Cohen, Rose (1880–1925)

Russian-born American author whose 1918 autobiography Out of the Shadow provides a classic account of the lives of Jewish immigrants in New York City at the end of the 19th century. Born Rahel Gollup in Belarus on April 4, 1880; died under mysterious circumstances, most likely a suicide, in New York City, 1925; one of six children of Abraham (a tailor) and Annie Gollup.

First published in 1918 and reprinted in 1995, Rose Cohen's Out of the Shadow remains one of the best firsthand accounts of what it was like to be a Russian-Jewish immigrant to America in the closing decade of the 19th century. Rose Cohen was born Rahel Gollup in a small village in Belarus in 1880 into a poor and deeply religious Orthodox Jewish family. She grew up in the Pale of Settlement, an area of tsarist Russia stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Jews in the Pale were not permitted to own land and by the early 1880s found themselves increasingly subject to not only legal discrimination but bloody terroristic pogroms as well. The result of this rapidly deteriorating situation led to a mass exodus of Jewish emigration to Western Europe and North America. When she was ten, her father Abraham immigrated to the United States, after having first been subjected to arrest at the Russian border because his papers were not in order. After having established himself precariously, in 1892 he was able to send steamship tickets for Rose and her unmarried aunt Masha. A year later, the family was finally reunited when her mother Annie, two brothers, George and Michael, and two sisters, Sarah and Bertham, also arrived in the United States.

Although they had escaped the pogroms and grinding poverty of the Jewish shtetls of tsarist Russia, the reunited family found itself living on the lowest rung of New York City's immigrant ladder. Being old enough to work, Rose joined her father in the shop where he toiled. Soon, however, she had work of her own, stitching sleeve linings for men's coats. Underpaid and overworked, many of her fellow-workers were drawn to collective action, and Rose (or Rosie), as Rahel now called herself, was soon attending mass rallies. She joined the union, gaining a sense of solidarity with her fellow toilers. But most of all, Rose was fired by the desire for self-improvement and self-knowledge.

Life during the 1890s was exciting for Rose Cohen as she found herself subjected to the complex process of Americanization that in varying degrees changed the lives of the millions of the immigrants who had come to the new world. She worked briefly as a domestic servant, but did not care for this kind of life. A new environment was revealed to Rose when she found work during summers at a camp in Connecticut that brought immigrant children into an invigorating world of fresh air, nourishing food, and never-ending activities. During one of her frequent illnesses in this phase of her life, Cohen was visited by the noted settlement worker Lillian Wald , who decades later would write a glowing review of Out of the Shadow. From then on, Rose became acquainted with not only assimilated German Jews like Wald, but non-Jews as well who funded medical facilities at the uptown Presbyterian Hospital where sick immigrants could regain their health. This was a new, exciting, and challenging world for a young woman who had grown up in a restrictive Orthodox Jewish ghetto.

By 1902, the family finances had reached the point where Abraham Gollup could quit working for a boss and open up his own grocery on 1st Street. Having turned down one suitor, a grocer, Rose eventually married, gave birth to a daughter, and enthusiastically continued to seek mastery of the English language and American ways. Along with many other immigrants, she attended the Breadwinner's College, a night school sponsored by the Educational Alliance, as well as the Rand School. Both of these institutions had been able to speed the Americanization of thousands of immigrants. Drawn to books, words and self-expression, Rose Cohen learned a great deal from her teachers, particularly Joseph Gollomb, a Russian-Jewish immigrant like herself. Perhaps inspired by his student, in 1935 Gollomb would publish an autobiographical novel entitled Unquiet.

Upon its publication in 1918, Out of the Shadow was showered with enthusiastic reviews. The New York Times praised it for its simplicity of style and sincerity, while in her laudatory review Lillian Wald held that its greatest value lay in the fact that it was "a social document transcending in value many volumes that have been brought forth by academically trained searchers for data on the conditions that the writer has experienced." Encouraged by the positive reception accorded her book, Cohen published a number of articles in literary journals during the next few years. All were essentially autobiographical in nature, continuing to explore her remarkable cultural odyssey, which had brought her from a life "among the Russian peasants" to years of struggle and intellectual challenges "among the Jews of Cherry Street" to her present life, "among the Americans." One of these pieces, the short story entitled "Natalka's Portion," was so highly rated by both editors and readers that it was reprinted at least six times, including an appearance in the prestigious anthology Best Short Stories of 1922.

Even greater successes now appeared possible for the woman who had begun life as a member of an oppressed community in benighted Russia. Rose Cohen spent the summers of 1923 and 1924 as an artist-in-residence at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Here, after hopefully productive days writing in her studio, she spent her dinner hours and evenings meeting and discussing various artistic problems with such cultural stars as the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the painter Lilla Cabot Perry , and the playwright Thornton Wilder. All of this attention should have led to more books from Cohen, but after 1922 she published no more. The clues that might explain her mysterious artistic silence are scant, but besides the possibility of declining physical health there are also some suggestions that her cultural odyssey had been paid for with psychic toll. A brief New York Times notice in September 1922 noted a failed suicide attempt in the East River by a "Rose Cohen, 40, of 25 Decatur Street, Brooklyn."

In her 1927 short story, "Wild Winter Love," Anzia Yezierska , herself a writer of Russian-Jewish background, presents as the protagonist an author named Ruth Raefsky who writes a book entitled Out of the Ghetto. The book's success, however, accelerates the disintegration of the author's marriage. After an illfated affair with an older, married Gentile, "Ruth Raefsky" commits suicide. It is not known whether Yezierska based all, part, or none of this story on the life of Rose Cohen, but the two writers knew each other, and it is possible that the tragic story of Ruth Raefsky is in fact that of Rose Cohen. At this point, what matters is that her remarkable autobiography is once more accessible, for it is a document of sincerity and passion that speaks for the millions of otherwise mute immigrants of Cohen's generation, telling of their dreams, struggles, victories and disappointments.

sources:

Birmingham, Stephen. "The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews. NY: Berkley Books, 1985.

Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girl-hood on the Lower East Side. With an Introduction by Thomas Dublin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.

——. A travers la nuit. Translated by S. Godet. Paris: Renaissance du livre, [1924].

Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side 1890–1925. NY: Monthly Review Press, 1985.

Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Goren, Arthur A. "Jews," in Stephan Thernstrom, ed. Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 571–598.

Howe, Irving, and Harold Libo. World of Our Fathers. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

——, and Kenneth Libo. How We Lived: A Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America 1880–1930. NY: Richard Marek, 1979.

Rischin, Moses. The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870–1914. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Sanders, Ronald. The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation. NY: Harper and Row, 1969.

——. Shores of Refuge: A Hundred Years of Jewish Emigration. NY: Henry Holt, 1988.

Shepard, Richard F., and Vicki Gold Levi. Live and Be Well: A Celebration of Yiddish Culture in America from the First Immigrant to the Second World War. NY: Ballantine Books, 1982.

John Haag , Associate Professor, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia