4 - Who Was Pauline Wengeroff? On Reading and Misreading Memoirs

Summary

FROM THE DRAMATIC MYTH of Memoirs Wengeroff appears as a nostalgic apologist for tradition and a victim, along with Jewish women generally, of modernizing men and modernity. No less discerning a reader than her son Simon, a pioneer of Russian literary history and criticism, states in his encyclopaedia article about her (signed ‘Her son’): ‘She came to the conclusion that a modern European education was necessary for the Jews but her sympathies belonged to the orthodox Judaism of the previous era’ (‘ihre Sympathien gehören aber dem orthodoxen Judenthum der älteren Zeit’)—as if Wengeroff 's ties to European education were tangential or reluctant, or that she yearned simply to revive the Judaism of her childhood, and her work were nothing but Shakespeare's plea, ‘O! call back yesterday, bid time return.’

On the other hand, no less sophisticated and experienced readers than the editorial board of the Jewish Publication Society of America ( JPS), which in 1910 was on the verge of publishing an English translation of Memoirs, decided against it on the grounds that the book was an apologia for Jewish assimilation and conversion. This extraordinary reading derived from a number of factors, which I treat in Chapter  below. Suffice it here to say that an element in Memoirs and the fact that Wengeroff 's brother was a convert who missionized Jews in the United States—a fact beyond her control or, I believe, her knowledge—led JPS to its conclusion.

How could Wengeroff, seeming bard of Jewish traditionalism, also be read as an apologist for assimilation and conversion?

Those at JPS who concluded that she was an assimilationist did so based on her account of the conversion of her sons Simon and Volodya, which she calls a tragedy but which she contextualizes in several ways. First, she blames ‘the fathers who had eliminated Jewish customs and morals from their children's upbringing and had them educated exclusively in the modern, enlightened European sense’. These men, raised in traditional Jewish society, had secure Jewish identities (‘remained Jews at heart’) even after leaving tradition. Not so their children, who lacked Jewish memory, ‘for which their own parents, above all the fathers, were guilty’.