There are no tenements, no sweatshops, and no Yiddish proverbs in Joanna Hershon’s lyrical new novel about early Jewish immigration to America.

In much literature of this genre, New York — and specifically the gritty Lower East Side — is a character unto itself; in “The German Bride” (Ballantine, 320 pages, $25), the city plays only a passing role. It is where newlyweds Abraham and Eva Shein disembark after crossing the Atlantic in the early 1860s, and where they find a brief respite from their travels in an elegant Fifth Avenue hotel suite.

Within a few days of their arrival, the couple is in a horse-drawn carriage, heading west along a treacherous stretch of highway, a Steinway piano and a porcelain bathtub in tow. Their harrowing journey ends in Santa Fe, N.M. There, Abraham and his brother, Meyer, had established a dry goods store more than a decade earlier.

“The German Bride” explores the complexities of sibling relationships, the consequences of secret-keeping, and the futility of harboring escape fantasies — themes central to Ms. Hershon’s two earlier novels, “Swimming” (2001) and “The Outside of August” (2003). But the author’s latest book is her first major foray into historical fiction; it draws on the stories of a small group of pioneering Jews, who made their way from Germany to New Mexico in the middle- to late-19th century.

In Ms. Hershon’s fictionalized account, Santa Fe’s plaza is full of shops with German-Jewish names “as amusing in these incongruous surroundings as they were reassuring”: Isinfeld’s, Sheinker’s, and Spiegelman’s. The largest among them is Shein Brothers’.

These familiar monikers prove cold comfort to Eva. The daughter of a prominent Berlin banker, she had never intended to become a frontierswoman. But after an illicit affair with a gentile artist, she is desperate to leave home — if only to spare her parents further heartbreak — and hastily agrees to marry Abraham. She hopes that a self-imposed exile among cowboys and American Indians might prove “a more efficient and perhaps gentler delivery from memory.”

But repercussions of the affair follow the young woman from her parents’ bucolic estate to the adobe-walled, dirt-floored hovel she shares with Abraham in New Mexico. To make matters worse, Eva finds life in the American West full of disappointment: Her modest home, with its rudimentary kitchen, is unfit for entertaining; she suffers a miscarriage, followed by a stillbirth, and her new husband spends most evenings drinking, gambling, and bedding prostitutes at the local saloon.

“There was no question this was punishment, and though she couldn’t deny she deserved it, she wanted to know when it might stop,” Ms. Hershon writes, after Eva delivers the stillborn baby. “There was also no more question of God’s existence. He was proved to her with this definitive horror, with this putrid silence that would not let her rest no matter how tired she felt.”

Eva doesn’t court mirth, only a comfortable balance. And for a time, her life in the desert does become more bearable: Shein Brothers’ wins a lucrative government contract, and Abraham makes good on his promise to build Eva a new, European-style home. But no sooner is the house complete — no sooner, in fact, does a pregnant Eva tell herself that “her life was set and there were no more choices” — than Abraham’s mounting debt threatens everything, including their lives.

“The German Bride” is buoyed by Ms. Hershon’s descriptive powers. She transports readers via stagecoach to saloons and sickrooms, and even to a Passover seder, where crisp tortillas takes the place of matzo. And she introduces a lively cast of characters whom the Sheins encounter in America: a flame-haired femme fatale who deals cards at the local bar; an idealistic German-Jewish woman who embraces the rough-and-tumble American West; a trio of icy French nuns; a nearby community of poor mountain people destined to “marry their kin, go blind, go mad,” and a mysterious young man who arrives in town bloodied and delirious.

There may be no record of an Abraham Shein or a Wolf Spiegelman (another shop owner depicted in the novel) ever having lived in Santa Fe, but that city’s early Jewish residents did include merchants Abraham Staab and Willi Spiegelberg. These men, like the similarly named characters in Ms. Hershon’s book, are said to have been close with the local French bishop — and to have donated funds toward the construction of a Roman Catholic cathedral, all the while maintaining their own faith traditions.

Whatever inspiration she may have found in the lived experience of these settlers, Ms. Hershon succeeds in spinning a devastatingly realistic tale of a young life defined by loss — and, ultimately, by resilience.

Ms. Birkner is a frequent contributor to the Sun.