition here). And I loved the whole romance and the setup for it. I think Emma Wolf was masterful at setting up this attraction. I was all-in; every time he and Ruth were in the same room my heart did start to pick up a little bit, you know? I could picture him as pretty hot.

KIM: The doctor archetype! The healer!

AMY: Yes, exactly. And it’s kind of critical for this book -- you have to feel invested in the romance to care later at the obstacle that’s going to be thrown in their path.

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: So Sarah or Kim, were there any particular moments where you felt like Wolf truly nailed that chemistry between Ruth and the doctor? 

SARAH: I mean, when you first see the doctor, one of the first scenes, he literally hypnotizes the mom…

KIM: Yes!

AMY: I forgot about that!

SARAH: I mean, so immediately, you're like, “Who is this guy?” You know, he's, he's a very powerful character from the beginning. But I think what Wolf does such a good job in is that it really starts out as this friendship that you really buy right away where they, you know, they're both concerned about her mom. And then he draws her in in his concern for his other patients, and kind of gives her a moral education. And she realizes that there's this whole world out there of people she can help. And she, you know, kind of rises to the occasion, and helps him, and they become partners, really, in this endeavor of visiting his various patients around town. And from there, you see their attraction grow. And Wolf also does a really good job of ... there are a lot of long conversations between the two of them, and they're not romantic conversations, but you see, the interplay, the back and forth, that they really get each other and are also kind of unafraid to speak their minds when they disagree. In addition to the quickening heartbeats, there's a strong foundation to the relationship that really works nicely and is a very believable romance.

AMY: For me, it was just these little slight, subtle moments between them. And the one that comes to mind that was just like “shiver all over” for me was, when they go to the theater, she's getting a wrap on or a cloak, and he helps her fasten it at her neck, and he kind of stoops down and is, you know, studiously fastening the tie at her neck and you could just picture it as this moment. But then there's also these kind of rom-com moments, too. So at one point, his carriage drives by the house and she had been in the kitchen helping with something and she runs outside to say hi, and she's all flustered when she comes back in but then the housekeeper tells her that she had a speck of scrambled egg on her cheek the whole time that she had been talking with him. So, like, a little “Bridget Jones-y” there.

SARAH: Very Bridget Jones. And she’s wearing a flannel day dress and her hair is in braids, and she kind of realizes after they've had this conversation that this is how she's presented herself.

AMY: And also, we should note that Dr. Kemp is not a fan of mayonnaise.

KIM: No.

AMY: That was one of the funniest parts of the book for me. He goes off on this whole tirade about mayonnaise…

KIM: That was hilarious…

AMY: … the hazards of mayonnaise on people’s health, which made me laugh. So next time you’re making a turkey sandwich, think twice about...

SARAH: Go easy on the mayonnaise.

KIM: Yeah, I’m a mustard person.

SARAH: I am, too. But I think what was interesting, also, about that scene is that he kind of makes a casually antisemitic comment after he's complaining about mayonnaise. And she doesn't really get mad at him, but her presence kind of recalls him to himself. He's embarrassed. So in that way, she’s kind of giving him a moral education, too.

KIM: Exactly. I think she does help him, also, develop his morality and ethics as well. So they’re kind of growing together, which I think is a cool moment.

AMY: On the flip side of Dr. Kemp, we have Ruth's cousin Louis, who we've mentioned. He also wants to marry her. So if Dr. Kemp is “McDreamy” Louis is “McPatronising.” Whenever I think of these type of characters, I always go back to “Cecil” from A Room With a View. Ruth is way more civil to him than I wanted her to be. How did you respond to Louis as you were reading, Sarah?

SARAH: I think the “Cecil” comparison is so good. I have, over time, become more sympathetic to this kind of character than I was, you know. You feel bad for him. He is horribly patronizing. He kind of doesn't know how to be charming or light. He doesn't really have a sense of humor, which is unforgivable. But at the same time, you see that his dreams are kind of slipping away before his eyes. Louis is the first one to kind of figure out what's going on before even Ruth herself, I think, knows that she's in love with Dr. Kemp. Louis sees the writing on the wall, and he starts making these kind of snide comments that are so obnoxious, but also, you know, they come from a place of pain for him, and he ends up, you know, being there for the family no matter what. But yeah, he's a very difficult character. He's a very good foil.

KIM: Yes, he is. So as we mentioned (I think we mentioned) Dr. Kemp is a Unitarian. It means that nobody is even considering him as a potential suitor for Ruth (and so it feels “safe” in some ways for Ruth to be hanging out with him unchaperoned even though we’re kind of like, “Hmmm.”) Wolf doesn’t really focus on the family’s religious practices too much (we don’t see them in the synagogue, for example, as we did in Amy Levy’s Rueben Sachs), but she does draw a cultural distinction. For example, the Levices are going to a party hosted by a Christian family, and Ruth’s cousin, Jennie, is really annoyed by this. She wonders, “What does possess your parents to mix so much with Christians?” So Ruth responds to this: “Fellow-feeling, I suppose. We all dance and talk alike; and as we do not hold services at receptions, wherein lies the difference?”

AMY: Yeah, but cousin Jennie’s not buying that. She responds: “There is a difference; and the Christians know it as well as we Jewish people. Not only do they know it, but they show it in countless ways: and the difference, they think, is all to their credit. For my part, I always feel as if they looked down on us, and I should like to prove to them how we differ on that point. I have enough courage to let them know I consider myself as good as the best of them.” So Jennie’s also one of the first people to raise her eyebrows at seeing Ruth and Dr. Kemp together. She’s also quite the gossip. Wolf describes Jennie by saying, “almost everyone who knew her agreed that a grain of flour was a whole cake, baked and iced, to Mrs. Lewis’s imagination.” I loved that line. And so basically, once Jennie starts to eyeball these two, she’s like a dog with a bone. She’s just not going to let it go.

KIM: Yeah. And then the family’s Jewishness also comes up when Ruth, who is an avid theater-lover, goes to see a production of “The Merchant of Venice.” She’s been waiting to see how the character of Shylock is interpreted and she’s incredibly moved by the performance. For her the play hinges on this character, and at the same time I’d say she’s fairly disgusted by the character of Shylock’s daughter, Jessica. Sarah, how do you think this play ties in with the overall story Wolf’s trying to tell?

SARAH: Well, I think that the primary way the play is used is that it's about loyalty or disloyalty between, you know, a Jewish daughter and her father in this hostile world. So it sets up the conflict that comes later on when Ruth's father, who is a wonderful character, opposes the idea of her marrying Dr. Kemp. And Ruth really feels that it's important to be loyal to her father, whereas Jessica runs away from her father, steals his money and converts and marries a Christian. So I think that's sort of the obvious setup there. “The Merchant of Venice” is such a tricky play it; it's really hard to argue that it's not like a virulently antisemitic play that's been used for, you know, centuries and centuries to justify antisemitism. And then there's also ... there's one or two moments where the character becomes so sympathetic (the character of Shylock) and a lot depends on the portrayal of it. And I think it's interesting that Wolf kind of picked up on that, you know, even back then, that she opened the chapter about “Merchant of Venice” by saying, you know, Ruth had seen various portrayals of Shylock that turned him into this greedy, horrible character and sort of a pathetic character and that this one was the one where she just saw him as so sad and sympathetic and grieving his daughter throughout the whole play, and she just can't think of anything but how sorry she feels for him. I think that's done to really, you know, draw out both her sympathy with her own father, her sympathetic tendencies as a character in general, her compassion, and also her ultimate loyalty to being Jewish, which is kind of what gets tested by her love of Dr. Kemp.

AMY: There’s an anecdote from an interview Wolf did in an 1901 with The San Francisco Examiner where she credited a grammar school teacher (Yay, teachers!) for helping influence her writing. She said the teacher had critiqued her tendency to use “superfluous language” in her composition, and apparently, the teacher said, “Emma, your balconies are bigger than your houses.” Such a great way to explain what’s wrong there. She noted that “Ever since, I have tried to avoid verbiage.” Do you think we see that restraint on display in this book?

SARAH: I think so. I think her style reminds me a lot of Wharton's in that there is a restraint. Like the opening passage of the book, on the whole, has a bit of flowery description, but I think she has these sort of one-liners like the one you mentioned, about the gossipy cousin and, you know, “every grain of flour was a whole cake” that are just really like, really get to the point, in a very succinct way, that are really a pleasure to read. So I think her writing style is very accessible and not dated for the most part, which is so nice to discover when I read it. You know, she's not describing them going to synagogue or celebrating the holidays, but she does have these little lines where she kind of pinpoints her social worlds in a really nice way. One of the things that I learned, also, from the piece that Josh Lambert wrote for Lilith about Emma Wolf was that there was this trend of writing that was called at the time, quote, unquote, “ghetto realism,” which was about these immigrant families, you know, squashed together in tenements on the Lower East Side. And they were kind of potboiler-y and, you know, a little bit othering, and full of stereotypes, you know, although there's some good writing to be found, of course, in all these genres, and good stories, but that those early plays and books have influenced actually a lot of more serious Jewish writing that came from there, and that they're, you know, there's this idea (especially until Philip Roth, maybe any of those guys came along) that the quote-unquote, “real Jewish novel” describes these kind of hard luck difficult, more sordid, more dramatic, more tragic scenes, in a specific area of the country, a specific milieu of the newly arrived, immigrant kind of clashing. What makes Emma Wolf's work so interesting is that it's, like we've said so many times now, there's really no difference between Emma Wolf's Jews and what someone might write about, you know, any other group of well-heeled people living in the United States at the time, and that, you know, there are a few different things like, they have different holidays, and they go to their services and their own social clubs, but otherwise, they have no different characteristics. In fact, when Dr. Kemp, when he tries to throw a stereotype out, Ruth, (and Emma) will correct him and say, “Look, we're not really that different. And, you know, in the areas where Jews haven't achieved as much as Christians is because we haven't been given the chance.” And she kind of leaves him speechless with that story. So it is really different from other Jewish literature, and that's why it's kind of its own branch.

AMY: And if anybody's listened to our previous episode on Amy Levy, I think Emma Wolf's is much lighter.

KIM: Yes. I feel like Emma wolf is more “Jane Austen,” and Amy Levy is more “George Eliot.” 

AMY: Oh, yeah, that’s actually a really good way to put it.

KIM: It's a great read, but it's not dark, or maybe as existential as Amy Levy.

AMY: There is another ... when you were talking about some of the other American Jewish writers who are writing more about the “ghetto,” one that comes to mind that is also on our list for a future episode at some point is named Anzia Yezierska. I think I saw in Joshua's article, he might have mentioned that in America, you weren't going to have a ton of super wealthy Jewish people at this time period. They're going to probably identify more with Anzia Yezierska’s books…

SARAH: Yes, yes. 

AMY: … than with Emma Wolf's books. At the same time, though, I do think there would be some sort of enjoying that aspirational, you know, seeing a wealthy Jewish family. I don't know. So it's interesting.

SARAH: Yeah, it's really interesting. And what Josh points out is how a lot of these debates that Wolf brings up in her work are super relevant today, especially maybe like one generation ago, but still today. I mean, intermarriage is still a hot topic, particularly, you know, in terms of having children. And there are still some people out there who think that, you know, intermarrying is a slow betrayal of Jewish peoplehood. I've done all this writing and read all this writing about organizations like Birthright Israel and these other Jewish youth groups that are basically existing to foster marriage between Jews so that they'll have Jewish babies, and that is, you know, partly an effect of the Holocaust. So it's different in that sense, from what Wolf's writing about, which is just about, you know, early assimilation and prejudice and antisemitism. And this is more of a response to a genocide, but it's still there. And this whole concept of: we will go to parties with our Christian friends, we will socialize with them, we will be friends with them, we will visit them, but we're not going to ever go to church with them and we're not going to mix our families together by getting married -- is very, very relevant today still, in a way that it probably wasn't relevant when it was published. just fascinating.

KIM: Oh, wow! Yeah.

AMY: Like we said, that's the crux of the problem. Once Ruth and “Dr. Hottie” finally acknowledge their feelings for one another, the only thing that's left to complete their happiness is to get her father's permission to marry. And Dr. Kemp and Ruth's father have been great friends for a very long time. And even though Ruth's dad had encouraged her to spend a lot of time with the doctor when he thought it was like an innocent, platonic thing, he is dismayed to discover that they've fallen in love.

KIM: The naivete!

AMY: How could it have happened?!! [laughing] And he's such a kind man, so as the reader, you have nothing but respect for him. I mean, it breaks his heart, but he explains why he cannot in good conscience consent to the marriage. And he does talk some common sense, I think.

SARAH: You know what it kind of reminded me of? (And I know we're doing lots of fun literary references) but it almost reminded me of when Jane Eyre finds out that Rochester has another wife, and he proposes that they just go away and live together in a foreign country without getting married. And she says it would be great at first, but it would wither because we're living a lie, and we can't really ever come home or be welcomed in polite society. And you wouldn't, we would basically lose our love for each other, and our respect for each other. And I think that that's not exactly what Mr. Levice is saying, but he's saying that if you become social outcasts and you have nowhere that you belong and you face all these pressures, because of your marriage, on both sides, it's going to make things really difficult for you as a young couple. Every decision is going to be fraught. And you know, you may not find the social welcome that you expect. And how can a young marriage (even if there's a lot of love) kind of stand on its own that way without a social world to embrace it? He's warning them that they may not be able to withstand that. And it's it's very real, I think.

AMY: Yeah, heartbreaking. You’re rooting for them, but everything he’s saying rings true.

KIM: Yeah. It's not like “Romeo and Juliet,” where it's just mean. He is trying to do what he thinks is best for her. It's pure-hearted. So Ruth is forced to decide between the man she's in love with and respecting the father, whom she completely adores. She knows that if she were to break her father's heart, she could never be truly happy married to Dr. Kemp. It's really heartbreaking, but is a non-starter for Ruth. She just can't do that to her father.

AMY: Yes, and there are a few more twists to the story en route to the ending (and we’re not going to spoil it), but I don’t think Wolf sugarcoats this debate at all on interfaith marriage. The answers are not simple. And they’re (like you said), they’re still not simple even today.

SARAH: And that's, in some ways, why it reminds me so much of Wharton. Because Wharton did such a good job of (in all her books) of juxtaposing the love, or the feelings that our characters have with the reality of a very hostile society. And, I think, you know, if I were to critique Wolf’s writing at all, I would say that I wish that we could see more of that. You have Jennie, and you have some of the gossiping eyes on Ruth and Dr. Kemp, but I was craving more of like both of their social worlds. Like, it would have been great if Ruth had gone somewhere with Dr. Kemp and experienced some antisemitism, or, you know, if Dr. Kemp was uncomfortable at a Jewish function, and you got to really see what Ruth's father was saying, because you know, it's there. 

KIM: Yeah.

SARAH: You're kind of filling in the blanks as a reader, but yeah, I mean, I think there's this essential dilemma here where some happiness is going to get lost either way. I think the question is what happiness is it?

KIM: Yes. So with respect to Emma Wolf, not everyone in the Jewish community was complimentary of this book. Some people accused her of breaking with her ancestral religion and undermining her faith. But when the novel was reprinted (and that was in 1916), Emma Wolf wrote a foreword to the book in which she said “The humanest love knows no sect.” (Also, we should note that members of Emma’s own family married outside their faith, including her sister, Alice. So she was maybe writing from some personal experience). Was there anything else that really struck you about this novel that we maybe haven’t mentioned yet?

SARAH: You know, I think we've mentioned most of what really struck me, which was, again, how fresh the writing is, how palpable the romance is, and how real the dilemma is. It talks about, you know, there are elements of it that are a little bit dated. But I mean, I know everyone in my family is always like, “I wish Jane Austen had written another book,” or “I wish there were even more in print Edith Whartons.” I mean, we all buy out-of-print Edith Wharton novels to read when we're feeling a particular craving, and it's amazing to come across this writer who is writing in that vein, and and maybe it's not quite as masterful as those writers, but it has a lot of the elements that make them pleasurable to read, and thought provoking. It's just a great find.

AMY: Yeah, it's very satisfying. And like you said earlier, it feels like a modern novel, too. 

SARAH: Yep.

AMY: Wolf did not always write about Jewish themes in her books, but she does have another novel, Heirs of Yesteryear [ed: Yesterday], which is about a young Jewish man who attempts to pass as gentile in order to further his social and professional advancement in the world. That one was just reissued last fall with an introduction by those two scholars I mentioned at the top of the episode (Cantalupo and Harrison-Kahan). And I actually purchased that one after reading Other Things Being Equal, because I just really enjoyed the first book, so I want to read more. I will point out also that Heirs of Yesteryear [ed: Yesterday]  was turned down by the main Jewish publishing company in America, they didn't want to have anything to do with it. 

KIM: Why? 

AMY: Because it's too controversial. They wanted books that, you know, were just all positive. They didn't want to even go there. I think,

KIM: Sarah, are there other books that you recommend that we read? Is there, like, a second book that you think we should read next by her or...

SARAH: I think Heirs of Yesterday is the other one that…

AMY: Oh, is it Heirs of Yesterday? Did I say it wrong?

SARAH: Yeah. I haven’t read that one yet.

AMY: It seems like that’s her other major title that you want to turn to next, for sure.

KIM: Okay.

SARAH: And I think just to go back to what you were saying before, that the publishing house ... she did find was a small Chicago publisher that actually ended up publishing pioneering works of Black and Asian American literature. So it was sort of, I think, a publishing house that was open minded.

KIM: That’s so interesting, wow. Yeah, we should look into that more.

AMY: So Emma also had started up an epistolary friendship with a Jewish writer from England named Israel Zangwill. (He was nicknamed “the Dickens of the Ghetto” so he was kind of a big name in England and America.) They never met in person, however, Wolf initiated a correspondence by sending him one of her other novels and he responded, “I am so accustomed to getting bad books sent to me that it was an added pleasure to find a gift one could be sincerely grateful for.” I love his honesty there. I mean, that just goes to show … sounds like he’s a pretty blunt guy and he seems to have liked it.) And in that same letter he goes on to compare her work to that of Emma Lazarus, as we mentioned at the top of the show.

KIM: Right. And then for the last 15 years of her life, Emma Wolf was basically confined to her room in a wheelchair. She died at the age of 67. You know, we compare things to Jane Austen and say, you know, maybe it's not quite as good as Jane Austen, but we're talking about Jane Austen. I mean, this is a wonderful book that's very much worth reading and better than a lot of things out there. 

SARAH: Absolutely.

KIM: So highly recommended by all of us to read this.

AMY: All right, so Sarah, thank you so much for dropping by to talk about it with us…it was so good to reconnect with you!

KIM: Absolutely!

SARAH: I agree. I was thrilled that you guys reached out. So thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. 

KIM: Anytime. Sarah, you’re the best. 

SARAH: Take care!

AMY: That’s all for today’s episode. We’ll be back next week with an episode all about the children’s book author Dare Wright. I’m so excited for this one; her life story is absolutely fascinating so you don’t want to miss this one!

KIM: Yes, I’m so excited for this, too. And to keep on top of all our upcoming episodes, be sure to go to lostladiesoflit.com and subscribe to our monthly newsletters. And keep those five-star reviews coming! We love them. Thanks so much for listening, everybody!

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.