Author's Note

Once Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West was launched, I turned to the untold history, the part available only in fiction — the inner lives of these pioneers as they progressed from newcomers to westerners. Facts, family lore, impressions — personal and borrowed — inspired a dynamic array of characters. Responding to life in the kaleidoscopic West, they developed traits perennially assigned to the legendary westerner. Before my characters dragged me through the erratic, painful, tradition- and life-threatening circumstances they endured, I would have dismissed those adjectives as overblown. As I would have words like exhilarating, energizing, uplifting, until those same characters experienced the rupture of age-old constraints in a region where everyone had to change, and change was as desired as it was unavoidable.