There are many under­ac­knowl­edged Jew­ish women in his­to­ry. Annie Cohen Kop­chovsky (1870 – 1947) is one of them, despite her tru­ly amaz­ing feat of becom­ing the first woman to ride a bicy­cle com­plete­ly around the world. An immi­grant from Latvia, Annie had long resent­ed the sec­ondary role allot­ted to women in many fields. She reject­ed domes­tic­i­ty and she was angered by the mar­gin­al­iza­tion of Jews in her Boston neigh­bor­hood. Stephen Kren­sky and Adri­ana Pre­doi present this inspir­ing hero­ine to young read­ers in their new pic­ture book, which empha­sizes both her deter­mi­na­tion and her even­tu­al triumphs.

Bicy­cles were a new and increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar tech­nol­o­gy dur­ing Annie’s young adult­hood. She seized on the pos­si­bil­i­ty that both of those qual­i­ties offered her an oppor­tu­ni­ty to chal­lenge obsta­cles in a pub­lic way. Adopt­ing the new last name Lon­don­der­ry — stark­ly dif­fer­ent from her Jew­ish one — Annie began her jour­ney. A per­sis­tent and adap­tive per­son­al­i­ty helped her to real­ize an unlike­ly goal. Kren­sky describes the phys­i­cal dif­fi­cul­ties, includ­ing rough ter­rain and lack of lodg­ing, that threat­ened to throw Annie off course as she mount­ed her bicy­cle and ped­aled on. While she had no con­trol over weath­er or the avail­abil­i­ty of places to stay, she sim­ply refused to wear the tra­di­tion­al skirts that ham­pered her mobil­i­ty, choos­ing pants instead.

Kren­sky admits, in a non-judg­men­tal tone, that Annie was some­thing of a fab­u­list, regal­ing her audi­ences with elab­o­rate tales that were some­times untrue. Yet, the truth of her adven­ture was as excit­ing as her invent­ed embell­ish­ments. She may not have fought off Ben­gal tigers, but she did ride through parts of the globe that seemed exot­ic because of their dis­tance and cul­tur­al dif­fer­ence: Sin­ga­pore, Hong Kong, and Chi­na. One often roman­ti­cized loca­tion was actu­al­ly quite sig­nif­i­cant to Annie. Her trip to the Near East includ­ed Jerusalem, where Pre­doi por­trays her at the West­ern Wall. Stand­ing among a group of men and women pray­ing togeth­er, as was com­mon in ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry Pales­tine, she is shown touch­ing the stone with rev­er­ence and fascination.

In order to com­plete her jour­ney, Annie had to trav­el through the Unit­ed States by bicy­cle, as well. Pre­doi depicts Annie’s own coun­try, in an era when trav­el was more dif­fi­cult, as also unfa­mil­iar. The deserts of Texas and New Mex­i­co were geo­graph­i­cal­ly dis­tinc­tive, and as remote in many ways from Boston as her Euro­pean and Asian travels. 

In this high­ly rec­om­mend­ed account, young read­ers will get a sense of phys­i­cal dis­tance in the age before air trav­el and reli­able telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions. Bicy­cle rid­ing was a leisure activ­i­ty, but also a tran­si­tion to the future of more acces­si­ble trav­el. In his after­word, Kren­sky relates that Annie Cohen Kop­chovsky was active in sev­er­al fields, includ­ing busi­ness and jour­nal­ism, after her suc­cess­ful but brief career as a cyclist. Appar­ent­ly, her trip on two wheels around the world had served its pur­pose for her, prov­ing that she could ​“do any­thing that any man can do.” Her state­ment, at that time, was tru­ly amazing.