Arizona Territory, 1886-1887: When her visiting kid sister is abducted and charged with being an accomplice to murder, Frieda Levie Goldson, distraught and blaming herself, abandons her husband and children in the frontier border town of Dos Cacahuates, and sets out to find the missing girl. On Her Way Home is the third of Rochlin's highly-acclaimed historical novels about a Jewish girl's life in the American West, the Desert Dwellers Trilogy. Frieda, the trilogy's headstrong heroine, is seduced by Bennie Goldson's promises of love and adventure and flees the constraints of her traditional Jewish San Francisco family's kosher boardinghouse for an adobe on the Arizona-Sonora border. After six years of life on the frontier, she has learned why the Arizona Territory is called "The Nation's Roughhouse." Now, on her own in a scruffy hotel, three jails, a makeshift law office, a Jewish-owned inn, two boisterous courtrooms, and at a bizarre trial and melodramatic execution, Frieda ultimately learns where and with whom she belongs. For this third book in the series, Rochlin sought a plot that would force Frieda out of Dos Cacahuates, population 200 (maybe), and into the center of Arizona life: Prescott, territorial capital and political cesspool. The true story of a family murder and kidnapping, adjudicated there in 1886-1887 under outlandish circumstances, provided the framework. Frieda and other trilogy characters mix with personalities and events culled from Territorial records and period newspapers. From this partly true, partly imagined tale, colorful characters emerge: an East Coast couple on a literary assignment, a Tenth Cavalry veteran, a power-crazed sheriff, a girl-chasing district attorney, an unpopular territorial governor, and Jews of every stripe. Things happen; the more incredible they seem, the truer they are. A little-known but timely variation on the inexhaustible immigrant family theme develops, one that shifts from group action against societal inequities--the customary focus of ethnic and women's stories--to responsibility for one's own misdeeds. Stripped of illusions, some amends made, more to be made, Frieda ultimately finds the true meaning of home and family.

On Her Way Home

Literature & Fiction

Harriet Rochlin

Genre Fiction

Roots West Press

The First Lady of Dos Cacahuates

Arizona-Sonora outpost, 1880: Her adoring husband promises love, status, camaraderie, wealth. Her father predicts she'll cry to come home. Frieda experiences sandstorms, flashfloods, hard work, heat, infidelity (hers), chicanery, disappointment. She cries--but not to go home.

Arizona-Sonora outpost, 1880: Her adoring husband promises love, status, camaraderie, wealth. Her father predicts she'll cry to come home. Frieda experiences sandstorms, flashfloods, hard work, heat, infidelity (hers), chicanery, disappointment. She cries--but not to go home.

Contemporary

ON HER WAY HOME

Arizona Territory, 1886-1887: When her visiting kid sister is abducted, Frieda, blaming herself, abandons her husband and children to search for her. On her own in a scruffy hotel, three jails, a makeshift law office, a Jewish-owned inn, two boisterous courtrooms, and at a melodramatic execution, Frieda learns where and with whom she belongs.

San Francisco, 1875-1880 
Torn Between her feminist group leader and her traditional Jewish family, Frieda leads a double life aspiring "Elevated Feminine Spirit" and unpaid, overworked cook at her father's kosher boardinghouse until a lusty Arizona pioneer, a Jew but not "strict," proposes marriage.

The Reformer's Apprentice: A Novel of Old San Francisco

Comprised of Rochlin's three highly acclaimed historical novels of a Jewish girl's life in the American West, the Desert Dwellers Trilogy is packaged in a gift wrap.
 Frieda Levie, the trilogy's headstrong heroine, is seduced by Bennie Goldson's promise of love and adventure, and flees the constraints of her traditional Jewish San Francisco family's kosher boardinghouse for an adobe on the Arizona-Sonora border. Bennie delivers on his promise--love and adventure, along with flash floods, sandstorms, desert heat, bankruptcies, and three children. In her sixth year in Arizona, when her visiting fourteen-year-old sister Ida is kidnapped and falsely accused of aiding her abductor, Frieda takes on the crude and corrupt justice system of the late 19th-century Arizona Territory. Ultimately, seven exhilarating, excruciating years in Arizona, the nation's roughhouse, teach Frieda where and with whom she truly belongs.
 After completing her landmark work of Western Jewish social history, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West, Harriet Rochlin turned to fiction to probe the inner lives of her subjects. The resulting Desert Dwellers Trilogy follows Frieda Levie's journey from Jewish newcomer to Jewish Westerner, and has won praise for historical authenticity, lively storytelling and graphic details.

Desert Dwellers Trilogy

Rochlin, Harriet

United States

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Books by Roots West Press

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Roots West Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

On Her Way Home

The First Lady of Dos Cacahuates

The First Lady of Dos Cacahuates

On Her Way Home

The Reformer's Apprentice: A Novel of Old San Francisco

Desert Dwellers Trilogy

The Reformer's Apprentice: A Novel of Old San Francisco