Read Online Hearts West by Chris Enss - Free Book Online Page B

older woman from Chvedkifka, Russia, watched the young woman’s every move closely. After several moments Rachel patiently and successfully transformed the snarled ball into a manageable skein.
    The ball of yarn was politely handed over to Chaya, who grinned from ear to ear. “Good,” she told her, “Good. You’ve passed the test.” The teenager breathed a sigh of relief. Chaya’s approval was all that was standing in the way of Rachel’s marriage to the North Dakota farmer seeking her hand.
    â€œA wife of good, strong character is what I seek, but it is optional. To be of the Jewish faith is mandatory,” wrote Abraham Calof in 1892. Rachel Bella Kahn fit all of the requirements set by the twenty-two-year-old man. She was not the first to reply to his advertisement for a bride, nor was she the applicant Abraham had initially selected. Abraham’s first mail-order bride choice reconsidered the proposal after her father persuaded her that America was too far away for her to move. Rachel had no such pull in her homeland and believed her sad existence could only improve in the United States. Once she was approved by Chaya—Abraham’s sister—as a suitable candidate for a wife, Rachel eagerly looked forward to beginning a new life in the fertile farmland of North Dakota.
    Rachel Bella Kahn was born in 1876. Her mother died shortly after Rachel turned four, leaving her and her three siblings to be raised by their father. A servant girl was hired to help Rachel’s father in tending to the children, but the girl was cruel to Rachel and her brothers and sister, denying them food and beating them. Her father remarried when Rachel was eight, but his new wife proved to be as abusive as the live-in help had been. Again the Kahn children were made to go without many of the basic necessities of life and were physically mistreated as well.
    Rachel’s father turned a deaf ear to his children’s complaints of their stepmother’s actions. The Kahn youngsters suffered through several years of cruelty. Rachel protected her family as best she could. According to her memoirs, her “childhood passed on slowly in tears.”
    At seventeen, Rachel went to work for her aunt as a maid. The job was a difficult one. She spent long hours cleaning the many rooms of her aunt’s elaborate mansion, doing laundry, and shopping for the evening meals. Often, the shopping excursion included a trip to the butcher’s shop. It was there that Rachel met and fell in love with the butcher’s son. Her mother’s side of the family, however, would not allow the two to pursue the relationship. They considered his occupation to be inferior and forbade them to see each other.
    Rachel celebrated her eighteenth birthday alone and with no prospects for the future. She was convinced she would die an old maid. A solicitation for marriage gave her a renewed hope that she could rise above her desperate situation. Abraham Calof liked what Rachel wrote about herself in a letter of response to his search for a wife. After exchanging photos and finding favor with one another’s looks, Abraham commissioned his oldest sister to further interview his prospective bride.
    Chaya put Rachel through a series of strenuous tests that challenged her patience and good nature. She won the critical woman over by not becoming frustrated or angry while unraveling the ball of tangled yarn. Chaya agreed that Abraham should marry Rachel and sent her on her way.
    Rachel made the journey to America traveling first by train from Brest-Litosk, Russia, to Hamburg, Germany, and then by ship to Ellis Island. She was sick for twenty of the twenty-two days at sea, but quickly forgot the discomfort the minute she saw Abraham for the first time. “There’s my beloved,” she told a girl sitting next to her once they arrived in New York. The engaged couple recognized each other from their photographs, and when