Backstory

In her late seventies, Harriet Lane Levy, 1867-1950, Berkeley alumna, single, active in artistic circles, and widely-traveled, wrote a memoir of her girlhood in San Francisco. Her literary and journalistic skills intact, she views the house, street, and city where she grew up with world-wise eyes. The class and gender prejudices she describes draw my knowing nods. Should my muse whisper, "1043 Sentinel, 1924-1944," I'd disconnect the phone and Internet, cleanse my datebook, and with 920 O'Farrell Street as prototype, revisit the house, street, and city where I lived from birth to college.

Synopsis

Harriet Lane Levy was the youngest and least conventional of the three daughters of Henriette [Michelson] and Benjamin Levy, a successful Forty-niner. With wince-making intimacy she records her own idiosyncrasies and those of family members, neighbors, servants, classmates, and suitors. In so doing, she bares the diversity of that polyglot metropolis and the social insecurities of its status-hungry immigrants. She takes particular delight in satirizing the Jewish social ladder: "Polacks" [Polish Prussians, like the Levys] irrevocably cast beneath "Bairn" [Bavarians]. In 1906, when O'Farrell Street vanished in flames following the San Francisco earthquake, a new story unfolds. Thirty-nine, an esteemed journalist, Harriet, accompanied by Alice Toklas, goes to Paris to visit Sarah Samuel Stein, Gertrude's sister-in-law. Reissued by Heyday Books, this 1996 edition adds a subtitle, A Jewish Girlhood in Old San Francisco, and an illuminating introduction by Charlene Akers.

Reviews

"Charming and thoughtful." - San Francisco Chronicle

"A wonderfully original view of the city's and her neighborhood's social layers and rules." - The Ark

"A wealth of sensuous detail...combines with sharp social commentary...vivid background...wry self-knowledge." - Jewish Book World

Product Description

Heyday Books
ISBN-0-930588-91-6
Trade paperback: List price $14.95, Rochlin Roots West price $11.25
Original edition copyright © 1938, 1947 by Harriet Lane Levy
Introduction © by Charlene Akers.
196 pages