Captured here in a watercolor by pioneer of California painting Juan Buckingham Wandesforde, Addie and Polly—as Adeline and Pauline were known—would be at least as vividly depicted, nearly seventy years later, in their sister Harriet’s memoir of a Jewish childhood in San Francisco, 920 O’Farrell Street.
The sisters were born to immigrants, Benjamin and Henriette Michelson Levy, known to friends and family as Benish and Yetta, who had both come from the town of Fordon, on the banks of the Vistula in what was then Prussia, now Poland. They had moved first to California, along with other German Jewish immigrants, to outfit the prospectors and miners of the 1850s. Benish ran a dry goods store in partnership with one Gustave Levy. In Harriet’s descriptions, her father comes across as warm and her mother rather severe. The girls’ older cousin, who grew up with them in San Francisco, was Albert Abraham Michelson, who would become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in physics.
According to Harriet, known in girlhood as Hattie, Addie was the sweet and gentle sister, while Polly was the adventurous and wild one. Yet it was Harriet who would live the most dramatic life of the three. Addie married Albert Moishe Salinger, also a child of German Jewish immigrants who had moved to California. They settled in the East Bay, raising their five children in Oakland and later in the affluent suburb of Piedmont. Polly, on the other hand, disappeared from the historical record when she left home and married at age twenty. Harriet was rather reticent on the subject, noting only that Polly married a “handsome, smartly dressed traveling salesman” whom her mother dismissed as a “dandy.”
Harriet never married. She adopted a bohemian lifestyle, dressing in extravagant and eccentric clothing, moving into a suite in the Huntington Hotel. After the 1906 earthquake, Harriet departed for Europe with her friend, also from a well-to-do Jewish San Francisco family, Alice B. Toklas. In Paris they immediately moved into the avant-garde and expatriate circles around siblings Gertrude and Leo Stein, also from an affluent German Jewish Bay Area family. Alice and Gertrude’s subsequent relationship, which would last till the latter’s death, is well known. Harriet returned to San Francisco and later moved to Carmel but she continued to travel extensively. In addition to 920 O’Farrell Street, she published a collection of poetry, I Love to Talk About Myself… and some theater criticism in San Francisco. When she died she was at work on a memoir of her bohemian years in Paris.
