anna genoese

Wow, hello, journal platform people! It's been almost a year! You can always find me at annagenoese, and right now I'm doing tumblr at dngrcpckwithmurdericing, although that's in no way professional at all and mostly hockey players doing hockey and shoving each other. (Insert joke about how that's the same thing here.)

Today I am here to recommend a great book I read on the bus this morning: Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains

This is the autobiography of a Ukranian Jewish woman who traveled from Ukraine to the United States in 1894 to marry a (Jewish) man she'd never met and start a life with him. She tells about how they decide to homestead in rural northeast North Dakota with his family, and the perils and successes. This is not a Jewish Little House -- this is much more stark, and much more to the point about poverty and privilege. It does not read the way current autobiographies/memoirs do -- it's much more like a letter Rachel Bella Kahn Calof wrote to her descendants so they would know about her life and struggles, so they would be able to know what her life had been at the turn of the century.

The autobiography itself is bookended by an "acknowledgments" that discusses the way the autobiography was discovered in historical archives, written in Yiddish on a "Clover Leaf Linen" writing tablet and translated into English and typed by children and grandchildren and then an "epilogue" written by the youngest son, who tells of what his mother leaves out about the rest of her life, giving an "ending" to the story, so to speak. At the end of the book are also two great, if much more academic, essays about Jewish homesteaders in the history of the United States, which I very much enjoyed reading.

I know a lot of you are interested in Jewish history the way I am, so I thought some of you might like to read this!


( TW: Pet death )


I hope everyone is having a good Friday! Have a great weekend! Read some good books!