Heirs of Yesterday

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.-- (05/27/2020) 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.-- (05/27/2020) 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.-- (05/27/2020)

Barbara Cantalupo is professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University and editor of The Edgar Allan Poe Review. She is the author of Poe and the Visual Arts, which won the Poe Studies Association's Quinn award for a distinguished monograph on Poe, and she is the editor of Emma Wolf's Other Things Being Equal (Wayne State University Press, 2002) and Emma Wolf's Short Stories in the Smart Set. Lori Harrison-Kahan is associate professor of the practice of English at Boston College. She is the author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary and the editor of The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson (Wayne State University Press, 2019).