Introduction: A Biography of a Person and a Book

Summary

THIS IS A BIOGRAPHY OF PAULINE WENGEROFF (1833–1916) and of her Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century. That is, it is a biography of a person, and of a book. Unlike most memoirs, a genre said to be produced by people who have led public lives, of interest because they come from such personalities (Winston Churchill; Chaim Weizmann; Golda Meir), Wengeroff ‘s Memoirs are her calling card. We know of her only because of them.

Wengeroff 's two volumes are extraordinary on many grounds. As their full title proclaims, she writes the history of an era in Jewish experience, coupling her story and that of her family with that of Russian Jewry in the time of its transition from tradition to modernity. The scale of this undertaking is astonishing coming from a woman born in 1833; we have nothing even vaguely comparable in claim or scope from a woman in the history of Jewish literature. Though I search for effective or actual literary precedents to what she does (except in a most limited sense—minhagim books for part of Volume I—there are none to speak of ), and for the necessary preconditions which made her assertion possible (a more fruitful search), in Wengeroff we have a true literary peritsat geder—a path-breaking author. This has been unheralded, indeed, unrecognized, but that should change.

In Memoirs Wengeroff gives a rich depiction of traditional Jewish society in Russia with a particular focus on the religious practices and piety of women. She tells a dramatic tale of the dissolution of traditionalism in this society—the world's largest, with over five million members at the time she wrote—from the perspective of women, marriage, and families. Unprecedented, too, she writes of men as subjects of enquiry—that is, not only as generic Jews, whose experience is presumed universal and normative, but as a specific case and whose behaviour was particular and different from that of women. She does not, of course, use the term ‘gender’, but her woman-centred narrative is profoundly gendered, asserting that women and men had very different stances towards, and experiences of, modernity, and that there was a power shift between them in that era that led to the loss of Jewish tradition.