3 - Complicity, Victimization, Guilt: Wengeroff as Agent of Acculturation and Assimilation

Summary

THE CENTRAL POINT of Wengeroff 's second volume is the catastrophic consequences of the loss of tradition in Russian Jewish families, exemplified by what transpired in her marital home. The worst blow for her, she says, was the conversion of her two sons (a daughter, unnamed in Memoirs, also converted, on which more below). Her main narrative line—the myth she constructs—is dramatic, accessible, and seductive. In it, she and her fellow Jewish women are Victims—of Chonon/Jewish husbands, and of the overwhelming forces of modernity, of Fate. Less conspicuous but quite present in Memoirs is counter-myth—material that subverts this same claim. Unlike ancient works containing contradictory material where multiple authors can be assigned variant expressions, here the same author indubitably wrote both myth and counter-myth, including them in the same work. What is the counter-myth in Memoirs, and why did Wengeroff include it? These questions go to the heart of others: why she wrote memoirs, and why Memoirs is constructed as it is: why she omits and includes what she does—sculpture versus excised material.

We know that Wengeroff was no simple apologist for Jewish tradition. She criticized some aspects of traditional society in her loving evocation of it in her first volume. More globally, we see in both her volumes that she shared a fundamental perspective with Haskalah, seeing European culture as a higher good and unenlightened, traditional Jewish life as obscure and inferior (modern Jewish men had abandoned tradition, recklessly making the leap from the ‘lowest rung’ of culture directly to the highest, and many other such expressions). She glorified not just Alexander II for his reforms —a common Russian Jewish stance—but Nicholas I, whom the Russian Jewish masses reviled (‘gather[ing] together throughout the Pale of Settlement’ to celebrate news of his death), but whom maskilim, and only maskilim, regarded positively.

Reading the entirety of Memoirs while resisting the seduction of Wengeroff 's master myth-narrative, we find a rather more complicated picture of the loss of tradition and the failure to transmit Judaism to her children than her myth would have it. First, from the beginning, she was a full partner in Chonon's striving for success, whose connection with the loss of tradition she herself stresses.