Books

"While I’ve read many books that chronicle the great waves of Jewish immigrants to New York and other Eastern metropolises, few look closely at the smaller Diaspora to the vast and untamed American West. I hadn’t known about such a population until one summer, when a friend said: “My great-great-grandfather was a Jewish cowboy.” After further probing, I discovered that he’d in fact been a merchant, but one whose life was as rugged and exciting as any Western hero, and that he’d indeed made a life in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as had a significant number of German Jews. I’d been searching for my third novel, and through my friend’s off-handed comment, I had found it.

But to write my novel, I had to find my own story. My historical sources were invariably dry documents about business. The same question kept rising up: all these German Jewish women—well educated, piano-playing, multi-lingual—why would they agree to marry men who lived half-way across the world? Love--yes, okay. But I began to think of other, more complicated reasons, which led me to my heroine, Eva Frank, and her particular journey."

--Joanna Hershon