I first learned about my great-grandaunt, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, in the early 1990s from a complete stranger, a researcher named Michael Wells. I had never heard of her, or about her remarkable around-the-world journey, even though she was my great-grandfather’s sister. Though she made headlines throughout the United States and Europe, appeared in advertisements for bicycles and spring water, and had been celebrated the world around, no one in my immediate family, and, as it turns out, almost no one in my extended family had ever heard of Annie, either. At some point many years ago, it’s not clear when or why, the two branches of the family, Annie’s, and my great-grandfather Bennett’s, lost touch with one another.
In the late 1990s, I started cycling regularly, but had given little thought to Annie since first hearing about her several years before. Then, in 2003, Mr. Wells contacted me again to see if I had learned anything about Annie since we had last corresponded a decade before. I had not but my interest was piqued, in part because I was now cycling myself, and I decided to poke around a bit to see what I could learn. I knew from an old newspaper article Mr. Wells provided that Annie had started her odyssey at the Massachusetts State House, so I called the State House library to see if there was any record of the event there. I was surprised when librarian Eva Murphy told me without hesitation that she knew there was nothing at the State House because she had looked about two years before when a gentleman named Dennis McCown, from Austin, Texas, had inquired about Annie. I was astonished. Annie’s story was obscure at best. Who else, I wondered, was on her trail? Ms. Murphy put me in touch with Dennis and he told me he had stumbled upon Annie while researching the murder of Martin Mrose in El Paso on the night of Annie’s lecture there. Dennis told me that as John Wesley Hardin’s men were dispatching Mrose at the El Paso city dump, Hardin, with Mrose’s wife, Helen, by his side, was at Annie’s lecture. The rest, as they say, is history.
That an ancestor of mine—my Jewish great-grandaunt from Boston—had crossed paths with such a notorious character of the Old West seemed utterly implausible, and I was hooked. I chased Annie through snow-covered cemeteries in icy rain, across cyberspace, and over miles and miles of microfilm of newspapers published from Chicago to Shanghai and dozens of cities in between. I phoned libraries, historical associations, funeral homes, academics, and newspapers all over the country. I located the descendants of people Annie had met during her travels and wrote them looking for long-lost remnants of her journey. And, after months of searching, I found her only direct, living descendant, her granddaughter, Mary, who had all of the artifacts that remain of Annie’s journey (at least those I have been able to find), including her lantern-slide show. The slides are made of glass and, remarkably, they had survived shipment around the world in the 1890s and many moves in the years since.
During the chase, Annie’s story became, in some respects, my story, too. As I struggled up the modest hills west of Boston on my superlight, carbon-fiber Trek bicycle, dressed in neon green breathable fabrics, cell phone in my saddle bag and a Gatorade in my bottle cage, I soon found myself thinking of Annie dressed in long skirts going over the Hudson Highlands on her forty-two-pound ladies’ Columbia bicycle, or, later, in bloomers, crossing the Arizona desert on her men’s Sterling, a hundred miles from nowhere with nothing but the hope of a passing freight in case of misfortune. She was, and is, my cycling muse. But that, alone, hardly explains the thousands of hours and the small fortune I’ve spent trying to recover this story of one Victorian woman’s quest.
A few weeks after I started my research, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I was nearing fifty, and although this disease is generally treatable, my deepening obsession with Annie and my cancer diagnosis were more closely linked than I understood at the time. As we face our own mortality we yearn, I think, to see ourselves as more than the sum of our years. If we look forward through the windshield, and have children or grandchildren, we gain a measure of reassurance in the knowledge that we will live on, in some way, through our children and their progeny. And if we look back, at our parents, grandparents, and other ancestors, we see the road in the rear-view mirror, too. Through family history we seek our connection to the past and the future and an appreciation of our place in the long human chain.
After my cancer surgery and treatment, the bicycle was my path back to health and a sense of well-being. During those days in the saddle, I felt as if my bike was tethered to Annie’s; that she was pulling me up and over the hills west of Boston. She kept me company, provided inspiration, and occupied my imagination as the miles went by. Getting back on my bike as soon and as often as I could made me feel very much alive. That I was finding my solace, and my strength, on two wheels, as Annie had, connected me to her in ways that I could not have imagined before. I found myself sympathizing with her for taking control of her life, even though others, especially her children, paid a heavy price for her independence. In different ways, Annie and I each found freedom on two wheels and used the bicycle to exercise control over our own destinies. For both of us, the bicycle became an implement of power.
WHEN I FIRST began the search that eventually led to her granddaughter, Mary, I quickly learned that Annie was going to be an elusive quarry for an amateur historian such as myself. The official records—her marriage registration, the birth registrations for her children, and various census records—gave wildly conflicting information about two basic facts: Annie’s place of birth and her age. She was either born in Russia, Poland, Massachusetts, New York, or Pennsylvania; and her age was all over the map, too. I was completely perplexed. Even if Annie’s date and place of birth didn’t promise to shed any light on her bicycle trip, trying to reconcile the conflicts and omissions provided valuable insight into Annie’s character. It was clear that, when it came to giving information to various officials, she was hardly a slave to the truth, and I began to suspect that she was going to prove to be a rather roguish and impish personality (more than one person hearing this story has suggested she was pathological).
After seven months of searching, it was two small death notices in the New York Times, one for Max and another for Annie, that led me to the New Jersey cemetery where they are buried and, through the cemetery, to Mary. (Coincidentally, the cemetery is just minutes from the house where I grew up and my paternal grandparents are buried there, as well. Annie is on my mother’s side.) I didn’t know if Mary was still alive when I learned her name (she was listed as the contact person in the cemetery records, but those records were thirteen years old) and I wasn’t sure how she would respond to a letter from a complete stranger poking around in her grandmother’s life. But I wrote, and feeling this was either going to be the end of the road or the beginning of a new one, I waited. Then, one evening, about ten days later, the phone rang.
“Peter,” said a woman’s voice, “this is your long-lost cousin, Mary.” With those words my entire body quivered with emotion.
Mary told me that my interest in Annie, and in recovering her history, had lifted a burden. For decades Mary felt she was supposed to do something with Annie’s legacy, but didn’t know what. Now, I had come along out of the blue, a blood relation no less, to provide the solution. Mary wondered aloud whether our ancestors “up there” had colluded to bring us together. “If you write my grandmother’s story,” Mary said when we first spoke, “it will be the fulfillment of my dreams!” With those words, I was truly on a mission.
Mary was seventy-two when we first spoke in late October 2003, and she is Annie’s only grandchild, the only child of Annie’s youngest daughter, Frieda, and thus Annie’s only living lineal, biological descendant. Mary knew Annie well. She was sixteen when her grandmother died on November 11, 1947, and during the final year and a half of Annie’s life, after Max died, Annie and Mary shared a bedroom in the latter’s home.
I asked Mary if she had the diary Annie reportedly kept. Alas, she did not, and its whereabouts, if indeed it ever existed, remain a mystery. Mary has her doubts. “If my grandmother kept a diary,” she told me, “she almost surely would have shown it to me.” Annie spoke often and with pride about her bicycle trip to friends and family throughout her long life, and Mary believes she would have brandished the diary if she had kept one, though it could have been lost or destroyed at some point.
“She loved the drama of telling a story,” Mary explained, “more than she did the living of ordinary life, and when she spoke of her bicycle trip it was if she was again very far from her later life as a business woman and a Jewish housewife. Even in business she thrived on the drama and the manipulation, being somewhat less moved by the results. Even the idea of motherhood, at least in the early years, probably outweighed the actual living out of the experience of being a mother.”
“And,” in a comment that seemed especially apropos, Mary said, “my grandmother had to be moving all the time. She was very persuasive, too. She could tell a story and you would just believe. If she wanted to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, you would buy it.”
When Mary and I first met in early November 2003, shortly after that first telephone conversation, I asked her about the two simple facts that had so bedeviled my early research, Annie’s date and place of birth. It didn’t surprise Mary in the least that her grandmother might have been the source for much of the conflicting information, for Annie, she suggested, had a casual relationship with the truth and was an inveterate storyteller.
One family story Mary related was especially strange and fueled my growing suspicion that the ghost I was chasing was a wily and imaginative one, and that the story of her bicycle trip would not be a straightforward one.
Annie had always spoken of a twin brother, Jake, who had died when she was young. And Mary’s mother, Frieda, no doubt repeating a story told to her by Annie, had said that Jake had frozen to death on Boston Common as a young man, after a fight with his father. The suggestion was that Jake had gotten drunk after the fight and passed out in the cold. Annie did, in fact, have a brother Jacob; he was the younger brother who died of a lung infection at age seventeen in May 1894, just before she left on her bike trip. But a twin who froze to death on Boston Common?
First, Jacob was born at least five or six years after Annie. They weren’t twins. Second, Jacob died on May 12, 1894, and while snow has been known to cover the tulips in Boston in spring, it would have been quite a feat to freeze to death in May. Finally, Annie and Jacob’s father, my great-great grandfather Levi, died in 1887, seven years before Jacob’s birth. Jacob didn’t die after a fight with his father. The whole story struck me as an especially peculiar family legend to pass down, particularly because it clearly wasn’t true. Annie really knew how to spin a yarn, that much was becoming clear, and I now had a clear sense of what an outrageous character she was.
After showing me articles Annie had written for the New York World, including her story about the wild man, Mary and I leafed through a scrapbook, fragile with age, in which Annie kept various mementos of her bicycle trip, and several family photograph albums. I asked Mary why Max agreed to his wife’s leaving. She replied that he was a passive man and adored the ground Annie walked (or rode) on. Though Annie told the World in July 1894 she would not have taken the trip without her husband’s consent, Max had little choice; she called the shots. “She was pretty good at disappearing,” said Mary. But, Mary also described her grandparents as having a very caring relationship, one devoid of acrimony. However, whenever Annie talked about her bike trip later in her life, as she often did, it was never in front of Max and he never, ever discussed it.
As I dug deeper into Annie’s life, I was especially curious to know about her eldest daughter, Mollie, who had been five when her mother had disappeared from her life for fifteen months. Mollie was not mentioned as a survivor, as her siblings were, in Annie and Max’s death notices, nor was she buried in the family plot in New Jersey where her parents and siblings are buried. I was sure, based on this information, that Mollie predeceased them. When I asked about Mollie, Mary, to my surprise, looked shaken and wept softly. The story she was about to tell me left me practically speechless.
As noted earlier, when Annie returned home from her bicycle trip, she was no more enamored of motherhood and domestic life than when she had left. As soon as her children were old enough, five or six years old, she and her Orthodox Jewish husband sent them to boarding schools—Catholic boarding schools! Though Annie kept a kosher home, she was not as devout as Max and was even, perhaps, agnostic, but she had a strong cultural identity as a Jew. Nevertheless, they first sent Mollie and Libbie to a French-speaking school run by the Dominican Sisters in Lewiston, Maine. Simon, Jr. was dispatched to a Catholic school in Arthabaskaville, Quebec. Annie visited them infrequently. Eventually, however, all the girls, Mollie, Libbie, and Mary’s mother, Frieda, attended Mount Saint Mary’s in Newburgh, New York, ostensibly so they would be closer to home.
Why Catholic schools? As my own Jewish mother might say, “Don’t ask.” It was, no matter how you look at it, a bizarre decision, though Mary suggested Annie believed the children would receive a superior education and be well cared for there.
All of Annie’s children had suffered profoundly, “been damaged,” in Mary’s words, by their mother’s inability or lack of interest in mothering them, as evidenced by both her bicycle trip, during which she left them for fifteen months, and her dispatching them to boarding schools when they were very young. Mary told me my letter had unleashed a flood of conflicting emotions because the ripple effects of Annie’s choice to leave her young children to bicycle the world—and of subsequent decisions borne of the same fierce independence—are still felt today. Mary believes that many of the emotional struggles Annie’s children faced in their lives, and that she faced in hers, can be traced to her grandmother’s virtual abandonment of her children when they were very young. Annie’s son, Simon, was deeply embittered, never married despite several engagements, and always lived in a perfectly neat, rented room. He spent most of his life in a rage, mostly directed at the Catholic Church. Libbie had an unsuccessful marriage and another romance that ended tragically. Frieda, Mary’s mother, constructed a fantasy in which no better parents than Annie and Max had ever walked the earth, a fantasy she held tightly into old age. But no one responded to Annie’s mothering—and to being sent away to Catholic boarding school—more dramatically than had Mollie.
Mollie attended Catholic schools until she was in her late teens. In 1911, in her early twenties, in a startling though perhaps not surprising act of rebellion, she converted. But Mollie didn’t simply convert to Catholicism, she became a nun and was, forever after, known as Sister Marie Thaddea of Sion. Mary asked me to refer to her as Sister Thaddea wherever possible in this book.
The violent impact of Sister Thaddea’s conversion on her family is clear from a profoundly bitter letter I obtained from the archive of the Nostra Signora di Sion at the Vatican in Rome. Written to Sister Thaddea on November 14, 1912, by her brother Simon, then twenty, it is a blistering indictment of her conversion. “Had you pierced my heart with a murderous bullet, or with the glistening blade, I shouldn’t have felt the pang of pain any stronger,” he wrote. His life, he said, had been forever ruined by the “curse” Sister Thaddea (whom he referred to throughout as Mollie) had inflicted on the family. He foresaw a life of degradation in carrying the burden of Sister Thaddea’s “secret” to the grave. And he despaired for his parents, Annie and Max. “With pain and sorrow I watch my…harried young mother strive to keep up a home under almost, in fact under impossibly removable obstacles. With a pain of intenseness I see her daily, go to work. God! It’s terrible, it’s frightful. Insanity is a joy compared to this. Can’t you realize the extent of your damage, my dear sister.”
The letter continues: “Your father is no longer gray, he is ‘white.’ Your mother and mine is no longer gray. She is ‘white.’…You are driving inch by inch, a mother to her grave. Do I speak truthfully? Positively. And a father also. Mollie, I predict you will be a murderess in a very short time. Did God command us to kill or did He say? ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
It is clear from Simon’s letter that Annie had regaled her children with stories (again with a grandiose twist) about her bicycle journey as they were growing up. Simon saw her as a heroine and took a sarcastic tone with Sister Thaddea for not recognizing it: “You forget who your mother is; the world famous globe girdler has no charm for you, has she: a woman who was good enough to interview every living ruler and sovereign in the world. God, how can you remain away as you do?”
The letter also suggests Simon suffered some form of abuse during his years in Catholic school, explaining perhaps why his letter is so filled with rage. “Mollie, I spent eight years of my life amongst those people who claim to be good by closing themselves up, when their leader told them to go out into the world and preach ‘good’ and ‘virtue’…I know their innermost secrets, and some day the world will be startled; both sexes I make no exceptions. The armies of the nations will rise against them. Do you want to be of them?” Indeed, Simon appears to have foreseen today’s clergy sex-abuse scandal.
His pleas that Sister Thaddea reverse course were to no avail. She eventually found her way to Saskatchewan, where she lived most of her life in Prince Albert, and later in Saskatoon, teaching school and living in a convent. When Sister Thaddea’s letters arrived home, Annie and Max would recite Hebrew prayers and burn the letters. As far as they were concerned, their daughter was dead. They never saw or spoke with her again, and to ensure the Catholic Church wouldn’t receive any of her money, Annie disinherited her eldest daughter.
“After Mollie’s defection, so to speak, the only god that my grandmother knew would have been a god she feared,” Mary told me. “I never had a sense that my grandmother relied on any kind of god, or that she even believed, but she had a great fear. I remember that whenever my grandfather took me as a little girl to shul, my grandmother would cry. Now I realize she was crying for Mollie.”
One can imagine it wasn’t easy for Sister Thaddea, left motherless for fifteen months only to be dispatched to a Catholic boarding school at a tender age shortly after her mother’s return. Indeed, her obituary in a Saskatoon newspaper reads, in part: “Why an American girl of 21 years started a new life under a new religion on the cold Canadian prairies will never be told. Mother Superior Noreen…a pupil and beloved companion of Sister Marie [Thaddea] said: ‘Her decision to come west was made a great many years ago, but a few old wounds might be opened and a few feelings hurt if too much probing were done…. A sister and niece[Mary] still live in New York.’”
Perhaps it was the shame they felt about Sister Thaddea that kept Annie and Max from sustaining contact with their relations in Boston, my branch of the family, and the secret of their eldest daughter was very tightly held, at least from Mary, for decades. Mary didn’t even learn of her aunt’s existence until 1961, when Mary was thirty and Sister Thaddea was in her seventies. A family friend let the secret slip.
Though Annie and Max never saw or spoke with Sister Thaddea again, and Annie had disinherited her, they gave tacit approval of her sibling’s ongoing contact with her. In 1961, Sister Thaddea traveled to Montreal for a conference. It was Mary’s thirtieth birthday and her mother, Frieda, telephoned her aunt there. Mary heard her mother say, “Hello, Mollie. It’s Frieda. Yes, I know it’s Mary’s birthday and I’m going to let you talk to her.” She then handed the phone to a stunned Mary. “Her voice was my grandmother’s voice,” Mary told me, “and I started to cry.” Indeed, in recounting this episode Mary began to cry quietly again.
As it turns out, a secret had been kept from Sister Thaddea, too. When Mary was born, her aunt had begun sending her birthday presents, but those presents were intercepted by Mary’s parents. When Mary turned nine, Sister Thaddea learned for the first time that her niece did not know she existed.
Mary showed me photographs of Sister Thaddea in her nun’s habit. She also shared with me long, beautiful letters written in a neat hand that she and her mother received at the time of her aunt’s death in 1961, letters from Mother Edeltrude, the Reverend Mother at St. Mary’s Convent in Saskatoon. Sister Thaddea sounded not unlike Annie from Mother Edeltrude’s description. “You just can’t imagine how we miss her,” Mother Edeltrude wrote, “she was so outlandish in her ideas at times…She was a great entertainer.” The same could have been said of Annie, of course.
Shortly after I met Mary in November 2003, I contacted St. Mary’s Church in Saskatoon and was put in touch with Sister Catherine Seeman, who had known Sister Thaddea. She wrote me from “a house for our aged Sisters,” as she described it, and told me she first met Sister Thaddea while living in Prince Albert Convent from 1944 to 1947. Sister Catherine told me of “House Journals” that were kept at St. Mary’s Convent, and she offered to go back and transcribe portions that pertained to Sister Thaddea. The journal entries begin in 1913 and continue, with great poignancy, right up to the last days of Sister Thaddea’s life in November 1961. The journals are mostly the daily comings and goings of the Sisters. But, the entry for November 17, 1961, was somber: “M. Thaddea was anointed as a precaution.”
For me, the most poignant entries were dated August 31 and September 23, 1961, the latter just two months before Sister Thaddea’s death. “Rev. Mother received a night letter from Sr. Thaddea who is visiting Montreal telling of a phone call from New York when not only her sister Frieda and her husband spoke to her but also Mary, her niece, who had just learned of the existence of her aunt,” read the first. “This was looked upon as a miracle.” The entry for September 23 is equally moving: “All rejoice with M. Thaddea who received a letter (the first) from her niece Mary.” Sister Thaddea died two months later, on November 27, having found in the Church the love and acceptance that had eluded her in childhood.
Until I read these transcripts to Mary, she knew nothing about how the joy of her “meeting” her aunt had been recorded a continent away in the House Journal of a small convent on the Canadian prairie. Mary’s letter was surely a comfort to Sister Thaddea in the last weeks before her death. Another circle, and a wound that opened on June 25, 1894, when Annie took off on her bicycle, had been closed.
WHENEVER I RIDE my bike, and often when I am not, my thoughts drift to Annie, to the remarkable life she led, and to the family—my family—that she sometimes left behind. I marvel that fate somehow brought Annie and me together and gave me the privilege of telling her story, a story virtually lost over the generations, not only to history but within my family, too. Before taking my own journey with her I had no idea it was possible to become so involved in the life of a person I’d never met, a person who had died six years before I was born. I have to admit that I love her, like one loves a slightly off-kilter old aunt, even though my focus has been on her life when she was just in her early twenties. She’s like a relative who dropped in for a visit and ended up staying, but it is a most welcome stay.
The process of resurrecting Annie’s story was endlessly fascinating because every tiny shard of evidence had to be held up and examined to see where else it might lead. It was, in essence, one long scavenger hunt and it was really great fun to pursue Annie across time and space. It was also, at times, very emotional. Some discoveries were more illuminating than others, of course, and finding Mary after months of genealogical detective work was the most exciting of them all. Second only to finding Mary was the discovery, in her basement, of Annie’s original slide show. In fact, Mary didn’t even know it was in her basement. She thought the slides had been discarded years ago. But her husband, Paul, remembered, and when he came upstairs with two dusty boxes of lantern slides, slides I had read about in the old newspaper accounts, I was absolutely astonished. Piece by piece, bit by bit, Annie’s legacy was reappearing, literally, from under the dust of history. For me, as a writer, her story has been the story of a lifetime—hers and mine.
Over the past four years, no matter how much I learned about Annie, and no matter how much material I unearthed, I was and remain frustrated that there is so much I don’t know and that cannot be known because so much has been lost to time—a diary (maybe), letters (surely), and the memories of those who knew her but who are now long passed. But I always believed that Annie’s story needed to be told using whatever remnants of her life I could find, not only because it illuminates the larger story of women at the turn of the twentieth century—but because it’s such a hoot! What I wouldn’t give to have just one evening to talk to Annie, to ask her my questions, and to listen to her tell tales of her much heralded spin around the world more than one hundred years ago.