The Reformer's Apprentice
A Jewish Girl Comes of Age in Historic San Francisco
"In her nimble, well-researched narrative, Rochlin paints a bustling San Francisco....This vivid novel portrays an independent-minded woman who rebels against the Orthodox religious strictures of her Polish Jewish immigrant parents in 1870s San Franciso."
--Publishers Weekly (May 20, 1996)
A young Jewish woman struggling with the issues of faith, emerging adulthood, women's rights, and community service is the heroine of Harriet Rochlin's new novel, The Reformer's Apprentice-A Novel of Old San Francisco.
Frieda Levy is buffeted by opposing winds. Her Orthodox father insists she marry and give him grandchildren. Her mentor, Miss O'Hara, leader of the elite girls' group Sisters of Service, urges her to pursue her dream of becoming a teacher and giving Service to Community. And then there's men.
The novel opens in 1875 in the San Francisco parlor of Miss O'Hara, where the Sisters of Service share inspirational readings and afterward discuss other friends who are getting married. But Frieda doesn't want to marry; she wants to be a teacher. When she again tells her father so and asks him to let her go to high school, he refuses angrily and beats her.
A new wind blasts Frieda when there is a panic on the banks. Her father loses all his investments, and the family is forced to accept a pushy aunt's proposal to open a kosher boardinghouse in a ramshackle Victorian in the seedy South of Market district. Miss O'Hara wisely counsels Frieda to put Service to Family before her own desires, but it is while working sixteen hours a day at the boardinghouse that Frieda becomes the object of less-that-pure attentions from the boarders and deliverymen who come to the house.
Things come to a head when Frieda's family arranges her marriage to one of the borders, a nebech named Gimel whom Fried can't stand. At this point Frieda finally acts on her own behalf, learns to balance service with self-assertivenes, manages to choose her own husband and escape to a brighter future on her own terms.
Ever since the days of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, much has been written about life in the early American West-but primarily from the Christian male point of view. The Reformer's Apprentice, the story of a young woman in San Francisco's vital and significant Jewish community, affords a good look through a window rarely opened into the early days of the American West.
Visit Harriet Rochlin's own website!
About the Author: Harriet Rochlin grew up in Boyle Heights, the Jewish community of Los Angeles. Her fascination with the importance of Jews in the opening of the American West led her to write So Far Away, a popular novel published by Jove Press in 1981. Her next project was Pioneer Jews-A New Life in the Far West, an illustrated history that she wrote with her husband, Fred Rochlin. That book was published in 1984 by Houghton Mifflin Company, and is still in print.
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