Sheaf of Leaves, A

First Book By First President Of National Council Of Jewish Women

Solomon, Hannah Greenbaum. A Sheaf of Leaves. Chicago: Privately Printed, 1911.

8vo; 270 pp.; original green cloth, corners bumped, spine edges a bit frayed with some professional repairs; rebacked, spine laid down, new linen hinges. Still an acceptable copy in custom clamshell box.

First Edition. This first edition is a very scarce book; it is a collection of Solomon’s articles and speeches. Her only other book was her posthumous autobiography, Fabric of My Life, 1946.

Hannah Greenebaum Solomon (1858-1942), educated in both public and Jewish schools in Chicago and well-trained in music and literature, devoted much of her early life to cultural pursuits. In 1877 she and her sister, Henriette Frank, became the first Jewish members of the Chicago Woman’s Club, “an organization founded the year before primarily for literary purposes,” but which soon developed a reform-minded bent. After taking several years away from social and political work to focus her attention on her husband and three young children, Solomon returned to the front lines of inner-city oppression by confronting the ills that plagued several groups of the Chicago community, especially Jewish women and immigrants. Raised by parents who were members of the first Reform Judaism congregation in Chicago, Solomon’s activism was rooted, according to one historian, “more deeply in religious convictions than that of many such women,” but she “nevertheless followed within the Jewish community a pattern typical of the progressive reformers of her period” (NAW 3, p. 325).

Solomon’s city- and state-wide accomplishments are numerous. In 1896, she helped found the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs. That year she conducted a census of the immigrants in the Jewish district, and the following year solicited financial backing from the Chicago section of the National Council of Jewish Women to establish the Bureau of Personal Service, providing legal and other services to immigrants. She worked with Jane Addams at Hull House on a number of initiatives, especially those addressing children’s rights. She was one of a number of members of the Chicago Woman’s Club who were instrumental in the establishment of the Cook County juvenile court in 1899. In 1905 Cohen was a key force in moving the Illinois Industrial School for Girls to its permanent location and developing its potential; during her tenure as President (1906-09) the school evolved into the Park Ridge School for Girls. In 1910, Solomon was a charter member of the Women’s City Club, and was appointed chairman of the club’s committee to investigate the city’s waste disposal system. “In her autobiography Mrs. Solomon recalls conducting an inspection tour of the city dumps clad in trailing white lace and carrying an elegant parasol, an experience which came to symbolize for her both the determination and the complete lack of preparation with which she and other women of her day met their new obligations” (NAW 3, p. 325).

Solomon’s national efforts are significant, as well. In 1890, with preparations underway for the Parliament of Religions at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Solomon was asked to organize a national Jewish Women’s Congress, an organization that would evolve into the National Council of Jewish Women. Sylvia A. Johnson writes of Solomon’s involvement:

By her personal efforts she brought together many of the leading Jewish women in the United States, the first such assembly in the history of American Jewry. As she had urged, the Congress resolved itself into a permanent organization, the National Council of Jewish Women. Its purpose, as Mrs. Solomon conceived it, was to teach all Jewish women their obligations both to their religion and to the community of which they were a part. Local sections were quickly organized (fifty by 1896), which not only studied Judaism but also sponsored social service projects. More broad

Item ID#: 5132

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