Landau took her new position in Los Angeles on a temporary basis, a six-month tryout, at thirty-seven and a half hours per week for $200 a month. But she had borrowed money to make the cross-country move. The job would have to prove permanent. Landau did not waver in that conviction, though, after only two weeks, she would admit the assignment was quite simply a “nightmare.”

Landau's expectations of the job did not match those of her employer. Fichman had wanted a practical music instructor, who could conduct and teach part singing. He also assumed Landau knew and could teach music connected to Jewish traditions. Looking back, she admitted, I was “absolutely the wrong person for such a position”: “I was creative, I had goals, but I was not a social worker, what the centers needed most. On the East-side an accompanist for the class in dancing was expected, I could not even do this, or lead community singing. I did not understand, and did not speak Yiddish. Jewish, folksong, Israeli folk melodies I learned gradually myself from the people who expected me to lead!”

Adding to her troubles, Landau became very sick during her first year on the West Coast, with a severe flu that triggered rheumatism, attacks of joint pain. Though the ailment limited the use of her hands and arms, she did her best to hide this supposed weakness, keenly aware of the importance of appearance. Later she credited that strategy to past experience: “How could a refugee from Nazi Germany believe in the existence of human understanding?” Fritz Riesenfeld, whom Landau had met in Berlin, was her doctor in Los Angeles, and she saw him weekly for treatments. She had found lodging, a furnished room, in a house on Cardiff Avenue with two sisters, Alice Mueller and Sophie Schott. The sisters generously cared for their new roommate. With a little help Landau would not let anything stop her from succeeding in Los Angeles—not illness, not the job.

Landau's difficulties with her new position in the Jewish Centers Association had much to do with general confusion within the Jewish community center movement. This movement had its origins in the development of US Jewish youth groups, including the first Young Men's Hebrew Association, founded in 1854 in Baltimore.