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EVERITHING that Wengeroff valued in traditional culture—above all, subordination of personal wishes to higher (religious) ideals and to parental authority and that of the community—she says her children and their generation had violated. True, she blames the parents but she does not absolve this youth.
Another youth, however, arose during the era of the pogroms. Not the youth of some bygone, pre-modern time to which Wengeroff supposedly harked back but an ‘enlightened’ youth who nonetheless, in her words, had not gone ‘astray to the alien in that dark time’. Among them were many who found their way back to the Jewish people and who, under the influence of recent events, closed ranks. Indeed, as a reaction to antisemitism (she uses this word, coined only in 1879, in Germany), ‘the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) society arose, founded by Dr. Pinsker, Dr. Lilienblum, and others’. It is to this youth that Wengeroff says she relates—for the first time—the ‘dreadful event’ of her sons’ conversion, something she had not previously shared even with her intimates:
Only to my sheets of paper, moistened with tears, did I confide it [at the time], and kept it deep, deep in my memory—until today.
Today, however, I shall overcome, today I shall tell of that dark night … And like everything that I experience, this project, this exercise, too, fits an image in my mind: I see myself as a little grandmother sitting at the fireside—and around me are the youth of today. They listen so gladly to me as I tell of the old, past times of Jewish life. Their eyes grow larger, they shine; the children raise their heads proudly and take careful note. Oh, wonder of blood! The children, whose parents deserted Judaism, return to it. They yearn for it and for the ancient, great Jewish melodies that they never heard. All this I read in the clever eyes of the children and to them will I open the wounds of my heart and tell of all the grief and terror of that night.
These are Wengeroff 's grandchildren, for whom Memoirs is written.
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