Rochlin, Harriet, 1924-

Harriet Rochlin, was born and raised in Boyle Heights at a time when that Los Angeles neighborhood housed the largest mixed immigrant population--mostly Jewish and Mexican-- in the West. She graduated from the UC Berkeley in June, 1947, and a month later married UC architectural student, Fred Rochlin, a Jewish native of Nogales, Arizona. Both Westerners of an unnamed sub-culture--American, Jewish, Mexican--they expressed their predilections in attachment to their natal landscapes, foods, music, and literature. They also savored the stories of their parents' moves West, and took pride in their Western nativity. Neither sensed that beyond their visceral and cerebral responses to Western life and culture lay buried a complex, 400-year-long Jewish history on Western soil. It took the civil rights-inspired ethnic history movement to illuminate that possibility, and a small army of seekers, the Rochlins among them, to bring it about. After the book, Pioneer Jews : a new life in the Far West was launched, Harriet sought deeper truths in the inner journey from immigrant to Westerner in the fictional Desert dwellers trilogy--The reformer's apprentice, The first lady of Dos Cacahuates, and On her way home. She is currently completing an illustrated documentary history, A mixed chorus : Jewish women in the American West, 1849 to 1924. A recognized authority and popular lecturer, Rochlin travels extensively, speaking on various aspects of Western Jewish history and fiction.

From the description of Collection of photographs of western Jewish life, ca. 1845-1991. (University of California, Los Angeles). WorldCat record id: 71791972

...