Epilogue: A Woman's Life

Summary

THERE IS NO HAPPY ENDING to report. Terrified of anti-Jewish violence, Wengeroff died, ‘lonely and miserable’, in Minsk in 1916, at the age of 83, in the midst of the First World War (the Pale of Settlement was the site of the war's eastern front) and a disintegrating tsarist empire, having encouraged one grandson to practise the piano so that he might, as I believe she wished for herself, get to America. The grandson, Nicolas Slonimsky, a brilliant pianist whose memoirs I have mined for much information his grandmother omits, eventually succeeded in reaching the United States, as did three of Wengeroff 's children—Zinaida, Isabelle, and Faina (Slonimsky's mother)—after Wengeroff 's death. A St Petersburg address book from 1913, however, shows Simon, Zinaida, and Isabelle in that city, outside the Pale in every sense of that phrase, in Russia but nowhere near their mother.

Through her resonance with a generation hungry for what she had to offer, Wengeroff tried to help right some of the losses of Jewish modernity, to which she knew she had contributed. With her memoirs she hoped to inscribe herself, and some chosen others, on the tablet of Jewish memory but, above all, to perpetuate and give life, a future, to Jewish memory. In that goal she was not alone but part of a vigorous stream. Whether Memoirs of a Grandmother or the conviction that it had reached its target audience and purpose gave her any comfort in her last days we do not know; but we can hope.