" My parents] got tired of eating potatoes, and prairie dogs weren't kosher." --Isadore Pitts, son of Jewish immigrants to South Dakota, about 1913
Linking the personal and the historical, Linda Mack Schloff integrates oral accounts, diaries, letters, and autobiographies with original research and interpretation to present the little-known story of the Jewish experience in America's heartland. And Prairie Dogs Weren't Kosher uses the voices of four generations of Jewish women who settled in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, and Wisconsin to show how they transported and transformed...
" My parents] got tired of eating potatoes, and prairie dogs weren't kosher." --Isadore Pitts, son of Jewish immigrants to South Dakota, about 1913
The earliest arrivals were German Jews who came when the territory was newly created. By the 1880s they were joined by immigrants from eastern Europe. Many settled in small towns or walked the roads as peddlers. Some found homes in the Iron Range towns of Virginia and Hibbing, but the majority lived in the Twin Cities. Gradually, as they clustered in neighborhoods, founded synagogues and community organizations, and sought to create Jewish homes, the two groups merged. A hundred years later, the process was repeated when immigrants from Russia arrived.
Authors Hyman Berman and...
The earliest arrivals were German Jews who came when the territory was newly created. By the 1880s they were joined by immigrants from eastern Europe....
