Rachel Calof's Story

Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains

Author: Rachel Bella Calof
Secondary Author: J. Sanford Rikoon
ISBN: 9780253209863

"Calof's [story] has the 'electricity' one occasionally finds in primary sources. It is powerful, shocking, and primitive, with the kind of appeal primary sources often attain without effort.... it is a strong addition to the literature of women's experience on the frontier." —Lillian Schlissel [asking for approval to use quote]In 1894, eighteen-year-old Rachel Bella Kahn travelled from Russia to the United States for an arranged marriage to Abraham Calof, an immigrant homesteader in North Dakota. Rachel Calof's Story combines her memoir of a hard pioneering life on the prairie with scholarly essays that provide historical and cultural background and show her narrative to be both unique and a representative western tale. Her narrative is riveting and candid, laced with humor and irony.The memoir, written by Rachel Bella Calof in 1936, recounts aspects of her childhood and teenage years in a Jewish community, (shtetl) in Russia, but focuses largely on her life between 1894 and 1904, w

Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publish Date: 1995

Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Women, History / United States / State & Local / West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY)

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: Feminism Early Works)