It’s a thin book called “Rachel Calof’s Story.” It is the memoirs of a Jewish Russian immigrant to North Dakota. She was an orphan, and came to the U.S. in 1894. In 1936, at the age of 60, she sat down and wrote the story of her life in a notebook. She was not a “writer”, just a mother and farm wife. In 1995, the University of Indiana translated her notebook from Yiddish into English and published it.

The hardships and horrors that this woman faced in her life are almost unimaginable to me. She is beaten and neglected as a child, she is sent across the ocean to marry a man she has never met, her entire family nearly starves to death,she survives a North Dakota winter in a 12 x 14shack with four other adults, a cow and twenty chickens for six months, she bears seven children within eight years and gives birth to all of them without medical assistance, she undergoes an unanesthesized D&C to remove aseptic miscarriage from her uterus,the entire homestead is nearly lost in aterrible storm, a child is burned horribly on the woodstove and she nearly dies multiple times.

What is most striking to me about these memoirs, though, is the section that she devotes to describing in detail the postpartum mental illness (which seems to be postpartum psychosis) that she experienced after the birth of her first child. Of her 87 page journal, fully 11.5 pages are devoted to the six weeks after her daughter’s birth. I find it interesting that with all that happened in her life, she chose to devote more than 13% of her memoirs to telling this story.And what a story.Within a few days of the birth she becomes psychotic. She isalmost unable to sleep or eat. For weeks, she experiences terrifying visual hallucinations of demons and auditory command hallucinations to “give us your child, or else we will take you and the child.” She sits at the side of the baby’s bed with a knife.

Her mother-in-law is aware of her insanity, but blames her for it and threatens her. Becausehe is gone so often (working as a farm hand miles from their home), and because shemakes up elaborate excuses for her bizarre behaviors, Rachel is able to hide her illness from her husband “with the cleverness of the deranged” for nearly six weeks. At that point the hallucinations become even more pronounced, and they find her screaming out on the prairie. A kindly female relative is finally called in who gently and patiently nurses her back to health.

So there it is: proof that perinatal mood and anxiety disorders are not a new “trendy invention” of spoiled women. The two things that I love most about the story are these:

1. The wisdom that Rachel has looking back. She is able to look back from a place of being fully recovered and callitwhat it was: “a fearful illness of the mind, a sickness.” I wish that everyone here in 2010 could have the wisdom that Rachel had in 1936 when she wrote the memoirs.

2. She goes on to survive and thrive! All of her children live, the farm becomes prosperous, she becomes arespected leader in her community, and she livesa long life with an adoring family.