Hanukkah in the Haggadah

Lillie Goldsmith Cowen (often called Mrs. Philip Cowen) was the first woman to translate the Haggadah into English. In 1904, she published the Cowen Haggadah, which was the first American English adaptation of the Haggadah to be published for a mass audience. It became the most popular Haggadah in the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century, with distribution of 295,000 copies by 1935. Lillie was born Lillie Cohen October 24, 1850 in London. Her parents, Salomon Cohen and Hannah Cohen-Goudsmit immigrated to the USA when Lillie was 11 years old. There she grew up and married her second cousin Isaak Goldsmith (Goudsmit) who died in 1876. Eleven years later she remarried, this time to Philip Cowen who was the first publisher of the Jewish Weekly Newspaper The American Hebrew. She worked with him on publishing the paper until 1906, when he retired. During this time, he encouraged her to do her own publishing and in 1904, she published her Cowen Haggadah. Up until then all American traditional Haggadot had used translations based on those created by David Levi and Isaac Levi in London. In the preface to the Cowen Haggadah Lillie writes: "At a Seder service given to a number of friends, their wives and older children, the thought occurred to me that the service was marred because of typographical blunders, bad grammar, and mis-translations which abounded in the books used, and, as I knew, in all the books obtainable in this country. I determined, therefore, if the Lord spared me, to issue in the near future a Haggada which would not cause derision among the younger generation but which would be read with interest and with reverence."

In the publisher's introduction we find: "In "Who Knows" some liberty has been taken with numbers eight and nine, in view of the fact that this part of the service is especially designed for the children." and indeed, if we look at this section we find: