Rachel Calof

The gripping, humane, and yes, humorous story of one woman’s life on the North Dakota prairie in the 1890s is spellbinding. It works its magic because it is honest, full of detail, and suffused with the dreams, hopes, and struggles of a young woman and young mother. Looking back on her life, Rachel Calof experiences in aching detail the daily challenges and triumphs of a young Jewish woman who came to North Dakota from a brutal childhood in Russia, with little but the picture of her fiancee, to introduce her to a new world.

A new world with an old world Mother-in-law, a 12’ by 14’ shack in which to live, a husband torn between fealty to his family and his new wife, freezing winters, flocks of chickens and opinionated cows; all these things and more give color, pathos and universality to her story.

Rachel Calof is highly unusual in that it addresses an aspect of the American immigrant experience that is rarely seen; the rural lives of Jewish immigrants as well as the day-to-day existence of a pioneer woman facing marriage, childbirth, and carving her own destiny in a harsh and unrelenting environment. She gave the gift of life to nine children who all survived and had children and grandchildren of their own. Many of them have come to see Rachel Calof and have given it their blessing. When she was 55 and living in St. Paul she chronicled her story, writing her manuscript in Yiddish, in a stenographer’s notebook, which lay undiscovered until after her death. It was translated and published as Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains in 1995 by Indiana University Press, and serves as the basis for this one-woman show.