“Minna’s veil was cut in the yard, next to the chickens.” This opening to our heroine’s wedding ceremony in The Little Bride offers a precious glimpse of the wondrously strange story of Jewish immigration evoked by Anna Solomon in her debut novel. Like other talented young Jewish-American novelists Jonathan Safran Foer and Dara Horn, Solomon fruitfully imagines faraway times and climes in The Little Bride — Europe’s Odessa and America’s Dakota Territory in the late 19th century, specifically — and creates a winning 16-year-old heroine in Minna Losk.

The novel opens in Odessa, as the orphaned Minna endures a dehumanizing physical and psychological inspection so that she might become a mail-order bride and make it to America. Solomon is unsparing in her depiction of this scene, which Minna shrewdly navigates. Solomon describes Odessa with spare and crisp, descriptive language, from its lowly mussel and beer-smelling docks, where Minna must travel to obtain a false passport, to its more sublime city streets, “the curved balconies adorned with half-naked statues. The gargoyles brooding at the roofs. The polished horse-hitches and heavy railings and ornate gates.”

After a grueling voyage across the Atlantic — Solomon’s account belies any romantic notions we might have of such migrations — Minna endures a somewhat less grueling journey halfway across her new country so that she might wed the middle-aged Max Getreuer, struggling mightily as a farmer in the barren, unforgiving plains of the Dakota Territory.

To Solomon’s credit, she neither demonizes nor valorizes Max. Rather, she imbues him with a painful personal history of his own, which earns him our sympathy, and Minna’s. All the same, our heroine cannot quite bring herself to love her husband, partly on account of his age and partly on account of his utter haplessness as a farmer coupled with his stubborn religious observance, which is ill-suited to life on the rugged frontier.

Solomon devotes significant attention toward rendering the harsh landscape of Minna’s America and does so with Cather-like confidence. Our protagonist tries hard to see beauty in her new environs, partly through her imaginative efforts to see something familiar in the strange land they call “Sodokota.” When she spots in the distance a precious line of “broad-limbed trees, their branches heavy with leaves,” Minna “felt a dazzling relief. … She thought: I grew up among trees, in the forest.” Solomon also painstakingly evokes Minna’s daily chores and struggles — her careful braiding of wheatgrass for fuel, for example, so they need not burn foul-smelling dung — and these quiet moments represent some of the most finely observed, rewarding sections of The Little Bride. Solomon’s spartan, yet elegant, prose seems masterfully paired with her literary subject.

As if these deprivations aren’t enough, Solomon imbues the narrative with a sexual threat in the form of Max’s handsome son from his first marriage, Samuel. A fierce attraction develops early on between Minna and Samuel, spurred on by Minna’s nude bathing in the nearby creek. Will Samuel and Minna succumb to temptation? Will they abandon Max, leaving him to his certain death? Will they all simply starve, or might they overcome the obstacles (environmental and domestic) to carve out a viable Jewish home on the range? Solomon’s tenderness for her characters and even the harsh land of “Sodokota” encourages us to care about the answers to these questions.

Solomon, apparently, summoned her inspiration for The Little Bride from the real-life Jewish agricultural communities that emerged in the American Midwest over a century ago. Most all of these settlements failed miserably. Yet, if nothing else, the agricultural efforts of these pioneers offered them, and their gentile neighbors, a glimpse of an alternative way of being Jewish in America. Through retrieving this little-known slice of Jewish Americana to memory, Solomon’s moving debut commemorates their efforts.

Andrew Furman is the author of “Alligators May Be Present.”