Other Things Being Equal

A San Francisco Jewish family, a daughter who falls in love with a gentile doctor, and a father who will not have it — argued out on both sides with respect and no melodrama. Wolf was born in San Francisco to French Jewish immigrants, and rarely left the city; this 1892 novel was the first serious American treatment of intermarriage, and it is still the fairest. Fifty-six plates by painters from Munch to Renoir, their houses and winter streets echoing the domestic tensions of Wolf's San Francisco.