Pappenheim — long known publicly only as Anna O., Breuer and Freud's patient — built her real life's work between Frankfurt and the women's home she founded at Neu-Isenburg in 1907.

Her translations of the memoirs of Glikl of Hameln (1910) and the Maaseh Buch (1929) recovered an entire archive of Jewish women's voices that had been written off the canon. The work is read by Phil-Tragen as a feminist genealogy carried out by way of translation.