Life in Jewish Oakland: A Lost Short Story by Jack London

“The Minions of Midas,” completed by Jack London on 21 March 1900, is considered London’s first explicitly socialist or political short story. The Klondike stories have been read in the context of London’s understanding of political economy, but they do not feature characters defined by their political beliefs. “The Minions of Midas” does, but it is not, as it turns out, the first of London’s stories to do so.

On 6 April 1899, Jack London completed a short story he entitled “The God of Abraham”; the next story he wrote was “In a Far Country,” and a month later he completed “An Odyssey of the North.” After “The God of Abraham” was rejected by McClure’s, the first magazine he sent it to, he changed the title to “Two Children of Israel” and sent it to Atlantic Monthly, which rejected it, and then five other magazines did, too. London gave in. Apparently, he quickly despaired of ever seeing the 6600-word story in print.

It wasn’t typical for him to retire a manuscript that quickly. Perhaps he thought it didn’t measure up to what he was also producing that year. Perhaps he knew that the story line and its characters were unsuitable for the magazine market. London scholars thought they would never fully resolve the questions of its quality and content, for the manuscript has been lost for more than 100 years.

Four pages of the manuscript have now been found. They were miscatalogued in the Huntington Library; it’s surprising that more documents haven’t been, given that London’s archive is the largest single-author collection at the library. A Huntington Library cataloguer gave this manuscript the title “Class Consciousness,” but it is clearly the remnants of a short story, consisting of four typewritten pages numbered six through nine at the top. Its typeface and paper match material London typed in 1899.¹ We will see, too, that an editor, Hamilton Holt of The Independent, describes the surviving scene in his rejection letter.

We don’t know how or why these four pages were singled out and saved, or by whom. It is tempting to think London pulled them as an aide de memoire while he wrote Martin Eden, for they tell a scene that is reminiscent of chapter 36 in that novel, although the characters are very different.² Instead of a young sailor being led by a consumptive poet into a room of politically active leftists discussing philosophy, this scene from “The God of Abraham” describes a young Jewish man—Jacob—taken to his first socialist gathering by an older friend. There’s a minor detail that links the two texts: Jacob’s friend Joseph Liebenbaum works in a grocery; Martin Eden lives above a grocery owned by his brother-in-law, Bernard Higgenbotham. Perhaps London retired his manuscript so quickly because he finally admitted there wasn’t a market for a short story about a young Jewish couple living in a poor Oakland neighborhood.³

We do have London’s first note for the composition of the story: “the god of abraham. Little German Jew—Anarchists who steal away his god, and the wife who prays; life a charmed bird drifts back” (“Notebook”). London crossed out these lines in pencil, indicating to himself that he had now made use of this idea—or something like it. The pages we have show that if the “little German Jew” was supposed to be the main character, he was replaced by a young Jewish man of indeterminate ethnicity, though the idea of a religious wife seems to have survived, and perhaps Joseph Liebenbaum is the “little German Jew.” If anarchists emerged as the dominant political force in the story, then the plot seems to be a dramatization by the revolutionary socialist London about the evils of anarchism.

The fragment of “The God of Abraham” begins with Jacob and his wife, Leah, preparing for bed in their tiny house. Joseph and Jacob had met earlier and decided to go to a meeting. Leah, who witnessed the discussion...