An elusive home : Rachel Calof, indoors and out

Abstract

Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains (Ed. J. Sanford Rikoon, Indiana University Press, 1995) is a first-person memoir of farming in North Dakota from 1894-1917, based on Rachel Calof‟s Yiddish manuscript. I traced this text from inception to publication, especially the translation and editing process, comparing a new translation of the Yiddish manuscript with the English publication. This article focuses primarily on the issues of space and the transition to a new environment. Rachel Kahn Calof immigrated alone to the United States and married into the Calof family. Resources were extremely limited and the families were forced to live in close proximity, often sharing shanties with extended family members and even the animals, during the winter. Examples of her adjustments to the environment, transitions and the rhetoric of frontier settlement are developed in the context of other pioneering narratives and theories from literary studies, history and geography.