April 30, 1999/14 Iyar 5759, Vol. 51, No.31
Author, historian focuses on experiences of Jews who settled American WestTAMI BICKLEY
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 Harriet Rochlin |
First, she saw green gnomes dancing in the corners of the room, followed by mysterious voices that came and went. Then, newspaper banners flashed across the wall that read: "Things are not what they seem."
When she returned to her Los Angeles home to recuperate, the fictitious headline stuck in her mind. "That message gave me a violent case of the 'Who am I?'s," she says.
She began a massive research project to uncover facts about her family, as well as the family of her husband, Fred, an architect, artist, writer and actor. She also turned her attention toward the impact that the town in which she grew up - Boyle Heights, Calif. - had on her.
To Rochlin, finding the answers would ultimately resolve her quest for self identity. She not only found what she was looking for; she also embarked on a writing career in the late 1960s, evolving out of her fascination with her family's history, that has brought her fulfillment and success.
Both Harriet and Fred Rochlin are descendants of "pioneer Jews" - Jews who immigrated to the American Far West from Europe, beginning more than 100 years ago and continuing until the early 20th century. Centuries before, large numbers of Jews had fled Spain and Portugal during the Spanish Inquisition, many of whom wound up settling in New Mexico.
Harriet Rochlin has written four books growing out of her research on the history of pioneer Jews - three of which have been published. The first, "Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West" (Houghton Mifflin, 1984), which she co-wrote with her husband, is a regional study of Jewish pioneers; the second, and the first in her Desert Dwellers trilogy, is the novel "The Reformer's Apprentice: A Novel of Old San Francisco" (Fithian Press, 1996); the third book, second in the novel trilogy, is "The First Lady of Dos Cacahuates" (Fithian, 1998), set on the Arizona-Sonora border in 1880.
"Grief on the Road," the final novel in the trilogy, has not yet been released.
Rochlin will visit Phoenix on May 19 to lecture about pioneer Jews and discuss her books at a luncheon sponsored by Arizona Center for the Book.
The Rochlins have close ties to Arizona, as Fred Rochlin grew up in Nogales, which was founded by a Jewish peddler, she notes. He was the son of Russian Jews who had immigrated separately to North America - his mother to New York, his father to Canada, where they met and married. Together, they trekked southwest to Arizona where they raised their family, in 1917.
Rochlin was fascinated with her late mother-in-law's ability and eagerness to assimilate into Western culture. She reminisces about her mother-in-law's "AmeriJewMex" cooking and her habit of speaking in sentences interweaving English, Yiddish and Spanish words. Rochlin incorporated her mother-in-law's lifetime experiences and personality traits into the main character of "The First Lady of Dos Cacahuates," Frieda Goldson.
Harriet Rochlin is a descendent of Eastern European Jews who immigrated to St. Louis, Mo., then headed west in 1921 to Boyle Heights, Calif., an immigrant community in which Jews, Mexicans, Russians, Italians, Japanese and African Americans lived side-by-side. Boyle Heights, a suburb of Los Angeles, had the largest Jewish population in the West at that time - approximately 50,000.
"It was an unusually successful (community) for that period of time," she says. "The schools encouraged us to get along, and by and large, we did. Most of us came out of there with a sense of interest and familiarity with different cultures and languages. Almost anyone who lived there knew some Yiddish, Spanish and Japanese."
Rochlin says she now speaks Spanish nearly every day. Her first writing assignment was in Spanish, and she once worked as a Spanish-speaking radio personality.
After earning a bachelor of arts at the University of California at Berkeley, she met Fred Rochlin. They married in 1948 and moved to Los Angeles about five years later. They have since raised four children.
"For almost 20 years, I took on the role of an impostor," Rochlin recalls. "I was a non-descript wife and a good citizen who, on milestone occasions, turned out to be Jewish. I just didn't feel exactly who I was, but I had a role to play, and I was a wife, mother and part-time journalist writing for (an architectural magazine published by Fred's company), and a volunteer for the Democratic Party. The ethos of Boyle Heights was still very much in me, but I was living in a very homogeneous suburban community."
When struck with the pneumonia-induced hallucinations, she realized that the legacy of Boyle Heights was calling to her. At first, she had a difficult time finding documentation about her childhood home. There were no photographs, nor did the name appear on any lists of Los Angeles neighborhoods, she says. Eventually, she did find evidence of Jewish pioneering elsewhere in Los Angeles.
"I was so excited. That was really my jumping-off point," she says. Through diaries and interviews with some surviving pioneer Jews, she got a deep sense of their fears and attitudes at that time.
"I knew that these people had gone through a massive transformation, from being Jewish immigrants to being Jewish Westerners," she says. "And it became increasingly clear to me that we were not lesser Jews - we were different Jews, as strongly Jewish, but in our own fashion.
"I also got a very strong sense of the difficulty between the conflict of the Western environment and the Jewish heritage, and how that brought them together, and at the same time, failed to bring them together. I knew by getting to mesh my personal experiences, my family (history) and my husband's, that this was what I wanted to do with fiction."