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If you start getting phone calls from relatives you never even knew you had, one of two things may have occurred:

A. You just won the lottery.

B. Somebody in your family wasn't exactly honest with you about his past.

For Palo Alto author Susan Wolfe, it was definitely the latter.

"I was just getting ready to go to bed, when the phone rang. The woman on the other end said, 'You don't know me, but I believe we have the same grandfather,'" recalled Wolfe. "My heart sort of stopped. Although I had no prior knowledge of this about my grandfather, and we were very close, something in me said, 'This sounds plausible, this isn't a crackpot on the phone.'"

In fact, it was a psychoanalyst. The voice on the end of the line belonged to Judith Merchant, Wolfe's long-lost cousin from New Jersey.

Heading to the Bay Area for a conference, Merchant made arrangements to meet Wolfe. And a few months later, Wolfe was in Merchant's home territory, visiting the family her grandfather, an Orthodox musician and b'nai mitzvah coach, had before he ran off to be with Wolfe's grandmother.

Her grandfather's former wife passed away some time ago, but Wolfe was able to meet with their daughter.

"Merchant's mother, my aunt, was so lovely to me, and I had no reason to expect that she would be. She embraced me like a regular relative even though I was 'that woman's' grandchild," said Wolfe. "She took me all around Brooklyn Heights, showing me the different houses she grew up in with my grandfather. And the whole time I was with her, I was thinking that the framework was there for a really interesting novel."

After almost a year of research and writing, with five additional years of searching for a publisher, Wolfe's fourth book and first work of fiction, "The Promised Hand," is finally on bookstore shelves.

The story is largely based on the real-life travails of Wolfe's grandfather and the two women in his life. In the novel, the fictionalized version of Wolfe's grandfather, Isaac Grossman, falls deeply in love with Amalia, but he does not question his family when they arrange a marriage for him with a woman named Bella.

In the book, written from the first-person viewpoints of both women, during the next 15-odd years Isaac continually wavers between faith and family on Bella's side, and love and passion on Amalia's.

"It's an age-old theme — passion versus religious commitment," said Wolfe. The title "sounds like 'the Promised Land,' which tips off the reader that the book has Jewish content.

"Also, there's some ambiguity. The protagonist meets his lover first, they talk about their life together and then they find out that his family has promised him to someone else. [At first], it's unclear whether the hand promised is his lover's or the woman his family selected for him."

Many of the plot details in "The Promised Hand" mirror the lives of Wolfe's relatives and that of her grandfather, who had a long affair and eventually fled to the Pacific Northwest. But those events provided Wolfe with only a skeleton; she needed to use her imagination to flesh it out.

"The framework was pretty much handed to me, but three characters do not a novel make," said Wolfe. "All the ancillary characters in the book are imaginary. Of course I couldn't possibly be in the heads of these women and know what they were feeling.

"I could only imagine what it's like to live an upstanding life in a close-knit Jewish community knowing that everybody knows your husband is cheating on you," she added.

While Wolfe couldn't see what was going on in her protagonists' heads, she could get a much better read on what was going on in front of their eyes. The author undertook heavy archival research on day-to-day Jewish life during the first two decades of the last century.

To do this, she interviewed relatives who knew her grandfather in his younger days and visited the Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn, where her grandfather and his brother, the synagogue's senior rabbi, presented numerous musical collaborations. Wolfe, a Reform Jew and a board member at Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, put extra effort into learning how Orthodox life was lived way back when, adding authenticity to both dialogue and decor.

"After I had the whole manuscript written, I shared it with my son's preschool teacher, who's involved in the Chabad movement, and she caught a Hebrew error," recalled Wolfe. "I had written it using modern Hebrew, and of course in the [1910s] and '20s they used Ashkenazic pronunciations instead of Sephardic. They'd say 'Shabbos' instead of 'Shabbat,' or 'tallis' instead of 'tallit.'

While "The Promised Hand" is ostensibly a Jewish book, Wolfe hopes that it will appeal to a broader audience.

"I expect that Jewish people will probably be most interested because it's our culture that's represented. But lots of cultures had arranged marriages," said the author. "It's really an Old World transitioning to a New World story."