Who’s ever heard of Cora Wilburn, the first Jewish novelist in America? At nineteen, she’d traveled the world and disdained its corruption. Clawing her way out of poverty as the Civil War divided the United States, she used her pen to fight for women’s rights, abolition, and her own freedom to rejoin the Jewish people

“Journal, La Guayra, 1844,” the cover of the precious diary reads. Its nineteen-year-old author identifies herself as “Henrietta.” Four years later, she would leave Venezuela and enter the United States as “Henretty Jackson.” But that was neither her real name nor the one under which she would write her many novels, essays, and poems. When she died in 1906, the death of this “well-known” Jewish writer was noted across the United States, and even in Hawaii, under a totally different name: Cora Wilburn.

Born in 1824 in France, probably in the Alsace region that became part of Germany as a result of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, Henrietta was originally known by the last name Pulfermacher (“Powdermaker”). Her German-born mother, Lea, died soon after her birth, and her father, Moritz, subsequently remarried in England. Then misfortune struck again in 1837, when “Moss” Pulfermacher, self-proclaimed “agent for foreign houses in the West Indies, and for Spaniards on the Spanish Main,” was listed in The London Gazette (pt. 1, p. 801) as an insolvent debtor and prisoner.

 

Footloose and Fancy-Free

Consequently, the little family traveled, in Henrietta’s words, “nearly over the world.” “In the year 1839… we were voyaging up the Ir[r]awaddy River, bound for the capital of the Burmah Empire – the city of Amarapoora [Amarapura],” she recalled in one article (“Honor to Whom Honor is Due,” Our Dumb Animals, November 1878, p. 46 ). Looking back on this period, she wrote regretfully: 

The dreamer of the beautiful, the free, wild, soaring spirit, is imprisoned by the requirements of the daily needs. She, who gazed upon the glories of the sunset from the Ganges’ sacred banks, she who stood beside the sphynx in solitary meditations, who drank in soul-draughts of life-lasting inspiration on the Alpine mounts – she is now the saddest, most unheeded thing of earth, a seamstress for her daily bread. (Banner of Light, June 16, 1860, p. 1)

Henrietta mentions spending “youth’s roseate hours” in Hawaii. Then on March 22, 1843, according to her diary, she and her parents left Singapore for Bremen. 

World travelers, especially Jewish ones, were few and far between in the first half of the 19th century. Prior to the advent of the steamship, sea voyages were risky, wearying, and expensive, so only traveling merchants and the very wealthy indulged.

Moritz Pulfermacher pretended to be among the latter, and his gem business lent his penchant for peripatetic travel credibility. But around the time he and his family departed from Singapore, an article in Burma’s Maulmain Chronicle (later reprinted elsewhere) blew his cover. “Tricks of a Traveller” described how Pulfermacher, opulently attired and in the company of his wife and daughter, held forth as a “rich diamond merchant” and swindled a sea captain and others by taking loans never repaid, leaving what proved to be  “false stones,” “counterfeit gold,” and “German” (faux) silver as collateral. In some venues, it reported, he paraded as “an American Jew named Moritz Jackson” – the same last name Henrietta adopted when immigrating to America. The exposé warned that the con man was en route to Curaçao to ensnare new victims (The Sydney Morning Herald, Australia, March 30, 1843). 

 

Orphaned in Venezuela

Perhaps to escape detection, the “Jackson” family took up residence some two hundred miles from Curaçao, in the Venezuelan port of La Guaira, near Caracas. There the only surviving volume of Henrietta’s diary commenced. Its family portrait is disturbing.

“I had not been home long yesterday but it began anew,” she reported cryptically on March 1, 1844. A week later, she and her father “had again a most tremendous row, as usual for nothing. . .. The brandy bottle was applied and so began his cursing and bellowing; it continued till near morning.” Within months, the situation at home deteriorated further; her father, perhaps fearing imminent discovery, turned violent. “Yesterday the looking glass was broken,” Henrietta recorded in May. “Today after fifteen glasses, butter glasses, were broken . . . he began to take a knife up to my [step]mother, so we both left the house.”

The tension took its toll on Henrietta’s stepmother. Her health declined, she could no longer keep house, and her physician applied leeches. Finally, on June 29, 1844, she “departed this life for a better. God gave her a calm and peaceful end.”

A year later, following a quick and somewhat mysterious trip to and from Bordeaux with his daughter, Moritz Jackson died as well; rumors abounded that he’d been murdered. Fifteen years afterward, in an autobiographical novel written under the pen name “Cora Wilburn,” Henrietta continued to dream of the tortures suffered by her criminal and abusive father as he lay dying – the “winged and horrible demons, wild birds of prey with outstretched sable wings” that perched upon his “laboring breast, croaked hoarsely in his ear, and snatched his trembling fingers from his eyes!” So he deserved, she thought, not least for wronging his wife, “Shina”:

From the open book in her hand, he read, in blood-red letters, there inscribed, the record of her wrongs; the manifold and pardonless sins committed against her life; and, at the close of each page was written the ever recurring, fearful word, “Retribution!” (Cora Wilburn, Cosella Wayne, published serially in Banner of Light, June 2, 1860, p. 1)