The Desert Dwellers Trilogy — Harriet Rochlin

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.