Arthur Wolf was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890, the fourth child of Jacob and Friedericke Wolf. His father died when Arthur was young, and at age 14 he was apprenticed to a textile firm. Before World War I, he traveled to South America repeatedly as a sales representative. During the war, Arthur was a high ranking Jewish officer in the Austrian army and spent six years as a prisoner of war in Siberia. He met his future wife, Maria Sebastianova Ossinovsky in Vladivostok, and the couple got married in Strasbourg in 1921. They had a son, Erich (later Eric) Robert Wolf, who became a prominent American anthropologist. From 1933 to 1938 Arthur managed a textile factory in Sudetenland, Czech Republic. When the Nazis marched into Vienna in March of 1938, Arthur immediately arranged for Eric and then for his wife and himself to emigrate to England. The three immigrated to the United States in 1940.
Beginning in 1906, Arthur kept diaries for most of his life, first in German and after the 1940s in English.
From the guide to the Arthur Wolf Papers, 1906-1968, (Leo Baeck Institute Archives)
