Wolf / Mazow Family Papers

Julia Wolf Mazow was born in Houston, Texas, in 1937 as the great-granddaughter of Orthodox rabbi and mohel, Zachariah Emmich. After she graduated from San Jacinto High School in 1955, she attended Brandeis University, from which she graduated with a degree in English in 1959. She married Jack B. Mazow, M.D. in 1962; they were married for 57 years until he passed away in 2019. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 1969 and 1974, respectively, where she taught English and American Literature approximately from 1970 until 1993. Julia was Fiction Editor of Lilith, a Jewish feminist publication, for 11 years, and continues to care greatly about the magazine. In 1980 and 1981, Harper & Row published her book, The Woman Who Lost Her Names, the first Jewish feminist literary anthology, which is still used in women’s studies courses today. In the late 1980s, her interest in Jewish feminism led her to study the Yiddish language so that she could translate and bring recognition to the work of Yiddish women writers, most of whose names were unknown at the time; some of these translations appeared in Bridges, another Jewish feminist publication. In 1986, she spent six weeks at Oxford University studying Yiddish, and continued her studies for the next three summers as part of the YIVO Summer Programme. She also taught "Who Are the Women Who Wrote in Yiddish and Why Don’t We Know Their Names?” for six years in the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center of Houston’s Melton program, each time covering different writers. Julia has also served as a manuscript reviewer for JewishFiction.net and worked closely with its editor and publisher, Nora Gold. Julia’s work has appeared in numerous academic journals, Midstream magazine, The Jewish Woman in America, Lilith, and more.

Jack Bernard Mazow was born in Houston in 1925. He graduated from Rice University and the University of Texas School of Medicine. He served as a captain in the U.S. Air Force, and then went on to do his medical residency at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, New York, and a fellowship at Buffalo General Hospital. Jack returned to Houston to set up a medical practice at the Scurlock Tower. He was on the clinical and teaching faculty of University of Texas Health Science Center and Baylor College of Medicine, receiving the Outstanding Volunteer Clinical Faculty Award from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology in 1996. Jack was also an accomplished musician with a love for classical music. He was a violinist for the Chamber Music Houston, of which he served as president and program chair. Jack died on September 4, 2018.