My Play Is Study: A Book for Children.
Rebecca Gratz’s Copy
Given by her to Jacob da Silva Solis Cohen
[Gratz, Rebecca]. [Krummacher, Frederic Adolphus]. My Play Is Study: A Book for Children. Translated from the German [of Krummacher] by L[orentz]. Lermont. Philadelphia: Published by James K. Simon, 1852.
Small 4to; 7 1/2 x 5 3/4”; 111pp; frontispiece and three hand-colored plates lithographed by Sinclair; with Cohen’s bookplate featuring palms forward hands, and his additional small shelf-label; front inner hinge starting; original dark blue-green cloth, decorated and lettered in blind and gold; corners bumped and rubbed; quarter-inch chip out of top of spine, small chips at bottom; about very good with hand-colored plates particularly fresh and bright.
First American Edition and first edition of this translation. Jacob da Silva Solis Cohen’s copy, inscribed in ink by him on the front fly-leaf, This book was given to me / January lst, 1852 / by Miss Rebecca Gratz / Jacob Solis Cohen. The book that Rebecca Gratz chose to give to Solis Cohen was a key text for those interested in early childhood learning. It was reprinted at least seven times in this country prior to 1866. Frederic Adolphus Krummacher (1767-1845) was a German theologian and writer of fables and parables; this is a translation of his book Mein Spielen Ist Lernen. It comprises four stories, such as “How Play Must Be Useful” (with quotations from Aesop), twelve parables, twelve fables and other didactic miscellany, as well as a children’s hymn. Krummacher was one of Amos Bronson Alcott’s favorite authors. At his experimental Temple School in Concord, Alcott often read from Krummacher. Throughout Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Record of a School: Exemplifying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture, Krummacher is often cited. For instance,
After this conversation, which involved many anecdotes, many supposed cases, and many judgments, Mr. Alcott read from Krummacher’s fables, a story which involved the free action of three boys of different characters, and questioned them respecting their opinion of these boys, and the principles on which it was seen by analysis that they acted. (p. 3)
Alcott and Peabody were at the forefront of innovations in teaching methods in this country and were deeply influenced by the German theorists in this area.
Jacob Solis Cohen (1838-1927) was a prominent Philadelphia physician and physicist who studied, among other medical schools, at the University of Pennsylvania. He became one of the residents of the Philadelphia Hospital, and, during the Civil War, rose to acting assistant surgeon in the United States Navy. Later he served as visiting surgeon to the two Philadelphia military hospitals. In private practice he studied the then new laryngoscope and became an expert on diseases of the throat. He wrote major books on these subjects, numerous medical articles, and taught medicine at Jefferson Medical College and the Philadelphia Polyclinic, of which he was one of the founders. He was interested the scientific aspects of acoustics and gave many popular lectures on the subject as well as teaching it at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.
Rebecca Gratz and Jacob Solis Cohen descended from prominent Jewish-American families, part of our nation’s history from the time of the Revolutionary War. They were close-knit. Umansky and Ashton include a letter from Rebecca Gratz to her niece Miriam Moses Gratz Cohen (Mrs. Solomon Cohen, of Charleston & Savannah), and there is other correspondence between the two. When Gratz gave this important children’s book to Cohen, she was seventy-one years old; he was fourteen. It represented a gift from the heart on a subject of the utmost importance to her: the education, especially moral, of the young.
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