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“A Grave Experiment”: Emma Wolf’s Marriage Plots and the Deghettoization of American Jewish Fiction

Most scholars of American literary history are familiar with William Dean Howells’s championing of ghetto fiction, especially the work of immigrant writer Abraham Cahan, for the way such writing exemplified the aesthetic principles of realism. For Howells, writers of “the Hebraic school” such as Cahan displayed an “instinct for reality,” and the streets of New York provided them with raw material that lent itself well to being rendered in gritty detail.1 The fiction of ghetto writers succeeds because they “persuade us that they have told the truth,” explained Howells.2 Yet scholars have paid considerably less attention to realist Jewish American writers whose work is set outside the ghetto. This essay focuses on one such writer, Emma Wolf, whose novels about middleclass Jewish life in late nineteenth-century San Francisco offer important alternatives to the ghetto genre, demonstrating not only the diversity of the Jewish experience in the United States, but also the diverse ways that Jewish writers have contributed to understandings of race, ethnicity, and religion in American culture. Despite Howells’ praise of ghetto fiction, the genre had its fair share of detractors in its day. In both the mainstream and Jewish press, critics accused Jewish writers of sacrificing truth for caricature and exoticism