Other Things Being Equal

At a time when American fiction rarely dared to imagine a Jewish woman as a romantic heroine, Emma Wolf gave us Ruth Levice: an intellectual, a daughter, a woman who refuses to choose between her faith and her heart. Set in the gaslit streets of 1890s San Francisco, Other Things Being Equal follows Ruth as she falls in love with Dr. Herbert Kemp, a Unitarian whose existence in her world should be impossible. But Wolf's genius lies in her refusal to make this a story about ideology. Ruth's mother is dying. Her father moves through high society with the careful grace of a man balancing two worlds. And Ruth herself wants both the life of the mind and the possibility of love, even when the world insists she must sacrifice one for the other. This is a novel about the impossible negotiations of identity: being Jewish without being orthodox, being a woman without being confined, being in love without being lost. It endures because it asks no one to apologize for complexity.