Woman, Jew, and Westerner: Excerpts from "A Mixed Chorus"
My next book, A Mixed Chorus: Jewish Women in the American West, 1849 to 1924, is a hybrid history--documentary, social, and pictorial. The book and its format sprang from a pressing need to illuminate and give voice to my triple identity--woman, Jew, and Westerner.
In 1965, as the ethnic history movement spread nationwide, someone asked me what I knew about Jews in the early West. "Nothing," was my response -- but not for long. In the next forty-five years, I published articles on the subject, delivered speeches across the country, and, with my late husband Fred, produced the landmark illustrated social history, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West, which remained in print at Houghton Mifflin for twenty-six years.
When I joined the rush of roots-seekers bent on adding their omitted kind to the Western record, my credentials consisted of an upbringing in Boyle Heights, then a heavily Jewish, mixed-immigrant Los Angeles neighborhood; a UC Berkeley Bachelor of Arts in Hispanic American Studies; marriage to a Jewish native of Nogales, Arizona; experience as a journalist; and a bad case of the Who-Am-I's.
To my good fortune, Pioneer Jews took shape in the wake of the 1970s women's movement when the biographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, and oral histories of American women were popping up like wildflowers in a west spring. Some were newly published; others had languished for decades in public and private collections and antiquarian bookdealers' catalogs. Among them were a number of outstanding works by or about Western Jewish women. Biographical sketches, articles, and essays had also begun to turn up in general and Jewish historical society journals and newsletters.
I felt an instant kinship with these newfound predecessors. Each pioneer reminded me of an early twentieth-century arrival I'd known intimately: my mother, a Missourian turned Los Angeles motorist, homebuilder, gardener, and businesswoman; my Russian-born mother-in-law, who'd known poverty in five communities in Canada and the Pacific Northwest before rooting with her husband and five children on a twenty-acre site on the outskirts of an Arizona-Sonora border town; my Yiddish-speaking Orthodox maternal grandmother, who arrived in Los Angeles wearing a sheitel, a matron's wig. Some even reminded me of myself, especially the daughters and granddaughters of those earlier pioneers who wore Western birth as a badge of distinction. Born in the West, I too was viscerally attached to Southern California's climate and culture. But I never identified myself as a Westerner until I cam to know more about my diverse spiritual antecedents than my bloodline forebears.
I began to focus my research and writing on Western Jewish women. I published articles, presented papers at women's history and Western Jewish conferences, and spent much of the 1990s writing the three novels that became the Desert Dwellers Trilogy, an exploration of the exhilarating and excruciating inner experiences of a young Jewish woman and her California and Arizona cohorts as they journeyed from newcomers to Westerners in the late nineteenth century. Mixing facts, family lore, memories, and imagination, their stories became mine, and mine theirs.
In 1999, I received an invitation to edit an anthology of articles on Western Jewish women published in Western States Jewish History, from its publisher Gladys Sturman, a close personal friend. My husband and I had supported the quarterly since its inception and had frequently drawn on its unremitting flow of scholarly and homespun contents. After spending a year and a half gathering nearly a hundred excerpts from the journal and my personal collection, composing introductions to each contribution, and collecting ninety period photographs, I realized that what I had assembled was not an anthology of complete articles. It was a documentary, social, and pictorial history--too long, off-beat, and abundantly illustrated for WSJH's format. It pained me to tell Gladys that I had strayed beyond return.
As it turned out, running in the wrong direction I had stumbled upon the format I'd been moving toward for years. To permanently eradicate the widespread notion that Jewish women were too fear-ridden, inbred, and city-bound to venture into the remote and thinly-settled Far West would require the voices of hundreds of Jewish women, speaking for themselves, and in so doing, for thousands of voiceless others. Not only were these women of diverse origins, educational backgrounds, social classes, and affiliations, they and their female offspring were widely dispersed, variously engaged, and in their personal writings reported experiences and innermost thoughts most male counterparts would rather be whipped than reveal.
On nearly every page, these women bear the markings of this erratic period and vast, eminently exploitable region. Fired by the pioneer impulse to build homes, enterprises, institutions, and communities, hopes soared, were dashed, and were reborn. Ingrained beliefs, customs, and tastes had to be fiercely retained, adjusted, or discarded. The rewards obviously outweighed the obstacles. In seventy-five years, Jewish women grew from a scant presence in the Far West to tens of thousands of enfranchised citizens. The least fortunate were too ill-equipped, ill-located, or ill-mated to meet the challenges they faced. The most qualified became outstanding leaders in communal organizations, businesses, professions, and public office.
The title, A Mixed Chorus, came to me early in the undertaking. Wherever I searched, I found Western Jewish women of every stripe: homemakers and homebreakers, stalwarts and suicides, pawns and protagonists, pious and secular, grand dames and paupers, educated and illiterate, traditionalists and reformers, rural and urban. Alone, I discovered, each voice is real and distinctive. Together, they create an oratorio of Jewish women breaking ground in a developing region and a new age.
The following is a small sampling of the pioneering Jewish women whose stories will appear in the book, A Mixed Chorus: Jewish Women in the American West, 1849 to 1924.