{"product_id":"rachel-calofs-story-jewish-homesteader-on-the-northern-plains-9780253329424","title":"Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Calofs 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 womens 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 Calofs 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  when she and her husband carved out a life as homesteaders. She recalls her horror at the hardships of pioneer life -- especially the crowding of many family members into the 12 x 14 dirt-floored shanties that were their first dewllings. \"Of all the privations I knew as a homesteader \" says Calof  \"the lack of privacy was the hardest to bear.\" Money  food  and fuel were scarce  and during bitter winters  three Calof households -- Abraham and Rachel with their growing children  along with his parents and a brothers family -- would pool resources and live together (with livestock) in one shanty. Under harsh and primitive conditions  Rachel Bella Calof bore and raised nine children. The family withstood many dangers  including hailstorms that hammered wheat to the ground and flooded their home; droughts that reduced crops to dust; blinding snowstorms of plains winters. Through it all  however  Calof drew on a humor and resolve that is everywhere apparent in her narrative. Always striving to improve her living conditions  she made lamps from dried mud  scraps of rag  and butter; plastered the cracked wood walls of her home with clay; supplemented meagre supplies with prairie forage -- wild mushrooms and garlic for a special supper  dry grass for a hot fire to bake bread. Never sentimental  Caolfs memoir is a vital historical and personal record. J. Sanford Rikoon elaborates on the history of Jewish settlement in the rural heartland and the great tide of immigration from the Russian Pale of Settlement and Eastern Europe from 1880--1910. Elizabeth Jameson examines how Calof \"writes from the interior spaces of private life  and from that vantage point  reconfigures more familiar versions of the American West.\" Jameson also discusses how the Calofs adapted Jewish practices to the new contingencies of North Dakota  maintaining customs that represented the core of their Jewish identity  reco\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45951525027893,"sku":"ByrdShop_0253329426","price":241.54,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780253329424_e91dabd8-8649-498a-9e4e-34235647d1ec.jpg?v=1788111916","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/rachel-calofs-story-jewish-homesteader-on-the-northern-plains-9780253329424","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}