West of the Ghetto

Blending history, biography, and literary criticism, author Lori Harrison-Kahan repositions the American West as a generative space for turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish women's literature. This book demonstrates that California-based writers Emma Wolf, Bettie Lowenberg, Harriet Lane Levy, Miriam Michelson, and Anna Strunsky played formative roles in Jewish American literary history. Shaped by ethno-religious, class, gender, and settler-colonial dynamics of San Francisco and the frontier, their works contrast dramatically with well-known New York ghetto stories. Mining print and archival sources, Harrison-Kahan narrates the obscured lives of these pioneering women and considers how literary communities--from bourgeois women's clubs to socialist bohemia--sustained them.