The Little Bride

The Little Bride by Anna Solomon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Minna, a mail-order Jewish bride, put all her 16 year old hopes and dreams into moving to America. Would her husband be young and wealthy? Living in Odessa and the Ukraine, suffering under the weight of the Russian army, being poor and forced to live with her war-crazed relative would all be forgotten soon. Barely alive after the ship docks in New York, Minna is met by not her betrothed, Max - but Max's younger son, Jacob, who then escorts her to a train and travels for days to South Dakota. To Minna's dismay, she finds out from Jacob that he is 14, his older brother, Samuel, is 18 and Max is 40 and the beautiful house she envisioned is only a soddy set in dry, desolate land. Brutally honest and brutally sad, Minna, a sometimes unlikeable main character, must find strength....



Not knowing anything about the Am Olam or the influx of Jewish immigrants eager to build a new Palestine or Jerusalem in America, this book, although fiction, was an eye opener for me. Most of the colonists had grown up in a city, and they found living off the land to be very difficult.



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