"Rochlin serves up enough period charm, crackling storytelling and priceless details (a Passover seder where tortillas substitue for matzoh) to satisfy devotees of both wild west lore and Jewish history."
The First Lady of Dos Cacahuates, by historian/novelist Harriet Rochlin, opens on a train with a western pioneer bringing an unsuspecting new wife to a perilous frontier community. Like Stephen Crane's The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, the reader may think, but not for long.
Rochlin, author of the landmark history, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West, breaks the exhausted good guy/bad guy mold. Of the pieces she creates a kaleidoscopic West jigging with newborn veracity and vigor. Supporting the central Jewish characters is a cast of both sexes and various ethnic and racial types who resurrect an authentic early West-culturally diverse, fast-changing, a backdrop for dreams and nightmares.
At the center of the novel (the second novel in Rochlin's Desert Dwellers Trilogy) is Frieda Levie, a Jewish San Franciscan who's traded her beloved city and her father's malleable suitor for an Arizona-Sonora border outpost and freewheeling Bennie Goldson. In Dos Cacahuates, the settlement Bennie foresees as a bustling port-of-entry, Frieda suffers her share of hardships: excruciating work, floods, crime, loneliness, disillusionment, and aching adjustments to unfamiliar foods, customs, languages, and searing heat.
But there are pluses as well: the exhilarating discoveries of lovemaking, new surroundings to explore, friendships to cherish, and the pride of fending for oneself. "You'll cry to come home," her father had warned her before she left San Francisco. She had. But there was no leaving Bennie, and he wouldn't budge. Nor, for that matter, would she. Their roots had knotted-his, hers, and Dos Cacahuates'.
Visit Harriet Rochlin's own website!
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About the author. Harriet Rochlin, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, has been researching, writing, and lecturing on Jewish roots in the West for twenty-five years. Her highly regarded social history, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West, published by Houghton Mifflin, is currently in a ninth printing. |
