jackiedoherty.org

My father recently came back from New York City where he visited the Tenement Museum (Teachers: the website is filled with excellent materials for a unit on immigration, including “the Immigrant Game.”) He liked it so much he went back a second time and brought back a book from the gift shop – Out of the Shadow by Rose Cohen. It’s a first hand account of a Russian Jewish girl who came to this country in 1892 (according to the Museum website, 23 million people immigrated to America between 1890 and 1924). Her story starts in a sleepy Russian village, where life falls in with the rhythm of the seasons. At the age of 12, she and her Aunt follow her Father to America, after being smuggled out of Russia in a hay wagon. She works 14-hour days in numerous sweatshops or as a servant until her health deteriorates, but she and her father save enough money to bring her mother and four siblings over from Russia. If you ever saw the musical Fiddler on the Roof, you get a sense of the family and culture into which she was born, including people whose profession is “matchmaking” and the constant fear of persecution for being Jewish (both in Russia and America). Her story, written at times almost haltingly, in a language that she struggled to learn in night classes or from her younger siblings, is one of a search for herself as well as a larger tale of the immigrant experience. There is a sense of wonder and amazement about the fact that public education is free to all. She discovers books, and I, who stumbled upon Dickens as a child, felt the same thrill as she did when she picks up David Copperfield and reads it aloud to her family. There’s also a Lowell connection: the book was edited with an introduction by Thomas Dublin, who wrote Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and community in Lowell, Masachusetts, 1826-1860.