920 O'Farrell Street: A Jewish Girlhood in Old San Francisco

Originally published in 1937 in the later years of her extraordinary life, Harriet Lane Levy's memoirs of her childhood in San Francisco during the late 1800s give us a rare view into the traditional life and manners of an upper-middle-class Jewish family of the era.

With sly wit and a writing style critics compared to Jane Austen's, Levy vividly portrays an often stifling world of parlors and sitting rooms, maids and cooks, family intrigue and neighborhood pretensions, eased by the warmth of family affections and Levy's own independent spirit.

It was her unique sense of self that enabled Levy to break away from this quiet, comfortable, almost ritualistically bourgeois existence and go on from 920 O'Farrell to lead a rather unconventional life. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley at a time when very few women went to college, and wrote for The Wave, along with Frank Norris and Jack London. She then moved to Paris with Alice B. Toklas and became an intimate of Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Matisse, and other leaders of the modern art movement.

Written long after the familiar city of her youth had disappeared with the 1906 earthquake, these rich and thoughtful reminiscences reveal a Victorian world of surface formalities and underlying urgency.