Rose Gollup Cohen
Rose Gollup Cohen (1880–1925) was a Russian Jewish writer who grew up in a village of the Russian Empire. She came to America in 1892 with her Aunt Masha to join her father and settled on New York’s Lower East Side. She worked in a garment sweatshop, joined a union, and also did domestic work. Poor health troubled her life.
Lillian Wald visited her and helped her go to uptown Presbyterian Hospital, where she met people who funded summer outings for immigrant children. Cohen spent summers at a Connecticut retreat and began working with Leonora O’Reilly, who directed a cooperative shirtwaist shop. When O’Reilly started teaching at the Manhattan Trade School for Girls in 1902, she hired Cohen as her assistant.
Cohen studied at Breadwinners’ College at the Educational Alliance, the Rand School of Social Science, and University Extension at Columbia University. In 1918 she published her autobiography, Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side. It was well received and appeared in French and Russian as well as English.
She also wrote several short pieces for New York and Philadelphia magazines between 1918 and 1922. One story, Natalka’s Portion, was reprinted many times and was included in Best Short Stories of 1922.
In the early 1920s Cohen met writers at the MacDowell Colony, including Lilla Cabot Perry and Edwin Arlington Robinson. She died in 1925 under mysterious circumstances, perhaps a suicide. Anzia Yezierska later wrote a short story about her, Wild Winter Love, that ends with suicide.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 05:46 (CET).