Harriet at Four. Once in a while an itinerant children's photographer went door-to-door on Sentinel Avenue seeking business.

I spent the first twenty years of my life in Boyle Heights, then a mixed immigrant neighborhood in East Los Angeles. From early childhood on, I was viscerally attached to Western and Jewish cultures, but never at the same time. There was no apparent connection between the two. A Jew, presumably, came from somewhere else and was likely to move on. A Westerner was a descendant of pioneers who sailed or wagoned west to claim a piece of the newly-American region, no known Jews among them.
 
If I wasn't a Westerner, what was I? The mild Southern California climate, outdoor lifestyle, diverse social mix and the notion that life was (or should be) better in the West were as innate in me as farsighted blue eyes, olive skin, straight brown hair, B Negative blood, and the love of language — native and acquired, spoken and written.

There were other complications. I was a Jew, but what kind? My Yiddish-speaking grandparents were unswervingly Orthodox, but my parents were not observant — they were on hold. Jewish Boyle Heights, like my family, was partly religious, mostly not. Our schools drew from various ethnic enclaves — Jewish, Mexican, Japanese, Russian, Armenian, Italian, black, Anglo — and our teachers encouraged us to enjoy our own and our classmates' native cultures. At school, maybe, our parents said, but not at home.

Unable to define my Jewish and Western sensibilities, and still less, the relationship between them, I identified with my school-endorsed ethos: multi-culturalism. Only to learn when I entered the job-boyfriend-college market that Angelenos at large tended to disdain Boyle Heights as an immigrant backwash, and its inhabitants as ill-bred intruders. In time, I would prize my polyglot upbringing, but as a vulnerable young adult, I went with a Spanish maxim: salispuedes (get out if you can). (Click for Author's Corner: "Boyle Heights and Beyond")

In January 1945, I left for the University of California, Berkeley. Four years later I returned to Southern California with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Hispanic America, a husband (Fred Rochlin, a Jewish native of Nogales, Arizona), the first of our four children and a wish to root anywhere but Boyle Heights. Anywhere turned out to be a tract house in the San Fernando Valley. For more than a decade, I did my bit in the mainstream as a good citizen who on milestone occasions turned out to be Jewish. While at home, prompted by the Holocaust, the creation of Israel, motherhood and a spiritual bent in search of expression, I began filling gaps in my skimpy Jewish education.

Then came the 1960s. Widespread social upheaval, challenging teenagers, mid-life pangs, and a raging viral pneumonia brought me to a dead stop. During my convalescence, a civil rights-inspired ethnic history craze ignited questions about Boyle Heights. Why had it formed, flourished, then disappeared?

Local archives and libraries yielded scanty records of the tens of thousands of Jews who had lived there, but there were a smattering of works on Jewish pioneering elsewhere in California, also in Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, even in Spanish Colonial Texas and New Mexico. I began to research and write.

Between 1968 and 1984, I published more than a dozen articles and an illustrated social history, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West, co-authored with my husband (I wrote the text, he collected the photographs). In the process, we gathered accounts and images of Jews who had pioneered in the Far West from the late sixteenth century until the end of the America territorial period in 1912. (Click for Collections)

Harriet in 2001, in front of 1043 Sentinel Avenue, where she lived from birth to marriage.

Via this emerging history, I traded a befogged past for an evolving place in the 400-year-old Western Jewish migration. It was like feeling my way down a dark, narrow trail and stumbling into the Grand Canyon. As the work progressed, the lives of these diverse pioneers effortlessly melded with my and my husband's lives, and the lives of our bloodline antecedents and descendants. A vision of a distinctive new Jewry took shape — one born and bred on the Western frontier, a Jewry rooted in pioneer pluralism.

Once I'd begun to see myself and my intimates as part of a growing Western Jewish presence, public depictions — my own and others--no longer satisfied me. I hungered for the deeper, private truths dug out of inner struggle — mine, ours, theirs. What impelled each of us to embark on that exhilarating, excruciating, always arduous, journey from Jewish immigrant to Jewish westerner? How did the experience alter us? What do these changes portend for us as a Jewry? From those seeds grew the fictional Desert Dwellers trilogy. (The Reformer's Apprentice: A Novel of Old San Francisco, The First Lady of Dos Cacahuates and On Her Way Home). Click for book information.