Southwest Jewish History

 

Volume 2, Number 2, Winter 1993

From the Shtetl to Nogales

Annie Shapiro Rochlin (1880-1978) was born in Schedrin, a small Russian Jewish village in the farmlands and forests of the Minsk Province. The oldest of eleven children, she was the first to emigrate to the United States. Quickly disenchanted with New York's tumultuous Lower East Side, she pushed on to Winnipeg, Canada where in 1911 she married Jake Rochlin, a native of Mogilev. Together the pair trekked west in search of work in Calgary, Vancouver, and then the American Northwest. In 1917, shortly after their third child was born, Jake tracked rumors of business opportunities on the Arizona-Sonora border. Soon after, he sent for Annie and the children.

As the train approached Nogales, Annie recalled staring horror struck at a hostile wilderness guarded by giant soldiers. When the giant soldiers turned out to be towering saguaros, she felt better, but not for long. Everything about the place--climate, terrain, people, languages, customs, foods--was foreign and forbidding. She was ready to move on, but her husband had at last established a going business. Pregnant with their fourth child, she resigned herself and settled in.

In early 1923, the Rochlins bought twenty acres of rolling desertland three miles east of the city limits. Several months later, a red brick territorial-style house began to rise on the leveled brow of a hill. That November the youngest of her five children was born in the still unfinished, storm-lashed house.

Annie remained in the house for nearly fifty years; twenty of them on her own, after her children were grown and her husband had died. Almost ninety, growing frail, her independence revoked with her driver's license, she finally agreed to leave her desert home and move first to Tucson and then to Los Angeles where her children could look after her.