The Bible barely mentions Serakh, although it does list her in two places about four hundred years apart. For thousands of years, people have spun tales about her. According to one story, the Jews of Isfahan (now in Iran) believed Serakh lived among them until she died in a synagogue fire about nine hundred years ago. Some say that Serakh was exceptionally beautiful, that she played the harp, and that she told Jacob that his son Joseph was still alive and later told Moses where Joseph’s bones were buried in Egypt. So I, too, have spun a tale about Serakh as the “wise old woman” of Jewish legend.
Abigail Scott Duniway might have been called the wise old woman of Portland in 1912. Shortly after moving there in 1871, Duniway started a newspaper for women, the New Northwest. She worked with Susan B. Anthony and others in the women’s movement, and managed to get women’s suffrage on the ballot in the 1884 election. The measure failed then—and four times more—before it came up for a vote, and passed, in 1912.
One of Duniway’s staunchest opponents was her brother, Harvey Scott, who fought against suffrage in the newspaper he edited, The Morning Oregonian. In 1912, Scott had been dead for two years and Duniway, nearly eighty, was often bedridden. Younger women from many different backgrounds worked together on the campaign. They organized rallies, parades, and media events such as Blotter Day. They had handbills, posters, banners, and newspaper ads—but, as far as I know, no VOTE FOR JUSTICE cards. The petticoat card is real. Two cards are pasted into Abigail Scott Duniway’s scrapbook archived at the University of Oregon.
National leaders, including Anna Howard Shaw, campaigned for the vote in Oregon, and many “equal suffrage leagues” sprang up in the state. Among them were the Portland Equal Suffrage League, founded by Josephine Mayer Hirsch, and the Everybody’s Equal Suffrage League, founded by Esther Pohl Lovejoy.
The amendment finally passed statewide (61,265 to 57,104), although it failed in Miriam Josefsohn’s “Nob Hill” section of Portland. On November 30, 1912, Duniway co-signed Oregon’s suffrage proclamation with Governor Oswald West and became the first Oregon woman to register to vote.
Following the lead of the national organization, the Portland chapter of the Council of Jewish Women decided not to endorse suffrage for women—officially, that is—and instead devoted itself to charitable causes. Among them was Neighborhood House, which offered classes, well-baby clinics, and other services to poor families in an area known as South Portland. Neighborhood House had the city’s first public kindergarten. Many Council members did support suffrage, among them Josephine Mayer Hirsch, the chapter’s founding president and a member of Temple Beth Israel, which was founded a year before Oregon became a state. Other Jewish congregations followed, including Ahavai Sholom and Neveh Zedek, now combined as Neveh Shalom. Beth Israel’s building at SW Twelfth and Main burned down under suspicious circumstances in 1923, when the Ku Klux Klan was powerful in Oregon.
Many other parts of Blue Thread are true. Edmund Gress’s typography book still lives in the closed stacks of Multnomah County Central Library. In 1912 there were still a few horse-drawn fire engines competing with cars on the streets of Portland. Portlanders learned who won the 1912 presidential election by watching for different colored lights. Children like fictional Danny Josefsohn might have died of a tetanus infection—commonly called “lockjaw.” The antitoxin for tetanus was isolated in the late 1800s, but the tetanus vaccine we have now was not developed until 1924.
I made up Miriam Josefsohn and the particular prayer shawl she found. Although there is a biblical mandate to tie a blue thread at the corners of a garment, most prayer shawls now have only white fringes at the corner. There’s a lively and ongoing debate about the origin and current availability of that particular blue dye. The most recent research favors dye from a snail—Murex trunculus. In 1912, Jewish women would not have worn a prayer shawl—for centuries that custom was reserved for men. Some Jewish women wear these shawls in synagogues now, often after they become a bat mitzvah—a daughter of the commandment.
Make no mistake, though. The magic in Miriam’s prayer shawl is real. It is that quality of something inside us that pushes us to do the right thing when we least expect it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people lent a hand with weaving the fabric of Blue Thread. Miriam Josefsohn's passion for typography and her experiences at Precision Printers could not have found their places in this story without the help of printmaker and artist, Emily Riley.
The background for Miriam’s religious experiences in 1912 and in the “back-then-and-there” came in part from: Judith Baskin, Knight Professor of Humanities at the University of Oregon; Sylvia Frankel; Anne LeVant Prahl, curator of collections at the Oregon Jewish Museum; and Rabbi Joseph Wolf. Miriam’s involvement in the 1912 suffrage campaign for Oregon women grew with the help of: Janice Dilg, professor of Women’s Studies at Portland State University; and Kimberly Jensen, professor of History and Gender Studies at Western Oregon University.
The story took shape thanks to the many resources of the Multnomah County Library, and the pleasures of working in the library’s Sterling Writer’s Room. I wrote and revised with the support, inspiration, and expertise of Viva Scriva and the best writer’s critique group in the galaxy: Addie Boswell, Melissa Dalton, Amber Keyser, Michelle McCann, Sabina Rascol, Mary Rehmann, Elizabeth Rusch, and Nicole Schreiber. And I am particularly grateful to my husband and beta-reader Michael Feldman, who has shared his home with my imaginary friends for so many years that they feel like part of the family.
Editor and instructor Linda Meyer and her Winter 2010 Book Editing class at Portland State University unraveled a draft of Blue Thread paragraph by paragraph and suggested valuable ways to weave it back together. And re-weave I did, guided and encouraged by the many editors, designers, and marketers at Ooligan Press, whose rare blend of education, enthusiasm, and persistence are any author’s dream. Dozens of people have helped along the way at Ooligan, starting with Janie Webster. A special shout out goes to Sylvia Spratt on the editorial side, to designers Brandon Freels and Kelsey Klockenteger, and the marketing team leaders Laura Gleim, Sara Simmonds, Brittany Torgerson, and Tracy Turpen.
Ooligan Press is a non-profit, general trade press located in the Pacific Northwest and dedicated to advancing the craft of publishing. Ooligan’s staff consists of educators, publishing professionals, and students within the graduate publishing program at Portland State University. We are a press committed to providing education, publishing sustainably, and producing quality books that represent the unique landscapes, communities, and people of the Pacific Northwest.
Project Managers:
Michelle Blair
Kelsey Klockenteger
Anne Paulsen
Stefani Varney
Marc Lindsay
LeAnna Nash
Editing Managers:
Julie Flannagan
Ashley Rogers
Tanna Waters
Developmental Director:
Sylvia Spratt
Developmental Editors:
Katelyn Benz
Leah Brown
Julie Flannagan
Sarah Heilman
Stephanie Kroll
Susan Wigget
Travis Willmore
Amanda Winterroth
Editors:
Kathryn Banks
Kyle Brittain
Erin Clarkson
Heather Frazier
Cheryl Frey
Leah Gibson-Blackfeather
Ben Hamlin
Taylor Hudson
Diane Shadwick
Kristen Svenson
Christopher Thomas
Robin Wilkinson
Cheri Woods-Edwin
Proofreaders:
Kathryn Banks
Kelsey Klockenteger
Isaac Mayo
Anne Paulsen
Ashley Rogers
Diane Shadwick
Kristen Svenson
Safa Sovia Ghnaim
Design:
Brandon Freels (interior)
Kelsey Klockenteger (cover)
Mandi Russell
Digital:
James Avery Wilhelm
Marketing & Sales:
Laura Gleim, Marketing Manager
Chelsea Pfund, Sales Manager
Sara Simmonds, Marketing Manager
Kristen Svenson, Sales Manager
Amanda Winterroth
Brittany Torgerson, Marketing Manager
Tracy Turpen, Marketing Manager
Jeremy Coatney
Lacey Friedly
Indu Shanmugam
Lucy Softich
Stephani Kroll
Ruth Tenzer Feldman is an award-winning author of numerous nonfiction books for children and young adults, including The Fall of Constantinople, Thurgood Marshall, and Don’t Whistle in School: The History of America’s Public Schools. Ruth has also published articles on a variety of subjects, ranging from leeches to Einstein’s refrigerator. Originally from Long Island, New York, she studied at the American University Washington College of Law and has worked as a legislative attorney for the U.S. Department of Education. She now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is a member of the League of Women Voters, the Oregon Historical Society, and the Institute for Judaic Studies. Blue Thread is her first novel.
For more information, visit her website at
www.ruthtenzerfeldman.com
and her blog at
www.bluethreadbook.com