Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains

Indiana University Press, 1995. Softcover. Like New. 9x5x0. Previous owner name. 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. 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.