Out of the Shadow.
Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow. Illustrated by Walter Jack Duncan. NY: George H. Doran, (1918).
8vo.; 12 black and white illustrations; pages 11-12 partially detached; tan cloth, pictorial label on upper panel; spine browned; extremities lightly frayed.
First edition of Cohen’s memoir of her adolescence in Russia and her first years in America. A presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title to the prominent Boston composer Mabel Wheeler Daniels: For Mabel Daniels/ Live with the one/ and know the many. / Rose Gallup Cohen/ MacDowell Colony/ Peterboro, New Hampshire/ June 1924. Cohen attended MacDowell during its 1923 and 1924 sessions, and Daniels, a close friend of Marian MacDowell, was an “enthusiastic” participant in the Colony’s development.
Rose (Rahel, Ruth) Cohen (b. 1880) and her family emigrated to the United States from Russia in her teens, and settled on one of the poorest streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Though she had been tutored, briefly, in Russian and Yiddish from age 11, after her family’s emigration she started working immediately, sacrificing a formal education to her brother and sister. At the same time, with help from a neighbor, she struggled to develop her reading skills in Yiddish, and her contact with Lillian Wald at the Nurses’ Settlement and Presbyterian Hospital encouraged her to acquire English skills as well. Joyce B. Adams notes,
At last, the settlement movement presented Cohen an opportunity for more education. She attended an informal talk on Shakespeare at the East Broadway House, and heard the phrase, “You can get it in the library.”… “I do not know how but it was now that I found that there were such things as free libraries and I joined the one at the Educational Alliance. I felt greatly awed when I looked around from my place in the line to the librarians’ desk and saw the shelves and shelves of books and the stream of people hastening in and out with books under their arms. (“Jewish Women Immigrants’ Motivation in Library Use and Reading,” by Joyce B. Adams, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1996)
Cohen’s job at the settlement-house dress-making shop stimulated her fluency in English, which she supplemented with voluminous readings of English and American literature, integral to the development of her literacy. Remarkably, she published Out of the Shadow while still only in her late thirties; little is known of Cohen that is not derived from this memoir. Despite her presence at the MacDowell Colony during both the 1923 and 1924 sessions—to which this inscription dates—her autobiography of a short but critical stage of her life remained her sole publication.
Mabel Daniels (1878-1971), who often went by the name “M.W. Daniels” in an effort to avoid the prejudice of concert-goers and even conductors, greatly expanded the frontier for woman composers of the next generation. A magna cum laude graduate from Radcliffe College and a student of the New England Conservatory of Music, she was the first female student in Ludwig Thuille’s score-reading class at the Royal Conservatory of Munich, and recorded her experiences in An American Girl in Munich (1905). Back in the Boston area she became active in musical events at Radcliffe, the Boston public school system, and Simmons College, where she was music director from 1913 to 1918. “With the domestic help of her ‘faithful retainer,’ Norah, the constant encouragement of her teachers, and the facilities of the MacDowell Colony…she was able to produce a body of varied musical compositions that defined her as an outstanding woman composer of her generation,” writes Eugenia Kaldein. However, Daniels was loath to be labeled a “woman composer”—even one considered “outstanding.” She preferred that her achievements be evaluated without regard to her sex, but given the lack of precedent women in her field, this was close to impossible. “She was the only woman to have had three different works played by the Boston Sym
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