Being For Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography 9780804763974

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Being For Myself Alone

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture edited by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Being For Myself Alone Origins of Jewish Autobiography

Marcus Moseley

st a n f o r d u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s st a n f o r d, c a l i f o r n i a 2006

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moseley, Marcus. Being for myself alone : origins of Jewish autobiography / Marcus Moseley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8047-5157-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Autobiography. 2. Autobiography—Jewish authors. 3. Jewish authors—Biography—History and criticism. 4. Jewish literature— 20th century—History and criticism. 5. Self in literature. I. Title. CT25.M67 2005 809'.9359200092924—dc22 2004018649 Original Printing 2006 Last Wgure below indicates year of this printing: 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Typeset by Classic Typography in 10.5/14 Galliard Published with the assistance of the Koret Foundation.

For Davina

wtbl ba

The sick man tosses and turns from side to side—and is aVorded no relief. When a man is oppressed by the realization of his insigniWcance and the shortness of days of his individual existence, he yearns to be absorbed in a large and enduring commonalty—and extinguishes himself in the midst of the collective. And when again he is oppressed by the loss of his personal proWle, which has been incorporated to the limbs of the collective—he yearns to be a grain of sand for himself, and not a drop in the mighty ocean. And thus does the wheel of history turn over and over again. One epoch—‘If I am not for myself, who is for me?’ and one epoch—‘When I am for myself, what am I?’ —Ahad Ha’am, Kol kitvei (Tel Aviv, 1953), p. 456

Contents

Acknowledgements 1.

2.

3.

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

ix 1

Generic Dilemmas Rousseau’s Confessions as Autobiographical Paradigm The “Children of Jean Jacques” in Jewish Eastern Europe In and Around the Self: The Critical Discourse

1 5 13 17

Intertextual Relations: Jewish Autobiographical Encounters

37

Autobiography as “Text”/Autobiography as “Discourse” Symptoms of Transition: The Crystallization of Autobiographical Discourse Cross-Cultural Fashionings of the Self Arrested Development: The Constitution of a Jewish Autobiographical Field

37 42 46

Autobiography as Reading

67

The “Tradition Model for the Study of Jewish Autobiography Sephardic Origins I: Valley and Vision: Abraham Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon Sephardic Origins II: “Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard”: Yehudah Aryeh Modena’s Hayyei yehudah Ashkenazic Origins I: Scrolls of Lamentation and Lament Ashkenazic Origins II: The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln

50

67 82 103 147 155

viii

Contents

4.

The Function of the First Person in Pre-Modern Jewish Narrative: An Overview

175

Pre-Modern Jewish Autobiography and the Radical Hermeneutics of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky

194

Worlds Within Worlds The Voice of the Individual and the Burden of Inheritance: Berdichevsky’s Autobiographical Counter-Tradition The Crystallization of an Autobiographical Hermeneutic Michah Yosef Berdichevsky Before the Speculum of Bin Gorion: The Collected Works as Encylopaedia From Re-Collection to Recollection: The Great Memory of Bin Gorion Miriam: The Summing Up 5.

6.

212 219 262 268 276

Jewish Autobiographical Writing at the Time of Rousseau

286

Synchronicities Jacob Emden’s Megillat sefer Nathan of Nemirov’s Yemei maharnat

286 288 312

Domesticating Rousseau: Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

333

“I am not the father of this book, rather its mother, for in pain did I bear it” The Conception of the Child Generation and Gender: Discourses on Power Autobiographies in Dialogue: From ’Avi’ezer to Hatt’ot ne’urim 7.

194

333 344 353 368

RamiWcations Of The Self: Cultural Landscapes of Jewish Autobiography

377

Autobiography against Autobiography: Traditionalist Versions of the Self Semiotics of Autobiographical Behaviour Buried Autobiographies Summons to Autobiography/Response

377 412 422 438

Contents

Matrices of the Jewish Autobiographical Self “Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past.”

445

Reference Matter

481

Notes Bibliography Index

483 599 625

461

ix

Acknowledgements

I wish to extend heartfelt thanks to some of the many people who have assisted me in the making of this book. David Patterson Wrst opened up for me the treasure-house that is Haskalah literature. His encyclopedic knowledge of nineteenth-century Hebrew literature provided me with many of the insights that have gone into the composition of this work. Not only that, but he gave me open access to his extraordinarily rich and detailed Wling-cabinets, whose cards provide an extensive thematic guide with meticulous bibliographic reference to this literature. While at Oxford, at the earliest stages of my studies of Modern Jewish history, I had the extraordinary good fortune of my path’s crossing with Steven Zipperstein. It was in my discussions and tutorials with Steve that the present project was conceived as a D. Phil. thesis; it was he who actually Wrst suggested the topic to me as one worthy of exploration. He has watched over this work—and its author—over the years, diligently, with tact, loyalty and aVection. I shall never forget his selfless support, intellectual engagement, the kindness: without Steven Zipperstein, this book would never have been realized. For my introduction to the sphere of Yiddish language and literature, I am indebted to Dovid Katz who taught me also at Oxford; his charismatic combination of linguistic mastery, humour and Brooklyn/English eccentricity drew me so to the Yiddish/Ashkenazic culture he exempliWes in his own person and conveys. The unique atmosphere of the YIVO Institute, where I worked as an assistant-archivist for some years, enriched my understanding of this culture immeasurably. I was privileged to be there at a time when

xii

Acknowledgements

so many more of the living representatives of the civilization the YIVO Institute immortalizes were still with us and to work side by side with them. It was the YIVO Summer Program in Yiddish that aVorded me my Wrst introduction to David Roskies, to whom I was introduced by Eli Lederhendler in the courtyard of the Jewish Theological Seminary on a sweltering August day in the Wrst week of my Wrst visit to America. We discussed, of course, Jewish autobiography; and the intellectual excitement of that encounter left me with a spring in my step. Some years later, through the mediation of Sam Norich, who was then Executive Director of the YIVO Institute—to whom I also express gratitude for all the goodness he showed me—we taught a course together on Jewish autobiography to an exceptional group of students; the dialogic encounter of each of our weekly sessions provided me with fresh insights into the topic. Ruth Wisse, whom I also met through YIVO, and was later privileged to work with as a colleague, believed in this work and encouraged me all along. I would also thank Arnold Band, Jonathan Frankel, Eli Lederhendler, Ada Rapoport-Albert, each of whom was kind enough to read and comment upon sections or all of this work at various stages of its completion and all of whom provided me with resolve to follow this thing through. The wit, wisdom and scholarship of Rabbi Mark Kiel have been for me, since our very Wrst meeting, an unfailing source of sustenance. I was much aided in the completion of the Wnal draft of this text by being a visiting fellow at the Center for Advanced Jewish Studies in Philadelphia; my thanks to the director of the Center, David Ruderman, the wonderful staV and fellow-fellows. The sense of community was quite exceptional in the year I was there—intellectual diVerences, sometimes sharp, as expressed in the weekly seminars only went to enhance the sense of shared commitment of members of a profession essentially solitary in orientation. Scholarship depends as much upon the funds allotted to its advancement as upon the excellence of its purveyors. The extraordinary generosity of two individuals in particular has made possible the realization of this project. I was the beneWciary of an Oxford University fellowship established by Frank Green that enabled me to spend a year of

Acknowledgements

research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Stanley Katz provided me with a grant to study Yiddish at the YIVO Summer Program. My thanks go also to Lord Quinton of Holywell, former president of Trinity College, Oxford, who brought my work to Mr. Katz’s attention. I hope that the present work will prove worthy of the investment of these extraordinarily generous patrons of learning. My mother, Anne Moseley, has given love, encouragement and support all along to a son who “took a road less traveled by” that was made of diVerence. Julianna Baka made, kept and keeps the home Wres burning for a peripatetic scholar; I am Wlled with gratitude for her modesty, valor and steadfast love. This book is dedicated to my daughter, Davina—already a voracious reader at the age of eleven. I hope that this book will one day deepen her understanding of the rich culture to which she is heir. Needless to say, all of the flaws and errors in this book are solely attributable to the author. baltimore, maryland august, 2005

xiii

Being For Myself Alone

One

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

Generic Dilemmas The study of autobiography, a relatively recent Weld, has been bedevilled from the onset by the deWnitional problem.1 While the last thirty years or so have seen a remarkable upsurge in the study of the genre, the question of what exactly constitutes autobiography has not only not been resolved but, if anything, become exacerbated.2 On the one hand, such unlikely works as Eliot’s Four Quartets 3 and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter 4 are now discussed as ‘autobiographies’. On the other, critics seem to take a perverse delight in revealing the ineluctable ‘Wctionality’ of such ostensibly straightforward self-referential texts as Newman’s Apologia5 and Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.6 The confusion has, in the post–World War II period, become compounded by representative autobiographers of the twentieth century, such as Sartre, Nabokov, Roland Barthes and Michel Leiris, who, playing elaborate literary games of hide-and-seek, call attention to the problematic generic status of their own works.7 Autobiography, as a literary category, was further destabilized, interrogated and complicated by being sucked into the vortex of structuralist and later deconstructionist discourse. The latter discourse, whose most important intellectual progenitor is probably Mallarmé, has, in fact, evinced a certain grim fascination with ‘decentring’, ‘displacing’, ‘de-facing’ the sovereign bourgeois ‘subject’.8 Post-modernist discourse on this topic actually provides a sort of photographical negative to the more traditional Whiggish narrative, as pursued by Dilthey, Georg Misch, Georges Gusdorf and Karl Weintraub, according to which the emergence of autobiography is coextensive with the emergence of historical consciousness, discovery of self, validation of the individual, et cetera. The rhetoric adopted in this

1

2

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

debate can be shrill: canonical autobiography is often viewed with barely disguised hostility, even paranoia, as ‘the locus of monumental Western selfhood’, an ‘imperialist’, ‘privileged, phallocentric discourse’, a ‘First World genre of the dominant culture’, a genre that ‘has been “policed” ’ to exclude non-normative works and so forth.9 The autobiographical self, with his/her attendant epistemological paradigms, has, however, proven rather resilient.10 Laura Marcus, in a recent survey of critical responses to autobiography, notes a contemporary tendency for the critics of autobiography themselves to yield to the autobiographical impulse in their discussions of the texts at hand. Marcus relates this to a wider phenomenon of the ‘return of the subject’.11 A parallel phenomenon in other disciplines of the humanities—anthropology in particular—certainly substantiates her thesis, as does, beyond academe, the sheer quantity of autobiographical/confessional literature produced in the last decade. Within the narrower conWnes of literary criticism, as Marcus points out, the revelation concerning Paul de Man’s pro-fascist articles written from 1940 to 1942 was of wide-ranging implications. These biographical data raised the issue of the autobiographical aspect of, as Marcus puts it, de Man’s ‘very substantial reflections on the modes of autobiography, confession and apologia—reflections which assert their generic ‘impossibility’ or the bad faith they manifest’.12 The comments of Alain Robbe-Grillet—forever the enfant terrible—apropos of the disappearance and reappearance of the self in twentieth-century intellectual discourse are quite germane in the present context. ‘Ideology’, he writes, ‘always masked, changes its face with ease. It is a hydra-mirror whose severed head quickly reappears, presenting the adversary who thought himself victorious the image of his own face.’13 In surveying the criticism of autobiography of the last several decades, it is hard to escape the conclusion that this branch of literary discourse has reached something of an impasse. Analogically to the impossible quest for self-knowledge, which is autobiography itself, the criticism of the genre appears to be locked in a pattern of chasing its own tail. This is in no small part due to the sheer weightiness and intractability of the literary, existential, psychological and metaphysical issues that the criticism of autobiography addresses: the ontology of the self; the dialectics of truth and Wction (‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’); the problem of memory, considered philosophically, psychologically

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

and neurologically; the absence of presence/presence of absence in scriptural representations. More recently, autobiography has also become a signiWcant site for feminist, ethnic, class and post-colonial debates.14 From being a relatively neglected branch of literature, then, autobiography has, if anything, become over-determined, over-interpreted, and over-politicised. One consequence of the oceanic nature of the discourse surrounding autobiography has been that this discourse has slowly but surely lost its moorings in any generically recognizable category of writing. There has been a noticeable tendency to include within the rubric ‘autobiography’ any text that reflects upon, and reflects upon itself reflecting upon, the vicissitudes of the self in relation to time, memory, narration and/or gender, race, class. The intellectual trajectory of James Olney, the founding-father of autobiographical studies in America, is representative in this respect. In a recent book, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life Writing—the title itself is telling—Olney writes as follows: Although I have in the past written frequently about autobiography as a literary genre, I have never been very comfortable doing it . . . and I have never met a deWnition of autobiography that I could really like . . . In the course of Memory and Narrative I call the kind of writing I am looking at by various names—confessions, autobiography, memoirs, periautography . . . autography . . . and—the most frequently employed term—life-writing . . . What I like about the term ‘periautography’, which would mean ‘writing about or around the self ’, is precisely its indeWnition and lack of generic rigor, its comfortably loose Wt and generous adaptability, and the same for ‘life-writing’.15

In this tinkering with the very term ‘autobiography’, in order to broaden the horizon of the word’s possible applications, Olney is by no means alone. The terrifying-sounding ‘autobiothanatography’, ‘autogynography’ and, less frightening, ‘auto/biography’ (the forward slash marking the innovation), ‘otobiography’, are amongst the neologisms that have been coined for this species of writing.16 The problem with all this, however, is that it becomes increasingly unclear what exactly is being talked about. Take, for example, Olney’s preferred terms: true, they are ‘indeWnite’—indeWnite to such an extent, however, that it is diYcult to determine what types of literary discourse these terms

3

4

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

for ‘writing about or around the self ’ would actually exclude.17 It is also worthy of note that both critics of autobiography on the more radical deconstructionist wing, and critics closer to Olney in their Wrm commitment to the existence of the self, are at one in eroding the generic boundaries of autobiography. To put it in broad stroke: one school of thought sees autobiography along a continuum of a multitude of forms of literary discourse that reveal the specularity/defacement/displacement et cetera of the self in writing; the other school of thought views autobiography along a continuum of literary modes that depict, reflect upon and substantiate a self in writing. Given all of this, there is some sort of perverted logic to the phenomenon of some critics of autobiography eVectively jettisoning autobiography, with or without quotation marks, altogether. Thus Laura Marcus: Attempting to open up the modes of autobiographical representation, recent critics have coined neologisms intended to redeWne, extensionally and intentionally, ‘autobiography’ away from the limits of its component parts, self-life-writing . . . Other critics have bypassed ‘autobiography’ altogether, overtaking it on the left, and focus instead on related ‘outlaw genres’—including testimonial literature, oral narratives and ethnographies. It could be argued that ‘autobiography’ . . . is kept in play through this shift to its transgressive homologues.18

We are thus left in very much the same situation, though considerably exacerbated, as that described by William Spengemann, writing in 1980: ‘The only arguable deWnition of autobiography would be a full account of all the ways in which the word has been used.’19 Thus Sarah Pratt, writing in 1996, essentially reiterates Spengemann’s observation: ‘In addressing the basic problem of deWnition, the easiest argument would be that almost anything counts as autobiography these days, for we live in the midst of a critical free-for-all about the nature of the self, the nature of reality, and hence the nature of autobiography.’20 Pratt goes on to provide a lucid and concise thumbnailsketch of the contemporary critical state of aVairs: Yet there are still scholars who are most aptly termed traditionalists, those who deWne autobiography as an individual’s presumably truthful, rational exposition of her or his own life story written by her or himself . . . And there are those who might be called ‘literary liberals’,

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

who see autobiography as a more flexible, capacious genre ranging from works of Wction, through traditional autobiography, to various forms of diaries, journals and even scholarly writing . . . And there are ‘radicals’. These are primarily more extreme feminists, deconstructionists, and materialists of various ideological persuasions. Radical feminists typically perceive the genre of traditional autobiography as an embodiment of patriarchal values and hence invalid in relation to women. Deconstructionists deny the very concept of the self.21

Rousseau’s Confessions as Autobiographical Paradigm The orientation in the present study deWnitely falls, for the most part, within the ‘traditionalist’ spectrum, as this is understood by Pratt. My approach is ‘traditionalist’ also in that generic considerations are given a central position in the present analysis; nor do I attempt, to refer back to Marcus, to ‘redeWne’ autobiography ‘away from the limits of its component parts’—‘self-life-writing’, taken separately or as a composite entity, hardly, in my view, constitutes an over-circumscribed topic. My decision to steer away from the wilder shores of autobiographical discourse is also pragmatic; since there exists, to my knowledge, no synthetic study of Jewish autobiography on the scale attempted here, my intention is to provide a preliminary study—a Wrst word, rather than dernier cri. Methodologically, I follow Philippe Lejeune, whose unwavering commitment to a generic approach to autobiography is unparalleled in the Weld.22 It is Lejeune’s early and pioneering work, L’autobiographie en France, that provides the model for my study. Lejeune’s later proliWc writings on autobiography have informed my reading of discrete texts. But it is this constitutive, introductory work of his that poses ‘elementary, but fundamental questions: what is an autobiography, in what does it diVer from the novel, from the personal diary, from memoirs? How long has it existed?’23 that is closest to the spirit and intent of the present work. Thus, following Lejeune, it is here posited that ‘autobiography’, as a mode of both reading and writing, is a strictly post-Rousseauian phenomenon. Rousseau’s Confessions, Lejeune argues in this work, not only gave rise to the conception and the term ‘autobiography’,24 but also

5

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Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

presages every major development of the genre, including works that seem, at Wrst blush, to deviate most markedly from the Rousseauian model.25 The paradigm of Rousseau’s Confessions, Lejeune further argues, also gave rise to a mode of reading, and it is this mode of reading which informs all histories of autobiography that seek to establish a pre-Rousseauian autobiographical tradition.26 Elsewhere, Lejeune terms such reading as ‘an illusion of perspective’: ‘This illusion is very natural: it corresponds to the most spontaneous historical operation, which makes us constantly redistribute the elements of the past dependent upon our present categories.’27 It is this ‘retrospective illusion’ in its back-projection of Rousseauian categories of confession to texts of classical and mediaeval provenance that enables the contemporary critic to read the Confessions of Augustine, Abelard’s Histoire de mes malheurs et cetera as ‘autobiography’. Such reading, Lejeune argues, runs quite contrary to the hermeneutic codes prevailing at the time of the initial production and consumption of these texts.28 The claim that Rousseau is the founding-father of modern autobiography has, of course, been made repeatedly.29 It is Lejeune, however, to my mind, who makes, in L’autobiographie en France, the most compelling and systematic argument for the primacy of Rousseau in the history of the genre.30 He thus corroborates Rousseau’s own claim, as trumpeted in the opening lines of the Confessions, to have ‘resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent’.31 Following Lejeune and drawing upon the works of other scholars, I present a summary of the principal innovations of the Confessions that exercised a formative influence upon subsequent autobiographical writing. Each of these elements may assume a greater or lesser degree of prominence within a given work. The manner in which these elements express themselves is not uniform, the modalities that they assume being dependent upon the system of literary discourse within which they occur. Of primary signiWcance, as has frequently been noted, is Rousseau’s desacralisation of the religious confessional. While availing himself of the model—he cannot have been unaware of the coincidence of the title of his work with that of Augustine—he eVects a fundamental and far-reaching alteration in the discourse of the religious confessional. Augustine, for whom “confession” means primarily confessio laudis and not confessio peccati,32 addresses himself throughout his Confessions to

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

God. Man is not the interlocutor in the Confessions but rather the indirect beneWciary of the laudatory eVusion that issues from Augustine and is directed toward the Divine. Rousseau, it is true, evokes the ‘Sovereign Judge’ in the opening paragraph of his Confessions, but this is little more than rhetoric. Rousseau’s apostrophes and invocations are directed throughout the Confessions not to God, but to his fellow man. The veracity of Augustine’s narrative is guaranteed by the omniscience of his addressee. Here, as Jean Starobinski notes, ‘is a content guaranteed by the highest bail.’33 For Rousseau, the ultimate criterion of sincerity is not that he be true to the ‘Eternal Being’, but rather to ‘the succession of feelings which have marked the development of my being’, this being the one ‘faithful guide upon which I can count.’34 For Rousseau and for autobiographers who follow him, even Christian,35 it is the ‘self ’ that assumes many of the functions traditionally assigned to God in Christian confessional literature. Rousseau was the Wrst to incorporate techniques of verisimilitude and psychological penetration deriving from the eighteenth-century novel within the non-Wctional, extra-referential context of autobiography. In particular, he was indebted to what Lejeune refers to as a ‘new biographical model’ of eighteenth-century providence—the novel that purports to be an authentic Wrst-person account of the life of the protagonist.36 The acknowledged pioneer of this genre is Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1721) each purport to be the genuine autobiography of the respective hero and heroine.37 ‘Autobiography’, Lejeune writes, ‘could not come into its own without imitating people imitating people who were imagining what it was like to be an autobiographer. A singular game of mirrors that demonstrates that sincerity is learned, originality imitative.’38 Rousseau himself was, both as reader and as writer, well versed in the discourse of the burgeoning novel. His La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), an epistolary novel modeled on Richardson’s Clarissa (1741)39, contains strong autobiographical elements as does his semi-novelistic ‘educational treatise’ Émile (1762).40 Autobiography, in distinction to biography and the memoir, functions primarily as an introspective, self-reflective mode of literary discourse. Perceptions and emotional responses of the self assume, in autobiography, the roles assigned for deeds and events in the life of the

7

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Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

other in the biography and the memoir. For these latter genres, the signiWcance of this other is independent of personal consideration, arising rather from social consensus. Autobiography operates upon an entirely diVerent set of criteria. For the autobiographer, the signiWcance of the other is determined solely by the role that he or she plays in the formation of the self, regardless of social standing. Thus Rousseau, in the ‘Neuchâtel’ variant of the preamble to the Confessions: ‘The relationships I have had with several people compel me to speak as freely of them as of myself. I can only succeed in making myself known by making them known also.’41 Many of the more decisive encounters with the other in the shaping of the autobiographer’s self occur in the years of childhood and adolescence. Parents, teachers, schoolmates, and domestic staV may thus achieve a prominence in the autobiography that would, in the memoir, be reserved for generals and primeministers, renowned men of letters and so on. This is not to say that the formative encounters with the other in an autobiography are restricted to the historically obscure. But when the great do drift in and out of the pages of an autobiography, it is often not on account of the qualities that granted them this status that they are recalled. Thus the most powerful and lasting impression left upon Amos Oz of the Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernikhovsky, the memory of which eclipses Oz’s subsequent acquaintance with his poems, derives from an infantile memory of the man’s mane of hair, his ‘felt [as in the material, M.M.] cheek’, the feel of his moustache on Oz’s cheek, his laughing eyes, furry hands, but above all the man’s smell, and the mysteries this smell evoked: ‘I summon this smell and the smell returns to me, a somewhat coarse smell, a dusty smell, but strong and pleasant, a smell that reminds me of thick sack-cloth . . . his compassionate, comforting smell.’42 The great poet—all but deiWed in the Revisionist Zionist family circle Oz grew up in—is thus leveled in the eyes of the child to a bundle of visual, tactile and, above all, olfactory sensations, experienced, Oz writes, ‘two to three years before I succeeded in pronouncing the name “Tchernikhovsky”’.43 Autobiography is contingent upon a degree of historical awareness. The autobiographer does not portray a pre-determined self or being, but rather tracks an open-ended process of becoming. It is under the sign of historicism that the crucial distinction between autobiography

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

and the self-portrait—in particular the Renaissance self-portrait, on the model of Montaigne’s Essays, Cardano’s Vita—manifests itself.44 Autobiography, by distinction to the self-portrait whose focus is upon the adult self in stasis, albeit from a variety of angles and in a variety of postures, directs attention to the dynamic process of the crystallization of self through all the stages of life, and most particularly to the period of origins, childhood, as recalled and reflected upon from the retrospective vantage point of the adult. ‘There is a certain sequence of impressions’, writes Rousseau, ‘which modify those that follow them and it is necessary to know the original set before passing any judgments. I endeavor in all cases to explain the prime causes, in order to convey the interrelation of results’.45 There is thus an implicit assignation of meaning to temporal passage and a hermeneutic investment in chronological narrative. Wilhelm Dilthey indeed, turning the tables, views autobiography as the paradigm par excellence for historical enquiry: ‘The power and breadth of our own life, and the energy and reflection upon it is the foundation of historical vision. It alone enables us to give a second life to the bloodless shades of the past.’46 And it is in particular to the resurrection/reliving of childhood that autobiography devotes especial ‘energy and reflection’. Of all the ‘ages of man’, childhood holds the privileged place in the autobiography; the implicit ideology of the genre even bestows upon the childhood an ontologically privileged status in the life-cycle; the childhood/garden of Eden analogy so common as to constitute a trope of subsequent autobiographical writing has its origins in the Wrst book of the Confessions. In quantitative terms alone, no writer prior to Rousseau would have dreamt of devoting so many pages to the depiction of his childhood as does Rousseau in the early books of the Confessions; that Rousseau himself was aware of this lack of precedence, and somewhat anxiously so, is attested to by the numerous asides that punctuate this account, apologising to the reader/justifying his close scrutiny of these years. In the subsequent development of the genre, it is, indeed, not at all rare for an autobiographer to devote him/herself predominantly, or even exclusively, to an exploration of the childhood years; while an autobiographer may well exclude from his narrative an account of the years of maturity, it is hard to imagine an autobiography that would exclude the years of childhood. Rousseau, as autobiographer, writes ‘less the

9

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Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

history of . . . events in themselves than of the eVect of their occurrence upon the state of my soul’.47 By virtue of this, he is given a free hand in the depiction of the trivial and paltry episodes that make so disproportionate an impact upon the mind of the child. In fact, in giving an account of the history of feelings, the heart, childhood experience may, and frequently does, assume greater signiWcance for the autobiographer than do the deeds and events of the adult years: the system of relations that obtains in biography, not to say the memoir, is thus reversed. Edwin Muir, who as an autobiographer stands Wrmly in the Rousseauian line of tradition, contrasts the unsullied, ‘original vision’ of the child, ‘in which there is a more complete harmony of all things with each other than he will ever know again’,48 with the ‘adult world’ which ‘is a dry legend consisting of names and Wgures’, made up in collusion with mankind and known only ‘in an external and deceptive way’.49 Anthony Cockshut writes of the ‘commonplace that the early chapters of autobiography which describes childhood are the best’,50 and Roy Pascal goes so far as to deWne those autobiographies that conWne themselves to the years of childhood as the ‘purest form’ of the genre.51 For Rousseau, and for autobiographers after him—and psychiatrists—childhood is viewed along an ontological continuum with adult identity, not, as in Rousseau’s own Émile, a self-contained and autonomous period of life. Thus Rousseau, in the lengthy ‘apology’ he supplies to the reader for the account of his youthful experiences that he is in the course of narrating in Book IV of the Confessions; this aside may fairly be called a manifesto for all future autobiographers: These long details of my early youth may well seem extremely childish, and I am sorry for it. Although in certain respects I have been a man since birth, I was for a long time and still am, a child in many others. I never promised to present the public with a great personage. I promised to depict myself as I am; and to know me in my later years it is necessary to have known me well in my youth. As objects generally make less impression on me than does the memory of them, and as all my ideas take pictorial form, the Wrst features to engrave themselves on my mind have remained there, and such as have subsequently imprinted themselves have combined with these rather than obliterated them . . . I endeavour in all cases to explain the prime causes, in

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

order to convey the interrelation of results. I should like in some way to make my soul transparent to the reader’s eye . . . 52

The coexistence of the child self with adult, adult self with child, gives rise to a Janus-faced view of personality; the autobiographer, as he gives an account of his childhood years, both is and is not the subject of his enunciation.53 This paradoxical situation of, in Lejeune’s phrase, ‘distance and relation’54 between the two planes of temporal existence elicits an autobiographical fascination with memory as the locus of the encounter between child and adult self. Since memory reaches back toward the self as child, but the act of memory occurs within the self as adult, an irresoluble temporal dilemma lies at the heart of the autobiographical enterprise. In face of this dilemma, autobiographical discourse evinces a marked tendency to collapse into the present. This collapse into the present moment of recall and narration, as is well illustrated in the above citation from the Confessions, lends a meta-discursive aspect to autobiography, which becomes a hallmark of the genre.55 Thus Rousseau’s formulation of the problem, as found in the ‘Neuchâtel’ variant of the preamble to the Confessions, is astonishing in its prescience and sophistication, especially in view of the fact that neither autobiography as a genre nor the criticism of the same had, at the time these lines were written (1764), become established: ‘In giving myself over both to my remembrance of the past impression and to my present feeling, I will depict doubly ( Je peindrai doublement) the state of my mind, that is both at the moment the event happened to me and at the moment I describe it; my style, which is uneven yet natural—now energetic and now leisurely, now subdued and now extravagant, now grave and now gay—will itself form a part of the story.’56 In high-modernist autobiographical experimentation, this aspect of Rousseau’s project is subject to hypertrophy to the extent of varying degrees of dissolution of autobiographical narrative. Thus Nabokov’s autobiography is, as the title Speak Memory suggests, a book about remembering, and Roland Barthes, writing On Roland Barthes writes about writing about Roland Barthes et cetera as a continuous process of self-creation.57It is Samuel Beckett, as James Olney has so richly demonstrated, who takes this autobiographical meta-vertiginousness as far as, or perhaps even further than, it can be taken.58

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Over and above all this, Rousseau’s signiWcance lies no less in his exposure of the sheer hubris and ultimate unattainability of the autobiographical quest—‘to make myself transparent to the reader’s eye’—than in his constitution of autobiography as a historical genre. Roussseau, Lejeune writes, ‘elaborated a problematic of autobiography at the same time as he was establishing its practice . . . He scarcely left a stone unturned for his successors’.59 In a more recent, profound study of the totality of Rousseau’s autobiographical writings—the Confessions, Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques—Dialogues and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire— James Olney argues that Rousseau actually preWgured the modernist and postmodernist fragmentation of self. Olney’s observation is corroborated by the paradigmatic post-modern autobiographer, Michel Leiris, who saw Rousseau’s Confessions ‘as exemplary of the heterogeneous writing needed to “grasp the human”, which he himself espoused in his ethnopoetic combination of anthropology and autobiography’.60 Rousseau then, the harbinger of the romantic self, modern individualism et cetera, was also he who sowed the seeds of dissolution into these constructs. ‘In how many ways’, asks Olney, ‘was JeanJacques not the crucial, pivotal, transitional Wgure between the antiquity of St. Augustine and what we have come to call the modernism and postmodernism of Samuel Beckett? . . . Rousseau it was . . . who fragmented the I and dispersed it among various hes . . . He cut the self loose, leaving it without ties, anchor, or direction, and to modern descendants he left as starting-point what for him was the endpoint: a free-floating self, uncentered except in itself, and quite unreal . . . ’61 Olney’s thesis, admirably documented with a wealth of examples from Rousseau’s entire oeuvre, demonstrates, I believe, that to adopt a paradigm based upon Rousseau for a literary/historical study of a particular autobiographical tradition, is not to adopt an overly rigid, prescriptive and restrictive heuristic model. To speak of ‘autobiography’ before Rousseau, without conceding that this term is used as a heuristic device, is to fall prey to what Lejeune terms the ‘retrospective illusion’, or ‘the illusion of eternity’, an illusion, writes Lejeune, that ‘corresponds to the most spontaneous historical operation, which makes us constantly redistribute the elements of the past depending upon our present categories’.62 By equivalence, to speak of autobiography after Rousseau without acknowledging his

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

fundamental role in shaping the genre—change as the modes of autobiographical discourse may—is to run the risk of losing sight of the subject altogether; and I believe that there is indeed a ‘subject’, in both senses of the term, to be lost sight of.

The “Children of Jean Jacques” in Jewish Eastern Europe We, who were related by spiritual consanguinity with BrennerBerdichevsky, recognized almost exclusively only one type of sincerity, that extending in world literature from Rousseau and the Young Werther: that of revelation of the self and confession of the self.63

In modern Jewish history Eastern Europe provided the soil, quantitatively and qualitatively, from which an autonomous, modern Jewish autobiographical discourse, written in Jewish languages, arose. Eastern European Jews, writing autobiographically in Hebrew and Yiddish, would, at Wrst blush, appear wayward and exotic ‘children of Jean Jacques’ indeed. Yet one cardinal aspect of Rousseau’s intellectual and autobiographical legacy is its omnipresence.64 Rousseauian thought, however, variously mediated, exercised a pervasive influence upon the Hebrew Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement,65 the intellectual matrix of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature in Eastern Europe. Moreover, one of the earliest autobiographies clearly fashioned after the example of Rousseau’s Confessions was written by an Eastern European Jew, Solomon Maimon. And, as shall be seen, Maimon’s autobiography provided the cornerstone for the Hebrew and Yiddish development of the genre. Eastern European Jewish autobiography, it is here argued, is a speciWcally modern, speciWcally post-Rousseauian phenomenon, essentially analogous to the history of the genre in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western Europe. Rousseauian autobiography left its mark on Jewish literary and intellectual history not only as a mode of writing but also as one of reading. As with wider European autobiography, so with Jewish, the notion of a pre-Rousseauian, indigenous autobiographical tradition is itself a post facto, post-Rousseauian intellectual construct arising from a modern mode of reading that projects autobiographical categories onto pre-modern texts. The origins and history of

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this mode of reading the textual deposits of the past through autobiographical lense thus constitute an essential aspect of the history of the autobiographical consciousness this study seeks to trace. Lejeune puts this in a nutshell: ‘This transformation of reading must become the object of a historical study, but it could not be its foundation.’66 The transformation of thinking, reading and writing in Jewish Eastern Europe, of which autobiography is both cause and symptom, was not eVected smoothly; the phenomenon with its attendant aesthetic, sociological and intellectual ramiWcations is of central import to the secularization of Jewish life and letters in Eastern Europe, and its reverberations are to be felt to this day. The problematic nature of the reception/absorption of the autobiographical into Eastern European Jewish literary and intellectual discourse is attested to by the literaryhistorical data. On the one hand, Jewish autobiography takes its cue, as does every other major European branch of the genre, from Rousseau, and that, as noted, hot on the heels of the publication of Rousseau’s Confessions. On the other, at least one hundred years were to elapse before autobiography, understood both as a mode of reading and as one of writing, showed any signs of becoming established within a Jewish sphere of literary discourse in Eastern Europe. Why should Jewish autobiography have entered into so lengthy a period of latency at precisely the time in which the ‘classic’ autobiographies of France, Germany, England, and Russia were written?67 The ‘theoretical model’ as outlined below seeks to provide some framework for the understanding of this curious phenomenon of literary and intellectual history. This theoretical model, combined with a substantive deWnition of autobiography based upon the paradigm of Rousseau’s Confessions, has determined the choice of texts in this study. For reasons advanced below the main focus in this study is upon texts written in Hebrew and Yiddish. A survey of Eastern European Jewish autobiography written in Russian68 or of autobiography reflecting the Eastern European Jewish experience written in English, French or German would require a very diVerent methodological model from the one here adopted.69 This having been said, in writing this book I became increasingly aware that the Yiddish autobiographical voice, as it emerged from a synthetic appraisal of a number of representative texts—inevitable exceptions notwithstanding—diVered markedly from that of Hebrew. It

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became clear to me that treatment of the topic thus necessitated a conceptual and literary-historical framework other than that here employed in tracing the origins of Hebrew autobiographical writing and thinking—a much less Rousseau-centric framework. I also discovered that in thinking and writing about this, I had suYcient material for an independent monograph, and that this would be a more eVective way to present this material than within the present book. Thus, while I do engage at some length on one Yiddish autobiography (that of Meir Viner) in this book, provide an overview of the YIVO interwar autobiography competitions in Poland, the majority of submissions to which were written in Yiddish, and have occasion to cite various Yiddish autobiographies as supportive material, I have not here attempted any synthetic overview of the topic. By way of meagre compensation for this omission, I shall conWne myself here to some general observations concerning this vital, massive and quintessentially Eastern European branch of Jewish autobiography. Chronologically speaking, autobiographical writing in Yiddish considerably postdates that in Hebrew, the origins of the latter traceable to the mid-nineteenth century. This is absolutely consistent with the more general Yiddish literary belatedness, by comparison with Hebrew, in the assimilation of modern European literary genres—most notably the novel. Thus, the great majority of nineteenth-century Yiddish writers, including the three Klassikers—Mendele, Peretz and Sholem Aleichem—made their literary debuts in Hebrew. Moreover, the two most proliWc Yiddish writers of the nineteenth century, Ayzik Meir Dik and N. M. Shaykevitsh (Shoymer), elected Hebrew as their language of autobiographical expression.70 Some members of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, notably Shimon Frug, had reverted to Yiddish after the 1881 pogroms,71 but Yiddish did not become an accepted linguistic medium for serious literary discourse until the Wrst decade of the twentieth century.72 ‘We have no tradition’, we read, in the dissident modernist Yiddish New York journal In zikh: of March 1923: ‘We have found very little that could serve as tradition for us. The tradition begins precisely with us, strange as it may sound.’73 This relative chronological belatedness of Yiddish autobiography also entails—though it does not fully account for—some marked phenomenological and stylistic distinctions to be drawn between Hebrew

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and Yiddish autobiographical writing. The emergence of an autonomous literature in Yiddish was coterminous with a change in the intellectual guard in Eastern European Jewish intellectual and literary history, by which indigenous, speciWcally Russian, paradigms of discourse steadily usurped the Western and Central European paradigms—in and through the mediation of the German language—that were predominant in shaping Hebrew literary and intellectual discourse.74 The eVects of this paradigm-shift are deWnitely to be discerned in Yiddish autobiographical discourse. Many Yiddish autobiographical works thus make much more sense when viewed within the speciWcally Russian variant of Rousseauian autobiography. Russian autobiography is, in general, markedly less introspective than its Western European counterpart. Less solipsistic and solitary in orientation, the natural, familial, and wider socio-historical environment—the ‘other’, in short—is accorded a far greater role in accounts of the becoming and being of the self; compare, for example, Tolstoy’s account of his childhood— pointedly entitled Childhood, not My Childhood—with that of his spiritual mentor, Rousseau.75 Russian autobiographical writings are characterized—as is the Russian novel—by their exceptional generic fluidity and amorphousness, their frequently composite status as memoir, novel and autobiography at one and the same time.76 For all this amorphousness, shift of emphasis and coloration these works do retain, as do their Yiddish counterparts, unmistakable traces of their ultimate progenitor—Rousseau—in particular the Rousseau of the Confessions. There is an essential correspondence between this very general diVerentiation between Russian autobiography and Western European, and that between Yiddish autobiographical writing and Hebrew. This allocentric, other-directed tendency, here contextualized within the Russian literary environment, dovetails with speciWcally Yiddish literary dynamics according to which this language was construed as the archetypal language of the other, the non-self, or even anti-self. Two of the chapter headings of Dan Miron’s classic study of the rise of Yiddish literature in the nineteenth century speak for themselves in this respect: ‘A Language as Caliban’; ‘The Mimic Writer and his “little Jew”’.77 The Yiddish autobiographical self—in prose at least—is, by contrast with that of the Hebrew, markedly more contextualized in speciWc place, socio-historical setting, family—I speak here of texts whose

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

dominant tone is recognizably autobiographical rather than memoiristic/ethnographic, though they may include aspects of each or both of these latter modalities. Thus the autobiographies of two of the ‘classic’ writers of Yiddish literature, S. Y. Abramovitsch and Sholem Aleichem, are written in the third person; that the familial environment is to a signiWcant extent constitutive of the self is accentuated by the naming of the protagonists of these autobiographies—respectively, ‘Shloyme the son of Khaim’ and ‘Sholem the son of Nokhem the son of Vevik’. In what is probably the most widely acclaimed Yiddish autobiography, Daniel Charney’s Barg aruf,78 Charney entitles the Wrst section—previously published as a separate book—‘Family Chronicle’. Again, there are clear Russian literary parallels here. Thus Andrew Baruch Wachtel: ‘Rather than beginning their autobiographies with their own memories . . . Russian autobiographers usually started with a discussion of their entire family history. In the course of the nineteenth century, there were at least Wve autobiographies that bore the subtitle ‘A Family Chronicle’ and many more in which the phrase was used in the text.’79 This ‘being for/with the other’ rather than ‘for myself alone’, a self-conception further fostered by the strong socialist dimension of a signiWcant number of Yiddish autobiographies, clearly swerves from the carefully constructed paradigm based upon Rousseau’s Confessions that informs the present study of the origins of Jewish autobiography. If, indeed, some of representative Yiddish autobiographers are ‘children of Rousseau’—and I would argue they are—it would be more of the fragmented, doubled-up ‘Rousseau’ of the Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques—Dialogues than of the Rousseau of the Confessions. In grappling with this shift in perspective, I have been much informed by recent studies of Russian autobiography, which until very recently, perhaps precisely because of its departure from the classic models, has been the least studied of the European national autobiographical traditions.80

In and Around the Self: The Critical Discourse Just as autobiography itself made a belated appearance in Jewish Eastern Europe, so the critical discourse surrounding autobiography. This

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is not to say, though, that there does not exist a sizeable amount of material tangentially related to the topic. There is, Wrst of all, the material that may be termed incidental: that is, critical responses to discrete autobiographical writings from the time of their appearance to the present day. The agglomerate of such critical responses, for example, to M. L. Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim, Mendele/Abramovitsch’s Shloyme reb khayim’s, and other noted examples of the genre, would constitute a sizable bibliography. This “incidental” material is not conWned to responses to self-declared autobiographical works, but extends to critical discussions of works clearly infused with autobiographical elements without declaring themselves as autobiography. This is especially true of Hebrew literature of the ‘Renaissance’ period, a period unprecedented and without parallel in autobiographical selfscrutiny in all branches of literature.81 Such was the heightened autobiographical sensibility of Hebrew literature of this period, and later, that much of the contemporaneous critical/theoretical discourse devoted to discrete works amounts, in eVect, to a critical and theoretical discourse of autobiography. In the poetic sphere, this is nowhere more manifest than in expositions upon and explications of Bialik’s writings. Bialik himself invited speculation concerning the autobiographical elements in his work, by the constant and on occasion coquettish games of autobiographical hide-and-seek he played with his readers, both in his prose and his poetry. That he did play these games is sure indication in and of itself that some confusion of codes was endemic to the rules of the literary master-game in which these discrete works Wnd their provenance.82 Thus Ya’aqov Fichman, one of the most proliWc and signiWcant literary critics of the ‘Renaissance’ period, writes that the key to Bialik’s poetry lies in the commingling of autobiography and ‘hints of ancient Jewish legend’, themselves transformed through the prism of autobiography.83 Fichman’s formulations, borne of profound and engaged reflection on what is arguably the most ideationally hermetic and aesthetically chaotic of Bialik’s works, Megillat ha’esh, and the intuitive intelligence with which he applies them, are clearly of wider application to the autobiographical genre—Jewish and general. The same is true of the work of subsequent Hebrew literary critics who address themselves to the autobiographical problematic in Bialik’s work—foremost among them Dov Sadan, Gershon Shaked,

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

and Dan Miron. The last-mentioned in particular, taking his cue from Sadan, has devoted a book-length survey to Bialik’s poetry, whose central theme is the poet’s overcoming of psychological and cultural resistances to the autobiographical compulsion that was the fons et origo of his creativity.84 Likewise, with respect to the criticism of Hebrew prose, the vast critical discourse devoted to the overridingly autobiographical element in the writings of Yosef Hayyim Brenner, in whose writings the autobiographical element, however complexly refracted, is rarely absent, has provided fertile ground for the exploration of autobiographical theory, and continues to do so to this day.85 Brenner was a Wne literary critic himself, and his own explorations of the autobiographical lode in the works of Gnessin, Berdichevsky, Nomberg, inter alios, were extraordinarily prescient in their anticipation of later theoretical developments in the study of the genre.86 The high degree of attunement of Hebrew literary criticism to the autobiographical as manifested in works not declaredly or unequivocally autobiographical may in no small part be accredited to the extraordinary level of intimacy by which the practitioners and consumers—a disproportionate number of whom were also practitioners—of this literature were bound together in the early decades of the twentieth century. A good illustration of this intimacy is the widespread usage of the Wrst-person plural in Hebrew literary criticism: the term Sifrutenu/‘our literature’ becomes a standard substitution for ‘Hebrew literature’ in this discourse; Meshorerenu/‘our poet’—Bialik, that is, who himself referred to his mentor Ahad Ha’am as ‘Daddy’; Shiratenu/‘our poetry’ et cetera.87 It is this intimacy in the midst of dispersion that forms the leitmotif of Dan Miron’s collective biography of Hebrew literature in the early twentieth century; hence the title, Bodedim bemo’adam/‘Solitaries in Their Place of Meeting’ (a play on Isaiah 14:31). This literary environment of what Miron calls ‘intimate loneliness’, was most conducive to the writing and mutual exchange of autobiographical texts within the coterie. Thus Gershom Shofman, writing apropos of his Wrst encounter with Uri Nisan Gnessin, as cited by Miron in this context: ‘This whole business of writing in general is when it really comes down to it no more than a kind of exchange of letters between a few fellow-brethren, dispersed and scattered over the surface of the globe,

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most of whom do not know each other.’88 In a striking analogue to the above passage, Shlomoh Grodzensky writes of awaiting each new story of Devorah Baron as if it were ‘a letter from a distant friend, for further knowledge of his changing life in faraway lands, with curiosity, good wishes and pride’.89 Y. H. Brenner, while declaring that he was ‘not a “genreist”’, viewed the totality of his writings in various Welds as above all letters: ‘In all that I write from time to time, be it newspaper articles or in story-form . . . I do not intend . . . to describe life as it is, as it appears to an objective and lucid observer. What then? I shall make no bones about it: letters, that’s all, I write to my close friends about the life of a man such as myself at that time and about his emotions . . . I only write letters, in which I relate essentially to whoever is interested, the impressions that I receive and how I spend my hours and days.’90 Dov Sadan’s evocation of his Wrst encounter with the writings of Brenner is equally illustrative of Shofman’s above observation: ‘I was a young man when I Wrst discovered Brenner, and I did not so much swallow his stories, as I was swallowed up by them, to the extent that I imagined, that they were crying aloud before me: “it is of you that the text speaks”.’91 The readerly/literary critical reception of a self-revelatory, autobiographical text may constitute a self-revelatory moment to the reader/critic, whose written response to the text may assume a highly autobiographical hue, thus bearing witness to a transmission of the autobiographical impulse from writer to reader/critic. Thus the centrality of the autobiographical impulse in the range of Sadan’s critical writings, to the extent that the literary-critical discourse often appears subsidiary to the autobiographical.92 And thus Shlomoh Grodzensky on the impact made upon him by Sadan’s own autobiographical accounts: The relationship between the reader and the writer is posited within a context of connections not of our own choosing—the historical period that fell to our lot, the shared mental horizon of a given generation. Therefore, a Hebrew reader whose childhood fell in the shadow of World War I, in characterizing his relationship with Dov Sadan, will declare—he is my writer, in this intimate sense. For those years, 1914–1918, were seen by those who were born at the end of the nineteenth century as sunrise, or as sunset, but for those who were born at the beginning of the century, this was morning, morning of terror,

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

that stood under the sign of the impending destruction of the Jews in Eastern Europe. For whomever this memory is buried in the hiddenmost regions of his consciousness, it is inevitable that a special relationship of fraternity will bind him to those who share this memory. Hebrew writers whose childhood fell within the arena of World War I constitute a unique body in our literature. It is odd that its literary historians and critics have still not acknowledged this aspect that unites them. In several respects they were the last of their kind: the last witnesses of Jewish life to which World War I dealt the Wrst fatal blow; the last generation of Hebrew writers to graduate from the traditional Beys- medresh, when it still stood on a Wrm basis; and above all, the last generation of Hebrew literature on European soil. In his two Wrst wonderful volumes of memoirs, the memoirs of his childhood and youth, Sadan seeks traces of the world as it was in his birthplace, the world before 1914, and of the shattered, tormented world after that.93

Such transference of the autobiographical impulse is well illustrated in Y. H. Brenner’s depiction, in the novella, Mehathalah, of his female protagonist’s reception of the writings of Feierberg and Berdichevsky: ‘She searches around for books to read on her desk: the writings of Feierberg, Mibayit umihuts, Mehe’avar haqerov94—she had already read all these several times, and had even copied down in her notebook all of the poetic sections that especially touched her, sometimes also with some alteration from masculine to female voice, in order to make the words her own . . . ’95 Shofman’s epistolary metaphor is also borne out by the intensely self-revelatory character of much of the vast correspondence generated by the Hebrew writers of this period, suggestive of a secular substitution for the rabbinic She’elot uteshuvot/‘responsa literature’. Sometimes, as with Bialik, Brenner and Berdichevsky, personal letters eVectively constituted the Wrst draft of published autobiographical texts.96 Thus the Wrst letter to be included in Fishel Lachover’s edition of Bialik’s letters constitutes, in eVect, an extraordinary revealing and self-lacerating autobiography, in which the influence of the autobiographical texts of Guenzberg and Lilienblum is clearly discernable. This gigantic epistle—it runs to twenty-two printed pages— was penned in 1890 when Bialik was at the Volozhin yeshivah, and it is addressed to a collective audience of the friends he has left behind in

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Zhitomir. The letter, one section of which is provided with a chapterheading, ‘Retrospective’, disrupting the informal epistolary flow, actually bases itself on a ‘book of memoirs’ that Bialik has before him at the time of writing and is in the process of editing: ‘Now I am running my hand over several pages and I have skipped over many remembrances, whose letters are blurred and many of them even erased entirely, now my hand is holding one page at the end of the second chapter, that is the end of “The Chapter of the Days of Boyhood” and I read: “The days of youth are close at hand and how have I prepared myself spiritually for these days?”’97 In fact, Shofman’s dictum could be altered to read: ‘This whole business of writing letters is . . . no more than a kind of exchange of autobiographical literature’ . . . et cetera—a topic I return to in the discussion of the personal archive in the Wnal chapter of this book. Within this literary environment, I would argue, the original literary texts, the critical response to them, and the actual correspondence surrounding each may be placed upon a continuum whose dominant feature is the autobiographical. This preoccupation with the autobiographical is evinced in Hebrew and Yiddish literary criticism—as these critical traditions gained maturity by leaps and bounds from the Wrst decades of the twentieth century on—by the predominance of biographical considerations in the explication of literary texts. The centrality of the biographical in this literary-critical discourse is attested to by the central place it held, and holds, in the works of critics of very diVerent ideological and aesthetic persuasion. For Joseph Klausner, for example, biography serves as the essential structuring principle of his six-volume History of Modern Hebrew Literature, a work constructed on solidly positivistic foundations à la Taine and Sainte Beuve.98 For Klausner’s counterpart in Yiddish literary criticism, Bal Makhshoves (Eliashev), basing himself on similarly positivistic foundations, biography constitutes an essential component of critical discourse. Biography, likewise, is of equal centrality in the critical works of Dov Sadan, one of the most outspoken opponents of Klausner’s literary schema; whereas for Klausner biography provides access to facts/details, for the wildly speculative Sadan biography provides a key to the cellar of the Freudian subconscious and the Jungian Collective Unconscious.99 Shmuel Niger, whose Yiddishist, secularist,

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and Diaspora-centered schema of Yiddish literature provides the ideological counter-point to that of Sadan, immerses himself in the biography of his subjects as much as does Sadan and, like Sadan, his explorations are strongly informed by psycho-analytic technique. Indeed, his most enduring book-length work is his biography of Y. L. Peretz, throughout which literary-critical and biographical considerations go hand in hand. The auto/biographical fascination is shared–especially as concerns Bialik—by two of the leading critics of the early decades of the twentieth century, Ya’akov Fichman and Fishl Lachover, critics of a very diVerent stripe: Fichman is one of the foremost representatives of ‘impressionist’ criticism, Lachover of the more analytic, empiricist school.100 No small part of the appeal, in the Israeli literarycritical Weld from the 1950s onwards, of the exclusively text-centered ‘New Criticism’ lay in its rejection of the institutionalized biographical paradigm.101 But, as demonstrated by the intellectual trajectory of a critic of the New-Critical generation, Dan Miron, the biographical imperative of the literary-critical founding-fathers continued to resonate. Indeed, more than any other single Hebrew and Yiddish literary critic, it is Miron who has relegitimized the simultaneous reading of literary texts as aesthetic/linguistic entities in their own right and as autobiographical/biographical documents; his project thus forms a dialectical continuum to that of Sadan.102 Then there are the massive biographical excursions of Nurit Govrin, Yitshak Bakon’s biography of the young Brenner, both of whom draw extensively from the ‘Wctional’ constructions/re-presentations of their biographees’ writings for the reconstruction of the life.103 Of the younger generation of Hebrew literary critics, Avner Holtzman’s biographically grounded studies of M. Y. Berdichevsky are of special relevance in the present context.104 Israeli Gestalt psychologist, Amia Lieblich, has written a feminist-oriented, somewhat New Age, experimental biography, that is no less an experiment in autobiography, of Deborah Baron—cast in the form of séance-style imaginary conversations between the biographer and her subject. In similar vein, Lieblich’s later biographical study of Leah Goldberg is ‘presented as the female biographer’s journal, in which she recounts her progress while studying Goldberg’s life and work’.105 It is my impression that contemporary Israeli criticism of Hebrew and Yiddish literature is more biographically oriented—and

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increasingly so—than that stemming from America, where biography has of late been largely the preserve of historians.106 This contemporary reorientation to the auto/biographical is also attested to by translation and republication of Jewish autobiographical/memoiristic documents: David Assaf ’s superbly annotated editions, with extensive introductions, of part of Yekhezkel Kotik’s Mayne zikhroynes and Reb Mordkhele’s (Tshemerinsky) Ayarati motele;107 a translation of Puah Rakovsky’s Zikhroynes fun a yidisher revoltsionerin;108 a projected reissue of Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg’s ’Avie’zer based upon manuscript variants of the work by Shmuel Werses;109 the publication for the Wrst time of the draft of an autobiography of the childhood years by Tchernikhovsky110 et cetera. Notwithstanding this considerable body of work in and around the autobiographical and the evident literary/critical fascination with the topic, very few works have appeared to date that attempt a synthetic overview of Jewish autobiography, in particular within the context of Jewish Eastern Europe, in whose literary ambience the autobiographical voice in Hebrew and Yiddish came to the fore. Prolegomena to such a study appeared at a relatively early stage. Thus, the Wrst essay to treat of Jewish autobiography in a comparative context, albeit in a primitive manner and largely derived from Heinrich Heine’s musing on this topic, was written by Meir Halevi Letteris and appeared in 1869.111 Since then, a number of essays which move beyond the monographic toward a synthetic overview of the genre have appeared with some regularity: M. Y. Berdichevsky’s Devarim ’ahadim ’al devar hatoladah veha ’autobiograWah (1899),112 Bal-Makhshoves’ Undzer memuarn literatur (1910),113 Y. Shatsky’s Yidishe Memuarn Literatur (1925),114 Sh. Werses’ Darkhei ha’avtobiograWah bitequfat hahaskalah (1945).115 As a complement to this essay, and at a remove of over a half-century, Werses arrived at a diVerent type of synthesis. In a monograph-length essay entitled ‘The Jewish Maskil as a Young Man’, he draws a magniWcent composite portrait of this ‘young man’, extrapolated from a vast array of autobiographical material from the period that he alone could muster and master.116 To these I would add David Assaf ’s superb introductions to his translation to Hebrew from the Yiddish of Kotik’s Mayne zikhroynes and to his edition of Reb Mordkhele’s Ayarati motele, as cited above. Each of these introductions, especially that to the Kotik

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

volume, places these works within the wider literary/historical context of Eastern European Jewish autobiography. To the best of my knowledge, only one book-length literary-critical study of Jewish autobiography exists to date: Alan Mintz’s Banished from Their Fathers’ Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography. 117 The body of Mintz’s book is devoted to highly intelligent, close and provocative readings of Wve texts: M. A. Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer; M. L. Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim; M. Z. Feierberg’s Le’an; M. Y. Berdichevsky’s ’Orva’ parah; Y.H. Brenner’s Bahoref. It is not these individual readings I shall address in the present context, but the methodological and literary/historical framework of Mintz’s treatment. Since Mintz’s is the most recent and the most comprehensive attempt at a synthetic overview of the phenomenon of Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe, I shall dwell on it in some detail. As is apparent from the title, Mintz is concerned with Hebrew autobiography insofar as this reflects and reflects upon the paradigmatic experience of post-Haskalah Hebrew writers: the loss of religious faith, a loss rendered all the more devastating by a corresponding disaVection with the ideological tenets of the Haskalah itself. Not only do the texts that Mintz studies give account of this crisis of faith, but their very creation is contingent upon this crisis, the loss of faith being the matrix, according to Mintz, from which Hebrew autobiography derives: ‘The attempt in Hebrew literature to represent and explore the shape of experience in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of faith is the subject of the present study. I shall argue that the need to tell this story resulted in the creation of a new mode of writing in Hebrew prose narrative—the autobiography, both inside and outside of Wction.’118 Mintz views the turn to the autobiography as expressive of a perceived dissonance between the sentimental and melodramatic conventions of the novelistic genre in Hebrew, as these had developed into the Wnal decades of the nineteenth century, and the urgent compulsion to render accounts with the existential dead-end in which this post-Haskalah generation of writers found themselves. Thus the belated incorporation of the Rousseauian confessional into Hebrew literary discourse, as mediated through the example of Solomon Maimon, responds to the need for ‘an alternative tradition of narrative prose writing which could take on life closer to the bone’.119 Mintz argues,

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very much as I have done above, that the Rousseauian turn is as unprecedented in Hebrew literary history as it is in the history of major European literatures; hence the cardinal signiWcance of Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte as a precursor for the recasting of Eastern European Jewish life through the eyes of the modern autobiographer. The majority of Haskalah autobiographies, as surveyed in Werses’ programmatic essay, Mintz excludes from consideration as being overly dry, and more of interest for the biographical information these shed upon their authors than as literary autobiography. Mintz’s dismissal of these texts is somewhat breezy: Sh. D. Luzzatto, after all, did introduce that ‘dangerous supplement’, masturbation, to Hebrew autobiographical discourse,120 and the autobiographies of S. J. Fuenn and A. Gottlober are not, I think, devoid of interest to those uninterested in their authors. But he is surely correct in singling out M. A. Guenzberg’s Aviezer and M. L. Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim as marking the high points of Haskalah autobiography and indeed the works that most closely approximate the Rousseauian paradigm.121 And these two texts were of immeasurably greater influence in shaping Hebrew autobiographical discourse than were any others of the period. Lilienblum, Guenzberg, and other Haskalah Wgures wrote what Mintz deWnes as ‘ “straight” autobiographies’. 122 That is: ‘In the Haskalah autobiography, the author of the work and the retrospective narrator of the story are presumably the same person. The Lilienblum who tells the story of his life in Sins of Youth presents himself as the same Lilienblum who lived the life and now exists as a real public person.’123 In Mintz’s scheme of things, the Tehiyyah/‘Renaissance’ period of Hebrew literature was accompanied by a crucial transformation in Hebrew autobiographical discourse: autobiography now ‘crossed over into Wction’.124 He appears to view this chiasma as a positive development in the history of the genre. Now that the writer—I hesitate to say ‘autobiographer’— is not to be identiWed with the retrospective narrator of his life-story, he is given ‘the opportunity to ironize the distance between himself and the narrator, who can then be tinged by various degrees of unreliability. This is a freedom, we shall see, of which both Berdichevsky and Brenner take full advantage . . . Fiction writers such as Brenner . . . violated the autobiographical compact for the sake of higher autobiographical truth.’125 Thus, the majority of Mintz’s study is devoted to what he him-

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

self terms ‘Wctional texts’, ‘novels and novellas’. In order to throw a bridge between these ‘Wctions’ and ‘“straight” autobiography’, and thus justify their treatment under one rubric—‘the Hebrew autobiographical tradition’—Mintz points to literary/historical, formal, and thematic commonalities that bind the texts under consideration together. First he points to an implicit or explicit intertextual ‘interdependence’ between the Hebrew texts he focuses upon, with the weight of his evidence lying upon the last of the series of texts he analyzes, Brenner’s Bahoref: ‘The true sign that these works comprise an identiWable and self-consciously organized tradition is indicated by the intertextual nature of Brenner’s autobiographical Wrst novel In Winter.’126 Next, there is a shared ‘formal axis’ to the works he examines: ‘the autobiographical premise of self-portraiture and retrospective narrative’. This ‘formal axis’, it should be noted, does not preclude a third-person narrative, such as that of Feierberg’s Le’an. Lastly, there is a ‘thematic axis’ that unites these disparate texts into a discernible Hebrew ‘confessional tradition’: ‘What we have called in a kind of shorthand the apostasy narrative . . . , which describes a young man’s break with religion, family, and community, and his attempts to live in a world empty of those beliefs and institutions.’127 A further thematic ‘axis’ of central importance in Mintz’s treatment is constituted by the account of the adolescent/young man’s psychological and existential crises engendered by sexual/erotic complexes. Whether this ‘axis’ or ‘code’ falls squarely within the ‘apostasy narrative’ or is a supplementary axis/narrative, related but independent in its own right, is not entirely clear.128 Thus deWned, or better perhaps, qualiWed, Hebrew autobiography is of an essentially transient character: ‘a brief but signiWcant moment in which the crisis of Judaism in the modern age was given a very speciWc literary expression’.129 When, according to this model, the crisis of faith ceases to constitute the catalyst in the individual life of Jewish writers/autobiographers of later generations, autobiography is no longer quickened by the ‘narrative of apostasy’ with its attendant erotic correlates. The genre thus becomes impoverished, evincing ‘a clear withdrawal from a commitment to individualized introspection and introspectiveness’. Now, autobiographies that seek to recreate the Eastern European Jewish childhood, sans crisis of faith, tend to retreat from the

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‘existential’ to the ‘ethnographic’.130 Other Jewish autobiographers, who recount their coming-of-age in the midst of cataclysmic historical events—World War I and all that followed it—tend to become reduced as individuals by the sheer magnitude of the events to which they bear witness. Those who emerged from this historical maelstrom to positions of leadership tend to dwell on the public persona rather than the individual self.131 In sum, with one or two exceptions that prove the rule, the stream of modern Jewish autobiography eVectively flows into the large river of the memoir. Mintz thus provides a bold and wide-reaching explanatory model for the phenomenon of Eastern European Jewish autobiography, especially in its Hebrew manifestation. My major equivocations arise from the texts Mintz chooses to include, and exclude, from the highroad of Hebrew autobiographical expression as he deWnes it. Of the Wve texts that he selects for close scrutiny, only two—those of Lilienblum and Guenzberg—are actual autobiographies, and these are dealt with in one chapter, which constitutes, approximately, but a quarter of the book. Mintz himself draws attention to this distinction pointedly by entitling the section of his work that discusses Feierberg and Berdichevsky ‘Into Fiction’. And in discussing the relationship between Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim and Brenner’s Bahoref, he writes: ‘At bottom the two works are separated by a fundamental fact of genre: one is an autobiography and the other is a novel. One purports to be a true story, no matter how artfully crafted, told by the person about himself in his own words; the other, though written in the Wrst person and based on personal history, is a Wction about a protagonist who is not identical with the author.’132 To be sure, the precise lines of demarcation between autobiography and ‘Wction’ are highly unstable and blurred—employment of novelistic technique in the recounting of the life-history, is, as argued above, endemic to the genre133—all the more so at this particular juncture of Hebrew and Yiddish literary discourse; it is a far less complicated matter, for example, to establish the essentially Wctional status of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Dickens’ David CopperWeld, Bronte’s Jane Eyre, later Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull et cetera, even though these all declare themselves as autobiographies and are written in this format, than it is to establish where autobiography ends and Wction begins, and vice-versa, in the Wrst-person nar-

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

ratives of Berdichevsky, Brenner et alii. In fact, the autobiographical element in Brenner’s writing, for one, is so all-engulWng that it could be argued, and has been, that the Wctional status of his Wction is a Wction: the name of the protagonist and narrator of Bahoref, ‘Fayerman’ (‘Fireman’), is, after all, a transparent allusion to ‘Brenner’ (‘incendiary’).134 More broadly, it could be argued that Brenner here is paradigmatic of a larger generic shift in the Hebrew literature of his day marked by the subsumption of the Wctional to the autobiographical, rather than vice-versa. Dov Sadan argues that this generation of writers, for whom Michah Yosef Berdichevsky was the founding father and Brenner the paradigmatic representative, in contradistinction to Mendele before them, and Agnon and Hazaz after them was a generation lacking the art that the latter writers were endowed with and enjoyed/employed ‘creative transformations’ (Gilgulei yetsirah): ‘A generation of writers that did not see and did not show anything other than themselves, the Jewish individual in his orphanhood and tribulations . . . A generation that is capable of metamorphosing the self and the experiences of the self by artistic transformations and transpositions of character by means of the liberation of autobiographical materials is not the same as a generation that is incapable of this, even though both draw the source of their creation from within.’135 This line of approach is not, however, adopted by Mintz, so it is strange that over a third of a book whose subject is autobiography should be devoted to a text separated from autobiography ‘by a fundamental fact of genre’. This generic/deWnitional confusion is compounded by the fact that Mintz understands autobiography by and large as formally determined—a Wrst-person retrospective text that tells of the life of the narrator, regardless of historical/biographical identity or non-identity between the narrator and author. (Thus Sholem Aleichem’s Wrst-person monologue Motel peyse dem khazans yingl may be construed as autobiography.)136 But Feierberg’s Le’an, ‘whose place in the autobiographical enterprise is assured by the fact that in his work the central moment of apostasy receives its fullest articulation’,137 is actually a third-person narrative, preceded by a brief Wrst-person authorial preamble, relating the crisis of faith of a protagonist, ‘Nahman the madman’ who dies at the end of the tale. As with Brenner, it is clear that Feierberg’s autobiographical investment in this account is immense. But

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the life of ‘Nahman the madman’ diVers in some key respects with what we know of that of Feierberg—most notably in the relatively positive, or at least nuanced, depiction of the father-Wgure in the tale by contrast to the fanatical sadist of a father that emerges from the memoirs of Feierberg’s contemporaries.138 If one were to insist upon the primarily autobiographical kernel of Le’an, one might take recourse to Freudian psychology and explain this discrepancy as overcompensation for Oedipal rage or some such. This is actually what Dov Sadan does in accounting for the polarized co-existence in Brenner’s writings—whose primarily autobiographical nature he insists upon—of the excoriated and idealized father-Wgure.139 Mintz, however, does not seem concerned with mooring Feierberg’s narrative to autobiographical reality; Le’an, he writes, apropos of the discrepancy between the represented and the real-life father, ‘is not the sort of confessional act distinguished by its psychological realism; and Nahman is not the kind of autobiographical hero who is driven to understand how his identity emerged out of conflict with his parents and to settle scores for the price he was made to pay. The Wgure of the father lies much closer to myth than gritty reality.’140 This is confusing: a ‘confessional act’ lacking of ‘psychological realism’ and without biographical grounding is surely compromised one way or the other: all the more so, an autobiographical confessional act that in the account of the formative years of childhood eschews the ‘gritty reality’ of bios in favor of ‘myth’. Are, for example, Tolstoy’s A Confession and his Kreutzer Sonata, both of whose form is confessional, to be read at the same autobiographical frequency? Here, as elsewhere in his study, Mintz actually seems to operate according to essentially New Critical criteria, according to which the novel is somehow on a higher plane than the autobiography.141 The teleological trajectory of his study traces the quasi-Hegelian ‘sublation’ of autobiography by the novel, of the documentary and non-Wctional by the Wctional. He thus appears to be in essential agreement with the hypostasized ‘novelist’, who, he writes, apropos of Brenner’s achievement, ‘may well argue that the truth he reaches for is deeper and even more autobiographically authentic than the literal-minded adherences of biographical writing, and indeed the canons of the novel genre leave him free to work unencumbered in the space between biographical facts and Wctional representations.’142 It is

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

thus the ‘study of how life is transformed into art, the quality of the alteration, not the quantity’143—and note that this is the polar opposite of Sadan’s assessment of Brenner and his confreres—that impels Mintz’s study. Consistent with this, Mintz Wnds fault with Brenner’s Bahoref when the existential howls of anguish of the narrator shatter the aesthetic harmony of the artistic construct: ‘Sentences either end abruptly with exclamation marks or trail oV unWnished . . . This is writing as existential howl. Ejaculations abound; “oh’s” and “woe’s” stud the page . . . In sum, the canons of craft and discipline set up by Brenner throughout the novel would urge us to judge chapter 33 not as an excrescence of insight but simply as bad writing. Its badness derives from its giving way to feeling. It is not as if the wretchedness of spirit is not real—it is.’144 From the point of view of the novel, the well-wrought literary artifact, Mintz may well be right; Montaigne entertained similar reservations concerning the laying of the self bare in writing: ‘Is it . . . reasonable?’, he asks, ‘that I should expose to a world in which grooming has such credit and artiWce such authority the crude and simple eVects of Nature—and of such a weakling nature too? Is writing a book without knowledge or art not like building a wall without stones and so on?’145 From the point of view of autobiography, the shattering of aesthetic norms upon impact with the expressive/confessional imperative may constitute a high point of Bahoref—and, indeed, of many of Brenner’s other writings, whose singularity lies precisely in this recurring, and often rude, intrusion of the “gritty reality” of the ‘I’ of the author at the time of writing. Chapter 33 (chapter 34, in my edition) may or may not be bad writing. Yet, to my mind one of the most unforgettable and disturbing images in the book occurs in this chapter: that of the sack, its insect-Wlled interior partially smeared with honey, that the narrator imagines tied over his head.146 Either way, bad writing may make good autobiography, and vice versa. Hence Bialik, whose standards for aesthetic harmony and Hebrew linguistic integrity were highly exacting, while critical of the ‘stylistic sloppiness’ and ‘architectural flaws’ of Misaviv hanequdah that Brenner had submitted to Hashiloah (of which Bialik was then literary editor), writes: ‘But what do I care about “literary theory”, if I see before me a living soul, ardent emotion and Wery intellect penetrating each line and writhing in each and every letter.’147 Indeed, it could be argued that over-attention to

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autobiography as aesthetic artiWce, while making for ‘good’ literature, may even detract from the autobiographical value of a work that lies in presence/immediacy of the self of the writer to the self of the reader. Thus, for example, I Wnd Bialik’s autobiographical letter to Joseph Klausner, and his earlier autobiographical letters from Volozhin, which formed the blueprint for his SaWah, more compelling than the latter work as autobiography, even though SaWah, in terms of style, tropology, symbolic motifs et cetera, is inWnitely richer. As autobiography, SaWah is, to my mind, overblown, on occasion rhetorically, emotionally and referentially excessive to the point of inducing vertigo or even nausea; its very literariness ‘conceals’ where the letters ‘reveal’, to adopt Bialik’s terminology in his Gilui vekhissui belashon, whose central problematic is the function of language as ‘defence’/barrier to transparency of the self to self/self to other.148 That literary sophistication may lie—though does not do so of necessity—in inverse proportion to autobiographical expression is also demonstrated by the YIVO youth autobiographies, many of whose authors are quite candid in drawing attention to their lack of literary Wnesse, even of full command of the language in which they write: ‘I am sure that you will Wnd my work very useful, although the language is perhaps not very good. But this isn’t my fault, as I never attended a Yiddish school, and therefore my writing is full of mistakes—please take this into account. If you can, please send me some material that will teach me how to write Yiddish well . . . ’149 That autobiographical imperative and literary/aesthetic considerations may clash may also be evinced in autobiographical texts of highly sophisticated litterateurs; thus the paranoid Rousseau of the later books of the Confessions, who confesses that: ‘now, the disturbances of my later life have become too unpleasant to be capable of straightforward narration . . . my story can only proceed at haphazard, according as the ideas come back into my mind.’150 And in his introduction to Rousseau Judge of Jean Jacques: Dialogues, ‘On the Subject and Form of this Writing’: What I had to say was so clear and I felt it so deeply that I am amazed by the tediousness, repetitiousness, verbiage and disorder of this writing . . . Seeing the excessive length of these dialogues, I tried several times to prune them, eliminate the frequent repetitions and introduce some order and continuity . . . It is impossible for me to retain anything,

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

collate two sentences, and compare two ideas . . . I am even forced to abandon multitudes of ideas that are better or better expressed than those which are here, ideas I had scribbled on scraps of paper hoping I could easily incorporate them . . . After all I have said just about everything I had to say. It is drowned in a chaos of disorder and repetitions, but it is there.151

Within the context of Jewish autobiography, a similar phenomenon may be observed in what, to my mind, is one of the most signiWcant and powerfully aVecting contemporary Jewish autobiographies: Amos Oz’s Sippur ’al ’ahavah vehoshekh, a work that in terms of literary structure is diVuse, rambling, frequently repetitive, on occasion even jejune. Oz himself, in a meta-reflective passage quite similar to that of Rousseau, notes this: An uncompleted chapter of this book awaits me on my table in a heap of scribbled drafts, crumpled slips and half pages full of erasures: this is the chapter on Teacher Isabella Nahalieli from the “Homeland of the Child” school and about her whole army of cats. I will have to make a few omissions and to erase from the chapter several cat-incidents and several episodes about Getsel Nahalieli, the clerk; to be sure, these were entertaining incidents, but they contribute nothing to the progression of the narrative. Contribute? Progression? As if I even knew at this point what would contribute to the progression of the story, as if I had the faintest idea whither this story wants to go, and why, in fact, there is any need for contributions? Or progression?152

I think that Mintz’s implicit preference for literary over autobiographical achievement leads him to underestimate considerably the scale and signiWcance of the autobiographical phenomenon in Hebrew and Yiddish literary discourse. He very much treads the highways of Hebrew literature, but a short detour in the byways reveals a very considerable group of Hebrew and Yiddish autobiographers, who Wgure barely, if at all, on today’s canonical literary map: Kotik, as mentioned above, E. E. Friedman, Buki Ben Yogli (Katznelson), R. Brainin, Rabbi Binyamin (Radler-Feldman), P. Hirshbein, M. Ravich (Bergner), A. Almi (Sheps)—the list could well continue. Some of these, moreover, do in fact reflect upon the crisis of faith, as do many of the YIVO autobiographers, writing well after Brenner in the 1930s. Of course, it would be virtually impossible to include discussions of

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every single one of these autobiographies in a synthetic analysis of the topic; were such a study to be undertaken, it would result in a multivolume work on the scale of that of Misch. And the generalization certainly does hold, both in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, that the drift in the Wrst half of the twentieth century is from the autobiographical to the memoiristic end of the life-writing spectrum. Yet to claim that, with several exceptions that prove the rule, the history of Hebrew and Yiddish autobiography is essentially exhausted by the Wve autobiographical texts that Mintz discusses at length, after which the individual autobiographical voice is reabsorbed by and into the ‘normative’, ‘unremittingly collective’ ‘mode of Jewish literature’153 is surely a misreading, albeit, pace Harold Bloom, a ‘strong’ one. This restriction of purview is further restricted by Mintz’s thematic insistence upon the crisis of faith/erotic problematic as necessary components of Jewish autobiography. First of all, it is extremely problematic to deWne autobiography—or the novel, come to that—by its content. While it is true that the crisis of faith recedes, with the protracted waning of the nineteenth century, from a central position in the lives, experienced and written, of many Hebrew/Yiddish autobiographers154—and, more generally in those of Jews and non-Jews writing in other languages— this does not mean that Hebrew/Yiddish autobiography eVectively ceased to exist after Brenner’s Bahoref, a work, Mintz writes, ‘whose authority seems to exhaust the possibilities of a genre and discourage further attempts at development’.155 Within the wider context of literary/historical dynamics, it would be strange indeed if such were the case: surely, the pinnacles of literary achievement, autobiographical or otherwise, are fecund in providing a model for emulation—albeit agonistic—rather than stultifying. Otherwise, the English sonnet, not to mention the historical drama, may well have disappeared from the literary landscape after Shakespeare; the Russian novel, after Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky et cetera. In Hebrew literature, for example, Bialik’s autobiographical account of his childhood in a Ukrainian village, SaWah, provided the ‘model par excellence’, not only for the childhood accounts of those of his own generation, who preserved memories of similar Eastern European childhood landscapes, but also ‘anomalously’, as Ziva Shamir and Tsvi Luz point out, ‘for the childhood narratives of the members of the generation of the struggle for

Autobiography: The Elusive Subject

independence (Hanokh Bartov, Binyamin Tammuz, and latterly even S. Yizhar), for those of the generation of statehood (Amalia Kahana Karmon, Yitshaq Orpaz, Yehoshua Kenaz, Ruth Almog and others) and up to the childhood narratives of Hayim Be’er and those younger than him.’156 Amos Oz, whose above-mentioned autobiography is so redolent of the Bialik childhood of SaWah, may now be added to their number. And yet, notwithstanding the extraordinarily long duration of Bialik’s SaWah in Hebrew autobiographical discourse, Bialik is actually banished from the table of Mintz’s autobiographers: ‘Even the one gem of Bialik’s prose that is genuinely autobiographical, “Aftergrowth” (SaWah), falls outside the bounds of the present study because it is attached to a wholly diVerent tradition which is concerned with the birth of the imagination in the child rather than the loss of faith and its consequences in later life.’157 This exclusion from within the canon on thematic grounds of so central a work surely undercuts Mintz’s more global claims for the indispensability of the ‘apostasy narrative’ in his epistemological framework for the understanding of the Jewish autobiographical phenomenon. Furthermore, one cannot help but wonder at the lack of any mention of another writer of canonical status whose works would seem to fall very squarely within the autobiography/ apostasy/eros rubric—Isaac Bashevis Singer, the son of a rabbi, and his obsessively autobiographical quest to ravel and unravel the weave of loss of faith/erotic cravings/mortality sans afterlife.158 All of the above leads me to question to what extent Mintz’s book really is about autobiography. That is, of the three-fold cord—autobiography/ apostasy/eros—it seems to me that autobiography is of subsidiary interest and signiWcance here. Mintz’s book Wnds an interesting analogue in the essays of Barukh Kurzweil, for whom the deWning and deWnitive crisis of Modern Hebrew literature is that of loss of faith, both in God and in any secular/humanist ideological substitutions for this loss. In tracing this thematic trajectory Kurzweil actually highlights the same texts as does Mintz: Lilienblum’s despair with both religion and Haskalah as documented in Hatt’ot ne’urim paved the way for Feierberg’s quintessential encapsulation of the personal/national dimensions of this “double tragedy” in Le’an; Berdichevsky in ’Orva’ parah and Brenner in Bahoref, advancing further along the path to nihilism with Nietzsche as guide, probe the erotic complications arising in the

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wake of apostasy. Kurzweil claims that the religious/existential ‘double tragedy’ as experienced by these writers—Brenner is a particular favourite and adversary of his—served as the matrix for the high points of Modern Hebrew literary creativity, and that subsequently, with the loss of the loss-of-faith element, this literature became much impoverished. This is essentially what Mintz writes with respect to Hebrew autobiography. And Wnally, Kurzweil, while noting on frequent occasion the autobiographical/confessional nature of the texts he elucidates, is less concerned with their generic status as individual documents véçus than in the perspective these writings aVord upon collective, generational, national crisis.159 The above critical engagement with Alan Mintz’s book has provided me with an occasion for dialogue with myself, as much as anything else. I have no doubt that subjection of my own book to such systematic analysis would reveal no fewer self-contradictions in my own choice of texts, modes of explication, criteria. But that is perhaps proper to the ultimate unknowability/aporia of the subject, ‘subject’ in the sense both of ‘self ’ and ‘topic’: the unknowability that is both the catalyst for the autobiographical project and the deWning outer limit of its attainability. An ‘aporia’ no better put, nor unput, than by Beckett: Where now? Who now? When now? Unbelieving. Questions, Hypotheses, call them that . . . I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me. These general remarks to begin with. What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by aYrmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner, or later? Generally speaking. There must be other shifts. Otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless. I should mention before going any further, any further on, that I say aporia without knowing what it means.160

Georges Gusdorf has written that the ‘original sin of autobiography is Wrst one of logical coherence and rationalization.’161 Looking back at it, I believe that this is precisely the ‘original sin’ of my own work, and perhaps of all studies that seek to scrutinize, deWne, or, in Bob Dylan’s reason and rhyme ‘analyze’, ‘categorize’, or ‘Wnalize’162 this protean form of literature that, in the Wrst decade of the twenty-Wrst century, continues to assume so increasing a predominance in Jewish literature in all languages.

Tw o

Intertextual Relations: Jewish Autobiographical Encounters

Autobiography as ‘Text’/Autobiography as ‘Discourse’ Thus far a substantive deWnition of autobiography has been arrived at through an explication of what, it is claimed, is the master-text of the genre: Rousseau’s Confessions. The Rousseauian paradigm forms the substantive bedrock for any discussion of the autobiographical genre. A substantive deWnition alone, however, can, at best, only provide the basis for a series of monographs in which various texts are taken in isolation and then measured against certain static norms. It does not provide the basis for a study that would attempt to grasp autobiography in its totality as a signiWcant phenomenon of literary and intellectual history. The mere existence, within a particular sphere of literary discourse, of one or several texts that do approximate to the Roussseauian paradigm, does not, in and of itself, constitute such a phenomenon. Should, indeed, the Confessions never have been imitated, as Rousseau predicted would be the case, autobiography—or an autobiography— would, technically speaking, exist, but only as an isolated text, a literary curio. The Confessions did, in fact, exist as such, albeit briefly, in the extremely short period of time that elapsed from their original publication to the appearance of a series of autobiographies, clearly modelled upon the Rousseauian paradigm, in the cultural centres of Western Europe. This existence of autobiography outside any total system of literary and intellectual relations will, in the present inquiry, be referred to as autobiography as ‘text’. Autobiography as ‘text’ refers to any text that bears the characteristics, in whatever conWguration or apportion of emphasis, of the Rousseauian paradigm as outlined at the end of the previous chapter, but falls outside any sphere of autobiographical ‘discourse’.

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The deWnition of autobiography as ‘text’ is static and substantive; that of autobiography as ‘discourse’, dynamic and functional. Autobiography as ‘discourse’ refers to a dynamic system of interaction between three principal components: writer, publisher, reader. Once a system of autobiographical discourse has emerged in a given social-cultural and literary environment, these components form a self-generating Weld of autobiographical relations.1 Autobiography as ‘text’ invariably precedes autobiography as ‘discourse’. The transition from ‘text’ to ‘discourse’ is characterized by a progressive movement of the autobiographical genre from a situation of dependence to one of autonomy. When the Wrst autobiographical texts appear in any given culture, there is an absence of any established criteria for the writing, reading, and publication of autobiography. The genre, at this stage, will, of necessity, evince a dependence upon literary modalities that fall outside autobiographical discourse. Writers of autobiography will be better acquainted, as readers, with novels and biographies than with autobiographies. Reader-response to autobiographical texts will be tentative and uncertain and will thus have no marked eVect upon patterns of publication. With the emergence of autobiography as ‘discourse’, however, the autobiographical genre becomes autonomous and self-sustaining. Writers of autobiography—once the writer, reader, publisher circuit is established—will be well-read in autobiographical literature. Readers of autobiography, even if they do not become autobiographers themselves, may become critics of the genre. The criticism of autobiography establishes certain criteria for the reading and writing of autobiographical texts which render the unfamiliarity of the genre less pronounced. As criticism confers a certain legitimacy upon the genre, reader-response will become more consistent and certain conventions for the publishing of autobiographical literature will emerge. Publication of autobiographical text in serialized form in literary journals or daily papers is especially indicative of widespread and stratiWed recognition of and reader-demand for this type of literature. Steady publication of such literature is, in turn, generative of heightened reader-response, which, in turn, gives rise to an increasing production of autobiographical texts and so forth. The transition of autobiography from a situation of dependence to one of autonomy can occur only under certain intellectual and social

Jewish Autobiographical Encounters

circumstances. Georges Gusdorf was the Wrst to formulate the extraliterary ‘preconditions’ for the emergence of the autobiographical genre in an essay that constitutes a landmark in the critical reception of the genre. Gusdorf ’s concern is less with autobiography as a literary form than with autobiography as an epi-phenomenon of modern man’s ‘discovery of self ’. Thus he does not focus upon discrete texts but treats autobiography as a phenomenological abstraction which he then locates within an anthropological and historical context. Autobiography, according to Gusdorf, ‘has not always existed nor does it exist everywhere’ but ‘expresses a concern peculiar to Western man’.2 Autobiography is dependent upon and symptomatic of an ‘involution of consciousness’, which ‘is not possible in a cultural landscape where consciousness of self does not properly speaking exist’.3 Such ‘unconsciousness of personality is characteristic of primitive societies’ and ‘lasts also in more advanced societies that subscribe to mythic structures . . . theories of eternal recurrence, accepted in various guises as dogma by the great cultures of antiquity which Wx attention on that which remains, not on that which passes.’ Autobiography, Gusdorf writes, ‘becomes possible only under certain metaphysical pre-conditions . . . Humanity must have emerged from the mythic framework of traditional teachings and must have entered into the perilous domain of history.’4 Gusdorf goes on to advance the imaginative and playful thesis that the invention of the mirror, especially the sophisticated silver-backed model produced by Venetian technique at the end of the Middle Ages, is the crucial event in the emergence of autobiographical consciousness. But even a cursory survey of Gusdorf ’s essay, as provided above, reveals the extent to which his ‘pre-conditions’ are more consonant with the prevailing social and intellectual trends of late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Western Europe5 than with those obtaining in the late Middle Ages—the invention of improved mirrors notwithstanding. When, to Gusdorf ’s ‘metaphysical’ pre-conditions, as pointed out by Lejeune, are added the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of a secular bourgeoisie, and the development of a popular press,6 it will be understood why the transition of Rousseauian autobiography from a situation of dependence to one of autonomy occurred with such extraordinary rapidity in nineteenth-century Western Europe. It is the synchronicity of the appearance of the Confessions

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with the necessary ‘pre-conditions’ for the emergence of the autobiographical genre that renders the time-lag between the appearance of autobiography as ‘text’ and the consolidation of autobiography as ‘discourse’ almost imperceptible in the case of Rousseauian autobiography.7 The distinction between autobiography as ‘text’ and autobiography as ‘discourse’ should properly be applied to pre- versus post-Rousseauian autobiography in Western Europe. That it is not is largely due to the ahistorical and weighty Diltheyan and/or Jungian assumptions that have informed much of the scholarly work on the genre.8 The usefulness of the ‘text’/‘discourse’ distinction, as aligned with Gusdorf ’s theory of the emergence of autobiographical consciousness, becomes especially apparent in the study of the process by which the autobiographical modality is transmitted from one culture to another. Gusdorf understands the introduction of autobiography to cultures in which the genre did not previously exist as a process of actual and/or metaphorical colonization. Autobiography is expressive of a concern that has ‘been of good use’ in Western man’s ‘systematic conquest of the universe’, a concern that he has communicated to men of other cultures: ‘But these men will thereby have been annexed by a sort of intellectual colonizing to a mentality that was not their own.’9 This “colonization” metaphor is suggestive, though Gusdorf does not elaborate upon the means by which colonization is eVected nor upon the varying degrees of colonial dependence that may exist. It is in this latter respect that an application of the ‘text’/‘discourse’ distinction is enlightening. The dynamics of appropriation of the autobiographical modality in the culture to which the genre is transmitted actually provide a mirror-image of the transition of autobiography from a situation of dependence to one of autonomy that occurs in the culture of origin. The pioneers of the autobiographical genre in the host-culture will, through lack of any indigenous model for the enterprise to emulate, evince an ineluctable dependence upon the example oVered by the foreign, or ‘colonizing’, culture. With the gradual transition, within the host-culture, of autobiography from ‘text’ to ‘discourse’, the foreign influence becomes progressively diluted. This process of ‘naturalization’ is especially apparent in cases where the autobiographical modality is transferred from one linguistic community

Jewish Autobiographical Encounters

to another; all the more so when the language or languages of the host-culture are, as was true of Hebrew and Yiddish in nineteenthand early twentieth-century Europe, the almost exclusive property of members of that culture. Where linguistic boundaries are equivalent to national boundaries, as they were in a unique sense for the Jews of Eastern Europe,10 there is a greater likelihood that an autonomous and nationally distinctive mode of autobiographical discourse will emerge after the initial breaching of the walls. A comparison of Jewish with African autobiography, which otherwise share some striking thematic parallels, is revealing in this respect. African autobiography was transmitted from its inception to the autobiographical circuit and Weld of literary discourse of non-African speech communities.11 The African autobiographer who writes in English or French is destined by his linguistic choice, or lack of choice, to be Janus-faced; he depicts himself through the medium of a European language both before his fellow-Africans and before the outside world. In the lack of any indigenous literary tradition, he is forced, moreover, to draw upon the symbolism and imagery of the literature of his adopted language. Thus the title of Chinua Achebe’s Wrst autobiographical novel, Things Fall Apart (1959), is taken from W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ and that of his second, No Longer at Ease (1960), from T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’.12 Autobiographical discourse, in such an instance, can never attain the degree of autonomy as is possible when the host-culture possesses an indigenous literary tradition that exists in dynamic interaction with the spoken language. A linguistic situation such as the latter is markedly characteristic of Eastern European Jewry, for whom the Hebrew scriptural tradition was mediated to the speaker through the Loshn-koydesh component in Yiddish.13 The same linguistic distinction as obtains between African autobiography written in a European language and Jewish autobiography may, in fact, be drawn within the Jewish autobiographical tradition itself. Jewish autobiography written in non-Jewish languages can never attain the autonomy of that written in Hebrew or Yiddish, but will always be subsumed within the larger autobiographical ‘circuit’ and system of literary relations of the adopted language—even if this subsumption be to the category of literary ‘exotica’.14

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Symptoms of Transition: The Crystallization of Autobiographical Discourse. It is diYcult to pinpoint with absolute accuracy the precise moment in the development of an autobiographical tradition at which the latent stage of autobiography as ‘text’ gives way to that of autobiography as ‘discourse’. Autobiographical discourse begins when there is a dynamic and mutual interaction between the three elements of the writer, publisher, reader conWguration. Each of these elements, once an autobiographical discourse has come into being, evinces characteristics lacking in the earlier period. The presence or absence of these characteristics may thus serve as a touchstone in assessing the degree to which the genre has become established in a given cultural context. One reliable yardstick by which to measure the degree to which the autobiographical modality has taken root is the degree of ‘intertextuality’ evinced by the autobiographical productions of a given period. In the earlier stage, this ‘intertextuality’ is wholly or partially absent. Autobiographical texts may be written and published within the same period of time. But they appear as isolated literary phenomena falling outside any larger context and bearing little or no relationship with each other. So swift was the transition of autobiography as ‘text’ to autobiography as ‘discourse’ in Western Europe that the element of ‘intertextuality’ becomes evident almost immediately after the Wrst publication of Rousseau’s Confessions. In the history of autobiography in Western Europe, the absence of ‘intertextuality’ is, though, markedly apparent in the pre-modern—that is, pre-Rousseauian stage. Augustine’s Confessions were followed in the ancient world by a series of autobiographical productions, some marginally indebted to Augustine, some not at all, and the great majority bearing no relation to each other whatsoever.15 In 1571, Montaigne shut himself up in a tower on his family estate to write his Essais. He was unaware of the Vita of his contemporary, Cardano, notwithstanding the extraordinary aYnities the latter work bears to the Essais.16 Cardano was likewise unaware of the autobiography of his own contemporary, Cellini, which was not circulated in manuscript, in any case until 1728.17 Once the autobiographical Weld is established, however, autobiographers imitate, vie

Jewish Autobiographical Encounters

with and deWne their own autobiographies as against those of their contemporaries and predecessors. Goethe is aware of Karl Philippe Moritz; John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle are aware of Goethe, Wordsworth and Chateaubriand; and all were aware of Rousseau. One of the most striking examples of such intertextuality is The Education of Henry Adams: Adams opens his autobiography with a citation from Rousseau’s preamble to the Confessions, entitles one of the chapters of the book ‘Teufelsdrökch’, after the protagonist of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and engages himself in the subsequent recounting of his life history with the autobiographical writings of St. Augustine, Montaigne, Cellini, Franklin, Gibbon, John Stuart Mill, Pascal.18 With regard to the second element of the ‘circuit’, the publisher: the publication history of autobiographical texts provides an important index for the emergence of autobiographical discourse. As this discourse develops, the time that elapses between the time of writing and the date of publication of autobiographical texts, in general, diminishes. Again, in the Western European context, such a narrowing of the temporal gap between the writing and the publication of autobiographical texts appears to have occurred with some rapidity after Rousseau. The publication of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit is virtually synonymous with the writing.19 The twelve volumes of Chateaubriand’s Memoires d’Outre-Tombe, which he worked on until his death in 1848, were Wrst published only a year later in 1849.20 Where there is a lack of consonance between autobiography as ‘text’ and autobiography as ‘discourse’, as was so in Western Europe prior to Rousseau, this is reflected in strikingly anomalous publication data. Cellini wrote his Life from 1559 to 1563. The Life was not published until 1728, was Wrst translated into English in 1771, and did not appear in French until 1822.21 Cardano’s Vita was written in 1575 to 1576 and Wrst published in Latin in 1643, but was not translated into English until 1930 nor into French until 1936.22 Peter Abelard wrote his Historia Calamitatum between 1132 and 1136. The work was not published until 1616, and the Wrst English translation did not appear until 1925.23 The above-cited examples point to a further signiWcant aspect of the history of publications for that of the autobiographical genre. It is under the aegis of the publisher that autobiographical texts from the

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past, if unpublished, are published for the Wrst time, and, if published, but out of currency, republished—frequently in critical editions. It is the publisher, also, who subsidizes the translation of autobiographical texts. The signiWcance of translations, and this holds true not only for autobiography, is enhanced in inverse relation to the number of speakers or readers of the target-language. A paradoxical relationship thus exists between the ‘autonomy’ of one autobiographical Weld, protected and yet restricted by a degree of linguistic exclusiveness, and its dependence upon other, linguistically less restricted, spheres of autobiographical discourse. The printing and dissemination of volumes are the means by which the past is retrieved for and the foreign harnessed within a given autobiographical Weld. It is, then, the publisher who holds the keys both to autobiographical productions of the past and to those of alien provenance. Publication or republication of pre-modern autobiographical texts and of autobiographies in translation almost invariably postdates the appearance of contemporary autobiographies written in the lingua franca of the culture in which these publications occur. The publisher measures the worthwhileness of his undertakings against the element of Wnancial risk. So, when a pattern of publications of autobiographies in translation and of pre-modern autobiographical texts emerges, this is a fairly sure sign that the third element of the circuit, the reader, has become an operative factor in autobiographical discourse. The accrued impact of such publications is, in itself, generative of a receptive readership. Favourable reader-response initiates a ‘feed-back’ process that is reflected in publication data when increasingly recherché and obscure pre-modern autobiographical texts begin to appear alongside translations of contemporary autobiographies. Reader-response is reflected not only in the type of autobiographical publications that appear but also in the quantity of these publications. Re-editions, especially if they occur within a short period of time, are always important to note since they are sure proof of an enthusiastic readership. The historian of autobiography must enquire as to why some autobiographies go through numerous reprints, others appear only in one edition, and others remain in manuscript. Analysis of publication data such as these is helpful in clarifying the implicit

Jewish Autobiographical Encounters

criteria by which autobiographical texts are evaluated by a speciWc reading-community within a given historical period. To the analysis of the type and extent of publications of autobiographical texts must be added that of the nature of these publications. The publication, in periodicals and newspapers, of ancillary forms of memoiristic literature, in which the autobiographical element may be more or less pronounced, plays an important role in, and is an important symptom of, the emergence of autobiographical discourse. Such autobiographical currency is especially to be remarked in the Yiddish literary sphere: the autobiographies of Mendele Moykher Seforim, Sholem Aleichem, Y. L. Peretz and Isaac Bashevis-Singer were all initially published in journals or newspapers. The feuilleton, frequently a form of self-reflective musing or reverie; travel impressions; depictions of meetings with famous writers and public Wgures; short childhood memoirs of places or historic incidents—all these feed into and draw sustenance from a system of autobiographical discourse. And this not only in a metaphorical sense: such ‘columns’, if Wxed, may provide a signiWcant source of income for established writers as well as stimulating lesser-known writers, or tyros, to give literary expression to their own life-experiences in such sketches—or, indeed, in letters to the editorial. The question of who publishes which autobiographical texts is of particular import when, as was the case in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Jewish Eastern Europe, publishing houses are ideologically committed and compete with each other through diVerentiation for the attention of the readership.24 When several publishers, each committed to a diVerent social/political or literary ideology, publish autobiographical texts, there is a strong likelihood that the Weld has been established and has attained a degree of autonomy. Autobiographies are occasionally published by the immediate family or more distant relatives of the author. Such autobiographies are generally posthumous and generally written by little-known men. But these publications are invariably a microcosmic reflection of standard publication procedure, and they thus provide important evidence both of the establishment of the Weld and of the impact of autobiographical discourse upon the popular consciousness.

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In seeking to establish the existence of an autobiographical discourse, the Wnal element of the circuit, the reader, is in many respects the most crucial. Publication data provide only partial access to this elusive component of the conWguration. The great majority of readers are not writers. In Jewish Eastern Europe, moreover, a large section of the readers of the early Yiddish chapbooks and popular press were, at best, semi-literate.25 If, however, an autobiography is published serially in a periodical, as is the case with a fair number of the autobiographical texts published in Jewish Eastern Europe,26 letters to the editorial may aVord a glimpse of the, for the most part, inarticulate and anonymous reader. A less direct but nonetheless useful means of assessing the reader is through careful analysis of the preambles and ‘reader’s asides’ within the autobiographical works themselves. The degree of conWdence with which an autobiography is presented reflects the degree to which the reader is presumed to be predisposed toward the genre. A wealth of material for an investigation along these lines is provided by the almost ritual apologia with which the majority of nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiographies are prefaced.27 The private correspondence of autobiographers, should this be available, is also useful in determining the type of expectations that the reader brings to bear upon an autobiographical text—in measure, of course, as the writer is sensitive to reader-demands.

Cross-Cultural Fashionings of the Self The theoretical model of Georges Gusdorf, as outlined above, provides a persuasive explanation for the emergence of autobiography. It does not, however, account for the persistence, development, and differentiation of the genre. The Rousseauian paradigm allows of considerable diversity. With the establishment of autobiography as ‘discourse’ within diVerent cultural and historical settings, distinctive variants of the Rousseauian model emerge. Analysis of the form that autobiography assumes is, at this stage, inseparable from that of the function of the genre within culturally distinct systems of intellectual and literary relations. In order to understand why, after the publication of Rousseau’s Confessions, French autobiography developed in one way

Jewish Autobiographical Encounters

and English, German, and Jewish Eastern European in others, it is necessary to adopt a methodological approach that will not only do justice to the enduring, substantive characteristics of the genre but also allow for its dynamism and contextual variability.28 It is this dynamism and contextual variability that fascinates Elizabeth Bruss. Bruss’s concern is not with autobiography as a historical phenomenon, as is Gusdorf ’s, but with the form that autobiography assumes within diVerent cultural contexts—or within the same cultural context at diVerent times—with, in her own words, the ‘changing situation of a literary genre’.29 Bruss draws upon linguistic philosophy, especially that of Austin and Searle, so as to formulate a theoretical model of autobiography adequate to the complexity and inconstancy of the genre in its later stages of development. As with the ‘speech act’, so the ‘act’ of autobiography is dependent upon context and contextually variable: ‘The generic “force” of autobiography and the leading features that have distinguished it throughout its history from other kinds of discourse are contextual rather than formal. . . . To count as autobiography a text must have an implicit situation, a particular relationship to other texts and to the scenes of its enactment.’30 Bruss’s elocutionary metaphor alerts the historian of autobiography to the relativity of any overly prescriptive genre deWnitions of this class of literature. The possibility presents itself, should Bruss’s thesis be accepted, that what is deWned as autobiography within one realm of discourse or ‘speech-community’ may be at odds with autobiography as deWned within another, or within the same at a diVerent time. A more far-reaching possibility that arises, should Bruss’s argument be taken to its logical conclusion, is that what the historian of autobiography, from the perspective of his own ‘speech-community’, may consider as ‘autobiography’ may never have been understood as such within the ‘speech community’ in which the work Wnds its provenance. Or, contrariwise, what he or she may consider ‘Wction’ may, within its original literary environment, have been considered autobiography. Autobiography, when subjected to the scrutiny of ‘speech-communities’ whose literary critics perform ‘elocutionary acts’ as complex as those of Bruss and then inscribe these acts in ‘linguistic markers sensitive to context’,31 is in danger of becoming too protean a subject to contain within any conceptual framework. It is thus not entirely surprising

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that Bruss, in a subsequent ‘speech act’, declares the autobiographical genre to be on the verge of ‘extinction’.32 Bruss leaves autobiography teetering on the precipice of generic oblivion. Lejeune throws a lifeline by which the genre may be salvaged—albeit not unscathed. He does this in his elaboration of his stipulation, which Wrst appeared in L’autobiographie en France, of the ‘autobiographical pact’.33 Whereas Bruss draws upon the terminology of linguistic philosophy to arrive at a working deWnition of the genre, Lejeune resorts to legal parlance. The autobiographer, according to Lejeune, concludes a ‘pact’ with the reader. This pact binds him to tell the truth as best he can and authorizes the reader to keep him to his word. Despite his awareness of the ‘complex’ and ‘unstable’ nature of autobiography,34 Lejeune’s deWnition is a good deal more exclusive and rigid than that suggested by Bruss. Lejeune rejects ab initio any texts in which the autobiographical ‘pact’ is not explicitly made: We admit only those authors who themselves ask to be admitted . . . The autobiographical declaration of intention can express itself in diVerent ways, in the title, in the publisher’s notice, most often in the ritual preamble, but occasionally in a concluding note, or even in interviews given at the time of publication. At all events, this declaration is obligatory. If an author does not himself declare that his text is an autobiography we have no right to be more royalist than the king.35

This, Lejeune’s early model, does not allow, as does Bruss’s ‘speech-act’ formulation, for the cultural/contextual variability of autobiographical discourse. Smashing a plate may conclude a contract in one legal system, tugging a knotted handkerchief in another, and placing one’s hand on a Bible in another. DiVerent forms of autobiographical ‘pact’ may likewise be made in diVerent Welds of autobiographical discourse, and the ‘pact’ need not necessarily be made by an open declaration of autobiographical intention of one of the types that Lejeune enumerates. Lejeune ran into trouble with this, his Wrst draft of the autobiographical contract, almost as soon as he began to apply it. The pages in L’autobiographie en France which immediately follow upon the drawing up of this contract Wnd Lejeune grappling with autobiographers who are liars, writers of ‘autobiographical Wction’ who are not, ‘apocryphal’ autobiographers, and so forth.36

Jewish Autobiographical Encounters

Lejeune is still standing by his contract in 1975, but is now forced to admit that the ‘pact . . . is a mode of reading as much as a form of writing. It is a contractual eVect, historically variable’.37 The title of his third book on autobiography, Je est un autre (quoting Rimbaud), notwithstanding, Lejeune is still carrying his contract in 1980 in an exploration of the interstices of autobiographical literature: autobiography in the third person, the wireless interview, the autobiographies of those who do not write. The ‘contract’ remains, but its bearer, Lejeune, shows signs of fatigue as he himself lapses into third-person autobiography in imitation of Rousseau’s Rousseau, Juge de Jean Jacques, which he has just been discussing: Throughout his scholarly career, he had, in eVect, analyzed the articulation of elements of the autobiographical contract, but one question remained pending: What is the diVerence between Wgures and ‘Wctional tropes’ as employed within an autobiographical text and the system of the autobiographical novel? Do the two not form a continuous spectrum? . . . All things considered, the dividing line between Wction and autobiography appeared to him to be Wner than ever. There, where analysis necessarily distinguishes, reality often presents a continuous spectrum . . . a maze of contradictions, then. He hesitated, chose to explore another dividing line; that separating biography and autobiography. He sat down at his table to write.38

Lejeune’s inter-generic speculations are further complicated when, as in the present subject of study, the importation of autobiography by a speciWc culture bears in its wake a whole-scale revision of the entire noetic taxonomy of author/text/reader by which the pact—or pacts— between the conveyors of knowledge and its recipients is/are determined. ‘Literature’, that is, in the sense of belles-lettres, autobiography included, was an essentially alien and unprecedented graft on the body politic of Eastern European Jewry, hence the widespread and bitter antagonism that it encountered from the mass of traditional Jews: one not uncommon ‘reader response’ to these books was assigning them to the flames.39 Distinctions between genres, sub-genres, ‘pacts’, the niceties of communicational etiquette that this exotic import brought with it were frequently not entirely clear to its earliest practitioners in Hebrew and Yiddish—métissage avant le mot. And, as suggested in the

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previous chapter, at a crucial stage in the development of Hebrew literature in Eastern Europe and the peculiar, even abnormal, intimacy of this literary environment, it is possible to argue that a tacit, albeit unstated, autobiographical pact underlay many of the texts of ostensibly ‘Wctional’ status. No adequate theoretical model has been devised to date which can be calibrated to the shifts, oscillations, and transformations that may and do occur within one autobiographical Weld at diVerent times, let alone to the increase in the number of relatively autonomous Welds which emerge with the ramiWcation of the genre in diVerent cultural contexts. Taking into account the additional variable, the Weld of literary discourse in which the critic or historian of autobiography is situated, the formulation of such a model could well prove impossible. As the situation stands, Bruss and Lejeune provide the most sophisticated methodological paradigms available; the virtues of each highlight the flaws of the other. Lejeune’s dogged adherence to the ‘pact’ prevents Bruss’s ‘speech-community’ from sliding into a Babel of confused voices. Bruss’s model tempers the unfortunate air of legislatory authority which hangs over many of Lejeune’s pronouncements.40

Arrested Development: The Constitution of a Jewish Autobiographical Field The study of Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe is, Wrst of all, a study of the impact of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century autobiographical discourse of Western Europe upon a culture within which such discourse did not, and could not, exist until the end of the nineteenth century—at the earliest. Eastern European Jewry was heir to a rich and ancient literary tradition. But there was no precedent within this tradition for autobiography as deWned against the Rousseauian paradigm.41 The ‘metaphysical pre-conditions’ for autobiography, as adumbrated by Gusdorf, were, for the greater part of the nineteenth century, lacking in Jewish Eastern Europe. This was a society that did, for the most part, subscribe to the ‘mythic structures’ and ‘theories of eternal recurrence’ which, according to Gusdorf, preclude the emergence of the autobiographical genre.42 Gusdorf ’s thesis is well illustrated in

Jewish Autobiographical Encounters

Devorah Baron’s depiction of Jewish shtetl life in the pre-First-WorldWar period, in her memoiristic depiction ‘Family’: The chain of generations, how it began and developed, is briefly recounted in the Bible. Here we read of a certain man who lived for so many years and begat so-and-so, and then of so-and-so who lived for so many years and begat sons and daughters—link after link in a chain that is never broken for it is ever renewing itself . . . And to Adam were born Cain and Abel and Seth; and Cain begat Enoch, the same Enoch in whose lifetime his father built a city. And Seth begat Enos, and Enos begat Cainan, and Cainan begat Mahalaleel, and Mahalaleel begat Jared, and Jared lived an hundred and two and sixty years and he begat—Enoch . . . In my little town, where people were named after their late grandparents or great-grandparents, this continuity was even more pronounced. Take our baker, for instance, from whom I bought a loaf of rye bread every day: Leizer, the son of Haim, the son of Meir. Sixty-year-old Leizer only fetched the water from the well for the kneading; it was his eldest son, Meir, who did the actual baking. He also had a small son—Haim—who was still at Kheder. The family had been bakers for generations. The only change that ever took place, was that when one of the Meirs became too old and too weak to stand at the oven, he would go out to draw the water and his son, Haim, would take over the baking, and when Haim grew old, he in turn would fetch the water, leaving the baking to his son, Leizer . . . 43

By the end of the nineteenth century, only a minority of Eastern European Jewry, the modernizing avant-garde, had ‘emerged from the mythic framework of traditional teachings’ and ‘entered into the perilous domain of history’.44 As late as 1910, Bal Makhshoves, who equates the emergence of autobiography, as does Gusdorf, with that of historical consciousness, could bewail the dearth of Jewish Eastern European autobiographical literature: Amongst us Jews the genre is virtually non-existent; anyone who wishes to Wnd a trace of such literature must be content with essayistic fragments, desultory jottings . . . an extraordinary phenomenon indeed! . . . We of all peoples, who already possessed so Wne a historical sense even in the time of Yehudah ha-Levy; that we, who assigned such a key role to history in our Wrst books, who could boast

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of a ‘Chronicle’ over two thousand years ago, should be bereft of that very autobiographical genre so widely practiced by younger and less civilized peoples.45

Bal Makhshoves advances very much the same explanation for this ‘extraordinary phenomenon’ as does Gusdorf. Autobiography, according to Gusdorf, does not occur in cultures that subscribe to the ‘wisdom of Ecclesiastes’, discerning the reality of existence in the permanence that underlies the illusory flux of phenomenal appearance.46 ‘The Jew’, Bal Makhshoves writes, ‘is by nature, both in middle and old age, a type of Ecclesiastes who asserts: “Nothing is new under the sun”— that is, he has little interest in transitory external changes—his concern is with the unchanging core of existence.’47 Indeed, so dismayed is Bal Makhshoves by the atrophy—or rather mummiWcation—of Jewish autobiographical creativity, that he goes beyond the conventional rôle of the literary critic by putting forward, at the end of his essay, several practical measures for the remedy of this situation: in every community where there is a Jewish society, a special section should be established for the study of ‘memoir-literature’—Jewish and non-Jewish. Sessions, moreover, should be devoted to the reading of members’ memoirs and these should be assiduously recorded for the sake of the future historian.48 Yitskhok Elkhonen Rontsh later makes a similar call for the systematic cultivation of Yiddish ‘memoir-literature’ in America.49 To the absence of the requisite ‘metaphysical’ pre-conditions for autobiography should be added the almost total absence of the most basic conditions for any form of secular literary discourse in Hebrew or Yiddish in Jewish Eastern Europe before the last decades of the nineteenth century.50 In Western Europe, the ground had been laid for the appearance of autobiography by the prior existence of a system of literary relations centreing upon the eighteenth-century novel.51 In England, for example, the eighteenth century saw the appearance of the Wrst literary periodicals—the Tatler in 1709 and the Spectator in 1811— the establishment of the Wrst non-proprietary libraries, and the emergence of the professional bookseller as the vital middleman between author and printer.52 These innovations in England were catalytic of analogous developments in eighteenth-century France and Germany.53 Only a handful of Hebrew novels had, by contrast, appeared

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in Eastern Europe by 1880, and the subscription to the Hebrew periodicals that did exist at the time was pitifully low.54 Thus, and this is a quite anomalous phenomenon in the history of post-Rousseauian autobiography, the Wrst Hebrew autobiography, M. A. Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer, was completed,55 although not published, some ten years before the appearance of what is generally considered the Wrst Hebrew novel, Abraham Mapu’s ’Ahavat Tsion (1853).56 Nor, in the nineteenth century, was the outlook any more auspicious for the emergence of Jewish autobiography in Yiddish. The attitude toward Yiddish was at this stage—and later—extremely ambivalent; the consensus being that this was a language only Wt for patently didactic works, or the type of shund (trash) served up in abundance by writers of the school of the wildly popular N. M. Shaykevitsch (‘Shoymer’).57 The Wrst indicators of the emergence of autobiography in Jewish Eastern Europe as more than a marginal, haphazard phenomenon appear at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is only now that the ‘metaphysical pre-conditions’ for a more general stirring of autobiographical consciousness have come into being, along with the more elementary conditions that make possible the expression of this consciousness in literary form. This phenomenon should be understood within the larger context of the Tehiyyah, or ‘renaissance’ of Hebrew literature.58 The Tehiyyah is generally held to have begun after the 1881 pogroms and to have lasted until circa 1920. In fact, the Wrst signs of a vastly increased readership of Hebrew literature and of signiWcant changes in the quantity and quality of Hebrew publications really began to appear only in the late 1880s to early 1890s.59 The ‘Renaissance’ period also saw the crystallization of Yiddishist ideologies and the emergence, for the Wrst time, of the concept of a Yiddish literary tradition.60 Thus, Shimon Dubnov, whose literary-critical articles in the Russian Jewish journal Voskhod in the late 1880s and 1890s played so crucial a role in the acknowledgement, on the part of the RussianJewish intelligentsia, of the existence of a modern Yiddish literature: ‘In my young years, it was my lot to stand by the cradle of our literature in the tongue of the Folk and later to observe how the little baby, who at that time was called “Jargon”, grew up and received the correct name “Yiddish.”’61

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It is in this period of cultural renaissance that the autobiographical genre was adopted by a signiWcant section of the newly emerged Jewish Eastern European intelligentsia who chose Hebrew or Yiddish—in some cases both—as their medium of literary expression. Rousseauian autobiography appears to have struck a chord with this intellectually liberated, yet emotionally unsure, element in Russian Jewry62 and the period from c. 1880 to c. 1940 witnesses an extraordinarily intense period of autobiographical activity in Jewish Eastern Europe. This period in Eastern European Jewish literary history is comparable, in terms of both the quantity of autobiographical productions and the creative experimentation with autobiographical forms, to the half-century that followed upon the publication of Rousseau’s Confessions in Western Europe. The crystallization of Jewish Eastern European autobiographical discourse is now characterized by the symptoms of transition from a situation of dependence to one of increasing autonomy as described above. When a signiWcant number of autobiographical texts begin to be written, published, and read in Jewish Eastern Europe, certain criteria for the reading and writing of the genre become established. In measure as the genre takes root, autobiographical writings evince an increasing degree of ‘intertextuality’. And, as the writer-readerpublisher circuit becomes progressively self-generating, so the form of Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe becomes less determined by the ‘colonizing’ (Rousseauian) example than by the dialectical tensions and tranformations taking place within the autonomous Weld. Certain aspects of the emergence of Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe invite comparison with analogous aspects in the histories of European and non-European branches of the genre. Taken as a whole, though, the phenomenon presents a unique and problematic case in the history of autobiography. Three aspects in particular render Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe sui generis both in terms of European and non-European autobiography. First, Eastern European Jewish autobiography had, with Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, already established a Wrm and enduring link with the mainstream post-Rousseauian tradition in the eighteenth century. This eighteenth-century Rousseauian connection distinguishes Jewish autobiography from African and from that of any other non-European

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culture to which the genre was transmitted by a process, pace Gusdorf, of nineteenth- or twentieth-century colonization. Second, Jewish autobiography is unusual, if not unique, in that roughly a century elapsed from the appearance of the Wrst Eastern European Jewish autobiography and the emergence of autobiographical discourse in Jewish Eastern Europe. This time-lag between autobiography as ‘text’ and autobiography as ‘discourse’ distinguishes Jewish autobiography from any other major European branch of the genre. Third, with the establishment of autobiographical discourse in Jewish Eastern Europe, Jewish autobiography develops in a more isolated manner than any other European branch of the genre and than any other non-European autobiographical tradition written in a European language. The reason for this isolation is to a large extent linguistic. Eastern European Jewish autobiographies provide the Wrst and only example of Rousseauian autobiography as a widespread phenomenon written in a non-European language—Hebrew—in the nineteenth century.63 And modern literary Yiddish, while it cannot be classiWed as a non-European language, was, in terms of free cultural exchange with the non-Jewish world, if anything more exclusive than Hebrew. Jewish autobiographical discourse took place in Europe but was not of Europe in the same sense as was French, German, or British. Linguistic exclusivity prohibited the process of reciprocal interaction between autobiographical texts written in various European languages that characterizes nineteenth- and twentieth-century European autobiographical discourse. Cultural interaction, when it did occur, operated largely on the basis of a ‘one-way system only’. This meant that the vast majority of critical ‘feedback’ from Eastern European Jewish autobiographies written in Hebrew or Yiddish came from within the sphere of literary discourse in which these texts originated.64 Or, when German-, Russian- or English-writing critics addressed these works, this took place almost exclusively in the interstitial realm of German-Jewish, Russian-Jewish et cetera literary discourse and their representative periodicals and presses. Each one of these three aspects corresponds to a distinct chronological stage in the crystallization of Jewish autobiographical discourse in Eastern Europe—a process which may be summarized schematically in the following manner:

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1. The drawing up, in the eighteenth century, of an autobiographical ‘pact’ (Lejeune), in direct response to the Wrst ‘pact’ of this type, that of Rousseau in the Confessions. 2. A century-long period of latency in which the ‘metaphysical’ and literary ‘pre-conditions’ are laid for a system within which this ‘pact’ can become either meaningful or operative within an Eastern European Jewish context. 3. A belated but extraordinarily intense period of autobiographical activity in which the autobiographical ‘act’ (Bruss) is performed within a ‘speech-community’ whose linguistic exclusiveness fosters considerable contextual variation upon the original ‘pact’.

The history of Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte reflects, in microcosm, the tortuous, century-long process by which the autobiographical genre was assimilated in Jewish Eastern Europe. The curious story of this text also provides a good illustration of the usefulness of the distinction between autobiography as ‘text’ and autobiography as ‘discourse’ for the study of Eastern European Jewish autobiography. Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte is the Wrst Jewish autobiography clearly modelled on the Rousseauian paradigm. While most autobiographies choose to draw up their contract with the reader from the onset, Maimon makes his ‘pact’ only at the beginning of the second book of his autobiography. This preamble to Book II of the Lebensgeschichte is, in eVect, a re-working of the opening paragraphs of the Confessions conflated with several of Rousseau’s more celebrated asides from the later books. Hence, Maimon pledges his allegiance to ‘Truth’, ‘whether this show me, my family, my people or others in a favourable light or no’. ‘Self-revelation’, Maimon writes, is ‘one of my chief characteristics . . . and I endeavour to describe myself as I am not only in a faithful description of my conduct in several events of my life but essentially in the manner of this description itself.’65 Indeed, Maimon openly acknowledges his indebtedness to Rousseau by entitling his account of a childhood theft of ‘a neat little medicine box which appeared to me uncommonly charming’, ‘A Theft à la Rousseau which is Discovered’.66 Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte is, then, should the Rousseauian paradigm be accepted, the Wrst autobiography by an Eastern European Jew. First published in book-form in two volumes in 1792–93, only four years after the Wrst publication of the complete edition of Rousseau’s

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Confessions, the work is, moreover, one of the earliest—if not the earliest—examples of post-Rousseauian autobiography in Western Europe. Maimon’s autobiography precedes and, in terms of subtlety and literary artistry, deserves to stand alongside such classics of European autobiography as Gibbon’s Memoirs (1796), Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811), and Chateaubriand’s Memoires d’outre-tombe (1848– 1850). The book was written in German which was fortunate; virtually everything Maimon wrote in Hebrew was either lost or remains in manuscript to this day.67 Realizing, perhaps, that, as Zinberg puts it, ‘such a book written in Hebrew would be as a voice calling in the wilderness’,68 Maimon appears to have written his autobiography with a non-Jewish or assimilated German-Jewish audience in mind. Germane here is the comparison that Ritchie Robertson draws between Maimon’s autobiography and that of Jakob Fromer. Fromer, a Lodzborn Polish Jew, retraced, at over a century’s remove, Maimon’s Odyssey from Eastern-European Jewish Orthodoxy to Berlin (he was Wnally granted German citizenship in 1899). Fromer followed Maimon’s example in providing an autobiographical account of his passage ‘From the Ghetto to Modern Culture’ (the title of the second, revised version of his autobiography, published in 1911). The degree of aYnity that Fromer felt towards his forebear is attested to by his extensively annotated re-edition of Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte (1911), which Robertson views as the most authoritative version of the text. ‘Maimon and Fromer’, Robertson writes, ‘are addressing Western readers, including non-Jews. Indeed, it is especially important for them to have their work read by non-Jews and thus to have conWrmation of their acceptance within European civilization.’69 The Lebensgeschichte was, in fact, Wrst published, read, and singled out for appreciation by non-Jewish intellectuals who were acquainted with Rousseauian autobiography. Maimon was initially persuaded to write his autobiography by Karl Philipp Moritz, whose own Anton Reiser: A Psychological Novel (1785–1790) is an important text in the history of autobiography and indeed a classic of German romantic literature.70 The Maimon-Moritz relationship, personal and textual, underscores further the extreme proximity between Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte and the matrix of modern autobiographical discourse in Europe. Maimon and Moritz actually shared much in common; each was a misWt and

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each attributed his not inconsiderable characterological disorders to the extreme religious environment of his upbringing—Moritz was of Pietist background.71 The Wrst sections of the Lebensgeschichte appeared in 1792 and 1793 in installments in Moritz’s monthly Berlin journal, Magazin zur Erfahrunngsseelenkunde, devoted to ‘psychology as illustrated from personal experience’. The periodical, whose last volumes Maimon co-edited, drew for its Erfahrungsseelenkunde upon autobiographical accounts, especially of the bizarre and paranormal; Maimon co-edited the last volumes of this journal.72 These Wrst autobiographical expressions constituted essentially the raw materials for the eventual Lebensgeshichte, as is intimated by the rubric under which they were published: Fragmente aus Ben Josua’s Lebensgeschichte. These ‘fragments’ consist of series of anecdotes recounted in the third person after the model of Anton Reiser; sections of the latter work had previously appeared in the same periodical. It was Moritz also who undertook the Wrst publication of Maimon’s complete autobiography in book form.73 Late eighteenth-century Germany actually provided a propitious forum for Maimon’s autobiography. A renewed classicism combined with the Mendelssohn phenomenon had given rise to a heightened interest in Jews and Judaism in non-Jewish intellectual circles.74 Goethe had been intrigued by the Jewish presence in his native Frankfurt when he was a boy and recounts, in his autobiography, how he learnt Hebrew so as to become better acquainted with Yiddish—a language in which he wrote several pieces.75 Maimon’s autobiography made, apparently, a strong impression on both Goethe and Schiller.76 This ‘wonderful bit of autobiography’ was later to come to the attention of George Eliot, who was fascinated both by autobiography and by Jewish history77—important evidence that interest in the book was not conWned to German intellectual circles. Eastern European Jewish autobiography, then, enjoys a close, if not a closer, degree of proximity to the mainstream Rousseauian tradition as does any other European branch of the genre. But Maimon’s autobiography remains, for roughly a hundred years, a text which falls outside any circuit of autobiographical relations.78 Fromer’s belated recapitulation of Maimon’s life and writing, as discussed above, provides living attestation of this time-lag. The Lebensgeschichte was preserved

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and read—insofar as it was read at all—in European circles more as a literary curio than as an exemplum of the autobiographical art in its own right.79 The book—notwithstanding its temporal primacy and early recognition and acclaim by the German literary/philosophical/autobiographical pantheon to which Maimon, who ‘as a speaking animal . . . a dog or a starling that has been taught to speak a few words’,80 gained miraculous entrée, exerted no influence upon the development of the autobiographical genre in Western Europe, and I have found no reference to the work in any nineteenth-century non-Jewish autobiography. The autobiography was thus, by contrast to its author, who spent his last days residing in the home and under the patronage of a Silesian count, eVectively ghettoized, cordoned oV from the mainstream autobiographical tradition which provided it with its very matrix. The circumstances surrounding the Wrst English translation of the work in 1888 attest to this marginality. The Lebensgeschichte was chanced upon by John Clark Murray, professor of ‘mental and moral philosophy’ at McGill University, Montreal, while ‘one day in Toronto, in order to while away an unoccupied hour, I was glancing, like Daniel Deronda, over the shelves of a second-hand bookseller’.81 Murray’s translation was published by Alexander Gardner of Paisley and Paternoster Row, London, a Wrm specializing in Scottish life/lives and literature. In the advertising flyleaves appended to the translation, we Wnd the Lebensgeschichte rubbing shoulders with James Hepburn, Free Church Minister; David Kennedy, the Scottish Singer: Reminiscences of His Life and Work; Loch Creran: Notes from the West Highlands et alia; Maimon’s loneliness in this company is somewhat allayed, however, by J. Snodgrass’s anthology, Wit, Wisdom and Pathos: From the Prose of Heinrich Heine, a volume published by the same house—though, given the man’s perversity, I can well imagine him preferring the company of ‘David Kennedy, the Scottish singer’, to that of Heine. But then, Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte kept strange company from the onset: the Wrst issue of Moritz’s Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, in a subsequent issue of which, as noted, the prototype for the Lebensgeschichte Wrst appeared, included self-penned case-histories of, inter alios: A catatonic who never learnt to feed himself, a paranoiac who barricaded himself in his room for fear of being murdered by agents

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of Frederick the Great; a weaver who thought he had found buried treasure . . . the Berlin gendarme who, after much reading of the Bible, especially the prophecies of Daniel, thought he could perform miracles, such as making cherries grow on apple-trees . . . a man who thought himself an envoy from the Holy Trinity but was afraid of evil spirits and therefore wore iron hoops around his body.82

In volume 9 of Moritz’s Magazin (1792), of which Maimon was then editor, and in which volume there Wrst appeared his Fragmente aus Ben Josua’s Lebensgeschichte, Maimon included a ‘case study of a delusionary Jew’.83 The subsequent publication history of the Murray translation— to date the only English translation of the text—likewise attests to the liminal status of the work: only in 1947 did a drastically truncated version of the translation of the work appear, issued by Schocken,84 to be followed by a less abridged version published by East and West Library of London in 1954. And each of the latter republications, by houses specializing in Judaica, is angled toward a parochial readership of those concerned with things Jewish, rather than the larger autobiographical enterprise. From the mass of scholarly literature devoted to autobiography as a phenomenon literary/cultural/historical, I have found only one work that makes mention of Maimon—desultory and incidental mention at that.85 Robertson’s above-mentioned article comes closest to literary appreciation of the Lebensgeschichte in terms of contemporary literary/autobiographical theory, but the controlling theme of his enquiry is the psychological fragmentation of modern Jewish identity, as manifested by the autobiography and by that of Maimon’s epigone, Fromer.86 Nor was Maimon’s autobiography any less aberrant in terms of German-Jewish autobiographical discourse of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. German-Jewish contemporaries of Maimon and those of a generation beyond who wrote autobiographies had, actually, more in common with their non-Jewish compatriots than they did with Maimon.87 The autobiographical writings of Henrietta Herz, Rachel Varnhagen, Heine, Moritz Oppenheim et cetera are thus better located in the context of German autobiography than of Jewish.88 Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte found echoes in the three major centres of the Haskalah movement: Italy, Galicia, and Russia. But the element of ‘intertextuality’ and the dynamic writer-reader-publisher relation-

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ship characteristic of an established autobiographical Weld were still absent at this stage in Jewish literary discourse.89 M. L. Letteris (Galicia) had read Luzzatto’s (Italy) autobiography but was not in the least bit influenced by Luzzatto in the writing of his own. And neither Letteris nor Luzzatto had read M. A. Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer (Russia) at the time of writing their own autobiographies.90 Maimon’s autobiography was also read, signiWcantly, by Joseph Perl, who is viewed by some as the creator of the Wrst Hebrew novel, the anti-Hasidic parody Megalleh temirin; Perl was much impressed and influenced by Maimon’s discussion of the Hasidim in the Lebensgeschichte.91 That Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte did not, in fact, begin to operate within any intertextual context of autobiographical relations until some hundred years after its original publication, is attested to by the history of the translations of the book into Hebrew and Yiddish. An extremely abridged Yiddish translation of the autobiography, by David Kahana, Wrst appeared in serial form in Alexander Zederbaum’s Kol mevasser from 1871–1872.92 It is worthy of note that M. L. Lilienblum, whose Hatt’ot ne’urim (1876) is a crucial text in the history of Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe, was co-editor of Kol mevasser at the time of the appearance of this Kahana translation.93 The Wrst translation of Maimon’s autobiography into Hebrew, less truncated than the Kahana version but still considerably reworked and abridged, Wrst appeared in 1898.94 It is symptomatic of the belated assimilation of the autobiographical genre in Jewish Eastern Europe that the Tavyuv translation postdated the Wrst, slightly abridged, Murray English translation of the Lebensgeschichte by ten years. A full—and exemplary—translation of the autobiography into Yiddish did not appear until 192795; Eliyahu Yankev Goldschmit, who made this translation, had previously translated sections of Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer from Hebrew to Yiddish.96 The time-lag between Tavyuv’s Hebrew translation of the work and the Wrst full Yiddish translation is reflective of the gap between the emergence of a secular literature in Hebrew and one in Yiddish in Eastern Europe. And, as Maimon’s autobiography appeared, originally, ten years after the Wrst publication of the Wrst books of Rousseau’s Confessions in Western Europe, so the Wrst Yiddish translation of the Lebensgeschichte appeared roughly ten years after the Wrst Yiddish translation of the Confessions in Eastern Europe.97 It is well illustrative of the Eastern

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European Jewish autobiographical belatedness here under discussion that Dovid Kassel, who made the latter translation of Rouseau’s Confesssions, and also translated Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood and Youth into Yiddish,98 was the editor of what has been acclaimed as the classic of Yiddish autobiographical literature—indeed the Wrst of its kind— Yekhezkel Kotik’s Mayne Zikhroynes, whose two volumes were Wrst published in Warsaw in 1913 and 1914.99 Kassel later wrote an impressionistic novella in which he attempts to recreate the world as seen through the eyes of a child, his Wrst erotic stirrings and the like.100 One literary critic went so far as to claim that Kassel was in eVect the ghost-writer of Kotik’s Zikhroynes; A. Litvin’s depiction of the primitive level of literacy that characterized Kotik’s self-published agit-prop pamphlets for various social causes and utopian schemes, which he would distribute free to the patrons of his café in Warsaw, would tend to lend support to this claim.101 What is more, Avrom Reisen, Kassel’s brother-in-law, recalls that Kassel, as co-editor of a journal Reisen contributed to, had a special talent and took special pleasure in ‘embellishing’ (Baputsn) and ‘belletricizing’ (Farbeletristevn) news bulletins, not only to dodge the censor, but ‘through love of art alone’.102 The collaboration between Kassel, the purveyor of the classic autobiographies of high European culture to the Yiddish reader, and Kotik, whose autobiography is generally viewed as a sort of literary ‘lubok’—an echt-Yiddish, naïve, in the Schillerian sense, unmediated transcription of the memories of a ‘man of the people’—is highly telling in the present context.103 Thus introduced, albeit late, into its rightful ‘speech-community’, Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte begins to take part, for the Wrst time, in the play of intertextual relations that characterizes autobiographical discourse. Redeemed from its aberrant status in Western European autobiographical discourse, the autobiography now takes on new life within the autobiographical Weld, which had, in the period that intervened from its original publication, established itself in Jewish Eastern Europe. The book is now read by Eastern European Jews, who are aware of the autobiographical modality and who can identify their own life-experiences with those of their trailblazer, Maimon, as related in the Lebensgeschichte. Thus, Gideon, the Maskilic mentor of Yosef, the hero of Peretz Smolenskin’s extraordinarily popular novel

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written in autobiographical form, Hato’eh bedarkhei hahayyim, (the Wrst complete edition of which appeared in 1876)104 is Wrst inspired to seek higher education at a German university after reading the Lebensgeschichte: ‘The thought just occurred to me several days ago upon reading the life-story of one of the renowned philosophers of that country.105 He also came from a poor background and suVered great privations. And, in his youth, he too suVered the persecution and disgrace of the Yeshivah. But after he left the Pale of Settlement and studied at a German University he became a great man and was widely acclaimed. I determined to follow his path, come what may.’106 M. Y. Berdichevsky, writing a generation after Smolenskin, was well acquainted with the autobiographies of Luzzatto, Letteris, Guenzberg, et alii. But he sensed an especial kinship with Maimon, so much so that he integrated episodes depicted in Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte into his own autobiographical oeuvre.107 In a passage reminiscent of that cited above from Smolenskin’s Hato’eh, Berdichevsky writes of ‘Mikha’el’, the thinly disguised autobiographical protagonist of his novella Mahanayim: Why does he not go to Germany? There in the capital city there are more opportunities, more openings; perhaps he could realize his potential there. . . . For is not this great city a centre for the sciences and scholarship? The people there are more cultivated and knowledgeable. It was there that Mendelssohn’s star arose and it was there that his own countryman, Solomon Maimon, arrived. For Mikhael had already read the autobiography of this great wanderer. He felt closer to Solomon Maimon than he did to Mendelssohn.108

Even Ahad Ha’am, Berdichevsky’s ideological nemesis and a man as unlike Maimon in character and temperament as can be imagined, entertained a special aVection for the philosopher. He thus commends, in uncharacteristically emotional tems, the intellectual historian Shimon Bernfeld’s sympathetic treatment of the man: I received Dor tahpukhot which I read with much pleasure. I was particularly happy that you stood up for Solomon Maimon. Many years ago I read his autobiography, and it made a profound impression upon me, and my heart went out to this unfortunate man, who lost his way through no fault of his own. And when a long time later

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I read what Graetz had to say about him, there occurred to me the same thoughts and feelings that I have now found in your book.109

Joseph Opatoshu, writing in the second decade of the twentieth century, describes how his protagonist Mordechai, comes across a young Jewish autodidact studying Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed with Maimon’s Hebrew commentary on the work in a rundown Jewish tavern in a Polish shtetl: He thought of the commentary upon the Guide for the Perplexed, and it seemed to him that it was by no means an accident that its author, Solomon Maimon, seventy-Wve years before, had sat in a tavern just like this young man, writing a manuscript in secret, and dreaming of foreign travel. Three quarters of a century—and nothing had changed. Everything was still just as it had been, and who could tell? It wasn’t at all impossible that three quarters of a century later, a hungry traveler would stumble into the half-ruined tavern and meet again just such a young man . . . Not at all impossible . . . 110

Shimon Dubnow, also well versed in Jewish autobiographical literature, including that of Berdichevsky, writes in his own autobiography, Wrst published in 1934, that when he read the Lebensgeschichte as an adolescent, he felt that Maimon had ‘depicted for me my own way from the old world to the new’.111 These are but three quite striking examples of the delayed impact that Maimon’s autobiography had upon Jewish Eastern European autobiographical discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In frequency of citation and extent of influence, Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte is, in fact, surpassed in the history of Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe only by M. L. Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim. Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte thus moves from an isolated and marginal position, standing on the peripheries of both European and Jewish literature, to the locus of autobiographical discourse in Jewish Eastern Europe. This gradual process of appropriation of the text is reflective both of the major linguistic and cultural shifts that Rousseauian autobiography undergoes before establishing itself in Jewish Eastern Europe and of the transition that occurs within Jewish Eastern Europe of autobiography as ‘text’ to autobiography as ‘discourse’. The belatedness of this reception and Maimon’s eventual incorporation to the neo-Hebraic autobiographical

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Weld that constituted itself a century after Maimon’s demise—the only autobiographical Weld to which he was incorporated—is well illustrated in the preamble to the memoirs of the Yiddish philologist and lexicographer, Alexander Harkavy, writing in 1903. The irony of this is all the more keen in that Maimon’s ambivalence to his mother-tongue, Yiddish, was acute.112 ‘Now do I feel’, Harkavy writes, ‘within my soul that I must excuse myself before the assembly of readers in oVering them my life-history, being aware that I am not a great man and the majority consensus holds that the community has no concern with the history of an individual man unless he is as great as Solomon Maimon, as Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg, or as “Tselafhad Bar Khushim hatoheh” (Moshe Leib Lilienblum).’113 Maimon, the archetypal Luftmentsh, was, then, very much ‘in the air’ in late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Jewish intellectual/literary discourse—speciWcally the Maimon of the Lebensgeschichte, not that of his voluminous philosophical writings. He surfaces again in a letter of 1906 from the young Martin Buber to socialist-anarchist Gustav Landauer, from which we learn that the latter has been seeking out Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte and that the work exercised an especial fascination upon Buber himself: You will certainly Wnd Maimon’s Autobiography in the Royal Library . . . I know for certain that the Leipzig library has it . . . As you know, a new edition is an old idea of mine (I gave a lecture on the Autobiography in Leipzig in 1898 and mentioned my intention to do a new edition), and I would gladly work on it, if only because I am tempted to write an introduction discussing the psychology of the bachur (indispensable for understanding the work) who comes to Europe with his heritage of detached intellectuality and solves the greatest problems [of philosophy] but is unable to master even the smallest aspects of [daily] life.114

In an autobiography that appeared in 1982, we subsequently encounter Maimon as progenitor of the neo-Marxist New York Jewish intellectual: Some of us . . . were a strange breed. We had no choice but to remain as Jews, except perhaps through devices too humiliating to consider. We took an acute private pleasure, through jokes and asides, in those aspects of intellectuality that bore the marks of Jewishness: quickness, skepticism, questioning . . . We were not at home in the organized

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Jewish world, and its leaders paid no attention to us—there was no reason why they should. We had made another choice of comrades, the straggling phalanx of the anti-Stalinist Left. Still, as I remember from conversations with Philip Rahv and Delmore Schwartz, we held in contempt those Jewish intellectuals and academics who tried to pass themselves oV as anything but what they were . . . In following this ambivalent course we were by no means cutting ourselves oV completely from Jewish experience. We too had a tradition of sorts behind us, the tradition of the estranged Jew, which had grown increasingly strong in the life of the Jewish people these past two centuries. It is a tradition that goes back at least to the moment in the late eighteenth century when Solomon Maimon, an ‘alienated’ Jew if ever there was one, wandered away from his Lithuanian shtetl to become a junior colleague of German Enlightenment philosophers. In our own century this type has been embodied in such leaders of European radicalism as Julian Martov, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky . . . 115

Maimon’s autobiography wandered for a century or so before Wnding its rightful place in Jewish literary discourse; the return of the text to its native ground provides a mirror image of its author’s own Westward migration in quest of a context in which he could realize his abilities. All of the texts, in the following survey of pre-Rousseauian Jewish autobiography, endured centuries of ‘wandering’ before they were published and read as ‘autobiographies’ in Jewish Eastern Europe. And, unlike Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, the great majority of these texts were more at home in their original locus in quo than in the new context in which they found themselves.

Three

Autobiography As Reading

The ‘Tradition’ Model for the Study of Jewish Autobiography One assumption that marks the point of departure for almost every scholarly article that attempts a comprehensive overview of the Jewish autobiographical genre is that there exists an indigenously Jewish autobiographical tradition. This assumption is rarely stated in so many words or explicated in any formal or systematic manner. The term ‘autobiography’ itself is, in these treatments of the subject, either not deWned at all, or, if deWned, done so only in the most rudimentary manner.1 Frequently, the crucial distinctions to be observed between autobiography and the memoir, or even autobiography and the ‘autobiographical novel’, are not noted, or, if they are noted, they are not observed. Thus, in a recent Hebrew Lexicon of Literary Terms, M. L. Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim is described as a ‘memoir’, an ‘autobiography’ and, as if this were not enough, it is also listed as a prime exemplum of the Jewish ‘autobiographical novel’.2 Azriel Ukhmani, in the same lexicon, classiWes the incontestably autobiographical ’Avie’zer by M. A. Guenzberg neither as ‘autobiography’ nor ‘memoir’ but as an ‘autobiographical novel’.3 The terms ‘Jewish autobiography’ or ‘memoir-literature’ are, in eVect, employed in the formulations of Ukhmani, Bernard Weinryb, Max Grunwald, Hiram Peri, Bal Makhshoves, et alii,4 as blanket terms to refer to the sum total of more or less (generally less) autobiographical or self-referential texts of various temporal and/or geographical provenance written by Jews from the biblical period to the present day—or, at least, until Herzl’s Diary or Weizmann’s Trial and Error. The line of tradition that emerges from a synopsis of these bird’seye surveys of the genre runs something like this: 1. Autobiographical fragments from the Bible: Amos 7–9; Isaiah 6–8; Hosea 3; Ezra 7:27f; Nehemiah.

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2. Josephus’ Life.5 3. Autobiographical excerpts from the correspondence of Maimonides. 4. Jewish autobiographies of Italian Renaissance or early-modern provenance: Yehudah Aryeh Modena’s Hayyei yehudah; Abraham Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon; Yitshaq min haleviim’s (Modena’s grandson) Medabber tahapukhot. 5. Jewish memoir-literature written in response to a personal or national disaster, of seventeenth-century Eastern and Central European provenance: Yomtov Lippmann Heller’s Megillat ’eivah and Nathan Neta ben Mosheh Hannover’s Yeven metsulah. 6. The seventeenth-century Yiddish autobiography of Gluckel of Hameln. 7. Eighteenth-century autobiographies written by Jews who stand on the threshold of the modern era of Jewish history: Jacob Emden’s Megillat sefer and Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte. 8. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the tradition branches out linguistically and geographically to Eastern Europe, America, Germany, the further areas of Ashkenazic settlement (the British Isles and the Scandinavian countries), and Israel. The nineteenth and early twentieth-century autobiographical texts of Eastern European provenance which are generally highlighted are M. L. Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh’s Shloyme reb khayims and Yekhezkel Kotik’s Mayne zikhroynes. There are slight variations on this ‘tradition’ model for Jewish autobiography. DiVerent works are foregrounded by diVerent scholars as constituting landmarks in this panoramic atlas of Jewish autobiographical productions. The range of texts is extraordinarily wide and, in the twentieth century, as the process of Kinnus6 gets underway and hitherto neglected autobiographical texts are now published for the Wrst time, becomes even wider. The degree to which certain of the discrete texts that constitute the tradition are highlighted will, naturally, depend in no small part upon the scholarly predilections of the author. Thus, Cecil Roth, one of whose particular areas of interest was the Jews of Renaissance Italy, lays great emphasis upon Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon and Modena’s Hayyei yehudah as crucial texts in the evolution of the genre.7 Jacob Shatsky, on the other hand, a historian of Eastern European Jewry, lays greater stress upon autobiographical documents

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of Ashkenazic Jewish provenance: in the pre-modern period Yom-Tov Lippmann Heller’s Megillat ’eivah and Nathan Neta Hannover’s Yeven metsulah and, in the modern era, Jewish autobiographies written in the Slavic-speaking countries.8 Whatever the personal predilections of a particular scholar for certain texts and whatever the implicit theory of Jewish autobiography that governs the selection and foregrounding of discrete works, all of the above-cited scholars share one basic assumption, overtly expressed or in various measure implied: Jewish ‘autobiographical’ or ‘memoiristic’ texts, written at diVerent times and places in Jewish and non-Jewish languages, somehow form a continuum, a tradition subject to some more or less immanent law of development. The fullest adumbration—albeit scarcely systematic—of this ‘tradition’ model for the study of Jewish autobiography is that of Leo Schwarz, in his introduction to the most comprehensive and Wnely documented anthology of Jewish autobiographical literature to have appeared to date, Memoirs of My People Through a Thousand Years. Schwarz acknowledges from the onset the degree to which the personal predilections of the scholar govern the selection of texts that form the Jewish autobiographical ‘corpus’. ‘The anthologist’, he writes, ‘like the historian and the novelist is an autobiographer in disguise’.9 Whereupon Schwarz sheds the ‘disguise’, and embarks upon an autobiographical preamble to his anthology. Schwarz relates how, in his study of Jewish history under the tutelage of Harry Wolfson he had ‘failed to understand the essential spirit, the hot burning heart of my people’.10 In this period, Schwarz writes, he did not look upon the autobiographical texts that he had come upon in his studies as ‘expressions of the “life-drive” that gave a peculiar cast to the living tradition and helped to explain the epic of group survival’.11 Having ‘rediscovered’ Ezekiel as ‘an emigre thinker, uprooted from home and culture, agonizing over the fate of his people and of civilization’,12 Schwarz casts Jewish autobiographical or memoiristic texts into a melting-pot in which all geographical, linguistic, or temporal distinctions are dissolved. The ‘melting-pot’ analogy is here particularly apt and provides a clue to the intellectual provenance of Schwarz’s anthology: the American Menorah circle.13 His approach is ‘nationalistic’ in an Ahad Ha’amist, cultural-Zionist sense, without being chauvinistic.14 Seeking the ‘eternal human element in the main stream of Jewish life and

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history’, Schwarz Wnds it in the ‘torrent of memory overflowing in the pages of the Wrst part of this volume’. ‘You’—the reader—will Wnd here, he writes, ‘flesh and blood beings—martyrs and merrymakers; rabbis and rapscallions, sages and sinners—with all their virtues as well as faults laid bare.’15 Not only does Schwarz blur temporal, linguistic, and geographical boundaries, but generic distinctions are also lost in the melting-pot. Schwarz, in common with the majority of the proponents of the tradition-oriented model for the study of Jewish autobiography, and in keeping with the then-prevalent conditions of Anglo-American literary criticism, which had, in 1943, scarcely begun to treat of autobiography as an autonomous literary genre, makes not even the most passing attempt to deWne autobiography; nor does he distinguish the genre from the memoir and other loosely related literary forms. It is thus diYcult to discern in what, precisely, lies the unifying factor that enables Schwarz to treat of his elected texts under a common purview, grouped beneath the rubric of ‘autobiography’—save, that is, for their being in various measure self-referential and written by those of Jewish ancestry—factors which do not, in and of themselves, provide sufficient basis for generic classiWcation. Memoirs of My People Through a Thousand Years contains sections of compelling interest to the historian, literary critic, and psychologist alike. It is the Wrst and only publication of its type in English, an extraordinary achievement in its own right, and Schwarz’s extensive and assiduously prepared bibliography remains, in itself, indispensable for any student of the genre.16 Taken as a whole, though, the eVect of this ‘huge gallery of selfportraits in which a panorama of a thousand years unfolds itself ’17 is quite disorientating. A section from the family chronicle of an eleventhcentury Italian Jew, Ahima’ats, who deWned his own work as a book of genealogies (Sefer yuhasin),18 is followed immediately by a conglomerate of Maimonides’ responsa.19 The Maimonidean excerpts are followed by the Wrst-person account of a mystical experience by an anonymous pupil of Abraham AbulaWa, the thirteenth-century Spanish Kabbalist.20 This description of Kabbalistic technique and contemplative ecstasy is, in turn, followed by the fourteenth-century ethical will (Tsava’ah) of the German-born rabbi of Toledo, Judah Asheri.21 Schwarz’s provision of somewhat kitsch captions to these pieces—

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respectively, ‘Family Album’, ‘Logbook of a Physician’, ‘Every Man His Own Messiah’, and ‘By the Waters of the Tagus’—together with the chronological sequence in which the texts are presented, and the twofold division of the anthology beneath the larger rubrics of ‘Flood Tide of Remembrance’ and ‘Tangled Destinies’ creates a semblance of homogeneity. None too close an examination reveals, however, that we deal here with no less than four literary genres—not one of which can be properly deWned as either ‘memoir’ or ‘autobiography’: a genealogical account written in rhyme that ends where the majority of autobiographies begin, with the birth of the author; epistolary fragments culled from a series of responsa (She’elot uteshuvot); a mystical testimony; an ethical will. If, moreover, the inter-relation of these early texts one with the other is hard—if not impossible—to establish, how much the more so to trace a line of development from such texts to nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiographical productions? The proper method for an anthologist of Jewish literature would surely be to trace the development of these discrete genres by placing each text alongside others of its ilk. Only then would we have any quantitative and qualitative yardstick by which to assess the nature and signiWcance of the autobiographical gobbets that are, in Schwarz’s anthology, wrested from their proper—or, at least, original—context. And, even if it be freely admitted that autobiographical elements play a greater or lesser role in certain pre-modern literary conventions whose primary purpose is otherwise, the crucial distinction remains between ‘additive’22 or incidental autobiography and ‘autobiography’ as a phenomenon of literary and intellectual history. In what, then, does this autobiographical ‘tradition’ as adumbrated by Schwarz et alii lie? One answer is provided by the proponents of a signiWcant variant of the this model for the study of Jewish autobiography. This variant of the model was Wrst propounded by Jacob Shatsky and has, of late, formed the basis for David Roskies’s observations on the genre in his study of Jewish literary responses to catastrophe. This variant of the ‘tradition’ model rests upon three fundamental assertions. Autobiography, with its implicitly solipsistic preoccupation with the individual in isolation from the group, is, Wrst of all, in the opinion of Shatsky, Roskies, et alii, an inherently non-Jewish form of literature; it is a genre which, by implication, even runs counter to certain

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key aspects of the Jewish social/moral code.23 Thus we Wnd in the Wrst monograph in Hebrew dedicated to Rousseau, whose tone is otherwise measured, well-informed and in general sympathetic, the following angry demurral from the author, Alexander Ziskind Rabinovits: In 1767, Rousseau began to write his book Confessions . . . Is it beWtting for a man to make public confession of all the bad thoughts and bad deeds he committed and thought in the days of his vain existence?—In my opinion, it is not right to do such a thing. The principle postulated by the sages of Israel: ‘A man cannot incriminate himself ’ has its basis in human nature. The feeling of shame does not permit a man to reveal his disgrace in front of everyone; and it takes excessive impudence on the part of a man not to be ashamed to confess in public that he did such and such . . . But if the writer comes to bear public witness to himself that he is the worst of human creatures, that he has committed repulsive deeds, then we will say that this deed too is repulsive. For it is not right for a man to confess other than before his Creator alone, and it is enough that he bears the imprint of his sin in his heart lest he grow haughty. Such thoughts come to my mind each time I read Rousseau’s Confessions. For, in truth, it is not possible to read them without disgust . . . Rousseau, who had such a strong moral sense within him, how could he remove the cover of shame from his face in telling us of the despicable deeds he committed?24

Shatsky, a scholar of very diVerent stripe and writing worlds removed from Rabinovits, essentially corroborates this assessment: ‘The purely personal in Jewish literature serves at most as a parable—pointing, that is, to some moral—but under no circumstances as an individualistic confession of the life of a man such as we Wnd in non-Jewish literature.’25 This was because, explains Roskies, ‘the careful plotting of the soul in search of perfection, the core of the confessional genre since the days of Saint Augustine, was foreign to Jewish tradition outside of the Kabbalah’.26 Jewish autobiographies—and this is the second element of the syllogism—do, however, exist, and have done so from the Middle Ages, at the latest. Such works, though, do not arise from within the tradition but are invariably prompted by external circumstance, namely, a catastrophic occurrence of personal or national dimensions.27 Jewish autobiographical texts are thus liable to appear, in a somewhat mechanistic fashion, ‘at each breaking-point—the Span-

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ish Expulsion, the Khmielnitsky massacres, the incursion of modernity into Western and Eastern Europe, the pogroms, the revolutions’.28 Roskies elaborates upon Shatsky’s thesis by claiming that Jewish autobiography is contingent not only upon the original catastrophe but also requires an additional and subsequent jolt from the intelligentsia.29 And, drawing more universal conclusions from this theory of the genesis of autobiographical consciousness, Roskies asserts: ‘The will to bear particular witness had to be cultivated. Nothing in my research suggests that it is an innate faculty of humankind, Jewish or otherwise.’30 The third, and Wnal, assertion upon which this model rests is that when Jews do write autobiographies, these works are, mirabile dictu, non-autobiographical. That is, the focus of Jewish autobiography, in distinction to non-Jewish, is not upon the self of the author but upon the community, the Wrst-person singular of the autobiographical narrator being, in eVect, a trope for the Wrst-person plural of the collective. ‘Therefore’, writes Shatsky, ‘our autobiographies are so subjective—all autobiographies are subjective, but individualistic—we subjectivize the collective.’31 For Shatsky, then, Reb Mordkhele’s (Mordechai Tschemerinsky) ’Ayarati Motele is the quintessential Jewish autobiography: ‘Tschemerinsky’s memoirs have persuaded me that unfavourable historical moments are the most conducive for memoir-literature. The totally ghastly “today” (not only from a personal aspect—he wrote his memoirs while critically ill in hospital—but also from a national!) is mirrored in “yesterday”. The flight from reality created a masterpiece. To date this is the greatest work that our memoir-literature has produced.’32 From an autobiographical perspective, what is most striking about Tschemerinsky’s vivid and detailed description of his family and home-town is the virtual absence of any mention of the author—hence the title of M. E. Jak’s perceptive review of Ayarati Motele, ‘The Unobserved Observer’.33 Indeed, in his epilogue to the work, Tschemerinsky roundly berates an imaginary reader for his vulgar curiosity concerning the personal life of the author; he chooses to divulge no more than that he is at present ill in hospital, awaiting an operation.34 For Roskies, likewise, S. Ansky’s Khurbm Galitsie (The Destruction in Galicia) remains ‘the quintessential Jewish war-memoir . . . precisely because the author submerged his personal experience so as to highlight the broad panorama of Jewish suVering’.35

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This somewhat lachrymose understanding of Jewish autobiography certainly provides one vantage point from which to discern the underlying continuity of Jewish autobiographical productions throughout the ages. The thesis, however, is in several respects problematic. First, the claim that autobiography is essentially foreign to the Jewish tradition: As discussed above, it may well be argued that autobiography is equally foreign to the Christian tradition, not to mention Buddhist, Hindu, or Islamic. Second, that Jewish autobiography is distinctive in that it is invariably prompted by a personal and/or national catastrophe: Is this not equally true of non-Jewish autobiography? Had Rousseau’s life flowed gently as a hidden stream, would he have written the Confessions? A good case could surely be made for the assertion that any form of artistic activity is contingent upon a degree of existential malaise or ‘cognitive dissonance’ prompted by the ill fortunes that assail the individual and/or the community to which he belongs. Autobiographical writings in particular—and this is a general phenomenon—do tend to emerge at times of historical crisis or momentous change, when the dissolution of established social and intellectual structures throws the individual back upon the self. Third, that Jewish autobiography is characterized by a communal or collective stance, and this in contradistinction to non-Jewish: This is a diYcult assertion either to sustain or to negate. Certainly many Jewish autobiographers—though by no means all—post-Rousseauian, that is, do evince a marked preoccupation with the communal; and there is a tendency, on their behalf, to bequeath upon their own life-experiences a supraindividual, even national, signiWcance. But is this peculiarly Jewish? One thinks, for example, of Goethe’s lengthy depiction of communal life in his native Frankfurt, of George Moore’s interweaving of the vision of the ‘Irish Renascence’ with data from his own life-history, of the assertion of H. G. Wells, in the preface to his Experiment in Autobiography: ‘My story will be at one and the same time a very personal one and it will be a history of my sort and my time.’36 The distinction here may be one of degree rather than of kind—the degree, that is, to which the author excludes himself from his personal account of an era in the life of the collective. But, then, if, as in Tschemerinsky’s Ayarati Motele or Ansky’s Khurbm Galitsie, the voice and presence of the author are deliberately and almost entirely eVaced, do we really deal with

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either ‘memoir’ or ‘autobiography’? And, if these works are indeed neither memoir nor autobiography, should not an alternative line of continuity be traced for these texts; an aetiology that stems from the mediaeval Ashkenazic Memorbucher, runs to the early-modern chronicles of persecution, such as Hannover’s Yeven metsulah, whence to the Yizker bikher of the post–World War I period—Ansky’s Khurbm Galitsie and Tschemerinsky’s Ayarati Motele being variants upon this latter, speciWcally Jewish, sub-genre?37 The Shatsky/Roskies variant of the ‘tradition’ model for the understanding of Jewish autobiography is, then, for all its strengths—as demonstrated especially in Roskies’s work38—open to some rather serious objections. The approach does, nonetheless, as does that of Schwarz et alii, clearly call into question the eYcacy of the theoretical model for the study of Jewish autobiography advanced in the present study. Rousseau scarcely deserves a mention in any of the above-cited treatments of the genre.39 Should, moreover, Roskies’s assertion that the ‘core of the confessional genre’ is essentially foreign to the Jewish tradition and has been so since the days of Augustine, be accepted, Jewish autobiography is eVectively removed from the sphere of Western European literary discourse, pre- or post-Rousseauian. Jewish autobiography is, rather, a law unto its own: autobiographical creativity, in this instance, is governed by certain archetypal patterns of response deriving ultimately from the national psyche or ‘collective unconscious’ of the people. Hence, Natalie Zemon Davis: ‘With Jewish confessional autobiography of the seventeenth century, the model is not a personal trajectory but the history of Yahweh’s chosen people, the individual life repeating and recombining the rhythm of Torah, sinning, and the suVerings of exile.’40 The method to be adopted, should this be the case, would be fundamentally ahistorical, the task of the scholar of the genre being to trace formal, thematic and psychological lines of continuity between contemporary and pre-modern Jewish autobiographical texts with little regard for actual evidence of textual transmission. One such line of continuity could, for example, be traced from the Tsava’ah (Ethical Will) to the Haskalah ‘confession’ à la Guenzberg, in which the writer summarizes the fruit of his experience for the beneWt of his oVspring.41 Accounts of Jewish suVerings in wars, pogroms et cetera could be viewed in the long durée of Hebrew

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Crusade chronicles, or those recounting the Khmielnitzky massacres of Jews in the Ukraine of 1648–1649, or in the even longer durée of the biblical books of Lamentations and Esther. Or, autobiographical texts by such writers as Berdichevsky, Peretz, and Feierberg could be taken within the context of an evolving tradition of Hasidic introspection. Approaches such as these latter would posit continuity, permanence within change, and would see nineteenth- and twentieth- century Jewish autobiography, notably that written in Jewish languages, as an end-point of a tradition of autobiographical writing stretching back to antiquity, or at least to the Middle Ages. The present model for the study of the genre is, by contrast, posited upon a sharp break and sees nineteenth-century Jewish Eastern European autobiography as a response to a radically new conception of personality, for which, in terms both of form and of content, there is no precedent in the Jewish literary tradition. A way out of this critical impasse may be aVorded if attention is shifted from the writing of autobiography to the reading of the genre. Such a shift in focus would appear to reveal more persistent and demonstrable patterns of continuity between pre- and post-Rousseauian Jewish autobiographical productions than those arrived at by scholars who seek to establish the same through consideration of the genre as a mode of writing. That is, the one empirically veriWable characteristic that all of the pre-modern texts cited by Schwarz, Shatsky, et alii do, indisputably, share is that they are read—or, at least, have been read since the nineteenth century—as autobiographies. This phenomenon Wnds, mutatis mutandis, a precise analogy in the history of nonJewish autobiography in Western Europe. The ‘idea’ of autobiography as a distinct genre with its own history—as, following Lejeune, has been argued above—is strictly post-Rousseauian. The notion of a ‘tradition’ of pre-Rousseauian autobiographical writing thus only arises—indeed, can only arise—once an autobiographical Weld of discourse has come into being; the tradition itself is then, inevitably and to a large degree, a symptom of the process that it seeks to explain.42 Pre-Rousseauian texts bearing some aYnity with post-Rousseauian autobiography are, in Western Europe, subsumed within this generic category only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even though they were originally neither written nor read as such. Neither Cellini

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(1500–1571) nor Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), who began his memoirs in 1771, before the publication of the Wrst books of the Confessions, wrote ‘autobiographies’. Cellini’s Vita was Wrst published as the Autobiography only in 1961;43 Franklin’s Memoirs of My Life appeared as the Autobiography only in 1868.44 And Augustine’s Confessions, Cardano’s De vita propria liber, even Descartes’s Discours,45 were only read as autobiographies within a post-Rousseauian context. To clarify these and other pre-Rousseauian works as ‘autobiographies’ is, strictly speaking, an anachronistic projection of contemporary categories onto past texts.46 It is a strange irony of intellectual history that such anachronistic projection of present categories of signiWcance onto past events is precisely analogous to the autobiographer’s own activity as he infuses events from the past with a teleological perspective derived from the present. That the notion of a pre-modern tradition of Jewish autobiographical writing arises, in no small part, from a projection of post-Rousseauian categories onto pre-modern texts is attested to by tracing the origins of this mode of reading. The Wrst essay on Jewish autobiography was written by Meir Halevi Letteris (1815–74). Forming the Wrst chapter of Letteris’s own autobiography, entitled Zikkaron basefer (1869),47 this essay performs a dual function as a monograph on the genre and a self-justiWcatory preamble. In a bold act of textual appropriation, Letteris opens his essay—and thus his autobiography—with a direct citation from the third paragraph of the Wrst book of Rousseau’s Confessions, the famous passage beginning, ‘Let the last trump sound when it will, I shall come forward with this book in my hand to present myself before my Sovereign Judge, and proclaim aloud: “Here is what I am. . . . ”’48 Letteris’s nerve fails him, however, when it comes to the sentence, ‘I have displayed myself as I was, as vile and despicable when my behaviour was as such, as good, generous and noble when I was so’. He omits this clause, without indication! Letteris then attempts, by means of a pious and deliberate misreading, to palliate the opening paragraphs of the Confessions, rendering thereby the autobiographical genre and the supreme egotism of its founder less jarring to the sensibilities of his moderately ‘Maskilic’ readership.49 Letteris, it should be noted, was something of an expert at this type of wilful distortion of the classics of European literature; his translation of Goethe’s Faust,

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in which Faust is replaced by the archetypal Jewish heretic Elishah ben Avuyah (Aher), was the target of a blistering attack for, inter alia, inWdelity to the original, from the young Peretz Smolenskin.50 In Zikkaron basefer, Letteris feigns to take Rousseau’s opening pronouncements as a serious declaration of faith in the workings of God’s providence. ‘Just as’, Letteris argues, God revealed Himself to His chosen people through Moses on Mount Sinai, and in coming generations through the words of His prophets, so He continues to manifest Himself ‘to the present day’ through the medium of human history, ‘showing mankind the path leading to the house of God, the place where He sits on His throne and judges with righteousness for all Eternity’.51 It is particularly in the deeds of all the great men of world history, Letteris argues, à la Carlyle,52 that the hand of providence may be discerned, for ‘all that occurs on the earth, the history of each people and of each state is as a bronzen mirror in which the workings of the Almighty are reflected’.53 Letteris, it appears, is here skirting around the subject, breaking the ice by furnishing his prospective audience with a pious rationale for the writing of biography and history before confronting them with a justiWcation for Rousseauian autobiography. This he does by availing himself of the classic microcosm/macrocosm metaphor of mediaeval Jewish philosophy, building upon the welltried proof-text for application of the Delphic maxim within a Jewish context, Job XIX:xxvi: ‘From my own flesh will I behold the Almighty.’54 ‘Each man’, Letteris writes, ‘is a little world, in which the spirit of God is at work and in all his ways, all his actions, all that occurs to him, the hand of God may be discerned.’55 This ‘little world’ (’Olam qatan) analogy would, again, be familiar to the more erudite Jewish reader from Kabbalistic sources.56 Having introduced the idea of Rousseauian autobiography to the Hebrew reader by means of these Trojan Horse tactics, Letteris proceeds toward a deWnition of the genre as opposed, on the one hand, to biography, on the other to history. Letteris’s distinctions are banal: biographers write about other people, autobiographers about themselves; history concerns itself with environment, diplomatic intrigue, the aVairs of nations, autobiography with the lives of individuals.57 In quite a striking simile, he compares the autobiographer to a man walking before the sun, accompanied at each step by his shadow stretched

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out behind him. With each step forward, he will pause to give a detailed description of the shadow.58 Letteris goes on to give a summary account of non-Jewish autobiography, the Wrst of its type in Hebrew or Yiddish literature. Taking Xenophanes as his point of departure, Letteris proceeds to give a brief account of Caesar’s De Bello Civili and Commentarii de Bello Gallico. He leaps from Caesar to the memoirs of Englishmen in the Tudor period,59 whence to French court memoirs, concluding with a discussion of German autobiographical literature in which, inter alia, Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit is mentioned. ‘Likewise with writers of our own people’, Letteris continues, making the transition from general to Jewish autobiography, ‘only a few wrote the history of their lives and that of the contemporaries who played a part in their lives and the following are those that I have seen’.60 Letteris’s choice of texts corresponds essentially with that of Schwarz, Peri, Grunwald, Weinryb, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica article, as discussed above. The genealogy of Jewish autobiography, as adumbrated in Zikkaron basefer, runs as follows: Josephus, Maimonides’ letters, letters written by Yehudah Halevy on his travels, sections from Yehudah Alharizi’s Tahkemoni, Benjamin of Tudela’s travel chronicle, Don Isaac Abarvanel’s brief account of his years in Lisbon, R. Joseph Hacohen’s Divrei Hayemim and ’Emeq habakha’, the Wrst chapter of Azariah de Rossi’s Me’or ’einayim, Menasseh of Israel,61 R. Isaac Chaim Cantorini of Padua, Isaac Samuel Reggio, S. Luzzatto, Yom-Tov Lippmann Heller’s Megillat ’eivah, Jacob Emden’s Megillat sefer, Solomon Maimon. ‘Several other such works’, Letteris adds, ‘are extant, written by the enlightened of our nation which I cannot mention by name, not having these books before me at present.’62 Of the Wfteen texts which Letteris mentions, Schwarz cites nine, excerpts from six of which form sections of his anthology. Letteris’s essay possesses little intrinsic merit and serves as the introduction to an undistinguished autobiography, a large section of which is taken up with biographical paeans to leading Haskalah Wgures, especially Nahman Krochmal. Written, moreover, in Melitsah63 of the most florid variety, it is scarcely comprehensible to the modern reader. It is, however, an important document in the history of Eastern European Jewish autobiography. This essay, prefaced as it is with a direct quotation—in the original French—from Rousseau’s Confes-

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sions, is powerful testimony to the decisive influence of Rousseau in shaping the perception of a pre-modern tradition of Jewish autobiographical writing. Letteris provides the Wrst example of a grouping of pre-Rousseauian Jewish texts under the common rubric ‘autobiography,’ or in Letteris’s own phrase ‘the history of his own life which a man writes in a book’.64 He is also, in his placement of these texts, the Wrst to suggest an implicit teleology of Jewish autobiographical productions; from Josephus to Maimon and, presumably, himself and beyond. It would not, I think, have occurred, nor did it occur, to any Jewish scholar, prior to the impact of Rousseau upon the Jewish Haskalah movement, to group these texts in such a manner. Analysis of the form and publication data of what are generally taken to be the ‘classics’ of pre-modern Jewish autobiography is supportive of the assertion that pre-Rousseauian Jewish autobiography arises not from any actual tradition of writing. We deal, rather, with a perception generated by a mode of reading that Wrst became current in Jewish intellectual circles in nineteenth-century Europe. The history of publication is, as has been noted above, of decisive import in determining the degree to which an autobiographical discourse has become established—the degree, that is, to which the production of autobiographical texts corresponds to a certain demand which later stimulates an increase in production and so forth. Publication data also provide an invaluable yardstick by which to measure the validity of the ‘tradition’ or ‘continuity’ approach to autobiography, Jewish or non-Jewish. In order to sustain such a tradition-oriented, developmental model for the study of the genre, it would be necessary to establish, in the Wrst place, that those pre-Rousseauian texts that constitute the ‘tradition’ were published, or at least disseminated to a signiWcant extent in manuscript form, within a reasonable amount of time of their having been written. And, as a corollary to this primary requirement, it would be incumbent upon a scholar who elects such an approach to provide some evidence of ‘vertical’ (temporally sequential) or ‘horizontal’ (contemporaneous) ‘intertextuality’ linking these various texts. Such evidence is, as has been noted, in the Western European development of the genre, markedly lacking; the random publication data of pre-Rousseauian autobiographical texts precluding ipso facto any degree of intertextuality, ‘horizontal’ or ‘vertical’.

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The relation of these pre-modern texts with post-Rousseauian autobiography is, at most, asymptotic; modern autobiographers, Rousseau included, deWne their own enterprises as against, rather than alongside, such works.65 The publication data of pre-modern Jewish autobiographical texts reveal a situation essentially identical in the Jewish as in the Western European development of the genre. The distinction, though, to be drawn between pre- and post-Rousseauian autobiographical productions is, in the Jewish context, if anything, more absolute. The timelag between the appearance of the Wrst post-Rousseaian autobiographical text and the emergence of an autobiographical discourse is, as has been noted above with regard to Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, greater in the Jewish case than in the larger European context. This time-lag is reflected in the publication history of pre-Rousseauian Jewish autobiographical texts.66 Whereas, in Western Europe, the process of publication, re-editing, and translation of pre-Rousseauian autobiographical texts is already under way by the mid-nineteenth century, this process really begins, in the Jewish intellectual ambience, only in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The existence of several of these pre-modern texts, for example, the Megillat ’Ahima’ats, with which Schwarz’s anthology opens, was not even suspected before the turn of the nineteenth century;67 others, especially those of Kabbalistic provenance, appear to have enjoyed only limited circulation in manuscript form before their being published for the Wrst time in the twentieth century.68 In the following survey of pre-modern Jewish autobiographical works, a line of continuity does emerge. But it is not, as the ‘tradition’ model would have it, a line extending from past to present; the temporal movement is, rather, counter-chronological, such continuity as may be perceived deriving ultimately from the nineteenth-century mind. The terms ‘autobiography’ and ‘autobiographical’ are thus adopted to refer to the texts here discussed for convenience sake and faute de mieux.69 It should, however, be noted that the adjective ‘autobiographical’, as employed in the present study, admits of a far greater degree of flexibility than does the noun from which it is derived. It is freely admitted that a text may be autobiographical—evince, that is, a measure of self-referentiality, concern for the self—without its being

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ipso facto an ‘autobiography’—a text, that is, that avails itself of speciWc conventions and strategies for the attainment of a speciWc and primary goal: literary presentation of the extra-textual self of the author.

Sephardic Origins I: Valley and Vision: Abraham Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon The autobiography of the sixteenth-century Italian Jew, Abraham Yagel, would appear to mark an auspicious point of departure for a study of the Jewish autobiographical genre. Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon (Valley of Vision—Isaiah 22:1) has been described as: Probably the Wrst autobiography to be written in Hebrew by a minor writer about a comparatively trivial life. . . . The focus is not upon any major historical event nor on the author’s participation in a noteworthy adventure. Yagel used the autobiographical form to express his misery and to complain about the injustice done to him. Due to its concentration of the personal, Gei’ hizzayon may be described as the Wrst autobiography to be written in Hebrew.70

Yosef Dan, from whose article in the Encyclopaedia Judaica the above citation is taken, essentially reiterates his assessment of Yagel’s contribution to Jewish autobiography in a more recent essay devoted to Gei’ hizzayon.71 Cecil Roth, in Wrst drawing scholarly attention to this apparently crucial text in the development of the Jewish autobiographical genre, lamented the critical neglect that the work has suVered.72 These centuries of neglect were compensated for in 1990, with the publication of David Ruderman’s translation of the full text with an introduction and compendious references, a hallmark of Jewish Renaissance scholarship.73 The Wrst part of the work, based upon an autograph manuscript found in Tiberias, was Wrst published in Alexandria in 1880;74 that is, roughly three hundred years after the book was written in a Mantuan jail in 157875; the second part has never been published in the Hebrew original. Another manuscript version of the work is extant in the British Museum.76 The printed Alexandria version is, as both Shulvass and Dan note, extremely rare and I have been unable to locate the book; it is due to the extreme rarity of the book that the majority of Dan’s treatment of the work actually consists of

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direct citations.77 Abraham Barukh Mani, the editor of this printed edition of Gei’ hizzayon, is mentioned in neither of the standard lexicons of Yiddish and Hebrew literature—by Reizen and Kressel, respectively; and, since the work was published in Egypt, it is fair to surmise that Mani had no links with the mainstream development of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in Eastern Europe. I have found no mention of Mani, nor of his edition of Gei’ hizzayon, in the literary sections of the leading Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; nor is Gei’ hizzayon mentioned in the works of those who would certainly have noted the book had it come to their attention—Abraham or David Kahana, M. Y. Berdichevsky, Letteris, Sh. D. Luzzatto, Shatsky, or Schwarz. It is in keeping with the obscurity of this text that Cecil Roth, who took an antiquarian’s delight in the discovery of the recondite and unsuspected, should have been one of the Wrst to draw attention to the work; absolute priority, in this respect, should probably be awarded Israel Zinberg, who devoted a brief excursus to Gei’ hizzayon in his Geshikhte.78 Whatever the merits of Gei’ hizzayon as a work of literature or as a historical document, publication data alone thus preclude the work from having exerted any influence upon Jewish autobiographical writing. Publication-data aside, it is very diYcult to square Yosef Dan’s description of the work ‘A watershed in the history of the autobiographical genre in Hebrew literature . . . the Wrst example of autobiography of a simple man, lacking literary, political, historical pretensions, whose concern is not with issues of universal signiWcance but with his small internal world’79—with David Ruderman’s authoritative edition of the text. Ruderman himself notes that not only did Yagel not ‘lack literary pretensions in shaping his autobiography’ but also the ‘simple man/’Adam pashut’ designation to Yagel is really a misnomer80: in the vision of the ‘Mother of All Languages’ recorded in this book, this ‘simple man’ enquires of her: ‘Why can one Wnd in Hebrew some words that appear to have been formed from another language, as you might say “pilegesh” (concubine) which is similarly called in the Greek and Latin languages as “pellex”, or “meretrix”, which also appears in the Roman language,’ et cetera!81 With respect to the claim that Yagel’s prime concern in Gei’ hizzayon—or, at least with the autobiographical sections of the work—is with the accounting of the ‘small internal world’

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of the author ‘not with issues of universal signiWcance’, this hardly accords with the larger design of the work, as a brief glance at the topical rubrics provided by Ruderman in his translation of the text demonstrates: ‘A Discussion on the Quest for Wisdom and the Purpose of Human Life’; ‘On Dying Before One’s Time’; ‘On the Belief in Metempsychosis’; ‘A Digression on the Soul and the Noahide Commandments’; ‘The Appearance of Angels and the Disclosure of Heavenly Secrets’; ‘The Third Woman’s Discourse on the Harmony of the Universe’.82 All of which begs the question: ‘What is Gei’ hizzayon?’ The structure of the Wrst part of Gei’ hizzayon, deWned by its Wrst editor as a ‘Book of Moral Instructions by Way of a Vision’,83 and by Yagel himself as ‘our sermon or homily’ (Derushenu),84 is as follows. In the opening section, the author gives an account of a dream that he had while in prison, in which he beheld his dead father, Jacob, ‘in a night vision’.85 Jacob, upon recognizing his son, requests him: ‘Now, tell me about yourself and why you were placed in this building.’86 Abraham is, initially, terror-stricken—all the more so when he tries to embrace his father and Wnds himself clutching at thin air. There ensues a dialogue between father and son culminating in Jacob’s inviting Abraham to a guided tour of the heavens, assuring him, meanwhile, that he will return him safely to his prison cell before dawn. Having successfully taken oV on their nocturnal tour of the ‘upper worlds’, Jacob repeats his request that his son ‘tell him everything from beginning to end, including all the disputes with my enemies that eventually led to the situation of my imprisonment’.87 Abraham’s airborne autobiographical narrative of his terrestrial woes is interrupted when he switches to relating what comes into view in the course of his flight in the supernal realms: the appearance of two souls, those of a schoolteacher and a gambler, each of whom, in a manner clearly resonant of Dante, goes on to relate his own potted autobiography.88 These souls having had their say, Abraham resumes his life-story, only to be interrupted again, a couple of pages hence, when ‘we heard a thunderous, screaming voice and noticed two men flying toward us, telling each other the story of their lives.’89 Prior to the recital of these vitae, however, there is interposed a philosophical dialogue between Abraham and Jacob on the topic of ‘Dying Before One’s Time’; actually, the ‘dialogue’ consists for the most part, as do the remaining exchanges be-

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tween father and son in this book, of a moralising monologue delivered by the father. The elements of Gei’ hizzayon are thus set in place: Yagel’s retrospective account of the events leading to his incarceration in the lower world; his contemporaneous account of the events unfolding before his eyes in the course of the night-flight; exemplary/cautionary lifeaccounts, as recounted by other departed souls encountered in the course of their journey; the father’s moralizing commentary. The overall structural composition of this work, as established in the Wrst part and maintained in the second, is essentially that of an ‘autobiography interruptus’, the ‘interruption’ actually far exceeding in scale the autobiographical consummation: in the second part of the book, Abraham manages to squeeze in only three pages of his life-history.90 Each element of the work, save for the autobiographical, which, as I shall argue below, really is sui generis, draws upon diVerent generic precedent: the depiction of the supernal worlds draws upon the Dantean tour and also Jewish mystical ascent literature; the tales recounted in the Wrst person by the various souls encountered bear the unmistakable imprint of the Italian Renaissance novella;91 the father’s speeches consist essentially of rabbinic commentary, at their worst, Pilpul; the lengthy discourses of the celestial women that dominate the second part of the book are written in the form of Kabbalistic theosophy. Indeed the most striking characteristic of Gei’hizzayon, in formal terms, is its sheer hybridity. It is not to be wondered at that Yagel’s prime metaphysical passion was ‘the ideal of interconnectedness . . . “the concatenation of the worlds and their interconnection” . . . the interconnectedness of all knowledge’.92 What then of this autobiography of Yagel’s for which such high claims are made, and how, given his conviction that ‘every process in the highest level of creation . . . has its analogue in the lowest levels as well,’93 does it ‘interconnect and concatenate’ with the remainder of the text? First, it should be noted that quantitatively speaking the autobiographical section of Yagel’s book, even though it provides some sort of structural peg for the work, does not constitute much more than a tenth of the entire text. From the onset, moreover, Yagel takes pains to distance himself from the autobiographical act; the autobiographical impulse derives not from Abraham himself, whose declared

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intention, at any rate, is to write a ‘sermon/homily’, but is, as it were, externalized in the Wgure of Jacob, the father, who demands some autobiographical reckoning from his incarcerated son. Phenomenologically speaking, there is an analogue here between the father’s cajoling autobiographical narrative from his son and the importunate friends/admirers so often encountered in later autobiographical discourse, who prevail upon the seemingly reluctant autobiographer to write of himself. Deference to father notwithstanding, Abraham, by contrast to later autobiographers whose consent is easily gained, evinces a marked reluctance to ‘tell his father about himself ’: I answered: ‘My Master, if you are God’s emissary, you surely must know what happens on earth. Why do you ask me? Is it to remind me of the sorrows I have encountered? Is it to keep me from asking you my questions about the matters of that world to which you belong, or [about the] other subjects concerning the secrets of nature and creation which our blessed sages called ma’aseh bereshit and ma’aseh merkavah?’94

Rather than a release, a cathartic unburdening of the woes of the individual to a sympathetic ear, Yagel here construes autobiographical speaking/writing as a penance: ‘Is it to remind me of the sorrows I have encountered?’ et cetera. Moreover, Yagel leaves little doubt concerning the relative status the autobiographical is to be accorded in the exposition that is to follow: it is an unwelcome distraction from what is of real and pressing concern to the author—matters concerning not the infernal realm of illusion, but the thereafter, the origins and structure of the universe as this is contained in Kabbalistic speculations concerning ‘creation’ (Ber’eshit) and Ezekiel’s ‘chariot’ (Merkavah). Yagel’s declared intellectual and literary preferences are thus the converse of those of modern commentators, who have singled this text out for appraisal and approval precisely on account of its autobiographical aspect. Yagel’s ambivalence/unease with respect to autobiographical reading and writing is further manifested and explored subsequently in Gei’ hahizzayon. One of the most aVecting autobiographical passages in the work, Book II of Gei’ hizzayon, opens with Yagel’s depiction of his practice, in the prison compound, of reading ‘from the Book of Psalms during the watches of the night’. ‘On one night’, he relates:

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When I reached the psalm [which begins]: ‘A song of ascents. In my distress I [I called] to the Lord, etc.,’ my eyes flowed with tears since I realized that the words of this psalm alluded to me. I was like a docile sheep led to the slaughter. I did not realize the deceit that they had cast around my legs nor the plots they had fashioned against me . . . [I would continue to interpret the psalm:] ‘A warrior’s sharp arrows’ [that is], your [Eliezer Almagiati’s] mouth, utters deceit and injustice like sharp arrows that emerge stealthily from the quiver of a mighty warrior [and] which murder at a distance anyone who is not careful of them . . . ‘Too long have I dwelt’ with the evil and cruelty that he [Almagiati] has proclaimed while sickness and wounds are before me constantly . . . 95

The relish behind this deliciously vengeful depiction of projection of the autobiographical self upon the psalmist’s ‘I’ is palpable. But every pleasure has its price. And, Yagel continues: While I was still alone, speaking these thoughts to myself, and while I was so distressed, murmuring, wailing and mourning, as tears descended from my eyes in a running stream, I fell asleep and beheld [a vision] in a dream of three women coming toward me in the company of my father . . . The image of the Wrst woman was that of a very distinguished noblewoman whose face was precious and whose eyes glowed and shined beyond human estimation. But their [the eyes’] pride was trouble and sorrow. The person who looked, gazed, and reflected on them was caught in the net of her love because they were so exceedingly beautiful. Indeed, certain poisonous sparks emerged and were diVused from them [the eyes] . . . and they cast gall on him . . . She also was dangerous, changing, like clay under the sea, into several forms before my eyes. Sometimes she appeared as large as giants who seize the globe of the sun, and sometimes as small as those people who live in the land of the graveyard . . . 96

Selected and truncated as it is, the above bizarrely sexualized passage— perhaps here as elsewhere in Yagel’s depictions of the ladies of the nightvision, the sexual frustration of a prisoner Wnds concealed autobiographical expression—gives some idea of the acute ambivalence with which Yagel greets the Hebrew avatar of Boethius’ ‘Lady Philosophy’.97 And while Boethius’ Lady Philosophy’s Wrst measure is to banish the ‘Muses of Poetry’, ‘these whores from the theatre’ from the sick

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bed of her former ward,98 it is rather the autobiographical muse that Yagel’s altogether more terrifying First Lady wills Wrst and foremost to dispel. ‘I arose,’ Yagel recounts, ‘and went with my father to the Weld where these serene and successful ladies were sitting . . . We came closer and the Wrst woman spoke’: Who gave man a mouth and who permitted him to preach flawed homilies as you do this day, interpreting the psalms and the words of the prophets to apply to your suVering and pain? Aren’t these the words of the living God which refer to higher concepts that are revealed in allusions? It is like what the divine sage, the beloved member of my sister’s household, said: ‘Woe to the person who regards the Torah as [a book] of mere tales and ordinary matters!’ If this were so, we might even write a Torah today dealing in such matters . . . Thus you have acted foolishly in doing two evil things: Wrst, what I have already said to you, and second that you should not have become excited. A person should not cry nor mourn about anything that happens to him, as women and children do and like any lightheaded person . . . Similarly, [one should not] compose poems about his miseries . . . If a person experiences a hardship or tragedy aVecting his children or friends or something else, he might expound [the psalm] in a faulty manner for himself as if the poet only wrote this particular psalm for this speciWc matter. Consequently, he might not direct his attention to understand intelligently what is actually hinted there . . . 99

Thus chastised by this vehemently anti-autobiographical diatribe, Yagel eVectively shuts up about himself for the remainder of Gei’ hizzayon, with the exception of his bringing an extremely accelerated conclusion to his entire personal saga, again at the express prompting of his father, in a matter of three and a half pages.100 Lest we be swayed by Yagel’s amazing description of the darkly fascinating ‘Wrst woman’, it is as well to remember that she, as is the father, and as are all of the other phantasmagoric Wgures of Gei’ hizzayon, is a shadow-Wgure cast upon a prison-cell wall—by the projecting light of the author’s imagination. Likewise, the anti-autobiographical sentiments voiced by this female Wnd their origins somewhere in their author, Yagel’s, highly conflicted relationship with his own undeniable stirrings toward autobiographical self-expression. Yagel’s notable un-

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ease in yielding to the strongly felt imperative to ‘cry and mourn’ autobiographically about the ‘hardship or tragedy’ that had encountered him, can only have been exacerbated by the lack of precedent, indigenous or Jewish, for the type of life-writing he would undertake. Instructive here is the contrast aVorded by the seeming lack of concern with which Yagel appropriates several very racy and ethically dubious Italian novellas to his narrative; he goes so far as to put one of them in the mouth of Job, who, appropriating the tale autobiographically, himself becomes a player in the plot! Concerning Yagel’s appropriation from a contemporary Italian source of a tale describing ‘the horriWc vengeance of the woman who blinds her husband’s murderer before killing herself ’, David Ruderman writes: The connection between the story’s plot and Yagel’s moral is exceedingly weak but it did not deter him from using it. By allowing himself a little latitude regarding the details of the story, Yagel may have intended to shock his reader and reinforce his proper behavior. Alternatively, he may simply have enjoyed titillating him with the sordid details of the narrative. In either case, he assumed, it was just a story, not real life.101

A third alternative, I would suggest, bearing in mind what has been said above concerning the depiction of women encountered in the night-vision, is that Yagel, writing in jail, may Wnd in the retelling of such tales some release from sexual frustration. Yagel’s lassitude when it comes to fabulistic excursion and his stringency when it comes to the autobiographical may partially be explained by the fact that whereas for the latter there was no real precedent, for the former, the precedent was considerable. Thus Ruderman points out that in his ‘utilization of Italian novelle’ Yagel is actually heir to a rich tradition of Hebrew and Yiddish compositions appearing from the early Middle Ages on that incorporated stories and folktales, ‘including tales of a sexual nature’, within a Judaic framework.102 Sixteenth-century Italy provided especially fertile ground for the incorporation of European novelistic elements in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, as exempliWed in the Yiddish romances of Eliyahu Bokher (1468–1549).103 But what precedent was there for incorporation of autobiographical narrative within a ‘sermon’ or Kabbalistic/philosophical enquiry—especially an autobiographical

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narrative of so gritty, down-to-earth a nature as that of Yagel’s? Ruderman, in his discussion of ‘Gei’ hizzayon as an Early Modern Autobiography’, notes that only two Jewish texts oVer some kind of precedent to Yagel’s autobiographical excursion: David Reubeni’s diary and Josel of Rosheim’s Sefer hamiqneh. But quite aside from the fact that these texts have little in common with each other and, if anything, less with Gei’ hizzayon, neither of them had been published in Yagel’s lifetime. Yosef Dan’s claim—on the basis of Gei’ hizzayon, Reubeni’s diary and the eyewitness account of the Ferrara earthquake with which Azariah de Rossi prefaces his Me ’or ’eynayyim—that ‘autobiography is one of the most cultivated branches of Hebrew literature in Italy from the time of the Renaissance onwards’—is thus misleading.104 With respect to the possibility of Italian Renaissance precedent, Ruderman concludes that ‘the self-portraits of Cellini and Cardano . . . appear to have little in common with Yagel’s composition’—but, then again, neither text was published in Yagel’s lifetime. Proximate autobiographical precedent thus eliminated, Ruderman comes to the conclusion that the prime model for Yagel’s autobiographical exercise is Augustine’s Confessions: ‘Like the Christian confessional, Yagel’s reconstruction of his past constitutes a formal self-examination, a systematic rehearsal of his transgressions, and an ultimate surrender of the self by acknowledging his complete dependence on God. Yagel alleviates his guilt by confessing it and is ultimately consoled by a higher revelation, a divine enlightenment that oVers him a new perspective.’105 Ruderman’s claim for Augustinian precedent is buttressed by the fact that Yagel does make speciWc reference—rare in Jewish writings until modern times—to the Confessions in Gei’ hizzayon. In my view, however, Yagel’s autobiographical narrative does not square at all with the Augustinian confessional, nor is this narrative nearly so integrated within the overall structure of Gei’ hizzayon as Ruderman’s assessment would suggest. First of all, Yagel—at least as he presents himself to us—is a man far more sinned against than sinning. The tone of his self-account is, throughout, one of an aggrieved innocent, on the model more of Job than of Augustine, who pleads his case before man and God in the form of a forensic apologia; his admissions amount to little more than lack of business experience and naivety.106 The putative iniquities for which the father berates him and

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counsels remedial repentance, glad acceptance of suVerings, and return to the Lord are entirely unacknowledged in his autobiographical narration. Augustine, by contrast, seizes upon the childhood theft of a pear as occasion to expatiate famously and mightily on the vile depravity of his former self prior to miraculous divine intervention. Nor has Yagel experienced a conversion in his lifetime of such magnitude that past and present selves are separated by a chasm. He thus does not, as does Augustine, subsequent to his conversion and now standing on the grounds of eternity, survey his past fallen self with revulsion. Feet Wrmly implanted on the floor of a prison cell, there is nothing measured nor restrained, nor I think ‘systematic’, in Yagel’s reliving of the disastrous series of business deals that landed him where he is. Emitted within a situation of dire existential urgency, Yagel’s account is by turns ejaculatory, perseverative, confusing—especially so when the desperately self-exculpatory author reconstructs with obsessive detail the calumnies, squabbles, unbelievably convoluted deals, with all of the attendant ‘he said/she saids’, that led him to the dire straits in which he Wnds himself.107 A random series of examples: My father, surely notice how they snared me like a bird and they plotted maliciously against me. From the beginning to the end of the aVair, see how they tried to destroy me for no reason and how they tried to return evil for the good I did them and for which I endangered my life, as you have heard. All the elders of my town know, God also knows and bears witness, and Israel too shall know that it isn’t enough that these men harmed me and instigated all that happened to me . . . According to the mores of any nation or people, one is forbidden to initiate anything during the time of the mediation [Compromesso]. When someone comes to pay his creditor from what he possesses or from what he has deposited as a pawn against his wife’s marriage contract, you take it but have compassion upon him and don’t mash his blood . . . as those men did . . . So I have complaints about these men and especially about the woman standing next to me in this place, who sold me to an Ashkenazic people and to a stranger who did not know me. A peel of garlic is just as important to him as quenching his thirst . . . And she [Rina] did not recall what I had done on her behalf either before this aVair or after, when Almagiati began his libel, as I have said . . . If babes weened from milk would know of all these developments from beginning to end—as

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little as I have told you, since it is impossible to relate everything— they would cry on my account for the great wrong done me . . . As for me, I will hope always and my eyes are ever before the Lord . . . He will gather up my soul from among sinners whose hands are full of bribes. I shall walk without blame and say tasteful things . . . 108

This is the voice of an extremely agitated man; Yagel clearly, to apply the auto-critique as projected by him within the speech of the ‘Wrst woman’ in Book II, as cited above, has ‘become excited’. This ‘excitement’ expresses itself in a marked breakdown in the decorum of the prose of Gei’ hizzayon: the shrillness, imprecatory interjections, selfrepetition, syntactical awkwardness, ellipses, colloquiality and recourse to Italian vocabulary decisively single out the autobiographical passages of Gei’ hizzayon, on the stylistic register, from the remainder of the text.109 For example, in addition to the passage cited immediately above: In the end, I told the honorable R. Gershon Porto that I would not be a spoiler any longer if they would just give me the money for the right of possession [of the bank] and forget the eighty scudi . . . Moreover, when I realized his [Almagiati’s] evil intentions, I warned him through the aforementioned men not to devise harm against me: ‘Not only does he think [such] thoughts, but so do I, and we shall see which one comes to pass. Don’t allow me to be handed over to disperazione [desperation] lest evil befall us . . . ’110

Lack of precedent for the encasing of personal experience in Hebrew prose, on the one hand, pressing (Italian) existential urgency—one may well imagine Yagel’s ‘warning’ to Almagiati being delivered in the semi-castrato rasp of Marlon Brando’s ‘godfather’—on the other, may provide some accounting for this stylistic disequilibrium. Yagel’s autobiographical apologia thus injects considerable discord into a text that had it narrowed its sights to ‘questions about’ the supernal world, ‘subjects concerning the secrets of nature and creation’ et cetera would have, in Yagel’s terminology, ‘concatenated and interconnected’ far more eVectively. That Yagel himself, both in his own voice and surrogate voices, expresses reservations within the text concerning his autobiographical narrative, suggests that he was aware of this, and indeed rued it. Nonetheless, the urgency of the autobiographical im-

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perative evidently overrode these considerations. The autobiographical narrative having been admitted, however, exercises a pervasive destabilizing eVect upon Gei’ hizzayon. Yagel’s very real and justiWed existential anguish/disperazione, the very brute nature of the reality he depicts in his autobiographical narrative, exercises considerable gravitational pressure upon the free flight of story, vision, intellectual speculation that characterizes the remainder of the text. This destabilizing tension between the upper and lower worlds and their narratives is apparent from the onset. It is encoded in the contrast between the embodied/corporeal (Abraham, the son, and his earthly narrative) and the disembodied/spiritual (Jacob, the father, and his celestial narrative). Thus Jacob opens his Wrst speech to his incarcerated son, with the following thoroughly neo-Platonic counsel: ‘Your soul possesses faith, intelligence and wisdom, but as long as you are captive in the tresses of matter, you will never be able to know anything clearly in all its dimensions, since your body and your corporeality oppress you. Your soul is most influenced by all that transpires in your body. How then can you understand profound matters while it [your soul] is captive in tresses?’111 If the above is true, this would eVectively entirely delegitimize Yagel’s autobiographical narrative: as a narrative of an embodied mortal concerning the very material ‘tresses’ that same mortal became ensnared in, it is of necessity worthless and purblind— doubly so, in fact, when it is remembered that Yagel’s ‘tresses of matter’, as represented by the physical body, are further conWned within prison walls. Souls, in themselves, construed as articulate entities released from all accidental restraints imposed upon the free flight of the mind by the human body, surely provide an inviting prospect indeed for the prisoner. Oscar Wilde, for example, thought deeply of Dante while incarcerated in Reading Jail. For all this, Yagel expresses resistance to his father’s neo-Platonic scheme of things and a marked reluctance to surrender his captive body to the spirit-world of inWnite freedom. Thus, at a certain juncture of Jacob’s dialogue with Abraham prior to the night-flight, it appears as if Jacob is inviting his son to give up the ghost: ‘This is the path you should follow to acquire knowledge. Then the mysteries of wisdom will be revealed to you daily according to your

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mind’s capacity for wisdom . . . You will understand from study what is required of you, and your soul will acquire much integrity until [Wnally] your body returns to God, who bestowed it. Then, in plain sight, all the hidden things in life will be revealed to you, without any doubt. But now get ready to approach me, if you desire, to wander with me this evening so that we might talk and we might proWt.’ I asked: ‘My father, my master, please inform me how I will be able to roam since I have no wings to fly in heaven.’ He responded: ‘This [your] body will remain here, on the bed in this building, in its place, while your soul comes with me; for without the body, it cannot be restrained from going.’ I then replied: ‘My master, don’t ask my soul to separate itself from this matter [body]. I am still young and it [my soul] has not yet acquired its complete reWnement; moreover, I have young children. If the decree [of death] has arrived at the right time, remove all false judgment and I shall be ready. However, if it is not so and my time to die has not yet come, let my soul remain with me for some more days and years until the time of its passing away.’ He then answered: ‘Do not be concerned, my son! I do not wish to separate it [your soul] from you at this time, but [I wish] only to roam [with you] and talk to you and to restore it [your soul] as it was before morning.’112

But Abraham’s concerns are still by no means allayed: ‘How can noncorporeal entities speak?’ he asks, incurring a nasty and irritable rejoinder from the father; ‘this garment with which you will clothe my disembodied soul—is it of suYcient duress to ensure return to the body?’ ‘Be strong and of good courage and do not be fainthearted’, Jacob coaxes his reluctant son, ‘Come with me and I will [eventually] return you to your cell.’ ‘I then declared’, reports the still wary Abraham, ‘I am ready for your command, and where you shall go, I shall go, only guard my soul. But please inform me that your words are sincere . . . ’113 Abraham thus would rather be soul and body conjoined within the conWnes of a prison cell than enjoy more than very temporary sojourn in the realm of ultimate verities that the father, no longer, as he says elsewhere, suVering ‘imprisonment in the mire and Wlth of the body when living on earth’,114 aviates at random. What is of signiWcance here is that a certain oppositional tension has been set up from the onset between

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spirit and body, the upper and lower worlds, and their respective narratives. Mikhail Bakhtin notes just such a tension in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and his comments are uncannily applicable to Gei’ hizzayon: It is as if such stories as Francesca and Paolo, or Count Ugolino and the Archbishop Ruggieri, are horizontal time-saturated branches at right angles to the extratemporal vertical of the Dantesque world. This is the source of the extraordinary tension that pervades all of Dante’s world. It is the result of a struggle between living historical time and the extratemporal other-worldly ideal. The vertical, as it were, compresses within itself the horizontal, which powerfully thrusts itself forward. There is a contradiction, an antagonism between the form-generating principle of the whole and the historical and temporal form of its separate parts.115

This oppositional tension is also to be noted in the relationship between father and son: they have scarcely had time to reacquaint themselves with each other before Jacob becomes snappy and impatient in his rejoinders to Abraham: ‘What foolishness you speak!’; ‘Your ears should listen to what comes out of your mouth!’; ‘I am truly surprised by these comments and by this question! How can you be so foolish to ask?’116 The father, Jacob’s, irascibility and evident impatience extend themselves to his reception of his son’s life-history. Thus, Abraham, in giving account of the one-sided Wnancial arrangement that impossible circumstances compelled him to enter into between himself and his nemesis, ‘Madame Rina’, is called short by the following interjection: ‘My father then remarked: “If your stupidity and lack of understanding led you to provide all of this, how could you complain about this [arrangement]? Doesn’t it state in Scripture that “a man’s folly subverts his way”? You should have Wrst consulted wise and understanding men; they would have instructed you in the strategy you should have chosen, since “there is victory with a multitude of counselors.”’ This is consolation on a par to that oVered Job by his counselors in adversity, and Abraham in his response, basing himself not upon abstract principle nor scriptural prooftext but upon the authority of lived, personal experience, casts the father in as unfavorable a light as these Biblical precursors:117 ‘I responded: “Pay attention, my master, if my words seem sincere to you. I was then like a person

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sinking in the river . . . I utterly had no support nor any escape. I was pressured to lend money; the ledger was open and I couldn’t Wnd a partner . . . ”’118 The above exchange reflects in microcosm a more fundamental rift in the poetic, stylistic and intellectual structure of Gei’ hizzayon: the two dominant narrative voices of this text, that of the son providing autobiographical testimony, and that of the father with his moralizing commentary, do not complement, but rather mutually subvert each other. Moralizing discourse, of its very nature, robs the document vecu of its speciWcity: The very function of the father’s discourse is to deindividualize his son’s autobiographical narrative by extrapolating from it, through copious availment of scriptural example, timeless, trans-personal verities of a Jewish/universal moral code.119 Thus, notwithstanding the maieutic design of the work, there is no real dialogue between the celestial commentary of the spirit and the terrestrial narrative of the body; each, rather, goes its own way regardless of the other—‘valley’ and ‘vision’ do not meet. Jacob, indeed, is, on occasion, implicitly disparaging of his son’s autobiographical narrative. Thus, in the Wfth of the seventeen moral lessons he draws from the women’s stories in Book I, we read: ‘Fifth, one should be accustomed to saying about any occurrence that whatever happens, God does it for good reason, as it is written: “I came upon trouble and sorrow and I invoked the name of the Lord.” . . . Subsequently, a person will not become excited or confused. If a greater eVort needs to be expended, he shall do what he can while God will do what is good in His eyes . . . This is not the case for a person harried with sorrow and lament as the second woman behaved, whose heart sank in utter dismay. What is she capable of doing in her grief when God turned away from her? The Divine Presence is only present in happiness. [If one asks] “What does happiness accomplish?” [one might retort] “What harm does it do?” On the contrary, when someone is excited and is consumed with grief, his vital strength is weakened and the bearer [of this grief] is harmed, as it is written: “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small indeed.” [Similarly, it is written] “Leave the drunkard alone; he will fall by himself.” Ben Sira likewise declared: “SuVer not grief to enter the heart, for grief kills the strongest men.”’120

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And, at the opening of Part II, in very similar key, Jacob expresses open impatience with Abraham, who has been ‘excited’—‘distressed, murmuring, wailing, and mourning, as tears descended from my eyes in a running stream’—and his self-piteous account of his woes, especially since the boy’s faint-heartedness delays the visionary encounter with the ‘three women’ whose intellectual and physical endowments provide the focus of this section of the work. Abraham, upon beholding the ‘great sight’ of these women becomes ‘stricken’ and ‘ill’, and ‘not allowing myself to gaze at these women’, he falls into a ‘torpor greater than sleep’. ‘Arise’, exhorts the father: ‘Approach these women. Surely they will teach you and inform you, speaking out of their understanding.’ I answered my father: ‘I am a young boy, despised and forsaken by men. How can I speak before them? I also am distraught and remain in dread of all my suVering’ . . . My father responded: ‘How long will you speak these things and not forget about your complaint and your misery? Please gird your loins like a man and come with us and let us go into the Weld in the company of these noblewomen, as is our custom. They have strength and understanding to fathom what God does in heaven and on earth, and nothing they propose is impossible to them. If they reprove you with an open rebuke, [you should know] that even a fool who keeps silent is deemed wise. Just as there is hope for a tree, that if it is cut down, it will renew itself, so it is for a person who keeps silent and listens and drinks with thirst the words of the wise and their secrets.’121

Thus, autobiographical silence is deemed as a prerequisite for the reception of higher celestial wisdom; all this messy business with Yagel’s perWdious banking-partner Madame Rina, the strong-arm Almagiati brothers and their rackety crew referred to collectively as the ‘dancing satyrs’,122 thus constitutes an interruption, essentially, to the higher discourse that it is the purpose of the text to convey. David Ruderman draws a parallel in this respect between Gei’ hizzayon and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy; he cites Seth Lehrer to the eVect that Boethius ‘grows from a writer of complaint to a reader of moral fable . . . from his Wrst, insecure autobiographical statements . . .

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towards a conWdent reading of mythological poetry’.123 The parallels are indeed striking. But the transition in Gei’ hizzayon from ‘complaint/ insecure autobiography’ to ‘conWdent reading of mythological poetry’ strikes me as altogether more agonistic, problematic and ultimately questionable than with Boethius’ work. First of all, the autobiographical voice in Yagel’s work is far more naggingly insistent and persistent than it is in Boethius’ Consolation. Boethius gives a well-organized and brief ‘account of his public career and especially of the causes of his present misery’, Wrmly based upon the conventions of classical forensic rhetoric, in Book I of the Consolation and does not return to consistent autobiographical narrative for the remainder of the work. Yagel, by contrast, persists doggedly in the account of the ‘causes of his present misery’, at intervals, pretty much through the duration of Gei’ hizzayon. More signiWcant, however, than the merely quantitative comparison: the two levels of discourse in Yagel’s text—the ‘upper’ and the ‘lower’, physical/metaphysical—bear far more complex and ambivalent relations to each other than is true of the Consolation. Gei’ hizzayon is a deeply self-divided text in a way that Boethius’ Consolation is not. In the Consolation Boethius’ vita soon gives way to metaphysical speculation and the raw data of the life-history become transformed to philosophical allegory, to the extent that the existential predicament of its author’s incarceration becomes quite eclipsed: ‘The author’s own literal imprisonment’, writes one editor of Boethius’ Consolation, ‘becomes a Wgure of the soul’s imprisonment in the body, the bondage imposed by the demands of the passions, the enslavement to Fortune and her deceitful favors. His exile from Rome represents his separation from the true country of the mind, a self-imposed wandering in an alien land of temporary satisfactions . . . ’124 In Gei’ hizzayon, this etherealization of the base, osmosis of the data of the life-history to their archetypal philosophical categories, is scarcely eVected; this is graphically illustrated in the concluding section of the son’s life-story in Part II of Gei’ hizzayon. In the upper realms, father and son are engaged in an extremely high-flown conversation concerning whether the three celestial women they have encountered should be viewed as allegories or real spiritual entities. Their intellectual ascent is paralleled by a physical ascent, as they ‘take the path that leads to the hill of frank-

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incense, the place where the three sisters whom you saw dwell’.125 The contrast aVorded all this by the dismal conclusion of Yagel junior’s autobiographical narration related during this ascent ‘to the hidden parts of the mountain leading to its summit’126 is stark. Everything goes from bad to worse and the tribulations he relates are anything but allegorical: having served his sentence in Luzzara, Yagel falls victim to the machinations of Madame Rina and the Almagiatis and winds up being reincarcerated on trumped-up charges in Mantua; released on bail, he has not gone ‘four cubits’ before he is arrested once more, tried and found guilty on further charges lodged by one of the Almagiatis, and thrown back in jail. Yagel, as autobiographical narrator, does not even attempt to provide these events with any redemptive gloss. Indeed, his commentary concerning the theological implications of his Mantuan catastrophe is very dark: it provides a sort of dystopian counterpart to the ‘discourse on the harmony of the universe’ and the special role of Israel in ensuring this harmony, as delivered later on the same (second) evening by the ‘third woman’, personifying ‘the divine science, the Torah which God gave to His chosen people’.127 Thus: I responded to my father: ‘My master knew how I was brought to prison initially. You shall see even more terrible abominations of which the nations will be dismayed. All the laws of heaven that have existed from former times of yore for [all] those [people] who dwell from here to the rivers of Kush called Barbary are equivalent to the evil deeds that those men did to me. Maimonides expressed this well in the Moreh [nevukhim] . . . [when he declared] that this perfect human form that does not protect its [divine] image in seeking to reach perfection might [also] utilize intelligence to cause evil, an evil worse than that of the animals in the forest. Everything that is diminished tends to its opposite and the opposite of complete good is complete evil. Therefore, do not be surprised about the people of Israel. As long as they do not observe the divine commandments, when they are aroused, their intelligence will despise their image and will be overturned in materiality to a quality worse than that of all peoples and cultures. The intelligence and thought that was capable of receiving perfection but will not reach [it], will be employed for all kinds of evil devices. While sitting at the table together, each person will lie

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to his neighbor with a slippery, deceitful and false tongue. [All this] instead of the [acts of the] remnant of Israel, which shall do no wrong and speak no falsehood.’128

The inability of the celestial/metaphysical/theological narrative to incorporate the autobiographical narrative that issues from the depths of the ‘valley’, and vice versa, rends a tear in the text of Gei’ hizzayon, a tear that does not receive suture. Consider the conclusion of the work: is it really true that Yagel, like Boethius, attains ultimately to the ‘turning away from the voices of men to the inner voice of the self or God’, and ‘Wnally reaches the stage’, as Ruderman writes, ‘of what Joseph Mazzeo calls a “rhetoric of silence” ’,129 acceptance of his lot and ‘irrepressible optimism in facing the future’?130 I am not so sure. The ‘third woman’ of Gei’ hizzayon, unlike Boethius’ ‘Lady Philosophy’, does not reach the crowning peroration of her discourse by which ‘consolation’ is aVorded, calm cast upon troubled nether waters by a super-terrestrial perspective. Such closure is deferred: ‘Leave’, the ‘third woman’ addresses the Yagels, in a strangely flirtatious and provocative summation: ‘Go and don’t be late. The way is long and it has already reached the end of the third watch [of the night] when the wife speaks with her husband and the infant nurses the breasts of his mother. You will see them and their treasure houses on another occasion. I will also Wnish speaking with you about the subjects of the worlds and the soul of man for I have still said nothing to you except for a little about the body and its shape and the form of its organs. Even the small amount that I spoke is like a drop in the bucket and like a drop of water in the sea.’131

It is the autobiographical voice of the Yagel incarcerated in the lower realms, not the ‘rhetoric of silence’ of the airborne Yagel, serene now in the assurance of the wisdom he has imbibed in the course of the ‘night vision’, that reverberates hauntingly from the indeterminate, if not decisively downbeat, closing paragraph of Gei’ hizzayon: In the meantime, while this woman spoke these words to me, I turned from side to side to see my father, but lo and behold, he disappeared completely from my sight. I rose to ask for him, for I was afraid to stand there alone in that place. I called him with a loud

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voice but there was no answer until my throat became parched because of the shouting and I awoke. I saw myself on my bed in jail [as I had been] before. I looked and, alas, the day had arrived and it was already time for the recitation of the Shema [prayer] of the morning service.132

Gei’ hizzayon is thus a text at war with itself and the center does not hold: the autobiographical narrative and the visionary/moralistic Derush hold an ironic, distorting mirror the one to the other. On the one hand, the lofty, irenic discourse of the upper spheres reveals the autobiographical narrative as shabby, base and irredeemably mucky, perseverative, self-serving and inelegantly related by the ‘over-excited’ Abraham Yagel in the heat of distress. On the other hand, the Job-like existential urgency of Yagel’s account of his calamities reveals the father’s ponderous moralizing, with which it is interpolated, as sanctimonious, pontiWcating, long-winded and, on occasion, even somewhat callous.133 From the perspective of early-modern Jewish autobiography, it is precisely the dissonance of this text that evinces itself both at the formal and intellectual/psychological level that is most fascinating and most revealing. Unable to avail himself of any precedent for autobiographical discourse, yet compelled by the overwhelming imperative of forensic self-accounting, Yagel inserts his autobiographical account into genres with which he is familiar—Hebrew and Yiddish ‘moralistic story books’,134 rabbinic/Kabbalistic disquisition, heavenly ascent literature, racy Renaissance novellae—and the overall result is jarring and disorienting. It is no coincidence that the recurring structural theme of this self-disputatious text is, as has been noted above, the interruption. SigniWcant, however, is that, following upon the Wnal interruption of the text by which the ‘third woman’s’ ‘Wnal revelations on the secrets of the palace’ is brought to a premature halt, it is the autobiographical voice of the prisoner yelling into the void that has the Wnal word. What more Wtting emblem could there be for this cry of selfhood bursting to escape from the generic barriers to such expression oVered him by the literary models of his day? What, then, is this bizarre generic montage that is Gei’ hizzayon? It is by now a commonplace that the meaning, or one amongst a plurality of meanings of a literary work, resides not solely in the text, but arises rather from the dialogic encounter with the reader; yet it is hard

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to construe Gei’ hizzayon as autobiography pure and simple without severely compromising the generic classiWcation, or Yagel’s composition—or both. It would be harder still to spell out with any precision what are the formal, thematic, and psychological aYnities that bind Gei’ hizzayon to other Jewish autobiographical texts of Italian Renaissance provenance. It is only, I would argue, the unprecedentedly heightened autobiographical consciousness of the twentieth- and twenty-Wrstcentury reader that ultimately constitutes this strange, thoroughly egregious text as an autobiography. It is surely telling that the copyist of the British Museum manuscript of Gei’ hizzayon ‘obviously considered the autobiographical sections to be unnecessary and omitted them’.135 Yagel himself, who published, it should be noted, three books in his lifetime,136 and who may well have entertained hopes of publishing Gei’ hizzayon too, would have surely been flattered, though also somewhat bemused, by the publication, in English, of an extensively annotated critical edition of this his literary Wrstling. Gei’ hizzayon is, after all, as Ruderman points out, ‘certainly a youthful indulgence, stimulated by an ugly taste of “the real world” . . . As the work of a twentyWve year old, it lacks the vast erudition and mature insight of Yagel’s later writings.’137 Yagel may well have wondered why such critical attention and intellectual labor—including that by the present writer— were not devoted to two ‘most important works, the unpublished Beit ya’ar halevanon . . . and Be’er sheva’ . . . massive encyclopedias of the sciences of his day’.138 To judge from the remainder of his works and his intellectual universe as this is so masterfully depicted by Ruderman, he probably would have viewed Gei’ hizzayon as a juvenile prototype of his later encyclopaedias: indeed, the work taken as a whole does approximate more closely to an encyclopaedia/treasury than to any other literary form, analogous to the ‘treasure-house’ of the ‘third woman’, emblematic of the ‘connectedness of all knowledge’.139 And yet, the existential anguish of that voice echoing within the four walls of the Luzzara jail does somehow resonate through the centuries, shattering the wall of time that separates us from Yagel; this precisely in its breaking free of the impersonality of the regnant modes of literary discourse of his day and of the larger palatial design of Gei’ hizzayon itself. Thus the Wnal verse of Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’, the most influential twentieth-century minstrel lament of the ‘prisoner’,

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literal and metaphorical (metaphorical, mainly), echoes that echo of Yagel’s from the Luzzara jail and reverberates oddly: Standing next to me in this lonely crowd, Is a man who swears he’s not to blame, All day long I hear him shout so loud, Crying out that he was framed.140

Sephardic Origins II: ‘Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard’: Yehudah Aryeh Modena’s Hayyei yehudah Yehudah Aryeh Modena’s Hayyei yehudah has, for some time now, been recognised as constituting a landmark in the history of Jewish autobiography. Along with Gluckel of Hameln’s Memoirs, Hayyei yehudah is generally considered one of the few ‘pearls’ of pre-modern Jewish autobiographical literature. In terms of formal and thematic innovation, Modena’s Hayyei yehudah actually assumes even greater prominence in Jewish literary—as opposed to linguistic, socio-economic et cetera— history than do Gluckel’s Memoirs: ‘Probably the most representative work of the genre and literally the best-developed autobiography written during the Middle Ages is Hayyei yehudah . . . The sincere revelation of the inner self in Modena’s account has not been equalled by any Hebrew writer until modern times.’141 And, whereas Gluckel’s Memoirs, as shall be seen, present a more or less isolated phenomenon in Jewish literary history and are recognized as such, Modena’s Hayyei yehudah, so it is held, represents but one—albeit exemplary—instance of a more diVuse and widespread impulse toward autobiographical self-expression that manifested itself in Hebrew literature of the Italian Renaissance period. Formulations such as these are not free from a logical contradiction: if Hayyei yehudah is so paradigmatic and ‘representative’, how come it is so ‘unequalled’/exceptional that as Cecil Roth writes, ‘we have far more intimate details’ concerning the life of Modena ‘than is the case with any other person of his age’?142 More than this, it has recently been claimed that the Jewish autobiographical ‘chain of tradition’ extends, by subterranean channels not accounted for, from Hayyei yehudah to Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte—even though Modena’s work, as shall be seen below, was not published at the time

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Maimon wrote his autobiography. ‘Maimon’s autobiography’, writes Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘owes much to Enlightenment experiences and models, but it was also nourished by some of the experiences and rhetoric and self-exploration that the reader will meet in Leon Modena’s Life of Judah’.143 The above assessment testiWes more to the subliminal appeal and sheer tenacity of the ‘tradition’/continuity model for the study of Jewish autobiography than it does to its inherent strengths. Leaving aside the putative correspondences between Hayyei yehudah and the Lebensgeschichte, the distinctions between Hayyei yehudah and its more proximate relative Gei’ hizzayon far outweigh, as Ruderman notes, the similarities between these two texts.144 Hayyei yehudah does share with Gei’ hizzayon in that publication data—albeit less exotic than those of Gei’ hizzayon—preclude the work’s having enjoyed any widespread readership before the twentieth century. Modena, however, was—and remains—a more signiWcant and controversial Wgure in Jewish history than Abraham Yagel; his fame actually extended far beyond the Jewish sphere.145 Hayyei yehudah thus did not suVer quite the same degree of anonymity prior to its publication in book form as did Gei’ hizzayon. That Modena’s autobiography aroused greater reader curiosity than did Yagel’s is attested to by the existence of at least Wve manuscript variants of the original autograph ‘Ambrosiana’ manuscript of Hayyei yehudah.146 The existence of these manuscript variants does, in itself, pose something of a puzzle. Why should an autobiography of a man of the stature of Modena not have warranted publication in full before the twentieth century—especially in view of the relatively wide manuscript circulation that these data suggest? The technical means and legal admissions for the printing of Hebrew books were certainly not lacking in the Venice of Modena’s day—CounterReformation blasts notwithstanding—as Modena’s own listing of his published works in Hayyei yehudah demonstrates.147 And since these manuscripts, including the autograph, had departed the hands of Modena’s immediate or collateral family, it is hard to imagine that they were not known of, and indeed mulled over, well before their belated publication.148 Nor did Modena leave any explicit instructions that Hayyei yehudah, an extremely frank testament in which the author is frequently depicted in a less than favourable light, not be reproduced or, indeed, printed. He states quite clearly, from the onset, that

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he envisions that his work will be read not only by his ‘children’ and ‘children’s children’, but also by students and those who ‘know my name’.149 As with Gei’ hizzayon—and here at least the comparison between the two texts is meaningful—it was only the intellectual ambience of the late twentieth century that conduced to the publication most extensively annotated and full and faithful versions of Hayyei yehudah, both in Hebrew and in English translation.150 Ruderman’s edition of Gei’ hizzayon and Mark Cohen’s edition of Hayyei yehudah constitute, to the best of my knowledge, the most extensively edited English translations of early-modern Hebrew texts to have appeared in recent years. Cohen’s edition of Hayyei yehudah, a collaborative enterprise of Wve scholars, includes, aside from a detailed preface by Cohen, three lengthy introductory essays on the historical, biographical and literary signiWcance of the work, close to one hundred pages of detailed historical notes to the text, eighteen illustrations and two detailed excursi. No other work of the proliWc Modena has been accorded in English translation—and I would hazard to say also in Hebrew—such lavish attention. Gei’ hizzayon and Hayyei yehudah thus share in the disproportion of their prior neglect and their subsequent rehabilitation. Why should these works that now occupy so central a position in the early-modern Hebrew canon, and more generally the Jewish autobiographical canon, have suVered so lengthy an eclipse? The circumstances surrounding the ‘discovery’ and eventual publication of the ‘Ambrosiana’ manuscript of Hayyei yehudah may go some way in accounting for this phenomenon. For here, it would appear that we have some empirical grounds for the previously posited connection between the impact of Rousseauian thought upon Jewish intellectual circles in the nineteenth century and the reading and publication of hitherto unclassiWable and for that very reason relatively or totally neglected pre-modern Jewish texts as ‘autobiographies’. The ‘Ambrosiana’ manuscript later to form the basis for the Wrst full printed edition of Hayyei yehudah was, in the nineteenth century, in the private possession of the Treves family in Venice. This manuscript Wrst came to the attention of Sh. D. Luzzatto, who was so impressed by the signiWcance of the work that he made a painstaking precis of the text, which he sent, on the 18th of April, 1934, to his friend, the

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noted biographer Sh. Y. Rappaport.151 Luzzatto (1800–1865), generally known by his Hebrew acronym ‘Shadal’, was the Wrst Jewish thinker to attempt to construct a systematic philosophy of Judaism infused with Rousseauian axioms.152 He was also preoccupied, from an early age, with the problem of autobiography, and especially with the diYculties encountered by the autobiographer in depiction of the years of childhood.153 He himself, taking Rousseau’s Confessions as his model, made several attempts at writing an autobiography, both in Hebrew and in Italian. Ultimately, though, Luzzatto failed to meet the challenge of Rousseauian autobiography and not one of these projects reached completion.154 Small wonder, then, that the discovery of what appears, at Wrst glance, to be a full-length autobiography of one of the more controversial Wgures of Jewish history should have made so deep an impression upon Luzzatto.155 The impact made upon Luzzatto by this text was certainly heightened by the shock of recognition of his own existential/ autobiographical aYnities with Modena experienced in the reading of Hayyei yehudah. The lives of these two men bore in certain key respects uncanny similarities: each bestrode Italian and Jewish culture, writing both in Hebrew and Italian; each earned accolades from leading Christian scholars (with Shadal, in particular, Franz Delitzsch); each, despite his fame, suVered terribly from Wnancial duress; Luzzatto suffered, as did Modena, from a miserable marriage—his wife, like Modena’s, suffered a mental collapse that led to physical paralysis; Luzzatto was cursed, as was Modena, to witness the death of his oVspring, and, like Modena, he was shattered in particular by the death of his oldest and dearest son, ‘’Ohev ger’, for whom he had predicted a glorious scholarly future akin to his own.156 In his autobiographical writings, Luzzatto makes frequent identiWcation of his plight with that of Job, as does Modena. Shmuel Werses, who Wrst called attention to the autobiographical identiWcation of Luzzatto with Modena, notes also that in his autobiographical letters there may be discerned the stylistic influence of Modena’s prose.157 Luzzatto was not alone in his estimate of the text and other scholars of his day were fast to appreciate the signiWcance of his discovery.158 Isaac Samuel Reggio published an abbreviated version of Hayyei yehudah in 1852, as did Abraham Geiger in 1856.159 Reggio, it should be noted, a propos of the Rousseauian con-

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nection, was the author of one of the Wrst published autobiographies to be written in Hebrew.160 In 1857, a Venetian rabbi, Moses Soave, made a copy of the entire ‘Ambrosiana’ manuscript which he eventually translated into Italian and published in serial form in Il Corriere Israelitico from 1862 to 1864.161 It was Soave’s copy of the manuscript that found its way into the hands of the Eastern European Jewish historian Avraham Kahana. This was a good address for Hayyei yehudah. Kahana was fascinated by pre-modern Jewish autobiography, and his two-volume anthology, Sifrut hahistoriah hayisra’elit (1922–1923), to a signiWcant degree, serves as the prototype for Leo Schwarz’s Memoirs of My People.162 It was Kahana who was the Wrst to refer to Hayyei yehudah as the ‘autobiography (’AutobiograWah) of Yehudah Aryeh Modena’, which he published in 1911 ‘for the Wrst time, with a portrait of the author, an introduction and notes’.163 Not only the date and circumstances but also the form of the eventual publication of the complete Hayyei yehudah is revealing. Traditional Eastern European Jewish texts rarely, if ever, appeared with scholarly apparatus and a portrait of their author. When texts of Orthodox Eastern European Jewish provenance do appear in such a format, this is a fairly sure sign of their stemming from counter-modernist Orthodox circles that employed some means of the adversary—including autobiography—in order to bolster their own position.164 Autobiographical discourse in Jewish Eastern Europe only manifested itself—and the publication data of Hayyei yehudah are, in this respect, exemplary— in those circles that could be receptive to Rousseau: those committed, that is—to a greater or lesser degree—to the secularization and modernization of Jewish life. There is some irony in the fact that the publication of those texts that constitute the Jewish autobiographical ‘tradition’ should, almost invariably, have been at the hands of an avant-garde that, in the eyes of the majority of Eastern European Jewry, stood Wrmly beyond the pale. * ‘This is the Life Story of Judah Aryeh . . . Few and evil have been the days of my life in this world’ Inasmuch as the King’s [God’s] word has power to remove man from this world on the day of his death—after which all is forgotten—for more than twenty-four years I have desired in the depths of my soul

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to set down in writing all the incidents that happened to me from my beginnings to the end of my life, so that I shall not die, but live.165

Such bold and unequivocal declaration of autobiographical intent is unprecedented in Hebrew literature and rarely to be encountered subsequently. No beating about the bush here, elaborate mise-en-scènes, apparitions, night-flights and what not. Nor does Modena, by contrast to Yagel and many later Jewish autobiographers, appear to experience any vacillations about the autobiographical act; Modena throws his cards on the table with no apology nor hesitation. By contrast to Yagel, for whom, overtly at least, the autobiographical act is subsidiary to the homiletic intentions of the work, the assignment of the life to writing is here of primary import. It is indeed a matter of life or death: Modena writes ‘so that I shall not die but live’. The life of Yehudah thus hangs upon the scriptural realization of the Life of Yehudah. Hayyei yehudah then, must, in Modena’s eyes—again by contrast to what we may surmise of Yagel—have held a place of cardinal signiWcance in his proliWc oeuvre. Most striking in Modena’s preamble is the absence of any moralistic/religious pretext for autobiographical selfaccounting. Contrast, for example, the preamble to the autobiographical account of Modena’s younger contemporary, Asher Halevi of Reichshofen, which in some respects bears similarity to that of Modena: This is the gate to the Lord the righteous enter here. Book of Memoirs Fat Is His Bread.166 To recall to mind for memorial the events and occurrences that encountered me and all the members of my family from the day that God expelled me from light to darkness, the darkness of time and its adversities [or possibly ‘dominion’, M.M] in this infernal world, and would it be that the day of death be as the day of birth without sin and cleansed of iniquity, I have thus decided to engrave with iron stylus for the preservation of good and ill all that came my way in order to give thanks and praise for everything, just as one makes blessings for the good so one makes blessings for the evil.167

No such homiletic pleading attends the inception of Hayyei yehudah: Modena wishes to preserve his life in writing lest, should death snatch him away at any moment, there should be no surviving remnant of his self in this infernal world. He manifests no sense of guilt nor clearly is he in any mood to make blessings over his misfortunes: upon taking

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pen to hand; ‘my soul has refused to be comforted’, he writes.168 Nor does he envisage his account as providing moral sustenance or instruction for his descendants and others who may read it. In thoroughly secular tone, he simply states that he thought it would be ‘valued’ or ‘esteemed’169 by its future readers, ‘just as it is a great pleasure to me to be able to know the lives of my ancestors, forebears, teachers and all other eminent and beloved people’. Noteworthy here is the contrast with the Tsava’ah/‘ethical will’—the purpose of these wills is certainly not to aVord the ‘pleasure’/‘’oneg’ derived from the reading of vitae, but to tender instruction, frequently couched in terms of rebuke and objurgations directed by the pater familias to his oVspring, on the model of Yagel père, and ultimately of Job’s counsellors.170 In many of these ethical wills, penances, prayers and abjurations are enjoined, and their timetable provided, the speaker or writer of the testament giving an account of the various penances he has taken upon himself by oath as example;171 Asher Halevy’s memoirs are punctuated regularly with such self-impositions. It is interesting to see what Modena, a man far more disposed to extra- than intra-punitive control—he viewed the ‘troubles of his life’ as adequate enough ‘expiation for my sins and transgressions’172—makes of this convention. In the preamble to Hayyei yehudah, Modena does make a pledge to himself and by implication to God, Whose help he invokes for the successful completion of the ‘Life’ twice in the Wrst line of the manuscript. But this pledge, though it is couched in the format of self-imposed penance with the latter’s typical dating of the resolution and provision of future schedule for observance, is not penitential but autobiographical: ‘I resolved in the month of Tevet 5378 [December 29, 1617–January 26, 1618] to begin and to Wnish, God willing, giving a full account of my inner being and the events that befell me . . . Subsequently, from year to year, at sixmonth intervals, I shall add to this account what new happens to me.’173 This actually marks a substantial departure from the manners and mores of the ethical will. Nor do the actual wills included in Hayyei yehudah include ethical instruction—the closest they come to it is in a few lines of self-exculpation. And of Hayyei yehudah as a whole, it could scarcely be said, as does Israel Abrahams of the ethical will: ‘There is never a sordid thought or hateful sentiment . . . morally all are high. Indeed if one were to write apologetically, one could Wnd in

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the conWdential pronouncements which constitute the testaments a most eVective vindication of the Jewish character.’174 The contrast that Michah Yosef Berdichevsky draws between the Tsava’ah and the autobiographical confessional applies extraordinary well to Hayyei yehudah: For the most part, Judaism only knows of the death-bed confessional: Put your house in order, for you are on the point of expiration! With his last ounce of remaining strength, man confesses according to the book. Greater than this is the confession of the individual that man utters while still in command of mind and body. Confession is the breaking of the heart and the reckoning of man with his heart and soul . . . Confession is immortality from yesterday to today, from the past to the future, the resurrection of man while he is still living . . . Confession is not an ethical, but a poetic imperative toward vital and actual self-revelation.175

It is diYcult to believe that Modena could not have been aware of his transgression of the ethical will format. Again, as with Yagel, we note the tendency of the autobiographical voice to break through and/or subvert traditional Jewish literary categories. Modena is actually bolder in his departure than is Yagel, whose autobiographical hubris is tamed and framed by the constant presence of the counter-narrative of the anti-autobiographical father. For Yagel, the impulse to autobiography appears to have been contingent and environmental, and thus he has no concern with relating anything other than the events that led him to the four walls of his conWnement. For Modena, however, the will toward ‘confession’, in Berdichevsky’s sense of the term, springs from far deeper sources: the problem of how to give literary expression to his own strong sense of individuality had occupied him for no less than twenty-four years before he set his hand to Hayyei yehudah: ‘I longed to bequeath it [my life story, M.M.] as a gift to my Wrstborn son . . . But for these twentyfour years up to the present I did not succeed in writing this down as a memoir in a book.’176 What was it that stood in the way of the unbelievably fecund, determined and conscientious Modena in the writing of this book, especially given the passion invested in its realization? It was, no doubt, in no small part, the lack of precedent and thus of any implicit agenda or formal guidelines for autobiographical selfpresentation that thwarted Modena in his design for almost a quarter

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of a century. The problem of precedent was, for Modena, actually more acute than it was for Yagel; whereas Yagel encases his autobiographical narrative within well-tried non-autobiographical literary conventions, Modena plans to devote an entire book to his life-story. Modena himself would have been hard put to describe precisely what it was that he was writing when he embarked upon Hayyei yehudah. The work certainly falls into no category of Hebrew or Yiddish literature known to Modena. Nor did Modena Wnd any non-Jewish literary form adequate to his declared intention ‘to set down in writing all the incidents that happened to me from my beginnings to the end of my life, so that I shall not die but live’.177 The death of his eldest and most beloved son, Mordechai, the intended addressee of Hayyei yehudah, in 1668, as a result of inhaling noxious fumes in the course of alchemical experiments, appears to have had a catalytic eVect upon Modena.178 Now, deprived of the assurance of some degree of personal immortality aVorded him by the survival of a son ‘whose good looks and features were like mine’,179 Modena, ‘at the age of forty-seven, an old man ridden by turmoil’,180 determines to surmount the obstacles in the way to his autobiographical project. Thus steeled in his resolve, Modena hits upon a strategy that is, to the best of my knowledge, unique in the history of literary self-portrayal. Having taken the story of his life up to his forty-seventh year, the year, that is, of his son Mordechai’s death and of his Wnal resolve to embark upon Hayyei yehudah, he will recapitulate, as declared in the abovecited pledge, his life-experience in writing each year at six-month intervals: ‘After that will come my will concerning my body, soul and literary remains—and God will do what is proper in His eyes.’181 Given such a procedure, declared from the onset, it is foreordained that Hayyei yehudah will be a hybrid literary form. Even if those sections of the narrative that relate Modena’s life-history up to the age of forty-seven constitute an autobiography, the ensuing account, covering the years from 1618 to Modena’s death in 1648, is, in eVect, a diary. The distinction is crucial; for the principles governing a diary, even one written at six-month intervals, are quite diVerent from those obtaining in autobiographical discourse.182 The temporal dimension of the diary is the present and the one organizing principle of its structure, the passage of time itself. The diary has, beyond this, no implicit

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agenda, no teleology, no established point of departure, nor any deWnite point of arrival. The writer of the diary may, at any point, arbitrarily terminate the project or, as did Modena, die mid-entry, without detracting, save in quantitative terms, from the value of the work. Autobiographical ‘truth’, on the other hand, arises from the tension between two axes of temporal experience, the present of the narrator of the life-history and that of his protagonist: the tension, that is, between ‘Dichtung’ and ‘Wahrheit’ or, in Roy Pascal’s formulation, between ‘design’ and ‘truth’.183 Extracts from diaries and personal correspondence may, as they do in Rousseau’s Confessions,184 play an important role in lending pathos to this encounter between past and present selves. Such citations, though, only function as a part within the larger whole, and should they swamp the text their function in autobiographical discourse is neutralized.185 One of the reasons why excessive citation of diary entries is so ruinous of the equilibrium of an autobiography, as, for example, in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life and Simon Dubnow’s The Book of Life,186 is that autobiography, in distinction to the diary, is the retrospective account of the crystallization of an identity. The autobiographer, unlike the diarist or the chronicler—the latter being a diarist of external events—cannot rest content with the mere recording of events to no teleological purpose. Being a historian of the self, he selects for inclusion in his work only those aspects of his experience which are salient for the understanding of the author’s present identity—or, at least, his sense of the same. The ‘suspense’ of an autobiography arises from the dialectical tension between the pattern of experience as perceived at the onset of the project and that which emerges in the course of—and as a result of—the reworking of past experience in the process of autobiographical narration. It is, as has been noted, this suspense which gives rise to the ‘metadiscursive’ aspect of autobiography; narration of past events is, in the great autobiographies, oVset by narration of this narration.187 Such suspense is markedly absent in the diary. The diarist, lacking the perspective afforded by temporal distance, is in no position to weigh the relative signiWcance of the events he records—let alone to juxtapose to artistic eVect the signiWcance of these events as perceived by the protagonist at the time of their occurrence with the complexion that these assume

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when presented to the consciousness of the autobiographer at the moment of narration and recall.188 The distinction between autobiography and diary becomes especially apparent and is especially crucial when it comes to the question of an ending. The completion of an autobiography derives from the resolution of a thematic that is developed within the autobiography itself. Should this not be the case, all autobiographies would have to end with a depiction of the death of their author, which is impossible; although several valiant attempts at such comprehensiveness have been made.189 The diary, though, proceeds by Wts and starts indeWnitely— within, that is, the limits of the human life span—the provisional ending of each entry giving way to the new beginning of the next and so forth.190 Each one of these provisional endings can, in the diary, become Wnal by an arbitrary act of Wat; an ‘unWnished diary’ is thus a contradiction in terms. Seen in the light of the autobiography/diary distinction, especially as viewed from the aspect of the ending, Modena’s seemingly curious choice of autobiographical strategy becomes more comprehensible. Not only does Modena not have the beneWt of an implicit agenda, established by literary precedent for his undertaking, he also remains something of a mystery to himself. Failing to achieve the solidity of self-image, or as Rousseau puts it “features which may appear incompatible, but which nevertheless have combined to form a strong, simple and uniform whole”,191 that serves as the vantage point for autobiographical self-reconstruction, Modena has no clear sense of the concatenation of crucial events in the life history which acted as catalytic agents in the crystallization of this self or self-image.192 It is for this reason that when narrative meets narrator in Hayyei yehudah, some three years after Modena’s son’s death, Modena cannot end but must continue in pursuit of a sense of identity that constantly eludes him until, overtaken by the Reaper, the pen Wnally falls mid-sentence from his hand. Modena, even though he may have counted on completing his Wnal sentence, knows from the onset that Hayyei yehudah must end with his death. That Modena envisions writing unto death, envisaging this as the only possible closure to his text, is attested to by his account of his turning to astrologers in order to predict the date of his death: The

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general consensus of this ecumenical assembly of astrologers—‘two Jews and two Christians’—conWrmed by palmists, was that, at the age of Wfty, he had about two years left. ‘If ’, he writes, ‘the time or any other that has been decreed for me according to the aforementioned persons should pass, I will write of that fact further on. But if their words prove to be true, one of the readers should write it here below’.193 He is careful to ensure, moreover, that his last wills and testaments, one written in 1634 and one in 1648, appear on the Wnal pages of the booklet that would, eventually, comprise Hayyei yehudah. This inclusion of the wills at the end of Hayyei yehudah is not, as Daniel Carpi contends, an afterthought, but arises of structural and psychological necessity.194 Modena cannot pin his subject down; the work can thus end only when this Protean and shifting subject, the self, is Wnally stilled. The grave in itself does provide some sort of ending, or rather a ne plus ultra, for Hayyei yehudah; but it cannot aVord per se adequate ground for autobiographical perspective. Modena, working toward his last will and testament and the self-penned epitaph (with the date left blank),195 has no other ground upon which to stand than the anxietyladen and labile moment of the present. He falls, Wnally, short of his goal; nine blank pages, another four pages including what appear to be notes/aide memoire, and one further blank page, intervene between the truncated last sentence of Hayyei yehudah and the wills.196 Comparison with a post-Rousseauian autobiographer who elected a similar narrative strategy to that of Modena is here enlightening. Chateaubriand, in his Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, aimed, as his title indicates, to take his life history up to the point of his death.197 Unlike Modena, though, and notwithstanding the many roles he has played in his earthly career, Chateaubriand has a profound sense of identity. It is this sense of identity that imparts an ‘indeWnable unity’198 to his account of the events of the life-history, as recorded at diVerent times and under diverse circumstances, that constitutes the Mémoires. In order to ensure the comprehensiveness of the Mémoires without sacriWcing thereby the distance necessary for autobiographical perspective, Chateaubriand situates himself ‘d’outre-tombe’, ‘beyond the tomb’; the sepulchral voice issuing from beyond the grave which ‘can be heard throughout my story’199 confers meaning and overall structure to the data of the life-history. Modena, for whom the self is ultimately

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an enigma, could not have availed himself of Chateaubriand’s imaginative solution to the problem of autobiographical comprehensiveness, even had he known of it. This—ultimately self-defeating—autobiographical strategy elected by Modena is quite possibly unique. But his predicament in face of the challenge of literary self-portrayal is emblematic of the Renaissance thinker’s inability to Wnd—or rather create—any adequate or ultimately meaningful structure within which to contain an inchoate but gnawingly insistent sense of individuality. The same constellation of historical and socio-psychological factors that impelled Modena to grope for a new literary form in Hayyei yehudah led his close contemporary, Montaigne, to break away from the literary conventions of his day, laying thereby the basis for a new literary form, the essay.200 ‘I am unable to stabilize my subject’, Montaigne writes in ‘On Repenting’: It staggers confusedly along with a natural drunkenness. I grasp it as it is now, at this moment when I am lingering over it. I am not portraying being but becoming: not the passage from one age to another (or, as the folk put it, from one seven-year period to the next) but from day to day, from minute to minute. I must adapt this account of myself to the passing hour. I shall perhaps change soon, not accidentally but intentionally. This is a register of varied and changing occurrences, of ideas which are unresolved and, when needs be, contradictory, either because I myself have become diVerent or because I grasp hold of diVerent attributes or aspects of my subjects. If my soul could ever Wnd a footing I would not be assaying myself but resolving myself. But my soul is ever in its apprenticeship and being tested.201

Montaigne did in the end, however, unlike Modena, succeed in creating some order out of chaos. The Essays, while they are not autobiography, came to form the basis for the kind of ruminative, oblique exploration of self which, in the nineteenth century, becomes associated with the feuilleton, and in the twentieth with post-modern autobiographical explorations. Hayyei yehudah, on the other hand, unlike the Essays—or indeed Rousseau’s Confessions—really can be described as ‘an enterprise which, once complete, will have no imitator’. The work is, in formal terms, impossible to either categorize or locate in a Jewish or non-Jewish literary-historical context.

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Such generic considerations, though, are liable to appear picayune or even pettifogging in face of the very real aYnities that the work bears to later autobiographical writings in terms of content. So striking are these aYnities that considerable restraint is required of a modern reader to ‘epoche’ his experience of autobiographical categories in order to grasp these elements within their proper, pre-Rousseauian context. It is, no doubt, these elements on the level of content, highly provocative of a reading of Hayyei yehudah as an ‘autobiography’, that have deflected critical attention from the fundamentally non-autobiographical conWguration within which they occur. Modena’s account of his birth would, to begin with, leap to the eye of any reader well-versed in modern autobiographical literature: Diana [Modena’s mother] became pregnant in 5331 [late 1570], at which time a huge and severe earthquake struck Ferrara, the likes of which had not been known in all the lands . . . My revered father and the members of his household fled for their lives to Venice. While they were still there, on Monday the 28th day of Nisan—corresponding to the 23d day of April [5]331 [1571]—between the eighteenth and nineteenth hours [noon to 1:00 pm], I, the bitter and impetuous, was born. I, almost like Job and Jeremiah, would curse that day. For why did I go out [of the womb] to witness toil, anger, strife, and trouble—only evil continually? My mother experienced great diYculty in childbirth. I was born in the breech position, my buttocks turned around facing outward, so that calamities turned upon me even at the beginning.202

This account of Modena’s catastrophe-strewn conception and his adverse and posterior entry into this world rings many bells, including that of the innate tottering of the autobiographical subject as in Montaigne, just cited. Compare, for example, Rousseau: ‘My birth was the Wrst of my misfortunes . . . I was almost born dead, and they had little hope of saving me. I brought with me the seed of a disorder which has grown stronger with the years, and now gives me only occasional intervals of relief in which to suVer more painfully in some other way.’203 The parallels with Chateaubriand, who, like Modena, identiWed strongly with Job,204 are really quite remarkable: I was almost dead when I came into the world. The roar of the waves whipped up by a squall heralding the autumnal equinox drowned my

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cries: these details have often been recounted to me; the sadness of them has never left my memory. Not a day passes but thinking of what I have been, I picture once more the rack on which I was born, the bedroom in which my mother inflicted life upon me, the storm which accompanied my Wrst sleep, and the unhappy brother who gave me a name which I have always dragged through misfortune. Heaven seemed to have gathered together these various circumstances in order to place in my cradle an image of my destiny.205

Accounts similar to these, of traumatic births, are to be found in abundance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century autobiography; the birth accounts of Goethe and Edmund Gosse, to take two famous examples, provide striking illustrations of the theme,206 as do those of the Jewish autobiographers Y. L. Katznelson, E. E. Friedman, and E. Lisitsky.207 Indeed, so prevalent is this trope of the diYcult birth that it reappears in Thomas Mann’s montage of classic autobiographical motifs, Felix Krull.208 The testimony of Marc Chagall synchronizes, as does that of Modena, force-majeure catastrophe with the traumatic birth: I don’t remember who—my mother, I think—told me that when she was giving birth to me in Vitebsk, on the ‘Pyeskovatik’, behind the prison, in a little hut next to the highway—there was a big Wre in the city. The town was in flames. The section inhabited by the Jewish poor. The bed and mattress, with me at mama’s feet, was carried oV to safety in another part of the city. But Wrst of all, I was born dead . . . I didn’t want to be alive. Imagine a pale bladder that does not want to live in the world . . . As if it were glutted with Chagallian pictures. They pricked it with pins, revived it, threw it into a bucket of water, and Wnally it gave out a squeal. But what’s important is that I was born dead. I certainly don’t want the psychiatrists to draw any unfavorable interpretation for me . . . Please!209

Quite why the births of so many autobiographers should have been so traumatic is diYcult to explain. Legends surrounding the births of religious leaders and Wgures from classical mythology suggest that we have to deal here with a variation upon an archetypal theme, related to the ‘monomyth’ of the hero as traced by Joseph Campbell.210 The underlying implication of all of these birth accounts is that the autobiographer’s incarnation signiWes a fall from grace. The subsequent

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depiction of the reluctantly incarnated infant’s Wght for life, especially when allied—as it is frequently in these accounts—with unusual natural phenomena and/or portentous planetary alignments, lends an epic, supra-personal dimension to the life-history that is to follow. It would appear, at all events, that Modena’s autobiographical account of the circumstances surrounding his birth is one of the Wrst of its type, and certainly the Wrst to be written in Hebrew. No less likely to strike the modern reader’s attention and equally innovative is Modena’s depiction of events from the years of his childhood. By the standards of Rousseauian autobiography, Modena’s account of the childhood years is brief; he dispenses with the period of birth to the age of seventeen in Wve pages. Modena’s, albeit sketchy, depictions of relatively paltry episodes to which he was party as a child of three or four are, nonetheless, to the best of my knowledge unprecedented in Hebrew literature.211 Yagel, for example, does not so much as hint at his experience as a child in his autobiographical narration. One childhood incident in particular that Modena does relate is, moreover, depicted with vividness, a naive immediacy that belies the temporal distance separating Modena from the modern reader and that separating the ‘old man’ from himself as child. Modena’s Hebrew prose style is exemplary; he is master of the language as employed within a secular context to a greater degree than were the majority of nineteenth-century Hebrew novelists.212 Thus the following account of a near-disastrous childhood escapade that took place in 1576: In the year 5335 [1574/1575] we left Ferrara and moved to Cologna, a small village belonging to Venice, to engage in money-lending in a pawnshop. My revered father took great pains to construct a ritual bath inside his house for the women to make their ritual ablutions, by drawing the proper kind of water into the house; and at the end of 5336 [summer 1576] he pronounced it ritually Wt for use. On that day I had been learning the chapter of the Mishnah beginning ‘One whose dead [is laid out]’ with Rabbi Gershon Cohen, who is now the head of a yeshiva in Poland but who at the time was a boy like me. When our teacher left, the two of us went to the ritual bath to play, as young boys do. I fell into the bath, which was full to the brim. The other boy fled screaming, and when the members of the household heard him they ran with my revered father and my mother searching

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here and there for me, for they did not know where I had fallen. Meanwhile, an hour passed with me clutching my hands to one side of the rim of the bath, until the people in the house arrived. Then a servant girl threw herself into the water and pulled me out, and I was carried back indoors and laid out on a bed as one dead from fear and terror.213

What is remarkable about this passage is that there seems to be no motive behind the narration of this childhood incident other than the pleasure of recording an event which clearly left a deep impression upon the author. This account serves no moral or didactic purpose, nor is it even self-aggrandizing as are so many of the anecdotes recounted in Hayyei yehudah.214 Such artless narration of this and other childhood episodes in Hayyei yehudah must have commended itself strongly to Shadal, the aspiring Rousseauian autobiographer, who, in a letter of October 18, 1847, to Rappaport, complains bitterly of the lack of receptiveness shown by the Hebrew-reading public of his day to autobiographical depictions of childhood. Making reference to the diYculties he is encountering in preparing one of the early drafts of his autobiography, Luzzatto writes: I was also aware that according to the conventions of our generation, it does not beWt me to make public several minor incidents relating to my childhood, especially in view of the fact that I am not an old man nor a famous one widely known for his outstanding achievements. Without a doubt, the scoVers in our midst will deride me for some of the incidents I relate. Nonetheless, I wished to include these, for the beneWt and pleasure of the discerning and especially for the sake of future generations.215

There is, however, a crucial distinction to be drawn between Luzzatto’s account of the seemingly petty incidents of his childhood days, for which he was upbraided by contemporary readers of Hamaggid, in which his autobiography was published in installments, and that of Modena. Luzzatto, who believed that ‘there is no equal of biography for the advancement of the exhalted study of man’, writes in the preamble to the Italian version of his autobiography: He who portrays his own life . . . will often omit certain details through false modesty or inability to perceive their import. While

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such details may be petty in themselves, their consequences may be weighty . . . Doubtless each man bears with him from birth certain characteristics peculiar to himself, but many of his characteristics are determined by external factors, which occur after his birth, and often the least important of them proves to be the most consequential. For this reason, I shall deal at length with the early period of my life in which I was formed . . . 216

Rousseau’s numerous asides to the reader of the Confessions, in which he presents ‘an apology, or rather a justiWcation, for the petty details I have just been entering into’217 et cetera, clearly underlie Luzzatto’s formulations. In Rousseauian autobiography, depiction of even the most petty incident is bound by innumerable strands to the total conWguration of the work in a manner akin to the opening theme of a symphony; be this, as with Rousseau, a spanking or the building of a miniature aqueduct or,218 as with Goethe, an unruly hail-storm that broke several window panes in his father’s house or a puppet-show.219 A childhood incident as it presents itself—frequently unsummoned— to the memory of the autobiographical narrator, bears in its train a host of associations from the adult years; and, as all lines converge upon the recollected moment, the event, in its retelling, is rendered incandescent. Depictions such as these in which art, as in Proust’s famous depiction of the ‘Madeleine’ in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, strains the fabric of time are to be reckoned amongst the highest attainments of the autobiographical genre. Attainments such as these, though, are beyond the grasp of Modena. The account of the Mikvah episode comes quite out of the blue and bears no relation to the passages by which it is immediately preceded and followed. Not an iota, moreover, would be gained or lost for Hayyei yehudah as a whole, were the entire account to be omitted. This childhood recollection thus stands in glorious isolation. Modena gives the reader no inkling of why, of all the childhood experiences that fall within the range of his capacious memory,220 this particular incident should have been selected for inclusion in Hayyei yehudah. Nor does he speculate upon the eVect that this experience, admittedly traumatic, may have had in the formation of the mature personality. Modena, as a child, stands one-dimensional and frozen as if in a tableau. The entire scene has something of the quality of an eighteenth-

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century primitive engraving; the child, clinging to the side of the Mikvah, the equally one-dimensional playmate frozen in the action of running for assistance, members of the household, hands raised in gestures of alarm, rushing to the scene. Modena, as child, only really comes to life in those more typical sections of the narration of the early years in Hayyei yehudah when the child is depicted not as a child, but as Yehudah Aryeh at the height of his intellectual powers—only in miniature. ‘People say about me’, Modena writes, ‘when you were young, you were like a grown man; now that you are old you are like a very small child’.221 Thus we are witness to the spectacle of the renowned preacher-to-be reciting the Haftorah in the synagogue at the age of two and a half;222 of the precocious eight year old who, having delivered a particularly ingenious exegetical disquisition in the study-house, elicits the praise of his teacher: ‘I am certain that this boy will become a preacher to the Jews, for from his manner it is clear that he will become fruitful in preaching.’223 Modena, in this respect, comes close to the ‘biographical vision’ that understands the child by the man rather than vice-versa. Thus Mikhail Bakhtin on the ontology of classical biography: What governs from the onset is the whole of the character; and from such a point of view time is of no importance at all, nor is the order in which various parts of this whole make their appearance. From the very Wrst strokes (the Wrst manifestations of character) the Wrm contours of the whole are already predetermined, and everything that comes later distributes itself within their already existing conditions.224

Thus ‘from the very Wrst strokes’—his birth, or even conception—the ‘contours’ of Modena’s life are established—‘toil, anger, strife and trouble’. Modena lacks, as do Renaissance thinkers in general, the historical or genetic sense which leads the Rousseauian autobiographer to the exploration of his origins in childhood.225 Modena was, moreover, a qualiWed determinist—‘Regarding the stars and constellations’, he writes later in Hayyei yehudah, ‘that God placed in the heavens to rule over those below and guide them, acting as secondary causes, I always thought that no one could escape their power and that nothing was hidden from their wrath. Even though they are not entirely determinative, they have a strong tendency to compel action.’226 Modena can

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have no sense of the formation of character as an ongoing and openended process of development. The child, and here Modena departs from both the biographical and the autobiographical vision, is simply a miniature conWguration of those qualities that, as fate has decreed from the onset, will constitute the character of the grown man. * No less innovative and proleptic of later developments than Modena’s admission of the infant and child to Hebrew literary discourse is his account of the entangled and conflict-ridden circumstances of his engagement, his wedding and, subsequently, his marriage. The ensuing account of the circumstances surrounding Modena’s engagement and wedding would appear to be a presentiment of a theme that would become central in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern European Jewish autobiography: the conflict between romantic love and the system of the pre-arranged marriage. The Wrst to highlight the signiWcance of this account was M. Y. Berdichevsky, whose lynx eyes were ever on the look-out for the antinomian and the autobiographical in pre-modern Jewish literature.227 Prescient as always, Berdichevsky’s lead was followed by later twentieth-century readers of Hayyei yehudah. Kahana included it in his above-cited anthology; Cecil Roth’s mid-century assessment of this ‘episode in the autobiography of Leone Modena, which contains one of the most moving love passages in the whole Jewish literature’, is reiterated by Cohen and Rabb, who write of this ‘glimpse of a woman’s romantic love for her intended groom in what must be the most poignant scene in the autobiography, and indeed in the Hebrew literature of the period’.228 The relative ‘fame’, pace Davis, that this rather secret episode in the ‘life of Yehudah’ has attained, in the eyes of posterity, merits its citation in full: After this my mother spoke to me each day, saying, ‘If you would heed my command and comfort me in my troubles229 you would take as your wife my niece, namely Esther—the daughter of my mother’s sister Gioja, the wife of Isaac Simhah, may God his Rock protect him and grant him long life—for she seems Wtting to me. I will thereby create a marital tie within my family and peace will reign in our house.’ And so she requested of my revered father of blessed memory in every conversation. She wrote to her sister about it and she gave her answer. And so the matter stood.

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And in the mean time,230 I had engaged in dream divination, using prayer without conjuration, in order to see the woman intended as my mate. In my dream, an old man held my hand and led me to a certain wall upon which was drawn a portrait covered with a curtain. When he drew aside the veil I saw a portrait of my cousin, Esther, as well as the color of her garment. While I was gazing at the image, it changed, and another one, which I could not clearly make out, replaced it. In the morning I reported the dream to my revered father of blessed memory and to my mother, but they did not believe it. Then, in the month of Elul 5349 [August–September, 1589] my mother and I arrived in Venice on our way to Ancona to retrieve property and goods that had been in the hands of my [half-] brother of blessed memory, because his wife had seized them and we had not seen even a shoelace of it. Afterward we changed our mind about going on and lingered in Venice, and while there, my mother and her sister and the relatives again discussed the match. We completed the marriage agreement, shook hands and made the symbolic acquisition with great rejoicing. I pointed out to my mother that she [Esther] was wearing clothes of the same color and ornamentation that I had described more than a year previously, when I had seen her in my dream. She was truly a beautiful woman, and wise too. I said that ‘Wnds’ and not ‘found’ applies to me.231 When the wedding date, which was the 13th of Sivan 5350 [June 15, 1590], approached, I wrote to my revered father, who was then in Bologna, and we all travelled to Venice immediately after Shavuot, rejoicing and lighthearted. When we arrived there, we found the bride conWned to her bed, and everyone said that nothing was wrong except for a little diarrhea and that she would soon recover. Her illness grew worse from day to day, however, until she lay near death. Yet her heart was like that of a lion, and she was not afraid. On the day she died, she summoned me and embraced and kissed me. She said: ‘I know that this is brazenness,232 but God knows that during the one year of our engagement we did not touch each other even with our little Wngers. Now, at the time of death, the rights of the dying are mine. I was not allowed to become your wife, but what can I do, for thus it is decreed in heaven. May God’s will be done.’ Then she requested that a sage be summoned so that she could make confession. When he arrived she recited the confessional prayer and asked for the blessing of her parents and my mother. On the night of

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the Holy Sabbath, the 21st of Sivan 5350 [June 22, 1590]—almost on the night that my [half-] brother of blessed memory had died—at the hour of the entry of the Sabbath bride, my own bride departed from this life of vanity for eternal life and passed away. The weeping on the part of all who knew her, both within and without her family, was great. May she rest in peace. Immediately after her burial, all the relatives set upon me and my mother, saying, ‘Behold, her younger sister is as good as she. Why forfeit the opportunity to perpetuate the kinship and to give comfort to the mother and father of the young woman?’ They entreated me to the point of embarrassment to take her sister Rachel to wife. I wrote to my revered father, who answered me as he had always done in this matter, and these were his words: ‘Do as you like, for the choice is yours. Today or tomorrow I will be taken from you, and you and your children will be left with her. For this reason, understand well what lies before you, and act to the best of the ability granted you by God.’ In order to please my mother, as well as the dead girl, who had hinted at it in her own words, I agreed to marry the aforementioned Rachel. Immediately we wrote up the agreement and were married on Friday the 5th of Tammuz 5350 [July 6, 1590].233

This, by all accounts, is a striking piece of prose, all the more so for its being written in Hebrew in the early seventeenth century. For Modena here employs autobiographical narration as a means of delivering an indictment against the entire system of the shiddukh, or prearranged marriage. Depiction of the shiddukh becomes, from Solomon Maimon onwards, a focal point in Eastern European Jewish autobiography for expression of a Rousseauianly inspired rancor against a system that subordinates the essentially good instincts of ‘l’homme naturel’ to cynical considerations of pecuniary and political advantage. Thus, one of the subtitles to Maimon’s account of his ‘Love AVairs and Matrimonial Proposals’ reads ‘A New Modus Lucrandi’.234 As with Modena, moreover, Maimon’s intended bride died on the eve of the intended nuptials: Already my mother had begun to bake the cakes she was expected to take with her to the wedding, and to prepare all sorts of preserves; I began also to think about the disputation I was to deliver, when suddenly the mournful news arrived that my bride had died of small-

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pox. My father could easily reconcile himself to this loss, because he thought to himself that he had made Wfty thalers by his son in an honourable way, and that now he could get Wfty thalers for him again . . . My mother alone was inconsolable about this loss. Cakes and preserves are of a perishable nature and will not keep long.235

Maimon’s tone throughout is ironic and seemingly detached. Thus, having provided further accounts of his ‘new modus lucrandi’—receiving advance-payments in dubious faith from prospective in-laws, he writes: ‘I must of course confess that this transaction of my father’s cannot be quite justiWed from a moral point of view. Only his great need at the time can in some measure serve as an excuse.’236 Modena’s account, by contrast, is passionate and imbued with an abiding sense of injury. What is most revealing here of the man and of the Life is the barely suppressed anger that smoulders beneath this entire passage. When Modena wrote in the preamble to Hayyei yehudah that he took up his pen Seva’ rogez, that I translated as ‘ridden with turmoil’, he may also have had in mind the secondary meaning of Rogez—“rage/anger”. This anger is already apparent in Modena’s supposedly verbatim account of his mother’s entreaties with which the Shiddukh episode begins. Clearly having encountered resistance from her son, ‘each day’ she spoke to him in order to bend his will; she induces guilt by conjuring up the spectre of her recently deceased son, Modena’s half-brother. Modena even manages to convey the needling tone of her entreaties in the direct speech he ascribes to her. She operates behind the scenes, using all the inducements at her disposal to sway Modena’s ailing father, dispatching letters to the putative bride’s mother. Modena’s ‘dream divination’ appears to have been undertaken as a resort to a higher court of appeal.237 While the divination is inauspicious—intimation of the ceremony of the Badekuns, in which the veil of the bride is raised by the Rabbi before the groom as a preliminary to the marriage proper, and the dissolving of the image of the one intended/desired into an ‘image . . . which I could not clearly make out’ is particularly sinister and revealing—it is ignored. Modena’s account thus serves, in no small part, as vindication for the poor judgment of his parents. Modena’s self assertion/declaration of autonomy, despite his outward compliance to custom and parental will, manifests itself in the

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extraordinary death-bed account. Modena, in retrospect, creates of Esther an ideal of womanhood. It is her ’Azut metsah/‘temerity’, or even ‘brazenness’, that he particularly admires: a quality not considered desirable in traditional Jewish mores for either sex. That it is she, the woman, who instigates sensual contact is likewise transgressive of traditional codes of ‘modesty’. The transgression is compounded in that only when she knows that she cannot be Modena’s wife does Esther embrace and kiss him; a deliberate flouting, as she is well aware, of traditional etiquette. Modena’s idealization of Esther is enhanced in that she also serves him as a model of vicarious identiWcation. Such conjecture is attested to by the presence of a pun in the clause immediately preceding the account of Esther’s last embrace. This phrase, ‘Yet her heart was like that of a lion, and she was not afraid,’ reads in Hebrew Velibah kelev aryeh velo’ nivhalah.238 The word for ‘lion’, Aryeh is Modena’s middle name, the Hebrew equivalent of ‘Leon’, with which Modena undersigned his works written in Italian. Modena, what is more, had made play of this double-entendre before writing this passage—once in a manner identical to that of the present context.239 It is more than likely then that Modena is aware of the alternative, and equally grammatically feasible, reading of the sentence in question, namely: ‘And her heart was like that of Aryeh, and she was not afraid.’240 That Modena may have availed himself of such selfprojection, via the voice of another, is bolstered by the extreme likelihood—though the issue of authorship continues to excite controversy—that Modena may have put the most devastating critique of the tenets of Jewish belief into the mouth of the pseudonymous author of a pamphlet entitled Qol sakhal (The Voice of a Fool), a critique to which he feigns to respond in his Sha’agat ’aryeh (Lion’s Roar) which, the title notwithstanding, is a pretty feeble and half-hearted refutation of the theses of the putative—and formidable—‘fool’.241 Should the Qol sakhal indeed be attributable to Modena, then the writing of this pseudonymous critique would be roughly contemporaneous with that of the above-cited passage from Hayyei yehudah. The structural and psychological mechanisms at work in the passage under discussion are actually comparable to those obtaining in Qol sakhal/Sha’agat ’aryeh. In a well-reasoned and convincing argument for Modena’s authorship of the Qol sakhal, Isaac Barzilay writes thus of Modena’s ca-

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pacity for vicarious identiWcation with the other and concomitant epoche of Jewish identity: The author of the Qol sakhal opens his Wrst treatise with the assertion that he is thoroughly acquainted with all kinds of speculations concerning religion . . . His subsequent statement that he imagines himself as if he were detached from the present, born and raised in a society with no religion or ethical code, is typical of the Cartesian age of methodical doubt and of an age that witnessed the mass phenomenon of Marranism . . . As early as his Sur mera’ . . . he illustrated his mastery of the actor’s art by assuming two opposite roles and carrying out each of them with equal skill and conviction . . . In his antiChristian work Magen vaherev, he writes that he tried several times to investigate the beginnings of Christianity and to understand the acts and thoughts of Jesus, especially how he came to consider himself the ‘Son of God’. Finally, ‘In consequence of reading our own and their books, I formed a view on the matter, which, in my view, is both true and valid as if I had lived in his generation and as if I were sitting next to him.’242

Could it be that, by the same psychological/methodological strategies, Modena is giving rein in the Esther account in Hayyei yehudah to antinomian impulses that he, by contrast to Esther, lacks the temerity or ‘Azut metsah243 to act upon, or openly to identify with? While in the retrospective narrative the muZed roar of the ‘lion’ is deWnitely present, in the actuality of the events he shows himself far more domesticated a feline. ‘Set upon’ by his mother’s relatives with indecent haste after Esther’s burial, he does not even take advantage of the loophole oVered him by his father, who, in an extraordinarily liberal gesture by the standards of the day, leaves any ultimate choice in the matter to his son. Succumbing, rather, to the combined pressure of his mother and the bride’s family, Modena agrees, albeit reluctantly,244 as the text leaves us in no doubt, to take Rachel as his wife. The contract is drawn up ‘immediately’, the ceremony following hot upon its signing. Overtaken by events, Modena here is oddly and strongly reminiscent of ‘Hirshl’ and his compelled marital predicament in Agnon’s Sippur pashut, a text with Wrm links to post-Rousseauian autobiographical discourse. The circumstances surrounding Modena’s wedding did not bode well for a happy marriage. And Aryeh and Rachel, as the later pages of

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Hayyei yehudah demonstrate were, indeed, not destined to be a happy couple. To depict his married life at all was a bold step for a Rabbi of Modena’s day to take. But to allow the reader glimpses into the most personal aspects of his domestic life, to write openly of marital strife: this was quite unheard of for a Hebrew writer of the early seventeenth century.245 There is nothing like this in Gei’ hizzayon, and Vital and Halevi provide little more than tantalizing hints in this realm that pale beside Modena’s brutally realistic account of domestic strife that is on a par with Countess Tolstoy’s diary.246 In this aspect also, then, Hayyei yehudah would appear to be a harbinger of Eastern European Jewish autobiography. Maimon again was the forerunner in this respect, as the following chapter heading of the Lebens geschichte indicates: ‘My Marriage in My Eleventh Year makes me the Slave of my wife, and procures for me Cudgellings from my Mother-in-Law’.247 And marital strife constitutes a central, if not the central theme, of the two most prominent Haskalah autobiographies, M. A. Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer and M. L. Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim. That Sivan [began May 10, 1641] my wife assumed a strange mood, and she began to quarrel with me and make me angry. This has been the destruction, ruin, and desolation of my money, body, honour, and soul to this day and so will it continue to do so. If I were to live for another hundred years, I would never return to my good standing in any of these four aspects [i.e. money, body, honour and soul, M.M.]. God alone knows whether she fought with me for no reason, when I had committed no wrong and there had been no evil deeds or transgressions on my part. I cannot write of how foolish she was, nor how from day to day I was driven down the slippery slope losing foot time and again from one evil to the next. I can only give an outline. From that month of Sivan until after Sukkot we fought incessantly, and I was yelling furiously, going out of my mind. My blood boiled, I was consumed with wrath, my heart palpitated, my bowels were in uproar. Occasionally she would vow to be quiet, to stifle her agitation, only to return to her folly a few days later. We carried on this way during the entire summer of 5401. On the 4th of Heshvan 5402, [October 8, 1641] I took her with me to Padua on condition that there be peace between us. We stayed there with my daughter Diana, may she be blessed above all women of the house, for Wve

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days. But as soon as we returned home she resumed her bickering until I could stand it no longer. Meanwhile, I developed an abscess, pus and a pulmonary infection. And about the middle of the month of Kislev [November, 1641], I became bedridden with fever, pains, and [other] severe symptoms, in particular the shortness of breath called asthma. Finally, at the beginning of the month of Tevet [began December 4, 1641], the doctors diagnosed me as dying. I recited the deathbed confessional prayer, while in the synagogues prayers were oVered up as I was at death’s door. But God did not wish to kill me. Nonetheless, my illness kept dragging on, and the shortness of breath and pains became so acute that to lie in bed was for me a punishment worse than death, and I began to get up in the month of Shevat [January, 1642]. But I still suVered from insomnia every time I got back into bed, and it lasted for about seven months. Only with the greatest of diYculty could I speak, pray and preach until I despaired of myself, thinking: ‘I can no longer serve the community as I have done for the last forty-nine years, or even associate with other living beings.’ Because I had spent about 130 ducats in cash on my illness by the beginning of the month of Shevat [began January 2, 1642], and because my wife did not stop causing me grief day and night, I became angry at myself, lost control, and returned to the ‘sin of Judah’ [of which I have written] several times, namely playing games of chance, which utterly consumed me and schemed against me. I did so much more evil than on previous occasions that I lost six hundred ducats in the course of a full year. At the time of writing I am up to my neck in debt, to the tune of over 300 ducats, and I lack even the means to provide food for my household. At the beginning of the month of Nisan 5402 [began April 1,1642], I was forced to move out of the house belonging to Meir Cigala of blessed memory, where I had lived for seventeen years—a Wne and beautiful house. On account of my illness, my knees had grown weak and, being short of breath, I could no longer climb the stairs. I moved to a house belonging to Moses Luzzatto, which was located next to his store. It was a dark and dingy place that I called ‘The Cave of Makhpelah’,248 with high rent and expenses. And though [good or bad fortune immediately following a move to a new place] does not constitute divination, it does act as an omen, for I was sick there too,

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depressed and in dire Wnancial straits. All that happened to me derived from one single source; for it was the anger and agitation that undermined my well-being, thus destroying my health, and it was ill-health that prevented me from climbing the stairs, thus bringing me to this dark and poorly lit dwelling, because it is low.249

This, Modena’s account of the years of 1641–42, sets the tone for the remainder of the work. From this point on, Hayyei yehudah is governed by a recurring pattern: mounting debt (incurred in no small part by gambling expenses), deteriorating health, and increasingly severe bouts of depression are countered by mounting rage directed largely toward the most immediate Wgure within its range, Modena’s wife, Rachel. Rachel, with whom apparently he had reconciled himself after their ill-omened nuptials—in 1634, he writes that ‘she is truly my other half ’250—now, with his life on the skids, becomes his nemesis. This ghastly process of increasingly precipitous swings of the pendulum reaches its nadir when Modena’s wit, which up till now has been characterized by ingenuity and lightness of touch, descends to the level of a joke made at Rachel’s expense that verges on the sadistic: At the beginning of the month of Nisan 5405 [began March 28, 1645], my wife became ill with gout and was bedridden for two and a half months. I brought my daughter Diana from Padua to tend to her, along with other servant girls, all at great expense. After she recovered her feet and arms have been paralyzed, but not her tongue, and her words were cutting as a sword. All day long she would not be silent.251

This is testimony not only to a nagging wife but also to the terrible anger that distorts the old man’s judgment and will eventually consume him. Was Modena perhaps aware of this when in an uncharacteristically self-doubting note he writes, in the above passage, ‘God only knows whether she fought with me for no reason etc.?’ It should be noted, in Rachel’s defence, that she may have had no small cause to take issue with her spouse. Here, after all, is a man who, on his own account, periodically lost large sums of money at the gambling tables, who drifted in and out of no less than twenty-six occupations, and who was constantly embroiled in feuds, to the detriment of kith and kin. Rachel’s ‘mood’ in light of these data and those that are

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to follow seems not so utterly ‘strange’ and inexplicable. And this ‘mood’ Modena actually turns to extremely good advantage: he construes it as the prime external causative factor for every mishap and pitfall that beset him from the time of its precipitous onset. Thus in a memorandum appended to the end of the manuscript in the ‘Miseries of my Heart in Brief ’ section: Last aZiction as severe as Sheol. Since the beginning of the month of Sivan 5401 [began May 10, 1641] and to this day, it is the cause of all the evil that has befallen me and will yet befall me until the day of my death, which has been hastening to overcome me on account of this for more than ten years, and so on—evil, ruination of honor, money, body and soul.252

Indeed, Rachel’s putative insanity serves Modena as the underlying, all-inclusive explanatory paradigm for the remainder of the text of Hayyei yehudah, functionally equivalent to the determinative role of the ‘constellations’ in the prior parts of the work. The phrase ‘ruination of honor, money, body and soul’ becomes a type of shorthand for the curse of Rachel; indeed, at one point in the text Modena writes ‘honor, money, body, and soul’ as an acronym.253 Nor is Modena’s behaviour itself devoid of a certain strangeness. He is hysterical, ‘furious and yelling’, insomniac and asthmatic, his ‘bowels in uproar’. Twice in his account of the years 1641–42, he refers to himself as ‘going out of his mind’.254 The extent to which the Wgure of Rachel functions for Modena as a cathexis for his Lear-like rage is brought out in his depiction of the events that led him to move house in Nisan 1642. According to his accounting of the unhappy series of events that led him to the ‘Cave of Makhpelah’, the burden of guilt lies squarely upon the shoulders of Rachel. Her needling made him angry and this ‘anger and wrath took away my health and made me ill.’ The expenses his illness accrued and the continuing ‘grief ’ caused him by his wife drove him to the ‘sin of Judah’ and the ‘desolation’ of his money at the tables. On account of the ‘destruction of his body’ inflicted upon him by Rachel, his legs grow weak and he is forced into the move. ‘All this’ thus ‘happened to me from one single source’. Artfully elided in this account is the possibility of any causal connection between Modena’s ruinous gamblinglosses and the necessity to move to dingier quarters.

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Especially revealing in this passage is the point at which Modena, accounting for his ‘return’ to the ‘sin of Judah’, writes, ‘I became angry with myself and went out of my mind’/Hitkatsafti veyatsa’ti mida’ati. Modena here describes symptoms very much characteristic of those he attributes to the Ruah zarah that aZicted his wife. Noteworthy in particular is the reflexive, ‘I grew angry at myself.’ Could it be that Modena’s rage toward his wife derives in part from his own inner-directed anger combined with guilt? Such conjecture Wnds support in Modena’s choice of three biblical verses to meditate upon in the midst of the gambling frenzy that overtook him in the autumn of 1642: ‘Now three verses from the Torah, Prophets, and Hagiographa distress me. From the Torah: “And if you will say, what shall we eat?”; from the Prophets: “The creditor has come to take”; and from the Hagiographa: “For my loins are Wlled with burning, and there is no soundness in my flesh.”’255 The Wrst two verses refer obviously to his material straits, but it is the last of these verses addressing his psychological condition that is of direct relevance here. Taken from Psalm 38:8, this verse depicts the inner-directed anger of one bowed down by the weight of his iniquity, who Wnds no peace within himself on account of his sin. In the following verse the Psalmist writes: ‘I am benumbed and crushed, I roared with the groaning of my heart.’ The Vesuvian overflow of Modena’s rage, combined with age, takes its toll upon the autobiographical narrative: the entries for the years 1642–48 become increasingly scattered, elliptical and disconnected. In fact the last really coherent extended narrative in the book is that cited above depicting the onset of Rachel’s disturbances. This loss of equilibrium is reflected in Modena’s penmanship: it is on the folio page immediately following this account that Mark Cohen notes the Wrst signs of deterioration in Modena’s handwriting by comparison with the ‘neat, stable handwriting that characterizes most of the previous part of the manuscript’.256 These Wnal pages make depressing reading. From now on, it is all downhill for Modena. Repeated gambling losses precipitate a series of moves, each to a less salubrious lodging than the one preceding. 1648 Wnds Modena flat broke (his funds depleted, so he claims, by medical expenses incurred on behalf of his wife), living in squalor and debilitated by crippling bouts of asthma. The old man’s anger, though, remains unassuaged; still he Wnds strength enough within

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himself to ‘cry out bitterly . . . all day and all night, I was never silent,’ to ‘roar like a lion constantly’ until his last breath.257 The autobiography proper concludes—and this is signiWcant with respect to what has been said before concerning Hayyei yehudah and the sense of an ending—with an anguished question: ‘What can I say about my expenses these past three months and the predicament I am in while writing today?’258 This closure, like that of the autobiographical narrative in Gei’ hizzayon, resonates hauntingly even at the remove of centuries. The above discussion of Hayyei yehudah makes no claim to comprehensiveness. Only those aspects of the text that appear to approximate most closely the Rousseauian autobiography, especially as the genre developed in nineteenth-century Jewish Eastern Europe, have been singled out for attention. It should be stressed that the impression to be gained from reading Hayyei yehudah in toto is quite diVerent from that given when the above-cited passages and others of their ilk, equally suggestive of Rousseauian autobiography, are conflated, as they are in the anthologies of Kahana and Schwarz.259 These autobiographical nuggets are set in the midst of material generally not associated with the genre: lengthy genealogical digressions,260 lists of the author’s published and unpublished works,261 and of his various occupations,262 perfunctory notations of events that have no bearing upon the central thread of the narrative—such as it is. * How, then, to locate Hayyei yehudah in the Jewish literary-historical context? The impression is frequently given in the secondary literature devoted to Jewish life in Renaissance Italy that Modena, more than any other Wgure, somehow epitomizes this era of Jewish history. Hence, in the historical reconstructions by Shulvass and Roth, more extensive reference is made throughout to Hayyei yehudah than to any other discrete text; the methodological assumption being that in the ‘life’ of Modena—understood both as expérience veçue and as text—we have a distillation of the collective experience of the period. Thus Roth writes that the ‘persons and personalia’ of seventeenth-century Jewish Venice ‘are best grouped about Leone da Modena who, more than any other person, represented Judaism to the outside world of his age, and represents his age to the modern mind.’263 The fact that Modena wrote an autobiography, or at best a work that approximates

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more closely to the genre than any other of the self-portrayals left us by his contemporaries, has been taken as further evidence that in the Wgure of this extraordinary man the wider tendencies of their age Wnd their fullest expression. Shulvass, for example, sees Modena and his autobiography as exemplary of wider trends: In this respect, as in so many others, Modena was the most forthright; for he makes speciWc mention, and quite unabashedly, of the keen pleasure he derived from knowledge of the lives of his ancestors and teachers and of other notables. Yehudah Aryeh Modena’s words are testimony, as always, to the inclination of the simple Jew, as evidenced by the fact that many men felt the need to relate the story of their lives in autobiographical sketches. And in this respect also, Modena surpasses them all in his autobiographical work, so astonishing in its explicitness and sincerity.264

The impression to be gained from such assessments as the above is that there exists a corpus of works of Jewish Italian Renaissance provenance that are comparable with Hayyei yehudah. Should this be the case, the placement of Hayyei yehudah within the Jewish literaryhistorical context would present no particular problems; the work belongs to a speciWc category of Renaissance Hebrew autobiographical productions, representative of the ‘spirit of the age’ of which it is the Wnest example. There is, of course, some circularity in this argument. Here, we Wnd an interesting parallel with what a contemporary autobiographical theorist writes of the reception of Cellini’s Life: Sixteenth-century Italy is a setting for autobiography which threatens by the splendour of its intellectual and artistic heritage, and by the anarchy of its mores, to reduce the autobiographer who writes within it to nothing more than the impersonal representative of his age . . . Cellini the autobiographer is not so much the product of his milieu as its creator, since the Life is the one source-book for understanding the spirit of the Italian Renaissance that most of those who read it will come across.265

Whence, however, the pervasive scholarly assumption that the Jewish experience in Renaissance Italy is somehow embodied in the Wgure of this strange man who, even in his own day, was viewed with some suspicion by many of his peers and was at the centre of innumerable

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controversies? Isaac min Haleviyim, Modena’s grandson, wrote of him: ‘He was better known among the Christians than among us, beloved and adored for his wisdom and his modesty in the eyes of the cardinals, dukes, priest, emissaries of kings and princes of every people and language and since him there has not been another like him.’266 In subsequent Jewish historiography, the Wgure of Modena continued and continues to excite controversy. The general tendency of the recent English edition of Hayyei yehudah is to provide a corrective to the distorting lens through which Jewish scholarship has viewed this man— whether as a dissolute hypocrite, or as an early-modern harbinger of Reform Judaism. Thus a sizeable section of Howard Adelman’s essay in this volume, carrying the subtitle ‘Toward a New Assessment of Leon Modena’, is devoted to setting the historical record straight.267 Subsequent to the publication of the English translation of Hayyei yehudah, one of the contributors to the latter volume, Nathalie Zemon Davis, has gone even further in the rehabilitation of Modena, now referred to as ‘Rabbi Leon’: ‘As a master of Hebrew, Latin, Italian and Judaeo-Latin, Rabbi Leon had access to the whole range of Jewish scholarship and male religious action: he prayed at the synagogue, taught and preached; he lived by the law, the Halakhah—or, at least, by most of it; the list of his published books, commentaries, translations, and poems takes up two pages of his memoirs.’268 Extremes meet: both the Reform and the neo-pious sanitization of Modena are, I believe, more reflective of the socio-historical situation of their readers than of the subject. Modena’s ‘typicality’, I would argue, derives not from the man himself, nor even from the Carlylean assumptions that underlie much nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish historiography—especially literary—but rather from the consonance of his image with the most powerful and enduring historical paradigm set forth for the understanding of the Renaissance. The reference is to Jacob Burckhardt, whose The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy provided the epistemological framework for earlier comprehensive study of the Jews in Renaissance Italy.269 Whether or not Burckhardt’s thesis has stood the test of time, or whether his collective characterization of Renaissance mentality really approximates to the historical Modena, I am not qualiWed to judge. My concern here is the sphere of reading by which the latter-day

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image of Modena was reconstituted, especially as this impinges upon the autobiographical. One of the most innovative and controversial aspects of Burckhardt’s thesis is that political and socio-economic conditions in fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italy fostered the emergence of a new type of man, the ‘geistiges individuum’.270 ‘In the Middle Ages’, writes Burckhardt, ‘both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within and that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. . . . Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category.’271 It was Wrst in Renaissance Italy, according to Burckhardt, that ‘the charm laid upon human personality was dissolved,’ making the Italian ‘the Wrst born among the sons of modern Europe’.272 The potential inherent in this atmosphere in which the ‘veil’ of the Middle Ages ‘woven of faith illusion and childish prepossession . . . Wrst melted into air’273 was most fully realized in the Wgure of the humanist. Modena, even if he did not reach the highest rung of Burckhardt’s humanist ladder, that of l’uomo universale, is as both Shulvass and Lachover, each here adopting speciWcally Burckhardtian terminology, note, the very type of this new species of individual.274 Modena could, indeed, have provided excellent material for one of the Renaissance cameos at which Burckhardt so excelled. The following attributes, the most signiWcant deWning characteristics of ‘Renaissance man’ as understood by Burckhardt, Wt Modena to a tee: 1. A strident sense of individuality that fostered, on the one hand, a monstrous egoism, a distasteful spirit of competitiveness but, on the other, an ‘impulse to the highest individual development’275 allied with a spirit of generous cosmopolitanism. The most commendable and least attractive aspects of Renaissance individuality coexist within Modena in an uneasy harmony. 2. An anxious preoccupation with immortality that gave rise, in no small part, to the ‘modern idea of fame’.276 Renaissance man, none too certain of the prospect of immortality, took all measures possible to assure the perpetuation of his name.277 Books, especially printed, provide, as Modena is aware, some assurance of life beyond the grave. He

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thus makes no bones of the fact that his principal aim in including an auto-bibliography in Hayyei yehudah is to guarantee that ‘despite death and these evil times, my name will never be blotted out among the Jews or in the world at large, as long as the earth remains.’278 Making provision for a decent burial and, as Modena puts it, ‘a durable grave stone that will last as long as possible’279 provided Renaissance man with another, more lapidary, means for perpetuation of the name. It was, no doubt, this same impulse that prompted so many Renaissance men to commission portraits of themselves or to paint or draw selfportraits. Modena took great pride in the portrait of him by the Italian painter Tiberio Tinelli. When Tinelli died, leaving the portrait unWnished, Modena apparently commissioned another ‘small, square portrait’ of himself, which he sent as a ‘remembrance’ or keepsake to David Finzi.280 3. A ‘many-sidedness’, the ability of the individual to project himself into and actually function within a variety of roles and situations.281 Modena, in this respect at least, would put many a Renaissance man in the shade; witness the twenty-six occupations at which he tried his hand, albeit to little pecuniary advantage, as listed by himself in Hayyei yehudah.282 This many-sidedness was, as is true of all the psychological characteristics that Burckhardt attributes to Renaissance man, a mixed blessing. The Protean capacity for self-projection expressed itself, on the one hand, in the attainment, or near attainment, of the ideal of l’uomo universale: the Renaissance polymath as exempliWed by Leon Battista, Pico della Mirandola, or Dante—men who could create a higher harmony from the intellectual restlessness that impelled them to artistic creativity. The quality of many-sidedness, though, in Burckhardt’s scheme, also gave rise to the type of aimless, even rakish dilettantism that gave humanism a bad name and was eventually to be a precipitant factor in its decline.283 Modena stands somewhere midway along this spectrum, veering dangerously toward the latter pole at times of crisis.284 4. An overwhelming pride (superbia) that, camouflaged as a sense of honour, made ripe for a Werce thirst for revenge.285 Modena’s constant embroilment in feuds and vendettas, the episodes of real violence of which Hayyei yehudah tells not a few, would again appear to be true to type in this respect.286

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5. A vestigial superstitiousness. Not only did the popular heathenism of the Middle Ages not lose its grip on the Renaissance mind, but in some departments, most notably astrology, superstitious practices actually enjoyed a revival in thirteenth- to sixteenth-century Renaissance Italy, the humanists being as prone to this virus as were the proletariat.287 Modena, as has been noted above, was a Wrm believer in the determining influence of what he calls the Ma’arekhet, or ‘constellations’,288 as well as in palmistry. This fatalism must be reckoned as one of the most signiWcant of the complex of factors that drove Modena to gambling, a vice to which the Italian man of the Renaissance was especially prey.289 For the gambler has, paradoxically, a strong sense of fate, even of ultimate order; he assigns, moreover, thaumaturgical signiWcance to certain ritual acts. Thus Modena writes that it was the ‘stars and constellations’ that ‘forced me all my life to persist in the folly of playing games of chance, even though inside I knew well its faults and evil’.290 The above roster by no means does justice to the many facets of Renaissance man as depicted by Burckhardt. It is, however, suYcient to convey the degree to which Modena, albeit belatedly, conforms to Renaissance psychology as understood by the most influential historian of the period. It is in view of this aYnity that it becomes understandable that Shulvass, Roth, Lachover et alii should perceive Modena as being the nucleus of a galaxy of ‘persons and personalia’ that peopled not only the Venetian ghetto but, apparently, the entire peninsula, for these scholars eVectively depict Jewish society of this period as a microcosmic reflection of the one historical reconstruction of Renaissance Italy available them—that of Burckhardt.291 Some of the most fruitful applications of Burckhardt’s thesis—in the Weld of literary scholarship, at least—have been precisely in the study of the autobiographical genre. The ‘psychological fact itself ’ of ‘individuality’ as Wrst highlighted by Burckhardt in his study of the Renaissance serves, in many respects, as the linchpin for Misch’s monumental work, for Gusdorf ’s extraordinarily influential essay, and for Weintraub’s survey of the genre, the latter being upon his own admission ‘an unabashed admirer of Burckhardt’.292 Literary historians are, however, by no means unanimous in their assessment of the signiWcance of Burckhardt’s thesis for the study of autobiography:293 the

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present, or recently present, environment of autobiographical studies is not hospitable to this male-centered, teleological and chronologically driven model for the emergence of ‘individuality’. To assay Hayyei yehudah within the context of Jewish intellectual and literary history is actually to touch upon a central and as yet unresolved issue in the history of the genre. How, that is, to account for the phenomenon of the near-contemporaneous appearance of several texts of disparate provenance, and quite independently of each other, that nonetheless bear such distinctive stylistic and thematic similarities as to be classiWable under the common rubric ‘Renaissance autobiography’—or better ‘literary self-portrayal’? Burckhardt himself noted this phenomenon: ‘Even autobiography’, he writes, ‘takes here and there in Italy a bold and vigorous flight, and puts before us, together with the most varied incidents of external life, striking revelations of the inner man.’294 As illustrative of this reWnement of literary technique for depiction of the inner man, he gives fleeting synopses of the Commentaries of Pius II, Cellini’s Vita, Cardano’s De Vita Propria Liber, and Luigi Cornaro’s Discursi della Vita Sobria.295 Had Hayyei yehudah come to Burckhardt’s attention, it could well have been included in this problematic cluster of seemingly unrelated expressions of Renaissance individuality.296 Some comparison of Modena’s Hayyei yehudah and Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte may prove useful here in casting certain aspects of this problem into relief. As is true of Maimon’s Lebengeschichte, Modena’s Hayyei yehudah, notwithstanding its being written in Hebrew, makes more sense within the non-Jewish than the Jewish context.297 Modena, like Maimon, collaborated extensively both in Wscal and in scholarly undertakings, with non-Jews and was well-versed in the culture of the surrounding society. And he achieved, as did Maimon, widespread recognition among his non-Jewish contemporaries; his sermons, as he relates with pride in Hayyei yehudah, were attended by and won him the admiration of many non-Jews—even the ‘brother of the king of France’.298 A crucial distinction must, however, be drawn between Hayyei yehudah and the Lebensgeschichte. With Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, we do not deal with the contemporaneous appearance of parallel yet unrelated literary phenomena but with a clear line of textual transmission and the crystallization of a distinct literary genre. Hayyei yehudah, by

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contrast, bears by far the strongest aYnities with another equally unclassiWable work, unique in its day, written by a man born a generation before Modena, also an Italian, though from Milan, Jerome Cardano.299 It was Natalie Zemon Davis who Wrst drew attention to the remarkable parallels between Jerome Cardano’s De vita propria liber, begun in 1575, but not published until 1643 (in Paris),300 and Hayyei yehudah. The question of direct influence is diYcult to ascertain: Davis does note that Modena did have direct and indirect links with the publisher of Cardano’s De vita, Gabriel Naudé, and she raises the real possibility that Modena may have come across the book.301 Even if he did, however, it can only have had minimal influence upon his own Life, since by the time Cardano’s book was published Modena had been working for twenty-Wve years on his autobiography and completed the great majority of the work. Unless, that is, he rewrote the whole thing in the last Wve years of his life or so; but the calligraphic evidence from the autograph manuscript pretty much rules this out. The psychological and thematic parallels between Hayyei yehudah and Cardano’s Vita are nothing short of extraordinary, and are not fully adduced by Davis herself, for whom the similarities between these texts are outweighed by their distinctions. It is indeed surprising that this remarkable correspondence should not have been noted by Cassutto, Zinberg, Lachover, or Kahana. Only in the formal aspect do these texts evince any marked divergence; Cardano’s achronological and frequently repetitive circumambulation of self actually serves him better than Modena is served by the essentially chronological form of Hayyei yehudah. Davis, indeed, suggests that under the influence of Cardano, Modena may have been led to a ‘topical rethinking about his life’ in his last years.302 The respective birth-accounts in Hayyei yehudah and De propria vita are already suggestive of a profound psychological aYnity between these two authors and their texts. Cardano’s mother, as did Modena’s, suVered a diYcult labour. Whereas Modena came into the world ‘upside down’ in the wake of a natural catastrophe, Cardano, narrowly escaping an inauspicious planetary alignment which would—and indeed should, according to his calculations—have made of him a ‘monster’, was born by caesarean: ‘Literally torn from my mother’s womb, I was

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born, or rather taken by violent means from my mother; I was almost dead . . . I was revived in a bath of warm wine which might have been fatal to any other child. My mother had been in labour for three entire days, and yet I survived.’303 Cardano then believed, as did Modena, in the determining influence of the constellations. Both men were convinced that the year of their death was foreordained; Modena was in full expectation of his demise at the age of Wfty-two,304 Cardano at around forty years old.305 Each man, in retrospect, came to view these premature intimations of mortality as injurious to his psychological well-being. But neither, when both of these prognostications proved incorrect, was deterred from his astrological beliefs. Both Modena and Cardano also set great store by dreams as auguring future events:306 Cardano gives as one of the main reasons for his taking up writing his being repeatedly urged to do so in a dream,307 and he, like Modena, claims to have Wrst seen his future spouse in a dream.308 Neither man, though, was happily married. Cardano came, like Modena, to see his ‘unfortunate union’ as ‘the cause of all the calamities which befell me throughout my entire life’.309 Not the least of these ‘calamities’ was, for both men, their children, who proved to be a constant source of vexation. Cardano in a chapter entitled ‘The Disasters of My Sons’, complains that ‘in general, everything pertaining to my children had the worst possible issue’.310 Modena writes, in similar vein, ‘it is only my sins and transgressions that have caused me to be able to say that of my three sons, one died, one was murdered, and one lives in exile’.311 A catalytic event in the life of each man was the death of his oldest and most beloved son; Cardano’s son, Giambattista, was executed in 1560 for killing his wife. For both Cardano and Modena, the experience was so traumatic that they seem impelled to return to the tragedy several times in their vitae.312 Cardano and Modena, moreover, both respond to adversity in a similar manner. Anxiety and anger frequently manifest themselves in symptoms that appear to be in part psychosomatic—Modena in attributing his illness to his ‘anger’ seems to recognize this—most notably in disturbances of the respiratory function.313 Cardano’s array of symptoms, however, was far more alarming than that of Modena and

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led many commentators of his own day and later to consider him insane. Indeed, Gabriel Naudé, the Wrst publisher of Cardano’s De vita, viewed him as a madman.314 Both men were aZicted by a chronic compulsion to gamble. From the frequency with which the subject crops up in the Vita—as, if not more, frequently than in Hayyei yehudah—we may surmise that the compulsion was as acute for Cardano as it was for Modena, and equally disastrous Wnancially.315 Cardano engages, as does Modena, in various self-exculpatory manoeuvres so as to extenuate the gravity of his vice; each man adduces the hardships of his existence as a mitigating factor. ‘If ’, writes Cardano, ‘anyone may wish to rise to my defence, let him not say that I had any love for gambling, but rather that I loathed the necessities which goaded me to gambling—calumnies, injustices, poverty, the contemptuous behaviour of certain men, the lack of organization in my aVairs, the realization that I was despised by many, my own morbid nature, and Wnally the graceless idleness which sprang from all these.’316 For each man, the death of his son precipitated a gambling binge.317 Both Cardano and Modena, moreover, wrote treatises condemning the practice of gambling—though Modena’s condemnation alternated with praise of the vice.318 Each man, moreover, seems to have been prompted by very similar motivations in assigning their lives to writing, thus making of the life a Vita. Cardano and Modena, in face of the erosion of the dogma of personal immortality as presented them by their respective creeds, shared the anxious concern of Renaissance man for perpetuation of the name that has been remarked upon above. Cardano, apart from having been ‘urged by a dream’ several times to take up writing, also felt impelled to set pen to paper ‘by a great longing to have my name live’.319 This motivation must have applied with especial force in the writing of his Vita; indeed it is, as Burckhardt notes, largely by virtue of the Vita that Cardano is remembered today.320 It is in line with this concern for perpetuation of the name that Cardano, like Modena, takes care to include a copy of his will in the Vita, which, in a remarkable act of prescience, he actually post-dates to only ten days after his death.321 And in a chapter entitled ‘Books Written by Me; When Why and What Became of Them,’ Cardano also—here the similarity with Modena is

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uncanny—gives an itemized list of all his works, published and in manuscript, not neglecting to mention the Vita which he is in the process of writing.322 John Sturrock, in a recent analysis of Cardano’s De Vita Propria Liber, draws attention to Cardano’s obsessive fascination with the play of chance, probability and determination oVered up by life. In recording the events of his life, Cardano seeks to arrive at a calculus that will enable him to discern pattern and system in seemingly random and vicissitudinary sequences of events, thereby achieving some mastery over fate. ‘Cardano’s theory of composition’, writes Sturrock, thus involves ‘treating the raw material of autobiography mathematically’: Everywhere in his autobiography there is evidence of Cardano’s passion for numbers . . . which is notable for its exactitude over dates, precise often down to the day of the month on which something happened. He is also fond of computation, as when he tells us that his visit to Scotland in 1552 on a medical mission took him from home for 311 days, or that his imprisonment in Rome in 1570 lasted 77 days, followed by a further 86 days as a prisoner in his own home, making a total of 162 days . . . He draws no explicit conclusions from sums such as these nor does he declare the numbers to be signiWcant. Why then bother to calculate and to publish them? Because, seemingly, they are the product of chance: Cardano’s excursion to Scotland might have lasted more than 311 days, or it might have been completed in fewer: the actual number of days that it took is a contingency. But it might also be interpreted as the product, in the mathematical sense of that word, of an incalculable number of individual factors multiplied together . . . themselves inWnitely divisible into smaller factors which have determined the seemingly insigniWcant total of 311 days . . . Cardano is the artist as semiotician, able to discern signs where lesser men can see only events.323

Modena too evinces such passion for numbers and exactitude in dating. Thus, in the account of his birth he provides both the Christian and the Jewish reckoning of the day and the hour, likewise in his account of the birth of his son Zevulun.324 The concern for calendric precision is also reflected in the memoranda that occur on the last page of the manuscript: here Modena makes careful record of the dates of his various

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shifts in residence from 1642 to 1645, totting up at the end of each entry the total time spent in one location.325 This concern for dating is surely related to Modena’s astrological determinism; at the age of seventeen he had come to the realization that ‘it had been determined by the constellations that I would not see any good.’326 Numerical detail also abounds throughout the text—debts, payments, sermons delivered, the precise weights involved in Mordechai’s alchemical experiments, days spent in bed while unwell et cetera. Modena appears also to assign signiWcance to numbers that is not entirely clear. Thus, in recalling Mordechai, he writes: ‘We were like two brothers, for he was twenty-six years and two months old [at his death] and I was forty-six and a half.’327 The causative conjunction ki ‘for’ in the latter sentence must apply to some signiWcance that inheres in the numbers alone, otherwise the sentence undermines its own premise. Modena also seeks pattern or system in calendric recurrence: Now it came to pass that the aforementioned scholar died during the night of the arrival of Tuesday the 9th of Heshvan [5]377, in a room in a dwelling belonging to the family of Zimlan Luria of Padua, which was next to the dwellings belonging to the Calimani family . . . My son died exactly one year later, on the night of the arrival of Tuesday the 9th of Heshvan 5378 [November 7, 1617], in the very same room and in a bed located on the very same spot. [That is] because I had moved to that apartment immediately after the death of that scholar.328

The search for pattern and system in the seemingly random, aleatory data of existence bears obvious aYnities with the gambling mentality. Isaac Barzilay argues that, for Modena, participation in games of chance was no mere hobby or bad habit. Gambling, for Modena, both generated and was reflective of a world-view, even a systematic theology, according to which God’s relations to mankind are viewed as those of an all-seeing croupier who derives pleasure from human beings above all other species of His creation, precisely because the latter, having been granted free will, exhibit such captivating unpredictability and capriciousness. The pleasure is slightly sadistic, however, in that this croupier, the master of the game, knows each and every move of each and every player in advance and, simultaneously, their outcome. Thus Barzilay on

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the relation between Modena’s juvenile dialogue on the pros and cons of gambling and the Qol sakhal, which he attributes to Modena: It is above all the heavenly endorsement of gambling that deserves attention. This may, of course, be interpreted in the framework of Modena’s strong astrological convictions as indicative of the view that the gambler’s fate depends on the heavenly constellations . . . Gambling, Meldad argues, is not only socially useful; it also has the Creator’s approval . . . It was in accordance with God’s will, he writes, that the lot that decided on the Day of Atonement the fate of the two goats (Lev. 16:18). According to the lot the land of Canaan was ordered to be divided (Num. 26:56). King David declared that God maintains his lot (Ps. 16:5), and ‘his wise son Solomon’, that ‘the lot causes contentions to cease’ (Prov. 18:18). If ‘dice’ be substituted for ‘lot’ . . . it is quite possible that the phrase ‘one lot for God’ was inserted here with the frivolous intention of alluding to the notion of a gambling God . . . The author of Kol sakhal proceeds in chapter four to expound his belief in divine providence. Inasmuch as that delight stems from man’s versatility, he conceives of providence as encompassing the full range of man’s deeds and thoughts, to their minutest detail. That such a conception is not unreasonable—the author assures us—may be inferred from watching the chess game, in which each player must keep his eyes on thirty-two pieces with their numerous possible moves. He further illustrates God’s knowledge by comparing it with a mirror in which are reflected the images of all objects in front of it.329

David Ruderman’s comments on the defence of gambling put forward in Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon are very much in concordance with the above: Yagel’s speaker (the ‘Jewish Gambler’ in Gei’ hizzayon) intended to demonstrate ‘that all human perfection is found in cards and dice’. Rather than merely a game of sport, playing at cards or dice hints at higher truths, revealing the orderly structure of the universe and the majesty of the Creator. The game is ultimately a symbolic representation of the universe as a whole and therefore, remarkably, mastery of the rules of the game leads the initiate to glimpse the deepest meaning of human experience.330

There also emerges here a deep structural aYnity between the ‘game’ and the autobiographical enterprise itself as practiced by the seasoned

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gamblers, Cardano and Modena: autobiography itself provides a powerful heuristic paradigm for the conferral of ‘pattern and system in the seemingly random, aleatory data of existence’. Thus Sturrock writes that: ‘In Cardano’s mastery of numbers there lies a restorative assertion of self premonitory of that of the autobiographer, who in the Symbolic Order of words can at last turn the hazards of an indiVerent Fortune to his own underlying advantage.’331 The cardinal distinction to be drawn, however, between Cardano’s self-exploration and that of the ‘children of Jean Jacques’ is that for the latter the shaping of the life arises from within and is structured according to a self known, or better felt, rather than according to numerical schemata that correspond to the objective structure of the universe. Thus Sturrock on Cardano, and the gist of his point is very much applicable to Modena: ‘The absence of a master-narrative to The Book of My Life is justiWed obliquely by Cardano’s assumption that the narrative orderliness of his life has required no contribution from himself and that he may borrow from it as he likes without calling its existence into question.’332 Modena, however, is by no means as conWdent as is Cardano in discerning the essential ‘orderliness’ of his terrestrial existence. His Life is altogether darker, more despairing of having cracked the codes of his earthly existence than is Cardano’s—hence Mallarmé’s paradox, ‘A throw of the dice will never eliminate chance’ as the subtitle to this section. Modena leaves his cards on the table on a note of disconsolation, but, I believe, in the never-dying hope of the gambler that in the world to come, all the cards, dice, wagers and gambits having been surveyed from the aspect of eternity, and simultaneously, he may still come out on top. The ‘master-narrative’, however, that systematizes and confers closure upon these chaotic deposits of a life, can only be provided by the Creator. ‘About a month’ after his father’s death, Modena recounts that: Several times he had spoken to me about the reward and punishment of the soul after death, the gist of his words having been that a certain Sephardi had said at the time of the latter’s death: ‘Now I will know what a soul is’—meaning that it is impossible to know this until after death. So I asked him [in my dream], ‘Tell me, please, honourable scholar, what is the state of your soul, and what is it like for you in that other world?’ He answered me, ‘I eat well and drink well

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there.’ I then said, ‘But how can this be? Did not the sages of blessed memory say that “in the world to come there is no eating and no drinking etc.?”’ He replied, ‘If you want this fool to seem wise in your eyes, look at the end of the saying—“instead the righteous sit . . . and enjoy . . . as it is written in Scripture: And they beheld God and ate and drank.”’333

Early-Modern Autobiography in Ashkenaz I: Scrolls of Lamentation and Deliverance With the power of Modena’s Hayyei yehudah in mind, it is certainly understandable that in the ‘tradition’ model for the study of Jewish autobiography, pride of place is, in the pre-modern period, accorded to works of Sephardic provenance. The balance of Jewish autobiographical productions shifts, however, after the seventeenth century, according to the same model, decisively in favour of Ashkenaz. Shatsky, for example, whose above-mentioned article Yidishe memuarn literatur remains the most comprehensive bibliographical survey of Jewish autobiographical writings from the seventeenth century on, cites, en passant, but two texts of Sephardic provenance.334 When, and how, was the transition of the autobiographical modality from Sepharad to Ashkenaz eVected? It would appear that a crucial text in the history of this transition is R. Yom Tov Lippman Heller’s (1579–1654) Megillat ’eivah (Scroll of Enmity), for this text, in bibliographical surveys and monographs on the genre, almost invariably marks the point of departure for the rich and variegated autobiographical tradition of Ashkenazic Jewry who, if we are to believe Shatsky, evinced an especial propensity and aptitude for this mode of literary self-expression. Megillat ’eivah is, actually, the Wrst Jewish autobiographical text cited by Shatsky in his 1925 article.335 Again, it was M. L. Letteris who initiated this tendency in Jewish literary historiography. Megillat ’eivah is the Wrst text of Ashkenazic provenance to be cited by Letteris in his bibliography of Jewish autobiographies prior to his own. Preceded by R. Yitzhak Haim Cantarini of Padua’s memoirs, and followed by Jacob Emden’s Megillat sefer and Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeshichte, Megillat ’eivah forms thereby a bridge from Sepharad to Ashkenaz. Likewise in Kahana’s Sifrut hahistoriah hayisra’elit, Megillat

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’eivah is preceded by Modena’s Hayyei yehudah, to be followed by the Zikhroynes of Gluckel of Hameln and Nathan Neta Hannover’s Yeven metsulah.336 And in the Wrst part of Schwarz’s anthology entitled ‘Flood Tide of Remembrance’, Megillat ’eivah also marks the Wrst citation of a text of Ashkenazic provenance, being preceded by a section from the diary of the Portuguese Marrano, Solomon Molkho.337 The tendency to regard Megillat ’eivah as a crucial text in the development of autobiography in Ashkenaz has been accentuated by Yiddishist literary historians who frequently couple Megillat ’eivah with the Zikhroynes of Gluckel of Hameln, the two constituting the classics of ‘Old Yiddish Memoir Literature’.338 It is, in fact, unclear whether Megillat ’eivah was originally written in Hebrew or Yiddish, but the details of this Yiddishist/Hebraist debate are not germane to the present discussion.339 In the surveys of Kahana, Schwarz, Erik et alii, the special place accorded Megillat ’eivah is implied by bibliographic placement, never speciWcally explicated. Indeed, the cultural gulf separating Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jewry in this period is so considerable as to render such explication extremely problematic.340 The contrast aVorded by Modena, the ‘bitter and impetuous’ Venetian, and Yomtov Lippmann Heller, the sombre central European halachist, is illustrative of this gulf. There is, moreover, no evidence of a process of textual transmission of autobiographical works from Sephardic to Ashkenazic areas of settlement. Such lines of communication as did exist between Sepharad and Ashkenaz in the late-medieval and early-modern period served primarily for the conveyance of Kabbalistic texts—the mediatory role of Italian Jewry being especially noteworthy in this respect.341 The factor, then, that unites Sephardic with Ashkenazic autobiographical productions and licenses the scholar to treat of both under single purview is phenomenological/essentialist rather than causal/historical. So, in Shatsky’s formulation, Heller’s Megillat ’eivah, the ‘nationalist’ account of a personal catastrophe, provides a foretaste of the ‘personal’ accounts of national catastrophe that will come to characterize Ashkenazic Jewish memoir-literature from 1648 on, as they did that of Sepharad from the year of the Spanish expulsion, 1492.342 The title of Heller’s memoir, recounting the calumnious charges that led to his imprisonment in 1629 and his Wnal vindication, is in itself suggestive both of national catastrophe and of an element of continuity between

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Megillat ’eivah and the flurry of Jewish memoiristic texts occasioned by the Khmielnitsky massacres of 1648. For the word ’eivah (enmity), when combined with the construct form of the noun megillah (scroll) is, to the educated Hebrew reader, immediately evocative of the book of ’Eichah or Lamentations, known in post-biblical tradition as the Megillat qinot (‘Scroll of Dirges’). The allusion is not accidental; Heller, as he writes in the proem to Megillat ’eivah, did make ‘an excellent choice of title’. For, as he goes on to explain, the word ’eivah is an acronym of the Wrst four words of Lamentations: ’Eykhah yashvah badad ha’ir343 (‘How doth the city sit solitary’ etc.). Not only is this title biblically resonant, it is also, within the context of seventeenth-century Ashkenazic memoir literature, proleptic; for, in Hebrew, only two letters, one of which is vocally equivalent to the other, distinguish the title of Heller’s memoirs from Shabbatai Cohen’s memoiristic account of the Khmielnitsky persecutions, the Megillat ’eifah (Scroll of Darkness), Wrst published in 1651.344 Cohen’s Megillat ’eifah precedes, though only by two years, the more substantial and famous memoir of the Khmielnitsky massacres, Nathan Neta Hannover’s Yeven metsulah, Wrst published in 1653.345 That Heller should also have written qinot (dirges) in response to the Cossack persecutions of 1648346 and that these, moreover, should have been published as a supplement to at least one edition of Yeven metsulah,347 would tend to strengthen the link between Megillat ’eivah and the memoiristic accounts of Tah vetat.348 Born under a bad sign, then, Jewish memoir literature in Ashkenaz would, so it seems, continue to be generated and shaped by a series of catastrophes of personal and/or national dimensions. Thus we Wnd grouped together in Kahana’s anthology Megillat ’eivah, Megillat ’eifah, Yeven metsulah and the Zikhroynes of Gluckel of Hameln; two memoiristic texts written in response to national calamity are oVset by two memoirs prompted by personal calamity, respectively imprisonment and the death of a spouse.349 Again, however, closer scrutiny of the publication history and of the formal properties of Megillat ’eivah renders such putative continuity problematic. No printed edition of either the Hebrew or the Yiddish version of Megillat ’eivah is extant until the nineteenth century. A version of the Hebrew text was Wrst printed in 1818 in Breslau by Mosheh Kerner. A Yiddish edition of Megillat ’eivah Wrst appeared in

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Vilna in 1869, in fact a translation of the 1818 Breslau edition. Two further Hebrew editions of the work appeared in the nineteenth century under the title Kos yeshu’ot haniqra’ megillat ’eivah (The Cup of Deliverance Also Known as the Scroll of Enmity). A critical edition of the Hebrew text only appeared in 1923 in Kahana’s above-mentioned anthology, Sifrut hahistoriah hayisra’elit.350 The Yiddish manuscript variant of the work, considered by Zinberg to be the original,351 remains, to the best of my knowledge, unpublished to this day. The possibility of Megillat ’eivah having exerted any actual influence upon the development of the Jewish memoiristic or autobiographical tradition must, then, be ruled out. Publication data aside, it is entirely a moot question whether Heller’s Megillat ’eivah displays the formal or thematic characteristics of memoir or autobiography, however loosely these terms are deWned. Closer analysis of the text reveals that Megillat ’eivah belongs to a very special class of literature, a uniquely Jewish sub-genre bearing only the most tenuous aYnities to either of these literary modalities. Again, clues as to the true identity of this text are actually included within the title. Mention has already been made of the ingenious acrostic in the word ’eivah, both refers to the Wrst four words of Lamentations and rhymes with the Hebrew title of the book. And it was noted that the word megillah serves further to emphasize the connection with Lamentations. But this is not all; the word megillah carries stronger resonances of the Book of Esther, the Megillat ’ester as recited at the Feast of Purim. In rabbinic tradition the word megillah alone is, in certain contexts, actually synonymous with the Book of Esther.352 And, ingeniously interwoven into Heller’s title, already so replete with biblical and rabbinic resonance, is a personal element whose allusion is selfreferential and contemporary—contemporary, that is, to the time of writing. The title as a whole contains the Wrst letters of the author’s name: Yud, Lamed and Heh, Yom-Tov Lippman Heller. The work ’eivah, moreover, in its literal meaning of “enmity” or “animosity” refers to Heller’s malicious detractors, whose trumped up charges brought about his unwarranted incarceration. Heller, then, in his account of these events, invokes two biblical precedents: the dirge of destruction on the model of Lamentations and the tale of persecution and subsequent deliverance à la Esther. In late

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mediaeval and early-modern Jewish literature, written in Hebrew and Yiddish, Lamentations and Esther form the prototypes for two distinct sub-genres: the lament or dirge written in the form of a poem or song describing a communal catastrophe,353 and the prose account of tribulations and subsequent deliverance to which Erik applies the term “family scroll” (Megillah).354 There is considerable overlap between these two sub-genres; the prose account of tribulations and subsequent deliverance may include elements of the dirge, and the identiWcation of the oppressor with Haman in such rhymed laments as the Megillat vints355 suggests an obvious connection with the Book of Esther. Lines of demarcation between the two sub-genres, in terms of both form and function, may nonetheless be drawn. The dirges are written in verse and frequently intended to be sung, an appropriate Niggun or “traditional melody” being suggested by the author.356 These dirges or laments, recounted in the Wrst person by an eyewitness, deal invariably with catastrophes of national, or at least communal, dimensions; they are thus functionally and formally equivalent in many respects to the ritual Selihot (penitential prayers).357 The narratives of deliverance, on the other hand, are written in prose and designed to be recited aloud, as is the Scroll of Esther on the Feast of Purim. These narratives, like the lament in verse, are written in the Wrst person and recount the actual experiences of the author, but unlike the latter their focus is upon calamities that befall a family or an individual rather than a nation or a community. Where the function of the versiWed lament, however, is to mourn and give vent to unrequited anger, the function of the prose-narratives is primarily that of commemoration of and thanksgiving for the ‘miracles and wonders’ by means of which deliverance from distress has been aVorded.358 The potentialities of both of these genres were most fully realized by Askenazic Jewry and the most distinguished examples of each are to be found in Old Yiddish literature,359 this tending to support Zinberg and Shatzky’s assignation of priority to the Yiddish text of Megillat ’eivah. Max Erik was the Wrst to characterize the ‘family scrolls’ modelled upon the paradigm of the Book of Esther as ‘memoirs’ and to subsume them, along with the later Zikhroynes (Memoirs) of Gluckel of Hameln beneath the common rubric of ‘Old Yiddish Memoir Literature’.360

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Zinberg adopted Erik’s classiWcation of these Megillot (Yiddish, Megiles) as ‘memoirs’,361 but innovated in distinguishing these latter from the versiWed Wrst-person laments that he deWned as ‘historical poems’362— an appellation generally accepted amongst Yiddish scholars today.363 This ‘family scroll’/‘historical poem’ distinction is useful in clarifying the relation between Megillat ’eivah and other early-modern Jewish autobiographical productions of Ashkenazic provenance. To group Megillat ’eivah with Megillat ’eifah (similarities in title notwithstanding) and with other ‘autobiographical writings of this time, occasioned particularly by the Chmielnicki [Khmielnitsky] massacres’,364 is, in fact, misleading. For we have here to do not with the sequential evolution of one genre but with the parallel development of two speciWcally Jewish literary traditions in Ashkenaz, better understood within the context of their own coordinates than within that of wider generic conWgurations: autobiographical, memoiristic, or otherwise. Shabbatai Hacohen’s Megillat ’eifah belongs to the ‘lamentation’ or, in Yiddish, Klog-lid,365 tradition, the earliest and most important exemplum of which is the above-mentioned Megillat vints. Although a personal voice is intermittently heard in the Klog-lid, as in Megillat vints, ‘My heart wished to leap from my breast. . . . Much would I have wagered against this, had I not seen it with my own eyes,’366 this personal voice only serves to stress the atrocity of the events recorded and to lend authenticity to the narrative. The self of the narrator is, apart from such brief exclamations of recoil, so absent from these accounts as to render them outside even the memoiristic genre, in which the author’s reactions to the events he witnesses are at least steadily documented, if not subjected to the secondary process of self-reflection characteristic of autobiography proper. The true ‘I’ of the verse lament is the ‘we’ of the mourning community; a symbolic ‘I’ whose Wrst-person enunciations give vent to the helpless outrage of the conscience collective aVording, thereby, some measure of cathartic relief: hence the facility with which such a ‘historical poem’ as Megillat ’eifah could be assimilated within the liturgy.367 For, as Zinberg sensed, these ‘historical poems’ may be located along a continuum with such liturgical productions as the Selihot (‘penitential prayers’). And it is these texts that, in Zinberg’s History, form a natural ‘point of transition’ to his discussion of the ‘purely religious poems’ of Old Yiddish Literature.368

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Megillat ’eivah, it is clear, is best situated on a continuum other than that of the ‘historical poem’. Heller’s memoir—as the subtitle of the nineteenth-century Vienna editions of the text Kos yeshu ’ot (‘Cup of Deliverance’)369 suggests—belongs rather to the tradition of the prosenarratives of redemption modelled after the Book of Esther. The moot question of whether Megillat ’eivah can any more be deWned as memoir or autobiography than can Megillat ’eifah and other Khmielnitsky texts, or, for that matter, be spoken of in the same breath as Gluckel’s Zikhroynes will, for the moment, be held in abeyance. But Erik and Zinberg are surely correct in locating Megilla ’eivah within the tradition of the ‘family scroll’. For Megillat ’eivah, whether or not it was originally written in Hebrew or Yiddish, conforms precisely to the formal and functional conventions of this, primarily Yiddish, literary tradition. The great majority of the extant ‘memoirs’ of Old Yiddish Literature are, in fact, ‘family scrolls’ and bear the title Megillah (Yiddish, Megile): the seventeenth-century Megillat rav me’ir and the eighteenth-century Megillat shmu’el, for example.370 Heller’s Megillat ’eivah is, arguably, the most important exemplum of this Megillah genre. This sub-genre, by virtue of the fact that it is written in prose and that its focus is more upon the experiences of the individual author than upon those of the community in face of the collective catastrophe aVecting all alike, does bear more aYnities with memoir or autobiography than does the Klog-lid or lament. The function of these ‘family scrolls’, including Megillat ’eivah, is, however, very diVerent from that of either memoir or autobiography. It was the custom amongst more prominent Jewish families in Europe to fast on the day of a family calamity, and to celebrate the day of deliverance with a ‘family Purim’,371 giving thanks to the ‘Almighty One, Blessed Be He for the miracles and wonders He had shown in His bountiful mercy and justice’372 in rescuing a member of the family, generally the patriarch, from the hands of the oppressor. The majority of these texts are, in fact, like Megillat ’eivah, accounts of libellous charges levelled against the author leading to his imprisonment and of his subsequent release upon the exposure of these calumnies. The formal approximation of these texts to the Book of Esther is, then, matched by their functional equivalence; the ‘family scroll’ is recited annually by the author’s family and, after his death, his descendants, on the date appointed for the celebratory feast. In

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one of Sh. Y. Abramovitsh’s later stories, cast in the form of autobiographical recollections of childhood, ’Dos tosfos yontev kelbl’,373 we Wnd an echo of this ‘family Megillah’ tradition, speciWcally relating to Heller’s Megillat ’eivah. The Tosfos yontev of the title refers to Yom Tov Lippmann Heller, known as the Tosfos after his commentary on the Mishnah of the same name.374 The mother of the child-protagonist in this story is a descendant of Heller. I have been unable to establish whether this is an authentic autobiographical detail relating to Abramovitsh, but consider this more than likely in view of the increasingly autobiographical complexion that his stories took on in the later period of his literary creativity.375 In this story, the family’s cow has just given calf. Going to milk the cow on a bitterly cold March morning, the mother (all of the characters in this story are unnamed, apart from the calf) Wnds that the animal, which has been left out all night in a dank and Wlthy outhouse without food or straw376 and is now covered in snow that has, apparently, ‘crept in through the crevices’377 is, not surprisingly, dead. Upon returning home, the mother takes the death of the cow as a starting point for a pious sermon-cum-funeral-oration to the household: I looked in . . . You could have blown me down with a feather. She was dead, can you believe it? Dead! When did she die and why? Died—just like that! A total mystery. But it suddenly occurred to me. . . . Alas!. . . . Such a calamity as I would not wish on my own worst enemies! You hear. We forgot the meal, the celebratory feast in honour of the Tosfos yontev which we observe every year. To make such a mockery of my noble descent! For I am descended from the Tosfos yontev’s family. In his scroll relating the miracle that occurred to him, this saintly man, may he rest in peace, bound all his future descendants by oath to celebrate a ritual banquet, like Purim, every year in the month of Adar— yesterday, that is. Should anyone not fulWll this oath, a disaster would befall him.378 The death of this animal, I tell you, is that disaster. This cow, poor beast, is our atonement. Why else should a cow die so soon after having given calf?379

The extraordinarily condensed and sustained ironic juxtaposition of linguistic and thematic elements taken from biblical, rabbinic, and Old Yiddish liturgical and fabular sources that combine to create the devastatingly satirical eVect of this passage is impossible to convey in English translation. Abramovitsh’s irony notwithstanding, this little story does

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give a vivid description of the actual function of the Megillah texts; and if, as is more than likely, this story is built around a nucleus of autobiographical truth, we have here important evidence that these texts continued to perform this function in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. Only when the tradition that these texts represent had died, or been forgotten, could these Megillot be assimilated to the essentially foreign categories of ‘autobiography’ or ‘memoir’. No more written as ‘autobiography’ or ‘memoir’ than were Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon and Modena’s Hayyei yehudah, these texts were not read as such until the nineteenth century. To locate Heller’s Megillat ’eivah at a point in a continuum that leads to the Zikhroynes of Gluckel of Hameln whence, by implication, to Jewish autobiographical productions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would thus be to wrest the work from its historical context and to foster misconceptions as to the true nature and purpose of this text and others of its ilk. Analysis of the form, function, and publication history of Megillat ’eivah points to conclusions similar to those suggested by consideration of the other ‘autobiographical’ or ‘memoiristic’ texts thus far discussed. That is, Megillat ’eivah as ‘memoir’ or ‘autobiography’ is symptom rather than cause of the phenomenon that the ‘tradition’ or ‘continuity’ model seeks to explain.

Early Modern Autobiography in Ashkenaz II: The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln The genealogy of texts that constitutes the autobiographical ‘tradition’ may, as noted above, vary in certain details according to the predilections of the scholar and the substantial and functional deWnitions that inform his understanding of the genre. The one pre-Rousseauian text that is invariably foregrounded in any discussion of Jewish autobiography is, however, the Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln.380 Gluckel’s Memoirs have been studied more extensively by historians, literary critics and linguists and have also been translated into more languages381 than any of the pre-Rousseauian Jewish autobiographical texts thus far discussed. As with Maimon, several Web sites are now devoted to Gluckel. Closer analysis of the publication history and of the formal and functional characteristics of the Memoirs reveals, however, a very

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similar situation to that noted with regard to Gei’ hizzayon, Hayyei yehudah, and Megillat ’eivah. Gluckel, born in Hamburg in 1645, began to write the Memoirs after the death of her Wrst husband in 1691. She planned from the onset to divide her account into seven books—each book to cover a decade of seventy years allotted human life.382 The last two books of the Memoirs were not, however, completed until 1719. The original manuscript was lost, and a printed edition of the Zikhroynes (Yiddish, ‘Memoirs’), based upon a copy of the original manuscript by Gluckel’s son, Mosheh Hameln, did not appear until 1896, edited by David Kaufmann. These publication data rule out, as Nokhem MinkoV points out, ipso facto, all possibility of the text having exercised any influence upon an evolving Jewish autobiographical tradition383—until, that is, the twentieth century, by which time the influence of Rousseauian autobiography had made itself felt in Jewish literary discourse.384 Shmuel Niger’s comments on the publication history of the Memoirs are pertinent here: One may state with assurance that Gluckel’s Memoirs would have belonged to the most popular and beloved Yiddish morality (Muser) books, had they been published not at the end of the nineteenth century, in Germany, by a professor, with a scholarly audience in mind, but by an ordinary Jewish printer and bookseller at the time when such books were a requisite and a delight and an article of pride for every Jewish home, for every cultivated Jewish woman,—the Zikhroynes would not then have laid in libraries, but in every good and pious Jewish household and they have been the best example of the feminine, that is the sensitive, intimate-lyrical character of the corpus of religious literature in Old Yiddish (Ivri-taytsh).385

The implication of Niger’s comments is that had Gluckel’s Memoirs been published in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, they would have constituted an entirely diVerent category of literature; not having been published then, their lengthy hibernation ‘in libraries’ until the end of the nineteenth century attests, moreover, to the belatedness of the translation of pre-modern texts of the national bequest to autobiographical categories within the Jewish sphere. The impact of the ‘discovery’ of the Memoirs within this postRousseauian context is attested to by the subsequent publication and translation history of the work. The Wrst full German translation of

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the Zikhroynes by a great-granddaughter of Gluckel, Bertha Pappenheim (‘Anna O.’ in Freud and Breuer’s famous study of hysteria), appeared in 1910. A second, extremely abridged translation by Alfred Feilchenfeld was published in Berlin in 1913; this translation had, by 1923, already run into four editions.386 In 1922, Solomon Birnbaum’s translation of the Wrst Wve chapters of the Zikhroynes into modern Yiddish was published in Der yud, the Warsaw daily journal of the Agudat yisra’el.387 The Wrst reasonably complete English translation, itself based on Feilchenfeld’s German translation, by Marvin Lowenthal, was published in 1932, going into re-editions in 1960 and 1977. Another English translation, by Beth-Zion Abrahams—a more accurate rendition of the Kaufmann edition of the text than that of Feilchenfeld and Lowenthal—appeared in 1962.388 An abridged Hebrew translation of the Zikhroynes—again based upon the Feilchenfeld edition—by A. Z. Rabinowitz, appeared in Tel Aviv in 1930.389 With regard to this latter translation, I Wnd it more than coincidental that Rabinowitz was the author of the Wrst Hebrew monograph on Jean Jacques Rousseau, as cited above. A full translation of the Zikhroynes into modern Yiddish— by Joseph Berenfeld—did not appear until 1967.390 These publication data are provocative. Why should Gluckel of Hameln’s Memoirs, ‘the pride and joy of Yiddish memoir literature’,391 have had to await publication for almost two hundred years? And why, once published, should the text have elicited such enthusiastic readership in the twentieth century? A study of the development of printing and the emergence of Jewish publishing houses in Western Central Europe can, it should be noted, provide no solution to the problems that these questions pose. Even by the end of the sixteenth century, the publication of Yiddish printed works had threatened the Shpilman (‘Glee-man’ or ‘minstrel’) with redundance.392 By Gluckel’s day, a corpus of printed literature in Yiddish by and for women had emerged—notably the Tekhines (supplications), of which ‘Sore bas toyvim’ became the most best-known authoress.393 Gluckel, in writing her Memoirs, was prompted by various motivations—the most important being her need to stave oV her loneliness and ‘melancholy’ after the death of her Wrst husband and her consequent desire to impart a philosophy of life to her children by preserving on record the example of their forebears: ‘That which I have written’,

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she writes, ‘and shall write comes from my troubled heart after the death of your father, peace unto him’.394 She was certainly not, however, motivated by the prospect of publication; it would never have crossed her mind that these ‘seven little books’ would ever be printed, let alone go into several re-editions and be translated into several languages. Gluckel’s Memoirs would not, I think, have been so readily published by the ‘ordinary Jewish printer and bookseller’, nor would they have sat so comfortably on the traditional Jewish bookshelf, as Niger’s above citation suggests. The Memoirs are, in formal terms, a mosaic of established Jewish genres and sub-genres of Gluckel’s period: the ‘Ethical Will’ (Tsava’ah), the Tekhines, the Sefer musar (‘Book of Moral Instruction’), the ‘Family Scroll’, and the Yiddish Mayse bukh (‘Story Book’). Taken as a whole, though, the book does not conform to the conventions of any one of these categories, nor to those of any other established genre in the literary discourse of eighteenth-century Ashkenazic Jewry. The concepts of ‘Memoir’—a term, it should be noted, that Gluckel herself never uses395—or of ‘Autobiography’ as an autonomous literary genre, and the understanding of personality that these terms imply would have been as foreign to Gluckel as they were to her contemporaries. The publication and translation of Gluckel’s Memoirs could only have occurred within a Western European, postRousseauian context of literary discourse. In order, however, to be assimilated within this sphere of discourse, Gluckel’s memoirs had to be forced into line with post-Rousseauian generic categories and with the reader-expectations that these categories elicit. This ‘repackaging’ of the Memoirs, in conformity with the tastes of a generation nurtured on a literature far removed from that which informed Gluckels’ world-view, was eVected through translation—striking illustration of the dictum, translare, tradere. It is, indeed, fortunate that the manuscript of the Memoirs fell, initially, into the responsible hands of David Kaufmann. The meticulous Kaufmann edition of the Memoirs enables us to measure the full extent to which Gluckel has been ‘betrayed’ at the hands of her translators. Study of the Kaufmann edition of the text, and Berenfeld’s Wne rendition of this text in modern literary Yiddish, taken in conjunction with the invaluable commentary of Nokhem MinkoV, reveals that Gluckel was not writing within any tradition of ‘memoir’ or of ‘auto-

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biography’, Jewish or non-Jewish; indeed, it is likely that she would have found both of these genres of dubious moral propriety. On several occasions she expresses unease with her own autobiographical undertaking, the focus upon her self and the solitary withdrawal required for the remembrance of her past in writing. At one stage, she speculates that her ‘whole book’ is ‘perhaps . . . not worth writing’. ‘I know well that in my weakness’,396 she writes, ‘I do wrong to pass my time in such loneliness and mournfulness. Far better were it if I fell on my knees every day and gave thanks and praised the Lord for all the great kindness He shows me, who am unworthy.’397 Not one of the preRousseauian autobiographical or memoiristic texts discussed thus far in this chapter—all of which were written prior to the Memoirs—is mentioned by Gluckel.398 Gluckel’s Weltanschauung, rather, is permeated throughout by the speciWcally Yiddish literary modalities of her day, in particular Musar or ‘Morality’ literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most important exempla of which are the Brantshpigl, the earliest extant edition of which was published in Basel in 1602, and the Lev tov, Wrst published in Prague in 1620.399 Gluckel makes explicit reference to both these works and to other Musar books in the Memoirs.400 And it is this literature which provides the warp and woof from which Gluckel’s Memoirs are woven.401 Gluckel assures her children several times in the course of the Memoirs that ‘I do not intend to write you a book of morals’. Whenever she says this, however, we can be sure to Wnd a passage that could have been—and in some instances clearly was—lifted straight out of such a ‘Morality Book’.402 Gluckel, it seems, is here forestalling the objections of her children, in whom she may well have detected some resistance to a mother’s reproachful sermonizing during her own lifetime. Gluckel’s oft-repeated disclaimers, while not to be taken at face value, do provide some evidence here for what Harold Bloom terms the ‘anxiety of influence’.403 There is a tension in the Memoirs between Gluckel’s acknowledged and grateful indebtedness to the conventions of Musar literature, which provides her with the linguistic and conceptual apparati without which her ‘seven little books’ could never have materialized, and an insistent—albeit inchoate—sense of the restrictions to self-expression that this indebtedness, or rather dependence, entails. At some level Gluckel really did not want to write a Sefer

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musar. In order to give free rein to her creative abilities and considerable imagination,404 she feels compelled to break the mold of this ‘Morality’ literature—even though, given that no printed Yiddish literature available her was free of a healthy dose of ‘morality’, she can never entirely cast oV the shackles of Musar; indeed, were she to do so, she would Wnd herself rudderless in uncharted waters. The shifts in narrative modality in evidence at certain junctures of the Memoirs are thus ones of degree rather than of kind; Gluckel, when she wishes to transcend the limitations of Musar, avails herself of two other indigenously Yiddish and implicitly feminine genres, both related—indeed, by the seventeen century, essentially subordinate to—the primary category of Musar literature: the Mayse bukh (‘Story Book’) and the Tekhines (‘Supplications’). The prototype of the ‘Story Book’ genre is the Mayse bukh, which Wrst appeared in Basel in 1602. This collection of 257 tales, including Yiddish renditions of legends and stories culled from non-Jewish sources, became, in Shmeruk’s words, ‘the cardinal model for the dissemination of Yiddish narrative prose until the twentieth century’.405 It is from the Mayse tradition that Gluckel Wnds precedent for telling a good story in which the ‘moral’ element, while rarely absent, is at least subsidiary. Thus we Wnd Gluckel recounting a tale concerning Alexander of Macedon: ‘This story I do not write as truth. It may be a heathenish fable. I have included it here in order to bide away the time and to see whether there are people in this world who care not for riches, relying always on their Creator. We have, thank God, our books of morals from which we can learn much good.’406 Gluckel’s demurrals only attest to the strong appeal exerted upon her by such ‘heathenish fables’, of which there are not a few to be found in the Memoirs. Turniansky’s observations with respect to the role of the ‘foreign’ fabulistic elements in Gluckel’s Memoirs by comparison with the canonic Yiddish anthologies of tales is here revealing: ‘In Gluckel’s Memoirs, however, the proportion—not in terms of number, but of volume—between the “Jewish” and the “foreign” stories is the reverse of that in the Mayse bukh, where the “Jewish” are predominant, as in general in all the Yiddish narrative prose known to us until the end of the eighteenth century.’407 Not only this, but Gluckel’s tales are far more ‘heathenish’ than the ‘foreign’ tales to be found in the above anthologies. In terms of content they are as strong

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and lurid, if not more so, as the novellas to be found in Gei’ hizzayon. The longest and most complexly concatenated story in the Memoirs concerns a ‘pious man’ (Khosid), who ‘did no business but devoted the whole of his time to study’.408 (I provide here only those details of this convoluted tale of direct bearing in the present context.) Subsequent to marriage and the fathering of two sons, the ‘business’ of devoting ‘the whole of his time to study’ lands him up in debtors’ jail. Upon release, he entreats the captain of ‘a ship about to leave for the East Indies’ to take him on board—in what employment capacity, if any, we are not informed. Put to sea, ‘when they were in mid-ocean, God let loose a great storm wind and the ship was smashed to smithereens’. Clinging to a piece of jetsam from the shattered vessel, the ‘pious man’ is washed up to strange shores: The Talmid khokhem [‘learned Jew’, M.M] was thrown on a great wilderness in a place where savages lived. Here the king’s daughter, who had charge of the sheep and cattle, saw him. She was naked and very hairy and wore Wg-leaves to cover her shame. Perceiving him, she approached him and made it clear that she loved him and would be his wife. Out of great fear he pretended love, and showed by signs that he would take her. The other savages saw this and they whistled and all the savages came leaping from their caves in the hills where they lived. They ran up to him, eager to drink his blood and eat his flesh. Even the king was there. The Talmid khokhem was so scared that he could scarce breathe. When the king’s daughter saw his terror she showed him that there was no cause for fear, and arose and went to the king and begged him that he should let the man live, as she wanted him for a husband. He assented and the pious man was once again preserved. And so the Talmid khokhem lay with her that night and she was his wife and he was her husband . . . For two full years he lived with them and tended the cattle in the wilderness; eating the flesh of the wild ass and dwelling in a cave in the hillside with his wife. They were now both overgrown with hair and he looked as savage as she.

The Talmid khokhem is eventually saved by a ‘ship full of civilized people’ passing shore: Just as he was about to step on board, his savage wife, who had heard his shouts, came running up, their child on her arm. Seeing him in the ship, she called to him to take her with him. But he mocked at

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her, shouting, ‘What have I to do with wild animals? I have a better wife than you,’ and such like. When she saw that he would return to her no more, anger arose in her. She took the savage child by his feet and tearing him in two, threw one half into the ship and in her rage began to gnaw away at the other half with her teeth. The Talmid khokhem sailed away.409

Gluckel here draws from a widely circulated folk-source, ‘Placidas, the Man Who Would Not Take an Oath’, which also found its way into Jewish story collections, including the Mayse bukh.410 Her version, however, diverges markedly from the Classical, Jewish, and Christian versions of the theme extant in print or manuscript form. The savage princess episode, inter alia, is entirely absent in these versions. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that Gluckel made these interpolations herself. The probability of their deriving from a now non-extant Yiddish source from which she copied the story is strengthened by Gluckel’s inclusion at the end, of the conventional rhymed summation of the author, which she could scarcely have memorized.411 Most likely, perhaps, is that Gluckel did copy word-for-word the majority of the account, but added and took away here and there, according to her whim. Be this as it may, why should Gluckel have selected this particular version over the much abbreviated but far less ethically problematic version to be found in the Mayse bukh? This ‘pleasant story to comfort the bereaved and sorrowful of heart’, ‘found in a book written by a man from Prague’,412 actually represents a sort of carnivalesque eruption in her narrative. There is Wrst of all the reversal of gender roles. The princess in Gluckel’s tale provides a parodic inversion of the chaste and inattainable royal-born shepherdess of the knightly romance—a genre she was most likely acquainted with through the hugely popular Yiddish rendition of the escapades of Bevis of Hampton, Bova de’antona, which went into countless re-editions after its Wrst publication in 1541.413 The aggressive sexuality of this ‘naked and very hairy woman’—the depiction of whom, in psycho-phenomenological terms, prompts some comparison with Yagel’s ‘Mother of All Languages’—and her unabashed advances upon the Talmid khokhem constitute an utter usurpation of the mercantile, delicately negotiated, convoluted, quite impersonal and highly professional betrothal negotiations associated with the Shiddukh—accounts of which Gluckel’s

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Memoirs are replete, including that of her own to her second husband, Hirsh Levy.414 Here the exchange is non-linguistic, swift and quite devoid of subterfuge—the nature of the ‘signs’ exchanged between the two Gluckel, wisely, leaves to her readers’ imagination. The Talmid khokhem’s passivity in submitting to the ‘savage’ woman is understandable given his predicament; still, he does fail to follow the archetypal example of Joseph, who placed his life in danger by overcoming his lust (‘Yeytser horo’) when landed in such a predicament—an example that Gluckel herself commends later in the Memoirs.415 The Talmid khokhem rather, as Gluckel writes/copies in the moralizing preamble to this tale, ‘accepted everything with forbearance and did not turn away from his God’.416 What is most puzzling, however, is the facility and alacrity with which, subsequent to this (bigamous) marriage, this humble, pious Jew ‘incapable of making a living, only Wt to study’,417 adapts to the new moral order. By contrast to a later stage of the story where it is recounted that the exemplary conduct of this man leads to a mass-conversion to Judaism,418 rather than Judaize his new spouse the Talmid khokhem allows himself to become feralized. He even refuses to take her on board the ship ‘full of civilized people’ along with their son, taunting her savagely for her savagery. The contrast with the resilience of the Talmid khokhem’s rightful spouse who, in the parallel section of the story, has been abducted by a ship’s captain, is instructive. She, the captain informs us reporting her speech: ‘Would rather kill myself than allow any other man sleep with me, otherwise I will take my own life. For it is not meet that the peasant, a coarse brute, should ride on the king’s horse.’419 A ‘peasant, a coarse brute’, riding the ‘king’s horse’ is actually the converse image of what the Talmid khokhem, the putative hero of this tale, actually did, thus problematizing the story at an array of levels—class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and so on—and raising many more very knotty ethical dilemmas, including that of suicide—the Talmid khokhem sick of his life ‘among uncivilized people’ also attempts suicide—420than it resolves. The problematization is further compounded in that the shepherdess was in fact the daughter of a king, which raises the question of the identiWcation of the ‘peasant/course brute’; and even further compounded in that the ship’s captain actually takes heed of the Wrst wife’s extremely oVensive rebuttal and does not violate her modesty—which was fortunate for him, for

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had he done so the Talmid khokhem, who by the end of the story has become a wealthy and powerful duke, would have put him to death.421 Davis writes, concerning this story: ‘Whatever the sources for her tale, Glikl’s additions intensify relations across the border between Jewish and non-Jewish, and the intimate ones lead to no good. In the episode on the “savage” shore, Jewish is equated with “civilized” . . . Christians are not merely on Jewish margins in this tale; they are below the Jews.’422 In my view, however, Gluckel’s fabulistic excursion is far more ambiguous, ambivalent and complex. ‘Non-Jews’—one signiWcantly I think, a female—actually save the Talmid khokhem not once but twice: his second wife intercedes with her father, the king, to spare his life and it is through her mediation that he is supplied with food and shelter, though perhaps not clothes; it is the (non-Jewish) ‘civilized people’ who heed his cries and take him on board their ship. Is, moreover, the Talmid khokhem’s conduct toward his second wife and their child really so ‘civilized’? All things considered, he treats her pretty shoddily—which is not of course to condone the inexcusable revenge that she takes upon their son for his desertion. If there is an ethnic/religious ‘border’ that is explored in this story that navigates so many acutely sensitive borders, it is not so much that between Jew and non-Jew as that between colonialist and colonized, First and Third Worlds. The only leading character in this story whose behaviour can really be said to be exemplary is the Talmid khokhem’s Wrst wife, who is indeed Jewish, but more to the point, I think, a woman. The story of the Talmid khokhem is by no means atypical of the stories included in the Memoirs. Nor is it actually the most lurid. Thus we Wnd in Book 6 a story well characterized by Davis as ‘a story of polygamy, incest, and violence recast from the biblical tale of David and Absalom (2 Samuel 13–18), it is placed in the midst of Glikl’s description of her betrothal negotiations with Hirsh Levy’.423 The placement of such a story in the midst of an account of her impending and as it happens, disastrous nuptials with Hirsh Levy, is indicative, as Davis notes, of Gluckel’s considerable autobiographical investment in her stories. Elsewhere Davis notes of the stories that ‘their narratives are sometimes so troublesome, so full of surprises and reversals, that they raise as many questions as they answer. Nor does the simple telling of a

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story end all conflict about the matter in the subsequent narrative of Gluckel’s life.’424 Another such extremely ‘troublesome’ and dark story is included in Book 5 of the Memoirs. This story’s purpose is to demonstrate the truth of the maxim ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed.’ A king seeks to impart a lesson in life to his gullible son, who believes that everyone in the town in ‘far-oV lands’ where he had been sent to acquire wisdom was his friend. He suggests the following test of friendship to his son: Take a calf and kill it secretly so that no one knows. Place it in a sack and at night carry it across to the residence of your equerry, your valet and your secretary, and tell them this tale: Alas! what has befallen me! I have been drinking all day,—until now—,and lost my temper with my father’s royal chamberlain when he contradicted me. I could not control myself when he admonished me and took my dagger and struck him dead. I am afraid lest my father hears of this, for he is an angry man and perhaps in quick fury will revenge himself. I have the corpse in this sack and so beg of you to help me bury it now!425

The prince follows his father’s counsel. Only one of the members of the royal household, his valet, meets him halfway in his request, agreeing to keep watch while the prince buries the corpse. Subsequently, all three report the matter to the king. The king asks his son to account for his actions. The prince protests that there was no body in the sack but a calf he had killed for sacriWce, but ‘slaughtered in an incorrect manner’ and since it was sanctiWed as a sacriWce he gave it a proper burial. The sack is exhumed and lo and behold, the calf. The king now advises his son to put the two who refused to help him to death, at which point the prince has moral qualms: ‘Because of one, must the other two be slain?’ asked the prince. ‘How can I do this thing?’ To which the king responds: If one wise man were to be taken captive by a thousand fools and there was no way to liberate the wise man from the thousand fools, my advice would be that every one of the thousand fools should be executed, in order that the wise man could be released. It would be thus better for you to execute all of your unfaithful servants, in order that your valet, who is already a half-friend, should be able to become a whole friend. And so indeed he did, and the valet became a whole

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friend for him. And thus did the king’s son come to the conviction, that one cannot trust a friend before you have put him to the test.426

As with the ‘Placidas’ variant, there appears to be no extant printed or manuscript Yiddish text of the story as Gluckel recounts it. There do exist, however, two Yiddish variants of this tale, one in manuscript and one in the Lev tov. It is the Lev tov version that is of particular interest here, since Gluckel speciWcally singles this hugely popular ‘morality book’ out for commendation earlier in the Memoirs. Turniansky summarizes the diVerences between the Lev tov version of the faithful friend story and that of Gluckel thus: ‘The version in Lev tov departs furthest [from that of Gluckel, M.M.], in which there is no king with a son, but “a man who had three friends”, no supposed murder, but a real trial before the king, and in which the third friend—‘that is the Torah and good deeds’—is, naturally, completely devoted to his companion.’427 Clearly this anaemic variant of the tale did not sit well with Gluckel’s aggrieved sense of self at the seemingly callous indiVerence of her friends and relatives to the desperate situation in which she found herself after the death of her Wrst husband, as she relates in the passage immediately preceding this tale: My dear mother, sisters and brothers comforted me . . . These talkings and comfortings lasted two or three weeks; after that no one knew me. Those to whom we had shown kindness, repaid us with evil, as is the way of the world. At least, that is how it impressed itself upon me, for the mood, the soul and the thoughts of a grief-stricken widow who has suddenly lost such a kingdom as one can never forget persuades herself thus. Perhaps she is not correct in thinking that everyone does her wrong. May the Almighty forgive me this . . . After the thirty days of mourning, no brother, no sister, no relative, no friend came to ask ‘How are you?’ or ‘How are you managing?’ Yes they came before the thirty days were up, but all of their talk amounted to no more than hot air which could hardly provide help to myself or my orphans.428

The ethical implications of the tale by which Gluckel revenges herself metaphorically for this perceived neglect in order, as Davis writes, to prepare for ‘her self-depiction as a Wercely independent widow, relying only on God’429 are, nonetheless, horriWc, and hardly accord with the popular image of Gluckel, shared even by so perceptive a critic as

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Shmuel Niger, as, to quote Shmuel Rozhansky: ‘An ideal type of a Jewish woman, in an aristocratic frame, in the spirit of the Torah of Moses. An exemplary human being and an exemplary Jew. An exemplary woman and an exemplary wife. An exemplary mother and an exemplary friend. Her morality is a lighthouse—beneath its dispersed light one sees with wonderful clarity people and events of her time.’430 The narrative of the Memoirs does not proceed in a mannered, orderly fashion: from a recounting of the life-history to story as illustration of the events just accounted to moral to be drawn both from the events and the story to recounting of the life-history and so forth. The stories, rather, as noted by Davis, introduce an internal dissonance to the text. The voice in the autobiographical narrative proper is set at an entirely diVerent register to that of the story and the juxtaposition of these two registers foments discord. Gluckel’s voice in the narrative of the life-history proper is deferential, sublimated and equivocal. Thus in the narrative interrupted by the faithful friend story, she admits that she may have been incorrect in thinking everyone was doing her wrong and she begs God’s forgiveness for this. No such equivocation is expressed within the story—on the contrary, the execution of two dubious friends who baulked when it came to conniving in what looked like a brutal and barely justiWed homicide is enjoined in order to keep the other half-dubious friend in line. It is a king, moreover, who pronounces this judgment, and Gluckel, quite a snob, is respectful of royalty.431 Gluckel, upon completing the faithful friend story, returns to her own voice with a pious summation of the tale: So, my dear children, let us not rely upon any friend, but only the Almighty. May He stand by us and be our help. And though it is true that you have lost your trustworthy, pious father, your heavenly Father lives for all eternity. He will not forsake you if you serve Him faithfully and call upon His name. And if, God forbid, punishment comes your way, you have only you and yourselves to blame, for you incurred this with your own deeds.432

This summation is glaringly out of accord with the content of the tale. The lesson-in-life that the prince acquires therein is utterly thisworldly, cynical and brutal. God is nowhere invoked and it is precisely self-reliance that the tale enjoins. And as for punishment always being

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merited, did the punishment of the equerry and secretary really Wt their crime? This dissonant juxtaposition of story and the life-narrative in which it is encased is also apparent, though less glaringly so, in the environment of the Talmid khokhem story, which is both preceded and followed upon by accounts of arranged marriages. In the pages immediately following upon the Talmid khokhem story, Gluckel gives an account of her own engagement and marriage. She relates curtly that ‘before I was even twelve years old I was betrothed and the betrothal lasted for approximately two years’.433 This prepubescent, protracted betrothal with an unseen Wancé Wnds an inverse counter-civilizational analogue in the savage, very hairy princess whose direct propositioning of the Talmid khokhem leads to their nuptials on the very same day. Gluckel goes on to relate how she travelled, at the age of thirteen, from Hamburg to Hameln for her wedding. She registers her dismay, and the dismay of her mother, at the contrast between Hamburg and Hameln. When the bridal retinue reaches Hanover, they send a message to the in-laws in Hameln to send them carriages to complete their journey: ‘My mother imagined it a town like Hamburg, and that at the very least, a carriage would be sent for the bride and her company. But on the third day three or four farm-wagons arrived, drawn by such horses that looked as if they should themselves have been given a lift in the wagons.’434 ‘Hameln’, Gluckel’s father-in-law to be explains to Gluckel’s mother, who has taken oVence at this, ‘is not Hamburg, and being plain folk from a small place we have no carriages here.’ Gluckel, her parents having returned home, initially experiences acute culture-shock in Hameln: And I who was not even fourteen years old had to be in a foreign province among strangers . . . Everyone knows the contrast between Hameln and Hamburg. And I was then only a young child, brought up in the lap of luxury. And now, so young I was removed from my parents, my friends and everyone I knew, from a city like Hamburg, in a small village where only two Jewish families lived. And Hameln, moreover, in itself, is a shabby miserable place.435

Is there not some analogue here with the urban Talmid khokhem, who comes also from a port-city and Wnds himself abandoned in the ‘wilderness’ amongst sheep and cattle and longs for the ‘civilized’ ambience

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he has left behind him? Perhaps the strangest analogue, however, concerns the Wnal scenario of the Talmid khokhem story, with its obvious resonance of the Solomonic test. Later on in the same book of the Memoirs in which this story occurs Gluckel tells of how, now in Hamburg, both she and her mother are at an advanced stage of pregnancy. Gluckel is the Wrst to give birth, her mother giving birth also to a daughter eight days later. Gluckel being young, her mother insisted on taking both babies into her own room, promising to send Gluckel her baby to be suckled if she cried. One evening, the maid did not come with the baby to Gluckel’s bedroom as usual. Gluckel runs to her mother’s room to Wnd the crib of her infant empty. ‘Where is my baby?,’ she shouts, awakening her mother and the maid. Going to the other crib, she Wnds her mother’s infant there and realizes that her own must be in her mother’s bed: ‘Mumma, give me my baby, yours is in the cradle.’ But she would not believe me, so I had to fetch the light and take her baby to her, so that she could see for herself before she returned my own to me. The whole household had been awakened and alarmed, but soon the consternation turned to laughter, and they said we would really have needed King Solomon soon.436

Davis notes the analogy between the above scene and the end of the Talmid khokhem story: ‘Gluckel also reminisces in Book 2 about how she and her mother, both nursing infants, became confused one dark night about whose child was whose, and it threatened to turn into an aVair needing the judgment of King Solomon. But only the vilde princess tears her son in two.’437 This may be the contrast that Gluckel wishes to convey. But, the analogy, bearing in mind the other analogies discussed above, is still strange and somewhat perturbing. I have not dealt with the blood-spattered, incest-ridden version of the Amnon and Tamar story that Gluckel includes in Book 6, encased within the narration of her betrothal negotiations with her second husband. Davis treats of this, and her comments are appropriate and in accord with the placement and function of the Talmid khokhem and faithful friend stories as discussed above: Jedidiah and his wives and children certainly provide an ominous transition to the ill-fated second marriage of Glikl bas Judah Leib . . . But

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the tumults that break out around ‘King Jedidiah’ are . . . violent and transgressive, even if the story does end in the peaceful dynastic succession of Friedlieb. What can Gluckel’s children have thought of their mother’s wish, ‘May it happen to me as it did to this pious king’?438

One of the sons of this ‘pious king’, it should be explained, had raped his sister, was subsequently murdered by his brother, who (the brother) having been exiled by his father from the kingdom, wages war on his father and rapes his (the father/king’s) concubines, and is eventually murdered by the king’s (his father’s) soldiers. To Davis’s question concerning Gluckel’s children’s response to all this, we may add that of how Gluckel’s other ‘implied reader’, God, would have made of the ‘morality’ she ascribes to His name.439 I have focused upon the stories in the Memoirs because of all the received Yiddish generic components that constitute this text, it is the Mayse that provides her with the greatest latitude for autobiographical expression, albeit indirect and disguised. Another signiWcant received Yiddish modality that she avails herself of in the expression of personal voice is that of the Tekhines or ‘Supplications’ tradition. It is indeed this adoption of the woman’s Yiddish supplication that, in Zinberg’s view, renders Gluckel’s Memoirs so distinctive in comparison with other contemporary exempla of ‘Old Yiddish Memoir Literature’ such as Abraham Levi’s Rayze-bashraybung (‘Travel Account’).440 Yet this Tekhine tradition, while providing a conduit for overflow of feeling, often assumes a conventional, formulaic and de-individualized tonality. As MinkoV notes: The Tekhine tone comes to the surface at moments of resignation. There, where tears arise—there come the words of Tekhine. And this Old Yiddish literature implanted in the hearts, in the psyche of the Jewish woman, and not in the hearts and in the psyche of individuals, but almost in those of all who belonged to the broad folk-masses. Established phrases, formulas in fact—these are to be found in abundance in Gluckel’s Memoirs.441

The stories, by contrast, provide an altogether more eVective arena for the letting oV of autobiographical steam, and this, I would argue, is no small part of their function in the text. The stories, for Gluckel, constitute a realm of autobiographical play; she can imply and say things

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in and through her stories that would be unmentionable in the life-account proper, where she is constantly aware of and kept in line by the conventions of the ‘Ethical Will’. It is thus the stories that constitute the sites of greatest tension and transgressive potential, to the point of brinksmanhip, in the overall economy of the text. And, precisely for these reasons, they are as revelatory of the self of Gluckel as the autobiographical narrative proper, if not more so. But, as the Yiddish saying goes, ‘Af a mayse frekt men kin kashye nisht’, for which Harkavy’s translation, ‘An idle story is not subject to criticism’, is the most appropriate in the present context. Gluckel certainly takes full licence of this concession. Let us go back to the account of her removal to Hameln from Hamburg. A certain resentment is deWnitely to be detected underlying the narration of her removal to and abandonment in what she perceives as the wilds of provincial Germany—she constantly stresses the young age at which this traumatic transition was inflicted upon her. And yet, as in the above-cited passage concerning the shabby treatment meted out to her by her friends and relatives after her Wrst husband’s death, she never allows this resentment to rise to the surface. When she is most critical, she pulls back, collects herself, tactically and tactfully, and defuses the narration by making amends in a sort of palinode to what has gone before. Thus, in the sentences immediately after her report of her parents having left her, not yet fourteen years old, in a ‘foreign province among strangers’ she writes: ‘I was not unhappy but even had much joy because my parents-in-law were respectable, devout people and looked after me better than I deserved. How shall I write of my father-in-law? He was an honourable man. He was like one of God’s angels.’442 Note in particular the selfdeprecatory ‘better than I deserved’. Immediately after this passage, however, it emerges that she was indeed unhappy; the next sentence opens with the passage cited above beginning with the words, ‘Everyone knows the contrast between Hameln and Hamburg’. After having described Hameln as a ‘shabby, miserable place’, the same compensatory tic sets in: ‘But this did not make me unhappy because of my joy in my father-in-law’s piety. Every morning he rose at three and wrapped in talith, he sat in the room next to my chamber studying and chanting Talmud in the usual sing-song.’443 Such compromise and constraint are remarkably, even shockingly, lacking in the stories that

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frame the life-history narrative and by which they in turn are framed. A certain latent antinomianism manifests itself and conceals itself in this text; and this latent antinomianism is closely allied to the impulse to give uninhibited autobiographical voice in a literary and social environment uncongenial, if not inimical, to such expression. Within this context, Gluckel’s fervent hope in the messianic mission of Shabtai Tsevi and her devastation at its disastrous outcome is signiWcant. Shabtai Tsevi’s conversion to Islam and the subsequent national catastrophe this brought about is described by Gluckel in one of the most emotional passages of the Memoirs—one in which she avails herself extensively of the conventions of the Tekhine. Gluckel’s personal investment in the fulWllment of the Messianic vistas augured by Shabtai Tsevi is accentuated by the fact that she had just given birth at the time of which she here relates: During this time I was brought to bed with my daughter Mattie; she was a beautiful child. And also, about this time, people began to talk of Shabtai Tsevi, but woe unto us, for we have sinned, for we did not live to see that which we had heard and hoped to see. When I remember the penance done by young and old—it is indescribable, though it is well enough known in the whole world. O Lord of the Universe, at that time we hoped that You, O merciful God, would have mercy on Your people Israel and redeem us from our exile. We were like a woman in travail, a woman on the labour-stool who after great labour and sore pains, expects to rejoice in the birth of a child, but Wnds it is nothing but wind . . . For two or three years Your people Israel sat on the labour-stool—but nothing came save wind. We did not merit to see the longed-for child . . . Your people hope daily, that You in your inWnite mercy will redeem them yet and that the Messiah will come . . . 444

Gluckel’s Memoirs close on a Messianic note. This mysterious and beautiful passage is as ambivalent and indeterminate as the endings of Yagel and Modena and, like them, extremely and strangely moving: In Nisan 5479 [March, 1719] a woman was on the bank of the Moselle scouring dishes. About 10 o’clock at night it became light as if it were day and she looked into the sky which was open like a . . . (a word is missing here in the manuscript) and sparks leaped from it and after-

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wards the heavens came together again as though a curtain had been drawn across and it was again dark. May God grant that this is a sign for good. Amen!445

Of all the early-modern autobiographical texts thus far discussed, it is with Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon that Gluckel’s Memoirs evinces the most remarkable and intriguing aYnities. Like Yagel, Gluckel constructs from the literary conventions available her—less extensive than those within Yagel’s purview—a highly unconventional, hybrid literary ediWce that is really sui generis. Yagel’s availing himself of the liberation aVorded him by the novella for surrogate expression of anarchic stirrings against the restrictive conWnes of Jewish literature/life is strongly paralleled in Gluckel’s employment of the Mayse: each text includes a scene in which murder occurs within the thoroughly non-Jewish context of a hunt.446 Gluckel’s text, though less dramatically so than that of Yagel, is ‘autobiography interruptus’; she herself is aware of the hiatuses in her autobiographical narrative and the book is peppered by such remarks as ‘to return to my purpose’, ‘but to start anew’ et cetera.447 Both Gluckel and Yagel strain against the leash of the received literary conventions within which they operate in order to make their autobiographical voice heard. And each text is thus restless, self-destabilizing and at odds with itself. Each text thus testiWes to the lack of any established memoiristic or autobiographical tradition which may have provided paradigm and parameter for its author’s project. Reading Gluckel’s autobiographical narrative through the prism of her stories and vice-versa, reading Yagel’s terrestrial narrative through the prism of the visionary account and vice-versa, thus sets in motion a dialectic by which all strata of the text are defamiliarized and made strange. And Gluckel’s Memoirs are a text very much in need of defamiliarization. The degree to which this text has been read against the grain in order to conform to the categories of memoir and/or autobiography is attested to by analysis of the translations of the work. The Wrst task of the translator seeking to present this text as memoir/autobiography is to minimize its hybridity and amorphousness. The text must be whittled down so as to give the impression that Gluckel’s overriding purpose, to which she adheres, is to present the story of her own life in chronological sequence from birth to old age. Gluckel does not

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give an account of her birth until the second book; the entire Wrst book is devoted to sermonic Musar with illustrative parables. These Musar elements, which one translator refers to as ‘really wearisome, repetitious moralizing’,448 must be, if not omitted entirely, considerably toned down, so as to appear subsidiary to the récit de la vie which is the true task of the memoirist or autobiographer. The same applies to the little tales culled from the Yiddish Mayse literature that are woven into the original text. Something of the Tekhines may be retained, but with their theological sting removed, and they must not be allowed to swamp the narrative as they do increasingly from the Wfth book onwards.449 This process began relatively shortly after the appearance of Kaufmann’s critical edition in 1896, with the 1913 Feilchenfeld translation. Gluckel’s betrayal at the hands of translators reaches its apogee, however, or nadir, with Marvin Lowenthal’s 1932 translation, which is now, sadly, the most widely available English translation of the Memoirs. Lowenthal acknowledged his indebtedness to Feilchenfeld’s ‘arrangement for dividing the Wrst two “books” and a number of happy suggestions pertaining to the order of the text’.450 “These slight [sic] departures from the Kaufmann text’, writes Robert S. Rosen in his introduction to the 1977 re-edition of the Lowenthal translation, give a better balance to the Wrst two books and to the work as a whole. Also Lowenthal further abridged what he called the ‘theologizing’ and omitted some of the borrowed tales Gluckel incorporated into her narrative, like the story of Croesus and Solon, and shortened others. While such tamperings may oVend some purists, they can be justiWed on the ground that they have resulted in a much tighter book. Nothing of Gluckel’s own story has been left out and the over-all changes are minor, so that no one but the specialist ought to object.451

Not only is the text mercilessly pruned, but the Memoirs are here submitted to the further indignity of being translated into an English that succeeds, according to Rosen, ‘in capturing something of the spirit of the original by giving the language a ring of an earlier period without sounding archaic’.452 Lowenthal is even occasionally snide at Gluckel’s expense as when, omitting Gluckel’s citation from an ‘Ethical Will’, he comments: ‘I have

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omitted Gluckel’s excerpt from Hurwitz in the fear that the “honey” may have lost its sweetness for the modern palate.’453 The crowning indignity, however, to be inflicted upon Gluckel’s Memoirs is the provision of such ‘kitsch’ subtitles as ‘Gluckel Bids Her Heart Be Quiet’ and ‘Virtuous Esther and Her Stingy Mate’, printed at the top of each page of the 1977 Schocken re-edition in pseudo-Gothic script. It is telling that the Wrst of these subsections, which extends to a full eight pages of the English translation, ‘Alarms and Excursions of Childhood’, in conformity with autobiographical convention. In fact, Gluckel relates almost nothing of her childhood: her second book is largely genealogy of her forebears and she only really enters the narrative as protagonist with the account of her wedding. Presumably intended to enhance the authenticity of a text that has been manipulated to conform to categories foreign both to the author and to her prospective readers (her children), these Gothic superscriptions are functionally equivalent to Saxon helmets or beaten bronze warming pans hammered onto the exposed beams of a mock Tudor inn. A full critical edition of the Memoirs in English, basing itself upon the meticulous Kaufmann edition, is still a desideratum.454 Such an edition would perform the invaluable service of making this text strange to the modern reader. Placing Gluckel’s Memoirs side-by-side with Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon and Modena’s Hayyei yehudah does reveal continuity, but it is a continuity that undermines itself: each of these texts is sui generis and each marks a breach, a discontinuity with the literary environment within which it is situated.

The Function of the First Person in Pre-Modern Jewish Narrative: An Overview From the above survey, it becomes clear that any model for the study of Jewish autobiography that posits some real continuity between preand post-Rousseauian autobiographical or memoiristic texts is diYcult, if not impossible to sustain. But more than this: Jewish literary discourse prior to Rousseau may even be characterized as anti-autobiographical. An overview of the publication data reveals that the closer

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pre-Rousseauian Jewish texts do approximate the Rousseauian autobiographical paradigm, the less likely these are to be published prior to the late nineteenth century, at the earliest. Hence, the one preRousseauian Jewish text that is the most unabashedly self-revelatory, Modena’s Hayyei yehudah, was Wrst published in full at a later date (1911) than any other of the pre-modern Jewish texts thus far discussed. The text, quite simply, could not be assimilated within any one of the existent categories of pre-Rousseauian Jewish literary discourse. The closer the focus of pre-modern Jewish texts narrated in the Wrst person is upon the self of the narrator, the less is the likelihood of their Wnding a place within this sphere of literary discourse. First-person narrative accounts in which there is an identity between narrator and author function within this system only insofar as the narrator’s gaze is Wrmly directed outward. The greater the degree to which this outer-directedness dissipates the singulariy of the ‘I’, the stronger the likelihood that these texts can be assimilated within the established categories of Jewish literary discourse prior to the incursion of modernity. Even when these texts could be so assimilated, and thus were printed and enjoyed a relatively wide degree of circulation, as with Yeven metsulah and Megillat ’eifah, such works were considered to be of subsidiary importance both by their writers and their readers. Nathan Neta Hannover’s primary motivation in writing Yeven metsulah was to earn enough money to cover the printing costs of his book of biblical homilies, Neta’ sha’ashu’im. When Abraham Kahana writes in his introduction to Yeven metsulah that ‘It is all the same to us whether this book of homilies was printed or not—nonetheless this book did lead to the writing and printing of Yeven metsulah,’455 we appreciate the full extent of the chasm that separates the realm of literary discourse within which Kahana is operating and that within which Yeven metsulah was written. Within the context of traditional Jewish learning Shabbethai Cohen is, to this day, referred to as the Shakh, an acronym of his name but also with the replacement of Shin with Sin, for his commentary on the Shulhan ’arukh, the Siftei cohen456—a work besides which his Megillat ’eifah pales into insigniWcance as measured by the standards of the traditional realm of Jewish literary discourse. Indeed, given the widespread practice of referring to Jewish scholars

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by the names of their books—a practice that in itself attests to a, by modern standards, extraordinary lack of curiosity concerning the personality of the author—it is pertinent to ask why not one pre-modern Hebrew writer is known by the name of an autobiographical text. The practice, however, of referring to the author by the name of his book was tenacious and did extend, in the modern period, to autobiographical texts, if we are to believe Chaim Nahman Bialik: With us no attention whatsoever is paid to the personality, aside perhaps for one or two exceptions, like Rashi, Rambam and so forth . . . but in general our writers are referred to only by the name of their compositions. A Jew bumps into you, for example and wishes to ask you about Lilienblum—so he begins: ‘Do you know the Hatt’ot ne’urim?’ Or he tells you that only just now he met the Hatt’ot ne’urim on the street.457

Only when it could be assumed that the author’s name served as signiWer and was in some sense coterminous with his literary productions rather than vice-versa was this practice rendered obsolete.458 Analysis of the respective publication data of the Klog-lider and the ‘Family Scrolls’ provides further evidence of the inverse ratio that obtains between the degree of self-referentiality of pre-modern Jewish texts and the possibility of their publication before the nineteenth century. The ‘I’ of the Klog-lid, especially within the semi-liturgical context of a communal recitation or singing, becomes, as noted above, a trope, for the collective lament of the communal ‘we’. This, moreover, is a protean ‘I’, which may form the focus of identiWcation for various groups if sung communally, or for various individuals other than the author if recited aloud. Equally protean, though more feminine, is the ‘I’ of the Tekhines, as has been noted above with respect to Gluckel’s employment of this modality. The ‘I’ of the ‘Family Scroll’ is more obviously self-referential. More Wrmly anchored to the existential predicament of an individual, this ‘I’ lacks the capacity for random transferability which the ‘I’ of the Klog-lid or Tekhines enjoys That the late publication of Megillat ’eivah is not fortuitous, but rather symptomatic of the inverse relationship between approximation of the ‘I’ to the self of the author of pre-modern Jewish texts and the possibility of their pre-nineteenth-century publication, is attested

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to by the fact that not one of the ‘Family Scrolls’ mentioned by Erik or Zinberg was published before the nineteenth century. The ‘Family Scrolls’ were, moreover, published under the auspices of those acquainted with post-Rousseauian categories of autobiographical discourse such as I. M. Jost, one of the founding fathers of the German Wissenschaft des Judenthum, who edited the Wrst edition of the Megillat Behrens.459 David Kaufmann published another of these ‘Family Scrolls’, the Megillat gans, in the same year as he published the Wrst printed edition of Gluckel’s Memoirs—1896. Kaufmann made his literary debut in 1872 with an essay, in German, on Peretz Smolenskin’s Hato’eh bedarkhei hahayyim, an autobiographical bildungsroman in which the influence of Rousseau’s Confessions is clearly discernible.460 And it was upon Kaufmann’s entreaties that the rabbinic scholar Ayzik Hirsh Weiss wrote his autobiography—the latter, so he would have us believe, being initially thoroughly disinclined to embark upon such a venture.461 Publication data of the Klog-lider present a very diVerent picture. These versiWed Wrst-person laments were, for the most part, published soon after having been written and many of them went into several reeditions.462 Typical in this respect is Megillat vints, one of the most important exempla of the genre. First published in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1641, Megillat vints was twice republished during the seventeenth century and was included in Wagenseil’s anthology in 1699.463 Even more striking are the publication data of Nathan Neta Hannover’s Yeven metsulah. Strictly speaking, Yeven metsulah, being written in prose, falls outside the Klog-lid category. In terms of content and function, though, Hannover’s memoiristic lament is equivalent to a Kloglid. Written in response to a national catastrophe, the Khmielnitsky massacres of 1648, Yeven metsulah falls within the Lamentations tradition. At one further remove from autobiography than the ‘Family Scrolls’, the Wrst person—for the most part plural—of Yeven metsulah is more in keeping with that of the Klog-lid. Indeed, Hannover’s design is so markedly non-autobiographical that he even omits to mention that amongst the victims of the Cossack persecutions that he describes in gruesome detail was his father, nor does he give any account of how he and his family survived these atrocities.464 And Yeven metsulah functioned, according to one source, within a context of communal lament, the text being recited annually in some Eastern European

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Jewish communities between the sixteenth of Tamuz and the ninth of Av (Tisha’ be’av).465 It is more than probable that it was these aYnities of Yeven metsulah with the Klog-lid which prompted the Wrst Yiddish translator of the work to render the text in rhymed verse—thus doing away with the one formal distinction between Hannover’s prose lament and the Klog-lid proper. Yeven metsulah was Wrst published in Venice in 1653. Two years hence, the Wrst Yiddish, rhymed translation appeared.466 This was followed, according to Zinberg, by another, diVerent Yiddish translation within a few decades.467 According to Abraham Kahana, who is as reliable a source as Zinberg when it comes to bibliographical details, Yeven metsulah was translated into French, German, Russian and Polish.468 The original Hebrew text went into several re-editions, including one by Ayzik Meir Dik, who resurrected the text in 1872, appending ‘an account of the anti-Jewish measures until 1872’. Dik’s version alone went into two further re-editions.469 Pre-Rousseauian Jewish texts which evince greater concern with the self of their author than do the Klog-lider or Yeven metsulah could only match these latter in terms of publication, translations and re-editions in the context of a post-Rousseauian sphere of literary relations. Passing reference has been made above to mediaeval Jewish travel accounts, important exempla of which are frequently cited as belonging to the Jewish autobiographical tradition. The travel account is, in fact, the most widely printed and extensively circulated form of Wrst-person prose narrative of pre-modern Sephardic or Ashkenazic Jewish provenance. The impact that these travel accounts had upon the pre-modern realm of Jewish literary discourse is attested to by the publication data of the prototypical Jewish travel text, that of the ninth-century North African Jew, Eldad the Danite: dozens of manuscript versions of this text are extant, no less than seventeen printed editions,470 plus at least one printed Yiddish translation. Later travel accounts such as the Travels of the twelfth-century Benjamin of Tudela or the Gelilot ’erets yisra’el of Gershon ben Eliezer of Prague fared equally well in the pre-modern Jewish book market, each going into several re-editions and each published in both Hebrew and Yiddish versions. It was the reading of Eldad ha-Dani’s and Benjamin of Tudela’s Travels471 and other books of this ilk which inspired S. Y. Abramovitsh’s hapless ‘Benjamin the Third’—a character based upon the real-life Israel Joseph Benjamin

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(1818–64), the self-styled ‘Benjamin the Second’472—to leave ‘Tunyadevka’ (‘Dunce Town’) in search of the ‘Ten Lost Tribes’. ‘These books opened his eyes, making, quite literally, a new man of him.’473 The entrepreneurial Mendele, foreseeing enthusiastic reader-response to ‘Benjamin the Third’s’ travel account, explains in his preface that he feels compelled to issue a ‘shortened’, pirated edition of the text, thereby beating other prospective translators to the post.474 The majority of these travel accounts are written in the Wrst person. Where this is not the case, the text purports to be a third-person rendition of a Wrst-person oral or written narrative. It was Eldad ha-dani’s Travels which established precedent for the sometimes oblique selfreferentiality of the Jewish travel account; the earliest version of the text takes the form of an epistolary account in which Eldad’s oral testimony is transposed throughout in the third person.475 In Benjamin of Tudela’s Travels, there is an alternation between the Wrst and third person which indicates that the text was either dictated to a secretary during Benjamin’s own lifetime or re-worked from a Wrst-person manuscript version after his death.476 It is this alternation between Wrst and third person which Abramovitsh mimics, to devastating satirical eVect, in his Travels of Benjamin the Third, the mercurial Mendele being the supposed editor of Benjamin’s Wrst-person account. Petachiah of Regensburg’s Sibbuv ha’olam (1595) is subtitled: ‘This Is Rabbi Petachiah’s First-Person Account of His Voyage Around the World When He Returned and Related All That He Had Seen and Heard.’ Petachiah’s travel experiences, recounted throughout in the third person, were apparently dictated to a secretary, R. Yehudah, the son of Samuel the Hasid, who then edited—and occasionally bowdlerized—the work.477 The ‘Travel Accounts’ written in the third-person may, therefore, be termed Wrst-person prose narratives by proxy. Where, however, as is true in the majority of cases, these texts are written in the Wrst person, the ‘I’ of the travel narrative would seem, at Wrst blush, to approximate more closely the ‘I’ of autobiographical discourse than does that of any of the pre-modern Jewish genres thus far discussed. Less free-floating than the protean ‘I’ of the Klog-lid, this ‘I’ is clearly anchored to a named individual. The individual of the travel account, moreover, plays a more active role in the narrative that he relates than does the ‘I’ of the Klog-lid; he thus approximates more

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closely the ‘protagonist’ of autobiographical discourse. The author of the travel account is also granted greater thematic liberty in the account of his experiences than that enjoyed by the writer of a Klog-lid or ‘Family Scroll’; he is not bound to edit his experience in accord with the constraints of a received—even hallowed—biblical paradigm. The travel book, as a genre, is, in fact, extremely closely related to autobiography. Accounts of various journeys, the most famous being that of Jean Jacques to Vincennes, play an important role in the overall structure of The Confessions. The journey, often taken as a metaphor for experience, becomes a recurring theme in post-Rousseauian autobiographies such as Wordsworth’s Prelude and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. Paul Fussell, in an important monograph on the genre, deWnes travel books as: ‘a subspecies of memoir in which the autobiographical narrative arises from the speaker’s encounter with distant or unfamiliar data, and in which the narrative—unlike that in a novel or a romance—claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality.’478 There appears to be no widespread agreement among Jewish literary historians over how, exactly, to categorize the Jewish travel account. Thus, Zinberg, in his History, treats of travel narratives as a branch of ‘Historical Literature’, related to but distinct from the ‘Memoir’ proper.479 Yet in his review of Max Erik’s The History of Yiddish Literature, Zinberg faults Erik for not having included Abraham Levi’s travel account, which he now refers to as an ‘important memoir’, in the section of Erik’s History devoted to ‘Old Yiddish Memoir Literature’.480 The classiWcation of David Reubeni’s (1490–1537) Travels is witness to the vacillatory stance assumed by Jewish literary criticism in its application of modern generic categories to the travel account. The work is variously described as a ‘travel account’ or ‘itinerary’,481 an ‘autobiography’482 or ‘memoirs’483 and, in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, by the strange designation ‘legendary autobiography’.484 Abraham Kahana, in his 1922 critical edition of the text, refers to the work on the title page as ‘David Reubeni’s Travel Account . . . Which Is His Book of Memoirs’.485 In general, it seems that if Reubeni’s book is situated diachronically within the context of an evolving Jewish tradition of travel narratives, alongside such texts as Eldad ha’Dani’s and Benjamin of Tudela’s Travels, it is referred to as a ‘Travel Account’. Where the book is situated synchronically under such rubrics as ‘pre-emancipation autobiography’

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(Carpi) or ‘Jewish Renaissance Autobiography’ (Dan), alongside such works as Modena’s Hayyei yehudah or Heller’s Megillat ’eivah, it is generally referred to as an ‘autobiography’. A degree of equivocation in deWning so egregious a text as Reuben’s ‘travels/memoirs’ is understandable. That this equivocation does not arise from consideration of the text alone but is rather a symptom of a more pervasive generic confusion is, however, suggested by the fact that such more normative travel accounts as those of Eldad ha-Dani (ninth century) and Benjamin of Tudela (twelfth century) are also sometimes referred to as ‘memoirs’ or ‘autobiography’.486 Closer analysis, however, of pre-modern Jewish travel literature actually serves to sharpen the distinction between this tradition and both the journey motif as found in Rousseau’s Confessions and the type of ‘travel book’ upon which Fussell’s deWnition of the genre rests. These texts would lose nothing if they were transposed to the third person, as was the above-mentioned travel account of Petachiah of Regensburg. In the more outlandish travel accounts such as that of Gershon ben Eliezer, who assures the reader that he saw in the course of his travels men without heads with eyes and mouths set in their chests,487 the function of the ‘I’ is no more than to lend credence to fantastic phenomena and events. While the modern reader may wish to know more about the personality of Gershon ben Eliezer than is oVered in Gelilot ’erets yisra’el, it is the men with no heads who would draw the attention of the pre-modern reader of a Jewish travel account. In fact we know no more of the personality of Gershon ben Eliezer—who, according to one modern commentator, may himself be the Wctitious construct of an imaginative Polish Jew488—than we do of that of Eldad ha-Dani or Benjamin of Tudela. Nor, to judge from the numerous manuscript versions and reprintings that these works enjoyed, was the absence of the author perceived as a deWciency by the audience for whom they were intended. This neglect of author is attested to by the ease with which later copyists interpolated new stories—some of non-Jewish origin—within Eldad’s travel account while retaining Eldad as eye-witness and Wrst-person narrator.489 And likewise, themes familiar from early Jewish travel accounts Wnd their way into later Travels; thus, David Reubeni appears to have deliberately

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culled elements from previous Jewish travel accounts in order to lend authenticity to his own narrative.490 It is in the data concerning the ‘Ten Lost Tribes’ of Israel that this process of plagiarism and textual interpolation becomes most apparent. Accounts of headless men and the like may add spice to a travel narrative. But no pre-modern Jewish travel narrative would be complete without some account of these ‘lost tribes’, one of which, the ‘Sons of Moses’, which dwells beyond the legendary river Sambatyon, laid a particularly strong hold on the Jewish folk imagination.491 The real signiWcance of Eldad in Jewish literary history was that he was the Wrst writer to give concrete form and eyewitness authentication to the ancient legend of the ‘Ten Lost Tribes’.492 These tribes are not only autonomous but some of them, notably Dan, Gad, Asher, and Naphtali, hold sway over other peoples and possess vast armies. The appeal of such compensatory fantasy to a disenfranchised nation living in exile whose scriptures resonate with former military might is obvious. Joseph Dan, in his analysis of Eldad’s Travels, comments on the lack of any self-referential element in the work and concludes: ‘The heroes of his stories are the “Ten Tribes”; and the essential core of his narrative, the history, organization, and dimensions of these tribes.’493 Far, then from being books about the self in relation to unfamiliar stimuli—as in Fussell’s formulation—pre-modern Jewish travel literature functions Wrst and foremost as a means for the dissemination of, and elaboration upon, a powerful myth. The one pre-modern Jewish travel account that does approximate more closely to autobiography and to the travel book as deWned by Fussell is that of David Reubeni. And, in marked contrast to the standard Jewish travel accounts, which were lapped up by an eager reading public, Reubeni’s account remained in manuscript form for some three hundred and Wfty years before being published by A. Neubauer in 1893.494 Reference to the ‘Ten Tribes’ notwithstanding, Reubeni deviates from the classical tradition of Jewish travel narrative precisely in that he shifts attention from the unfamiliar stimuli encountered in the course of his wandering to the impact of these stimuli upon the self of the narrator. Only in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century context of Jewish literary discourse could Reubeni’s Travels vindicate

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their previous neglect, going into several re-editions within a relatively short period of time.495 As there has been frequent occasion to note in the above survey, publication data often provide important clues concerning how a text was read and the sort of ‘reader-expectations’ that are brought to bear upon a given work. SigniWcant in this respect is the translation and publication history of Reubeni’s Travels in Yiddish. Reubeni’s travel account was translated from Hebrew to Yiddish by A. Y. Goldshmit.496 Goldshmit, as has been noted above, also translated Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte from German to Yiddish. He also wrote a monograph on Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg,497 whose ’Aviezer, to be discussed in greater length below, is the Wrst Jewish autobiography written in Hebrew that is clearly based upon Rousseau’s Confessions, thus constituting the vital link in the chain that leads from Rousseau via Maimon’s German autobiography to Hebrew literature. What is more, Goldshmit’s translation of Maimon’s Lebengeschichte and that of Reubeni’s travel account both appeared in the same year, 1927, and both were published in Vilna by the same publishing house.498 The word Zikhroynes (Hebrew, Zikhronot) literally means ‘Memoirs’ but is employed in both the Hebrew and Yiddish literature of Goldshmit’s day to refer interchangeably to both memoirs and autobiography, the Hebrew and Yiddish equivalents of the term ‘autobiography’ not having gained widespread currency at this stage.499 It is thus unclear whether Goldshmit deWned Reubeni’s narrative as a ‘Memoir’ or an ‘Autobiography’. The publication data do, however, suggest that something about Reubeni’s travel account struck a chord in a Weld of Jewish literary relations highly attuned to the autobiographical voice. And it is this same chord which would strike a flat or even discordant note in the pre-Rousseauian Hebrew/Yiddish literary environment. Reubeni’s text does, however, as do all those thus far discussed with the one exception of Modena’s Hayyei yehudah, bear fundamental and unmistakable aYnities with an established pre-modern Jewish literary genre. The Travels—this being the most neutral designation for Reubeni’s account—are, in fact, aberrant in terms both of pre- and postRousseauian literary discourse. Insofar as the work approximates to the pre-modern Jewish travel account, it deviates from post-Rousseauian autobiography and vice-versa: the text is thus somewhat akin both to Gluckel’s Memoirs and Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon.

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But the Wnal cluster of pre-Rousseauian Jewish autobiographical texts to be taken into consideration in this summary overview make even the grand exception of Modena’s Hayyei yehudah appear relatively normative. Modena’s autobiography can, at least, be approximately located within the—albeit problematic—literary-historical context that gave rise to the Renaissance self-portrayal. And Modena’s Life does bear the most extraordinary phenomenological aYnities with one other, albeit non-Jewish text, of comparable provenance. The following cluster of pre-modern texts would, by contrast—pending, that is, the discovery of hitherto unknown manuscripts—appear to be wholly aberrant: the thirteenth-century autobiographical account of a pupil of Abraham AbulaWa;500 the ‘Memoirs of a Siennese Jew’ written in Italian in the early sixteenth century;501 the above-mentioned Book of Memoirs of Asher ben Eliezer Halevy (early sixteenth century); the Latin autobiography of the Marrano Uriel da Costa (completed shortly before his death in 1640);502 the anonymous ‘Seventeenth-Century Autobiography of a Bohemian Jew’.503 Not one of these texts, save that of Acosta, was published before the twentieth century. The account of AbulaWa’s disciple—an important document in the psychology of religious experience—was deemed so aberrant in the pre-modern sphere of Jewish literary discourse that it was deleted from two of the four manuscript versions of the book to which it belongs, evidently falling prey, as Gershom Scholem puts it: ‘to that previously mentioned self-censorship of the Kabbalists who are averse to confessions of an all too intimate character concerning mystical experiences and before whom the author deems it necessary to apologize for his candor’.504 The Memoirs of a Siennese Jew, Wrst published by Cecil Roth, consist, in fact, of some jottings in Italian on the fly-leaves of a ledger of the business house of Jacob ben Eleazar Modena, written by a second-hand clothes dealer of uncertain name and whose existence is attested to by no other sources.505 This vindictive little document which recounts the tale of an intra-familial Wscal wrangle, is really a literary—or sub-literary—curio.506 Likewise, the Memoirs of the Alsatian Jew Asher ben Eliezer Halevi really defy categorization. The circumstances surrounding the discovery of this text are in themselves unusual; the manuscript, bound together with a parchment page from a Latin New Testament and some pages from a work

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of Erasmus, was discovered by Elie Scheid several years before its publication in Berlin in 1913, in one of the second-hand bookstalls that line the banks of the Seine.507 Asher ben Halevy’s primary—though undeclared—motivation in writing his Memoirs appears to have been to check himself from a recurrent behavioural pattern of perpetual backsliding by preserving on record both his misdemeanours—generally treated of in somewhat oblique fashion—and his various self-imposed vows and abjurations—about which he is more prolix. The guilt-ridden author with a propensity for alcohol and gambling appears to have a ‘compulsion to confess’ coupled with an inclination to self-punishment through fasts and abnegations of a lesser degree, such as taking it upon himself not to drink non-Kosher wine or not to indulge in certain types of gambling play.508 The text is eccentrically punctuated at regular intervals by detailed weather bulletins (the author traded in wine and agricultural produce, hence his dependence upon the harvests) and funerary Piyyutim that Halevi penned at various stages of his career and in which he took great pride.509 The author displays some psychological aYnities with his older contemporary Modena, especially with respect to his recurrent gambling problem, but whereas Modena’s response to his setbacks and failings tends to be markedly extra-punitive, Asher ben Eliezer Halevi seeks, albeit vainly, to still the stirrings of his conscience through open admission of guilt, glad acceptance of suVering and self-chastisement. His text is markedly Protestant, as is Gluckel’s in certain key respects—especially so in its application of the accounting techniques of the Wnancial ledger to the data of personal experience, with the attendant anxious concern that, at the day of reckoning, the credit history should be positive on both accounts. Uriel d’Acosta’s Vita is, indeed, a moving work and an important document both in the study of Marrano psychology and in the history of religious liberty. But the account of this wealthy Marrano, who reconverted to Judaism and was subjected to the humiliation of a ritual flogging for infraction of the dietary laws, written moreover in Latin, really falls outside any sphere of Jewish literary discourse whatsoever.510 In the context of Eastern European Jewish autobiography, though, it is the short ‘Seventeenth Century Autobiography’ of an anonymous Bohemian Jew which is most noteworthy—and most problematic. In the history of Jewish autobiography, this text is somewhat equivalent

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to the above-mentioned account of the anonymous pupil of Abraham AbulaWa in the history of Kabbalah as understood by Scholem; that is, it is the exception that proves the rule. Apart from the genealogical excursion which prefaces this work, related to the Sefer hayuhasin (‘Book of Genealogies’), one of the earliest examples of which is the Scroll of ’Ahima’ats,511 the work bears no generic aYnities with any pre-modern Jewish literary tradition. So striking, however, are the stylistic and thematic aYnities of this work with Rousseauian autobiography that, if this text is at all classiWable, it would appear to be only so in terms of this literary tradition which it preceded. This short autobiographical sketch actually preWgures—and this, as is not true of Modena’s Hayyei yehudah, unqualiWedly so—some of the major themes of such classics of post-Rousseauian Jewish autobiography as Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, M. A. Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer, M. L. Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim, and Ephraim Lisitsky’s ’Elleh toldot ’adam. The emphasis upon childhood is exceptional for an early-modern Hebrew text; the narrative only takes us up to the author’s Wfteenth year, the account being rounded oV with a somewhat doleful and resentful retrospective written at a later date. An acute and barely disguised ambivalence toward the father pervades this autobiographical account of childhood and early adolescence such as I have not encountered in any other pre-modern Jewish autobiographical text. Ambivalence, conflicting emotions toward the father, becomes almost a leitmotif in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish autobiographical writing. And, in this aspect, this seventeenth-century Bohemian text only really bears comparison with the autobiographical writing of Guenzberg, Lilienblum, Bialik, Berdichevsky, and Feierberg. The author’s depiction of orphanhood, subsequent parental neglect, and resentment toward the stepmother are also, to the best of my knowledge, quite unprecedented in Jewish literature. Depictions of the orphan—in the overwhelming majority of cases the child is bereft of only one parent—play, as will be noted below, so important a part in later Jewish autobiography as to warrant a separate treatment of the subject. A passage such as the following, recounting the ghastly deprivations that the Jewish orphan had to endure, points to the harrowing autobiographical accounts of childhood of M. Y. Berdichevsky, Buki ben Yogli (Katznelson), and of Ephraim Lisitsky, in all of which orphanhood is a central motif:

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Thus a long time passed by without my learning anything, until I became a thorn in my own eyes and even more so in the eyes of my father, because, for the lack of a mother, I was a boor, brought up in dirt without any cleanliness; and I remember that at the age of eleven, I ran around barefooted and without trousers, and no one cared. My father then had many little children, for his wife bore him a son or a daughter almost every year. I am sure that if anyone had announced my death to him at that time, he would have thought this good news, for he considered me ignorant and good for nothing, so that my existence was a burden to him . . . 512

Another innovation of this work, again to the best of my knowledge unprecedented and again presaging aspects of nineteenth-century Jewish autobiography, is the implicit critique of traditional Jewish education that is embedded in the autobiographical account. The following depiction of one of the author’s early learning experiences at the hands of a Melammed reads like one of the classic nineteenth-century autobiographical Heder descriptions, for which the locus classicus is Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte. This passage could well have been written by a contemporary of Guenzberg, Lilienblum or Gotlober: I was left there in the house of a teacher, R. Jacob from Gaja, and he began to teach me Rashi, Midrash, other Aggadic texts, and the sayings of the Fathers. He noticed that I could not read properly—this through the fault of my Wrst teacher who had not instructed me well. The little I had known I had forgotten, and I was in sore distress, for the new teacher was of an irritable temper, and had neither composure nor common sense. He hit, bruised and humiliated me; but he could not make good for my previous neglect. All that I learnt from him were the melodies for the readings from the Torah and the Haftarot at the synagogue service, a little bit of Aggadah and of the Sayings of the Fathers. However, I used to respond with questions and analysis of these Aggadic sections, as he had taught me to do. But when he just ridiculed and poked fun at me, I fell silent. This, without a doubt, was of serious consequence, but what do these foolish Melamdim care about the damage they inflict? 513

Not only does this Heder account evince extraordinary thematic aYnities with later such depictions in nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Eastern European Jewish autobiographies, but there is also

Autobiography as Reading

here a striking metaphoric equivalence. In describing his journey to the new Melammed, the author avails himself of the ’Aqedah motif— that is, the ‘binding’ of Isaac to the altar to be sacriWced by his father, Abraham: He Wnally agreed to take me with him; however, the cold was so extreme that several times I almost froze to death, for as the snow fell the wind blew it into our faces and my father was in great pain. It was literally like the binding of Isaac (’Aqedat yitshaq) when they were on their way and, so the Midrash relates, Satan brought them into the water up to their throat, etc. But no harm befalls those who are sent for the fulWllment of a Mitsvah and he (my father) brought me to Herschmanik and left me there in the house of the local Melammed.514

In modern Jewish autobiography and Wction, the Wrst journey of the child to the Heder is frequently described in terms of the oVering up of a sacriWcial victim: ‘My father lifted me up’, writes Shemaryahu Levin: Wrapped me from head to foot in a silken Talith, or praying shawl, and carried me in his arms all the way to the Heder. My mother could not come along—this was man’s business. Such was the custom among us. The child was carried in the arms of the father all the way to the Heder. It was as if some dark idea stirred in their minds that this child was a sacriWce, delivered over to the Heder—and a sacriWce must be carried all the way.515

The most sustained and outrageous employment of this variant of the Aqedah motif is to be found in S. Ben-Tsiyon’s thinly disguised autobiographical novella Nefesh retsutsah, Wrst published in Hashiloah in 1902; here the entrustment of children to the hands of the Melammed is, in the imagination of the child-protagonist, depicted in terms of a mass ritual-slaughter.516 Last, and perhaps most remarkably, this seventeenth-century autobiographer innovates in his open attribution of sexual dysfunction to his early adolescent experience. Rousseau was—with the one possible exception of Jean-Jacques Bouchard, whose Confessions (the title of a later editor) were not, however, published until 1881517—the Wrst autobiographer to give such open account of his sex life, and arguably the Wrst, prior to Freud, to trace a speciWc etiology of a sexual dysfunction—in his case a mild masochism—to a childhood trauma: a beating

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at the hands of Mlle. Lambercier.518 This element of sexual frankness and of open discussion of childhood and early adolescent sexuality was introduced into Eastern European Jewish autobiography by Solomon Maimon, whose Lebensgeschichte became the prototype for Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg’s ’Aviezer. In the latter work, to be discussed in greater detail below, the sexual element assumes particular prominence; a great part of the autobiography is devoted to an etiology of the author’s sexual impotence and his eventual recovery. Whereas Guenzberg attributes his impotence in no small part to his forced marriage at an early age, the anonymous author of this seventeenth-century autobiography attributes his bachelorhood to precocious sexual activity at the age of Wfteen: I stayed in that house for almost two years and for those two years I felt as if I dwelt amid roses;519 never did I experience such pleasure as in those two years. But, on account of my sins, there was no one to watch over me and I fell in with a bad lot. They constantly told me lewd stories about women and inducted me into their ways. We were a dissolute gang of boys together with some young men and we spent all our time in pursuit of vain amusements, cheap thrills, going out whoring, as was their foolish habit. Eventually I came to think that this was man’s sole purpose in the world; for this entire time— day and night—no one spoke of anything other than the pursuit of lust. I spent most of my time with this dissolute gang, a few of whom were over twenty-three years old and better-versed both in Talmud and in the ways of the world than was I. Thus my father raised no objection to my associating with them. So, like a blind man in the dark, I followed in their footsteps. Being totally naive, I considered the seduction of young girls the height of sophistication, the crowning achievement of youth. Actually, even in the house where I lodged, there was a bad crowd—the stable lads who serviced the carts and carriages of the local magnates and noblemen. Their chief scoundrel and whoremonger was a certain Abraham Bass, an irascible and unpredictable man. It was as if a plague surrounded me from all sides, both at home and without and I could not help but become infected by their talk. I seethed with a lust for women more then than at any other time in my life. How happy should I be now if my father had then given me a wife. By now, no doubt, I would have raised a large family and would be in a position to retire from all worldly aVairs. As it is, I am now—for my sins—bereft of all knowledge and wisdom,

Autobiography as Reading

childless, and unmarried and I wish to leave the things of this world aside. But I cannot decide whether, after all, it would still be better to marry and raise a family; perhaps my sons would grow up to be pious men and my wife would be a pillar of strength for me. I await an answer from God, hoping that he might notify me by a sign or a dream or a verse, of which I might think when I wake up, or which a child might answer when I ask for its lesson.520 May I be successful according to the wish of God. Amen.521

Unfortunately, we know no more of the Bohemian Jew who wrote this autobiography than is given in the text. For, within the context of Eastern European Jewish autobiography, it is as diYcult to account for the existence of this text, as, within the wider European context, it is that of Bouchard’s above-mentioned Confessions. * The above survey makes no claim to have resolved the problems that the dozen or so pre-modern Jewish autobiographical texts now known to us pose for the study of autobiography, Jewish and general. Certain broad outlines for the study of these texts and pointers toward future avenues of exploration do, however, emerge. First, there is much to be gained from a comparative approach that seeks to locate these texts within a synchronic context; that is, within the wider literary and intellectual ambience to which they belong. Second, it is helpful, wherever possible, to locate these works within their diachronic context— in relation to the indigenously Jewish pre-modern generic traditions to which they belong, or to which they bear comparison. Finally, and perhaps most challengingly, the contemporary reader of these texts from the past should hold in mind the historical locus of the epistemological and literary categories and strategies that inform his or her horizon for the reception and transmission of knowledge. This is what Bourdieu refers to as ‘double historicization’. I quote him on this, even though he says diYcult things in a diYcult way, because the issues he raises are ones that I have been grappling with in the present analysis of what constitutes a Jewish autobiographical ‘tradition’: At the risk of introducing surreptitiously, thanks to the eVusion and illusion of immediate understanding, the most obscure layers of beliefs that are always concealed in the cultural arbitrary of a tradition,

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one must in eVect operate a double historicization, both of tradition and of the ‘application’ of tradition. Only the analysis of inherited schemas of thought and of the illusory manifestations they produce can ensure a theoretical mastery (itself a condition of a true practical mastery) of the processs of communication. This requires the reconstruction both of the space of possible positions . . . in relation to which the historical given (text, document, image et cetera) to be interpreted is elaborated, and of the space of possibles in relation to which one interprets it . . . Alienated ‘understanding’, ignorant of its own social conditions of possibility, deWnes the traditionalist relation to tradition, a relationship of immersion and adherence without any distance; the appearance of historical awareness, as a consciousness of the gap between the time of production and the time of ‘application’, marks the rupture with that ‘understanding’.522

Even, however, should it prove possible that each of these texts be situated on a horizontal (synchronic) and vertical (diachronic) grid, and within the historical/theoretical horizon of their interpreter, the problem remains of devising some overall theoretical framework, some terminology, that would justify the taking of these texts together, or render their comparison meaningful. With the renewed interest in autobiography in general and Jewish autobiography in particular, equal to if not surpassing that evidenced in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, it is possible that hitherto unknown pre-modern Jewish texts may be discovered that enable us to arrive at a more comprehensive view of this phenomenon, or that point to thus far unsuspected links between some of these disparate works that when taken in isolation present something of an enigma. New modes of reading, moreover, especially I think of Kabbalistic texts, may discern certain patterns of pre-modern Jewish self-writing that, while not autobiographical in the Rousseauian sense, nonetheless demonstrate suYcient persistence and currency as to constitute a legitimate phenomenon of pre-modern Jewish intellectual and literary history. Such modes of reading, in order to do justice to these pre-modern texts, would have to start from generic assumptions other than those that enable us to recognize and deWne a modern texts as autobiographical—would have, that is, to ‘epoche’ the experience of contemporary autobiographical categories. But having thus defamiliarized the text, to the extent that this is pos-

Autobiography as Reading

sible, does the reading-process end here? Could it not be argued that something dormant, latent, hidden within a text from the past may not emerge through the encounter with the contemporary reader and his literary environment? Such an encounter of subjectivities is most fruitful, however, if it occurs within the realm of Buber’s ‘I-thou’, rather than that of the ‘I-it’. It is with the meeting of pre-modern Jewish texts with an associate of Buber, Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, that the following chapter concerns itself. Finally, whilst any ultimate verdict on the mutual inter-relationship between these texts must be held in abeyance, the reading and publication of these texts as autobiographies remains a phenomenon of indisputable signiWcance for the study of modern Jewish autobiography. Indeed, as things stand, it would appear that this mode of reading, which Wrst became current in the late nineteenth century, is the one factor that unites these texts both with each other and with later Jewish autobiographical productions. This problematic relation between the reception of literary texts and their original signiWcation is taken up in the following chapter, which focuses upon the encounter of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky with the pre-modern Jewish literary heritage.

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Pre-Modern Jewish Autobiography and the Radical Hermeneutics of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky

Worlds Within Worlds

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In the theoretical model for the study of Jewish autobiography, as outlined above, the distinction was drawn between autobiography as text and autobiography as discourse or Weld. The deWnition of autobiography as text, it was argued, is static and substantive and thus forms the necessary terminus a quo for any discussion of the genre. In the analysis of autobiography as discourse, however, critical attention must shift from the substantive properties of a given text to the function of a text or texts within a Weld of autobiographical production and consumption. The nature of this Weld is determined by the dynamic and mutual interaction of the three principal components: writer, reader, publisher. It was noted, with respect to Philippe Lejeune, that a historian of autobiography who adopts too rigid a substantive deWnition of the genre as shibboleth is liable to run into problems when accounting both for the generic shifts to which the genre is prone within the context of one dynamically evolving Weld and for the variations that may occur when the autobiographical modality is transferred from one cultural context to another. Substantive deWnitions are absolute; functional, relative. Elizabeth Bruss’s ‘speech-act’ model for the study of the genre shifts the emphasis from what autobiography is to what autobiography does within a particular community of writers and readers. In the more dynamic context of the Weld, Bruss’s model has the virtue of allowing for the possibility of functional shift. Thus, a text that functions as autobiography in one ‘speech community’ need not do so in another—nor even in the same—should a marked alteration take place in the groundrules of rhetorical convention. Not one of the pre-modern texts discussed above, however, including that of the anonymous Bohemian Jew that approximates most closely to

Pre-Modern Jewish Autobiography and Berdichevsky

autobiography as ‘text’, however, can be said to have functioned as autobiography until the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. For, as there has been frequent occasion to note, the absence of any conventions for the reading or writing of autobiography eVectively precluded the emergence of any realm of literary discourse within which an autobiographical ‘speech-act’ could be meaningful—or published— prior to the nineteenth century. Bruss’s ‘speech-act’ model does, however, suggest the possibility that pre-modern texts that were initially neither written nor read as autobiographies may function as such within a post-Rousseauian sphere of literary discourse. Or, to express this in terms of the autobiographical Weld or circuit: If two components of a given literary Weld of relations, the publisher and the reader, deWne a work as ‘autobiography’, does this not justify our taking the work as such, regardless of the original intentions of the author? This leads to consideration of the impact that these pre-modern texts, published and read as autobiographies, may have had upon the development of post-Rousseauian autobiography. If an autobiographer believes, for good reason or not, that, in giving an account of his life, he is heir to a time-honoured tradition, this will naturally aVect his attitude to his work and may even influence his mode of self-presentation. And, if this belief is shared by a good number of readers, this in turn will have some bearing on the reception of the genre, the type of reader-expectations brought to bear upon both pre-modern and contemporaneous autobiographical texts. It is extremely diYcult to determine the degree to which pre-modern Hebrew and Yiddish autobiographical texts were really influential in the shaping of modern Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe.1 There is, however, some evidence that with the publication of an increasing number of pre-modern Jewish autobiographical texts, Jewish autobiographers do begin to evince some awareness not only of their immediate predecessors—Rousseau and those that took up the challenge of the opening paragraphs of the Confessions—but also of an indigenously Jewish succession of autobiographical texts that predated Rousseau. Such awareness of Jewish precedent was certainly not shared by the Wrst authors of Eastern European Jewish autobiographies clearly modelled after the example of Rousseau’s Confessions. Maimon, writing in the last decade of the eighteenth century, makes no mention of any

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other autobiography or memoir though his indebtedness to Rousseau is, as has been noted above, considerable and openly acknowledged. Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg, who began writing his autobiography ’Avi’ezer in 1828, was anxiously aware of his indebtedness to the nonJewish paradigm of Rousseau’s Confessions and of the lack of Jewish— more speciWcally, Hebrew—precedent for his own enterprise. In his search for precedent, Guenzberg comes up with two biographies written in Hebrew, but he flounders when it comes to speciWc citation of one pre-modern Jewish autobiography.2 Meir Halevi Letteris, by contrast, who set about his autobiography in the mid-eighteen-sixties, cites a dozen pre-Rousseauian Jewish precedents for the genre, four Jewish autobiographies written by contemporaries of Rousseau, and he alludes, furthermore, to other works that ‘I cannot mention by name, the books not being before me at present’.3 Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, writing in the essay ‘Several Words on the Subject of History and Autobiography’ in 1889, appears to assume the existence of a corpus of Jewish autobiographical writings when he refers to ‘all the autobiographies in our literature’.4 Likewise, Reuven Brainin, a literary associate of Berdichevsky who evinced a life-long pre-occupation with autobiography, while he remarks upon the paucity in Hebrew literature of the ‘biographies of writers written by their own hands’, does, in an autobiographical preamble to his selected works, cite seven of the ‘well-known confessions and autobiographies of our literature’, three of which are of preRousseauian provenance and one (Jacob Emden’s Megillat sefer) written by a contemporary of Rousseau.5 A reading of the autobiographical narratives in which the citations of Letteris and Brainin are embedded reveals that little more than lip-service is paid to these pre-modern autobiographies. Neither writer appears to have been influenced to any real extent by any of the pre-modern precedents that he cites. Far more complex, however, is the situation with Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, a writer for whom the autobiographical problematic assumes a centrality unprecedented in Jewish literature. Only with Berdichevsky do we Wnd evidence of some real influence of pre-modern Jewish autobiographical texts upon post-Rousseauian Jewish autobiography; and, in this aspect, Berdichevsky distinguishes himself, not only from Letteris and Brainin, but also from all other Jewish autobiographers known to me, with the exception of Agnon, who in

Pre-Modern Jewish Autobiography and Berdichevsky

this as in so many other respects, is Berdichevsky’s unacknowledged debtor. That Berdichevsky was aware of the pre-modern Jewish autobiographical texts that began to appear with some regularity from the last decade of the nineteenth century on is not open to doubt. He was, from the very beginning of his career, constantly on the look-out for the autobiographical in modern and pre-modern Jewish literature. Being a voracious reader over an extraordinarily wide range of Jewish literature, he let few works escape his net. He followed closely, for example, the work of Abraham Kahana, who has been mentioned several times in the course of this study and who excelled in the publication of critical editions of pre-modern Jewish autobiographical texts.6 Berdichevsky thought about those works and attempted to locate them, in his essays and publicistic articles, within some wide-ranging Jewish historiosophical context; indeed, as shall be argued below, Berdichevsky’s discovery of the autobiographical in pre-modern Jewish texts was, in no small part, influential in shaping his historiosophical conceptions. No previous Jewish scholar, it would be fair to say, nor any one of his contemporaries, evinced so persistent a fascination with the entire spectrum of Jewish autobiographical literature as did Berdichevsky.7 In this steady preoccupation with Jewish autobiography, Berdichevsky thus preWgures such contemporary scholars as Leo Schwarz, Shmuel Werses and Dov Sadan. But the quality of Berdichevsky’s relationship with those texts, in terms of existential commitment and identiWcation, surpasses even that of the most engagé scholar. The formative influence of Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte and Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim upon the thinly veiled confessional stories, most characteristic of—but by no means conWned to—the earlier strata of Berdichevsky’s belletristic writing, is indisputable.8 In this respect, at least—save, perhaps, in terms of temporal priority—Berdichevsky does not diVer markedly from other writers of his generation. Unique in kind, though, is Berdichevsky’s deliberate employment of narrative strategy and ideational content culled from pre-modern Jewish texts for the purpose of autobiographical selfpresentation. In a feuilleton of 1891, he even writes that his tendency toward confessional self-revelation was triggered by his textual encounter with Nahman of Bratslav: ‘From the day I read the biography

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of Reb Nahman whose way was to reveal secrets, a mania entered me and I could not keep to myself things that one should not reveal even to the discreet . . . And since this has become a Wxed habit I reveal what is in my heart, things that should remain hidden . . . ’9 Dan Almagor has remarked upon the possibility of the real influence of such works as Megilat ’ahima’ats, Modena’s Hayyei yehudah, and Gluckel of Hameln’s Memoirs upon the shaping of Berdichevsky’s autobiographical vision.10 But the degree and the precise nature of this influence have not, to date, been adequately explored. In an autobiographical— or thinly disguised autobiographical—context, Berdichevsky adopts Wrst-person narrative strategies reminiscent, inter alia, of the Ethical Will (Tsava’ah),11 The Klog-lid,12 the Book of Genealogies (Sefer yuhasin)13 and of the chronicler of the Pinqas (Community Record).14 The very hybridity of such autobiographical discourse suggests paradoxical continuity with Yagel and Gluckel. Berdichevsky also breaks seemingly autobiographical narratives in media res in order to recount tales or legends that he has either heard or read in an Aggadic compilation, Mayseh, or Musar book—this in a manner reminiscent of Gluckel of Hameln.15 Experiment as he may with these pre-modern autobiographical voices, Berdichevsky’s work is permeated through and through by the overt or tacit presence of a strong—even omnipotent—Wrst person whose Rousseauian provenance is unmistakable. But it is the alternation and juxtaposition of pre-modern and post-Rousseauian narrative techniques that comes to lend Berdichevsky’s autobiographical voice its utter distinctiveness at the same time—and paradoxically—as rendering his later writings in which the self is, as it were, palimpsestically enmantled, well-nigh indecipherable. Many of the elements that would later lend the Berdichevskian autobiographical self its distinctiveness—even peculiarity—are already contained in embryo in his earliest works—from, that is, ‘Hetsits venifga’ ’, Wrst published in 188816 to the series of autobiographical novellas and short stories that Wrst appeared from 1899 to 1900.17 These elements, in the earlier stages of Berdichevsky’s belletristic activity are, however, disparate and inchoate, and it is scarcely possible to deduce, from the evidence of these texts alone, in which particular direction Berdichevsky’s quest of an autobiographical voice would lead him. It is only in 1904,

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I think, almost exactly midway in Berdichevsky’s writing career—with the appearance of two autobiographical pieces that resist any easy generic classiWcation, the Yiddish ‘A velt mit veltelakh’18 and the Hebrew ‘Bein hapatish vehasadan’19—that we are provided with some clear intimation of the way in which the various lines in Berdichevsky’s autobiographical oeuvre are converging and tending. ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, especially, I see as marking both a crystallization, a coming-into-focus, of a certain highly individual—even idiosyncratic—autobiographical perspective and a point of departure for and prolepsis of the dialectical interplay between autobiographical self and pre-modern texts that will, from 1904 on, come to Wgure so prominently in Berdichevsky’s belletristic work, to reach a pinnacle of complexity in the unWnished novel Miriam. This little Yiddish story, then, whose brevity, like that of so many of Berdichevsky’s stories, belies an extraordinary suggestiveness, density and depth, may, I believe, serve as a lantern by which to illuminate a path—albeit labyrinthine—through the chaotic ensemble of autobiographical texts that precede and follow upon its composition. ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, literally, ‘A World with Little Worlds’, but best translated, perhaps, as ‘Worlds Within Worlds’ or even ‘Microcosm/Macrocosm’, carries the subtitle ‘A story of long ago: The tale begins with the account of a great magnate and his daughter, which, as it transpires, has some bearing on the life of the author. In the middle he breaks into a quiet sob’.20 There is already enough in this subtitle to induce in a reader or listener some mild state of cognitive dissonance. A mayse fun fartsaytn. Do heybt zikh on tsu dertseyln fun a groysn gevir un zayn tokhter. So far so good; a folk-tale is to be related—a rich magnate and his beautiful daughter—the theme is perennial. Vi se vayst zikh oys iz dos in lebn funem mekhaber a bisl negeye. Odd: if this is a Mayse fun fartsaytn, ‘a folk-tale from long ago’, in what manner can it impinge upon the life of the author? Odd, too, that such a tale should have an author, rather than a narrator—the authors of such tales are generally not identiWed. Perhaps this is a folk-story about a folk-narrator who tells a folk-story, in which case we are in the presence of another folknarrator: unlikely, but possible nonetheless. But In mitn git er a shtiln veyn! What sort of a Mayse can have as its central protagonist the narrator of another Mayse who is quietly weeping? And in the middle of which Mayse does which narrator begin to weep or sob? The presence

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of this weeping narrator, whether he is of our Velt or one of the Veltelakh of the folk-imagination, would appear, at all events, to signal some indeWnite seizure of narrative-action to occur somewhere in the middle of the text that is to follow. Or could it be that the mention of the Mayse was a ruse, that Velt and Veltelakh, narrator and Mekhabber, are here one, that the truth of the tale is not, as it is in the Mayse, in its retelling, but rather, as with autobiographical narrative, in its telling? Some relief from the momentary aporia that this subtitle may have induced in the reader/listener—I conflate the two in deference to Berdichevsky’s Yiddish style, which really does succeed, here and elsewhere, in conveying the impression of a spoken narrative—is however granted by the opening sentence of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’: ‘Once upon a time there was a beautiful maiden whose name was Rokhele. She was so beautiful and radiant that no one could look her in the face . . . like the sun.’21 The aura of fairy tale and legend, albeit eclectically interwoven with elements taken from the Hasidic wonder-story, is sustained throughout the Wrst paragraph. Scarcely, though, have we had time to settle back, comfortable in our generic assumptions, the story of Shloyme Vulf the magnate proceeding tolerably well, than there is an interruption in the narrative. The strange proem to ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ was, it appears, more than a temporary aberration. The folknarrator’s mention of a memorial-light (Ner tamid) that Shloyme Vulf set up in memory of his Wrst wife now provokes some kind of autobiographical interference: Many years have passed since I saw this little lamp burn, and to this very day, when I recall this, it tugs at my heart . . . Why did the Creator so fashion the world and mankind, that he allows the body to be buried, but the soul he gathers to Himself? There are some things that the intellect simply cannot grasp. I appear to have wandered far from the point.22

This seemingly chance, oV-the-cuV digression actually serves as a prelude to the progressive usurpal of the folk-narrator by the intrusive Wrst person of the recollecting author/Mekhaber. And it is the drama enacted, at the metadiscursive level, between folk-narrator and author, that, I would argue, constitutes the narrative tension of this tale. In the “surface” story of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, wherein is related the Shloyme

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Vulf/Rokhele tale, very little actually happens. The folk-narrator, rather, sets the scene for a Mayse—and a good one at that, resonant of Jewish and non-Jewish folklore and suggestive of an allegorical, Kabbalistic dimension as in the stories of Nahman of Bratslav—which is never really allowed to get oV the ground. The odds, however, are heavily stacked against him, for Berdichevsky, in the manner of Yishaq Erter and Yosef Perl, injects into this folk-story a goodly dose of fairly lethal anti-Hasidic irony. He thus implants—albeit in a subtle and insidious manner—in the folk-narrator’s tale the seeds of its own self-deconstruction. The tale in its entirety could serve as a fabulistic illustration of Bakhtin’s theory of double-voiced parodic narration: ‘The author employs the speech of another but . . . he introduces into that other speech an intention which is directly opposed to the original one. The second voice, having lodged in the other speech, clashes antagonistically with the original, host voice and forces it to serve opposite aims.’23 Quasi-Kabbalistic glosses and pietistic asides notwithstanding, Berdichevsky leaves the reader in little doubt that the focal—indeed consuming—point of interest for the folk-narrator is money. Thus, at the very beginning of the story, our folk-narrator is captivated by the prospect of a ‘little box’, according to hearsay a gift from the Shpoler zeyde,24 which ‘if one twists a little knob on it in the morning, a golden ducat is immediately disbursed, and so forth, every day’.25 The massive wealth of Shloyme Vulf and its accoutrements exercise a persistent fascination for the folk-narrator throughout the tale; he pauses repeatedly to dwell upon the niceties of this wealth, its nuances and implications: ‘What Shloyme Vulf distributed in charity on that day alone would have suYced for the building of a synagogue . . . ’26 This implicit or injected irony reaches a type of crescendo with the folk-narrator’s lavish extolment of the founder and scions of the Ruzhiner dynasty of Hasidim. The court of the Sadagorer Rebbe, Israel of Ruzhin, achieved renown primarily for its thoroughly this-worldly ostentatiousness and pomp, and the Ruzhiner’s children, one of whom was arrested for the forgery of Russian currency (compare the ‘little box’ at the beginning of the tale), were notorious spendthrifts and ne’er-do-wells.27 But more than this, the nexus of symbolic relations at play within the folk-story in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ is a travesty of that obtaining in the sacred tales of the Hasidim. In the classic Hasidic tale, there is a

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complex symbolic structure that makes of the mundane elements of the folk-tale—even of real-life events whose origin is in the biography of the Tsaddik—a trapeze to the cosmic supernal of the Kabbalistic SeWrot; such transformation is most marked, and most dialectical, in the stories of Nahman of Bratslav.28 In ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, however, those elements of the folk-tale that would lend themselves most easily to ‘seWrotic’ interpretation lead us back, almost invariably, to the personal recollections of the autobiographical narrator.29 It should be noted that when Berdichevsky, in the guise of the autobiographical narrator, enters the fabula of his own creation, the undercurrent of irony all but vanishes, giving way to a gentle and wistful lyricism that risks some coy exposure to the sentimental.30 So, in the middle of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, we Wnd the folk-narrator, having regained his composure after the initial interruption occasioned by mention of the Ner tamid. He rattles on rapturously, in the manner of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, about the new palace and estate Shloyme Vulf—‘a Jewish lord!’—acquired and its opulence: the count who previously owned the estate inherited it from his uncle who used to ride around in a silver carriage; the stairs of the palace were of white marble et cetera.31 And then he comes to the garden: ‘And the garden—a veritable Gan eydn. What am I talking about—garden?! A cornucopia! Little running streams, Wsh swimming playfully on the water’s surface. The further you go, the more everything becomes like a dream . . . ’32 With mention of the dream, something goes awry; the folk-narrator himself loses his substantiality—as if in a dream—leaving behind a faint echo and spectral blur as his narrative dissolves, in the original text, into three dots, just as previously three dots had marked the tapering oV of the narrative into the ‘memoriallight’ digression. It is the folk narrator’s evocation of the Gan eydn that now, it seems, provides the author/Mekhabber with the cue for an autobiographical excursion into those ‘happy Welds with joy forever blessed’—the lost world of childhood: When I stole into the garden for the Wrst time, it was as if I were enchanted—so quiet was it there, even though the sun was at its height. But, I can hear music, someone playing, I think, from the other side of the water . . . It is quite impossible to describe. Man has only one

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soul, but this soul has many strings . . . Once I read a story about the son of a king who became lost in a deep forest and when he sat down upon the bough of an old tree, a golden goose flew down and began to speak with him. My mother, may she rest in peace, could tell many such stories! When I was a young boy, my father introduced me to the holy Torah, and he gave me a little book in which the Garden of Eden was described, with its wells of gold and rivers of oil. Angels sing a kind of melody there which is not for the ears of a mortal being. All that I have in my inner being—I, a Jew without beard or peyes who has made his home in a faraway and foreign land in the midst of a people whose language he knew not33—all comes from there, from my mother and father and the stories they used to tell me . . . I am a wastrel (A hultay bin ikh) in that I threw all this away and became a gentile (Goy). Still, I have lost the thread of my tale. I had only just begun to relate the story of the beautiful Rokhele, but how one begins to babble when one gets into a conversation.34

After this intrusion of the autobiographical narrator, the equilibrium of the tale which the folk- narrator has purportedly come to relate is irrevocably upset. The latter, ruZed but unbowed, makes several valiant attempts to set ‘the tale of the beautiful Rokhele’ back on the rails; he speculates kabbalistically on the origins of Rokhele’s soul; he endows his carnivalesque depiction of Rokhele’s wedding to the grandson of the Ruzhiner Rebbe with all the hyperbole he can muster from the armory of folkloristic rhetoric: ‘Oxen, sheep and cows were slaughtered for the betrothal party . . . Rivers of wine flowed, and for eight days and nights Jews caroused in the streets. Even the gentiles got drunk. Anyone who just attended stuVed their pockets and brought home goodies to keep forever’.35 But, in vain; the autobiographical narrator steals his thunder, connecting the Rokhele story with a classic theme of childhood autobiography—a Wrst, unfulWlled love;36 a motif, it should be noted, that recurs in Berdichevsky’s writings, notably ‘’Ahavat ne’urim’ (A Childhood Love),37 as it does in the autobiographical writings of Bialik, Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and Ephraim Lisitsky.38 ‘But I myself ’ (emphasis in original), interjects the autobiographical voice, ‘who relate to you here this story, was suVused with longing . . . I too am after all a rabbi’s son. I imagined to myself, what would happen if I myself was the prince and came to a mountain and espied the

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princess . . . And Rokhele came to me in a dream over and over again after many years and still does to this day.’39 And, by the end of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, the folk-narrator has completely disappeared from the scene, his story eclipsed—or, rather, washed away—in the wake of the tears issuing from the autobiographical narrator. who, aZicted, we are told, by a ‘perpetual depression’ (A mareshkhoyre af eybike tsaytn)40 since the time of Rokhele’s marriage, now breaks into his ‘quiet sob’. That the autobiographical monologue in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ does not refer to a Wctitious ‘author’ who stands between Berdichevsky and the folk-narrator in this piece may be established both by reference to Berdichevsky’s own biography and to his autobiographical writings that precede and were written contemporaneously with this tale. Indeed, I would argue that any reading of this, as of others of Berdichevsky’s stories, that chooses to turn a blind eye to the autobiographical data contained therein will be as flawed as an approach that would seek to reduce the text to its biographical components. In order to do justice to the constant dialectic in Berdichevsky’s works between the autobiographical and the Wctional, a way must be cleared between a more New Critical approach, as in Arnold Band’s analysis of ’Oyvi,41 and the naive acceptance of Berdichevsky’s stories as biographical documentation for which Yeshurun Keshet, in his biography of Berdichevsky, was justiWably taken to task.42 Berdichevsky was, like the autobiographical narrator in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, A rav’s a zun, the son of a Rabbi.43 At the time of writing this story, Berdichevsky lived in Breslau, far from the heartland of the Eastern European traditional Jewry of his childhood years and from the new centres of modern Hebrew literature. Leaving Russia in 1890 was a traumatic event for Berdichevsky, and the same note of isolation and nostalgic yearning as expressed by the autobiographical narrator in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ is paralleled in a heartfelt autobiographical aside in one of Berdichevsky’s earlier essays,44 as it is in the Hebrew counterpart to ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, the above-mentioned ‘Bein hapatish vehasadan’.45 ‘I am here and my heart is in Russia’, he writes à la Yehudah Halevi to Yerahmiel Shakpenyuk from Breslau in 1891.46 He was also, like the autobiographical narrator of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, aZicted with longing for the lost love of his youth, his Wrst wife, from whom he was

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forced to divorce by his father-in-law for his heretical tendencies at the age of twenty.47 We also Wnd, in ‘Bein hapatish vehasadan’, the same ambivalence, mingled with guilt, toward the acquisition of secular knowledge—synonymous with gentile culture—as is expressed by the autobiographical narrator in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’: ‘Cursed be the day when the Haskalah took me under her wings and hewed down the forest that grew in me, the forest of generations.’48 Nostalgia for the world of childhood, coupled with a degree of ambivalence toward the Haskalah that has sundered his organic relation with the scriptural and oral tradition of his forefathers, characterize Berdichevsky’s writings from the onset of his literary career.49 But these tendencies appear to have been heightened by Berdichevsky’s sojourns with his new wife, Rachel (note ‘Rokhele’ in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’) at his father’s home in 1901 and 1902,50 having spent ten lean and hungry years as a peripatetic ‘extern’ in Western Europe. This ‘return of the native’, which had a profound eVect upon Berdichevsky, must be reckoned as a key factor in his shift of autobiographical direction toward the deliberate incorporation of pre-modern elements in depiction of the self, of which, it will be argued, ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ is possibly the earliest example. The return to Dubova was also the immediate biographical occasion for Berdichevsky’s temporary shift to Yiddish as one of his principal languages of literary self-expression.51 For Berdichevsky, Yiddish was the Mame loshn in more than a Wgurative sense;52 the Yiddish Mayse was, for him, intimately bound with the memory of his mother. And in the evocation of the mother in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, there is a subtle confluence of the autobiographical and the fabulistic. The mournful ruminations of the autobiographical narrator in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ on the Ner tamid, which mark his Wrst intervention in the narrative, carry in their train associations with the most traumatic event of Berdichevsky’s childhood, the death of his mother when he was twelve years old—an experience that reappears in many guises in Berdichevsky’s works.53 This association in memory between ‘the burning of a little light’ and the death of Berdichevsky’s mother, implicit in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, receives more explicit formulation in ‘Bein hapatish vehasadan’: The Shekhinah in exile! My mother died in her twenty-eighth year and I and two other children were left orphans. My tender heart,

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which brought me to tears upon reading the biblical passage, ‘And he raised his voice and wept,’ felt then only shock and some uncomprehending hurt. Only the candles do I remember that they placed by my mother’s bed as she lay on the ground.54

No less evocative of the lost mother than little lamps, candles,55 is, for the Berdichevskian autobiographical narrator, the Mayse—the Yiddish tale. The strong impression left upon the autobiographical narrator by his mother’s stories is obviously not subject to hard and fast authentication—nor are the majority of incidents related in a childhood autobiography. But, since the twin association of Mayse and mother is, for Berdichevsky, recurrent, more signiWcance, I think, accrues to the biographical ground of this theme than it does, for example, to the question of whether Proust ever partook of a Madeleine. That certain memory-traces do lead from the magniWcent estate of Shloyme Vulf in the ‘frame-story’ of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, whence to the Mayse whence to the mother of the author, is attested to by ‘Shebikhtav veshabe’al peh’. This piece was originally published with a couple of other fragmented sketches of childhood autobiography under the collective title ‘Zikhronot’,56 undersigned ‘Yossi ze’ira’, the ‘Little Yossi’ or, in Yiddish, Yossel, the name by which Berdichevsky was known in his hometown.57 Here Berdichevsky relates of his mother: The stories, ’Aggadot and Mayses that she knew by heart and used to relate every day to her friends, quite enthralled me. . . . My mother’s stories held a special place in my heart . . . and when she opened her mouth to tell a story—true or imaginary—I immediately forsook all my other childhood concerns and immersed myself in her tales which took on real life in my imagination.58

The authenticity of this childhood recollection is further attested to by the frequency with which other Jewish autobiographers, contemporary with and succeeding Berdichevsky, make mention of the extraordinary impact that the Yiddish Mayse—traditionally a literature designed for women and thus transmitted via the mother—had upon the young child’s imagination.59 But what distinguishes ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ from Berdichevsky’s previous autobiographical piece is the seeming reversal of context. In ‘Shebikhtav veshebe’al peh’ and in parallel accounts by other Jewish

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autobiographers, the recollection of the mother’s tales occurs within the Rousseauian context of a childhood autobiography. In ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, by contrast, the autobiographical narrator, as it were, steps into a Yiddish tale of the type his mother would have told—just as he ‘steals into’ the fabulous garden of Shloyme Vulf the magnate that the folk-narrator has evoked in the spinning of his tale, and just as, at the end of ‘Batim-zikkaron’ (Houses: A Memory), he steps into the deserted house that is the focus of this beautiful sketch from ‘the recent past’.60 It is this reversal of context, the idiosyncratic narrative strategy here adopted, which points beyond the layer of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ that may be illuminated through considerations of biographical parallelism, to the metadiscursive stratum of this tale. For not only, I would argue, is ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ a story about stories—that of the folk-narrator, those of the mother, the hagiographic legends of the Hasidim; it is also a Mayse, or better, perhaps, a Mashal, about the writing of Jewish autobiography. The seeming insipidity of the folknarrator’s Mayse in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ is compensated for by the enaction, at the metadiscursive level of the tale, of the principles of its own composition and by the suspense thereby engendered—in the allegorical concurrence, that is, between two modes of literary discourse as represented respectively by the folk-narrator and the autobiographical Mekhabber. If there is in this story ‘intrigue’ or ‘plot’, it derives not from the characters of the folk-tale—Shloyme Vulf, Rokhele, the grandson of the Ruzhiner—whose lack of mutual interaction in the fabula is well-nigh Leibnizian, but from the problematic encounter between folk-narrator and Mekhabber, each of whom has a tale to tell and each of whose tales somehow ‘impinges’ (iz a bisl negeye) upon that of the other. We have here, that is, not only a story anchored, in certain important respects, to the extra-textual biography of the author, but also a story about the attempted transformation of this extra-textual reality into a text that will be at the same time autobiographical and of speciWcally Jewish resonance. And, on this, the metadiscursive level, it is the Wrst extended autobiographical monologue coinciding with the author’s covert entry into the ‘garden’ that marks the climax of the tale. Meyle, dos bin ikh nisht oysn—“I have lost the thread of my tale”— the narrator exclaims after this powerful intrusion. Now this is very

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much in the tradition of the Mendele (Abramovitsh) aside. And, just as when Mendele says, ‘Dos bin ich nisht oysn’, the implication is, almost invariably, quite to the contrary, so here the autobiographical narrator, far from “losing the thread” of his tale, has, rather, caught hold of its reins. Noteworthy, however, is that the relationship between Berdichevsky and his folk-narrator is here the reverse of that which obtains between Abramovitsh and his folk-persona, Mendele. Abramovitsh, for the most part, succeeds in muZing or camouflaging his autobiographical voice by hiding behind the Mendele mask.61 Whereas Mendele has to cajole the reluctant Abramovitsh into writing his autobiography, to the extent of personally undertaking to defray the printing expenses,62 Berdichevsky’s folk-narrator attempts repeatedly to stem the autobiographical torrent, whose source is the author, that he has unwittingly unleashed. This wrangling of narrative personae as enacted at the metadiscursive level of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ is more than an exercise in rhetorical jouissance. I take, rather, ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, with its play of pre-modern narrative personae and post-Rousseauian autobiographical voice, as marking an important stage, or junction, in the progressive complexiWcation of Berdichevsky’s autobiographical vision. With the beneWt of hindsight, moreover, we may perceive in this text some presentiment of the problematic that Berdichevsky, as Jewish autobiographer, would grapple with for the remainder of his literary career: How to appropriate, or at least come to terms with the voice of tradition while remaining true to the formal and thematic requirements of a genre— autobiography—for which there is no precedent within that tradition? Or, in more Berdichevskian language, how to synthesize the Qol hadorot (the voice of generations) with the Tsa’aqat hayahid (the cry of the individual)? For Berdichevsky, it appears, was not content with casting his life-history so wholly within the mold of Rousseauian autobiography as had been Solomon Maimon—with whom he nonetheless identiWed strongly, to the extent of incorporating several episodes from the Lebensgeschichte within his own autobiographical narratives. He seems to have sensed that wholesale adoption of the Rousseauian confessional mode, while revelatory of certain aspects of the deracinated self of the contemporary Jew—the ’Ozev or Boded63—may yet eclipse those other more millennial, atavistic aspects of Jewish identity

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by which he was alternately attracted and repelled but Wnally fascinated. For Berdichevsky sought in modern Hebrew literature a means of healing the split (Qera’) that had opened up in the soul of the individual Jew in the wake of the incursion of modernity to Jewish Eastern Europe; it was upon this basis that he was so forcefully opposed to Ahad Ha’am’s proposed division of functions between Hebrew literature and that written in non-Jewish languages.64 For Berdichevsky, then, literary presentation of the self—the self as ‘Jew’ (’Ivri) and the self as ‘Man’ (’Adam)65—presents a considerable dilemma; a dilemma that, on the plane of autobiographical aesthetics, transposes itself to the problem of how to speak authentically of the self and yet invoke the resonance of generations without thereby opening up a Pandora’s box of dialectical self-negation. No easy task in itself, but Berdichevsky’s dilemma was further compounded in that his relationship with the texts and oral lore of tradition that constituted the world of his childhood was precisely that of a ‘distant relative’, as Berdichevsky refers to himself in the title of the cycle of Yiddish writings in which ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ was eventually included: Yidishe kesovim fun a vaytn korev. This title, that in Yiddish has such a charming ring—artless and uncontrived—is in itself a consummate exercise in compressed understatement and legerdemain. ‘Writings from a Distant Relative’—the title could serve equally well as that of Berdichevsky’s collected works in all three languages of his literary composition—Yiddish, Hebrew, German. Especially appropriate, though, is this title for Berdichevsky’s autobiographical writings; for contained therein is an intimation of the central paradox with which he, as Jewish autobiographer, was faced. Distance and relation— these are the two poles between which Berdichevsky as writer, but especially as autobiographer, attempts to negotiate a path. Distance and relation—seemingly antithetical qualities; yet both are interconnected and each is dependent upon the other. In the autobiography, distance from the self in its previous incarnations is the prerequisite for the perspective that enables that relation between past and present selves from which the autobiographical text is born.66 Distance—geographical, temporal, and cultural—provided Berdichevsky, the ‘Jew without beard or peyes, far away in a strange land’ (Vayt in der fremd),67 with the possibility of entering into an autobiographical relationship with his Eastern

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European past, the ‘stories his mother used to tell’, the Humash and the Talmudic ’Aggadot as instilled in him by the father. But to Berdichevsky as undivided self, in his previous avatar as Bar bey rav (the son of a Rabbi—the pseudonym that Berdichevsky adopted in his earliest articles),68 who enjoys an organic connectedness with the traditions and texts of the ‘fathers’, is denied that Archimedean vantage point upon which the autobiographer may take his stand.69 With the passage of years, however, and the geographical and intellectual migration of Berdichevsky, retrieval of the lost world of Bar bey rav is almost entirely dependent upon the tenuous thread of memory; it is thus not surprising that Berdichevsky comes close to apotheosizing this function: Even though snares await us at every step of the way, the pastures of memory remain wide open. There we may walk, at the rising and setting of the sun. Even on our deathbed, the glowing embers of youth may still dispel the shades. I do not believe in the revival of the dead, but I do believe in the revival of that which has passed—even died— in the mind of a man.70

Thus it is that the narrator of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ ‘constantly carries within himself ’ ‘Rokhele’ even if he ‘goes to the end of the world’ and thus it is that memory makes of man a ‘world with little worlds’.71 Summoning to consciousness of the past is one thing, but recreation of this past in literary or artistic form is dependent upon a human attribute, not inherited, but learned—Ars Poetica in the widest sense of the term. But—and here a further complication is introduced—Ars Poetica (Shirah, in Berdichevsky’s formulation) is, for Berdichevsky, closely allied with the concept of ‘sin’, which is itself allied with the complex of associations surrounding the ‘West’—Ma’arav, the locale of Berdichevsky’s ‘exile’ and a synecdoche for all that is opposed to the world of the ‘East’—the Pale of Settlement and, further to the East and prior in time, the land of the Patriarchs.72 ‘At that time, I scarcely knew the myths of creation. But I left that town and I am no longer a child. And I too became entangled in life and I was bitten by the serpent of poetry (Shirah)and sin . . . ’73 Only then, through the instrumentality of ‘sin’, can Berdichevsky recreate the world of his childhood in all its innocence and numinosity. When Berdichevsky, as autobiographer who has ‘become a gentile’, approaches the self as child and, in

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so doing, attempts to harness the texts of tradition to the services of Het’/Shirah (Sin/Poetry), it is as the meeting of two countervalent force-Welds, attracted to each other, but which upon contiguity set into motion a process of mutual self-displacement. And, so it is, in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, that the voice of tradition—the folk-narrator—and that of the autobiographer come to reassess this tradition from the perspective of a post-lapsarian nostalgia, tinged with regret, make uneasy bedfellows; these voices are held together—and the story thus redeemed from fragmentation—only by artfully construed juxtapositional irony, whose technique the Mekhabber has acquired in the course of his extended sojourn in the ‘West’. SigniWcant, in this respect, is that the only really graceful transition in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ from folk-story to autobiographical narrative is eVected via the felicitous mediation of a symbol that is, at one and the same time, Jewish, universal, and a stock trope in the symbolic repertoire of autobiography, as well as being a standard colloquialism in spoken Yiddish—the Garden of Eden, Paradise. It is in terms of Eden and the expulsion from Paradise that Rousseau depicts his childhood sojourn at Bossey,74 as does John Ruskin the small suburban garden of his childhood in Herne Hill, London.75 The lost Eden theme is especially prominent and pervasive in Edwin Muir’s account of his leaving the Orkneys as a child to be pitched into the urban dystopia of Glasgow.76 Berdichevsky, moreover, had already made frequent recourse to this classically Rousseauian motif in his earliest autobiographical pieces.77 Especially striking is Berdichevsky’s employment of the Genesis myth within an autobiographical context in the most important of these early writings, ‘Gershayim’—to be discussed in greater detail below—whose title has a triple reference, to the author’s two divorces and to the expulsion of Adam from the Garden of Eden (Vayegaresh et ha’adam).78 It should occasion no cause for wonder, then, that the folk-narrator’s casual and idiomatic—innocent, as it were— evocation of Eden in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’—Der gartn iz an emeser ganeydn79—provides the autobiographical narrator with the linchpin that connects their respective Veltelakh, and, in eVect, extends him an open invitation to enter this “garden”, which now becomes the locus—even the apex—of both tales.

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‘A velt mit veltelakh’ is, then, to paraphrase the autobiographical narrator of this tale, only one story, but this story is woven of many strands. The story is like a Russian doll that enacts and recapitulates itself in miniature in a series of successively microcosmic gradations. But, after layer upon layer of the text has been peeled aside, there remains, at the nucleus of the story, an unresolved riddle that the text itself has posed. The dilemma of the Jewish autobiographer, as understood by Berdichevsky and as enacted at the metadiscursive stratum of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, was to exercise Berdichevsky’s creative imagination for the remainder of his life. The nature and dimensions of Berdichevsky’s autobiographical dilemma cannot be appreciated by reference to ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ alone; for the signiWcance of this text is not inherent, but derives rather from its positional relationship with the other texts generated in the course of Berdichevsky’s quest of an autobiographical voice, and with the extra-textual biography of their author. The above discussion of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ will, I believe, help illumine certain essential aspects of the texts to be discussed below, in measure as these latter cast further light upon this enigmatic little story. The aim of the following sections of this survey is then to situate this story, Wrst on a synchronic grid—within, that is, the context of a synthetic overview of Berdichevsky’s historisophical conceptions— and then, diachronically—within the context of the key works in the Berdichevskian corpus that precede and follow upon its composition.

The Voice of the Individual and the ‘Burden of Inheritance’: Berdichevsky’s Autobiographical Counter-Tradition Berdichevsky’s fascination with the autobiographical did not, as has been noted above, conWne itself to the belletristic sphere. In this respect, as in all others, Berdichevsky’s publicistic and his belletristic works are extremely closely connected and neither can be fully understood without reference to the other. His essays, as are his stories, are deeply self-exploratory; the constant use of ‘On’ as the Wrst word of their titles—‘On Confession’, ‘On the Book’, ‘On Values’ et cetera—

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suggests a link with Montaigne. The interlinkage between the essays and the stories becomes especially apparent from circa 1900, when Berdichevsky devoted himself in equal measure to his belletristic and publicistic works. In his essays, Berdichevsky innovated in casting premodern Jewish autobiographical texts within a new perspective. He injected these works with new life by focussing less upon the value of these documents as historical testimony, as did Abraham Kahana, than upon their existential and literary signiWcance. Wrested from their original locus in quo, these texts are presented by Berdichevsky as adumbrations of the Jewish crisis of identity in the modern world, as reflected in his own autobiographical writings and those of other writers of the period such as Lilienblum, Feierberg and Brenner. Berdichevsky posited secular Jewish identity upon the presence of ancestral memory-traces—or, to adopt Jungian terminology, a ‘Collective Jewish Unconscious’—ineluctably impressed upon the psyche of the individual Jew.80 The latter, however far he may stray from the collective fold, bears within him a ‘store-memory’, or in Berdichevsky’s terms a ‘historical feeling’:81 The pains of history, buried deep deep in our souls, carrying us away whether we will it or not to distant days . . . And how powerful is the feeling, how strong the memories . . . How they live in our being . . . How deep in our being—deep as the abyss!82 This is the immense historical anguish and these are the agonies of history, a pain which Wlls our spirit and being and fragments us: irreconcilable opposites; victories and groans of defeat, groans of death and victories . . . When we conquer the past, we Wnd ourselves defeated—On the other hand, if the past prevails, we and our sons are also defeated . . . An elixir of life and a deadly poison at one and the same time. Oh—who will clear the way for me? Who will clear the path?83

The centrality accorded memory in Berdichevsky’s autobiographical schema has been remarked upon above; but now, with the positing of the quasi-Jungian ‘Collective Jewish Unconscious’, memory assumes a crucial role in the scheme of things on an altogether grander scale. For not only is it solely through memory that the personal life-history is rendered attainable to the contemporary consciousness of the individual;

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memory is what mediates between the national past and personal present of the Jew; and only, it appears, through the durée84 of memory, is the contemporary, deracinated Jewish individual, still linked— as, Berdichevsky says elsewhere, by a ‘Gordian knot’85—to the Jewish collective from which he has cut his moorings. But this is not all; for Berdichevsky implies that the national, ancestral memory—the ‘Collective Jewish Unconscious’—is itself, to a degree, a screen-memory, a cover for pre-patriarchal memory-traces that have their roots in the hoary realms of pre-monotheistic paganism.86 Concealed, beneath the ‘Collective Jewish Unconscious’, is, then, a type of ‘Collective Jewish Id’ (Freud), ‘Shadow’ (Jung), or Daemon (Goethe), that while, in temporal terms, of a prior—even primordial—historical provenance, runs, in its psychic dimension, concurrently with all other strata of contemporary Jewish consciousness. The implications of this theory are, furthermore, that the Patriarchs, caught up in the inner dialectical struggle between wilful amnesia—the forceful staving-oV of pre-modern memory-traces—and the ineluctable return, as it were, of the repressed to consciousness, Wnd themselves in very much the same existential predicament as does the contemporary Jew, as portrayed by Berdichevsky in the passages cited immediately above. Berdichevsky, in his plumbing of the Acherontic layers of Jewish consciousness, levels an implicit—and not undeliberate-critique at the Jewish historiosophy of the man who posed very much as the conscience of his generation and the Apollonian guardian of the Jewish spirit in the scientiWc age—Ahad Ha’am. Berdichevsky’s invocation of the pre-monotheistic and pagan well-springs of Jewish creativity would not have sat well with Ahad Ha’am and his confrères. Equally subversive, though, of the tenets of Ahad-Ha’amist historiosophy was Berdichevsky’s claim that the true source of Jewish cultural continuity and capacity for renewal throughout the ages lay not in conformity to the demands of some abstract and monolithic ethical system, but rather in the Nietzschean revolt of the individual against the same.87 This claim—as is true of almost all of the ideological theses advanced by secular Jewish intellectuals in this period—bears considerable implications for the reading and the writing of Jewish literature; for, if the true hallmark of a collective is the individuality of its members, the idiosyncratic, autobiographical voice which may be heard in this com-

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munity’s literary bequest is, paradoxically, the most representative. And thus, according to Berdichevsky, some of the key texts in the Jewish literary canon are in essence autobiographical, or, if not explicitly so, they bear witness to a stifled autobiographical voice straining at the leash of received tradition—the Nussah88—for free expression; he hints, furthermore, at the existence of a literature in which the Jewish individual gives voice to the self that has been consigned to oblivion (Ta’un genizah) by the framers of the canon.89 And so, Berdichevsky refers to ‘the books of memoirs that are erroneously called the “Former Prophets”’,90 and, in his 1909 essay ‘’Al havidui’ (“On Confession”), which has been cited above, he claims that: ‘The book of Psalms is one great confession. Deuteronomy is a confession, as is Ecclesiastes’.91 Thus far we have two distinct but related postulates, which, when taken together, give rise to a third proposition, as in the categorical syllogism: the existence of a Jewish ‘store-memory’ or ‘Collective Unconscious’, impervious to the ravages of time; the seemingly antithetical claim that ‘Judaism’ should not be understood as a monolithic entity of historical persistence, but rather as the sum total of the lifeexperiences of individual Jews throughout the ages; the autobiographical voice is thus, in some sense, archetypally Jewish and draws upon the ‘Collective Jewish Unconscious’, which is itself, in the Wnal reckoning, the cumulative bequest of Jewish individuals. In projecting the autobiographical impulse to the nether regions of Jewish consciousness, whose dimension is not of time, Berdichevsky is enabled, as a corollary to this syllogism, to collapse temporal distinctions between pre- and post-Rousseauian Jewish autobiographical texts. The autobiographical voice of the contemporary Jew draws upon the same source as that, inter alios, of Moses, Uriel d’Acosta and Leone Modena.92 So, Berdichevsky continues in his essay, ‘’Al havidui: ‘In all the three taken together (that is Psalms, Deuteronomy and Ecclesiastes), diVer as they do from one another, there is something in every man, in every suVering soul, in every poet . . . All growth and creativity in a man is a type of confession.’93 Jewish autobiographers, contemporaries and successors of Berdichevsky, frequently claim that their own lifehistory is reflective or paradigmatic of the experience of a generation.94 But Berdichevsky’s autobiographical narrator, for whom the dividing line between ‘Truth’ and ‘Reality’ is tentative and blurred, draws

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upon and relives the historical experience of the Jewish people from the expulsion from Eden to the turn of the nineteenth century:95 For several days now, I hear another voice, a voice that hails from elsewhere: the Jewish people in distress! I recall my sin. For several days now I have not thought about the world of the Jews. I tried to ignore the subject, to turn my mind to other things . . . I, who already considered myself far, far away, on another plane altogether. But now, it is as if I have awoken from a long sleep . . . And, behold, cries of distress I hear—my innermost soul is wracked by the pains of history.96 Suddenly all of our great past—its glory and its terror— lives within me, Wlls my being, alternately attracts and repels me. Everywhere I turn, in every hidden corner of my soul, I hear the voice of Jacob, the voice of the Jewish people. I experience the immense anguish, the hopes of the people, the suVering in these hopes . . . And by the waters of Babylon, I also pluck the strings of my harp . . . 97

With the positing of the ‘Collective Jewish Unconscious’, the contention that the fons et origo of Jewish creativity resides in the individual, Berdichevsky adumbrates an implicit theory of origins for Jewish autobiography. But the rudiments of this theory could, mutatis mutandis, be transposed to the study of autobiographical self-expression in any national literature. Embedded, however, in the passage from ‘Bil’adeiha’ cited immediately above, as in the two previously cited extracts from ’Al em haderekh and Din udevarim, is a key term that points to another dimension of Berdichevsky’s thinking on Jewish autobiography, a further layer of complexity, which supplements his theory of the origins of the Jewish autobiographical impulse with one of the nature of the Jewish autobiographical voice: ‘The pangs of history’. Yissurei hatoladah—Berdichevsky draws attention to the phrase in the passage cited immediately above by double spacing; it is this formulation that serves as the matrix for an implicit, veiledly prescriptive, theory of Jewish literature in general, and of the poetics of Jewish autobiography in particular—a theory that, as has been well demonstrated by Yitzhak Bakon, crystallized simultaneously in Berdichevsky’s publicistic and his belletristic writings of the turn of the century.98 This term, the ‘pangs of history’ proved extraordinarily fecund and gave rise to a host of synonymical variants that are dispersed throughout

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Berdichevsky’s literary productions in this period: ‘historical anguish’ (Hatsa’ar hatoladi), ‘national pain’ (Tsa’ar ’amami), the ‘Jewish sorrow’ (’Etsev yisra’eli), the ‘historical feeling’ (Regesh toladi), ‘the burden of inheritance’ (Sevel hayerushah), the ‘pressure of generations’ (’Aqat hadorot).99 It is this notion of the ‘pangs of history’, with all their attendant aches and pains, which enables Berdichevsky to attribute a qualitative distinctiveness to the various manifestations of the Jewish autobiographical voice that attests to their common origin. The resonance, however muted, of these ‘historical pangs’ attests also to the existence of the disparate, frequently veiled or stifled, Jewish expression of self that Berdichevsky sought out, and believed himself to have found, in the interstices of the pre-modern Jewish literary bequest. And it is these same ‘pangs of history’ that temper the post-Rousseauian autobiographical voice with a speciWcally Jewish timbre. We are left with a paradoxical formulation: Pre-modern Jewish literature is autobiographical in measure as it is expressive of the ‘pangs of history’; the autobiographical writings of Berdichevsky and his contemporaries are Jewish in measure as they admit of these same ‘pangs’. Berdichevsky was especially drawn to autobiographical accounts that give evidence of a Qera’ or ‘split’—another essential term in the Berdichevsky vocabulary—between personal and national identity. The note of divisiveness, the ‘split’, is, according to Berdichevsky, characteristic of Jewish autobiography, as are ‘the pangs of history’—the ‘historical anguish’. The two concepts are closely related, that of ‘the pangs of history’ attesting to the archetypal continuity of the Jewish autobiographical voice and that of the ‘split’ charging pre-modern Jewish autobiographical documents with a contemporary note of existential urgency. This ‘split’ may be expressed in terms of the Rousseauian antinomies, Nature versus Civilization, Nietzsche’s Apollonian/Dionysian,100 or Freud’s ‘Id’/‘Super-ego’.101 The ‘split’, as does the sense of ‘historical anguish’, sets its stamp upon Jewish experience throughout the generations and in Berdichevsky’s counter Ahad-Ha’amist historiography becomes, paradoxically, a source of Jewish creativity.102 The notion of the split is, then, as is that of the ‘pangs of history’, an archetypal concept.103 And this notion, even more so than is true of the latter, renders Berdichevsky vulnerable to

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the charge of the projection of a peculiarly modern malaise onto previous generations. Ever on the look out for grist to his historiographical contentions, Berdichevsky found the ‘split’ in the Jewish soul expressed in various guises in Jewish documents—especially autobiographical documents. The ‘split’, the conflict that rages within the Jewish individual between the desire for free gratiWcation of instinctual impulses—even to the extent of the antinomian—and the repressive strictures of the collective, may be expressed in terms of Eros, as in the autobiographies of Jacob Emden and Solomon Maimon and, as hinted at in the autobiography of Nathan of Nemirov, the amanuensis of Nahman of Bratslav and in Modena’s Hayyei yehudah.104 Berdichevsky presents these texts with a delicate innuendo that borders upon, but Wnally falls short of, prurience—here, as elsewhere in his writings, he displays an eerie capacity for navigating the narrow ridge between artful insinuation and crude suggestiveness. Or, the ‘split’ may be expressed in terms of attraction to gentile culture, or non-Jewish forms of magic and divination, as in Modena’s Hayyei yehudah and Hayyim Vital’s Sefer hahezyonot.105 For Berdichevsky, then, the Qera’—split—may serve as a unifying principle for Jewish texts of disparate provenance and type, but especially of autobiographical texts, that hint at individual egregiousness, recidivism, marginality. It is the primary Qera’ which enables Berdichevsky to place sections taken from the autobiographical writings of Aryeh Modena, Nathan of Nemirov and Jacob Emden side by side and to group these under a common topos.106 This highlighting of the existential dilemma of Jewish individuals, as expressed, inter alia, in the compass of Jewish autobiographical writings through the ages, was influential. But Berdichevsky’s influence, in this respect, was felt less by Jewish autobiographers than by Jewish historians, and even here this influence is diVuse, sometimes oblique. By positing a chain of Jewish tradition whose principal exponents were marginal, self-divided men, Berdichevsky laid the basis for a Jewish ‘counter-history’.107 This ‘counter-history’ challenged the assumptions of any Jewish historiography posited upon the putative continuity of a normative ‘Judaism’—most notably that of Ahad Ha’am, who, as has been remarked above, was the principal target of many of Berdichevsky’s publicistic articles. The most celebrated exponent of this ‘counter-

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historical’ tradition in Jewish historiography is Gershom Scholem, who, in his autobiographical works, acknowledges, though at no great length and somewhat obliquely, the formative influence that Berdichevsky exerted upon the crystallization of his own Kabbalistic perspectives.108 In Jewish literary history, the influence of Berdichevsky’s ‘counter-historical’ model, especially in the aspect of the Qera’ or ‘split’, is certainly discernible in the works of Yisroel Zinberg.109 And some spiritual kinship may, I believe, be discerned between Berdichevsky and one of the few Jewish Jungians, Erich Neumann.110 Many of the individuals who Wgure prominently in the counter-historical tradition—Modena, Acosta, Reubeni, Maimon—did leave behind them autobiographical testaments. This aspect of their activity was, however, eclipsed in the ‘counter-historical’ surveys of Berdichevsky’s successors—the actual writing of autobiography not being considered so much a ‘counter-historical’ phenomenon as the discrete hints of a tradition of Jewish antinomianism contained within these texts. Be this as it may, Berdichevsky’s ‘counter-historical’ perspectives, do I believe, provide the requisite metaphysical backdrop both to the tale ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, and to the autobiographical Odyssey of its author, as this shall be charted in the following section.

The Crystallization of an Autobiographical Hermeneutic Outlined above is a synthetic overview, drawing upon a representative cluster of texts written at various stages of his career, of Berdichevsky’s implicit theory of Jewish autobiography—a theory that evolved in tandem with a wide-ranging historiographical thesis whose implications point far beyond the study of Jewish autobiography. But Berdichevsky’s formulations with regard to the nexus between pre- and post-Rousseauian Jewish autobiography were a long time in the making. The relationship between the crystallization of a theory of autobiography in Berdichevsky’s publicistic and scholarly works and the increasing complexity of the autobiographical strategies he adopts within the belletristic context is dynamic and reciprocal. And, as with any other aspect of this eclectic, intuitive and wilfully inconsistent

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thinker, any clear line of chronological development that admits of no exception is extremely diYcult to determine. Berdichevsky did, nonetheless, leave certain signposts at irregular stages along his tortuous path from which it is possible to trace, albeit in broad outline, the development of his thought on the subject. To follow Berdichevsky on his path from post-Rousseauian autobiography to pre-modern texts is actually to present, in miniature but bold relief, the larger phenomenon in Jewish intellectual history that it has been the purpose of this discussion to explicate: the arrogation, that is, of pre-Rousseauian texts to post-Rousseauian categories. If, however, the example of Berdichevsky is particularly telling, it is, at the same time, particularly egregious and complex. For Berdichevsky’s encounter with these pre-modern texts is, at one and the same time, his own quest for an autobiographical voice—a voice that would answer to the requirements of a modern, non-Jewish literary genre and yet not break the primary ties that bound him to the Hebrew and Yiddish literary traditions with which he was most intimately acquainted. Berdichevsky in this, again, is the ‘strong precursor’ of S. Y. Agnon in his grapplings with the same problematic, largely with respect to the novel, but also to that of autobiography.111 Writing, for Berdichevsky, provided, from the very beginning, a means and medium of exhuming and expunging autobiographical ghosts.112 The two most painful episodes in his youthful experience— the death of his mother when he was twelve years old and the forcible divorce of his Wrst wife at the age of seventeen, to which, as has been noted, he returns repeatedly in his later autobiographical writings— are now described for the Wrst time.113 With his second marriage, undertaken in untimely haste, eVectively on the rocks, Berdichevsky was, in 1887, of a decidedly melancholy disposition and much given to introspection.114 Immersed in non-Jewish literature, Berdichevsky Wnds now a focus of identiWcation not in any Jewish Wgure but in Hamlet: In gentile tongues, I have read the works of Buckle and Spencer. I also returned to the English and German classics. I was especially drawn to Hamlet, the creature of Shakespeare’s imagination; for, due to my sorry situation, I, like him, am embittered and depressed. As birds of a feather flock together, so man is drawn to a kindred spirit.115

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The flirtation with Hamlet, however, was relatively short-lived: in an 1891 letter to Shakenpiyuk Berdichevsky writes that in one of his previous letters, he had written that ‘I do not say with Hamlet “To be or not to be?” I have to live—concerning non-existence there is nothing to say.’116 And by 1889, the twice-divorced twenty-four-year-old exstudent of the Volozhin Yeshivah appears to have found a more ready source of identiWcation in Jewish autobiographical literature, especially post-Rousseauian. This year saw the appearance of Berdichevsky’s essay ‘Devarim ’ahadim ’al devar hatoladah veha’autobiograWah’,117 his Wrst major publicistic essay and only the second essay to be written in Hebrew on the subject—after, that is, M. L. Letteris’s introduction to Zikkaron basefer, which appeared in 1869. In a markedly autobiographical state of mind, and with more than his Wll of experience for one so young, Berdichevsky now comes to assess the signiWcance and requirements of the autobiographical genre in general and its standing in modern Jewish literature. Unflinching sincerity and the willingness to reveal everything in the life-history—down to the pettiest of details—casting the author in a favourable light or no; these, following Rousseau, are the qualities Berdichevsky demands of an autobiographer. Judged by these criteria, Berdichevsky declares that, ‘of all the autobiographies in our literature’, only one, and that not without qualiWcations, has met the exacting requirements of the genre. The reference appears to be, though neither the book nor its author is mentioned by name, to M. L. Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim.118 The author, Berdichevsky writes, has depicted the life of a complete man, nor was he ashamed to present us with the naked truth of his life. He has given us a clear and honest account of the complexities of his emotional and intellectual development. He depicts his attitudes toward religion and life119 at each period of his career, not flinching from self-criticism. His book is more than the story of an individual life; it sheds light, rather, upon the morals, mores, customs and attitudes of the entire people at the time in which he lived. His book is written from the heart, in an intense state of mental agitation, and it is for this reason that it aVects us so deeply. The source of the book’s strength, however, is also that of its flaws. The excessive sentimentality is injurious to

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reasoned judgment; his book was written as an expression of anguish, and it is incumbent upon the writer to be cool-headed and to follow the golden mean. Moreover, he related only what pertained to himself, providing us with no depiction of the friends who played a part in his life, the wider historical ambience in which he moved, the ruling opinions and philosophies of the time . . . 120

Berdichevsky’s blanket dismissal of all Jewish autobiographies other than Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim and the rather serious critique that he levels against the one autobiography that he himself has singled out as being worthy of commendation imply a sorry prognosis for this genre in Jewish literature. The situation, however, is not beyond redemption; for, in the Wnal paragraph of ‘Devarim ’ahadim ’al devar hatoladah veha’autobiograWah’, Berdichevsky declares his intention of writing his own autobiography: I have decided to rectify these flaws in the autobiography I plan to write. I shall present the readers with life as it is, in all of its variety, not neglecting to include a depiction of all those friends who played an important role in my life. With a Wne eye for detail, I shall describe each period of my life, all within the context of the history of the era, the intellectual climate within which we lived. Nor shall I hesitate to reveal my innermost thoughts—I shall present them exactly as they were . . . 121

Berdichevsky’s criteria for the evaluation of autobiography are, at this stage, as may be gleaned from the above citations, thoroughly Rousseauian. But it is unclear whether Rousseau’s Confessions are the ultimate or the proximate source for Berdichevsky’s deWnition of and stipulations for the autobiographical genre as expressed in this 1889 essay. The emphasis upon absolute sincerity does not, in itself, necessarily point to Wrst-hand acquaintance with Rousseau; Maimon, Luzzatto, Letteris and Lilienblum all follow Rousseau in extolling sincerity as the principal virtue of the autobiographer—indeed, the sole qualiWcation for the writing of an autobiography. One aspect in particular, however, of Berdichevsky’s essay on autobiography does seem to point to more than a second-hand acquaintance with Rousseau’s Confessions: the singular emphasis that he places upon the attribute of totality, all-inclusiveness, as a sine qua non of a successful autobiography:

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Truth to tell, the majority of autobiographers are disingenuous in their methods: Of unfamiliar and atypical events, they inform us aplenty, but about the quotidian and mundane, they are silent. Certain essential links in the chain are thus lacking. Only those events that played some part in their intellectual development do they deem worthy of inclusion . . . as if ordinary, day-to-day events were quite irrelevant. In truth, however, every single event that befalls a man, whatever its nature, holds within it a store of information . . . For an autobiography to be authentic, it is incumbent upon the author to give an account of each and every event in his life—everything—the good with the bad, the petty with the momentous . . . In an autobiography, we should see the whole man, in all the stages of his life . . . And only then, when every stage of a man’s life, every incident that befell him, with no exception, are within our purview; only then may we form a picture of the whole man, in all of his aspects, in all the subtle nuances of his emotional and intellectual life.122

Of Jewish autobiographies prior to Berdichevsky—prior, at least, to his 1889 article—Maimon and Luzzatto, especially, do follow Rousseau in drawing attention to the signiWcance of seemingly petty incidents in the life-history. The inclusion of such incidents in their autobiographies does, however, appear to be conditional upon the light these shed upon the authors’ intellectual development; just the type of tendentious selectiveness, that is, that Berdichevsky, in his essay, deplores is here in force.123 Neither Maimon nor Luzzatto, then, reveals himself quite so ‘absolutely’ to the public as Rousseau claims he does and as Berdichevsky deems it appropriate for an autobiographer to do. Dan Almagor, in his review of ‘Devarim ’ahadim’, highlights Berdichevsky’s stress upon totality as a necessary aspect of autobiography; he points to the striking frequency with which the word Kol (Hebrew, ‘all’) recurs in this essay.124 Some comparison of Berdichevsky’s formulations in ‘Devarim ’ahadim’ with those of Rousseau, on the subject of autobiographical all-inclusiveness in the Confessions, is enlightening: Avant que d’aller plus loin, je dois au lecteur mon excuse ou ma justiWcation, tant sur les menus détails où je viens d’entrer que sur ceux où j’entrerai dans la suite, et qui n’ont rien d’intéressant à ses yeux. Dans l’entreprise que j’ai faite de me montrer tout entier au public, il faut que rien de moi ne lui reste obscure ou caché; il faut

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que je me tienne incessament sous ses yeux; qu’il me suive dans tous les égarements de mon coeur, dans tous les récoins de ma vie; qu’il ne me perde pas de vue un seul instant, de peur que, trouvant dans mon récit la moindre lacune, le moindre vide, et se demandant: ‘Qu’a-t-il fait durant ce temps-là?’ il ne m’accuse de n’avoir pas voulu tout dire.125

And: Je voudrais pouvoir en quelque façon rendre mon âme transparent aux yeux de lecteur, et pour cela je cherche à la lui montrer sous tous les points de vue, à l’éclairer par tous les jours. . . . En lui détaillant avec simplicité tout ce qui m’est arrive, tout ce que j’ai fait, tout ce que j’ai pensé, tout ce que j’ai senti, je ne puis l’induire en erreur, à moins que je ne le veuille. . . . Or, il ne suYt pas pour cette Wn que mes récits soient Wdèles, il faut aussi qu’ils soient exacts. Ce n’est pas à moi de juger de l’importance des faits, je les dois tous dire, et lui laisser le soin de choisir.126

I have cited these passages in French in order to convey the cadence of the original, especially the manner in which the anaphoric repetition of the word ‘tout’, together with the accrual of paraphrastic variations upon the theme, lends the argument its rhetorical force. Berdichevsky’s Hebrew essay rings with very much the same cadence, achieved by similar technique, notably the employment of anaphora, in order to lend rhetorical force to very much the same argument. Indeed, a comparison of Rousseau’s with Berdichevsky’s formulations on the totality of self-exposure that it is the reader’s right to demand of an autobiographer does yield the most striking aYnities—more striking, I believe, than those to be derived from a comparison of ‘Devarim ’ahadim’ with the preambles and asides of any Jewish autobiographer with whose work, in 1889, he would have been acquainted. It is as if Berdichevsky here goes over the heads of these autobiographers, revealing their deWciencies by appealing to the example of their intellectual forebear and the progenitor of the genre. Rousseau, it is true, is nowhere mentioned in this essay—but then neither is anyone else and the essay itself is signed pseudonymously.127 We do know, however, that at around the time Berdichevsky wrote this essay, he was immersing himself intensely in the writings of Rousseau, as he recalled in his diary for this

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period.128 The extent of Berdichevsky’s mastery of European languages by 1889 is unclear: in a letter of August 1889, he had expressed a desire to learn spoken French129—a language much coveted, it should be noted, by the nineteenth-century Russian intelligent—but I know of no evidence of his having acquired a reading knowledge of this language then or later.130 If he had read the Confessions while he was in Russia—and Rousseau was immensely influential in non-Jewish intellectual circles in Russia from the 1860s on131—it would most likely have been in German translation.132 Berdichevsky’s ‘Devarim ’ahadim ’al devar hatoladah veha’autobiograWah’ Wrst appeared in December 1889. On the fourth of April of the following year, there appeared in the same periodical, Ha’ivri (or, as it was titled occasionally, ’Ivri ’anokhi), and undersigned by the same pseudonym, Yabam, the story ‘Gershayim’ that has been mentioned above. This story is, as had been Berdichevsky’s previous ‘Hetsits venifga’’ which appeared a year previously in Hamelits, a thinly disguised Wctional account of the events surrounding Berdichevsky’s Wrst divorce. ‘Gershayim’, like ‘Hetsits venifga’’ is recounted throughout in the third person, but the self-referential element is, in this story, even more apparent than it had been in ‘Hetsits venifga’’. The chief protagonist of the story, a rabbi’s son, is, as a comparison of the events recounted in the story with the biographical data available us on this period of Berdichevsky’s life demonstrates, clearly to be identiWed with the author.133 The name given the protagonist, ‘Mikha’el’, Berdichevsky’s Wrst name, makes the connection clear, as does that given the father-in-law in ‘Gershayim’, Lavan ha’arami; Lavan in Hebrew means ‘white’, in Yiddish Vays, and Weiss was the surname of Berdichevsky’s Wrst father-in-law.134 In order to enhance the verisimilitude of the narrative, Berdichevsky subtitles ‘Gershayim’, ‘Sippur ma’aseh shehayah’ (A Tale of an Event That Occurred);135 ‘Hetsits venifga’’ had, by comparison, been subtitled ‘Me’ein sippur shehayah’ (Like a Story That Occurred).136 And when describing one incident—when Mikha’el’s stepmother’s two daughters by a previous marriage are simultaneously stricken by madness—Berdichevsky sees Wt to append a footnote: ‘As did, in fact, occur.’137 At the end of the twelfth chapter of ‘Gershayim’, which appeared in Ha’ivri of the thirteenth of June 1890, Berdichevsky promises a sequel:

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‘Where did he go? Where was he headed? This will be revealed in the following chapters.’138 But ‘Gershayim’ was never to be completed, possibly due to the fact that Werber’s Ha’ivri folded up a fortnight after the appearance of the twelfth chapter of the story. Berdichevsky, it appears, never returned to the story and, when he came to compile and revise his early writings for the Shtibel edition of his collected works in Berlin in 1920, he did not deem ‘Gershayim’ Wt for inclusion. Following so close, however, upon the heels of ‘Devarim ’ahadim ’al devar hatoladah veha’autobiograWah’, the question arises: Did Berdichevsky intend ‘Gershayim’ to be the autobiography whose imminent composition he had so boldly announced, four months previous, on the pages of the same journal? Dan Miron and Dan Almagor consider this likely; they see in ‘Gershayim’ the Wrst of Berdichevsky’s many stalled attempts at writing the autobiography to which he aspired.139 Certainly, in terms of content, if not of form, ‘Gershayim’ does stand in the direct line of post-Rousseauian Jewish autobiography; the text bears especially close aYnities with Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer and Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim. The claim, however, as Wrst advanced by Miron, that ‘Gershayim’ is the Wrst episode of the autobiography as promised by Berdichevsky in 1889 is diYcult to substantiate. Berdichevsky, as is abundantly clear from the above citations, promised, in his 1889 essay, to write an autobiography that would be accurate, but above all comprehensive, including an account of everything that happened to him at every period of his life. But the protagonist of ‘Gershayim’ has already reached puberty by the beginning of the narrative. Berdichevsky’s adoption of the pose of the all-seeing narrator who recounts and comments upon the events that befall the autobiographical protagonist, Mikhael, is also problematic. The presence of such an all-seeing narrator who stands between the author and his autobiographical protagonist would appear to contravene the ingenuousness and lack of artiWce that Berdichevsky demands of the autobiographer in ‘Devarim ’ahadim’. Stylistically speaking, Berdichevsky is closer, in this respect, to the wide-ranging social novel of the Haskalah period, notably Reuben Braudes’s Hadat vehahayyim, a novel based upon the early stages of Lilienblum’s career, than he is to autobiography.140 Berdichevsky’s tactical retreat behind the persona of the all-seeing narrator, his substitution of the Wrst person for the third—while none-

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theless retaining his own name—his exclusion of a depiction of the years of childhood which would identify ‘Mikhael the Yahsan’ rather too closely with the Bar-bey-rav from Dubova, may, perhaps, be explained as an autobiographical failure of nerve. If, that is, ‘Gershayim’ is, indeed, related to ‘Devarim ’ahadim’, it would appear that Berdichevsky, upon embarking upon the project whose successful outcome he had so conWdently predicted in the winter of 1889, has second thoughts. On the one hand, it appears, Berdichevsky is motivated by a strong compulsion to confess, inspired in part, no doubt, by his reading of Maimon, Guenzberg, Lilienblum—possibly Rousseau—but also by the very real suVering and mental anguish that he as a child and a very young man had already experienced. On the other hand, he is held back by a degree of reticence; more than this, he is probably fearful of the recriminations that may fall upon his head should this story, in which several members of his family—notably his father-inlaw and his stepmother—are described in decidedly unflattering terms, fall into the wrong hands.141 The obstacles here encountered by Berdichevsky in his quest for autobiographical self-expression may also be accounted for in terms of the distance/relation paradox, as discussed above: Berdichevsky has, in 1889, not established suYcient distance for him to enter into an autobiographical relation with the events he describes, nor, indeed, as a corollary to this, is he yet suYciently versed in Shirah/Ars Poetica so to do. Perhaps the employment of the third person is a deliberate means of establishing distance from what is too close. It is thus that Berdichevsky arrives at a provisional and compromise solution to his dilemma by retaining the form of the classic Haskalah novel, while Wlling it with barely disguised autobiographical content, the non-Wctionality of which he is at pains to impress. Throughout the 1890s, Berdichevsky continued to experiment in his search for an autobiographical voice. This decade, from c. 1889 to 1899, has represented, until the appearance of Avner Holtzman’s works, which have utterly changed the face of Berdichevsky studies, an interesting and little-studied period in Berdichevsky’s career. Berdichevsky himself, it seems, preferred to pass over this period in silence; he chose to exclude all but a fraction of his earliest writings from his collected works.142 The almost simultaneous appearance of Berdichevsky’s Wrst nine books, albeit short books, between 1899 and 1900 also

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had the eVect of putting the decade that preceded this annus mirabilis into the shade. Yet it is in this decade that many of the most influential of Berdichevsky’s autobiographical stories must have been conceived, if not written; it is highly unlikely that Berdichevsky could have written so many stories, two of novella length—not to mention the many essays that appeared in these volumes for the Wrst time—within the space of one year.143 The great majority of Berdichevsky’s writings published prior to 1899 were, however, essays.144 With the premature curtailment of ‘Gershayim’, Berdichevsky now seems to Wnd in the essay a more comfortable medium for autobiographical self-exploration, albeit in a manner far removed from the measured, circumambulatory self-perusal of the father of the genre, Montaigne. Perhaps he felt that ‘Gershayim’, a story borne of conflicting impulses, was unsatisfactory, both as Wction and as autobiography, and that the encasement of raw autobiographical material within the framework—fairly clumsily contrived—of a thirdperson narrative exacerbated rather than resolved the tension between the compulsion to confess and the fear of self-exposure. Autobiographical elements do Wgure in some of Berdichevsky’s earliest essays, as the title to one of these generically hybrid pieces, ‘Fragmented Sections from an Anonymous Book of Memoirs’ (1888), suggests.145 But only in the following decade (1889–99) do we witness the systematic displacement of the autobiographical, self-revelatory urge from the belletristic to the publicistic sphere in Berdichevsky’s writings. In the preface to his Wrst collection of essays, ’Al ’em haderekh, Berdichevsky writes: ‘My essays are no more than the chain of my thoughts and questions from the day I began to form my own opinions independent of those of others; I fear to say that they are little more than my autobiography.’146 And in the 1920 preface to the second volume of the Shtibel edition of his collected essays, entitled Baderekh, Berdichevsky writes that the ‘scholarly and philosophical matters’ with which he deals in these essays, written for the most part ‘in my youth’, are ‘inextricably bound up with my own spiritual needs: I projected subjective concerns onto objective matters. . . . I sought a disguise and a justiWcation for the dreams of an individual within a philosophical and scholarly context’.147 This self-avowed projection of ‘subjective concerns onto objective matters’ is markedly apparent in Berdichevsky’s most important essay

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of this period—his longest work to date and the Wrst to appear as a separate volume—Reshut hayahid be’ad harabim, which Wrst appeared in 1892.148 This essay, well characterized by Shalom Spiegel as ‘an immature, confused, ill-written pamphlet full of chaotic thoughts and leaps from one idea to another’,149 is typical of the Berdichevsky ‘essay’ of this period, both in its impressionistic formlessness and in the passion with which Berdichevsky identiWes with his cause; and both the passion and the identiWcation make of Reshut hayahid an important autobiographical document. The essay is framed by two openly autobiographical sketches, neither of which appears to have any but the most forced and tenuous bearing upon the matters discussed in the body of the text. Opening with Berdichevsky’s memories of his Heder years and of the deep impression made upon him by the Talmudic ’Aggadot,150 the essay closes with a brief and poignant description of the author’s ‘most bitter memory’, that of the day on which he left his homeland, Russia.151 If one thread runs through this strange, hysterical essay, written in a curious, heavily Aramaicized Hebrew, it is the protest of the individual in the face of the crushing demands of the collective.152 Many of Berdichevsky’s pronouncements in Reshut hayahid on the subject of the individual vis-à-vis the collective, have as strikingly a Rousseauian ring about them as do his comments on autobiography in ‘Devarim ’ahadim’. But in Reshut hayahid, the Rousseauian element is infused by an even stronger Nietzschean component absent from his earlier essay. Berdichevsky, by 1892, had studied philosophy for a year at Breslau.153 He had also befriended David Frishmann, the most ardent ‘westernizer’ of Hebrew literature and the Wrst to translate Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra into Hebrew,154 whom Yeshurun Keshet, Berdichevsky’s biographer, characterizes as a ‘nihilistic dandy’.155 Berdichevsky’s exposure to Nietzsche appears to have fanned the embers of his discontent with modern Hebrew literature that may already be discerned in ‘Devarim ’ahadim’ and of which there are intimations in his articles written prior to 1892.156 The acquaintance with Nietzsche and Frishmann seems also to have added a new dimension to his understanding of autobiography. In his 1889 essay, as has been seen, Berdichevsky, following Rousseau, demands sincerity and all-inclusiveness of the autobiographer. Now he demands, above all, ‘life’ and the unfettered expression of extreme individualism:

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Literature is life and life is boundless. . . . Life infuses everything. . . . Man is an individual, a world in his own right. Society surrounds him and within society he matures, but the core of his being is his individuality. This being the case, literature should reflect his self, his individuality, and only incidentally his typicality. Our literature, on the other hand, concerns itself only with the typical. . . . Our literature devoted all its attention to the general, the external aspect, not to the individual, his inner being, his quest for wholeness. Learning, wisdom, history and nationalism, these all have their place, but man, the individual in his own right, has been neglected.157

It is these Nietzschean equalities—‘life’ and an untrammeled egoism, which Berdichevsky now commends in Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim and in the works of Ludwig Boerne, of whom he writes with all the intoxication of a neophyte: ‘This is his greatness. He did not draw his inspiration from dry books or abstract ideas. He drew from the book of life—naked life; he was a living protest against lies and deceit, against all that is rotten in life.’158 Berdichevsky’s own stance in Reshut hayahid, in contrast to the humble posture that he aVects in his 1889 essay in which he refers to himself as a ‘thoroughly ordinary man’, who has ‘contributed absolutely nothing to secular or religious learning’,159 is now arrogant and aggressive. He hurls abuse at any and every form of Apollonian restraint that the Jewish collective may impose upon the individual, including Zionism: ‘If anyone comes to me and says, “I am a nationalist and a genuine lover of Zion,” I shall spit in his face, should he dare to look me straight in the eye.’160 Berdichevsky’s flaws as an essayist—and, indeed as a thinker—are surely writ large in Reshut hayahid; the essay provoked a blistering critique from Sholem Aleichem shortly after its publication.161 But Reshut hayahid is a thoroughly original piece and—albeit stridently—authentic; the essay marks an important milestone in Berdichevsky’s thought, of considerable implication, moreover, for his autobiographical quest. The heady combination of Rousseau and Nietzsche, as witnessed in this essay for the Wrst time, lends an added dynamism to Berdichevsky’s quest of his own autobiographical voice that will, later, lead him to a ransacking of pre-modern Jewish literature, not so much for an all-inclusive autobiography as for the voice of the individual—wherever, whenever, and however expressed. The essay also marks Berdichevsky’s

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most extensive exploration, to date, of a medium other than that of the short story—such as ‘Hetsits venifga’’ and ‘Gershayim’—for autobiographical self-expression. From now on, almost everything that Berdichevsky was to write, whether in the belletristic or the publicistic sphere, was to be characterized by a strong, indeed overriding, autobiographical element. In the same volume of ’Otsar hasifrut that contains Reshut hayahid, there appeared Berdichevsky’s series of childhood recollections, ‘Zikhronot yossi ze’ira’’ (Memoirs of Little Yossi—or Yossele), by which name, as noted above, Berdichevsky was known in his home town. There is a fragmented quality about these ‘memoirs’, which consist of three short sketches, each of which relates a diVerent childhood experience. A measure of narrative continuity is, however, assured these texts as they appear originally in ’Otsar hasifrut, by consecutive numbering and bridging sentences, the last sketch in the cycle ‘Mitato shel tsaddiq’, a recasting of a Hasidic story, being linked thematically to the previous ‘ ’Ukhmata’ vehivrata’’.162 Berdichevsky later imparted a more eVective unity to these texts when he revised them for their Wrst appearance in book form in 1900. Here he employs the device of ending each sketch with three dots, the bridging sentences giving a greater sense of chronological progression in the life of the child-protagonist; ‘Mitato shel tsaddiq’ is replaced by the more obviously consonant ‘Pat lehem’ and a further sketch, ‘Hitgallut’, is added to the cycle.163 Berdichevsky appears to be writing these memoirs with Jewish autobiographical precedent in mind. Thus, in one of these sketches, quite probably written at the same time but only published later, ‘Pat lehem’, Berdichevsky relates how he cursed his stepmother when she took a cup of hot, sweet tea from him; this is a reworking of a similar incident recounted in M. A. Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer,164 itself based upon an episode in Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte.165 It is clear that Berdichevsky attached a special signiWcance to these ‘Memoirs of Little Yossi’; two of these sketches, ‘Shebikhtav veshebe’al peh’ and ‘’Ukhmata vehivrata’’, were the only two belletristic works published in the Wrst six years of his writing career (1886–96) that he saw Wt to include in the Wnal edition of his collected works. It is quite possible that Berdichevsky intended these fragmentary recollections of childhood to form the Wrst chapters—or the Wrst chapter—of the all-inclusive

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autobiography as promised in his 1889 essay. Thus, when Berdichevsky came to revise his works for the Shtibel edition in 1920, he formed a sort of composite autobiographical prelude by combining these two sketches with a number of other childhood reminiscences of approximately contemporaneous provenance, entitling the whole Me’arWllei hano’ar.166 It is equally possible that Berdichevsky intended these sketches to be an example of the kind of Hebrew literature that he demands in Reshut hayahid: a literature reflective of the ‘self ’, ‘inner being’, and ‘life’. For Nietzschean tendencies in modern Hebrew literature may, as Baruch Kurzweil has argued, often disguise themselves as a fascination with the world of childhood.167 The child is less encased in the veneer of civilization than is the adult, less inhibited by Apollonian, or super-ego restraints, closer to ‘life’. We deal here possibly with a confluence of influences: Rousseau, however mediated, fostered within Berdichevsky an already innate disposition to autobiographical self-expression, the most immediate result of which was the semi-Wctional account of the adolescent years, ‘Gershayim’; the exposure to Nietzsche may have been in part instrumental in leading him to a reconsideration of that period of his life to which he had thus far devoted lesser attention—childhood—which he now depicts in Rousseauian terms. The precise ratio of intellectual influences at play upon Berdichevsky is, in this period, diYcult to determine; he was now immersing himself in European thought with all the enthusiasm of a tyro, as witnessed by ‘Reshut hayahid’ and ‘’Al shulhan hasifrut’, which also appeared in the 1892 volume of ’Otsar hasifrut.168 Be this as it may, ‘Zikhronot yossi ze’ira’’ marks an important stage in the development of Berdichevsky’s autobiographical vision. The evocation of the lost mother in these sketches, the depiction of her death, the arrival of the stepmother to the household who begrudges the children of the previous marriage, represent Berdichevsky’s most direct and aVecting confrontation to date with these, the most painful memories of his childhood experience. The ‘Memoirs of Little Yossi’ are also an important text in the history of Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe. For here we have, arguably, the Wrst depiction of childhood in Hebrew literature, with the one possible exception of Aizik Meir Dik’s Mahazeh mul mahazeh,169 in which both the didactic element that mars the au-

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tobiographies of M. A. Guenzberg and Shmuel Y. Fin,170 and the mawkish sentimentality that stamps Zalman Epstein’s Hayaldut171 so markedly with the projections of an adult mind far removed from the world of the child that is supposedly invoked, are quite absent. Berdichevsky succeeds, in ‘Zikhronot yossi ze’ira’’ in conveying an impression of the world as seen through the eyes of the child with no apparent didactic or ideological subterfuge. In this respect, he paves the way for the autobiographical novellas of Feierberg that are cast in the form of childhood reminiscences, most notably Ba’erev.172 And Feierberg’s stories, written at the turn of the century, exercised a profound influence upon Jewish autobiographical writing from Brenner to Eliezer Shteinman.173 For the remainder of the last decade of the nineteenth century, Berdichevsky continued his search for an autobiographical voice. At some stage in the middle of this decade, he began to request friends with whom he had corresponded to return the letters he had sent them so that he could rework the incidents recorded therein into his autobiographical narratives.174 The major autobiography, as promised in the 1889 article, failed, however, to materialize. Rather than build upon the basis for such an autobiography as laid by the ‘Memoirs of Little Yossi’, Berdichevsky preferred, it seems, to Wght shy of the task, choosing, for the time being, to disseminate autobiographical fragments throughout his publicistic work.175 ‘Little Yossi’s Memoirs’ remain, somehow displaced—orphaned, as it were—and, notwithstanding their later inclusion in the section Me’arWllei hano’ar that precede, in the Collected Works, Berdichevsky’s autobiographical sketches and novellas that focus upon late adolescence and early adulthood, they are destined never to Wnd their way into a full-length autobiography. Already, then, in the 1890s, may be discerned that tendency toward the fragmented dispersal of autobiographical material—rather as scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle—that remains, as shall be seen, so characteristic of Berdichevsky’s writings. Toward the end of the century, however, there are signs that Berdichevsky despaired of any future for Hebrew literature. His 1897 essay, ‘Tsorekh viykholet besifrutenu hayafah’,176 an essay which made a lasting impression on the eighteen-year-old Brenner,177 calls, as does Reshut hayahid, for a greater degree of introspection in Hebrew literature: Literature, Berdichevsky maintains in this essay, must penetrate, rather

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than represent, the perceptual encrustations that render day-to-day existence manageable, but banal, in order to reveal the ‘hidden world’ whose source is the individual psyche.178 But in the closing paragraphs of this essay, Berdichevsky appears none too sanguine about the possibility of his demands being met.179 This pessimism is strange, as Berdichevsky must now have been in the midst of writing the stories and many of the essays, all to be published in 1899–1900, with which he Wrst made his name as one of the most signiWcant Hebrew writers of his generation. The pessimism, the disgruntled tone which now may be heard in his essays is in some contrast with the brash self-conWdence of ‘Devarim ’ahadim’ and Reshut hayahid and may, in part, have been occasioned by Berdichevsky’s frustration at his failure to achieve, in Hebrew, his Wrst declared literary aim: the writing of a full-length autobiography.180 Berdichevsky may also have felt inhibited in employing Hebrew as a medium for exploration of the self by the strait-laced presence of Ahad Ha’am, who by the mid-1890s had become the accepted arbiter of good taste in Hebrew literature and whom Berdichevsky opposed, but respected.181 The most immediate result of Berdichevsky’s disenchantment with Hebrew literature was his turning to German as his language of literary expression—a language at which he had Wrst tried his hand when writing his doctoral thesis, Über den Zusammenhang zwischen Ethik und Aesthetik, completed in 1896 and Wrst published in 1897.182 That Berdichevsky had still not despaired of the possibility of writing an autobiography, and that the shift to German at this stage may indeed have some connection with his failure to realize this project in Hebrew, is evidenced by the fact that, at the time he turned to German, he laid the blueprint for what his wife, Rachel Bin Gorion, terms ‘a major confessional novel’.183 The details of this autobiographical project remained in obscurity until Avner Holtzman’s meticulous reconstruction of the episode, which I draw upon and précis in the following account. From Holtzman’s account it is clear that this was Berdichevsky’s most concerted and ambitious attempt to realize the all-inclusive autobiography he had promised to deliver in ‘Devarim ’ahadim ’al hatoladah veha’autobiograWah’. The Wrst we hear of this project is in Berdichevsky’s letters to Mordechai Ehrenpreis in the summer and fall of 1896. From the

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onset, it appears that Berdichevsky was unsure of the nature and form that this autobiographical undertaking would assume. In the Wrst letter to Ehrenpreis in which the topic is broached, he speaks of ‘a large story in their language, approximating (Ke’ein) my book of memoirs in which I shall describe our new world and our new “Israel”’.184 A month later, in September 1896, he informs Ehrenpreis that as soon as the opportunity presents itself, he will begin ‘his book of memoirs’, about which he has ‘already thought about a good deal’.185 From the very beginning Berdichevsky encountered obstacles—both linguistic and psychological—with this ‘book of memoirs’; its inception was stalled for a further two years. He writes to Ehrenpreis that he plans, in the summer of 1898, to devote himself to improving his mastery of the German language and beginning to collect documentary material for the work he now refers to as ‘my large novel’. In the spring of 1898, he sketches the blueprint for this work to Ehrenpreis, which he now deWnes as a ‘large novel in a non-Jewish language (Lo’azi) in four books”: A cultural and spiritual novel in the full sense of the word. In the Wrst book, I shall describe the old ghetto, Jewish life in its entirety in both the material and spiritual aspect. The life of that Jewish generation, the ancestors of the hero of the story. The birth of the hero, his religious education and the Wrst inner stirrings of his soul, until the age of ten—In the second book from the age of eight onwards, the Wrst stirrings of the heart, study, inspiration, et cetera, until the age of Wfteen. In the third book from the age of Wfteen to twenty-Wve. Ten years of romance and enlightenment, the battle of religion and life. Coarse assimilation and the return to work in the midst of his people. Primitive nationalism. In the fourth book the time of emigration, foreign cultures, sociological, historical and philosophical studies, literature, poetry, transvaluation of values and inner conflict. The quest for synthesis of the Orient and the Occident and the creation of a national culture. Transvaluation of values. I have everything ready and perfected and now it is only up to me to write and write, to gather and gather. Though the event that will wrap the novel up at its conclusion is still not clear to me.186

In the summer of 1898, supplied with a publisher’s advance from the Fischer Verlag—most likely the Wrst that he had ever received—Berdichevsky retreated Wrst to Buckow and then to Weimar to set about this

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War and Peace of an autobiographical novel. Never had he enjoyed such tranquility and relative ease in which to pursue writing and writing alone. In order to ease himself into the commencement of the ‘large novel’ he set about translating his recently completed novella Me’ever lanahar—a work whose autobiographical nucleus is the author’s Wrst divorce—presumably for inclusion in the second book of the major German work. He expanded the narrative considerably, and, in the German translation, decided to switch the narrative pointof-view from Wrst to third person.187 Meanwhile, he restructured the blueprint of the work into ‘four large novels’ under diVerent titles than those of the originally projected work; the problem of closure for these four still haunted him in particular—‘? The question of all questions. What is the conclusion for all these unfortunates?’188 He is now referring to the work as a ‘social novel’.189 A few months later, he altered the entire structure of the projected work once more. From all of these vacillations, deferrals, shifts in orientation, it is evident that Berdichevsky was floundering. Returning from Weimar to Berlin in December of 1898, he felt that all he had written in Weimar for the childhood section needed reworking. In June of 1899 he resumed the project, switching titles once again. The end result of Berdichevsky’s quest for synthesis of self and of ‘Orient and Occident’ was a débâcle: Fischer rejected the manuscript submitted by Berdichevsky, which was subsequently lost.190 Berdichevsky’s infelicitous German appears to have been a major factor in the book’s rejection.191 It also should be remembered that this was the Wrst time that Berdichevsky had embarked on anything of this length. But there were also factors more subterranean and complex impeding the realization of this work. That Berdichevsky felt that the place most conducive to the writing of this autobiographical novel, now entitled The Renegade, was Weimar, whence he withdrew with this purpose in mind, for several months at the end of 1898, tells us not a little about the thinking behind this grandiose and ultimately scuppered autobiographical bid for recognition as a German writer.192 Berdichevsky’s choice of Weimar is, of course, of no little symbolic signiWcance. Weimar had, since Goethe established residence there in 1775, become a place of pilgrimage for romantics; Franz Liszt actually lived there from 1848 to 1880.193 By 1898, the year of Berdichevsky’s sojourn there, this small town had

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again become a place of pilgrimage—this time as the home town of the ailing, insane Nietzsche. When Berdichevsky went to Weimar, he visited Nietzsche’s house several times, where he was received, not by the philosopher himself, who was kept out of sight, but by his sister.194 One of Berdichevsky’s Wrst ports-of-call at Weimar, however—before he had even found lodgings there—was Goethe’s Gartenhaus, of which he sent a postcard to David Pinsky on the fourth of October.195 And, in the present context, it is the Goethean and not the Nietzschean association with Weimar that is of primary signiWcance; indeed, given the coincidence of Berdichevsky’s speciWcally autobiographical mission and his relocation to Weimar, I consider it more likely to be the aura of the author of Dichtung und Wahrheit that now draws Berdichevsky to this town than the terminally ill, half-crazed Nietzsche. Berdichevsky’s choice of Weimar at this juncture is, I believe, indicative of a gradual refocussing of perspective that is leading Berdichevsky increasingly away from Rousseau toward Goethe, as the paragon of autobiographical truth. Yeshurun Keshet, Berdichevsky’s biographer, has, at all events, scant grounds for his contention, in discussing Berdichevsky’s Weimar interlude, that ‘we do not know whether the world of Goethe exercised any influence upon Berdichevsky, now or at any other time. It is well-nigh certain, however, that Goethe’s Hellenistic spirit, free from any Judaeo-Christian moral restraints, was quite alien to Berdichevsky’.196 While it would be unfair not to admit to biographers the failings of omission and commission to which many, if not most, autobiographers are prone, this really does amount to pious obfuscation and tells us a good deal more about the predispositions of Keshet than about those of his subject. For it is precisely those ‘Hellenistic’ or ‘Daemonic’ qualities, so distasteful to Keshet, which would have drawn Berdichevsky to Goethe, just as they drew him to Nietzsche. In one of the letters he wrote during his seventy-day sojourn in Weimar, Bercichevsky writes with relief: ‘The prevailing spirit here is really that of paganism, and there is not even a hint of the spirit of Mount Sinai.’197 Fishel Lachover recalls a conversation, in the last year of Berdichevsky’s life, while he was in the midst of writing Miriam, in which the latter remarked: ‘Insofar as I can still read books at all, I read Plutarch, and, as for modern literature, only Goethe and of Goethe only Dichtung und Wahrheit.’198 Traces of Dichtung und Wahrheit, as of

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Goethe’s other works, especially the biblical studies, themselves adumbrated in Dichtung und Wahrheit,199 may be discerned in Berdichevsky’s writings from the period of his stay in Weimar onwards. The influence of Goethe’s autobiography is especially noticeable in Berdichevsky’s many autobiographical accounts of a Wrst, frustrated love, which have been mentioned above in connection with ‘A velt mit veltelakh’; these bear close aYnities with the ‘Gretchen’ episode and Goethe’s depiction of his relationship with his sister in books V and VI of Dichtung und Wahrheit.200 It was, no doubt, Goethe’s autobiography, also, that led Berdichevsky to the Jugendsroman of Gottfried Keller, Green Henry, a work which he read in 1898, and which left a profound impression upon him.201 The influence of Dichtung und Wahrheit upon Berdichevsky is, indeed, pervasive, irreducible to incidental parallelism; the overall design of the work, the weaving of a mythical, ‘poetic’ dimension into the autobiographical narrative provided Berdichevsky with compelling alternative to the direct confessional style he adopts in his earlier autobiographical pieces, thus laying the basis for the recasting of autobiographical material within a legendary context, of which we are given some inkling in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’. And Berdichevsky, who wrote in his diary that ‘The greatest moment in the life of a man is when reality becomes for him Wction’,202 continued, I think, to aspire toward the writing of a Jewish Dichtung und Wahrheit—an autobiography, that is, in which the Jewish legacy of Midrash and legend play the same role as does the world of Hellenistic myth in Goethe’s autobiography, in which the self is woven of an ‘aggadic’ Wligree. Dichtung und Wahrheit also provided Berdichevsky with a model for the integration of ‘individual and collective’ in an autobiographical work, the study of the self not in solipsistic isolation but in dynamic and mutual interaction with the wider socio-historical environment. It is this aspect of Goethe’s autobiography that has given rise to an influential tendency, dating from Dilthey, in the scholarship on autobiography, especially German, to view Dichtung und Wahrheit as, as Marcus puts it, ‘a step beyond Rousseau’s Romantic individualism, and his desire to embody “uniqueness” rather than “connectedness”’.203 ‘I am not one man’, Berdichevsky writes from Weimar: ‘Thousands of human beings from time immemorial live

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within me and they all demand their due.’204 Berdichevsky also appeared to aspire to Goethe’s stately, epic and ironic detachment toward his prior self-characteristic of Dichtung und Wahrheit and so very diVerent in tone to Rousseau’s Confessions. In one of the Weimar letters, Berdichevsky writes that his relationship to ‘Yosef ’, the autobiographical protagonist of the work, ‘is no closer than is my relationship with the remainder of the charaters in my poetics, this is the secret of my new poetics’.205 But the time was not yet ripe; Berdichevsky had still, as shall be seen, to undergo a series of dialectical transformations before he became close, tantalizingly close, to realizing his aspiration. The cultural distance between Luisenstrasse, where Berdichevsky found lodgings in Weimar, and Medzhibozh, Podolia, where Berdichevsky was born—birthplace also of Nachman of Bratslav and place of residence of the Ba’al shem tov—is vast. Indeed, one of the factors that conduced to the failure to realize the Weimar German confessional is that now Berdichevsky has eVectively outdistanced himself. If, as suggested above, distance is, for Berdichevsky, the essential prerequisite for the entering into an autobiographical relationship with the world of his childhood and early youth, then distance aplenty had, by 1898, become established for such a relationship to ensue. It is to be expected, then, should the distance/relation dialectic prove valid, that, at the turn of the century, with Berdichevsky, happily—albeit penuriously—ensconced in Weimar,206 the past should beckon with increasing urgency. And so it did. ‘I came here’, he writes in a letter of October, 1898: With the idea of Germanizing myself (Lehit’ashkenez) as much as was necessary for me, but behold the Hebrew prevailed within me with strong hand and outstretched arm . . . and it has been a good while since I have been so full of Jewish thoughts and Jewish emotions. In Buckow I was absolutely whole-hearted in my work, but here I am compelled to split myself and make notations for my Hebrew writings.207

Just as the Weimar confessional marked the climax of Berdichevsky’s bid for acclaim as a German writer, it also marked a high point in the tension within himself between the need to establish distance from his Eastern European past—Lehit’ashkenez kol tsorkhi—and to relate to the

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same. What could be more emblematic of this distance/relation paradox than this ‘renegade’—such was one of the projected titles for the Wrst book of the work—son of a Hasidic rebbe in the Ukraine writing his autobiography in Weimar?208 This tension, however, as attested to by the above citation, did not erupt with the sudden force of a revelation in Weimar; it was latent throughout the period in which Berdichevsky was devising, redevising, drafting, redrafting his autobiographical novel. Thus, at the time at which he was conceptualizing the ‘book of memoirs’/‘large novel’ ‘in a non-Jewish language’/‘their language’, he was in the midst of writing his next signiWcant Hebrew autobiographical statement, that later was to form the introduction to the 1899 volume Sefer hasidim, ‘Nishmat hasidim’. The Wrst reference I have found to this essay occurs in a letter of September 28, 1897, to David Frishman, in which he reports that he is working hard on his German; in the postscript of the letter, he writes: ‘In Hashiloah 4 that will be published shortly, you will Wnd a large essay by me, “Nishmat Hasidim (histakelut)”. I am sure and I hope that it will meet your approval.’209 Actually, Berdichevsky did not send this essay to Ahad Ha’am, theneditor of Hashiloah until the 16th of October, 1898; his accompanying comments stress the autobiographical investment in this ‘large essay’: ‘I enclose herein as a memento for you my “Mishnat hasidim”, which is a sort of personal confession of mine, and I would be very pleased if you would be so gracious to inform of your assessment of it.’210 Clearly Ahad Ha’am’s assessment of the piece was unfavourable; it was not published in Hashiloah, but Wrst appeared in Reuven Brainin’s Berlin periodical Mimizrah umima’arav at the beginning of 1899.211 That the essay was written sometime between 1896 and 1898 is attested to by the fact that Berdichevsky had already sent Ahad Ha’am his Sefer hasidim for publication in Hashiloah in 1896; it was rejected and Berdichevsky rewrote it, to have it rejected by Ahad Ha’am once more in that year.212 It is clear from the accompanying comments to his submission of ‘Nishmat hasidim’ to Ahad Ha’am that this is a new piece that cannot have been included in the earlier versions of Sefer hasidim, the majority of which appears to have been written, in Wrst draft at least, in the Wrst half of the Wrst decade of the 1890s.213 Berdichevsky had, by the time he wrote this essay, with a dissertation on the ‘Relationship Between Ethics and Aesthetics’ behind him,

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eaten well—to adopt the metaphor he uses in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’— from the tree of knowledge and ‘become a Goy’ insofar as he is now steeped in the Ars poetica or ‘sin’ of the Rousseauian and neo-romantic autobiographical tradition. He had, moreover—and this is unusual in the history of autobiography—not only evinced a fascination with the genre at the age of twenty-four, but, by his early thirties, tried his hand at diverse modes of autobiographical self-expression:214 the short story, the feuilleton, the essay, and the Wrst tentative steps toward the confessional novel. That Berdichevsky found none of these modes adequate for the realization of his autobiographical project, which had now been in crystallization for a decade, is attested to by the appearance, precisely at this juncture of his career, of a paean, with unmistakably autobiographical overtones, to Hasidism—a sect which he himself had satirized in his earliest autobiographical stories, ‘Hetsits venifga’’ and ‘Gershayim’, shades of this Galician heritage of anti-Hasidic satire being discernible, as noted above, in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’.215 ‘Nishmat hasidim’ is the third major publicistic article in Berdichevsky’s career, after, that is, ‘Devarim ’ahadim’ and Reshut hayahid (1892). And as ‘Devarim ’ahadim’ (1889) and ‘Reshut hayahid’ both contain hylic and inchoate prolepses of Berdichevsky’s later intellectual development so, I think, ‘Nishmat hasidim’ really lays the cornerstone for the study and compilation of pre-modern Jewish texts that will, as shall be seen, Wnally stamp Berdichevsky so irrevocably with the mark of the hermeneute. ‘Nishmat hasidim’, like ‘Reshut hayahid’, opens with reminiscences from the world of childhood, ‘from those halcyon days when I was still at one with myself and with my God and when I walked along the paths of life together with His Hasidim’.216 And the essay closes, again as does ‘Reshut hayahid’, with the melancholy, confessional voice of the older narrator who has left his homeland and ‘cut the shoots’,217 as did the archetypal Jewish heretic and favoured focus of identiWcation for Jewish autobiographers, Elisha ben Avuyah, by whose pseudonym, ’Aher, Berdichevsky was known in certain circles.218 Whereas seven years previous, though, the break with the past seemed irrevocable, with Berdichevsky, in ‘Reshut hayahid’, bidding leave of the reader, his ‘heart utterly empty’, his ‘ideals irredeemably dashed’219—in ‘Nishmat hasidim’ a ray of hope is aVorded by the possibility of a partial retreat from modernity and a tentative

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reconciliation with the Hasidic Judaism of his childhood. Now, identifying himself with the founder of the movement, the Ba’al shem tov, from whose Wrst-person account of a mystical ascent to the ‘Upper Worlds’ he has just given a lengthy citation,220 Berdichevsky writes: I, too, after all my spiritual torments and searchings, after all my experiments with alternative modes of spirituality, Jewish and nonJewish . . . my long and aimless wandering in the paths of life . . . Now I also see a light at the end of the road . . . in the rays of light beckoning me from the distance, from the days when the soul of the Hasidim was upon the earth . . . banishing the shades that separated me from my self, from my Father in heaven.221

The more percipient critics of Berdichevsky’s day were not convinced by this return to Hasidism. Joseph Klausner accused Berdichevsky of reading the ideas of Kant and Schopenhauer into Hasidism,222 and Bal-Makhshoves said that when Berdichevsky writes about the Hasidim he is really writing about himself.223 Mendel Piekarz, it should be noted, has, more recently, levelled very much the same kind of charges as were laid at Berdichevsky’s door against Arthur Green, the biographer of Nahman of Bratslav.224 Berdichevsky’s rapprochement with Jewish tradition, via Hasidism, is indeed charged with a strong emotional investment, and he does bring with him, naturally, in his reassessment of Hasidism, much of the intellectual baggage he has acquired in the ‘West’. This, in itself, surely no more invalidates Berdichevsky’s interpretation of Hasidism than it would, mutatis mutandis, the approaches of Martin Buber, Jiri Langer, Abraham Joshuah Heschel—or, indeed, Arthur Green. Of more immediate concern in the present context, however, is the nature of the intellectual expectations that Berdichevsky now brings to bear upon the Hasidic truths he believes himself to have rediscovered and the implications of this Hasidic excursus for his autobiographical quest. For Berdichevsky appears to Wnd now in Hasidism an eccentric variant of a creed that is, in its essentials, of decidedly Rousseauian provenance—his iconoclastic intellectual stance now being legitimated by a bold identiWcation with the founder of the last great religious revivalist movement of Eastern European Jewry. Thus, Berdichevsky now ascribes to Hasidism ‘a spirit of childhood innocence’,225

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a love of nature and solitude: ‘The Hasid does not Wnd his spiritual needs answered in society, but in total seclusion, there . . . far away from the bustle of life, there . . . dwelling in solitude . . . there he Wnds himself . . . There he can be himself . . . ’226; an espousal of individuality and ‘fundamental inner liberation’.227 Berdichevsky Wnds in ‘the soul of the Hasidim’ the balm that may heal the ‘split’ (Qera’), on the collective level, between a petriWed Orthodoxy and the outright assimilation of a signiWcant section of the Jewish people in Europe, and on the individual level, between the preservation of Jewish identity and subscription to universal, humanistic values.228 Berdichevsky’s ‘rediscovery’ of Hasidism, as refracted through the prism of Rousseau’s philosophy of nature and Nietzsche’s apotheosis of ‘life’, did leave its mark on his autobiographical writings that appeared in the Wrst few years of the twentieth century.229 ‘Nishmat hasidim’ itself marks a new stage in Berdichevsky’s autobiographical quest; Berdichevsky here seeks an alternative to both the Rousseauian and the Goethean autobiographical modes in an idiosyncratic weave of the personal voice with the texts of an indigenously Jewish tradition, which lays the basis for what I would term the Neo-Hasidic introspective, as exempliWed especially in the writings of Martin Buber, with whom Berdichevsky had some contact.230 Indeed, textual comparison would appear to indicate that ‘Nishmat hasidim’ served, in fact, as the prototype for Buber’s extraordinarily influential and beautiful ‘Mein Weg zum Chassidmus’, Wrst published in 1918;231 Buber, in his ‘way to Hasidism’, follows a path already beaten by Berdichevsky. The impact of this creative re-encounter with Hasidism, as described in ‘Nishmat hasidim’, upon Berdichevsky’s belletristic writings that are clearly autobiographically based is noticeable but diVuse. On the one hand, as in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, Berdichevsky interweaves motifs taken from the Hasidic Mayse into the narrative; the child protagonist in the latter story, for example, imagines that he is the ‘son of a king who came to a mountain and espied the daughter of a queen’.232 This Ben melekh/Bas malke motif occurs frequently in the Sippurei mayses of Nachman of Bratzlav—the ‘son of a king’ symbolizing Israel, the ‘daughter of a queen’, the Shekhinah or divine presence in its feminine aspect,233 although, in Berdichevsky’s story, while the content is Jewish,

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the overall design may have been suggested by ‘The New Paris: A Boy’s Legend’ in the second book of Dichtung und Wahrheit.234 But the influence of Hasidism is most marked in the mystical, pantheistic element that appears in Berdichevsky’s autobiographical writings of this period. A passage such as the following, taken from ‘Bein hapatish vehasadan’, a highly introspective document which reads at times like a series of free-associational diary entries, is typical in this respect: Revival! Let the sun shine . . . ! In my heart—peace. I have found my God and I have found my way . . . Listen to the song of the morning, listen to the world that is given to you! The God of Gods dwells in the desert; to Him let us oVer our prayers, that He may reveal Himself to us as in a vision, that we may behold the countenance of the Almighty. If the hidden secrets of love have been revealed to me, the wonder of life, if I have been granted any original ideas or words of poesy, in all I recognize the Creator and to Him will I bow down.235

At some point, however, in the middle of the Wrst decade of the twentieth century, cracks begin to appear in Berdichevsky’s relationship with Hasidism. Shmuel Werses, citing Berdichevsky’s correspondence with Shmuel A. Horodetzky, traces the Wrst signs of equivocation, on Berdichevsky’s behalf, toward Hasidism to circa 1908.236 But Berdichevsky, it appears, despaired of a synthesis of his personal voice with the individual voice that he discovered in Hasidic texts in 1899 at an earlier stage than this.237 ‘Bein hapatish vehasadan’ actually marks the high-point and the end-point of Berdichevsky’s interweaving of Hasidic stories and his idiosyncratic and subjective rendition of Hasidic accounts of religious experience within an autobiographical context. Berdichevsky, then, with the cooling of his Hasidic ardour, had reached yet another impasse in his search for a Jewish autobiographical voice. And as previously, when he had despaired, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, of realizing his autobiographical project in Hebrew, so now he Wnds the language lacking (‘sour grapes’, one is tempted to add) and turns once more to German.238 This time, however, he grapples with autobiography on two fronts: a diary written in German and begun c. 1904239 and a new plan for a major autobiographical novel covering the years of childhood and young adulthood in Russia, which he now deWnes as an ‘Ich Roman’.240 Dan Almagor

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suggests that these two projects are related, that Berdichevsky found in the diary a compensatory substitute for the ‘Ich Roman’ that failed to materialize241—just as previously, perhaps, he had found in ‘Gershayim’ and ‘Zikhronot yossi ze’ira’’ some substitute for the autobiography he failed to deliver after the 1889 ‘Devarim ’ahadim’. The chronology here, however, is problematic; whereas ‘Gershayim’ followed almost immediately upon the heels of ‘Devarim ’ahadim’, and in the same periodical, thus rendering some connection between the two highly likely, the diary was begun before Berdichevsky drafted the outline for the ‘Ich Roman’. Besides, the ‘Ich Roman’ and the diary focus upon diVerent periods in the author’s life. The diary is, altogether, an extraordinary phenomenon in the annals of diary-keeping. It was actually not written—not, at least, preserved—in Berdichevsky’s hand, but in that of his wife, Rachel, as are Berdichevsky’s later scholarly works in German: Rachel Bin-Gorion’s command of German was superior to Berdichevsky’s. Berdichevsky’s son, Immanuel Bin-Gorion, speculates that Rachel transcribed certain sections of the diary from previously completed journals or notes now no longer extant; the remainder of the diary, he believes, may well have been dictated by Berdichevsky to his wife.242 Thus in the entry for May 15, 1914, we read that ‘she who writes these lines fell oV the ladder and was conWned to her bed for a week’.243 Rachel is thus a constant, albeit spectral presence in the diary, and the diary itself attests, as Avner Holtzman has pointed out in a beautiful essay on their relationship, both to the extraordinary intimacy shared between the two, and to her dynamic involvement in Berdichevsky’s intellectual and spiritual life.244 On the day after her husband’s death, before his body had been removed from the house, Rachel Bin-Gorion took up his diary and, immediately adjacent to the last of his entries recorded by her, wrote a heartbreaking letter to her departed, with the opening words: ‘Geliebter, du bist nicht mehr.’ On the day following his funeral, she began her own diary, addressing all of her entries to her husband; this diary she maintained with regularity for the following three years, and from the entries cited in Holtzman’s essay, it appears that in visiting the diary she was also making séance-like visitations to the man to whom and to whose diary she had devoted herself for the last

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two decades.245 This is, oxymoronically, a dialogic diary. Nor is it entirely clear when Berdichevsky began this diary. A Wrst notebook appears to be missing and the second book and the Wrst part of the third are retrospective accounts, whose composition clearly post-dates the time of the occurrence of the events therein described.246 The diaryentries, and thus the diary proper, begin in the second half of the third book with an entry for the Wrst of December 1904. But such egregious circumstances surrounding what is generally taken to be the most private of documents would tend to corroborate Yeshurun Keshet’s intuitive sense that the diary, which Berdichevsky continued at irregular intervals until the year of his death, was written with half an eye to publication.247 I consider this not unlikely: Berdichevsky, though far less overweening and hard-edged a personality than his literary cohorts Bialik and Agnon, was possessed from his earliest years of an unerring and unshakable conviction of his signiWcance in modern Jewish intellectual and literary history. This most unusual ‘diary’ is, I think, best understood not with reference to the scuppered ‘Ich Roman’, but to the 1889 ‘Devarim ’ahadim’. In ‘Devarim ’ahadim’, it will be remembered, Berdichevsky lays great stress upon the totality of the autobiographical enterprise; he promises, in his forthcoming autobiography, to give a rich and detailed account of every period of his life. But it is a striking fact that Berdichevsky, in his hundreds of autobiographical stories and essays, makes virtually no mention of anything that occurred to him from the time of his Wrst arrival in Berlin, his doctorate just completed, in 1896, to his death in 1921.248 Only in his diary, it seems, does Berdichevsky go some way toward fulWlling the obligation of autobiographical allinclusiveness that he had imposed upon himself in 1889. His choice of medium for the coverage of his years in the ‘West’ may be explained by the distance/relation formula as adumbrated above; the geographical and temporal dislocation that enabled him to establish, by the mediation of memory, an autobiographical relationship with the self in its previous incarnation as Bar-bei rav in the Pale of Settlement, was here lacking. Such autobiographical relation as could be established could only come through the direct transcription of impressions, thoughts, associations, as these presented themselves in the precarious and unpredictable moment of the present, outside any larger design

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derived from the wisdom aVorded by hindsight.249 Added to this is the sense of immanent, or at least premature, mortality sensed by Berdichevsky: from the second decade of the twentieth century the most regular refrain in the diary is the account of deaths of those with whom Berdichevsky was acquainted, incidentally through neighbourhood interaction, through reading from all periods of his intellectual development, or personally.250 Diary, aside from anything else, is for obvious reasons a mode of autobiographical communication favoured by those who feel that their days are numbered—witness Marie BashkirtseV. The circumstances surrounding the inception of the second autobiographical project, the ‘Ich Roman’, are no less complex than those surrounding that of the diary. Whereas Almagor sees the diary as compensating for the ‘Ich Roman’, which was never completed, Dan Miron sees the ‘Ich Roman’ project itself as a consolatory substitution for another project that Berdichevsky framed at this time and failed to realize: a full-length novel of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, the outline of which Berdichevsky had sketched in the German diary in 1905. Berdichevsky, according to Miron, realizing that such a novel was beyond his capabilities, turned to a literary mode with which he was more familiar: thinly disguised autobiographical Wction. Miron works upon the assumption that Berdichevsky, now and later in his career, is primarily motivated not by his declared ambition to write a fulllength autobiography, but by the more covert aspiration to write a wide-ranging social novel.251 There is much evidence to suggest, however—and much of it is included in the above sections of this chapter—that Berdichevsky was playing for higher stakes than the achievement of a well-executed Bildungsroman with a female as the central protagonist; that the ‘aspiration to the novel’ is, rather, a secondary manifestation of Berdichevsky’s primary, and declared, aspiration toward the autobiography. Should this be the case, the sketched outline for the novel as found in Berdichevsky’s diary—later to form the blueprint for Miriam, which Berdichevsky began writing in 1919—admits of a very diVerent interpretation. The Wrst plan for Miriam and its subsequent shelving bears, I would argue—contra Miron—no necessary causal relation with the hatching of the ‘Ich Roman’ project several months later. There is,

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rather, a distinct possibility that in the novel Miriam, as it is initially conceived, Berdichevsky is seeking an alternative and paradoxical solution to the autobiographical dilemma that has now been plaguing him for some years. Miriam, the heroine of this projected novel, serves, in many respects, as the mirror image or Anima of the classic Berdichevskian autobiographical protagonist.252 The name itself is, in Hebrew, a near-palindrome: a mirror image, that is, of itself. The last two letters of Miriam’s name in Hebrew (Yud and Mem) are, moreover, when read backwards, Berdichevsky’s Wrst two initials. Berdichevsky, it should be noted, delighted in word-play of this type and many of his noms-de-plume are derived from various anagrammatic combinations of letters from his names; one of these, the above-mentioned Bar-bei-rav, is itself, in Hebrew, a near-palindrome.253 Miriam is female; Berdichevsky male. Miriam’s father dies when she is thirteen; Berdichevsky’s mother died when he was twelve. Miriam’s mother remarries with indecent haste after a statutory period of mourning, and so does Berdichevsky’s father. Miriam’s mother’s second husband was a widower who brought children with him from a previous marriage; Berdichevsky’s father’s second wife was a widow, also bringing children from a previous marriage. Miriam, Wnally, becomes entangled in an unhappy love aVair in Interlaken, Switzerland—the setting for Berdichevsky’s autobiographical stories, the German Daneben and the Hebrew ’Orva’ parah254—that allows of no happy outcome; Berdichevsky was likewise involved in an unhappy love aVair—possibly with a non-Jewish girl—at the University of Bern.255 True, Berdichevsky set the Miriam project aside—at least, for the time being—and the preliminary sketch for the ‘Ich Roman’ did appear only several months later. But this sequence of events provides, at the best, no more than circumstantial evidence for the validity of Miron’s thesis; documentary proof for some actual connection between the provisional setting-aside of Miriam and the taking up of the ‘Ich Roman’ project is, to the best of my knowledge, lacking and, if extant, is not cited by Miron. With respect, moreover, to Miron’s claim that the ‘Ich Roman’ project provided Berdichevsky with the path of lesser resistance when confronted by the dilemma posed him by the Miriam plan, it should be noted that the ‘Ich Roman’ project, in contrast to the Miriam blueprint, was irredeemably abandoned

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shortly after its inception. These two projects, so diVerent in character (and language), whose outlines were sketched at roughly the same time, could, from the outset, have been intended as distinct but complementary enterprises,256 each providing a curious mirror-image of the other. If the ‘Ich Roman’ project is indeed a substitute for anything, it would, I think, be for the Weimar ‘confessional novel’, begun and shelved at the turn of the century. From a diary entry of the December 24, 1904, we learn that Berdichevsky ‘set to work once again’ on his German ‘Zu Hause’, the title he gave the Wrst volume of his projected autobiographical tetralogy.257 Some connection between the Weimar project and the ‘Ich Roman’ is also rendered probable by the fact that Berdichevsky, it appears, was reading—or re-reading—Dichtung und Wahrheit at the same time as writing the Wrst draft of the Wrst three chapters of the ‘Ich Roman’. In a diary-entry from the summer of 1906, Berdichevsky quotes and takes as the starting point for his meditation of the day Goethe’s maxim taken from the introduction to Dichtung und Wahrheit: ‘It can truthfully be said that any man, had he been born a mere ten years earlier or later, might, as far as his own formation and his outward achievements are concerned, have become an entirely diVerent person.’258 Once again, it seems, Berdichevsky was searching for the secret of that alchemy of ‘poetry and truth’ by which autobiography is transformed to art, and of which the works of Goethe provided him with the paradigm.259 In both the ‘Miriam’ and the ‘Ich Roman’ projects, there is in evidence Berdichevsky’s desperate desire to somehow ‘Wt’ himself/his self into regnant generic categories of ‘their’ literature: autobiography on the model of Rousseau/Goethe; the Bildungsroman; the displacement of the autobiographical to a novel whose central protagonist is female à la Jane Eyre, Bovary, Karenina. The ‘Ich Roman’ project, however, fared little better than the Weimar confessional; Berdichevsky, having taken his autobiographical protagonist up to the Heder years, abandoned the work. And, as in 1898, so now, having abandoned one autobiographical project—possibly two, if the sketch for Miriam may be counted as such—Berdichevsky turns once again to pre-modern Jewish literature in his quest of an autobiographical voice, this time with redoubled energy. But Berdichevsky’s frustration with his work, his despair of any future both for Hebrew or Yiddish literature and for himself as a writer, seem now to be

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more acute than at the turn of the century.260 In November 1909 he informs his diary: ‘I have Wnally taken leave of Hebrew and Yiddish literature entirely; needle jabs and humiliations to the last.’261 Certainly, the failure to realize either of the major projects upon which he embarked in 1905 must have been dispiriting, especially given the poverty and loneliness of these Breslau years. Indeed, the period from c. 1904 to c. 1907, the mid-point of Berdichevsky’s career, are marked, I think, by something like a mid-life crisis. This crisis, nonetheless, proved to be creative and led to a systolic ingathering of forces that ultimately set the agenda for the remainder of Berdichevsky’s life-work. These years, which saw, inter alia, the beginning of the diary, the ‘Ich Roman’, the framing of Miriam, and, most signiWcantly, the commencement of serious scholarly study of the pre-modern Jewish literary heritage,262 mark both a crossroads and a watershed in Berdichevsky’s search for autobiographical and literary direction. It is against this background of quest and experimentation that the signiWcance of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ becomes apparent; for here we may perceive the Wrst attempt at—and prolepsis of—a synthesis of the new directions that are now crystallizing, as well as a recapitulation, in a novel format, of many of the stages thus far traversed—the Rousseauian, the Goethean, the Hasidic and so forth. At this point—nel mezzo cammin, of Berdichevsky’s literary career— a pattern begins to emerge. Berdichevsky’s autobiographical quest is marked by a series of critical junctures, each juncture acting as a catalyst for the next stage in the quest. At each juncture, the autobiographical project at hand seems to be hampered by some resistance, be this psychological, literary, or linguistic. Berdichevsky then seeks to circumvent the barrier raised by this resistance by making a thematic, linguistic, or generic shift. The further he is driven, in this quest for self, away from Jewish tradition, the more he seems to be drawn back to a re-exploration of traditional Jewish literature in search of the autobiographical voice that constantly eludes him, a kind of pendulum motion being thus established.263 Thus, in 1899, Berdichevsky Wnds his way back, via Rousseau, Goethe, and Nietzsche, to Hasidism. Realizing that the synthesis of the self, or healing of the ‘split’, which he believed himself to have found in Hasidism, cannot hold, he turns once again

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to the mainstream post-Rousseauian European autobiographical tradition; whence he returns, once again, in the Wrst decade of the twentieth century, to traditional Jewish literature, this time of pre-Hasidic provenance. Berdichevsky’s peregrinations call to mind, in this respect, one of the bons mots of Franz Kafka, writing of Freud and his followers: ‘They wanted to break with Judaism, but their hind legs were bogged down in their fathers’ Judaism and their front legs could Wnd no new ground. The resulting despair was their inspiration.’264 Berdichevsky, however, was far more steeped in the ‘fathers’ Judaism’ than was Freud or Kafka; with each step forward to modernity, the ‘West’, Berdichevsky seems to take two steps backward as he retraces his path to the Ma’asei ber’eshit of the personal and national childhood, where now he Wnds the autobiographical voice that initially drew him to Rousseau and Weimar. Berdichevsky’s wrestling with autobiography, the series of checks and countermanoeuvres which characterize his quest for self, is, perhaps, unique in Modern Hebrew literature—though some parallels may be drawn with Bialik in his struggle for the liberation of the autobiographical ‘I’, as recently described by Dan Miron.265 As egregious and undeniably quirky as Berdichevsky’s autobiographical vision may be, he is, I believe, in his subjective reappropriation of pre-modern Jewish texts, symptomatic— even paradigmatic—of the wider intellectual currents of his day that gave rise, inter alia, to the notion of an essential continuity of autobiographical self-expression throughout the ages. And now, after the abandonment of the ‘Ich Roman’, c. 1906, Berdichevsky makes his strongest bid to date for a subjective and creative reappropriation of the Jewish literary heritage, his net this time cast wider than it had been at the turn of the century. Berdichevsky’s initial response to the ‘Ich Roman’ débâcle and the indeWnite shelving of Miriam was, it appears, to turn once again to Hasidism, albeit with less fervour than that with which he had embraced the cause in 1899. Now, evidently dissatisWed with his previous treatment of the subject, he seeks to uncover the ‘soul of the Hasidim’ by historical research and assiduous textual compilation.266 This historical research, however, seems, if anything, to have put a further damper on his already cooling Hasidic ardour and, by the end of the Wrst decade of the twentieth century, he becomes increasingly aware of the full extent of the

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chasm that lies between himself and the Ba’al shem tov or Nahman of Bratslav. In 1910, he writes to Shmuel A. Horodetsky: I have lost my enthusiasm for this project . . . My compilation is not scientiWc in the true sense of the word . . . and, on the other hand, it can hardly be classiWed as literature, my own book, that is; for it is, at the end of the day, no more than a compilation. And I feel most ambivalent about exchanging the role I have cut out for myself in Hebrew literature—that is, as a writer pure and simple.267

Shortly thereafter, in a review-essay of Shivhei habesht, Berdichevsky fairly vents his spleen of the frustration and chagrin engendered by closer Wrst-hand acquaintance with Hasidic scriptures: We thought to have found here total religious liberation; here, we imagined, all is infused by a divine radiance . . . And what did we Wnd? A hide-bound religiosity, become petriWed and hackneyed through plebeian custom. And so, we conclude by closing the Shevahim, in which we placed such high hopes, with heavy heart and lingering revulsion.268

A full ‘return’ to Hasidism, then, being ruled out, Berdichevsky is now led to a Diltheyan re-encounter with the entire spectrum of premodern Jewish literature. From Hasidic texts, he now traces a bold counter-chronological trajectory to mediaeval Kabbalistic literature, whence to the Talmud and Midrashim, whence to the Bible in search of traces of pre-monotheistic Israelite paganism. Still motivated by the quest for the constantly elusive self, for the lost days of childhood, even for a reconciliation with the father—who is depicted in decidedly ambivalent terms in his turn-of-the-century autobiographical writings269—Berdichevsky now undertakes his most extensive foray into pre-modern Jewish literature, a foray that was, by and large, to distract him from autobiographical self-exploration within a belletristic context until the Wnal years of his life. It is as if he is now seeking to overcome the resistances that had doomed all his previous autobiographical projects to failure, or incompletion, by deflecting the overtly subjective confessional impulse toward more “objective” or “epic” channels of expression. Thus, in two essays that appeared within a short time of each other in 1909,

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Berdichevsky speaks, on the one hand—in the above-mentioned essay ‘’Al havidui’—of the paramount, even cosmic, signiWcance of the uninhibited confessional,270 and, on the other—in an essay entitled ‘Kibbush haruah’—of the supreme need of the ‘poet’ to ‘quell’ or ‘sublimate’ his ‘spirit’, to ‘still the storm’: Who is the hero? He who restrains his spirit.271 Who is the true poet? He who restrains the storm within, he who holds his identity, the pain of his inner being, within him and speaks of others with a quiet, still voice . . . True poetry is metamorphosis or, rather, stepping out of ourselves, our egos, to enter into the life of others—others quite unrelated to ourselves . . . Not of our own selves shall we relate and lament, not our own dreams shall we describe . . . The true artist does not create only for himself, according to his inner needs and compulsions, but rather he who steps out of himself, restrains himself.272

This clash of conflicting forces that Berdichevsky, clearly extrapolating from the personal to the universal, gives expression to in these contemporaneous formulations on ‘confession’ and ‘self-restraint’ provides yet another example of the radical Qera’ or ‘split’ in the heart of the Jewish poet/autobiographer.273 Compelled to confess, yet bound by the imperative of self-restraint—‘Kibbush haruah’—the ‘poets’’ voice, however, would be eVectively stilled. And it was, in no small part, I think, as a way out of this paradoxical impasse, that Berdichevsky turned increasingly away from Shirah, belles lettres, to the almost obsessive compilation and rendition of pre-modern Jewish texts that, from c. 1906 on, becomes his major preoccupation.274 As if to underline this change of direction that amounted, almost, to one of personal and professional identity, Berdichevsky changed his name—by law—in 1911 to Bin-Gorion, after the author of the Yossipon, a pseudepigraphic collection of legends of mediaeval Italian provenance that left a deep impression upon him as a child.275 Berdichevsky, in 1899, had heralded his discovery of the ‘soul of the Hasidim’ with an important autobiographical essay charting his path from a Hasidic childhood to the Haskalah, to his creative re-encounter with the Ba’al shem tov. Likewise, in the introductions to the two volumes of his Wrst collection of Jewish legend and tales, Me’otsar ha’aggadah, Berdichevsky gives an autobiographical account of the path that

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led him Wrst to Hasidism and then from Hasidism to the entire gamut of pre-modern Jewish literature. These two introductions, written within a year of each other in 1912 and 1913, constitute, when taken together, a remarkable document humaine, a document, moreover, whose hermeneutical implications are of profound signiWcance in the present context. Berdichevsky opens his Wrst preface, written in 1912, on a seemingly apologetic note. Freely admitting that his choice of material is eclectic, subjective, and follows no pre-determined scheme, Berdichevsky disavows any claim to all-inclusiveness, even to academic probity.276 Berdichevsky’s disclaimers both serve to forestall possible criticism of his work and to pass judgment, albeit in an oblique manner, upon Bialik and Ravnitsky’s Sefer ha’aggadah, the Wnal volume of which had appeared a year previous in 1911,277 and upon the intellectual cynosure of the ‘Odessa’ school of writers, Ahad Ha’am. Bialik, in his 1908 manifesto for Sefer ha’aggadah, had spoken of the ’Aggadah as an ‘all-inclusive and deWnitive category’,278 the collective creation of the Jewish people: ‘The ’Aggadah is not the bequest of individuals but the collective creation of the entire people, and each member of the people took part in its creation.’279 Berdichevsky, on the other hand, implies that any attempt to classify or categorize pre-modern Jewish literature is, in fact, pernicious. The word ’Aggadah actually holds a special place in the Berdichevskian vocabulary; he employs the term sometimes to refer to an actual, though loosely deWned, corpus of Jewish literature and sometimes, interchangeably with the words Hazon or Hizzayon, to refer more universally to the works and/or workings of the imagination— Dichtung in Goethean language.280 His deWnition of ’Aggadah, in the 1912 introduction, is, so to speak, catholic; the term embraces ‘historical stories, memoirs, fables, accounts of mystical experience, even philosophical matters, proverbs, historical tracts . . . ’281 Berdichevsky’s reading of this literature thus leads him, contra Bialik, to the conclusion that ‘there is no one Jewish literature, reducible to any one category; rather, a myriad of literary types, each of which arose and developed at diVerent times, under diVerent circumstances. . . . The Jewish people is, likewise, not a monolithic entity, of one heart and mind.’282 This being the case, it is of the very nature of the material at hand to resist classiWcation. But this is not all. Further problems are presented by the shifting moods of the compiler and reviser of this material:

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He who compiles and redacts this material will, of necessity, do his work day by day. The writer will naturally be aVected by day-today circumstances, his work thus being rendered liable to manifold inconsistencies. For is there not a spirit in man, a spirit which is constantly in flux? Sometimes he (the compiler) will be completely enslaved to the source from which he draws and he will give a punctiliously accurate rendition of the text. At other times, the text serves as raw material in the hands of the artist and he will mold the text according to his wishes and emotions. If these texts fall into no one category and if we adopt no predetermined stance toward them, who can prevent us from rendering them in one way one day and in another the next? . . . In our many and various books of memoirs and legends, written by diVerent scholars and writers for diVerent reasons and from diVerent points of view, you will Wnd no one spirit which may serve as a criterion of evaluation, nor any single paradigm which may guide us.283

While Bialik’s approach to the ’Aggadah is nationalist and prescriptive, Berdichevsky’s hermeneutic is existential and open-ended.284 But few existentialist hermenutes, even at the more extreme end of the spectrum, would make quite such a virtue of subjectivity as does Berdichevsky.285 For this approach, as outlined in the 1912 introduction, eVectively gives the compiler and redactor of pre-modern Jewish literature a free hand in the rendition of his material. If there is any ‘one spirit’ that informs the selection and rendition of these ‘books of memoirs and legends’, it is the present consciousness of the redactor; and this consciousness is itself in a state of constant flux, all the more so with so restless and capricious an intellect as Berdichevsky, very much besieged as he was, moreover, by the pressing demands of ‘dayto-day’ existence. The compilation itself, then, becomes a kind of seismographic register of the shifting moods and various stimuli to which the consciousness of the redactor is subject. ‘Should anyone seek any academic method in these words of poetry and imagination’, writes Berdichevsky: Clearly he will fall wide of the mark, Should he, however, seek to Wnd the guiding principle in the writer and redactor himself, this much I can tell him: I found my way to these ’Aggadot in the reverse sequence from that in which they are presented in this collection. I

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began some time ago to render versions of Hasidic tales, a task that took up a great deal of my time—but with a very diVerent aim in mind. Then it was not the voice of the people that I sought in these texts but my own voice, and even where life was openly revealed to me I sought refuge in the shades of mystical vision. After a while, I was driven to the days of the Kabbalah and mystical vision, the cradle of Hasidism. Thence I came to the cramped life of the Middle Ages, the period of hope in Messianic deliverance . . . From the West I returned to Babylon, from Babylon to the land of the Patriarchs . . . Then I made the leap to the literature of the Talmud and the Midrash and the dreams of childhood and what I knew as a child returned to me from Father’s house and the Beit midrash . . . I have recalled what I knew as a child and Father’s house. And in truth my passion for the fruits of ’Aggadah came to me from my father, a rabbi, a man of piety and a guardian of the past. From him I also heard some of the things that will be included in these anthologies, and it is to him that I also dedicate the book.286

That Berdichevsky should Wnd his point of arrival in the literature of the Talmud and the Midrashim, and that this touching base with the key texts of rabbinic tradition should mark, at the same time, a return to the ‘dreams’ and ‘ways of thinking’ of the child, a homecoming to ‘Father’s house’ and the Beit midrash, is not, I feel, fortuitous. Beit hamidrash would also have special connotations for Berdichevsky: this was the name of the journal he edited and of which he was the main contributor, in 1888 at the age of twenty, and in which he sought a golden mean between tradition and Haskalah.287 Several times in the course of this 1912 introduction, Berdichevsky speaks of being ‘compelled’ or ‘driven’288 (Nidhafti, Niddahti), as if by some force beyond his conscious control, inexorably backward in time, ‘from one matter to another, from one historical period to another’.289 Not least among the forces that here drives Berdichevsky is, I would argue, the same autobiographical impulse by which he had been driven, via Volozhin and Bern, to Weimar à la recherche du temps perdu. For Berdichevsky, in his counter-chronological Odyssey through history follows very much the same path as does the autobiographer in his Janus-faced quest for self. Berdichevsky—or, rather, Bin-Gorion qua compiler of ’Aggadot—retraces, that is, the temporal movement of the autobiog-

Pre-Modern Jewish Autobiography and Berdichevsky

rapher, who, as he reaches back in time with his mind, reaches forward with his pen. Both the compiler and the autobiographer cast a mental trajectory from the present to the past; the point of arrival for each— respectively, Talmud and Midrash and the earliest recollections of childhood—marks at the same time a point of textual departure. And so, in the 1917 introduction to Me’otsar ha’aggadah, the two ‘arrivals’ are conflated; the re-encounter with the Talmud and Midrash is, at the same time, a return to childhood and a reconciliation with the father—and the Father. And as, in ‘Shebikhtav veshebe’al peh’ and ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, Berdichevsky seeks, through evocation of the oral tradition of the Yiddish Mayse, a reuniWcation with the lost mother, so now, it appears, through evocation of the speciWcally scriptural traditions of the Heder and Beit midrash, he seeks a rapprochement with the still-living father.290 Berdichevsky, then, appears to have found some provisional solution to the autobiographical dilemma that has plagued him since 1889. In his preface to the second volume of Me’otsar ha’aggadah, written a year later in 1913, Berdichevsky elaborates upon the autobiographical motivations for his work. Once again, he despairs of any criteria of evaluation that can do justice to the heterogeneity and sheer mass of the material at hand. Post-Talmudic Jewish literature, or the ’Aggadot ’am291 which form the material for this second volume, is even more resistant to classiWcation than the ’Aggadot of ‘ancient days’292 as presented in volume 1. Now: ‘There is no end of Halakhic works, rabbinic responses, written accounts of controversies, polemical works, memoirs, travel literature.’293 Berdichevsky’s stance toward these texts is still to a large extent determined by the dictates of the ‘inner feelings and wishes’ of the beleaguered redactor. His perspective, though, as outlined in the 1913 introduction is softer, less aggressive. The challenging rhetoric of the 1912 introduction suggests a confrontational existential encounter between redactor and text in which the scales are always tipped in favour of the redactor. Now, in 1913, we Wnd Berdichevsky adopting a seemingly passive, more renunciatory role in his reading of the post-Talmudic texts that constitute the second volume: The whisperings of the Muse and the form that she takes, if we do not submit ourselves unconditionally to but one criterion and

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schema, are protean and in constant flux. The spirit blows from without and you Wnd yourself driven, standing on the edge of your own abyss. In your distress, you speak, even if you decide to use others to speak on your own behalf . . . But suddenly we cease to listen to our inner fears and we pay heed only to what is said and received (in the text), especially the manner in which it is said and communicated. Then it is beyond our strength to swim against the current and the ship will be cast to wherever it is driven by the waves. I too came initially to speak, but I found myself listening; the further I strayed from myself, the more I heard.294

Berdichevsky seems to be saying here that, initially, ‘in his distress’, he took recourse to pre-modern texts in order to give voice, albeit vicariously, to his own response to the existential predicament in which he found himself: ‘on the edge of his own abyss’.295 Such, by all accounts, his own included, appears to have been the primary motivation behind the rendition of Hasidic texts in Sefer hasidim and of the ’Aggadot as presented in Volume I of Me’otsar ha’aggadah. This latter approach he now equates with a ‘swimming against the current’, a forcible and angst-ridden existential counter-thrust which may not be sustained. With the shift of equilibrium in favour of the voice of the ‘other’ (that is, the text), the exhausted swimmer (redactor) Wnds the text speaking through him rather than he through it; and that the hermeneutical circle, in face of this reversal of current, does not shortcircuit, is due, in no small part, to the fatigue of the thinking subject— ‘the swimmer’. It is not entirely clear from the above passage whether the renunciation of self of which Berdichevsky here speaks, in terms clearly evocative of ‘Kibbush haruah’, is the result of sheer fatigue, or is, so to speak, willed. As there is an element of disingenuousness in the apologetic posture that Berdichevsky aVects in his preface to volume 1, so here in his stance as passive listener and medium for the text. Berdichevsky, as the above-cited passages from the essay ‘Kibbush haruah’ indicate, was increasingly drawn to the Goethean/Schopenhauerian ideal of renunciation, but the Nietzschean within him could not long tolerate the role of serving as a mouthpiece for others. Berdichevsky may listen, but it is Berdichevsky who decides what he does and does not want to hear; the receptivity of the redactor to a given text is, again, largely depen-

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dent upon his intellectual and emotional waverings and oscillations. ‘When I came to select the various legends from the days of dispersion, in its various periods’, he writes in the paragraphs succeeding that from which the above citation is taken, ‘my inner being was wracked by conflicting impulses’.296 And with that disarming candour which marked the introduction to the Wrst volume, he avers quite openly that his fluctuating ‘state of mind’ contributed in no small part to the ‘selection of some things and the omission of others’.297 Sometimes the redactor is ‘drawn’ to documents of historical or national signiWcance, and at others ‘only unadorned ’Aggadah held me in thrall, the fantasies and innermost feelings of the human spirit, of man embracing life and constructing a world for himself ’.298 The ‘conflicting emotions’ to which Berdichevsky refers are, in line with his paradoxical positing of a ‘split’ at the heart of Jewish continuity, reflected in the material at hand; in the ’Aggadah, the ‘parochial’ is to be found side by side with the ‘universal’, the ‘nationalistic’ with the ‘humanistic’, the ‘individual’ with the ‘collective’.299 And Berdichevsky, true to type, evinces in his anthology, as in his autobiographical writings, a decided preference for the ‘humanistic/individual’, as against the ‘collective/nationalistic’. The two introductions to Me’otsar ha’aggadah remain a crucial manifesto in the life-work of Berdichevsky. Equivalent, on the literary plane, to the adoption of the ‘Aggadic’ pseudonym, Bin-Gorion,300 these introductions give oYcial imprimatur to a radical alteration of literary identity, whose embryonic stirrings may, nonetheless, be traced back to the crucial watershed period of 1904–06. The two introductions serve, moreover, as a monumental testimony to that ‘split’ in the modern Jewish soul that Berdichevsky believed to have been a perennial aspect of Jewish experience and whose roots may be traced to the hoary realms of antiquity. Indeed, Berdichevsky, in the introductions, makes of the ‘split’ both a criterion of identiWcation for the ’Aggadot with which he deals and a heuristic device. Me’otsar ha’aggadah itself is born of the dialectical tensions, as experienced by the redactor, between such polarities as the ‘Jew’ and ‘Judaism’,301 the ‘national’ and the ‘humanistic’,302 the ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’,303 ‘poetry’ and ‘truth’,304 et cetera; the same polarities, that is, as characterize the totality of pre-modern Jewish literature, or the ’Aggadot.

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The ultimate synthesis of self, then, that Berdichevsky had previously sought in Hasidism, and that now he seeks in the ’Aggadot, still eludes him; he continues to be ‘torn by conflicting impulses’, in his relation—qua redactor and compiler—to the pre-modern Jewish literary bequest. And, as autobiographer, in quest of a voice at once individual and millennially Jewish, Berdichevsky, it appears, is now caught in an uneasy dialectic; greater proximity to the ’Aggadot than that enjoyed at the time of writing ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ has increased their hold upon him, and in speaking of the self through the medium of pre-modern Jewish texts, Berdichevsky now Wnds himself forced to listen as these texts begin to ‘speak back’ to him.305 Some inkling of Berdichevsky’s state of mind at this period may be gleaned from a letter that he wrote on the 31st of August 1913 to Shmuel A. Horodetsky: ‘I am split (qarua’) and torn into a thousand pieces. I am overwhelmed, confused and quite bowed down by the burden of my writings. If only I could devote myself single-mindedly to one thing, rather than being, quite literally, torn to shreds (Qarua’ leharbeh qera’im mamash).’306 Rather, then, than marking a point of arrival at the much sought-after synthesis, the two introductions to Me’otsar ha’aggadah actually constitute a bill of divorcement—albeit not irrevocable—from certain essential aspects of Berdichevsky’s being; from now on, he was, until the last two years of his life, to neglect Hebrew and Yiddish belles-lettres, critical and publicistic articles, in favour of increasingly Wissenschaft-oriented Aggadic compilations and ‘scholarly’ studies of Jewish antiquity, all written in his adopted language, German.307 The enforced isolation from the centres of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the war years was, moreover, to foster an innate tendency toward a somewhat wounded and reproachful self-isolation and to exacerbate his perceived sense of neglect by the Eastern European Jewish intelligentsia and reading public.308 Notwithstanding, however, his marked shift to German, the increasingly scholarly complexion of his researches into pre-modern Jewish literature, Me’otsar ha’aggadah remained, for Berdichevsky, the jewel in the crown of his literary oeuvre. He saw the work as his consummate achievement309 and continued, until his last days, to collect and rework material for the revised and expanded edition, published posthumously as Tsefunot ve’aggadot.310 He also, so it appears, attached a special importance to the Wrst two introductions; for he chose, ten

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years later, to set these, with no alterations, at the head of Tsefunot ve’aggadot311—this at a time when he was engaged in the most radical and far-reaching revision of all his previous writings, in line with the changed perceptions of the later years, for the Shtibel edition of his Collected Works. The passage from literature to compilation, from Mehabber (‘author’) to Sofer (‘scribe’), or Me’assef (‘gatherer’), as Berdichevsky refers to himself in the 1912 introduction, or, ultimately, from Berdichevsky to Bin-Gorion, was clearly painful and Me’otsar ha’aggadah bears all the marks of this rite de passage. At evidence in Me’otsar ha’aggadah, which Berdichevsky viewed not only as falling within the compass of his original literary productions, but also as the crowning achievement of his oeuvre,312 is a type of two-way osmosis, or Hithallefut, as he puts it in ‘Kibbush haruah’. On the one hand, the texts of ‘ancient days’ (Minni qedem), whose provenance is that internalized ‘other’ against whom Berdichevsky waged some of his most spectacular and ultimately self-defeating early campaigns, are refracted through the prism of autobiographical memory; on the other, Berdichevsky’s autobiographical memory itself becomes increasingly woven of the texts of tradition in whose transmission he serves as a steadily more passive, ‘listening’ medium. The Wgure of ‘osmosis’, while suggestive, actually provides too irenic an analogy for the violently contradictory hermeneutical principles at operation within Me’otsar ha’aggadah: The implicit and ancient tension between memoria and inventio, as complementary components of classical rhetoric, is here raised to fever-pitch.313 The anthology thus stands as a monumental testimony to what Berdichevsky in an article of 1906, terms the ‘poetry of the divided heart’: With one hand, the poet wishes to cast from his shoulder the burden of generations , with the other, he himself prolongs the chain, he himself is one more link in the chain he sought to tear asunder. . . . This is the poetry of the split in the heart: The heart is torn and at fever-pitch, contradictory forces tug at it from all sides, and the poet stands at the crossroads.314

Me’otsar ha’aggadah did indeed mark a crossroads for Berdichevsky/ Bin-Gorion. Bin-Gorion, as Sofer or Me’assef, takes the route of increasingly Wissenschaft-oriented Aggadic compilations, and quasi-scholarly

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studies of Jewish antiquity, all in his adopted language, German, in which the Schopenhauerian ideal of ‘subdual of the spirit’ appears to be, provisionally at least, attained.315 Berdichevsky, on the other hand, the will-driven confessional ‘poet’ of autobiographical expansiveness, appears to walk away from the crossroads marked by Me’otsar ha’aggadah into almost total obscurity.316

Michah Yosef Berdichevsky Before the Speculum of Bin-Gorion: The Collected Works as Encyclopaedia It is possible that Berdichevsky may never have emerged from the eclipse of some eight years duration which followed upon this parting of the ways, had it not been for the intervention, in 1919, of the Berlin publisher, Abraham Joseph Shtibel, whose covert aim in oVering to publish Berdichevsky’s collected works was to restore a writer he admired to the land of the living, to stimulate him to renewed creativity.317 In 1921, Shtibel summoned Fishel Lachover from Warsaw in order to expedite the preparation of the collected works for publication. Once arrived in Berlin, Lachover encountered an ailing Berdichevsky, one assailed, not unwarrantedly, by premonitions of national doom and by intimations of his own mortality.318 If the two introductions to Me’otsar ha’aggadah marked the symbolic swan-song of Berdichevsky as, standing on the threshold ‘between this world and the next’,319 he took his leave of literature and of his leading language of literary expression, Hebrew, now the bid to overtake the Reaper assumes pressing existential urgency. Immanuel Bin-Gorion draws attention to the parallels obtaining between the liminal existential predicament of 1912–13 and that of 1920–21, adducing the fact that Berdichevsky, who left no stone unturned in the process of winnowing and sifting his earlier works for the Shtibel edition, nevertheless retained the introductions to Me’otsar ha’aggadah in their entirety, as a preface to the much altered Wnal version of the work, now entitled Tsefunot ve’aggadot.320 If, however, the crossroads of 1912–13 marked the uneasy emergence of Bin-Gorion from Berdichevsky, then that of 1920–21 marked the no less uneasy reemergence of Berdichevsky from Bin-Gorion. That Berdichevsky is as racked with inner contradictions now as he was when he wrote the

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1912/13 introductions is attested to by a letter, again to Horodetsky, who appears to have become Berdichevsky’s chief conWdant in the Berlin years, of 1 July, 1921: I am extraordinarily tired, and I have to rest two hours every midday in order to gather my strength. The preparation of my writings involves an awesome amount of labour—some twenty books in all— and, on top of this, new writings in the Weld of ’aggadah, as well as ‘poetry’ (shirah), literature, and the whole business of the publication . . . But, in the Wnal reckoning, all that I have completed to date is but a husk for another fruit that has been coming to maturity within me for some time now. I am alienated, even from myself— torn apart by two conflicting tendencies at war within me: Poetry (shirah) and scholarship—expression of universal, national and individual pain and a desire for a Wnal realization, distilled from all the crises of religion, or rather, religions . . . SuVering, fatigue of the body notwithstanding, there is a spirit alive within me that cries out for Wnal expression—an all-inclusive and embracing summation.321

This revealing passage provides an invaluable glimpse into the lair of the ‘solitary of the West’, as Berdichevsky styled himself.322 Some idea of the ‘awesome amount of labour’ involved in the preparation of the Shtibel edition of the collected works is provided by Lachover: When he came to collect all of his writings together, he broke them up again into fragments: he divided them into countless divisions; beneath the sections he put lines, roads, paths, and above them he set section-headings—each section-heading comprising sub-headings. He dispersed and gathered together, gathered together and dispersed. Sometimes he arranged things one way, sometimes another—and he found no resting-place either for himself, or for them.323

That Berdichevsky who, now as ever, was torn between the poles of dispersion and fragmentation, on the one hand, and an almost manic desire for ordering and reordering on the other,324 should have experienced such extreme torment in the preparation for the Shtibel edition is understandable; for in breaking down, dissecting and reconjoining the dispersed fragments, or membra disiecta of his previous writings, he was, in eVect fashioning a corpus to survive the physical body whose transience was becoming ever more apparent. ‘On

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occasion’, writes Lachover, Berdichevsky’s vacillations (shemma’) prevailed to such an extent that ‘The entire enterprise was called into question: “Is there any real justiWcation for the Collected Works? Should one congeal what is in and of its nature fluid? Should one set before the face of eternity things borne of time and subsumed within its flux?”’325 The above citation suggests that the aspiration toward immortality was accompanied by fear lest the corpus, whose tendency is to ‘congeal’ the ‘fluid’, become corpse. For Berdichevsky, who had early in his career raised the cudgels on behalf of ‘life’ versus the deadening hand of the ‘book’, for whom system and dogmatic abstraction were anathema, the sealing up, or entombment, of the self in a Wnal multi-volume edition was an inherently problematic enterprise. And yet, the absence of such a corpus or canon would severely compromise the prospects of a literary afterlife, which had now, through the Shtibel/Lachover intervention, fallen within his grasp. Berdichevsky sought to achieve in the Collected Works a book that would be anti-canonical, a structure that would comprise anti-structure, a unity that would encompass, yet not compromise, heterogeneity, a summation that would not, at the same time, be a sealing. In an aphoristic notation entitled ‘The Work as Polygraphy’, Roland Barthes puts forward the encyclopaedia as the paradigm for a literary form that would go some way in satisfying such contradictory requirements: ‘L’oeuvre comme polygraphie’. I can imagine an antistructural criticism; it would not look for the work’s order but its disorder; for this it would suYce to consider any work an encyclopaedia: cannot each text be deWned by the number of disparate objects (of knowledge, of sensuality) which it brings into view with the help of single Wgures of continuity (metonymics and asyndetons)? Like the encyclopaedia, the work exhausts a list of heterogeneous objects and this list is the work’s anti-structure, its obscure and irrational polygraphy.326

Berdichevsky, who sought ‘to enclose formlessness within form’,327 and for whom textual closure and artistic ‘completion’ went as much against the grain as they did for Barthes, would have found much to commend in the Barthesian ‘oeuvre comme polygraphie’, especially in 1921, when, as is clear from the letter to Horodetsky, the polygraphic urge jostles uneasily with the pressing demand for encyclopaedic summation.

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There is a signiWcantly self-referential aspect to Barthes’s observation: It occurs within the context of an experiment in autobiography that is also, like Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, a commentary on his own works, as is indicated by the double mirror of the title, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. In his Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, Michel Beaujour poses an analogy between the literary self-portrait and the encyclopaedia: The self-portrait thinks of itself as the microcosm, written in the Wrst person, of an encyclopaedia and, further, as the self-awareness of the attention ‘I’ pay to the things encountered in the process of scanning the encyclopaedia. Not a solipsistic—or narcissistic—portrait of an ‘I’ cut oV from things, nor an objective description of things in themselves, independently of the attention that ‘I’ turns to them, the selfportrait, rather, is a sustained textual awareness of the interferences and homologies obtaining between the microcosmic ‘I’ and the macrocosmic encyclopaedia.328

Thus phrased, the encyclopaedia would appear an ideal prescription for the reconciliation of the antinomies so painfully bared in the 1921 communication with Horodetsky, and for the more longstanding schism between confessional and renunciatory memory. When Beaujour speaks of the encyclopaedia, he has in mind not so much the modern type, whose ordering is alphabetical, as the topically arranged mediaeval speculum, on the model of Vincent de Beauvais’s thirteenthcentury Speculum Maius: The distinctive trait of this structure, which one might call a mirror is that it has a topical dominant: It is entirely opposed to the narrative structure that comprises historiography, the novel, biography and autobiography. . . . The mirror. . . . is governed by a spatial metaphor that sets the reader on a course. . . . through the compartments of a ‘space’ or a sequence of topics. The specula are groups of places arranged according to a topical metaphor (tree, macrocosm, house, garden, itinerary, and so forth); they furnish (are furnished by) a taxonomy; and each of these places contains, in a virtual sense, the dialectic development of a descriptive or conceptual discourse accessorily susceptible to illustration with exemplary micro-narratives. The mirror, then, does not purport to narrate, but, rather, to deploy intelligibly a

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representation of things or of the self to whom these things are known, all the while preserving the possibility of cross-references from place to place, of ampliWcation in the places already seen along the way.329

In the self-portrait, then, by contrast to the autobiography, in which personal memory traces the evolution of the self along a chronological route, the self is mapped out according to the topoi of an impersonal, archaic and macrocosmic ‘great memory’, to resort to Yeatsian esoteric vocabulary.330 Since the encyclopaedic self-portrait is, as Beaujour demonstrates, non-narrative and open-ended, it aVords the self a seemingly limitless range of dialectical movement in and around the topoi, or places, thus preserving that fluid vitality that Berdichevsky feared may be lost in the process of self-canonization, as well as providing the self, or microcosm, with a window to eternity. The speculum/encyclopaedia/self-portrait nexus is considerably illuminating of the parting of the ways of Bin-Gorion and Berdichevsky at the crossroads of Me’otsar ha’aggadah and their re-encounter in the last years of the author’s life. Bin-Gorion, the ‘Aggadic’ alter-ego, actually emerged simultaneously with Berdichevsky’s Wrst systematic attempt to produce a deWnitive canon of his own Hebrew literary oeuvre, which he then saw as a closed episode; Me’otsar ha’aggadah was originally intended to form the Wrst two volumes of a projected ten-volume edition of the collected works whose appearance in 1915 was to coincide with Berdichevsky’s Wftieth year.331Thus, Bin-Gorion, the anthologist, compiler, medium of the literary bequest of antiquity, was at one and the same time the compiler and anthologist who would set the seal on the Hebrew works of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky. The hermeneutical principles governing the selection and rendition of material, as laid forth in the introductions to Me’otsar ha’aggadah, thus bear with signiWcant, if not equal, force upon the larger project of the collected works to which they likewise serve as preface. Of particular import is the evidence that the Me’otsar ha’aggadah manifesto provides of Bin-Gorion’s grappling with the mutually exclusive alternatives of a historical/chronological rubric for the anthology, versus a topical/synchronic mapping-out of the material on the model of the encyclopaedia/speculum:

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As stated earlier, the compiler adopted a system that would be faithful both to chronological order and to topical rapprochement. These two principles, however, exercise mutually restraining influences the one upon the other; to a degree, they cancel each other out. A topic, according to its content on the one hand, and the temporal process on the other! We follow one topic and seek to exhaust it by reference to many occasions and, willy nilly, we have made a historical leap, and then, when we turn our attention to the second topic, we are forced to go back in time once more and begin afresh. . . . I should further note that several of the ’Aggadot, ascribed in the sources to named individuals, I have chosen to render anonymously; in so doing, I released them from the narrow sphere of the individual occurrence, relocating them in a more universal design whose signiWcance transcends the individual item.332

While Bin-Gorion does not come out unequivocally either on the side of ‘historical suture’ (Hahut hatoladi) or ‘topical rapprochement’ (qeruv ha’inyanim), his underlying preference, it would appear, is for the latter. The erring on the side of the topical is betrayed by the somewhat high-handed ‘release’ of individuals from their historical Sitz in Leben, the better to accommodate them within the de-individualizing zone of the topos. While chronology does eventually serve as the formal backbone of Me’otsar ha’aggadah, such clearly topical headings and subheadings as ‘Words of Vision’, ‘Of Deliverance and of Redemption’, ‘Events and Deeds’, ‘From the World of the Spirits’, et cetera, in making virtually no reference to speciWc time, person or place, establish a complex series of achronological interconnections between the passages selected ‘from post-Talmudic times to the present day’, which belies, and ultimately subverts, their chronological ordering. In the anthologizing, or rendering encyclopaedic, of his own writings, Bin-Gorion’s topical preference is, at all events, markedly to the fore. As early as 1912, in anticipation of the eventually aborted Wrst edition of the collected works, Berdichevsky seems aware of the alchemical potential of plucking the disparate shards of his earlier writings from their original locus in quo and setting them within a larger topical constellation. Thus in the 8 January, 1912 letter to Horodetsky, in the paragraph immediately succeeding that in which he announces

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his intention to desert the belletristic Weld in favour of the study of antiquity—to become, that is, Bin-Gorion—Berdichevsky writes: My desire to see my literary works collected and arranged in their entirety—or, at the least, part of them—has led me to consider a complete edition of all my Hebrew books, poetic and publicistic. . . . To this end, I have arranged my writings into two cycles, each cycle (Ma’arakhah) containing three sections. The Wrst section will contain poetic pieces: legends, stories from the life of the fathers, stories from the life of the sons; and the second, publicistic cycle will include matters pertaining to poetry, language and literature, culture and nation, scholarship and religion. . . . You will already observe, from this general arrangement, how a comprehensive edition will put things I wrote at various times with no overarching order to my work in an entirely diVerent light. Then, and only then, will my contribution to the reading-public, insofar as such a reading-public exists for us, be perceived and recognized for what it is.333

And in one of the draft introductions to the projected edition, Berdichevsky speciWcally eschews an arrangement of his writings according to temporal provenance: ‘Here, the (stories) will be arranged again, in a complete order, not according to their time of composition, but according to the life therein described. I thus divided this collection into diVerent cycles, and I placed in each cycle all that pertained to the topic, section by section, according to their content and spirit.’334 The essays, likewise, were to be arranged according to their ‘spiritual aYnity’, regardless of time of composition.335

From Re-Collection to Recollection: The Great Memory of BinGorion In a manuscript variant of the introduction cited immediately above, Berdichevsky asserts that the prime motivation behind the gathering together of his writings is memorial: ‘In these stories of mine, earlier and later pieces are gathered together; while they follow no one road, the destination is one and the same: to erect a memorial (Lehatsiv tsiyyun) to days that have passed.’336 Paradoxically, in measure as the memorial function in Berdichevsky’s oeuvre comes to the fore—the phrase used

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here, Lehatsiv tsiyyun, ‘to erect a memorial’, occurs repeatedly in the later works, notably Miriam and Mimerhavei ’ir337—it becomes increasingly unclear to whom, exactly, these memories belong. Certainly, these are not the memories of the thinly veiled Berdichevskian autobiographical protagonist: Side by side, indeed, with the ascendancy of the topical in Berdichevsky’s scheme of things, there is a marked and progressive deflation of the voluminous—on occasion oceanic—ego of the confessing ‘Mikhael’s’ of the early period, as attested to by comparison of the successive redactions these pieces underwent.338 Besides, even those writings invested with maximal subjectivity and ‘will’, when subsumed to the larger cycle or ‘constellation’ (ma’arakhah) of an invisible hand, are by the very act divested of these qualities. Hence, in the plan for the 1915 edition, Berdichevsky assimilates the confessionals to the archetypal and perennial topos, ‘Fathers and Sons’—the title he selected for the Wrst cycle. That this rubric bears more than local signiWcance to the generational conflict in nineteenth-century Jewish Eastern Europe—as it does, for example, in Abramowitsh/Mendele’s 1867 novel of the same name—is further attested to by the title broached for the Wrst volume of the ‘Fathers/Sons’ cycle—which could have served equally well as a topical heading in Me’otsar ha’aggadah—‘From the Tents of Jacob’.339 A memory larger than that of either ‘fathers’ or ‘sons’ is required to generate the topics by which the memories of these latter may be both de-individualized and contained. The encyclopaedic memory that is here setting in place the scaVolding for the ‘memorial of days gone by’ is, by implication, as Berdichevsky puts it in the 1912 introduction to Me’otsar ha’aggadah, ‘released from the narrow sphere of the individual’, and thus, to quote one of Barthes’s formulations, ‘a memory without person’.340 Hence Beaujour, whose theoretical premises underlie the present discussion: A memory without a person—do not all self-portraits tend toward the paradoxical status that clearly opposes them to autobiographies? . . . What Barthes seeks to decipher in the haiku and the Japanese idea of the mirror is the very mirage that constantly leads the self-portrayer beyond narcissistic or delphic self-knowledge, towards the places of a personless encyclopaedia through which his own death would no longer rise to taunt his vanity . . . The empirical individual . . .

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matters much less . . . than the unstable places of an impersonal memory always exceeding with its ‘wild polygraphy’, the memories of the individual . . . The memoria sui, which is implicitly identiWed through the mirror’s mediation does not deliver a sticky packet of predicates that paints a constant ‘self ’, but, on the contrary, a series of discrete places—an immemorial and impersonal Grund, where an inWnite regression begins—no being but passage . . . 341

Is not this ‘paradoxical status’ of ‘memory without person’ precisely the end toward which Berdichevsky is tending? And does not Bin-Gorion himself, whom Immanuel Bin-Gorion, playing on Isaiah 41:4, styles ‘the recaller of generations’ (Qore’ hadorot), bear all the characteristics, or rather non-characteristics, of such a memory without a person? The function of Bin-Gorion as ‘great memory’ that would encompass the memories of others from previous generations, and the autobiographical memories of the solitary self (as foreshadowed in the compilatory activity of the years 1912–14), is revealed in its full force in the feverish literary activity that marked the last two years of Berdichevsky’s life. In the period that intervenes between the completion of Me’otsar ha’aggadah and the undertaking of the Wnal editing of the collected works for the Shtibel edition, Bin-Gorion has grown considerably in stature; indeed, it is as Bin-Gorion, compiler of Jewish legend, that Berdichevsky secured for himself a place in the German literary canon, and a modest income, something he never derived from his Hebrew writings.342 Socio-economic status apart, Bin-Gorion’s memory is, by 1919, vastly augmented by comparison to that of the fledgling Bin-Gorion of 1912–14. EVectively withdrawing from society with his removal to the Berlin suburb of Friedenau,343 Berdichevsky immersed himself day and night in the pre-modern Jewish literary bequest. Manifesting all the symptoms of acute depression,344 he appears to have spent much, if not most, of his time, in the years 1911–19, in word-for-word handwritten transcription of a massive quantity of material, culled from the most diverse sources, for the anthologies Die Sagen der Juden and Der Born Judas, several volumes of each series appearing at intervals over these years.345 In the midst of this awesome amount of scribal, or transcribal activity, it was precisely in the creative recombination of received materials, under a vast array of topoi, that Berdichevsky found some outlet for his stifled creativity.346

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A further outlet, in which Berdichevsky appears to have invested considerable energy over these years, was the building-up of his library, which, by the time of his death, had expanded to some six thousand volumes, the most signiWcant section being devoted to pre-modern Jewish literature in all its branches.347 Aside from the labour, correspondence and expense involved in the acquisition of volumes, some extremely recondite, Berdichevsky devoted much eVort to the actual arrangement of the library. Immanuel Bin-Gorion sees in the construction of the library a ‘unique creation, in and of itself ’;348 and Ya’aqov Fichman, having secured an audience with Berdichevsky in Berlin at the outbreak of the First World War, registered astonishment at both the order and the originality of order of the library ‘consisting largely of biblical commentaries and Jewish folk-tales’: ‘This order astonished me. From the hypertension of his writing and the daredevil anarchy that prevailed in the exposition of his thoughts, it was scarcely possible to deduce such rigorous Wle and order.’349 The homology suggests itself between the expansion, ordering and reordering of the library and the expansion of the encyclopaedic memory of Bin-Gorion, and the division of this memory into topical divisions in order to permit easy access and speedy cross-referencing. Besides its function as a scholarly resource, there is a signiWcantly autobiographical aspect to Berdichevsky’s library. It included a special section for all of his own published volumes; journal-clippings representing 90 percent of the earliest writings that he chose to exclude from the Wnal edition of the collected works; personal memorabilia, including the bag of teWllin that accompanied him on his fateful journey from Russia to the West in 1890;350 genealogical material pertaining to his father’s family.351 Thus, the textual and reliquary deposits of Berdichevsky’s selfhood are implicitly contained and caught up in the topical architectonics of the library. Hence, the micro-analogy, taken from his 1909 essay, ‘The Mission of Our Lives’, ‘The many incidents and deeds of all the days of a man in his allotted span comprise numerous letters scattered, with no order nor regimen, and the mission of our lives is but the combination of one complete word from this profusion’,352 if magniWed suYciently to make of the letter, book, and of the word, library, is suggestive of the equation: librarian/rememberer; library/self. Indeed, the memory and selfhood of one who, as he wrote

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to Brenner in April 1913, had ‘immersed his entire being in the four ells of the dust of books—and how this dust suVocates!’,353 must have become textualized and inter-textualized to an extraordinary degree, thus lending credence to the claim, as expressed in one of the aphorisms to be found in Berdichevsky’s diary: ‘For me, reading is the elevation of material from memory’354—an adage which could be reversed to: ‘For me, memory is the elevation of material from reading.’ ‘The uniqueness of Berdichevsky’s library’, writes Bin-Gorion, who discerns in its creation an unconscious ‘memorial impulse’, ‘lies in this, that here we have a mirror of an extremely speciWc culture, which reflects, at the same time, the man who assembled it’.355 The library thus becomes a type of speculum: ‘A mirror of the “I” that seeks itself through the mirror of the universe.’356 The degree to which Berdichevsky’s library functioned as a kind of sealed memory laboratory is indirectly attested to by the striking fact, as noted by Dan Almagor, that Berdichevsky’s personal experiences, and the tumultuous events in the Jewish street and in the wider European arena, from the time of his departure from Russia in 1896 to the year of his death, 1921, Wnd virtually no echo in the creative writings he undertook in these years.357 This omission is all the more remarkable in that in the diaries the recording of contemporary political events is prominent—some of the pages read like Reuters dispatches.358 When Berdichevsky emerges from this lengthy hibernatory immersion, on the summons of Lachover in the employ of Shtibel, it is as a changed man: he seems to have all but disappeared into the speculum of the memory of Bin-Gorion, which has now expanded to almost cosmic dimensions.359 This slightly eerie transmutation is further attested to by the increased stringency with which Bin-Gorion erases any autobiographical deposits of his prior self, which would betray the existence of an empirical or remembering self, behind the ‘memorial to days gone by’ which it is the purpose of the collected works to erect.360 As Lachover noted: When he came at the end of his days to arrange his writings anew, he ordered them according to the topic, erasing from them inasmuch as possible the least trace of the ‘I’. When asked whether he did not thereby block the way for those who would later come to penetrate

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this ‘I’, in order to discern its trajectory and development? he would answer: This ‘I’ of mine is of no consequence. All that counts is the topic. If that is there, then everything is there.361

In measure, it appears, as autobiographical memory is atrophied, the topical, ‘encyclopaedic’, ‘memory without person’ becomes enriched. Thus, in the Wnal edition of the collected works, when Berdichevsky maps the ‘scattered letters’ of his literary bequest onto the encyclopaedic speculum of the generational memory of Bin-Gorion, the topical arrangement is inWnitely more complex than the relatively straightforward and consistent ‘Fathers/Sons’ polarity that was to serve as the backbone of the stories in the 1915 edition. Now, there is an overall division of the stories into two Ma’arakhot—‘arrangements’, or better, given the cosmic expanse of the memory from which these topics derive, ‘constellations’, as the term is employed by Modena.362 Each constellation was divided into three parts, yielding, by a profane correspondence to the Mishnaic Shas, six groupings of stories, each grouping of which is broken down into an uneven number of topical subsections, sixteen in all, excluding those subsections whose title is identical with the story itself. The topical constellation of the essays, in the Wnal redaction, is even more complex: divided into three Ma’arakhot, each of which has three topical sub-groupings, with each sub-grouping divided into an uneven number of subsections, the sum total yields no less than Wfty-one topical headings.363 The network of topoi thereby established is of such exceeding complexity that even Immanuel Bin-Gorion, who is in general faithful to a tee to his father’s literary bequest, clearly Wnds the system somewhat baZing: in re-editing the Shtibel edition of the collected works, he feels constrained to revise the order of the topical groupings and to do away with the macro-headings, the Ma’arakhot, in order to provide some semblance of thematic or chronological continuity.364 Likewise, Avner Holtzman, Immanuel Bin-Gorion’s heir as guardian of the Berdichevsky heritage, admits defeat when it comes to ‘clearing a path through this convoluted structure in which chronology is overturned’.365 Not only is the labyrinthine structure of the Ma’arakhot forbidding in itself, but it is also infrequently unclear in what precisely lies the distinctions between the topoi therein included, as, for example, in the essays:

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‘Thoughts’/‘Contemplations’; ‘On the Essence of Poetry’/‘Poetry and Prose’; and, perhaps most cryptically, ‘Inside and Outside’/‘Outside and Inside’. While the detailed inner workings of the Ma’arakhah will, in all probability, remain forever shrouded in obscurity, certain, admittedly rather general, observations may be vouchsafed concerning the ground-rules of its operation. First and foremost, this is a determinedly time-defying mechanism. Perhaps the most striking example of this seemingly deliberate achronology is Berdichevsky’s relegation of the Wrst-person sketches that relate most directly to his own experiences as a child to the fourth volume of the Wrst Ma’arakhah in the projected 1915 edition,366 and the Wrst section of the second Ma’arakhah of the Shtibel edition, under the generic topos, ‘From the Mists of Youth’ (Immanuel BinGorion, working upon more conventional generic assumptions, places this section at the head of the revised printing of the collected stories). In absence of chronology as an axis of combination, Berdichevsky sought, it appears, to establish, by means of allusions implanted within the titles of the Ma’arakhot and of the micro-systems they contain, a system, Swedenborgian in complexity, of cross-references and correspondences, whereby the generic classiWcations established by the collected works’ tripartite division into essays, stories and ’Aggadot tend to dissolution. The implicit ‘anti-structure’ of the encyclopaedia is here most at evidence, for by means of the correspondences and crossreferences, the topoi travel a criss-cross route in and between the various Ma’arakhot; the ‘constellations’ thus preside over a sort of controlled chaos. ‘Miymei hama’aseh’, for example, a topos Wrst broached in Me’otsar ha’aggadah vol. I, book I:C, subsection 1b, reappears in the Shtibel edition of the essays in Ma’arakhah II, subsection 3b; ‘’Olim veyoredim’, from Me’otsar ha’aggadah, vol. I, book I, subsection 2, reappears in mirror-image as ‘Yoredim ve’olim’, in the stories in Ma’arakhah I, section 2c; ‘Divrei hazon’, the title of book V in vol. II of Me’otsar ha’aggadah, is the title of vol. I of Ma’arakhah II of the essays. On occasion, the cross-reference between the topoi is even more elliptical: thus, ‘Mimetsar umimerhav’, the title of book VI in vol. II of Me’otsar ha’aggadah is splintered in the stories to ‘Min hametsar’, subsection 7 of Ma’arakhah I: B and ‘Bemerhavei ’ir’, subsection 2 of

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Ma’arakhah I: A; ‘Me’arWllei hano’ar’, in the stories, Wnds its analogue in ‘’ArWllei kedem’, Ma’arakhah III: B, subsection 3, of the essays. Nor does this internal system of cross-references exhaust the potential of the Ma’arakhot. There are at least three further constellations, each with its own complex alignments, to which the primary Ma’arakhot point: the topical alignment of Berdichevsky’s own previously published volumes; the biblical, talmudic and liturgical spheres evoked by linguistic resonance in the titles of the topoi; and the literary and intellectual discourse of Berdichevsky’s contemporaries, or near-contemporaries, writing in Jewish and non-Jewish languages. Thus, ‘Mibayit umihuts’, a topos evoked twice in the Ma’arakhah of the essays (once in mirror-image), points to Berdichevsky’s Wrst volume of stories under the same name published in Piotrkow in 1899, carries biblical resonance (Genesis 6:14; Exodus 37:2; Lamentations 1:20), and also, as Shmuel Werses has suggested, makes reference to Menahem Dolitsky’s story, Mibayit umihuts (Vilna, 1890).367 ‘Me’arWllei hano’ar’ strikes a possible correspondence with the title of the Wrst chapter of Y.L. Peretz’s Zikhroynes, ‘Nepldike kinder yorn’, 368 and resonates with the ’ArWllei tohar of Attah nigleita, one of the supplementary prayers for the New Year. ‘Shinui ’arakhin’, the topos of Ma’arakhah II: B of the essays, points, by contrast to this multi-layeredness, uneqivovally to Nietzsche’s ‘transvaluation of values’. A further aspect of Berdichevsky’s topoi that leaps to the eye is the constant recourse to spatial analogy: ‘Roads’, ‘Paths’, ‘Beyond the Pale’, ‘In the Field of the Book’, ‘Inside and Outside’, ‘Homes and Families’, ‘Townlets’, ‘In the Expanses of a City’, ‘On the Road’, ‘At the Crossroads’, et cetera. It is noteworthy that none of these places refer to particular place; they are, rather, ideational memory-places wherein a host of speciWc places and individuals—or ‘People’, to cite a topos from the stories—who occupy these spaces may be sorted and Wled. The spatial preference underlines the fundamentally achronological principle of ordering of the encyclopaedic speculum;369 the collected works unfold before us as a map of criss-crossing ‘roads’ and ‘paths’, each of which may be traversed and re-traversed, crossed at various intersections, in the restless passage from place to place that the system sets in motion. This paramountcy of place as topical coordinate is

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again suggestive of a model for memory more archaic—and, as exempliWed by Barthes, more modern—than that autobiographical memory which traces, via a linear series of temporal pointers, the becoming of a self that is ‘I’. Place, the assignment of topoi to loci, serves, as Frances Yates has so amply demonstrated, as the foundation of the ancient ars memoria.370 Indeed, the Ma’arakhah of the Collected Works leads one to wonder whether its assignation of places may not be the manifestation of an arcane mnemonic system, akin to those discussed by Yates, whose codes are now beyond retrieval.371

Miriam: The Summing Up The revision, editing and re-placement of his prior writings was not, however, what Berdichevsky had in mind, uppermost in mind at least, when he wrote to Horodetsky in the above-cited letter of July 1, 1921 of the ‘all-inclusive and embracing summation’ that would reconcile the polarities of Shirah and scholarship. Indeed, it is not entirely clear what he did have in mind in this letter; whatever it was, it seems dubious that he ever attained it, and more dubious yet that such a clavis universalis upon which he set his sights is at all within the bounds of mortal grasp.372 The work, however, in which Berdichevsky came closest to realizing his totalizing aspirations is, arguably, his novel Miriam: A Novel of Life in Two Townlets, which he wrote concurrently with the preparation of the collected works in the last year of his life, and whose Wnal sections he dictated to his son on his deathbed.373 ‘Many years ago’, Berdichevsky writes in the opening to Miriam: I set down on a tablet all the details of this event, an event that included within itself an entire novel in all of its chambers and rooms. I saw it all in a vision and I peeped into the spheres of the events and into the loom of those aVairs. But the vicissitudes of time were upon me and I was prevented until now from realizing my poetic design. But behold, I have advanced in years. The day, which is given to man and to his trust has passed, and shades of evening approach from the distance—there is but a footstep to that long night in which we will all abide to the ends of existence. Here I write now by the light of the candle alone and time is pressing, so I shall make brief.374

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Note how well Berdichevsky’s above depiction could apply not only to the Wrst drafted blueprint of Miriam but also to the various detailed schemata he had laid out for his autobiographical projects. And it is fundamentally as an autobiographical project that Immanuel BinGorion understands the novel: Miriam, he writes, ‘is more autobiographical, even, than the early Wrst-person novellas, generally held— and somewhat simplistically so—to be autobiographies’.375 He writes of Miriam as his father’s ‘last testament’, or Tsava’ah, a work in which: The writer is revealed in his entirety, all of his worlds included. . . . The novel is the key to Berdichevsky’s personality, to his art, his assessment of Judaism in all its various traditions and teachings and to his world view. . . . the quintessence of his writings. . . . I would venture to say that there is no aspect of the Jewish experience—historical phenomena, religious, communal, tribal, whether these are to be found on the high road, at the crossroads, or hidden by the wayside, which is not called to remembrance in Miriam.376

Filial piety notwithstanding, Bin-Gorion’s assessment of Miriam is only slightly hyperbolic, as is well demonstrated by Zipporah Kagan’s exhaustive survey of the biblical, talmudic and apocryphal ‘sediments’ deposited throughout the text.377 It is, however, precisely this superabundance of material, this vast ‘list of heterogeneous objects’, as Barthes puts it, that constitutes the work’s ‘antistructure, its obscure and irrational polygraphy’. This anti-structure manifests itself in the novel’s bewildering panorama of characters, events, plots, subplots, tales within tales, inexplicable eclipses of the supposed protagonist, bizarre variations in the narrator’s—or narrators’—point-of-vision et cetera, at evidence within this ‘novel’. Indeed, if laid on the procrustean bed of the nineteenth-century novel and measured according to criteria of chrono-logic, sense of closure, ‘well-rounded characters’, narrative consistency, and so forth, the work must be deemed a total failure.378 To use a play of words of which Berdichevsky was fond, this is more a Rimmon, ‘pomegranate’, or even, as in modern usage, ‘grenade’, than it is a roman, ‘novel’.379 If measured, however, by the norms or non-norms of the speculum/self-portrait, as explicated by Beaujour, Miriam presents an aspect that if it is no less enigmatic, on occasion even hermetic, is at least less

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generically aberrant.380 Viewed on the continuum of the encyclopaedia/speculum/self-portrait, it becomes apparent, notwithstanding the impression often gained that Berdichevsky’s compilatory and editing activity for the collected works was a supererogatory chore that needed to be completed before his creativity, as manifest in Miriam, could come into second bloom,381 that there is an intimate connection between the two undertakings. Berdichevsky’s avowed aim in Miriam, as it was in the Collected Works, is to erect a memorial, to perpetuate the perishable data of memory in writing. The memorial thereby erected bears witness not only to the Jewish townlets of Eastern Europe, frozen in the mind of the author, but now poised on the brink of destruction; not only even to the prior Israelitic generations that Berdichevsky evokes repeatedly in the depictions of these townlets, beneath whose contemporary existence he perceives the eternal return of archaic and archetypal rhythms of Jewish history. Miriam, as the crepuscular and chilling opening paragraph of the work intimates, is a haunted book. In Miriam, Berdichevsky also eVects a recapitulation of all the previous strata of his own literary bequest: from the early confessional stories, to the quasi-feulletonistic sketches of Eastern European Jewish life, to the later depictions wherein this life is painted against an omnipresent—and ominous—backdrop of ancient myth. Miriam thus partakes both of the nature of the anthology, in the mode of Me’otsar ha’aggadah, in which prior texts, written by others, are rendered and rearranged in accordance with the labile sensibility of the compiler, and of that of the revision, whereby prior texts, written by the author himself, are reWltered through the contemporary consciousness of their redactor and creator. The work is thus a speculum of specula, one that contains the collected works, at the same time as it is contained by them. And no less than the collected works, Miriam, with its ‘chambers and rooms’, follows the contours of the ‘Welds and spacious palaces’,382 to use the famous Augustinian image, of the ‘great memory’ of Bin-Gorion. Like the collected works, that is, it is a composition whose structural orientation is spatial (as is implied by the subtitle, ‘A Novel of Two Townlets’) and topical, thus oVering a potentially limitless arena, as do the collected works, for cross-referential bifurcations, interconnections and recombinations. In a passage in the Wrst part of Miriam, Berdichev-

Pre-Modern Jewish Autobiography and Berdichevsky

sky, proceeding topographically over the memory-loci of the Jewish Eastern Europe of his childhood and youth—‘Let us pass on to Linitz’383— calls to remembrance the bookkeepers of this town: There was also another category of persons essential for the smooth functioning of the economy: bookkeepers. In conducting the business of the factories, everything had to be noted down and calculated. . . . Particular accounts amounted to general accounts; there were Wxed assets, surplusses and balances. All the ramiWcations of the Wgures and the columns of the accounts meshed together like small individual cogs into the functioning of a mighty machine. For quick reference each item was entered in a special ledger which referred to others. But if you wanted to locate a particular entry, there was an index which would instantly Wnd the information you required. . . . Anyone who was not an expert in these matters would have been driven out of his wits at the very sight of the multitude of Wgures; but the initiated grasped it easily; they worked it out at once with no need for a second or third look. It is not only for Talmudic argument that one needs quick grasp and ability; accounts too require a special type of mind.384

The meta-reflective dimension of the above passage is provocative of consideration. The ledgers (Pinqasim) of the ‘bookkeepers’ of Linetz, in which ‘everything’ was ‘noted down and calculated’, and each of which refers to other ledgers, may be construed as the microcosm of the great inter- and intra-textual machine spun out in the memory of BinGorion, to which Berdichevsky aspired to give expression in the Sekhum kolel,385 ‘summing-up’, or ‘Wnal account’, of Miriam. The ‘special type of mind’ required for the lightning comprehension of these ledgers is not one adept at the linear reading required by the classic novel but rather one versed in the art of cross-referencing, inter-referencing, lateral thinking. If Berdichevsky held before his eyes an ‘ideal reader’ for Miriam (a work not lacking in the capacity to drive many a reader ‘out of his wits’), it would be one endowed with this ‘special type of mind’. It is in the opening chapters of book XI of Miriam that narrative— or rather, given the pomegranate/grenade-like anti-structure of Miriam, narratives—gives way to discursive meditation upon memory and the process of narration itself, in a manner strikingly reminiscent of the tenth book of Augustine’s Confessions. At this crucial juncture of

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the work, a glimpse is provided of the ‘individual cogs’ of the ‘mighty machine’ that is the generational memory ‘without person’, Bin Gorion. As Berdichevsky/Bin-Gorion writes this passage, his consciousness is buVeted simultaneously on three principal fronts: Wrst, scenes from East European childhood and youth as these are summoned by memory and further evoked in the course of preparing the writings for the Collected Works, undertaken simultaneously with the writing of Miriam, and in and by the actual writing of Miriam ‘by the light of the candle’ in face of the ‘long night’ from which there is no return; second, the chain of literary associations that arise, almost ineluctably, as Berdichevsky, after years of essential withdrawal from society and total immersion in the Jewish literary bequest, returns to Hebrew literature to evoke the world of the ‘recent past’; Wnally, the pressure of contemporary events, most notably the Ukrainian pogroms of 1919, in which Berdichevsky’s hometown was sacked, and his father, brother and Wrst father-in-law killed.386 It is this present dimension that threatens to break through into the life of the author in the midst of writing his text, to throw into disequilibrium the unflinching and Olympian purview of his Eastern European past that he had achieved through the medium of the ‘great memory’ of Bin-Gorion.387 All of these temporal lines, intra- and extra-psychic, Wnd their apex at the moment of writing; as the writer’s hand moves across the page, he traces their intersection: It once happened in a far oV land that recluses of one of the Israelite tribes swore vows to the House of God, on the Temple Mount. They travelled for a long time through desert lands to reach the City of Priests and oVer sacriWces on the altar of the Almighty. They reached Mount Scopus and saw a pillar of smoke in the distance and thought it was smoke rising from the sacriWces. Then came a messenger who said, ‘The sanctuary has been burnt, all the sons of the Levites have been slain, the city of the scribes is destroyed and its foundations utterly razed.’ They rent their garments and began to roll in the dust. An event such as this happened also to me. I am engaged in the birthpangs of setting up a memorial for my generation, to inscribe thereupon the life of the townlets in which I was raised. Many are the thoughts within me, feelings of childhood rise up in me; in my heart are many faces, events and experiences, fleeting souls, shades of the tapestry of life but also the weave of distant days. I am a child of the

Pre-Modern Jewish Autobiography and Berdichevsky

children of the Exile and from an ancient cup I too have drunk my Wll. And behold the destroyer came to all these townlets, descended upon their lives and their books; days of total destruction were visited upon all those places in which my hopes and the buddings of my poetry Wrst emerged. My home-town was laid waste, the hand of the oppressor fell upon all that I held most dear. The God of righteousness devoured without respite all the habitations of His people. Even those who taught in His name, He did not spare.—My harp is turned to mourning, my soul knows no peace, my flesh and spirit consumed with sorrow, a lament is all I can muster. How shall I tell the tale of a young girl, of everyday incidents, snatches of the song of everyday life? In the lower part of the town, at the time I left it never again to cast my eyes upon the place, there lived a certain man called Reb Shlomo the Elder, a direct descendant of one of the martyrs of Nemirov, slaughtered in sanctiWcation of the Name in the year 1648. This old man used to fast for a whole day on the twentieth of Sivan each year, and he used to recite the laments and memoirs from those terrible days, that have not ceased, and tears would come to his eyes upon seeing how the God of Jacob has no mercy upon the remnant of His people, how He leaves them each time to be destroyed at the hand of the oppressor. ‘Where is the Keeper of Israel?’ he would ask over and over again. The assurances of the prophets and the seers have come to naught; God has reneged upon his Torah. This Hasid dozed oV and he too saw the smoke of the altar pyre as it made its twisting ascent, and he looked around but there was no altar and no burnt oVering. He sought to leap into the midst of the cloud, but an abyss opened up before his feet. And I also, as I go about my work, my spirit rages within me. The sword of the Almighty is upon my people and there is no hand of deliverance. The seat of judgment is overturned; ‘the Shekhinah is in shame and confusion’—stones are upon my shoulder, the heart breaks and I transcribe events from the past.388

To tease out every single implicit, and often mordantly ironic, reference in the above passage would require more expertise in the entire spectrum of Jewish literature, from biblical to apocryphal to mediaeval to Haskalah, than that enjoyed by the present writer. Berdichevsky here shifts in and out of various premodern narrative modalities with

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dazzling rapidity; he invokes, inter alia, in the span of little more than one page, resonance of the mediaeval travel-account, the communal record (Pinqas), prose-chronicles of Jewish suVering—most notably Hannover’s Yeven metsulah—and the rhymed lament, or Klog-lid, on the model of Shabbethai Cohen’s Megillat ’eyfah—not to mention the biblical and rabbinic references with which the text is packed.389 Textual anamnesis and autobiographical memory here become conflated; recollection of prior texts of others has become all but indistinguishable from recollections of the self. Thus, even though maddened by grief at the murder of his father, the virtual destruction of the townlet in which he had lived with his Wrst wife and which is so frequently evoked in the stories,390—events that might have been be expected to release a flood of autobiographical memories, as apparently, they did in his personal conversations at the time of writing Miriam391—Bin-Gorion gives no expression of personal pain, but rather persists in his ‘copying’ or ‘transcription’ (Ma’atiq) of ‘events of long ago’. There remains, for all this, a jarring discordance between the archaic structure of this anamnesis and its quasi-scribal transcription, and the decidedly antinomian sensibility which informs it: this is a thoroughly subversive form of ‘unforgetting’, and the transcription is that of a decidedly heretical Sofer.392 With Miriam, the only one of his works to which Berdichevsky appended the word Tam—‘whole’, or ‘complete’393—the circle is closed. From the Nietzschean thesis of deliberate cultural amnesia, the better the willing self may remember, to the antithesis of Schopenhauerian withdrawal of aVect—whereby memory serves as alembic to the willing ego culminating in bitul hayesh, ‘self-extinction’—is borne a memory larger than that of Berdichevsky, Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, large enough, indeed, to accommodate these three and many others beside: Bin-Gorion. Berdichevsky, who had initially sought in autobiographical memory a means of escape from a culture so all-engulWng as to rob the individual of the slightest autonomy or sense of self, Wnds release, ultimately, from the very existential condition of individualism he secured at so steep a price, in an ancient mode of memory of mythical dimensions. What Jean Pierre Vernant writes of this mythical construction of memory in Greek thought is so applicable to the memory of Bin-Gorion that it may serve as conclusion to the present discussion:

Pre-Modern Jewish Autobiography and Berdichevsky

It is not a matter of the individual apprehending himself in his personal past and Wnding himself again within the continuity of an interior life that diVerentiates him from all other creatures. He must place himself within the framework of a general order, and reestablish on every level the continuity existing between himself and the world, systematically connecting the present life with time as a whole, human existence with all of nature, the destiny of the individual with the totality of being, the part with the whole.394

The passage of Mikha’el, the Bar bey rav of Dubova, to the fledgling Nietzschean ‘Tsa’ir’ aspiring to release himself of the insupportable burden of ancestral memories, to the spectral and somewhat demonic remembrancer, Bin-Gorion of Berlin, may, on the face of things, appear quite egregious—even downright odd. And yet this grappling with the dilemmas posed by the impact of Western notions of individualism upon a traditional culture whose collective memorial base was implicitly threatened by the autobiographical memory that such individualism entails, is not without parallel. Many of the leading Wgures of the Hebrew literary renaissance, it could be argued, found the imposition of the autobiographical, with the heavy yoke of individuality that this entailed, to be as oppressive as it was liberating. Berdichevsky was by no means alone of his generation of Hebrew writers in devoting much of his creative energy to writing his way out, paradoxically enough, of the existential condition of individualism without which his work could never have come into being. Generally viewed as the torchbearer of uncompromising individualism in Hebrew literature, Berdichevsky’s signiWcance resides no less in his pointing the way to the unmaking of the self. H. N. Bialik’s autobiographical SaWah (completed in 1923), for example, attains its apocalyptic dénouement with ecstatic consummation of the poet/prophet of Hebraic revival par excellence in Wre, as an ultimate release from the bonds of individuality.395 And S. Y. Agnon’s so-called ‘mythical autobiography’, Hadom vekhise’ to which reference has already been made, represents a deliberate attempt to dissolve the life-history of the empirical individual in the timeless realm of Midrash. Berdichevsky, Bialik and Agnon, each increasingly engaged, toward the latter years of their lives, in the programme of Kinnus—‘collection/ingathering’, or,

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more apposite to the present context, ‘recollection’—seemed, at some level, to yearn for an exchange of the role of modern author for that of the anonymous scribe, or ‘sofer’.396 Bialik, in response to critics who discerned a lack of homogeneity in his Megillat ha’esh, called for a return to the ancient model of author as anonymous compiler of fragments in the creation of a mosaic, on the model of the Talmud and the authorless epics of ancient Greece and India.397 ‘In artistic creation’, Mordecai Ovadyahu recalls Bialik saying in a conversation of his later years: ‘One must never invent but only discover what is hidden in the space of experience; what was secreted, as it were, during the six days of creation and is waiting to be revealed and laid bare. . . . ’398 Bialik’s mature understanding of the creative process in terms of Platonic anamnesis is thus fully in accord with that of his predecessor, BinGorion, the ‘recaller of generations’. By a curious twist of intellectual history, it is precisely at this moment of Teshuvah, recoil from the authorly conventions established by the European novel, in favour of the indigenous model of the scribe, that the path of Hebrew literature, a belated literature if there ever was one, intersects with that of high European modernism. Berdichevsky’s Miriam, for example, is as exemplary of such high modernist tendencies as the ‘dehumanization of art’;399 the substitution of ‘spatial form’ for temporal sequence as a structuring principle for the modern novel;400 the eVacement of the author, and so forth, as is Joyce’s Ulysses, which was to appear a year after Berdichevsky’s death. The example of Berdichevsky is indeed suggestive of a coincidence between the anamnesis of archaic, pre-autobiographical modes of remembering and the wider modernist enterprise.401 * All of this, it must be said, is a far cry indeed from the well-ordered, allembracing, and ingenuously candid autobiography that Berdichevsky had promised to deliver in 1899. In place of this, we have an autobiographical dissemination, an almost oceanic diVusion of self throughout the entire oeuvre; the Collected Works, both in their Wnal and unrevised form may, that is, be read as a monument to a lifetime of autobiographical endeavor, ‘fragments of a great confession’, in Goethean language.402 From this diVusion and dissemination, there does, however, emerge a central strand in Berdichevsky’s autobiographical vision. Hinted at

Pre-Modern Jewish Autobiography and Berdichevsky

in the earliest works, Wrst adumbrated in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ and ‘Bein hapatish vehasadan’, reaching toward Wnal consummation in Miriam, this strand I would deWne as the hermeneutical. By the word ‘hermeneutical’ as applied to Berdichevsky’s autobiographical writings, I refer to a process whereby the self is refracted through the prism of traditional texts at the same time, and dialectically, as these texts are transformed by the self in the process of infraction. And it is in this dialectical hermeneutics of self-exploration that Berdichevsky’s most signiWcant—indeed, unique—contribution to Jewish autobiographical writing lies. The autobiography itself, it is true, failed to materialize. But, it remains to be asked: Should Berdichevsky indeed have succeeded in writing a full-length autobiography in the last decade of the nineteenth century, would we have been left with so rich and complex a literary legacy? To return, however, to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter, by application of Bruss’s thesis to the history of Jewish autobiography: If a work is read or published as an autobiography, even rendered as such so as to serve as the surrogate autobiography of a redactor or compiler, does this not justify our taking the work as such, regardless of the initial intentions of the author? And, should this be the case, is not the notion of an indigenously Jewish tradition of autobiographical writings that extends from antiquity to the present day less than chimerical? The answer, on both fronts, must, in the light of Berdichevsky’s writings, be a qualiWed but resounding aYrmative. There is, however, a paradoxical twist in this admission; for it is precisely in his hermeneutical integration of pre-modern texts within an autobiographical context that Berdichevsky is so unequivocally modern. Toponymically speaking, Berdichevsky stands at the crossroads between past and future—a locus of convergence of ‘roads’/‘ways’ (‘Netivot’/‘Derakhim’ as in the taxonomy of his collected works) and their divergence toward the future. The same is also true, though in a less far-reaching manner, of the two principal Wgures to be discussed in the following chapter, Jacob Emden and Nathan of Nemirov, both of whom Berdichevsky situates along the continuum of radically individualistic Jewish ‘others’ that he, as ‘distant relative’, perpetuates.

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Synchronicities

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With Berdichevsky we have to do with a recapitulation and reintegration of various strata of Jewish autobiographical writings within a highly individual but most deWnitely modernist perspective. The great majority of pre-modern texts that Berdichevsky invokes in his own autobiographical writings may scarcely, though, be said to foreshadow his own autobiographical works, whose more proximate point of departure is, however mediated, the revolution of sensibilities wrought by Rousseau. The situation, however, is rather more complex when it comes to those—admittedly few—Jewish autobiographical productions, written by contemporaries or near-contemporaries of Rousseau, the most signiWcant of which Berdichevsky was certainly aware: the Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow (Birkenthal), written in Hebrew c. 1790–1800, and Wrst published in 1922;1 Aaron Isak’s Autobiography, written in Yiddish (albeit heavily Germanized) from 1801 to 1804 and Wrst published in 1897;2 Jacob Emden’s Megillat sefer, written in Hebrew c. 1762–70 and Wrst published in full in 1896;3 Mosche Wasserzug’s Memoirs, written in Hebrew probably in the second decade of the nineteenth century and not published until 1911;4 Nathan of Nemirov’s (Sternharz) Yemei maharnat, written in Hebrew and completed c. 1835, Wrst published in 1876.5 These texts, in line with the text/discourse distinction as adumbrated above, appear to present quite isolated and unrelated instances of autobiographical self-expression. There is, moreover, with those written after the publication of the Wrst books of the Confessions, no attestation of any common origin in Rousseau. And, with respect to the text/discourse distinction, it should be noted that not one of these

Jewish Autobiographical Writing at the Time of Rousseau

texts was published in the author’s lifetime. And yet, this cluster of early-modern autobiographical productions of Western and Eastern European provenance does present a considerable dilemma for the history of Jewish autobiography; while not one of these texts falls comfortably into any category of Jewish literature, each in its own way and in various measure does move, albeit falteringly, toward autobiography as this is understood in the present study. The dilemma is compounded in that the one of these texts whose writing preceded the publication of the early books of the Confessions—Emden’s Megillat sefer—bears the most striking aYnities with Rousseauian autobiography. Notwithstanding the considerable divergence in provenance, style and theme of these texts, three of these documents, at least, do evince suYcient thematic, socio-historical and psychological aYnities to justify their being treated of under a common purview. These are the Memoirs of Ber of Bolechow and Mosche Wasserzug and the Autobiography of Aaron Isak.6 Each of these authors—and this is the most signiWcant common denominator whence all others arise—engaged in commerce: Isak in jewels and engraving, Ber of Bolechow in wine and Wasserzug in loans and real estate. It was through the necessities of commerce that each man acquired, Wrst of all, numeracy, secondly some knowledge of the ways and languages of the non-Jewish world. Commercial transactions, frequently quite complex and recorded in laborious detail, occupy a prominent position in these documents. And it is within the context of the belated impact of more advanced forms of capitalism upon certain Jewish families in Western Central and Eastern Europe that, I believe, these autobiographical testimonies are best understood. Each of their authors was born in, or near, a centre of commerce: Wasserzug, Posner; Isak, Berlin; Bolechow, Lemberg. Their memoirs, with their mass of detail concerning business transactions, protracted negotiations, et cetera, appear as outgrowths of the account-book or ledger, and in this they bear some aYnity with the Memoirs of Asher Halevy. They are akin, in this respect, to the libri segreti of some Renaissance Italian merchants, notably Florentine,7 and to such Puritan self-accounting as represented especially by the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, a book whose Hebrew rendition and adaptation was influential in Jewish Eastern Europe in this period.8 It

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is possible that the relatively private experience of maintaining a ledger provided each of these authors with the initial spur for the undertaking of more extensive memoirs in which accounting procedures are redirected toward the self. Added to this is the sense of ‘inner isolation’, that, according to Weber, is symptomatic of early capitalistic individualism; the individual entrepreneur, isolated from country kinsmen and family, is thrown back upon the self as the ultimate source of spiritual and material sustenance.9 Bolechow, Wasserzug and Isak each led a peripatetic existence; indeed, Isak’s trade took him as far as Sweden, until then terra incognita for Jews. Each of these documents evinces a rugged self-reliance, but there is little introspection here, nor any perceived tension between self and social persona; these memoirs, rather, read as inventories of the activities of homo economicus in the nascent stages of his development. Much more diYcult to deWne and locate within their literary-historical context are the two remaining works in this group of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Jewish autobiographical writings: Jacob Emden’s Megillat sefer and Nathan of Nemirov’s Yemei maharnat. Each of these works must be considered sui generis; but each is, in its own way, suggestive of a shared socio-cultural matrix for an alteration in sensibilities that now gives rise to changing modes of subjectivity.

Jacob Emden’s Megillat sefer Particularly puzzling and problematic in the present context is Jacob Emden’s Megillat sefer. The one text in this group that was completed before the Wrst publication of the Wrst books of the Confessions, Megillat sefer, as has been noted, approximates more closely to Rousseau than do any of the texts here discussed. Emden, moreover, comes closer to attaining the ideal of autobiographical totality than does any other of the authors in this group; nor does he flinch from explaining various aspects of the self generally left untouched in more memoiristic presentations. Megillat sefer thus raises the possibility that Jewish autobiography in the modern era emerges in response to very much the same conditions in Western Europe as gave rise to Rousseauian autobiography, and yet presents an analogous but quite distinct phenomenon.

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Rousseau and Emden do indeed share certain prominent character traits: Both were, at heart, convinced of their ultimate rightness; both were paranoid and litigious; each employed the confessional format for self-justiWcatory ends and in no small part as a J’accuse against their supposed detractors. The correspondences between Megillat sefer and the Confessions are, indeed, so striking that Avraham Bick, the most recent editor of the former work, feels it necessary to point out that publication data rule out any possibility of the direct influence of Rousseau upon Emden.10 And it may, in part, have been the extraordinary aYnities of Megillat sefer with Rousseauian autobiography that caught the eye of David Kahana, who prepared, edited and annotated the complete manuscript for its Wrst publication in 1896;11 Kahana, it will be remembered, was the Wrst to translate sections of Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte into Yiddish for Zederbaum’s Qol mevasser. It is possible, also, that Berdichevsky, who was in contact with Kahana and Hayyim Gurland at the time of their initial collaboration in preparing the manuscript of Megillat sefer for publication,12 had Megillat sefer in mind when, in Reshut hayahid, he speaks of Emden as ‘the father of the modern period in our history. . . . He did not write in order to teach, to work upon the intellect alone, but to inspire. Not in ink did he write, but with tears, with blood, his heart’s blood. And thus in each of his lines, in each of his words, we hear a voice raised in indignation, an outcry from the heart.’13 Certainly, as both Bick and Ben Tsiyon Katz note, though neither takes into account Modena’s Hayyei yehudah, there is nothing quite like Megillat sefer in rabbinic literature prior to Emden.14 In boldness of self-revelation, Megillat sefer does, indeed, appear unprecedented and comparable only to post-Rousseauian Jewish autobiographical productions. Emden’s revelations proved, at all events, too strong for the editors of Hame’assef, who, in greeting the Wrst publication of a section of Megillat sefer in 1810, advised the reader: Because there are many matters in Megillat sefer dwelt upon at length, that are of no interest to anyone save to the descendants and relatives of this departed genius, his memory be blessed, we have abridged the Megillah, making a transcription of almost a third of the book, matters concerning the events of his life, that are Wtting for all and that will not oVend nor prove injurious to anyone.15

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The Wrst section of Megillat sefer is devoted to Emden’s forebears, notably to his father, the Hakham Tsevi (Ashkenazi), the depiction of whom constitutes approximately a third of the entire book. Such a genealogical preamble is, as has been noted, characteristic of pre-modern autobiographical writing in general and of Jewish in particular, notable examples being Gluckel’s Zikhroynes and Modena’s Hayyei yehudah and later Yekhezkel Kotik’s Zikhroynes and Dov Sadan’s Mimehoz hayaldut. When Emden comes eventually to speak of himself, however, and chooses to preface his account with an explanation of his undertaking, very much in the tradition of the nineteenth-century autobiographical preamble, the parallels with Rousseau are unmistakable. ‘Before I begin the story of my life’, writes Emden: I should like to declare in good faith that I did not take this project upon myself in order to make my name known, or sing my own praises. For I know myself to be a man of no achievement: Neither learning, wisdom nor greatness fell to my lot that I should boast or set myself upon a pedestal. Would it be indeed, that I put nothing down in writing that will lay bare my flaws?16 However, as is known by all my kith and kin, I elected a modest station. From the day I arrived at judgment I recognized my virtues and defects. In this respect, then, I am little concerned, nor do I fear. May my lowliness17 be known to all, for truth alone have I espoused.18

The shifting of emphasis from the ideal of virtue to the virtue of sincerity, as implied in this passage, is, to my knowledge, quite unprecedented in Jewish autobiographical writing prior to Rousseau— though after Rousseau it becomes something of a commonplace. Emden, of course, unlike Rousseau, is a theist. Confessio peccati in Megillat sefer is thus tempered throughout by confessio laudis. Praise and thanksgiving to God, Emden declares, retreating somewhat from his prior elevation of sincerity, is one of the principal aims and motivations of the work: To make known the lovingkindness of God to me from my youth, in spite of the fact that much aZicted me . . . I was [exposed] to almost all hardships, to diYcult occurrences and mishaps without even a moment’s surcease. The Lord, may He be blessed, rescued me from them all and aided me until now. He has punished me severely, but did

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not hand me over to death (Psalms 118:18) . . . I therefore said that I would tell of your Name, O Lord, to my brothers, my children and my descendants so that I will not forget His kindness and my soul not forget all his bounties (Psalms 103:2) . . . That a future generation might know—children yet be born—and in turn tell their children (Psalms 78:6) and they should praise the Lord for He is good, His steadfast love is eternal (Psalms 118:1, 29) for he has saved the soul of the needy from the hands of evildoers (Jeremiah 20:13).19

Borrowing extensively, like Augustine, from the language of Psalms, expressions of praise and thanksgiving punctuate Megillat sefer as a constant refrain. Confessio laudis in Megillat sefer is, however, at constant tension with confessio peccati; virtue and sincerity may exist in a relation of complementarity in Augustine’s Confessions, but in Megillat sefer they do not make for the easiest of bedfellows. And Emden’s extolments of the providence of the Almighty do not entirely diminish the radicality of his earlier pronouncements. One of the most startling manifestations of Emden’s commitment to sincerity is, as with Rousseau, the frankness of admissions in the sexual sphere. Indeed, Megillat sefer must be reckoned as one of the most sexually explicit autobiographical documents in Jewish—and quite arguably in non-Jewish—autobiographical literature prior to the publication of the Wrst books of the Confessions. This aspect of Megillat sefer has, since the publication of the Kahana edition, naturally drawn the attention of scholars—including, not surprisingly, Berdichevsky20—and Emden has been the subject of a provocative psycho-biography that draws extensively upon Megillat sefer in support of a fundamentally Freudian assessment of the life and character of the man.21 Emden’s romantic attachments were ill-starred from the onset; already, in his depiction of the events leading up to his Wrst marriage, may be discerned the seeds of an erotic discontent that would, in later life, render him vulnerable to the enticements of eros and lead him perilously close to the infringement of the sexual conventions of his day. No wonder that this passage, which has much in common with Modena’s account of his Shiddukh, as discussed above, held such a special fascination for Berdichevsky; for intimated here are two themes that

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play so prominent a rôle in Berdichevsky’s oeuvre—a Wrst unfulWlled love and the early stirrings of Oedipal resentment: In the middle of the winter, 1714, my father—may his memory be blessed—travelled to London for several weeks, and he sent us, his family, by ship to Emden. We stayed there as strangers until after Passover, even though the dwellers of that little town treated us with respect and made life as comfortable for us as was possible. The head of the community, the learned Rabbi Levi Emden, wished to give me his daughter for a wife—a learned and intelligent maiden, indeed she had no equal in the whole land of Germany. He sought to lavish a good sum of money on me as a bridal bequest. His daughter, likewise, was much desirous of a match with learning and pedigree. But in view of a certain taint upon this family, my father and teacher, the great luminary, was unable to grant his assent and welcome this match. For me also, this was a severe trial; for I was already of an age to pass independent judgement and to make an objective reckoning of the matter, and it was quite apparent to me that this was an eminently suitable match. Such a match, indeed, was not to be found in the land—not in terms of Wnancial bounty nor in those of good breeding. Indeed, it appeared to everyone that the way was straight before me—that I was in a singularly advantageous position, that by means of this match I could attain good standing with ease. For I was well aware that my father and teacher the Gaon had not the wherewithal to bequeath anything upon me. It was all he could do to keep himself and his household from falling into debt, leading, as he did, a peripatetic existence, never knowing whither he would travel next. The head of the community and his household, moreover, showed me great aVection, actually imploring me to go along with their scheme that they might reach their desired end. All this notwithstanding, I had no intention—God forbid!—of causing Father pain, even though, in my own mind, I was disinclined to pass up so sterling an opportunity as this. Even the taint upon the family was scarcely suYcient cause for avoidance, for this—God forbid!—was no irremediable flaw; by then, indeed, all the greatest dignitaries of Ashkenaz associated with this family that so excelled in wealth and benevolence. The head of the community and his household, moreover, showed me great aVection, actually imploring me to go along with their scheme, as has been mentioned above. A Shiddukh such as

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this does not happen every day! Nevertheless, I did not reveal what was in my heart and I submitted myself to the decision of my father and teacher, the Gaon, with love. But a day of pain and distress was thereby to fall upon me.22

Emden is writing this passage at a remove of approximately forty years from the events therein recounted. But the chagrin that Emden experienced at the time at the frustration of this projected Wrst marriage has clearly remained; indeed, given the less than happy circumstances of his subsequent marriage, it has probably festered. He carried with him the memory of this Wrst love for the remainder of his life; the unnamed daughter of Levi Emden reappears in Megillat sefer in Emden’s account of his return to Emden some Wfteen years later. There, ‘this great, important and extremely intelligent woman’ was instrumental in gaining him the rabbinate of this community. Upon seeing the one to whom she had been so nearly betrothed some Wfteen years previously, Emden tells us, she ‘emboldened me to eat bread and to stay in her house’;23 the erotic connotation of these words is not lost to the most recent editor of Megillat sefer.24 No less vivid for Emden than the memory of the object of his earliest desires—a memory he caresses in this passage—is that of its untimely and arbitrary removal. Frustration, chagrin and a muZed anger directed toward the Wgure of the father are discernable in this account of the stalled marriage, so reminiscent of Modena’s Hayyei Yehudah— all the more so for their never being openly expressed. The passage is characterized by a tremendous self-restraint, as if Emden is imposing a censorship upon himself in the retelling of this occurrence. This selfrestraint actually renders the account more aVecting; for it reduplicates, at a textual level, the self-denial that the young Emden, torn between conflicting loyalties, was called upon to exercise in these trying circumstances. And it is in terms of the ancient paradigm of trial or test that Emden encases his account.25 There are muted resonances here, even, of the Aqedah motif. Trial or test is a recurrent motif in Megillat sefer; Emden, as shall be seen, perceived himself as a disproportionate number of autobiographers do—and in this he was probably correct—as a much-aZicted man, a latter-day Job. This motif—temptation, trial and subsequent

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deliverance—recurs in each of Emden’s accounts of his erotic encounters in Megillat sefer; indeed, the motif provides him with the means of patterning these most compromising experiences in line with his deeply ingrained theological perspectives. Emden’s next trial occurs in the course of his extensive wanderings throughout Europe in vain pursuit of moneys apparently due him from his father’s estate.26 Here— and this account is omitted from the Kahana edition of Megillat sefer, possibly as being overly bold—Emden almost falls prey to the seductions of the non-Jewish wife of an excise oYcial while her husband is away from home. He leaves the reader in no doubt of the severity of this trial: Then I realized that the Evil Impulse lurks constantly at our side as a crouching bear to cause us to stumble at every step of the way. May God in His great mercy and manifold bounties protect us from this . . . And I felt great repulsion at this foul desire, even though I am not lacking in lust, craving, passion or libido—quite the contrary! Yet I remained—thank God!—master of my own desires; to crush them under my feet, not to permit them to enslave me. Nor did I pay heed to all their enticements, to allure me into partaking of their many delights . . . Nor shall I bow to them in obeisance, to be a consorter of whores, a desecrator of the splendour of the Torah, that the burning flame may not burst through the wall . . . 27

Confessio laudis and confessio peccati here interact in an uneasy dialectic of self-enhancement and mutual self-negation. But it was in Prague, ‘that most dangerous of cities’28—equivalent to Augustine’s Carthage—that Emden was to face the most severe trial of his erotic sensibilities: There also was a miracle performed for me, pertaining especially to matters of the spirit, a miracle as occurred to the righteous man, Joseph—even greater, in certain respects. I was, at that time, a lad of tender years, at the height of my passion; I had been separated from my family for a long time and was quite ravenous for a woman. And there happened to be there a woman free of commitments—an extremely attractive girl, the daughter of my uncle—; she was alone with me. She flirted shamelessly with me, came close to me, almost kissed me. Even when I was lying on my bed, she came to arrange the blanket to ensure I was well covered, as if this were no more than fa-

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milial hospitality. And, truth to tell, should I have heeded the call of my impulses, she would have shown no resistance. More than once, there was but a Wngersbreadth between the flame and the wick. Frequently, there was no one in the house apart from her. Nor was there any danger of anyone coming; for they were all busy at their stalls in the market-place, constantly engaged in earning their livelihood. Had the Almighty not provided me with superhuman strength and resistance to overcome my enflamed passions, I should have been compelled to satisfy my desires . . . For I was a man at the height of my potency and passion, and there, with me, was an extremely beautiful and comely girl, who flirted with me and displayed me many aVections frequently. She was close at hand,29 free of commitments, a tender young girl, recently widowed—and perhaps ritually pure, or she would have puriWed herself had I so wished. And I was sure that there was no likelihood of my secret being revealed, should I have wished to fulWl my passion and desire and have my way with her. But I restrained my impulse and put a damper upon my ardour . . . How awesome are the strength and temptations of the impulse and how many nets it spreads before the feet of a man; this was no simple and easy matter—everything was ready and waiting before the impulse and there was no danger of being found out. May He who aids and delivers us be praised in the above-mentioned matter! Blessed is the man whose strength is in Him. He will watch over the ways of His righteous.30

This passage, in particular, has, not surprisingly, drawn the attention of all scholars who have used Megillat sefer as a source for the life of Emden.31 M. J. Cohen’s contention that the incident in Prague between Emden and his cousin ‘furnished him the basis of a written confession that is unique in rabbinical literature both for its frankness and the literary art with which it is told’32 would, I think, arouse little disagreement. The account is exceedingly daring, even by Rousseauian standards. There is, moreover, a certain literary artistry at work here that succeeds much in the manner of several of the erotic episodes in Rousseau’s Confessions—in conveying the erotic suspense of the situation. Confessio laudis, there is here, thoroughly reminiscent of Augustine, but the element of praise is much outweighed by confessio peccati; while Augustine, moreover, reviews his ‘past foulness’ while standing upon the eternal ground of divinely entrusted truths, there is a note, in Emden’s passage, of unseemly nostalgia as he relives his past concupiscence.33

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There is, indeed, as unmistakable an ambivalence here, as there is in the above-cited account of the shiddukh: Emden’s cousin was, after all, recently widowed, ‘free of commitments’, of undoubtedly good parentage and, moreover, ‘pure’ or prepared to purify herself. Worthy of note, in this context, is that Emden waged a vigorous campaign against Rabbenu Gershom’s advocacy of monogamy and against R. Moshe Isserles’s ruling that it is only permitted a king to take a concubine, arguing in the latter context that ‘The greater the man [the greater his Evil Inclination]’.34 Both the shiddukh passage, then, and the account of the temptation at Prague are characterized by an ambivalent compound of gratiWcation at a tremendous feat of self-restraint and a sense of frustration and gnawing regret at not having grasped the opportunity of the moment, now forever lost save in the retroactive evocations of fantasy. There is a further, more concealed, link between Emden’s account of the stalled shiddukh and that of the Prague ‘miracle’—that is, the veiled hint of Oedipal resentment. Of the Prague aVair, Emden writes that there took place ‘a miracle as occurred to the righteous man, Joseph—even greater in certain respects’. In citing this biblical precedent, it is most unlikely that Emden was not unaware of the midrashic glosses upon the Joseph/Potiphar’s wife incident. One well-known midrash relates that when Joseph was at the point of succumbing to Potiphar’s wife’s advances, he beheld a vision of his father’s face and ‘his blood was cooled’;35 it is this gloss that may well have been uppermost in Emden’s mind as he evokes the precedent of Joseph in his account of the Prague incident. It is surprising that Cohen, in his psycho-analytically informed study of Emden, should not have noted the signiWcance here of the Joseph motif; though Berdichevsky, with his unerring instinct for the Qera’ in its Oedipal and erotic manifestations, hints at this correspondence between Emden’s account of the shiddukh and that of the Prague incident when he conflates the two passages in his Shetei nashim behayyei ya’aqov emdin. No less remarkable than Emden’s candour in the sexual sphere is the extraordinary openness with which he discusses his mental and physical conditions in Megillat sefer and, indeed, elsewhere in his writings. Graphic depictions of bodily conditions and ailments are, it is true, to be found in pre-modern autobiographical documents—most

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notably in such Renaissance productions as Cardano’s Vita, Montaigne’s Essais and, as has been noted, Modena’s Hayyei yehudah; such depictions are part and parcel of the Renaissance fascination with man and environment as phenomenological objects of enquiry. In none of these writings, however, does ailment—mental/physical and the two in noxious counter-action—assume quite so central a place as in Megillat sefer. In this respect, also, comparison of Megillat sefer with Rousseau’s Confessions yields more compelling aYnities than comparison of the work with any pre-modern autobiographical document—Jewish or non-Jewish. It would be idle to speculate concerning the precise nature of the urinary and penile aZictions of which both Emden and Rousseau complained. It is, rather, in the place accorded by each man to illness in the total scheme of their self-understanding and in the strategies elected for self-presentation that an extraordinary correspondence emerges.36 Both Rousseau and Emden are at pains—as are Châteaubriand and Nietzsche—to stress the uniqueness of their aZictions; misunderstood and persecuted by their fellow men and dealt, moreover, a series of cruel blows by nature, each man carries his ill-health as a token of unwarranted aZiction and of fortitude in the face of adversity—‘What does not kill him makes him stronger’, as Nietzsche writes.37 Each traces the seeds of his aZictions to earliest infancy, and for each these earliest symptoms serve as a mark of their uniqueness—even of a certain elective superiority; there is, it should be noted, some connection here with the ‘diYcult birth’ motif as has been discussed above vis-à-vis Modena’s Hayyei yehudah. Thus Rousseau: I was almost born dead, and they had little hope of saving me. I brought with me the seed of a disorder which has grown stronger with the years, and now gives me only occasional intervals of relief in which to suVer more painfully in some other way. . . . I suVered before I began to think: which is the common fate of man, though crueller in my case than in another’s.38

And Emden, in his autobiographical prolegomenon to She’ilat ya’abets, writes in similar vein: So I, the aZicted and grief-stricken, was born to my parents in great sorrow—so I have been informed. For my father and teacher,

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the Ga’on, was at that time, stricken with melancholy and had fallen into so dire a depression that the physicians all but despaired of his recovery; only by the merciful administrations of the Almighty was he returned to strength and health. These circumstances, at all events, appear to have left some impression upon my life-history. For, from birth onwards, I was liable to anxiety and depression, palpitations of the heart, lassitude, dizziness, Wts of melancholy . . . From then on, I was assailed by a melancholy over which I had no control . . . Not once, nor twice, but a hundred times have I tasted death . . . To this day I have found in this world neither peace nor joy nor satisfaction . . . In fact, I hated life, I despised it.39

And in Megillat sefer, in his preface to the life-history proper, Emden writes: ‘Should even a thousandth part of the suVerings that I, a child of good family have endured, this would defy credence. Am I fashioned of stone, my flesh of bronze?40 I was, rather, an infant coddled by my parents, pampered and weak, accident-prone, highly susceptible to disease.’41 In his brief account of his childhood years, Emden relates only of his mishaps and illnesses: blows to the face, a penile infection, boils on the feet,42 measles, teething problems, glandular swelling, snivelling and coughing, pimples, an incommodious ‘pressure’ of the Wngernails. And, as if this were not enough, Emden was hit ‘without mercy’ by his Melammedim.43 Unembarrassed, and frequently quite stomach-churning, accounts of illness recur as a leitmotif of Megillat sefer; most noteworthy, in this respect, is perhaps the extraordinarily vivid and gruesome description of Emden’s forcible removal of a massive ringworm from his bowels.44 As Rousseau had promised to reveal himself intus et in cute, so certainly does Emden—at least, when it comes to organic ailments. There is also, as there is with Rousseau, a certain sexual complexion to Emden’s ailments, or, rather to the treatment these ailments receive in their autobiographical presentation. He displays, as does Rousseau, an especial preoccupation with the penis; penile aZiction, indeed, is the second of the three most traumatic childhood experiences that he chooses to recall at the onset of Megillat sefer.45 He speaks unabashedly in Megillat sefer, and elsewhere in his writings, of sexual impotence and of involuntary erections and emissions—these frequently

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within the context of his supposed malady.46 There is some precedent for detailed exploration of male and female sexual functions in Mishnaic, Talmudic and in particular Zoharic literature; but these matters are here discussed at arm’s length in a manner quite divorced from the personal. Emden’s frank revelations of these aspects of his personal experience would appear only to be commensurable, in Jewish literature, with parallel accounts in Hebrew and Yiddish autobiographies that take Rousseau’s Confessions as their point of departure. Emden’s audacity in his exposure of aspects of the physical that many, even latter-day, autobiographers would have better left untouched is matched by the extraordinary frankness with which he depicts his inner psychological fluctuations and waverings. Emden, it appears, from the evidence of the above-cited section from the introduction to the second part of She’ilat Ya’abets, viewed his propensity to the depression, by which he was debilitated at regular intervals in his life, as genetically determined.47 The Wrst acute manifestation of the Shehorah—‘blackness’, or ‘black dog’, as Emden terms his depression—appears to have occurred in Emden’s adolescence. It was precipitated, it seems, by the frustration occasioned at the stalling of the Shiddukh with his Wrst love, the daughter of R. Leyb of Emden, and by the prospect of his imminent marriage, negotiated by his father, to Rachel Katz.48 Attendant psychosomatic symptoms of acute anxiety accompany this Wrst attack of the Meihush hashehorah—insomnia and shortness of breath—and, Emden implies, all this contributed to his inability to perform on his wedding night.49 Commercially ambitious, but, it seems, inept, Emden is assailed by the Shehorah when faced with Wnancial duress at the collapse of several ill-advised undertakings. He seeks refuge from his cares in wine and hard liquor. Finding alcohol counter-productive, Emden seeks release from his ‘depression and agitation’ in tea.50 This he drinks to excess, with the result that he is assailed by urinary incontinence—also one of Rousseau’s chief complaints—so severe that ‘several times there was but a hairsbreadth between myself and death’.51 Compelled, eventually, to abstain from tea, Emden switches to coVee; an unwise substitution, the drinking of coVee nevertheless grants him some respite from his torments, without, unsurprisingly, eVecting any cure to his urinary condition.52

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So candid and detailed a depiction of mental depression with its attendant somatic symptoms is, to the best of my knowledge, unparalleled in previous—and in fact subsequent—Jewish autobiographical writings. Again, it is only Modena who provides some precedent for this, but for the latter it is external circumstance and the ‘constellations’ rather than inner, psychological diagnosis of his mood-swings that constitute the focus of enquiry. That Emden should have left us with quite so graphic a depiction of his depressions, and of his none-tooorthodox means of numbing his inner pain, is all the more surprising in view of the fact that he, unlike Modena, clearly has a fairly wide audience in mind for his book; Megillat sefer is mentioned as the last of the books in the list of his unpublished works that he includes in the life-history, and he refers to the work elsewhere in his writings.53 In part, of course, Emden’s depictions of mental suVering serve him much as do his accounts of his physical ailments; the two, indeed, frequently coincide, and since he, like Rousseau, was something of a hypochondriac, many of his physical ailments should be viewed as part and parcel of the Shehorah. In depicting his mental anguish, Emden underlines the unique misfortune of his lot in life, lending thereby conWrmation to the desired self-image he would convey—that of the righteous suVerer, of whom the supreme exemplum is Job. Mental anguish, as does physical, also provides him with an occasion for confessio laudis; his direst aZictions, mental and physical, along with his sexual temptations, are presented by Emden, above all, as trials or tests, and are characteristically accompanied in Megillat sefer by psalmodic refrains— frequently in rhyme—attesting to the redemptive beniWcence of the Almighty. Thus, he interrupts the narrative that tells of the fearful depression in Amsterdam and of his fruitless recourse to alcohol and caffeine as palliatives: Were I to relate all that befell me then in Amsterdam, this would inspire terror—eyes would turn away in horror, ears would be loth to hear . . . Only in brief shall I make known a fraction of what occurred. I shall not prolong in declaring the mercies of God upon me; how, even though I was constantly stricken with manifold and terrible aZictions, He saved my feet from stumbling. May He be blessed for all eternity, and generation upon generation confess to

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His name . . . My sins do I recall in commemorating in writing how my sorrows and distress did multiply; they almost destroyed me— were it not for the great mercies of God, I would have perished in my poverty amidst the most extraordinary aZictions until then quite unimaginable to me.54

Emden’s location of his experience within the ancient paradigm of trial and deliverance, to the accompaniment of psalmodic refrain, enables him to contain his most potentially threatening experiences within the boundaries of his theological perspectives. The data of the life-history, however, here as elsewhere in Megillat sefer exert considerable pressure upon the salviWc and laudatory framework within which they are contained—or better constrained. It is in measure, indeed, as the content of Megillat sefer compromises its structural superimpositions that the work moves toward the autobiographical. Emden, in his remarkably vivid description of his inner states, his erotic trials, eVectively breaks through to aspects of experience untouched upon in any Jewish autobiographical writing that can have been known to him at the time of writing Megillat sefer; a further century would elapse before the Wrst full publication of Hayyei yehudah, and even longer before that of the anonymous autobiography of a seventeenth-century Bohemian Jew, as discussed above. All the more remarkable, in view of this lack of precedent, is the considerable artistry with which Emden navigates what, in Jewish autobiographical writing, was for him a dark continent. He succeeds in drawing nuance and pathos from an extremely limited vocabulary of essentially biblical Hebrew—a flawed instrument for the expression of complex eighteenth-century emotions, which he nonetheless coaxes to unfamiliar strains with admirable dexterity. Emden’s narrative, moreover, proceeds, albeit at intervals, with a certain pace and verve; his above-cited accounts of dark moods and erotic encounters are set against a swiftly changing backdrop of cast and place strongly suggestive of the picaresque. The picaresque, a modality characterized by movement and employed to good eVect by Rousseau as he accompanies his youthful protagonist on his adventures on the road, is equally well-suited to Emden’s purposes as he retraces his complex and lengthy itineraries, often fraught with danger, throughout Europe on

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various debt-collecting and mercantile expeditions. Following swiftly upon the heels of the Prague incident, there thus appears the following wonderfully executed account: From Prague, I travelled in health and safety on a covered wagon called a ‘land-coach’ which travelled from there to Bruenn, the capital of Merrin. I took care to book a seat in advance, along with a group of Jews from Merrin who were returning home, and we made payment to the driver for the foremost and highest places in the coach, according to the custom whereby the earlier the booking was made, the further forward one was seated in the coach. Upon our arriving at the coach, however, there came also two foreigners, one an Italian trader, the other a priest. Even though these two came after us, they pushed us Jews out of our original seats, amidst derision and cursing, and the driver could not stand up against them, even had he wished to, for he knew that to do so would be a religious and legal infraction. He was thus compelled to hold his peace, while we were the butt of various insults from these dreadful men who gave us not a moment’s respite. We could not fulWll the commandment of laying on TeWllin, nor were we able to make our proper prayers, for they constantly interrupted us, shouting out ‘Wretched Jews!’ Each time there was a slight curve in the road, they would hurl the most foul abuse at us—‘Get the hell out of the coach and walk’—and force us out of the coach as they pleased. This, actually, was all for the better, for the Lord saw us in our distress. So, for some ten miles after Prague, they continued to harrass us until we came to a particularly treacherous section of the way where we had to negotiate an extremely narrow path. On one side was a mountain sheer as a wall, on the other a steep incline that plummeted deep as an abyss. Upon reaching the most perilous point of the way, these men threw us out of the coach violently, as was their wont; we, on our part, did not resist and followed on foot while they remained safely ensconced in the carriage. Thus we continued walking at a distance when the coach suddenly overturned, toppling head-Wrst on the slope that, as has been mentioned, was adjacent to the road. The coach was heavily loaded with trunks and barrels, some of which fell on top of the Italian tradesman, breaking almost every bone in his body, so that he fell down crushed and was in such grave condition that he could not return to the coach and was forced to remain there on the road and seek lodgings in the nearby village. The priest, on

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the other hand, went totally unharmed. The tradesman, nonetheless, was loth to let him leave his side, asserting that he was duty-bound to remain with him lest he die. In addition to this, they were both mortiWed to the quick upon realizing how we rejoiced in their downfall and in all that the God in whom they themselves placed their trust had shown us. Thus did our tormentors take leave of us and we parted from them in peace. Having seen vengeance upon our foes, we resumed our journey rejoicing and of good cheer. We sat alone in a spacious carriage and we could observe our religious duties without hindrance or injury on the way. With the help of the Almightly, blessed be He, we reached Bruenn healthy and in good spirits. There, who should I chance upon but the priest with whom I had parted on the road! He shook his head at me and said that never again would he travel in the same coach with a Jew.55

This is a particularly Wne passage, but many others in Megillat sefer would serve equally well to illustrate Emden’s narrative skill and powers of evocation. Indeed, taken out of context, such a passage would do credit to, if not outshine, some of the picaresque descriptions of such nineteenth-century Hebrew novelists as Broides or Smolenskin, both of whom were of course well-acquainted with the novelistic conventions of their day. Abraham Bick’s novelistic recasting of this episode in modern literary Yiddish can scarcely be said to improve upon the original.56 Of primary concern in the present context is not, however, Emden’s literary artistry in and of itself, but rather the application of such literary technique in the service of autobiographical self-presentation; for, I would argue, as the narrative techniques pioneered in the eighteenth-century novel enable Rousseau to recapture experience of the past in the autobiographical act, so does Emden, albeit with far less assurance than Rousseau, adopt certain of these techniques in the recasting of life-experience in Megillat sefer. Emden himself, in a passage strikingly reminiscent of accounts of the Wrst acquisition of the rudiments of secular knowledge in many Haskalah autobiographies, of which Maimon provides the locus classicus,57 testiWes to some—albeit limited—acquaintance with the nonJewish literary currents of his day. From the time of his Wrst extensive travels after the death of his father, Emden writes: ‘I felt a constant inclination to study also the aVairs of the world—diVerent peoples and

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faiths, their values and opinions, their histories and philosophies— none of which was to be found in our sacred books.’58 The opportunity to satisfy this hunger for secular knowledge presented itself while Emden was in Amsterdam, at a time when he was wracked by the most acute depression: There, I made the acquaintance of a young boy, one of the servants, who was learning how to read and write in the non-Jewish language (La’az). I took him aside and asked him to teach me the letters of the foreign alphabet as they are printed. These he had only just begun to learn from his teacher, a non-Jewish scribe; he himself could still only make out the shape of the letters with diYculty, and only in their separate forms, not having learnt to read cursive script. Only once or twice did the boy show me, saying, ‘this is “A” this is “B” et cetera’— no more than that. But, with the help of the Almighty Blessed be He, who bestows knowledge upon man, I formed a mental concept of the likeness of the letters immediately. Afterwards, I worked hard, all by myself, quite unaided, in combining the letters. I succeeded in so doing and gained an understanding of the matter with no teacher or guide to give me any aid whatsoever. Within a short time, I gained suYcient knowledge to read foreign books in German with ease, as if I had been tutored in this for several years. I only succeeded, however, in reading their printed books and capitalized handwriting. I still have not mastered the art of reading foreign tongues in cursive script . . . There are even certain signs and punctuation marks and variant forms of letters in typed Roman script that I still do not know to this day; for such knowledge is not acquired in the process of hurried and casual oral instruction from a half-educated boy. And later, I felt too ashamed to ask anyone to make good my deWciencies in the knowledge of their language. Nonetheless, I hastened to read as many of their printed books as I could lay hold of, until I had acquired suYcient expertise to read Dutch even, and periodicals, and to gain a good understanding of Latin. I read widely in all branches of European knowledge in order to gain some understanding of all the opinions concerning other men’s faiths, their beliefs and customs, and in order to ascertain their estimation of us and of our sacred tradition. I also longed to know and understand the setting of the terrestrial globe, as this is explained in their books concerning the movement of the planetary spheres. I was also most desirous of acquiring an understanding of their works concerning natural history,

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the composition of minerals and the properties of plants and herbs, and especially the science of medicine, also of their statecraft and wars, their legends, the incidental accounts and histories of travelwriters, the seas, rivers and deserts and their geographers, crafts, all of their wiles, charms and deceptions, and tales of vanity construed of Wctional inventions. All this did I behold in their books . . . Such knowledge I acquired so as not to be naked in the wisdom of worldly men. For all that, I took the greatest care not to read nor study such books, save in places where it was forbidden to study Torah—never in any other place.59

This is a moving account and one of considerable signiWcance for the history of Jewish mentalities of the period. Noteworthy is the subtlety and nuance with which the play of Emden’s conflicting emotions is conveyed, and this in quite an uncontrived manner. The hunger for knowledge and the satisfaction at his newly found attainments is oVset by a gnawing sense of cultural inferiority that oVends his innate Jewish pride; he puts a brave face indeed upon the indignity of receiving instruction from a semi-literate child, a servant at that, rendering the innate hurtfulness of this situation all the more poignant. The ambivalence that breathes from this passage is compounded in that Emden feels, at the same time, constrained to excuse himself before his prospective Jewish reader for his considerable departure from the traditional curriculum. Both Azriel Shohet and Ben Tsiyon Katz tend to downplay the actual extent of Emden’s secular knowledge;60 certainly, the extent of his historical and medical knowledge is belied by some of the more preposterous opinions expressed in his responsa that fly in the face of any rational enquiry,61 and by his astonishingly vitriolic attack upon Azariah de Rossi’s Me’or ’einayim.62 From the evidence of Megillat sefer alone, however, it would appear that Emden did, as he puts it, ‘draw forth sweetness from strength’ and Wnd ‘honey’ in these non-Jewish books ‘which I gathered into my hands to employ in service of the Almighty in several matters, both anonymous and those to which I signed my name’.63 While Emden may have rejected much of the content of these books and ‘gazettes’, read only ‘in places where contemplation of Torah is forbidden’,64 the style of these secular compositions would appear to have left a more lasting impression. Emden’s depiction, for example, of

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the mighty mountains, ravines and oceans encountered in his wanderings is surely facilitated by his acquaintance with the ‘incidental accounts (Ma’asiyot zulatiyot) and histories of travel-writers, the seas, rivers and deserts of their geographers’. Likewise, in his graphic descriptions of his physical symptoms, he is, no doubt, in part indebted to the popular books of medicine he read, and whose counsel he followed to such deleterious eVect. Above all, however, and this has been noted by Abraham Bick, it is with the spirit of the novel—the Sippurei havalim behamtsa’ot beduyot—that Megillat sefer is infused. SigniWcant, indeed, is that one of the few—if not the only one—of these ‘tales of vanity construed of Wctional inventions’ that Emden mentions by name is a rendition, most probably German, of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.65 It is the eighteenth-century novel that provides the uniting link between Megillat sefer and Rousseauian autobiography; and it is at those points in the narrative of Megillat sefer where the influence of the novel is most clearly discernible that Emden foreshadows his close contemporary, Maimon, and Jewish autobiographical writings that take the Lebensgeschichte as their point of departure. There remain, for all this, some very real distinctions to be drawn between Megillat sefer and autobiographical writing as this is practised after Rousseau. Emden, however we assess the extent of his reading of non-Jewish literature, has, as has been noted, never read an autobiography. He is thus faced with very much the same dilemma, when it comes to the structuring of autobiographical experience—the translation of bios to graphe—as Modena, Yagel and Gluckel—none of whose autobiographical works he had read. In the absence of any ‘implicit agenda’, established by precedent, for the presentation of the life-history in autobiographical format, such structure as may be discerned in Megillat sefer is as sui generis as that of Gei’ hizzayon, Hayyei yehudah, of the Memoirs. One acute manifestation of the structural dilemma, as has been noted with respect to Modena’s Hayyei yehudah, resides in the inability of the author to confer upon his work a satisfactory sense of closure. No less problematic, in the absence of any ‘implicit agenda’ for autobiographical productions, is the conferral upon the life-history of an adequate sense of inception. And it is from the inception of Megillat sefer that Emden’s structural idiosyncrasies become apparent. Emden’s ap-

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pearance as central protagonist of Megillat sefer is, actually, much delayed. He begins his narrative in the mid seventeenth century with an account of his paternal grandfather, which serves as a prolegomenon to a lengthy eulogistic biography of his father, the Hakham Tsvi. This biographical section of Megillat sefer is not itself free of lengthy digressions, especially when it comes to the accounts of the many feuds and controversies of the Hakham Tsvi—a man no less given to contention than was his son. And in one such account, concerning his father’s most bitter controversy with the crypto-Sabbatian, Nehemiah Hayyun, Emden makes a gigantic ‘flash-forward’ to his own, equally acrimonious, controversy with Jonathan Eibeschuetz.66 Only after some Wfty rambling and quite wearisome pages of apologetic polemics on behalf of the Hakham Tsvi does Emden make a peremptory break in his biographical account and writes: Thus far has my story concerned itself with Father, may his memory be blessed—with those events, at least, that have remained in my memory. For much I heard, but forgot, and of much more I had but a shadowy knowledge, for I was but seven years old and he was approaching forty at the time of my birth . . . I have even forgotten most of what I learnt from hearsay, on account of all the turbulence and confusion of my latter years, at whose recall I should recoil in terror. Indeed, in view of these dreadful occurrences, I very much doubt if I could recall them at all. And even were I to recall them, their number would be as grains of sand, which to write of each and every one an inWnite quantity of quills and ink would not suYce. I shall thus make short, proceeding rung by rung.67

There then follows the preamble to the life-history proper, so reminiscent of Rousseau, as has been cited above. In beginning his own life-history at this late juncture, the ‘unique construction’, as Zinberg puts it,68 of Megillat sefer places Emden in something of a quandary; for in giving an account, in the Wrst section, of his father’s life, he has already touched upon several essential aspects of his own experience—notably his birth and Wrst marriage. To omit those events of his own life already touched upon in the Wrst section of Megillat sefer is scarcely a feasible option. And so Emden, in his autobiography proper, is forced to retrace his steps chronologically and provide a second account of his birth: ‘As I have mentioned above,

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at the time of my conception my father suVered a depressive illness on account of his Wnancial losses,’69 et cetera. This second birth of the autobiographical protagonist necessitates further repetitions, albeit rendered with interesting variation, of, inter alia, Emden’s Wrst marriage and the negotiations leading thereunto, his separation from his father at the age of seventeen and the death and funeral of the Hakham Tsvi shortly thereafter.70 These are to a degree, however, inevitable repetitions, forced upon Emden by his decision to preface his own life-history with an account of that of his father. Quite aside, though, from the ineluctable repetitions that are occasioned by the eccentric architectonics of the work, Emden does have a marked and innate tendency to repeat, or—to adopt contemporary psychologese—to perseverate. This tendency is apparent even in the Wrst, largely biographical, section of Megillat sefer,71 and becomes more pronounced as the work progresses. Thus, the sudden death of Emden’s second wife is related twice, once fleetingly and once in greater detail, in the span of two pages.72 Likewise, the tea-drinking episode in Amsterdam, with the subsequent symptoms of caVeinepoisoning and urinary incontinence, is recounted twice in the span of three pages. Indeed, so aVected is Emden by the recall of the dreadful depression by which he was aZicted during this second sojourn of his in Amsterdam that he appears to be unaware that he is repeating himself. Two paragraphs, which appear on the same printed page in the Bick edition, begin with an almost identical refrain: Were I to undertake to record in writing the new aZictions and the adverse occurrences that fell to my lot in the period of my second sojourn in Amsterdam, on account of the increasing depression—may God protect us—the reader would be aghast and scarcely believe such things possible. . . . Were I to recall all that befell me in Amsterdam, this would inspire terror—eyes would turn away in amazement, ears would be loth to hear . . . 73

On other occasions, when the events that he recalls provide him with lesser cause for agitation, Emden seems quite well aware of the digressions and repetitions by which his autobiographical narrative is marred; this awareness, however, is matched by a seeming inability— perhaps even disinclination—to rectify these flaws. So, from begin-

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ning to end of Megillat sefer, and at regular intervals throughout the work, Emden feels called upon to address the reader with such asides as: ‘Let us return to the life-history of this sainted man’;74 ‘Let us return to the point’;75 ‘At this point, I return to the sequence of my narrative and life-history—with the help of the Almighty, blessed be He—to the place at which there occurred a temporary interruption’;76 ‘I shall now return to the place where I was in this account,’77 et cetera. Emden’s inability to Wnd adequate span or structure for the autobiographical presentation of his experience actually appears, at times, to occasion him considerable frustration. He senses constantly that his narrative is running away from him, and he feels, at the same time, insuYcient to the task of portraying the enormity of the subject at hand. Thus, in a series of refrains, which appear with the same regularity as the many declarations of intention to ‘return to the subject at hand’, Emden makes an open disavowal of prolixity, at the same time as stressing that the actual scope of his experience is far greater than can be intimated by medium of the written word: ‘To present all the details of the matter is beyond my ability. This would require several scrolls and even that would not suYce’;78 ‘Were I to relate all that occurred to Father in Lvov, this would take too long’;79 ‘These are but a few of the mercies and wonders that the Lord, in His great compassion, showed me in Merrin. I would give an account, at least, of the majority of these, but much I do not remember and I am unable to concentrate suYciently on that period to relate all of them in their proper order and as they occurred. Besides, this would make the book extremely long’;80 ‘Were I to put into writing all that occurred to me, my canvas would prove too short; for this would require a book in itself and even then I could not touch upon even a third or a quarter of the matter.’81 That Emden is, in eVect, floundering in face of the diYcult art of the translation of life to text is evident from these asides. For lack of any model for the hewing out of autobiographical form, he feels called upon to explain to the reader why he falls short of the impossible task of presenting all that occurred in the life-history in its precise sequence and exactly as it happened. Emden’s addresses to the reader are, themselves, moreover, formulaic and repetitious, his disavowals of prolixity, prolix, serving only to create unnecessary deflections in an

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already confused narrative. They thus diVer markedly from the ‘instantaneous’ asides and digressions pioneered by Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and adopted to such eVect by Rousseau and subsequent autobiographers. The polemical agitation with which he writes must be reckoned as an additional factor in his inability to relate his life in an orderly fashion—like the monologist of The Kreutzer Sonata. If repetition emerges, at the end of the day, as the one underlying principle of the rhetorical structure of Megillat sefer, repetition and recurrence are no less deeply inscribed in the basic thematic of the work. Emden viewed his own life, to a degree, as a repetition of that of his father. He traces, as has been noted, the origins of his depression to events in the life-history of his father. Several times in Megillat sefer, as elsewhere in his writings, Emden cites the rabbinic dictum: ‘All that befalls the father, befalls his children.’82 Emden’s own life, moreover, as this is presented in Megillat sefer, tends to repeat itself. Thus, as has been noted, Emden views his erotic temptations as recurrent variations upon the trial motif. A certain repetitious formula underlies, likewise, Emden’s accounts of his many controversies, his successive ill-starred business enterprises, and the bickerings, more often than not Wnancial, that soured his three marriages.83 Emden’s tendency to perceive his experience in terms of the repetition of prior events places considerable constraints upon his autobiographical self-expression. This tendency, moreover, runs counter to one of the implicit tenets of autobiography, according to which the evolution of identity is to be traced as an open-ended process of becoming. If lack of precedent presented Emden with insurmountable problems when it came to the presentation of his experience in scriptural form, no less were the problems of the future editors of the manuscript of Megillat sefer who sought to present the book in printed form as an autobiography. Repetitions and digressions aside, there are no chapter or paragraph divisions in the original manuscript of Megillat sefer, and the book reaches no satisfactory conclusion. Emden’s account, rather, peters out with the death of Jonathan Eibeschuetz in 1765,84 the outbreak of the controversy with whom provided, it appears, the initial stimulus for the writing of Megillat sefer.85 Thus David Kahana, whose avowed intention in the Wrst edition of Megillat sefer was to publish the text in its entirety, himself saw Wt to omit those sections in which Em-

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den repeats himself, ‘so that his words should not prove burdensome to the readers’.86 In view of the indeterminacy of the work, he also saw Wt ‘to complete Emden’s life-history to the day of his death in 1776, drawing upon his own books and those of many other writers. I have also reproduced his wonderful grave-inscription at the end of the book, in order that we may have the life-history of this great man in its entirety’.87 Avraham Bick, the second to edit the complete work, claims to restore the Kahana omissions and encloses the latter’s emendations in brackets; but he too Wnds it necessary to divide the text into chapters, to provide paragraphs and punctuation, bestowing thereby a measure of coherency to the work quite absent in the original.88 Megillat sefer, then, presents altogether a strange phenomenon in the history of Jewish autobiographical writing—and, indeed, in the history of autobiography in general. The work really has no parallel in Hebrew or Yiddish literature, pre-or post-Haskalah. Nor is it possible to illuminate the work by reference to a cluster of non-Jewish texts of roughly contemporaneous provenance—as it is, for example, to locate Modena’s Hayyei yehudah within the wider context of Renaissance self-portraiture. The thematic parallels, unaccountable for in terms of direct literary influence, between Megillat sefer and Rousseau’s Confessions are, however, quite remarkable. That two contemporaries, of such radically diVerent ambience, should evince such elective aYnities in personality constitutes a phenomenon, but one impervious to analysis. Such stylistic aYnities as do exist between Megillat sefer and the Confessions—and these, while striking, are discrete and sporadic—are best attributable to a common source in the novelistic discourse of the late eighteenth century. And yet this begs the question: Why should Emden, as did Rousseau, have perceived the inherent potential of techniques derived from the burgeoning novel for the art of autobiographical self-presentation? It is when viewed as a whole, however, that the major divergencies between Megillat sefer and Rousseauian autobiography become apparent. Emden’s rambling and repetitious autobiographical diatribe has, in terms of overall structure, little in common with the artful and subtle construction of the twelve books of the Confessions. Nor does it evince the design that becomes characteristic of European autobiographical productions, Jewish and nonJewish, after Rousseau.

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Emden was, by all accounts, a contradictory and transitional personality. A staunch defender of Orthodoxy, who inclined toward extreme stringency in many of his Halakhic rulings, he was, nonetheless, by no means unaVected by the wider intellectual currents of his day. The same man who applied his casuistic skill to the issue of whether the castration of Wsh was Halakhically acceptable, who believed implicitly that his grandfather had created, then destroyed a Golem,89 was also the Wrst leading Ashkenazic authority to cast aspersions upon the traditional ascription of authorship of the Zohar to Shimeon ben Yohai.90 In this, indeed, as in certain other aspects, Moses Mendelssohn found in Emden a useful and most unlikely ally.91 Likewise, as autobiographer, Emden stands on the threshold of the new without making, as did his contemporary Rousseau, the decisive advance that would establish autobiography as an autonomous genre. In the history of Jewish autobiography, Emden occupies much the same place as does his contemporary Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (1707–47) in the history of modern Hebrew literature. Arguably the Wrst to introduce secular, humanistic themes into Hebrew poetry, Luzzatto was possessed of an essentially mediaeval world-view, and entertained, moreover, messianic delusions, for which he called forth, inter alios, the vitriol of Emden himself.92 And just as such works of Luzzatto as Migdal ’oz and Layesharim tehillah occupy a thoroughly ambivalent place with respect to the later poetic productions of the Haskalah period,93 so does Megillat sefer with respect to such Haskalah autobiographies as Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer and Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim, to be discussed below.

Nathan of Nemirov’s Yemei maharnat No less singular a text than Emden’s Megillat sefer, and the one work in the cluster of texts discussed in this chapter that is of Russian provenance, is Yemei maharnat of Nathan of Nemirov. Arising from a Hasidic ambience, however, Nathan’s Yemei maharnat raises rather diVerent problems concerning the genesis of Jewish autobiography than does Emden’s Megillat sefer. To consider Yemei maharnat as autobiography is to touch upon an influential theory of modern Jewish literature that would trace the origins of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish

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literature to nineteenth-century Hasidic scriptures—notably the Sippurey mayses of Nahman of Bratslav. One of the Wrst to formulate this theory of the dialectical relation between Hasidism and literary modernity, with particular emphasis upon Nahman of Bratslav, was Shmuel Niger.94 The thesis, which actually has its roots in the Haskalah period itself,95 was later adopted, in modiWed form, by Israel Zinberg and Shimon Halkin.96 Hasidism, according to those scholars who would follow Niger, with its this-worldly orientation, its fostering of individuality, casting aside of the yoke of rabbinic conformity, its quasi-romantic stress upon solitary communion with the wonders of nature, prepared the ground for the emergence of a secular Yiddish and Hebrew belles-lettres in Jewish Eastern Europe. Given, then, the pronounced individualism of the Hasidic ethos— as this is presented by Niger et alii97—its worldly emphases, combined with a marked tendency toward introspection and ‘aloneness’ (Hitbodedut), the Hasidic ambience should, it seems, have provided fertile ground for autobiographical self-exploration. And, within the Hasidic milieu, Bratslav Hasidism, with its institutionalization of the confessional98 and the markedly autobiographical tenor of many of the tales of Nahman of Bratslav,99 would, it appears, provide an auspicious forum for the emergence of novel forms of autobiographical self-expression. Should, then, the arguments of Niger, Halkin et alii prove valid, this would constitute strong ground for an alternative ontogeny for the Jewish autobiographical genre: not under the sign of Rousseau, not in response to literary and social ‘pre-conditions’ in Western Central Europe analogous to those that paved the way for the Confessions did the Jewish autobiographical genre emerge, but rather within the context of an indigenous revivalist movement in the heartland of Eastern European Jewry. Such bifurcation between Western and Eastern Europe, Hasidism and Haskalah, is perhaps altogether too stark, however. Hasidism and Haskalah emerged contemporaneously and each movement vied for the same youthpool disaVected with traditional ways. Maimon, initially, was strongly drawn to this ‘new sect’;100 and the teenage Berdichevsky found his Wrst alternative community, over a century later, amongst Bratslav Hasidim.101 Certainly, Nathan’s Yemei maharnat is not to be understood by reference to Rousseau, nor does the text arise from the same liminal historical

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nexus as Emden’s Megillat sefer. There is no evidence, moreover, of any connection whatsoever between Yemei maharnat and any other work discussed in this chapter. Only from the aspect of its later reception does Yemei maharnat share with Megillat sefer in that sections from these two works are included in Berdichevsky’s presentation of amorous snippets from rabbinic literature, ‘Romanim noshanim’.102 The Wrst instance, moreover, that I have found of the word ‘autobiography’ (’autobiograWah) in Hebrew prose occurs with reference to Yemei maharnat in an earlier essay of Berdichevsky’s on Nahman of Bratslav.103 No less diYcult than to discern the precise relation of Yemei maharnat to the works of those Jewish contemporaries—or near contemporaries—of Nathan, who left autobiographical testaments, is to locate the work within the context of Hasidic scriptures; for, contrary to the implications of the Niger/Halkin thesis, there is actually, as has been noted by both Shatsky and Schwarz, a remarkable dearth of autobiographical or memoiristic documents of Hasidic provenance.104 Yemei maharnat is cited by each not as a primary exemplum of a corpus of commensurate Hasidic texts, but rather as the exception that proves the rule. We know more of the outer circumstances and inner life of Nathan of Nemirov than we do of any other leading Hasidic Wgure of the nineteenth century, save Nahman of Bratslav, whose own life-history was preserved for posterity by none other than his faithful disciple, Nathan. The problem of precedent, of lack of any ‘implicit agenda’ for autobiographical presentation of self, is as acute, if not more so, for Nathan as it had been for Jacob Emden. While Nathan is writing almost Wfty years after Emden, he is, in terms of non-Jewish culture, a virtual illiterate. He is thus precluded, unlike Emden, from making eclectic borrowings from novels, travels, geographies et cetera, in the recasting of life into narrative. These disadvantages notwithstanding, Nathan does actually succeed in conveying a powerful sense of his own motivations and personality—so much so that he found ardent champions in Yisroel Zinberg and Eliezer Shteinman against the derogatory remarks of Shimon Dubnow, who viewed him primarily as a boorish and uncomprehending scribe.105 Nathan, indeed, as has been noted by a more recent

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scholar, Arthur Green, provides an inviting prospect for the biographer.106 The question to be addressed in the present context is how, without the parameters of any autobiographical discourse, did Nathan succeed in his writings in leaving so powerful an imprint of his personality? Yemei maharnat, in this respect, actually provides a good instance of the shortcomings of a literary-historical approach that would seek to apply generic categories derived from European literature in an overly rigid manner to indigenously Jewish forms of literary production. The methodological remarks with which Niger prefaces his genre-study of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature are here germane: We do not always have to deal here with the narrative genres with which we are acquainted from other literatures. For this reason, it would not be correct to follow the well-beaten path and rest satisWed with accepted literary classiWcations. We must be well aware of our own literary life, remember our own cultural tradition which nourishes it, and then discern which types of literature we share with other people and which are indigenous to us by dint of the diVerent conditions, requirements and possibilities of our unique environment.107

Bearing Niger’s observations in mind, it is best, perhaps, to approach Yemei maharnat not from the vantage-point of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European literature, but rather from the aspect of the unique spiritual and literary ambience within which Nathan operated—the circle of Nahman of Bratslav and his disciples. Nathan’s understanding of the rôle of literary testament, indeed his very sense of self, derive above all from the profound impression made upon him by the extraordinary personality of Nahman of Bratslav. The Wrst stimulus for Nathan’s setting pen to paper appears to have been Nahman’s prompting his new-found disciple to record his teachings and tales.108 Nathan proved to be ideally suited to the rôle of chronicler of his master’s teachings and life. Not only do Nathan’s Shivhei haran and Hayyei moharan109 remain the primary sources for Nahman’s life to this day,110 but also virtually all of Nahman’s teachings and tales were mediated through the person of Nathan and translated by him from Yiddish to Hebrew.111 This, in itself, creates a considerable methodological problem for any scholar of Bratslav Hasidism; for Nahman comes to us as Wltered through the consciousness of Nathan. In treating of the one, we

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treat ineluctably of the other; and it is unclear—so will it remain— whose was the guiding intelligence in the transformation of Nahman’s life and teaching to text. A comparable situation may be imagined, should the sole source available for a biography of Johnson be Boswell’s Life.112 That such exclusive reliance upon a secondary source should not prove an insurmountable obstacle in Bratslav scholarship is due to the extraordinary qualities—measured, that is, by the standards of his day— of Nathan as a biographer. Nathan’s reliability and precision as historical witness derive, however, not from any nascent historicism, nor from acquaintance with the Wrst Hebrew biographies written in the empirical mode—notably Euchel’s life of Mendelssohn—that had begun, in his day, to appear in Haskalah circles,113 but rather from theological conceptions peculiar to Bratslav Hasidism. The speciWcally Hasidic lineage of Nathan’s biographical works is attested to by his Wrst choice of title for his Wrst treatment of the life of Nahman, Shivhei haran. This title would seem to place the work squarely within the context of Hasidic hagiography, for which the prototype is Shivhei habesht.114 While Nathan, as biographer, is certainly infused with the hagiographic spirit, there is, as has been noted by Yosef Dan and Arthur Green, a marked distinction to be drawn between the classic mode of Hasidic hagiography as exempliWed by Shivhei habesht and Nathan’s accounts of the life of Nahman.115 From the hagiographical perspective, Nathan’s most glaring omission in Shivhei haran and Hayyei Moharan is of any but passing mention of the supernatural and/or the miraculous. This absence is only explicable by reference to the singularly Bratslav conception of the Tsaddiq; for the doctrine of the Tsaddiq, as expounded by Nahman of Bratslav—or as understood by Nathan—assigned equal revelatory signiWcance to every utterance, gesture and day-to-day action of the master.116 Accounts of miracles proper would, thus, prove not only redundant, but even subversive of a scheme in which there is so thorough a confluence of the quotidian and the supernatural. A quasi-scientiWc accuracy and comprehensiveness, not usually associated with the genre, are, moreover, required of the hagiographer who would discern, in each and every earthly manifestation of the Tsaddiq, some inkling—frequently imperfectly understood, or not understood at all—of the workings of the Divine.117

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This is not tantamount to modern scientiWc biography, but rather, as Joseph Dan notes, the taking of hagiography to the extremes of selfnegation.118 Paradoxically, however, and contrary to Nathan’s intentions, the end result of this taking of the hagiographic to its outer limits is an enhancement of the humanness of the subject, much as would be achieved in latter-day biographical writings.119 This hagiographic background and the unique dynamics of Bratslav Tsaddiqism are indispensable for an understanding of Yemei maharnat, a work written toward the end of Nathan’s life, after his Wrst exercises in hagiography, and, most likely, concurrently with his preparation of further material on Nahman, eventually to appear in the posthumously published Hayyei moharan. In writing of Nahman, that is, Nathan developed the literary skills and thoroughly distinctive style that he would eventually employ in writing of the self. The interrelation of the works that deal with the master and those that deal with the disciple, Nathan, is so marked that scholars of Bratslav Hasidism do not, in general, distinguish between Yemei maharnat and Nathan’s hagiographical writings, either in terms of literary form or in terms of the testamentary problems raised by the deflection of attention from Tsaddiq to self. Green, Yosef Weiss and Piekarz, for example, draw upon Yemei maharnat as a useful supplement in the reconstruction of aspects of Nahman’s career that are omitted, or glossed over, in Liqqutei moharan, Shivhei haran and Hayyei moharan.120 Nathan himself, it appears, from an anecdote recounted in ’Emunat ’iteikha,121 and reprinted at the head of a recent edition of Yemei maharnat, did draw some distinction between Yemei maharnat and his hagiographical accounts of the life of Nahman: It is known amongst our brethren what our teacher, the sainted master, Rabbi Nathan, once said concerning the book Hayyei Moharan, in which is related the holy life of our sainted teacher and leader, Rabbi Nahman. This book he entitled ‘Life’, whereas to the book Yemei maharnat, wherein is related the events that befell upon him himself, he gave the title ‘Days’. Our master and teacher—may the memory of the righteous be a blessing—explained concerning this: ‘Our leader and guide and sainted master really succeeded in living a new life at each instant, through his awesome and wondrous insights into the holy Torah; for these, themselves, are the essence of life, as it

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is written ‘For He is your life’ (Deut. 30:20). So, did he once proclaim of himself: ‘Today I experienced life, life in such a manner as I have never previously attained.’ Thus does the name ‘Life’ genuinely beWt the account of his sainted existence. I, however, cannot draw upon nor coax such abundance so as to be imbued with the life-force, other than by means of our guide and teacher and sainted master, he who is my life and length of days, who bestows upon me constantly wisdom, understanding and knowledge. Only through him and through his great strength was it granted me to experience such Wne and festive days as I have enjoyed in his service—may he be blessed. It is for this reason that the word ‘Days’ is most Wtting for my book in which I relate the events that befell me.’122

As with many of the Bratslav oral traditions, this anecdote is not subject to hard and fast authentication. The kernel of the account does, however, in light of Yemei maharnat and Nathan’s letters collected in ‘Alim literufah, ring decisively true. It is also substantiated by the title Nathan himself gave to his work: not Yemei maharnat/The Days of Our Teacher, Rav Nathan—the title conferred upon the work by the Bratslav disciple who edited the work for its Wrst publication—but the more modest Yemei natan/The Days of Nathan.123 Nathan’s comments here are revealing of the approximation of his peculiarly Bratslav hagiographic sensibility to his own self-accounting in Yemei maharnat. While Yemei maharnat partakes—and here Niger’s remarks are in order—in certain aspects, of the characteristics of biography, autobiography and the memoir, it is, at the end of the day, as irreducible to any one of these literary modalities as it is to the Hasidic shevahim (‘praises’) in the classic mode. Unlike Gluckel’s Zikhroynes, however, the work seems to bear none but the most tenuous aYnities with any indigenous Jewish literary forms. The problem is compounded in that it is by no means clear for whom, exactly, Nathan considered himself to be writing Yemei maharnat, the function that he envisaged for this work, nor, indeed, whether he ever had an eye upon its publication. And, aside from the unascertainable degree of self-censorship to which all Bratslav texts are prone,124 it is clear that the posthumously published Yemei maharnat has undergone a secondary process of revision and emendation at the hands of the anonymous ‘copyist’ (Ma’atiq) who Wrst took the work to print.125 Not only, then, has the self-censoring device operative within

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Nathan quite possibly distorted the text beyond its original conception, but we have no way of knowing the degree to which Yemei maharnat, as written by Nathan, actually corresponds to the printed version of the text. Arising, then, from the peculiar literary and historical conWguration of Bratslav Hasidism, the self and texts of Nathan of Nemirov are inextricably entwined with those of his master, the most egregious of Tsaddiqim, Nahman. Indeed, Nathan’s ‘days’ do not properly begin until his path intersects with the ‘life’ of Nahman. Nathan, like Augustine and others who have felt the impact of a conversion experience, perceives a radical division between all that occurred prior to the revelation and Wnal turning and all that ensued thereafter. He thus dispenses with all that befell him from his birth in 1780 to his Wrst fateful encounter with Nahman, at the age of twenty-eight, in a little less than one-and-a-half pages.126 While Nathan does, in the conventional manner, begin his account with his birth in 1780, this birth to a wealthy family disinclined toward Hasidism is into a very diVerent life than that of which he is to relate in Yemei maharnat. Nathan’s true ‘life’— and hence the narrative of Yemei maharnat—only really begins when he has died to his former self, the fruitless quest in various Hasidic courts for an alternative to the staunchly Mitnagdic ambience of his wife’s family over, to be reborn as the disciple of Nahman. And thus, it is in terms of birth, suckling and early training in basic literacy, that Nathan describes his Wrst encounter with Nahman: In the year of 1802, in the month of Ellul, was I Wrst privileged to come into contact with our sainted and awesome leader, guide and master, our teacher Rabbi Nahman—may the memory of the sainted Tsaddiq be a blessing. He took me by the hand and drew me to him in his bountiful mercy and he raised me up as would a nursing mother a suckling child (Numbers 9:12). And immediately after the Wrst R’osh hashanah that I had become close to him—the New Year of 1803—he began to instruct me in the writing of his holy teachings. I still, however, did not succeed in writing down his holy teachings until after Shabat hanukkah, when I wrote down before him all the teaching pertaining to the golden Menorah. And this was the manner of my writing in his presence: The teaching that he would give at that time, as on that Hanukkah, he would repeat later at the time of writing, and

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go over it with me word by word, as he dictated each phrase in Yiddish. And I would sit before him and write the words down in Hebrew, until I had completed the entire teaching. In general, I would recite this version before him when I had Wnished writing.127

Thus reborn and re-educated, Nathan eVectively relegates, in Yemei maharnat, the vestiges of his previous unregenerate adult life to oblivion. Wife, in-laws, natural family, a child born to the couple when Nathan was fourteen—these are eVectively erased in the ensuing narrative of the ‘days’ of Nathan. Parental and marital duties—the obligations imposed by Wscal necessity—all of the trappings and encumbrances, in short, of Nathan’s life prior to his encounter with Nahman—are now perceived primarily as impediments in the way of the transformed self to the object of its desire, and, indeed, its origin. Nathan’s ruling passion, it appears, from the age of twenty-three until the death of his master in 1810, was to attain as near as constant a propinquity—geographical and spiritual—to Nahman as circumstances might possibly allow. The circumstances, as it happened, proved less than propitious for the realization of Nathan’s new-found and consuming passion. So, the above-cited passage continues: The magnitude and proliferation of hindrances and suVerings I experienced that year—1803, that is—it is impossible to imagine. For they all opposed me—my wife, my father, may he live long, all the members of his household and of that of my grandfather, his memory be blessed. Indeed, the sheer magnitude of the impediments that encountered me relentlessly on each and every journey, every single movement, and in the performance of every one of the sacred obligations laid upon me by our sainted master, his memory be blessed, simply deWes description. All this notwithstanding, I did succeed in sojourning with him, his memory be blessed, several times that winter.128

It is here, precisely at the point where the self reborn bids leave of its previous avatars, that the crucial term Meni’ah—‘hindrance’, ‘obstacle’, or ‘impediment’—makes its Wrst appearance in the text of Yemei maharnat. The term, while of Hebrew origin, is not uncommon in Yiddish usage. Within the context of Bratslav Hasidism, however, and especially within the context of Nathan’s Yemei maharnat, the term

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assumes a very special and far-reaching signiWcance: the Meni’ah, as this term is employed in Bratslav scriptures, may refer to an actual, practical obstacle in the way of a desired goal; on the more cosmic dimension, the Meni’ot may refer to the array of demonic forces with which the Tsaddiq and his followers must contend on their path; lastly, and this is perhaps the most crucial understanding of the ‘obstacle’ in Bratslav Hasidism, the Meni’ah may be taken to refer to psychological resistances, the acute self-doubt and anxiety that attend the Tsaddiq and his followers at every step of the way:129 All the obstacles are but psychological resistances (Meni’ot hamoah). Even though it may appear to a man that he really is faced with almighty hindrances, impossible to surmount, nevertheless, all of them are, in truth, no more than psychological resistances. And if the desire and wish are of suYcient strength, and if a man truly longs to achieve a sacred goal, he will indeed break asunder all the hindrances, et cetera . . . 130

The ‘obstacles’ encountered by Nathan in his single-minded pursuit of Nahman from his twenty-third year until his master’s death in 1810 were actually more real than the above citation may suggest; the psychological explanation of the Meni’ot may derive, in no small part, from wishful thinking on Nathan’s behalf. His father and father-in-law were appalled by the turn of events following upon Nathan’s fateful encounter with Nahman, and by the eVective abnegation of Wscal, paternal and marital obligations that this relationship entailed. Nathan’s father’s Wrst response was to throw his son out of the house; the young bride remained with her father-in-law and Nathan was forced to seek lodgings with his grandfather.131 Nathan’s break with his family, however, was not so clean nor so abrupt as the account in Yemei maharnat implies. It is clear, rather, from other reliable Bratslav sources, that there ensued a protracted period of tension, during which Nathan’s family made several desperate compromises in order to keep the vacillating young man within the fold.132 In face of the young husband and father’s prolonged absences from home, his seeming indiVerence to his family’s welfare, it is to be wondered that Nathan’s marriage survived all this.133 Concealed, at all events, beneath the term ‘hindrances’, as this is employed in Yemei maharnat, is an ongoing and prolonged situation

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of family tension that remained, no doubt, an emotional thorn in the side for Nathan. Nathan’s immediate family, however, and that of his wife were not the sole source of the extrapsychic Meni’ot that blocked his way to a more perpetual cleaving to his master. Even more painful to bear, perhaps, and less easily surmountable, were the Meni’ot emanating from Nahman himself: At that same time, between Passover and ’Atseret, I paid several visits to him from Nemirov; he, however, displayed a certain irritation at the frequency of our visits. Much distress and many hindrances were occasioned us, every time we wished to visit him, lest he grow angry at us. By then, indeed, we no longer took into consideration familial and Wnancial hindrances. This one hindrance, however, continued to gnaw at our minds as an obstacle; for it seemed to us, that in coming to him so swift upon the heels of our last visit, we might incur his anger.134

Nathan here speaks in the Wrst person plural. It is, however, clear, from the evidence that Nathan himself provides in Yemei maharnat, as well as from other Bratslav sources, that Nathan’s unbounded enthusiasm for Nahman was, in particular, by no means reciprocal. On more than one occasion, it appears, Nahman found Nathan’s excessive attentions irritating, and took certain steps toward ridding himself of his overly conscientious acolyte.135 Beset then by an array of ‘obstacles’ or ‘impediments’ from all sides, Nathan, and his family, paid a steep price for the attainment of his spiritual fulWllment. Indeed, the narrative of Yemei maharnat concerns itself as much, if not more, with the formidable obstacles encountered on the way of Nathan’s ‘coming close’ to Nahman, as it does with the ‘coming close’ (Hitqarevut)136 itself. The motif of the Meni’ot, having made its early appearance in Yemei maharnat, recurs throughout the work with the regularity of a refrain and actually serves Nathan extremely well. This recurring theme provides Nathan with some rationale for the tremendous adversities with which he was faced, and enables him, moreover, to cast these within an overall salviWc framework. Nathan’s employment of the blanket-term Meni’ot for his various adversities serves also to blunt the emotional impact of extremely

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painful conflicts of loyalty. Since, furthermore, there is a certain cosmic inevitability in the arising of the Meni’ot and their overcoming, Nathan may, by means of this device, camouflage, or at least glide over, certain aspects of his own behaviour that may cast him in a less than favourable light.137 And, at the textual level, the accounts of the Meni’ot and their overcoming provide Nathan with a mould for the scriptural recasting of life-experience. Very much, then, as Emden avails himself of the trial and deliverance paradigm, does Nathan Wnd, in his own master’s teachings, a key to the translation of life to text. Closely related to the theme of the Meni’ah in Yemei maharnat is a motif no less recurrent—that of the journey. The journey motif is, of course, more Wrmly anchored—at least more demonstrably so—within the extra-textual reality that Yemei maharnat comes to depict. The confluence, however, of the theme of the Meni’ot with the depiction of the journey enables Nathan to cast his accounts of the numerous journeys to Nahman within an overall symbolic nexus of far-reaching dimensions. Indeed, for lack of any precedent for autobiographical selfaccounting, it is the felicitous conjunction of Meni’ah and journey that provides Nathan with the central metaphor for experience in Yemei maharnat. In the following account of a journey, undertaken c. 1809, is encapsulated the essence of the narrative of Yemei maharnat, as this takes us from Nathan’s Wrst encounter with Nahman until the latter’s death. Following upon this account—and this, I feel, is no coincidence—is the most explicit declaration of autobiographical intention that occurs within the body of the text of Yemei maharnat: Thus I took the coach to Nemirov, leaving Mohilev on Thursday at about two p.m. I understood that I had to be in Bratslav that Sabbath, for I knew that immediately after Sabbath, all of the company would have left for Zaslav. I was wondering what course of action to take, for the coach was bound for Nemirov, and who knows whether I could still reach Nemirov by noon, in order to travel on from there to Bratslav for Sabbath? Trouble also lay ahead from my father—may he live long; for the business of this journey of mine met also with his disapproval, all the more so should I arrive suddenly on the eve of Sabbath and then wish to leave immediately—this, certainly, he would not allow for. So, I just hoped and prayed that the coachman

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would hurry up and expedite the journey, in order for us to be near Nemirov with the day still ahead, whence I could look for a coach to take me to Bratslav . . . and thus avoid Nemirov altogether. But, immediately upon leaving Mohilev, the hindrances (Meni’ot) that occurred at the time of the journey itself started up again, as is, more often than not, the case with us. For there are many hindrances before embarking on a journey; and afterwards, once one has succeeded in shattering these hindrances and set out upon the journey, then, during the journey itself, the hindrances return, this time with a vengeance—from the coachman, the horses, the cart, the wheels, the ropes, and all the other parts, and from the sleet and rain, the mud and the muck et cetera. Scarcely one journey was free of these hindrances, and many others besides, both during his sainted life and now when we make the journey to mark his sacred and awesome grave. And so it was that immediately I left Mohilev, in a highly agitated state of mind—as mentioned above—I realized, upon closer examination, that the coachman was travelling with a large carriage, but he only had two horses. So I asked him: ‘What do you mean by this?’ He answered that, on his way here, one of his horses had taken ill . . . And then a light rain began to fall. So we travelled until we arrived at the village where he had left his horse. We were immediately informed of the ‘good tidings’ concerning his horse which had already given up the ghost there. . . . Twilight was already approaching and he, of course, made extremely slow headway with only two horses on a carriage that size. We had to make lodgings for the night near Mohilev, and we were still a long way oV from Nemirov—approximately thirty-eight miles. I arose that Friday morning heartbroken and confused, and I did not know what to do. I travelled on with the same coachman to Markhve, by which time it was already almost midday, whence it was a further twenty miles to Nemirov. As we entered the district of Nemirov, I was extremely anxious, as I saw that I would be hard-put even to arrive in the town of Nemirov in time for Sabbath, let alone have enough time to hire a coach midway on the journey to Bratslav, as previously planned. And should, God forbid, I arrive in Bratslav after Sabbath, there would be neither coach to travel by, nor friends to travel with, to Zaslav . . . At the very point of entering the city, while I was on the bridge, I raised my voice in supplication: ‘Ribbono shel ’olam, Deliver unto me here a coach with four horses that will take me, free of charge, to Bratslav!’ The coach-

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man heard me as I was saying this. Then we came to the city and entered an inn. The coachman wanted to stay there a while in order to feed the horses. I washed my hands in preparation for a meal, and between the washing of the hands and the blessing the coachman came and informed me: ‘Rabbi Nathan, your prayer has been answered, for just now has a four-horse coach arrived, bound for Bratslav, and I am quite sure that the merchant travelling there will take you in for free.’ So it was that I reached Bratslav while the sun was still high. All of my fellow-disciples were ready and prepared to travel on Sunday to Zaslav. But there was no room for me. Immediately, however, a special emissary was dispatched to one of the villages to procure a coach for me and one other at a cheap fare . . . So I came to our master, may his memory be blessed, on the Wednesday . . . It is, in truth, impossible to explain all the notions in my mind that would have put a stop to this journey—and others similar—especially seeing as our master himself, his memory be blessed, had expressly counselled me in writing not to undertake such a journey to him. The entire range of ‘hindrances’ stood around me like an encompassing brick wall, but the Lord, may He be blessed, in His great strength, enabled me to overcome all of them, to come before him in Zaslav, to hear at Wrst hand his holy teaching and to write it down in a book, so that it may become the bequest of many for generations to come. I have given a somewhat lengthy and detailed account of this journey, so that a later generation may know of the obstacles (Meni’ot) with which we were faced and which, through his great strength, we succeeded in shattering. For all that I have written of what befell me, such also befell the remainder of our companions. Most, if not all of them, were faced with the most mighty and awesome obstacles in drawing close to him, especially at the beginning; many, indeed, fell and were driven away by these obstacles and lost what they lost . . . Fortunate are those that remained, who took strength and surmounted and shattered all the obstacles, to cleave to our master—may his memory be blessed.138

The above, with its conjoining of the Meni’ah motif with the account of the journey, marks a key passage in Yemei maharnat. The Meni’ot/ journey paradigm, once established, is repeated, with slight variations, throughout Yemei maharnat. Indeed, the greater part of the narrative of the remainder of the text is given over to the account of various

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journeys undertaken by Nathan, the Meni’ot encountered and their successful overcoming. Accounts of journeys, as has been noted, play an important rôle in modern autobiography. It is not, however, from this tradition that Nathan draws, nor does he build, as does Emden, upon picaresque example, nor even is it possible to detect any influence from mediaeval Jewish travel-accounts, which he may well have read. As with the Meni’ot, so in his rendition of the journey, Nathan actually transposes aspects of his master’s teaching in the recasting of his life into narrative;139 for the account of the journey, most notably Nahman’s journey to Palestine in 1798–99, holds a prominent place in Bratslav scriptures. Nahman’s own conception of the journey was, it appears, closely allied with the notion of the Meni’ot. Indeed, Arthur Green, following a lead provided by Neal Rose, has provided a powerful argument for the understanding of Nahman’s journey as: ‘The great example in Bratslav literature of the battle to overcome Meni’ot . . . The would-be initiate (whether in primitive tribal cultures or here recreated in the rich myth-making imagination of a religious Wgure at the edge of modernity) seeks to undertake the death-defying voyage to the centre of the world in order to receive that knowledge only the initiate may possess.’140 The journey, for Nahman, is, Green adds, ‘an attempt to transcend his own lower self ’.141 All of this could apply with equal force to the journeys of Nathan, as recounted in Yemei maharnat. More practically speaking, it appears that Nathan’s Wrst apprenticeship in writing of the self was in his depiction of his accompanying Nahman on his journey to the Holy Land, the depiction of which constitutes Part II of Yemei maharnat, but which, according to Mantel, was written before Part I—the account of the Hitqarevut to Nahman was conceived.142 If, though, there is a larger literary, rather than anthropological, context within which to locate Nathan’s account of his journeys, this would not be the motif of the journey in autobiography, nor in the travel-account, but rather in the writings of the mystics of all religions, for the journey, as symbol, is of perennial recurrence. ‘Under the image of a pilgrimage’, writes Evelyn Underhill: An image as concrete and practical, as remote from the romantic and picturesque, for the mediaeval writers who used it, as a symbolism of

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hotel and railway train would be to us—the mystics contrive to summarize and suggest much of the life-history of the ascending soul; the developing spiritual consciousness. The necessary freedom and detachment of the traveller, his departure from his normal life and interests, the diYculties, enemies and hardships encountered on the road—the length of the journey, the variety of the country, the dark night which overtakes him, the glimpses of destinations far away—all these are seen more and more as we advance in knowledge to constitute a transparent allegory of the incidents of man’s progress from the unreal to the real. . . . 143 Through all these metaphors of pilgrimage to a goal—of a road followed, distance overpassed, fatigue endured—there runs the deWnite idea that the travelling self, in undertaking the journey is fulWlling a destiny, a law of the transcendental life; obeying an imperative need.144

The journey as classic allegory for the soul’s progress is, however, as employed by Nathan in Yemei maharnat, subject to certain inherent and severe limitations; for Nathan, rather than plotting a singular, albeit rugged, pattern of ascent, or homecoming, with its attendant way-stations and diversions, traces a series of tortuous tos-and-fros from his family to Nahman and back, all set to a virtually identical format. The impression thus given is not so much of progress, or movement, toward a once-glimpsed but evanescent transcendental point, as of repetition—a wearisome, but dogged tracking-down of the evasive object of desire, Nahman.145 The journeys, as recounted in Yemei maharnat, thus being syncopated and repetitive, do not recommend themselves as metaphors for the gradual, but ineluctable, crystallization of self or soul. And while Nathan does demonstrate an awareness of the psychological aspects of the Meni’ot that obstruct the soul’s path, it is not with these that he concerns himself primarily in the narrative of Yemei maharnat. So, in contrast to many mystical testimonies that employ the allegory of the journey, there is, in Yemei maharnat, scant and inexplicit account of the trials, equivocations and vacillations of the soul in its homeward spiral, which Nathan nonetheless acknowledges.146 The ‘journey’, in Yemei maharnat, thus loses in allegorical potency what it gains in verisimilitude; Nathan’s focus upon the actual mechanics of transportation, the practical hitches encountered in getting from A to B and back again,

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exerts, as in the above-cited passage, considerable gravitational force upon such accounts. The motif of the journey, moreover—or of the repeated journeys— may only serve as the central metaphor for experience in Yemei maharnat so long as its destination and its ultimate raison d’être—Nahman— remains alive and functional. The source of Nathan’s new-found identity, the destination and prime mover of his many journeys gone, around what point, however, may he, now left, as he says, ‘as an orphan with no father’,147 reconstitute both himself and the narrative of Yemei maharnat? (Emden, whose narrative is generated by a hatred as passionate as Nathan’s love, is faced with an analogous predicament when his adversary, Eibeschuetz, dies.) Just as the initial encounter with Nahman, in 1803, marks the point of departure for the regenerate self, whose halting and obstacle-ridden progress is tracked in the early sections of the book, so Nahman’s death, in 1810, marks a hiatus in the narrative of Yemei maharnat and a phoenix-like transformation in the inner life of the work’s author. Nathan’s account of the last hours of his master’s life—one of the Wnest passages in the book—constitutes, in a sense, the climax of the work, the point at which Nathan is divested of the last vestiges of his previous identity, to re-emerge as the de facto leader of the orphaned brethren of the Bratslav community: Later, I whispered to Naftali, ‘Go and lie down and sleep, for you still have not slept at all.’ But he did not wish to leave him (Nahman), so distressed was he by what he had heard him say concerning his death. He wished to stay with him longer, so consumed was he by love, by longing to partake of the pure and holy radiance that emanated then from his face. A short while later, however, tiredness overcame him and he went to sleep. Shimeon, likewise, lay himself down on the ground to sleep in the very same room where our master, his memory be blessed, lay down—likewise the servant and his wife—; everyone was asleep and I alone remained before him to watch over and look after him. So I stood before him on that night—the last of his life—for several hours in succession; I alone, from after midnight until daybreak. It was not, however, granted me to hear any conversation from him— all because I did not wish to entertain the idea of his death, and so I refrained from asking him anything concerning how we would man-

Jewish Autobiographical Writing at the Time of Rousseau

age and what we would do, and so forth . . . Now I understand in retrospect that he, may his memory be blessed, really longed for me to ask, even beseech him to explain certain matters. If we had, he would have spoken to us. But, on account of our many sins, and of our devotion to him, to the extent that we could not imagine that he would die, we did not entreat him, as explained above. So I alone stood before him on that night. He looked, gazed into me with his awesome eyes, and with each one of those looks, it was as if he were really speaking. Only now do I understand what encouragement, what foresight was in those looks. And each time—God forbid—that misfortune strikes, upon me in particular or upon all around me, and God, in all His wonders, delivers me safe, then do I understand how all was intimated in those looks, by which he meant to impart to me, as if by speech: ‘Who will you be left with, you with all the treasures hidden within you? And what will become of you? For many will rise up against you, and how can an enfeebled man like you prevail . . . ?’ These things and others, many others beside, that I myself did not know—all was intimated in those looks, as he looked at me again and again with profound intention on that night, and with each and every look that he gave me that night, he would linger a good while . . . A short while later, it seemed as if he had expired, and I began to weep copiously and cry out: ‘Master! Master! In whose hands have you left us?’ Upon hearing our voice, he came around and turned his awesome face toward us as if to say: ‘I am not leaving you, God forbid.’ After that, he did not tarry long. He died and was gathered unto his people in great holiness and purity . . . Now all this is only according to our manner of knowing. The true nature of his death, however, deWes verbal description, for it is quite beyond the grasp of the mind. . . . What can we say? What words would suYce? How can I render thanks to the Lord, that it fell upon my portion to be present at the hour of the departure of his holy soul? Had I only come into the world for the sake of this moment, it would have suYced.

After Nahman’s death, Nathan continues: Before they had begun to prepare him for burial, while he was still lying on the ground . . . I went into his room and I lay down beside him on the ground, and I spoke in his ear all that I had longed to tell him in his presence while he was still alive, but could not. ‘Now’, I

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said, ‘I shall speak in his presence’. Afterwards, I wept copiously for him as I lay by his side on the ground. Meanwhile, the other men assembled and stood over him and wept with me. But there was no other man in the world who wept, then, while lying on the ground, apart from myself—only I. ‘Mine eye aVecteth mine heart for all the daughters of my city.’148 For he, himself, had already attested of me, that I knew more of him than all of them.149

Nathan, it appears from this extraordinarily moving account, actually attains a greater closeness to Nahman at the time of, and after, the latter’s death than that achieved during the master’s lifetime. In the several hours before Nahman’s death, the unique relationship enjoyed by the master with his disciple Nathan, is, it is implied in this account, somehow consecrated. The high-point in the master/disciple relationship, as this is traced in Yemei maharnat, occurs not in Nahman’s lifetime, not even in his last moments, but after his death. Now, in a strange reversal of the ritual of the death-bed confessional, the living Nathan reveals to the dead Nahman ‘all that I had longed to tell him while he was still alive, but could not’. Nathan’s unburdening himself of all that, until now, he has been unable to give expression, to the dead Nahman, constitutes also a repetition, albeit somewhat macabre, of the confessional, some seven years previous, that set the seal upon Nathan’s initiation into the Bratslav circle.150 The initiation this time, however, is not, as it had been previously, to the status of disciple, but rather to that of rightful successor and master—if not Tsaddiq—of the saving remnant. Noteworthy in Nathan’s account of his master’s Wnal hours, is the scant mention of the remaining members of the Bratslav circle. Only Shimeon, Nahman’s oldest friend, to whom was entrusted the most vital task of destroying all of his manuscripts after his death, and Naftali, are mentioned by name; and these, when they are mentioned, are Wrmly relegated to the background.151 Thus Nathan advises Naftali, against the latter’s will, to go and sleep; Naftali eventually succumbs, though, as does Shimeon. Nathan, from now on, is at pains to stress that ‘he alone’ is left to preside over and care for the expiring Tsaddiq. While Shimeon and Naftali are sleeping, moreover, Nathan alone is privy to those ‘awesome glances’ ipso facto denied his sleeping companions. Again, it is only after Nahman’s death—his body yet un-

Jewish Autobiographical Writing at the Time of Rousseau

buried—that the full extent of Nathan’s privilege over the remaining disciples becomes apparent—or, at least, underlined in the account left us in Yemei maharnat. The remaining disciples, now assembled and fully awake, stand and weep while ‘no other man in the world’ lies weeping beside Nahman’s corpse, ‘for he himself had already attested of me, that I knew more of him than all of them’. The remaining disciples, it is thereby implied, are witness not only to the death of their beloved master, but also to the transformation of one of his more recent devotees. The term ‘transubstantiation’, were it not so heavily loaded by theological usage, would be quite apt in describing the process whereby Nathan, at the death of Nahman, is reconstituted in the image of his master. Nathan now eVectively internalizes Nahman in a way that would have been impossible during the latter’s lifetime. He now assumes the rôle of paterfamilias to Nahman’s bereaved family; he arranges for the dispensation of the estate152 and takes care, inter alia, of the engagement of his youngest daughter.153 Nahman’s teachings, moreover, of which, according to Yemei maharnat, only Nathan has a clear grasp, remain ‘buried in my heart, as a constant living wellspring’.154 Nathan, then, becomes the sole conduit for the unmediated transmission of the master’s teachings.155 And so, drawing upon erotic imagery from the Song of Songs, Nathan describes, in a later section of Yemei maharnat, how Nahman’s teaching becomes transmitted through his person in the winning over of new souls for the small and persecuted Bratslav community: I was then still unaware, and I did not realize that is was still possible, even now, to enlighten several Jewish souls and to inspire them to the true worship of God, according to what I had received from him, may his memory be blessed. Even though I was asleep, my heart was awake, the voice of my beloved knocks within me.156 For the holy and true words that he left with me, words as hot as burning flames, were as a Wre imprisoned in my bones that I was weary of containing;157 no longer could I restrain myself. Thus did I speak openly to the young men concerning the true purpose of this world; in so doing, I would relate to them of the might and awesome wonders of his teachings, conversations and deeds . . . until they longed to hear the words of the living God from me, that issued from the

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salviWc springs of our master and teacher, our awesome leader . . . And every time that I spoke of him . . . it was as though I were aroused from sleep and I realized that, my lowliness and humility notwithstanding, there was none other than myself who knew the true meaning of these words.158

Not only in oral teachings, but also in scriptural format, Nathan laboured untiringly for the dissemination of his master’s teachings. Likening himself to Ezra,159 Nathan supervised not only the rendition and ordering of the teachings and life-history of Nahman, but also the actual printing and binding of all the Bratslav scriptures that appeared in his lifetime.160 Nahman’s teaching and being did fall, that is, in a unique sense as the bequest of Nathan and Nathan alone, and the extraordinary identiWcation that he achieved with his master after the latter’s death remained as a legacy for all future generations of Bratslav Hasidim. With Nahman’s death, to return to the mystical allegory of the journey, Nathan comes close to the Wnal stage of the way, as this is described by Evelyn Underhill: ‘The Valley of Annihilation of Self: the supreme degree of union or theopathetic state, in which the self is utterly merged “like a Wsh in the sea” in the ocean of divine love.’161 A singular testament, then, Nathan of Nemirov’s Yemei maharnat scarcely bears out the claims advanced by Niger and Halkin concerning the new individualism heralded by the Hasidic Weltanschauung. The high point of the work is the annihilation of the self—Bittul hayesh,162 in Hasidic parlance—whose crystallization the autobiographer seeks to trace. Yemei maharnat is testimony not so much to the emergence of an immanent self that underlies the socially contrived persona, as it is to the extinction of a previous self in face of the sudden incursion of an “other” who is eventually incorporated.163 It is, at the end of the day, not as a testimony of the individual self, but of the self in relation to one of the most extraordinary personalities of his day, that Nathan’s Yemei maharnat stands as alone within Hasidic literature as it does within the wider purview of Jewish autobiographical writings.

Six

Domesticating Rousseau: Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

‘I am not the father of this book, rather its mother, for in pain did I bear it.’ No such equivocations concerning the motivations and means of the Jewish autobiographical texts written by contemporaries, or near contemporaries, of Rousseau, as discussed above, attend to Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer. Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg is the Wrst Hebrew writer to take it upon himself—quite self-consciously—to write an autobiography on the model of Rousseau. He thus has the advantage, as did no other Hebrew writer before him, of a paradigm for the presentation of autobiographical experience, whether through Wrst-hand acquaintance with Rousseau’s Confessions, or the Confessions as mediated through Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte. It has, in addition, been suggested that the influence of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit is discernible in the structure of ’Avi’ezer.1 For an obscure and impoverished Maskil, writing in an unspoken language and beset by a keen sense of cultural inferiority, such lofty precedent was debilitating and daunting in measure as it was enabling. For, in accord with the theoretical model as outlined above, for lack of any indigenous (Eastern European Hebrew or Yiddish) precedent for his enterprise, Guenzberg’s dependence on the foreign model—or, in Gusdorf ’s formulation, the ‘colonizing’ example—is inestimably greater than it would be for future Eastern European Jewish autobiographers. And, unlike Berdichevsky or even Letteris, he cannot, writing in the Wrst half of the nineteenth century, have been aware of many—if any—premodern Hebrew or Yiddish autobiographical texts, the most signiWcant of which did not, as noted, begin to appear until the turn of the century. Nor can Guenzberg avail himself, as did Rousseau, of any prior and indigenous novelistic precedent for the depiction of contemporary reality.

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The Wrst Hebrew novel to deal with contemporary Jewish life in Eastern Europe—unless Yosef Perl’s Megalleh temirin (Vienna, 1819) is to be counted as such2—Abraham Mapu’s ’Ayit tsavua’, did not appear in its entirety until 1869.3 As late as the 1860s, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh (Mendele) laboured mightily, and not entirely successfully, to break loose of the ideological, linguistic and artistic constraints that stood in the way of novelistic depiction in Hebrew of the realia of contemporary Jewish life in Eastern Europe.4 To Guenzberg, then, falls the task of justifying the inclusion of Rousseauian autobiography within the as yet amorphous, but primarily rationalistic and pragmatic Maskilic canon.5 The question thus presents itself: Was Guenzberg himself aware when he formulated the scheme for ’Avie’zer, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, of the magnitude of his task or of the signiWcance of his achievement, should this project reach completion? The methodological preamble to ’Avi’ezer, unprecedented in Hebrew or Yiddish literature precisely in Guenzberg’s awareness of the convention of the nineteenth-century autobiographical preface, is here instructive. Guenzberg, in entitling this preamble Toldot ’anshei shem (biograWen), studiously avoids mention of the unfamiliar terms ‘autobiography’ or, following Goethe, Selbstbiographie, harking back instead to a standard nineteenth-century Hebrew term for biography that would ring familiar to readers of the Me’assef:6 The histories of men of renown (biographies) provide us with the life-stories of men of high esteem—exceptional individuals who have achieved fame for their wisdom, bravery and mighty deeds. Such biographies are considered an aspect of universal history (allgemeine Geschichte) which includes within its purview the lives of individuals. For the lives of individuals also are deemed worthy by history to have their memory preserved to the last generation; for this purpose, the life-stories of such individuals must be examined, as must the external circumstances that aVected their lives, and the changes that they underwent in the course of time . . . Such a historian must select for his account exceptional individuals who attained renown for the outstanding strength of their personalities or through their extraordinary circumstances. He must single out with insight and precision all that is most elevated and praiseworthy in their life-histories and in a spirit of truth and scientiWc enquiry, he must lay bare the motivations of

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

their wondrous deeds, the underlying principles of their achievements, that his account may serve as exemplar and yardstick of human potential. There are many Wne examples of histories such as these to be found in the holy tongue, such as the history of the philosopher Mendelssohn,7 the history of the poet Wessely and others besides. He who recounts the history of his own life (Selbstbiographie),8 the times he lived through, his fortunes and misfortunes, his actions and opinions, is not bound by the same conditions. As one who is well aware of his own defects, such a writer will, for the most part, make it his aim to expose his shortcomings, the manner in which his character was distorted by those who reared him, by his teachers, friends or contemporaries. It is his hope that those who come after him may derive beneWt from his making known to them the follies of their predecessors. Even though he may not be counted as an exceptional individual, so long as he does not lack a good understanding of man and the ability to express himself clearly, he too is equipped to write his own life-history. Such a writer, however, needs to be possessed of a complete self-knowledge and he must love the truth with all his heart, lest he espouse falsehood unwittingly through lack of knowledge, or lest he be ashamed to make a clean breast of his sins and shortcomings in the name of truth and in the love of morality. And seeing as there are but few writers in the holy tongue who tell of their own life-histories, I shall present a section of the history attributed to Yoash avi ha’ezri, to be found in manuscript amongst the books of Getsion Gever,9 one of the dwellers of ’Elef ’oneg,10 that this may serve the reader as an example.11

The ultimate source for this preamble is clearly the opening paragraphs of Rousseau’s Confessions, though especially strong parallels do suggest that Guenzberg’s more proximate source for this preamble may have been the introduction to Part II of Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte. Guenzberg’s preamble, however—and in this he shares with Letteris—is a good deal less brazen than Rousseau’s; Maimon, even, appears far more sure-footed in his introduction to Part II of the Lebensgeschichte than does Guenzberg in his Toldot ’anshei shem. Where Rousseau, presenting himself at the opening of the Confessions to the chords of the ‘last trump’, is confrontational to the point of absurdity, Guenzberg is sidling and apologetic. Rather than confront the reader

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directly, as does Rousseau, with his declared aim, Guenzberg adopts a via negativa; he comes to autobiography (Selbstbiographie) only after having Wrst explained what it is not—namely, biography, or Toldot ’anshei shem. Noteworthy also is Guenzberg’s combination of the Rousseauian notion of confession as self-exculpation—‘to expose his shortcomings, the manner in which his character was distorted’ et cetera—with the note of typical Haskalah didacticism—‘that those who come after me may derive beneWt from my making known to them the follies of their predecessors’. Most striking, however, is Guenzberg’s inability to give speciWc citation of even one precedent for his enterprise. True, Guenzberg does write of a ‘few writers in the holy tongue who tell of their own life-histories’; but, since he fails to mention one by name, it could well be that, in truth, he knows of none. He does not fail to cite, after all, in the prior section of the preamble, the two most contemporary Hebrew biographies known to him—those of Mendelssohn and Wessely. That Guenzberg was indeed aware that ’Avi’ezer constituted a signiWcant departure in Hebrew literature, and that, moreover, he encountered considerable obstacles in the introduction of Rousseauian autobiography to the sphere of Eastern European literary discourse of the early nineteenth century, is further attested to by the circumstances surrounding the composition of ’Avi’ezer. Since the present of writing is, as has been noted, so crucial a dimension in autobiography, these circumstances also lend considerably to our understanding of the nature of this complex text. It should, however, be noted that knowledge of these circumstances can, at best, be partial; much of Guenzberg’s literary bequest, including personal letters, was left in manuscript form and it is unclear how much has survived to this day12 and in the principal source for Guenzberg’s biography, other, that is, than ’Avi’ezer—the second volume of the epistolary collection, Devir—the editor saw Wt to exclude all names of those still living at the time of publication (1861) and, moreover, the majority of dates and locations on the letterheads.13 The Wrst explicit reference to ’Avi’ezer occurs in a letter dated the tenth of Av, 1828. The addressee is not mentioned, though it is probably Guenzberg’s friend, fellow-Maskil and contributor to Sh. Y. Finn’s Pirhei Tsafon, Binyamin Nathanson, to whose son the completed ’Avi’ezer was eventually dedicated:14

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

A man of enlightenment and seeker of wisdom such as your esteemed self will be pleased to hear that, for all the troubles by which I have been plagued since settling in Vilna, I have not turned my back upon such little knowledge as I have. I have, rather, tried such strength and will power as I have to the best of their abilities. Several of the translations issuing from my hand have, indeed, gained the attention of some non-Jewish scholars. To such an extent have I been accepted in their fold that I have been deemed worthy of inclusion in the lexicon of the learned men of Kurland, to appear in the coming year.15 The work, however, that at present engages me is no translation; to myself, rather, belongs the derivation of this work, as does its composition.16 This is my life-history for the beneWt of my son/children,17 to which I shall not be ashamed to give my name and which is to be published in Berlin, God willing, with the help of several of my friends in that city. Since, according to the plan I have formulated for this composition, the book will also make honourable mention of my esteemed addressee for his wondrous contributions to the renewal of the holy Biblical tongue, I would ask of him that, should he so please, be set aside some time to apply his intelligence to a critical reading of this book. Should he grant me this request, I shall send him a copy, but, to date, I have only completed Wve Boygn,18 covering the events of my life and my upbringing from the fourth to the sixteenth year.19

It would appear, from the evidence of this letter, that Guenzberg did indeed assign a special signiWcance to ’Avi’ezer, his ‘threshed and winnowed one’, over and above that of all his ‘translations’ to date, which, nonetheless, he valued highly. The coincidence of Guenzberg’s warranting a mention in a literary lexicon and his undertaking his autobiography is here worthy of note. To be included in a non-Jewish literary lexicon was an unheard-of privilege for a Hebrew writer of Guenzberg’s day, and the increased sense of self-esteem that Guenzberg no doubt derived thereby may, in part, have led him to follow the example of his more illustrious countryman, Solomon Maimon. Many literary lexicons of this period, moreover, relied upon the autobiographical information supplied them by the writers for their entries; the Jewish literary lexicon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided, as shall be noted, a signiWcant stimulus for autobiographical productions.

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Shortly after this letter was written in Av, 1928, Guenzberg, it appears, was victim of a disastrous robbery. Aside from losing all of his clothes, money and oYcial documents, Guenzberg writes in a letter of the seventh of Tishri, 1828, to Zvi Hirsh Katznellenbogen: ‘I have lost . . . all of the notebooks and manuscripts, the fruits of my labour over the course of these last Wve years. So I stand today as if I never dipped a pen in ink, utterly naked, stripped of all I have.’20 Guenzberg himself, however, as his Wrst biographer, David Maggid, noted, left contradictory accounts of this robbery and the precise extent of the losses suVered, so it cannot be taken for certain that the Wrst Wve Boygn of ’Avi’ezer were amongst the ‘notebooks and manuscripts’ stolen in 1828.21 The next signiWcant and unequivocal reference to the writing of ’Avi’ezer to be found in Guenzberg’s published works occurs also in the second volume of Devir. The date of the letter and the name of the addressee have, however, unfortunately fallen prey to the editor of this important collection: I have news for you! On Monday of the Wfteenth of this month, I was in a state of intense agitation the whole day long. That night, also, my thoughts would give me no peace—I felt as restless as did Napoleon as he idled his time away in Vitebsk. As dawn approached, I detected in the depths of my being that wonderful excitement that I recognize as the stirring of the Muse. I hastened, took pen and paper in hand, reviving myself in the mean-time with coVee, which I am wont to refer to as ‘writer’s elixir’.22 I took out the notebooks of ’Avi’ezer and I read through them until midday. Then, I bought, on your account, a half-bottle of the choicest rum and some sugar in order to revive my flagging spirits as the occasion demanded. To cut a long story short, for four days running, every day and half the night, inspiration took hold of me and would not release me until I had completed almost three Boygn of the book ’Avi’ezer in letters flying like dust—or, were I to speak in proverbs, I would tell you that I sowed three white Welds with seeds of sesame. And, I speak frankly, the majority of these words are good and edifying, albeit not to the taste of the masses . . . Last Sabbath, however, I began to cough up blood from my throat and this put an end both to my work and, for my many sins, to the rum punch. So, for the last three days, I have subsisted on vegetables and curd and have managed only to write the

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

motto of this book of mine, which runs thus: “I am not the father of this book, rather its mother, for in pain did I bear it.”23

This letter, most likely written to Guenzberg’s one-time pupil and life-long friend Ya’aqov Katznelson,24 provides a fascinating glimpse into the surprisingly Bohemian writing-habits of an early-nineteenthcentury Maskil. From the mention of buying rum ‘on your account’, the possibility suggests itself that Guenzberg may have been writing ’Avi’ezer on commission; Katznelson was a wealthy business man and known for helping out distressed Maskilim Wnancially.25 The letter constitutes, moreover, important testimony to the intensity of inspiration evoked in Guenzberg in and by the process of writing his autobiography. The letter, in Devir volume II, that immediately follows that from which the previous citation is taken, and is clearly written to the same addressee, makes reference to the previous letter: ‘Thanks be to God, I am no longer spitting up blood, and I have already cleared away the bowl of vegetables and curd from my table, but the flask of punch has not yet returned to me, nor have I returned to my work. I have, nonetheless, left you with many days’ work; for three Boygn in my handwriting will be equivalent to six in yours.’26 By a happy lapse of editorial diligence, the date—though not the name of the addressee—of this second letter has been preserved: ‘the twenty-eighth of Heshvan, evening, 1845’, only a year, that is, before Guenzberg’s death on the fourth of November, 1846.27 The prior letter, then, from which the extensive citation concerning the writing of ’Avi’ezer is taken, must have been written sometime in 1845. The reference to the coughing-up of blood would corroborate this dating; we know that Guenzberg was aZicted by chronic ill-health for the last two years of his life28—his death is luridly described by his brother, Moshe Leib, in the introduction to the posthumously published ’Avi’ezer.29 Considerable signiWcance accrues to this date; for if the year 1828 holds good for the above-cited letter in which the writing of ’Avi’ezer is mentioned for the Wrst time—and, that it does is corroborated by the mention of the Kurlandische Literarische Leksikon, which Wrst appeared in 1829—it would seem that ’Avi’ezer was written over a period of no less than seventeen years. Given the general consensus among Hebrew literary critics and historians concerning the signiWcance of ’Avi’ezer, it

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is, indeed, surprising that such a basic and crucial fact as the seemingly seventeen-year period of gestation of the book—to adopt Guenzberg’s metaphorical ‘motto’—has gone unnoticed. Lachover and Zinberg write that the book was began in 1828 but never completed.30 This critical neglect is, to a degree, understandable; for one of the most puzzling aspects of ’Avi’ezer is that there is no evidence from within the text of the discontinuity in style, theme and approach that an approximately seventeen-year period of writing—bringing the author from the age of thirty-three to Wfty—would surely entail. David Maggid’s conjecture that Guenzberg wrote the Wrst Wve Boygn of ’Avi’ezer in 1828, set the work aside for seventeen years, then wrote the remaining three Boygn in 1845, bringing the total number of printed pages up to one hundred and seventy—the eventual length of the printed ’Avi’ezer— must therefore be called into question.31 With respect to the claim that ’Avi’ezer is an unWnished work, ‘a shard, a fragment’ as Zinberg says,32 there is no internal literary evidence to suggest that ’Avi’ezer is anything other than a complete and uniWed composition; Guenzberg, in his above-cited preamble, promises to present but a ‘section of the history attributed to Yo’ash ’avi ha’ezri’, and this is exactly what he does. Guenzberg may have planned a follow-up volume to ’Avi’ezer, giving an account of his mature years, the circle of Maskilim in Vilna, et cetera—though I know of no evidence for such a project—but this does not appear in any wise to have aVected the presentation of the Wrst sixteen years of his life in ’Avi’ezer. All these data, rather, go to suggest that ’Avi’ezer, as we now have it, is the end-result of at least one, but quite likely successive, revisions to an original text—possibly still extant—originally penned in 1828. Guenzberg, in line with his aspiration to serve ‘as an example to my people’ in purity of Hebrew diction and grammar,33 was a most assiduous and punctilious reviser of his own works. In a letter published in Devir II, he writes that he never puts his writings into Wnal shape without extensive corrections and emendations.34 We know, moreover, from the previously cited letter in which ’Avi’ezer is mentioned for the Wrst time, that to date—to 1828, that is—Guenzberg had covered ‘the events of my life and my upbringing from the age of four to that of sixteen’, and that, in fact, as good as covers the entire lifeperiod recounted in ’Avi’ezer. It seems probable that Guenzberg did

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

indeed send a copy of this manuscript to Binyamin Nathanson after 1828, and it is to this that he refers in an undated letter, also in volume 2 of Devir, in which he requests the addressee—most likely Nathanson’s son, Mordechai35—to return to him ‘direct and express . . . the notebooks (Quntresim) of the story of my life history—perhaps I shall be able to complete them’.36 By ‘complete’ (Lehashlim), Guenzberg may well here intend to revise, put into Wnal shape, rather than to add to. For a more careful reading of the letter of 1845, in which Guenzberg provides so graphic a description of the writing of ’Avi’ezer, would suggest that the activity in question could well have been revision and redaction rather than original composition. Guenzberg here writes that he took out the ‘notebooks’ (Quntresim) of ’Avi’ezer and ‘read through them until midday’. He then goes on to describe the writing of three Boygn of ’Avi’ezer—the Boygn presumably being a redaction of the Quntresim. It was, no doubt, this Wnal redaction of ’Avi’ezer that Guenzberg’s brother, Moshe Leib, entrusted to print, after Guenzberg’s death in 1863; for, if there were two or more manuscripts of ’Avi’ezer extant, then Moshe Leib, or Ya’aqov Katznelson, who also had a part in the posthumous publication of Guenzberg’s manuscripts,37 would surely have selected the latest version for publication. Needless to say, short of detailed comparison of the printed text with any manuscript versions of ’Avi’ezer that may still remain extant, especially the version mentioned by Shmuel Werses, such conclusions as arise from the material at hand must remain tentative. At all events, in light of the evidence we do have, ’Avi’ezer is perhaps best understood as an account of childhood and early adolescence, complete in and of itself, by a moribund and disillusioned man,38 come to draw up the balance-sheet of his past, drawing upon prior Quntresim that may well have depicted this past in a very diVerent light. Indeed, as shall be noted in greater detail below, such circumstances of writing are consonant with the muZed, but insistent, sense of bitterness to be read at many points in Guenzberg’s account. And the voice of a writer assailed by ill-health—a leit-motif of this autobiography—makes itself heard at an early stage; already, in the second chapter of ’Avi’ezer, Guenzberg bewails the lack of physical education in his youth, which has forced upon him the sedentary and unhealthy profession of writer.39

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A period of no less than seventeen years spent in revision and redaction attests no less to the determination of the author to see his autobiographical project through than it does to the considerable obstacles encountered on the way. From translations, albeit creative, of German historical text-books,40 and epistolary collections themselves including much translated material,41 to the Wrst detailed autobiographical account of the Wrst sixteen years in the life of an Eastern European Jew to be written in the Hebrew language is a mighty leap. An acute lack of self-conWdence may, then, have impelled Guenzberg to subject ’Avi’ezer to a steady process of revision and emendation. He must, moreover, have wondered for whom exactly he was writing this book and whether, in the prevailing literary climate, there would even be the possibility of publishing a work that departed so markedly from Maskilic convention. Some evidence of this concern is to be found in the letter of 1845 to Katznelson, when Guenzberg writes that while ’Avi’ezer contains many ‘good and edifying words’, it will not, he feels, merit popular appeal.42 In a later letter also apparently to Katznelson, written, it seems in the last year of his life,43 Guenzberg entrusts his ‘faithful copyist’ with a book which he feels will not be published in the near future and even if published ‘much would be omitted that would prove oVensive to the critics, and the copyists would without doubt, distort much else through a combination of negligence and lack of understanding’.44 The reference here is, in all likelihood, to ’Avi’ezer. Some comparison with the circumstances surrounding the composition of Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte is, in the present context, both germane and revealing. Maimon, it appears—and this is not, I feel, coincidental—occupied Guenzberg’s thoughts in the last year of his life. In the letter immediately following upon that from which the above citation is taken, again, it appears, to Katznelson, Guenzberg describes how his commercial travels took him to Nesvij, Maimon’s birthplace: ‘This Nesvij was the birthplace of the philosopher, Solomon Maimon, and I took great pleasure in walking around the place where this philosopher spent his early days of childhood, as this is recorded in his autobiography (Toldot yemei hayyav).’ Guenzberg recounts, further in this letter, how he sought out Maimon’s family in Nesvij, especially his son, an expert apparently in the merchandise of grain and other agricultural produce.45 There is a sad irony in the spectre of an ageing

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

Lithuanian Maskil, subject to all the indignities of a travelling Jewish petty trader in the Pale, poking around Nesvij in search of some residue of one who had broken free of this world to write an autobiographical account, which he, in the forsaken Hebrew tongue, would emulate. Maimon, writing in Berlin in the last decade of the eighteenth century, was actively encouraged, as has been noted, by Karl Philipp Moritz, a leading literary Wgure of the day, to assign his life-history to writing; Moritz both provided him, in his periodical, the initial forum for the Wrst published ‘fragments’ of the autobiography and undertook the publication of the work shortly thereafter.46 And Maimon writes, in his introduction to Part II of the Lebensgeschichte, that, in view of the unforeseen acclaim accorded the Wrst fragments of his life-history in Moritz’s journal, he could no longer refuse the request of his friends, notably Moritz, for the full-length autobiography.47 It is revealing, in this respect, that Guenzberg, from the evidence of the letter of 10 Av, 1828, envisioned his autobiography being published in Berlin, not in Eastern Europe, since the Toldot anshei shem that he refers to in the preamble all derive from Germany, and with Maimon in mind, perhaps he felt that Berlin would provide a more propitious ambience for the reception of his work. No such encouragement and support as Maimon was granted was forthcoming in the many years of Guenzberg’s lonely struggle with ’Avi’ezer. Far more interest would likely have been generated amongst the Vilna Maskilim of Guenzberg’s day for his ambitious, and sadly unrealized project which he entitled, The History of Mankind . . . A Chronicle of All That Befell the Human Race from the Dawning of Civilization to the Present Day.48 As it is, Guenzberg was to see only the Wrst eight chapters of ’Avi’ezer, minus the introductory preamble, published in his lifetime.49 This he only eVected by introducing these chapters, in disguised format, into a didactic epistolary collection—a literary mode he held in slight esteem50—completed shortly before his death. In the introduction to this collection, Guenzberg provides an inventory of the types of epistolary and literary material to be contained therein. The third category of this inventory runs as follows: The life-histories of men of esteem (Toldot ’anshei shem): These also are half-way between letters and books, for by design they constitute complete works, but they only include the history of one particular

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individual. The opening section, however, of the history that I have included in this work of mine, holds within it axioms for the rearing and upbringing of children, for the ediWcation of all households and schools.51

The reader of this introduction is given no inkling that included in this epistolary collection are the Wrst eight chapters—or seven in the Devir redaction—of an autobiography, let alone the autobiography of the author, or compiler. It is surely more than coincidental that Guenzberg, in volume 1 of Devir, includes these early chapters of ’Avi’ezer under the rubric Toldot ’anshei shem. These are the words with which he opens his preamble—which he had no doubt written by now—to the full version of ’Avi’ezer. But in the preamble, ’Avi’ezer is not included within this category; the ‘life-histories of men of esteem’ provide, rather, the point of negation by which the autobiographical project at hand is deWned. When confronted with the actualities of publication of ’Avi’ezer, his ‘threshed and winnowed one’, Guenzberg evidently feels constrained to camouflage the work doubly: it is presented within a literary mode, in Hebrew, of pre-Haskalah provenance—the epistolary primer—and subsumed under a category, well-tried since the days of the Me’asseWm for the purveying of ‘enlightenment’—the lives of exemplary men.

The Conception of the Child Further evidence that Guenzberg felt none too sure-footed when it came to fulWlling the autobiographical assignment he set himself in his preamble à la Rousseau is to be derived from the text of ’Avi’ezer itself. The tension in ’Avi’ezer between the pressing demand for autobiographical expression of self and the constraints imposed by the Hebraic literary conventions of the age is most apparent in the early chapters of the work. This, in itself, is understandable; Rousseau himself, as has been noted, felt constrained to explain and apologize for inclusion of so detailed an account of the earliest years in the Confessions. Guenzberg, mutatis mutandis, must tread extremely gingerly in his introduction of the Rousseauian child—a presence thoroughly subversive of the favoured modality of Toldot ’anshei shem—to his cir-

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

cle of prospective readers in early nineteenth-century Jewish Eastern Europe. Indeed, given the anachronistic espousal by the majority of Russian Maskilim of a militantly eighteenth-century rationalism well into the nineteenth century,52 he must measure his steps all the more carefully.53 Maimon, in signiWcant contrast with Guenzberg, and casting his seed on ground already well-furrowed by Rousseau, treats of his early years with an almost breezy conWdence; only with his arrival in Berlin and Wrst acquaintance with the Mendelssohn clique—childhood and adolescence well behind him—does he present the reader with an apology for his autobiographical enterprise. Guenzberg opens his autobiographical account proper with a proverb, or rather a Mashal—a well-tried didactic form in Hebrew literature that was given a new lease on life by the Maskilim from the period of the Me’asseWm.54 Based upon the biblical account in Judges 6, this Mashal, which explains Guenzberg’s curious choice of title for his autobiography, recounts an imaginary conversation between the ’Ephod of Jeruba’al and the wheat threshed out in the wine-press by Gideon, son of Joash the Aviezrite, in order to hide it from the Midianites.55 The point of the Mashal is to counsel against actions taken in undue haste and without due consideration of their long-term consequences: As the wheat of the Aviezrite, harvested prematurely, could not give forth of its potential abundance, so Gideon, in forging the ’Ephod, did not consider the deleterious consequences that this action would have for himself and his house.56 Of all the proverbs and Aesopian fables cited in ’Avi’ezer, this opening Mashal—the only one in the book that builds upon a biblical theme—is the most forced and clumsily contrived. Since, moreover, the Gideon/Jerubaal theme does not recur later in the work, Guenzberg’s entitling his autobiography ’Avi’ezer would appear a pointless conceit. The title, the contrivance of the biblical Mashal, become more understandable when viewed as palliatives, means, that is, of lulling the reader into acceptance of the ‘axioms for the rearing and upbringing of children’ that, according to Guenzberg’s itemized summary of the contents of volume 1 of Devir, are cloaked within the ‘life-history’ that is to follow. Such niceties, however, scarcely blunt the impact of the extraordinary indictment of the modes of Jewish conception that follows

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immediately upon the stilted conversation between the ’Ephod and the Aviezrite wheat: O that parents would only pay due heed, as they take their wives into their embrace, to the outcome of their mutual activity and to the momentous consequences ensuing therefrom! Then they would not take this great matter lightly, nor would they arouse their desire before nature had ripened the tender sap she had prepared in their bodies for the Wrst-fruits, so that their oVspring would be whole and hale in body and soul. But like the Aviezrite, when he cast his golden ephod without considering the ultimate consequence of his actions, so they pour forth their gold from themselves without paying due heed to the mighty act they perform. They do not wait until the spirit of nature has aroused them to pour forth their reWned gold. Bed-ridden through excess, stuVed with food to bursting-point, they toss and turn, for the heavy, inadequately digested food, gives them not a moment’s rest. Without passion or desire, but only to while away the hours, they engage their spouses in intimate conversation. In this befuddled state, do they compel nature to push forth unripe seed; in a state midway beween sleep and wakefulness, do they perform that momentous act—the conception, no less, of a human being!57

The most striking, and indeed puzzling, aspect of this extraordinary diatribe, is that while Guenzberg displays considerable equivocation when it comes to the autobiographical act itself, he shows few reservations in tackling the sexual thematic head-on; here, as elsewhere in ’Avi’ezer, as Klausner notes, Guenzberg attains a ‘realism that threatens to break the bounds of decency’.58 Guenzberg’s intent, however, in this passage is clear, and it is less autobiographical than it is reformist and didactic: By taking himself as negative example, he seeks to expose the deWciencies not only of the traditional Jewish manner of ‘rearing and upbringing’, but also of conception. The repeated invocation of ‘nature’ (Hebrew Teva’), in this passage, characteristic of ’Avi’ezer as a whole,59 and the pervasiveness of the naturalistic metaphor are illustrative of Guenzberg’s fundamental allegiance to axioms Rousseauian in origin. ‘But concerning what you said that the Maskilim provided a naturalistic explanation (Derekh hateva’), this my mind cannot grasp’, says ‘Reb Yitshaq Ya’aqov’ in one of Agnon’s stories:

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

“And nature itself, how do they interpret it?” mocked Reb Yitshaq Ya’aqov and he said that all of them piss in the same pot, nature nature nature (Teva’ teva’ teva’). If they are so enamored of nature, how come they do not behave according to nature (Kederekh hateva’), as Sforim (traditional religious books, M.M.) cite according to section ‘Humility’ in Duties of the Heart, that a man should always be modest and humble until humility adheres to him as second nature (Teva’).60

It is also revealing that Guenzberg has ‘Teva’’ throughout this passage and almost invariably in ’Avi’ezer as a whole in the feminine gender, such sex-change being most likely accounted for by his conforming to the example of French/German Nature/Natur. Interestingly, and I believe this is highly signiWcant, when Guenzberg uses nature to refer to human nature/disposition, as does the word Teva’ in classic Jewish sources, he employs the word in the masculine: for example: ‘Teva’ hamelammed hehadash hazeh hayah rakh kekaneh’/‘The nature of the new Melammed was soft as a reed’.61 This understanding of Teva’ as human nature/character/disposition, is precisely that which Agnon’s ‘Yitshaq Ya’aqov’ opposes to the Haskalah understanding of the term: Guenzburg’s gender bifurcation is thus, I believe, deliberate, and speaks volumes in terms of the history of mentalities. It is not, however, to the Rousseau of the Confessions that Guenzberg is here primarily indebted, but rather to Rousseau, author of the vastly controversial and no less influential ‘Treatise on Education’, Émile:62 God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil. He forces one soil to yield the products of another, one tree to bear another’s fruit. He confuses and confounds time, place and natural conditions. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He destroys and defaces all things; he loves all that is deformed and monstrous; he will have nothing as nature made it, not even man himself, who must learn his paces like a saddlehorse, and be shaped to his master’s taste like the trees in his garden.63

These, the opening lines of Émile, express in a nutshell the underlying presuppositions that Guenzberg brings to bear upon the reconstruction of his early years as he comes to draw up the balance sheet of his past in ’Avi’ezer. In Rousseau’s Émile, Guenzberg Wnds precedent and

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model for speaking of infancy and the early days of boyhood within a context clearly didactic in intent, the account of these early years thus being justiWed by the beneWts accorded society by the ‘instruction’64 contained therein. And so, after his account of his infelicitous induction to the womb, Guenzberg goes on, by means of personal example, to expose and berate the noxious indignities visited upon the Jewish child at his expulsion therefrom: In the same way as parents destroy their own handiwork in the very act of insemination, so, in the manner of their rearing of this alreadyenfeebled sprout, do they add insult to injury. Almost as soon as the voice of the arrival is heard in his new place of dwelling, he is bound head to foot in coverings, swaddling-bands, swathes, so that he cannot move his tender limbs in accordance with his wish and as nature intended. Son of man! Son of man! It is not now as it was in former days; you have been deprived of the authority you enjoyed for nine months while nature alone watched over you, when you could move freely within the conWnes of your world—up or down, to the left or to the right. Now you may not move even the tiniest of your limbs, even your little Wnger, as you wish, without the permission of the nurse to whom fate has entrusted you, for to slavery have you been sent forth. In hot baths do they enfeeble his flesh, with thick blankets do they separate him from the outside air which nature has provided in order to make his limbs Wrm. And if, even worse, his parents are wealthy and he their only son, they take every opportunity to undermine his health; for it is a disgrace for children of the upper-classes to be hale and healthy like one of the peasant children in the villages . . . Such is the lot of the body and such the portion of the soul from birth and from upbringing, and I too have not escaped their eVects, as shall be seen in the following chapters.65

This tirade against swaddling, warm baths, pampering, appears to be lifted, with slight modiWcations, straight from the Wrst section of Émile.66 Either Guenzberg, who, as shall be seen, freely interpolated the works of European writers into his original compositions, had a copy of Émile in front of him at the time of writing, or the work was fresh in his mind.67 Guenzberg, however, at the time of writing ’Avi’ezer, had also before his eyes, or in his mind, Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte and,

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

quite probably, the Confessions of Rousseau.68 Mutually contradictory forces are thus at play—and pronouncedly so—in Guenzberg’s depiction of his early years in ’Avi’ezer. Rousseau himself had to submit the child as created in the ‘Treatise on Education’, Émile, to considerable modiWcation in order to justify his inclusion in the autobiographical scheme of relations in the Confessions. In the Confessions, presentation of childhood falls outside any didactic purpose; Rousseau here, rather, gives an account of the self as child with the aim of presenting himself ‘as he was’, and is—for Rousseau, as autobiographer, perceives the child as constant and indwelling presence—and in order to trace the origins of the unique personality who was to create Émile.69 Guenzberg, though, would have it both ways; in ’Avi’ezer, he undertakes to write a work that serves simultaneously as autobiography, testament to self, and as ‘treatise on education’ of universal implications. This dual motivation serves ultimately to the detriment of ’Avi’ezer both as autobiography and as educational treatise, for Guenzberg, in electing such a bifurcated approach, is faced with several insurmountable paradoxes. How, Wrst of all, can he, as does Rousseau in the Confessions and Maimon in the Lebensgeschichte, trace the unique and unrepeatable sequence of events in the life of the child that went into the making of the no less unique sensibility of the adult autobiographer, without thereby vitiating the general applicability of the ‘maxims for the rearing and upbringing of children’ which he has come to impart? In writing the early chapters of ’Avi’ezer, Guenzberg must steer a path midway between the depiction of the early years of a generic, composite ‘child’, as is, of course, ‘Émile’, and an account of the peculiar concatenation of childhood events and impressions that left their mark upon the sensibility of the adult autobiographer.70 Two devices serve Guenzberg especially well in the neutralization of the particularity of his experiences of early childhood and Heder as these are recounted in ’Avi’ezer: the Mashal, as mentioned, generally in the form of the Aesopian fable, and the formalized address of the Hebrew ethical will or Tsava’ah.71 These means of generalizing autobiographical experience, and of extending the range of the narrative’s applicability, carry with them a considerable price. There is not here, as there is in the Wner examples of the Tsava’ah, the same organic connection between the

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experiences recounted and the ethical maxims to be imparted to the author’s oVspring. Guenzberg’s parables, or fables, likewise, frequently sit uneasily with the matter at hand and give the impression of being artiWcially—and somewhat clumsily—superimposed.72 In measure, in these early chapters, as the didactic superstructure impedes the flow of the autobiographical narrative, so this narrative, as it strains at the leash, robs much of the didactic import of its sting; Rousseau strikes far more satisfactory a balance betwen novel and treatise in Émile, than does Guenzberg between autobiography and treatise in ’Avi’ezer. These Wrst twelve or so chapters of ’Avi’ezer constitute, in the end, less a continuous autobiographical narrative than a series of tableaux, each depicting, by way of negative example, an educational or moral maxim. This tendency toward the atomization of the narrative is especially apparent in the account of the autobiographical protagonist’s Heder experiences—the Wrst of their type in Hebrew literature, with the exception of the brief sections from the Autobiography of a Bohemian Jew, as cited above. Each of Guenzberg’s learning experiences at the hands of a succession of Melammedim is here used to stigmatize a particular pedagogic flaw.73 Didactic imperative and autobiographical impulse clash, likewise, in ’Avi’ezer, when it comes to the implicit value, in the autobiographical narrative, to be assigned the state of childhood vis-à-vis the adult condition. Should the childhood years be viewed, from the retrospective vantage-point of the autobiographer, as a necessary, albeit autonomous waystation—or thesis, in the Hegelian sense—toward an achieved and satisfactory maturity, as they are in Émile? Or, should the modes of perception and ethical evaluations of the child be accorded an immanent and privileged position, as they are in the Confessions? Guenzberg wavers uneasily between these two options. In the third chapter of ’Avi’ezer, with the aid of an animal parable concerning a silkworm and a moth, he apologizes to the reader, in the manner of Rousseau, for inclusion of the years of childhood in his narrative: You will, no doubt, be amazed upon reading what is to be related in the present chapter and you will ask: ‘What is this writer thinking of in inundating us with petty trifles from the days of childhood, in burdening us with childhood prattle? He would have done better to skip

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

over the account of the days of childhood and go straight on to provide a depiction of the adult years.’ It is for this reason that I have prefaced this section with the silkworm parable, in order to convince you that for working men such as us, the days of our childhood are the best of our lives. These are the days in which the intellect sprouts and puts forth flower, sends out shoots to form tender blossom to delight the eyes and nostrils of every passer-by.74

Guenzberg goes on, even, to express an Edenic nostalgia for the lost days of childhood: What picture, my child, can I present you of my adult years? . . . The intellect is become dulled through work and pursuit of a livelihood, its unique ability to soar upward to the lofty spheres is gone. Rather does it sink like lead through the weight of the millstones around my neck . . . Of what further use to the world is an enfeebled memory, clumsy intellect and faint heart such as this . . . if not to produce oVspring and die! . . . Alas! The days of childhood are the springtime of life! ‘The former days were preferable to these’, I do exclaim, along with the Wrst man as he was driven out of the Garden of Eden.75

And later in ’Avi’ezer, when Guenzberg comes to describe the trauma of leaving home for the Wrst time, he compares the consolation aVorded by the recall of memories of childhood, and their recording in writing, to the pleasure derived by cattle from chewing the cud.76 The tenor of these passages, with the complaint of ‘enfeebled intellect, weak memory and faint heart’, would accord well with a later dating for the composition of the Wnal version of ’Avi’ezer than the year 1828. Perhaps, in the process of writing the Wnal version of ’Avi’ezer— ill and disillusioned as Guenzberg appears to have been in the Wnal years of his life—an inner compulsion to recall the years of childhood, which now appear in rosier hue, was added to the declared or manifest didactic intent as articulated in the preamble. Thus Burton Pike, in his essay ‘Time in Autobiography’: The autobiographer’s fascination with childhood emerges as a screening-device which enables him to express in the present of writing certain ideas and feelings which his active consciousness might lead him to reject—ego-dominated autobiography is fascinated by the timeless vision of childhood . . . It may be a way of blocking the ticking of the

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clock toward death, of which the adult is acutely aware, and it may also represent a deep fascination with death itself, the ultimate timeless state.77

But the autobiographical notion of idyllic retreat to childhood as a period of unsullied vision and pre-lapsarian bliss does not square at all with the utilitarian and didactic emphases of ’Avi’ezer in its aspect of ‘treatise on education’. In excoriating the then-prevalent Jewish modes of upbringing, education—even conception—Guenzberg must present in as negative a light as possible the childhood of whose natural pleasures he feels himself to have been cheated. A similar tension between the idyllic and the satirical in the depiction of the Jewish childhood may, it should be noted, be observed in the works of Sh. Y. Abramovitsh.78 An overly enthusiastic embrace, moreover, of childhood modes of thinking and feeling—as in Rousseau’s Confessions and in the ‘Aggadic’ reworkings of the Jewish childhood of Zalman Epstein, David Frishman, Berdichevsky and Bialik—would prove quite subversive of the rationalism that the Vilna Maskilim, Guenzberg foremost among them, sought to promulgate. SigniWcant, in this respect, and further evidence of the conflicting lines of discourse at play in the early chapters of ’Avi’ezer, is that Guenzberg, in the above-cited passage, professes nostalgia for the superior intellectual lucidity, the Sekhel, of the child. He does not, as does Rousseau and the autobiographers who follow him, perceive the child as pre-eminently a creature of feeling and intuition. If, however, there is a pervasive theme in these chapters, notwithstanding the conflicting inclinations that went into their composition, it is that of the play of power and powerlessness. Forcibly inducted, before his time, into the womb, Guenzberg emerges into a Foucaultlike entanglement of power-relations converging upon the mind and body of the child. The child is bound hand-to-foot; at his Wrst cries he is terriWed into silence by the dreadful apparitions conjured up by his nurse, who wishes to sleep.79 Trussed up and deprived of the only articulation available to him—tears and yelling—he is further emasculated and enfeebled through excessive and misguided parental pampering. During his Wrst learning sessions with his father, the young Guenzberg shows signs of a precocious and enquiring intelligence.80 These Wrst flickerings of cognitive autonomy are, however, swiftly and decisively extinguished when the child, borne in his mother’s arms, is

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

entrusted to the Wrst Melammed.81 Now, subject to the conflicting influences of Melammed and father, Guenzberg is victim of an intrapsychic power struggle between the forces of intellect and imagination.82 All this leaves him with a chronic and permanent impairment of the ability to draw conclusions or make decisions independent of the opinion of others, ‘to such a degree as I take it almost as a rule-of-thumb that it is better to do what is improper, so long as this is in accord with the opinions of others, than to do what is proper in my own eyes’.83 This inability provides the cognitive analogue to Guenzberg’s helplessness in the sphere of action and volition. And, as if this is not enough, Guenzberg becomes the largely undeserving butt, at home, of intrafamilial tensions and power-shifts.84

Generation and Gender: Discourses on Power As each of the moments of passage in Guenzberg’s life—including that from potential existence to foetus—is forced and premature, so the burdens of adulthood are summarily thrust upon the child ‘Aviezer’ with no allowance for the intervening period of adolescence. Thus, at the end of chapter 11 of ’Avi’ezer, Guenzberg informs the reader peremptorily: ‘The narrative of my childhood is ended’.85 Each of the traumatic and forcefully inflicted rites de passage in ’Avi’ezer involves the child’s induction to a sphere of power-relations more ramiWed and threatening than the one preceding: From non-existence, Guenzberg is forced into the womb, within whose conWnes he enjoys a period of relative freedom and well-being; thence he is delivered into the stifling embrace of nurses and the immediate family; thence to the savage pedagoguery of the Heder and the noxious influence of schoolmates. So now, the end of Guenzberg’s childhood years heralds a further expansion in the network of power-relations with which the eleven-year-old has to contend. The marriage-brokers now come to remind him that ‘the days of childhood have passed and now I stand on the threshold of young adulthood’.86 The intrusion of the Shadhanim in the relatively circumscribed world of the child coincides with the expansion of his mental horizon through exposure to the Hebrew ‘historical’ and Kabbalistic works in his father’s library—most notably

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the Yossipon,87 of which he writes, “my eyes were opened up and I saw that the town of my birth was but a small and tranquil speck in the mighty and bustling world’.88 As each expansion in ’Avi’ezer is accompanied by danger, so this ‘eating of the tree of knowledge’89 sets the scene for the ensuing intra-psychic conflict between faith and reason, imagination and intellect, Kabbalistic theism and Enlightenment deism. With the Wrst tentative exposure to secular knowledge and the initial, probatory advances of the Shadhanim are set into place the twin alignments that will, throughout the remaining narrative of ’Avi’ezer, vie for control of the hapless Guenzberg’s body and mind. In both spheres—the intra- and the extra-psychic—Guenzberg portrays himself as passive victim caught in the midst of a play of forces beyond his ken or conscious control. Thus Guenzberg, by use of the metaphor of the merchant’s scale, depicts his father’s negotiations with the Shadhanim in terms of a capitalistic transaction. Guenzberg, as prospective suitor, is entirely reiWed in this process; as the object of the transaction, he must be exchanged for another object of at least equal, but preferably greater, value.90 Since, moreover, his value and that of his prospective betrothed derive not from any quality inherent in their individualities, but from the whole network of Yihus (‘pedigree’), this value is subject, as it were, to the invisible play of market forces quite beyond either of their control. Thus, when one of Guenzberg’s father’s relatives deserts wife and children and converts to Islam, Guenzberg’s value on the marriage-exchange plummets drastically. When, in addition to this family catastrophe, Guenzberg’s father himself suVers a Wnancial setback, he is forced to ‘incline his ear’ to the Shadhanim, whose oVers he had previously rebuVed, and redeem himself through the sale of his son to wealthy parvenus.91 With this calamitous reversal of fortunes, Guenzberg’s die is cast. On Tuesday, the second of Adar, 1810, the members of the household install him in his place in the carriage that is to take him to his new home; ominous sacriWcial undertones accompany Guenzberg’s account of this removal from the familiar and delimited sphere of family and friends in his home-town to the unknown.92 The future in-laws’ reception of the prospective groom is, in ’Avi’ezer, depicted in distinctly pagan terms: Amid the clashing of cymbals and blowing of flutes, the trembling Guenzberg is accompanied to the house where

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

the marriage ceremony is to take place, to be presented with a goblet of wine by his future mother-in-law.93 Guenzberg’s installment in his father-in-law’s house marks a major point of transition in ’Avi’ezer. The polarity between this home and that of his natural parents lends the ensuing narrative much of its tension, and accounts of the various journeys between the two households mark some of the dramatic high points of the work. With Guenzberg’s removal, of course, from the ambience of his immediate family, his servants and townsfolk, there is a further expansion of the periphery of power-relations within which he is contained, or better, restrained; the lines of power, their possible ramiWcations and permutations become more complex. And it is within this enwidened arena of power-relations that the central drama of ’Avi’ezer is acted out—that of sexual impotence and its eventual overcoming. Guenzberg, as noted above, shows remarkably little reticence, in ’Avi’ezer, in discussing sexual matters with an openness that is, at times, astonishing. Impotence, being a symptom at once psychological and somatic, provides Guenzberg with the ideal trope for the subjugation of mind and body of which he feels he has been victim. The theme also enables him to make a thematic link with the Wrst chapter of ’Avi’ezer, and the Wrst major transition therein recounted—from non-existence to being—thus lending gist to the spiralling structure of the work as a whole, whereby each of a series of stages previously traversed is recapitulated, by gradations, in ever larger and more complex format.94 Guenzberg, on his Wrst night in the marital chamber, now Wnds himself in much the same situation as the ‘parents’, replete with food, tossing and turning on their beds, compelled to ‘push forth unripe fruit’, as depicted in the opening chapter. At the textual level, indeed, considerable potency accrues to the inability of the young protagonist of ’Avi’ezer to perform sexually. Power versus powerlessness, nature versus nurture, forcible indoctrination as against freedom of intellectual enquiry—all of these antinomies and the variants thereof that provide the theoretical underpinning for ’Avi’ezer Wnd their fullest and most poignant expression in the saga of Guenzberg’s impotence and its overcoming. It is in his depiction of sexual impotence that Guenzberg discovers the means of overcoming the tensions between the didactic and confessional strains as is so marked in the earlier sections of the work. It is not uncoincidental that the

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mashal, the disquisitional aside, are conspicuously absent from those sections of ’Avi’ezer which deal most directly with the protagonist’s sexual encounters.95 Sexual dysfunction is, of course, a major theme of Rousseau’s Confessions,96 and Maimon, in the Lebensgeschichte, makes mention, en passant, of his inability to perform sexually for a considerable time after his marriage at eleven years old.97 Guenzberg, no doubt, felt emboldened by these precedents in his broaching of the subject. But, in the centrality he accords the sexual problematic in ’Avi’ezer and, above all, in the graphic nature of his descriptions, Guenzberg goes well beyond Maimon, even Rousseau. The following exposure of the sexual mores of Western European Jews with which Guenzberg prefaces the account of his own sexual impotence is well illustrative of the extraordinary candour and seeming lack of embarrassment with which Guenzberg approaches a subject that would, surely, have been taboo to the majority of his Hebraist contemporaries: As our brethren who dwell in Poland stray far from the golden mean, so do our brethren in Germany who follow the footsteps of the Gentiles with bovine compliance err in the opposite extreme. They delay in taking wives until they are on the threshold of senility, having exhausted their youthful vigor on the laps of whores and floozies. Only when thoroughly depleted, dissipated through a youth of depravity and excess, and beginning to feel the wages of their sins do they make so bold as to approach the fortress of a young lady of charm and beauty. But they bring with them a ‘king who will not rise’.98 Coax him as they will, this ‘king’ will not stand up; he has barely the strength to lean at the door of the household he would establish.99 So would a lad uncork a bottle of Wne champagne as gladdens the heart and oVer up the Wrst foaming cup to a wanton, imperious whore,100 sparing only the dregs for his wife. Has there ever been heard the likes of such an abomination? And, should, then, this wretched, disappointed woman be held to blame if, at the arousal of her desire she, in turn, seeks to quench her parched spirit from the cup of another?101

Not only is this passage candid and explicit, it is also astonishingly crude. Guenzberg’s use of puns, and biblical and Talmudic references— most notably the Wgure of the ‘king who cannot stand up’—serves not to camouflage this crudity but rather to heighten it. The same note of

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

crudity, such as is absent even in the writings of Berdichevsky, for whom, as has been noted, the perverse manifestations of Eros exercised a persistent fascination, is also apparent in Guenzberg’s account of his wedding night: Since I have already informed you above that, at that time, my nature had not yet stirred me to sexual desire, it is scarcely necessary for me to raise the curtain of my bedroom in order to demonstrate to you that as I ascended my wife’s bed on the eve of Sunday the seventh of Adar to make love,102 so did I descend on the morning of the eighth of Adar. Nor, on the second night, did I muster adequate strength to perform as a man, even though I saw the fortress opened up wide before me. I had but to say the word and its gates would have been thrown wide open. The rules of war I knew from the Gemara; for all this, I did not muster up enough strength to mount the ramparts and storm the fort. From knowledge to ability it is a far cry indeed!103

Guenzberg’s double-entendres in these passages, the jocularity of tone are, notwithstanding the thoroughly convoluted but essentially biblical Hebrew in which they are written, strongly reminiscent of the Victorian pornographic novel. The levity and vulgarity of tone as evinced in these, as in other depictions in ’Avi’ezer, is altogether puzzling. This scarcely furthers the didactic intent of the work and robs, furthermore, the autobiographical narrative of some of its pathos. The vulgar, almost bawdy, tenor of these passages would, moreover, appear to contravene Guenzberg’s own prescriptions concerning ‘purity’ and ‘good taste’ in Hebrew composition.104 Guenzberg’s employment of the vocabulary of warfare and siege in these sexual depictions is, aside from the pornographic dimension, suggestive of the thematic link between the impotence of the protagonist and the major motif in ’Avi’ezer—the play of power and powerlessness. Guenzberg, so long as he does not perform sexually, is at a distinct disadvantage in the new arena of power-relations in which he Wnds himeslf. Until he has demonstrated his virility by consummating the marriage, Guenzberg, ‘the feminine male’ will not be shown the deference due a husband by his wife, ‘the masculine female’.105 Nor, until such time, will he be accorded anything but the status of ‘foreigner’ in his in-laws’ household.106 The focal point of interest for Guenzberg, in his narrative of impotence and its eventual overcoming, is not, as Mintz has pointed

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out, sex—certainly not love—but rather the balances of power, their shifts and their ultimate redress in his favor.107 Marriage itself, Guenzberg views in terms not of romance, but of power, Realpolitik; the ideal relationship between the sexes is in the nature of a homeostatic arrangement whereby an equitable balance of power is maintained by a system of checks, balances and mutual compromise.108 Guenzberg’s period of sexual impotence coincides, at all events, with his nadir on the scales of power. The crowning, and near fatal, indignity to be inflicted upon the protagonist of ’Avi’ezer is the ‘cure’ procured him for his impotence by his mother-in-law. Guenzberg is administered a herbal emetic, prepared by a local medic, and is then cajoled, through emotional blackmail, by his wife to drink of the vomit thereby induced.109 The physical and psychological consequences of this treatment are, needless to say, severe. So much so that the repercussions of Guenzberg’s dire predicament are felt in both households—that of the in-laws and that of Guenzberg’s natural parents—indeed, the marriage comes close to annulment. The tendency, in ’Avi’ezer, for the arena of power-relations in which the drama is enacted to emanate, by a series of ever-expanding circles, from the nucleus of home-town and family outwards, has been noted above. And it is at this critical juncture in the lifetime of the protagonist that the fourth—and Wnal—shift from a more delimited sphere to one of wider range and ramiWcations occurs. ’Avi’ezer, like Agnon’s Sippur pashut, with which the text has such striking aYnities, is primarily a drama of households; the one major geographical shift therein recounted is from the home of natural parents to that of the in-laws. Within this limited geographical domain, however, the movement from one household to another may signify the traversal of a considerable cognitive distance; as, for example, in the Wrst section of ’Avi’ezer, does the removal from home to Heder. As Heder, in the Wrst section, serves as the negative counterpart to home, so, in the second section, does the home of the mysterious Yashish (‘old man’) serve as the positive counterpart to the fractious and essentially vulgar house of the in-laws. Here again the recapitulatory structure of ’Avi’ezer is in evidence. The dynamics of temporary absence, occasioned by Wnancial necessity, of the patriarch of the household, and his subsequent return,

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

serve, in ’Avi’ezer as an agency of change. And, as previously, the return of Guenzberg’s natural father from business travels marked the transition from one unsatisfactory Melammed to another—as it happens, equally unsatisfactory—so now, upon his return to the home, Guenzberg’s father-in-law, seeing the deleterious consequences of his wife’s ‘cure’, seeks a ‘professional physician’ to rectify his son-in-law’s impotence. Help arrives from unexpected quarters: At Wrst, I was less than overjoyed to hear from my father-in-law that my cure was to be entrusted to the hands of this man . . . for he was of ill and dangerous repute amongst all God-fearing men on account of the faith to which he subscribed. By the Jews, he was considered an abominator who denied the existence of God, and he was also considered tainted by pious Christians. The old men who knew him said he was descended from those Jews who converted to Christianity; some of them said that he was a magician who sold himself to the devil in order to gain wealth. The Maskilim of the city said that he was in possession of the philosopher’s stone that could transform base metal to gold. The seven-storey tower that he erected next to his house was, in the opinion of the former, a conventicle for demons and spirits . . . He was, in truth, a philosopher and a man of great wisdom . . . The tower he built was an astronomical observatory. He also, however, delved into the mysteries of alchemy and metaphysics and, enjoying some expertise in the Holy Tongue, he sought also to penetrate the secrets of Kabbalistic scriptures . . . Perhaps I am not mistaken when I venture that he was of the descendants of Shabbatai Tsevi, who were compelled to assume the Christian faith; for he held the Zohar in especially high esteem. His two sons went to Germany, never to return to him, whence it was rumoured that they had returned to the Jewish faith. All this, however, is but hearsay and conjecture for which I do not wish to be held accountable.110

In the household of this old heretic, a Wgure of almost mythic dimensions, and one on the very margins of Jewish society—quite possibly the prototype of the equally marginalized medic ‘Dr. Langsam’ in Agnon’s Sippur pashut—the Wnal scenes of ’Avi’ezer are played out. This old man, in whose person there is some striking conWrmation of Gershom Scholem’s thesis concerning the dialectical relation between Sabbatian and Frankian antinomianism and the emergence of Haskalah and Reform Judaism,111 performs, in ’Avi’ezer, a function much akin

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to the deus ex machina of later Haskalah novels. Guenzberg’s sexual impotence is incurable within the conWnes of the social group at whose door he lays the blame for this incapacity—within, that is, the framework of traditional Jewish society in Eastern Europe. The old man, rather than employing unnatural methods to enforce the victimized child into precocious sexual activity, employs natural means in order to hasten the process of nature. He imposes upon Guenzberg a period of abstention from his wife’s bed, forbids him even to think of a woman—to indulge, as Guenzberg puts it, in ‘moral onanism’. Within several months, ‘nature’ responds to this treatment; the marriage is consummated amid great rejoicing at the in-laws’ home,112 and a period of harmony ensues in which the various alignments of power are tentatively held in balance. Indeed, so successful is the old man’s cure at the purely physical level that the young Guenzberg now Wnds it all but impossible to hold his unleashed libido in check, as the old man counsels him to do.113 With the cure of Guenzberg’s physical condition, however, the old man’s rôle in ’Avi’ezer is far from complete. It is the young Guenzberg’s cognitive dissonance, rather than his physical impotence, that provides the old man with the most formidable challenge.114 For Guenzberg’s period of sexual impotence coincides with his chancing upon Pinhas Eliyahu Hurwitz’s Sefer haberit, Mendelssohn’s Phaedon and the latter’s commentary on Ecclesiastes with text.115 Guenzberg, upon his own admission ‘of a reflective and speculative bent and by nature inclined to cast doubt upon everything, to waver between alternatives’,116 is now assailed by the most severe and far-reaching doubts that call the tenets of revealed religion entirely into question. These ‘doubts’ appear to assail Guenzberg’s consciousness ineluctably; he is as much their victim as he is that of the noxious notions implanted him in previous sections of the work by nurses, Melammdim, unethical schoolmates et cetera. The underlying theme here is, again, that of the individual caught in the cross-Wre of colossal forces beyond his conscious ken or control that compete for the mind of the young boy. And as in his depictions of sexual impotence, so within this context, Guenzberg avails himself of the vocabulary and imagery of battle, warfare, in describing his uneasy predicament.117 Skepsis clearly has the upper hand in this battle; faith, as Guenzberg says, ‘when it came to the battleWeld

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

was for the most part at a disadvantage’.118 As with Guenzberg’s sexual impotence, no remedy for his cognitive dilemma is forthcoming from the immediate entourage of family and Melammdim, home-grown Kabbalists and folk medics. ‘Indeed’, Guenzberg writes: It was not through any innate deWciency that faith did not prevail, but rather through my ignorance of how to avail myself of its power. For I was never instructed in the ways of faith nor in the foundations upon which it rested. Not one of my teachers enlightened me concerning one of its fundamental principles; they just stuVed me full with laws and casuistry, tier upon tier they erected, but the foundation they left unfortiWed. For the Melammdim themselves, when it came to faith, were as untutored as young calves. Just try asking one of those appointed as Rabbis to Israel, to declare to you the fundamental tenets of his own faith! You will Wnd out that he has no true understanding even of the Yigdal which he recites every day119 . . . Woe upon a disgrace such as this!120

That Guenzberg should be driven into the arms of an alchemist of Deist persuasion, possibly a crypto-Sabbatian, for resolution of his religious uncertainties implies a sorry diagnosis for the ability of traditional Jewish society to answer to the spiritual needs of the rising generation. The old man becomes for Guenzberg, in all that pertains to religious faith and intellectual enquiry, a ‘guide, a doctor of the soul’.121 Guenzberg Wnds, in the company of this old man who is quite estranged from Jewish tradition—indeed, from society as a whole—a type of spiritual kinship denied him in the household of his in-laws or of the local Rabbi: ‘Nor did I cease to visit him after a cure was eVected on my body. Whenever I felt a spiritual emptiness, I would go to see him, for I knew that I should not return from him emptyhanded. Even the casual conversation of this man contained as much wisdom as a pomegranate does seeds.’122 Such an impression did these conversations with the old man leave upon the young Guenzberg that the greater part of the Wnal section of ’Avi’ezer consists of a transcription of these discourses, cast in the form of the Socratic dialogue which Guenzberg has borrowed from Mendelssohn’s Phaedon. Much of this transcription consists, Guenzberg freely admits, of translations, or adaptations, of ‘the words of great metaphysicians that I have gleaned from the books of contemporary scholars’.123 His justiWcation

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for such plagiarism is nice: In order to replicate the impression made upon him at the time by the discourses of the Yashish, adapted, as they were, to the intellectual capacities of the child, he feels constrained to oVer his adult reader rather more sophisticated fare.124 Again, it appears, Guenzberg’s most signiWcant source for this Wnal section of ’Avi’ezer is Rousseau. The lengthy discourse of the Yashish evinces the most striking aYnities in style, structure and theme with the ‘Creed of a Savoyard Priest’ with which Rousseau interrupts the narrative of Émile.125 Not only in creed, but also in person, does this lapsed Savoyard priest, deprived of a parish and living in exile and isolation, display a quite remarkable similarity with the person of the Yashish as this is depicted in ’Avi’ezer.126 And the person of the Yashish enables Guenzberg, as did the person of the Savoyard priest Rousseau, to give disguised expression to his own ‘profession of faith’ in natural religion.127 The Savoyard priest’s generous attitude to Jews as expressed in the profession de foi128 would, no doubt, have commended itself most strongly to Guenzberg, especially given the latter’s proto-Zionist proclivities, to be discussed below. While the ramblings of the German idealist novelist and thinker Heinrich Zschokke—a writer hugely influential in Jewish Eastern Europe129—provided Guenzberg with rich precedent for the expression of solipsistic doubts and waverings,130 Zschokke’s particular brand of evangelical Christianity would scarcely have lent itself to Guenzberg as a feasible solution to his own religious dilemma.131 The old man, then, performs a complex of functions in ’Avi’ezer. Only in part, however, does he fulWll the rôle of deus ex machina that is not the least of his intended functions in the work. The bodily cure that he eVects, albeit with masterful eYcacy and economy of method, does not address the more deep-seated malaise of Guenzberg’s marital relations. ‘For all this’, Guenzberg writes, ‘the love by which myself and my wife were bound together was a love based on cleaving rather than genuine attachment. For, in our hearts, we were already divided, nor would we ever be as one flesh. This was a breach that was beyond repair—all this on account of the haste with which my parents sped me toward marriage before my time.’132 The cognitive cure likewise can scarcely, in the last analysis, be said to hold; the old man’s discourse and example provide more fuel for

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

radical skepsis than they do ballast for faith. Guenzberg’s passionate declaration of faith, at the end of the old man’s discourse, is, in light of all that has transpired in the previous pages, as disingenuous as it is unconvincing.133 Mordechai Levin, who makes frequent citations from ’Avi’ezer in his study of Haskalah ideology, is surely correct in seeing in Guenzberg one of those Maskilim for whom ‘uncertainty’, if not denial, ‘gnawed at the roots of the heart’.134 Indeed, this ‘gnawing at the heart’, exacerbated by the evident failure of the established institutions of belief to provide adequate cognitive support, may have been an important motivation in Guenzberg’s turning toward autobiographical expression in order to Wnd a Wxed centre in the self. ’Avi’ezer, at all events, ends on a note of irresolution. A further reverse of fortunes, this time for the better, brings Guenzberg’s father to his in-laws’ house to attend to the wedding preparations for Guenzberg’s widowed sister with a native of the town. With the arrival of the father in the in-laws’ camp, trouble now looms, once again, on the horizon for Guenzberg, both in his relationship with his wife and with his father. There is a deWnite sense here that a renewed cycle of frictions, shifts in power-alignments, of which Guenzberg is to be the hapless victim, is now in the oYng.135 Part autobiography then, part ‘treatise on education’, and part, indeed, translations—or renditions—of fragments eclectically culled from German, quite possibly French,136 books that fell into Guenzberg’s hands, ’Avi’ezer presents a motley spectacle. That the work, as a whole, is not only original but also coheres, is, on the face of things, occasion for surprise. And the aspect that, above all, lends the work both its cohesion and its originality is the singular emphasis throughout upon the dynamics of power and powerlessness. Whence did this motif, which serves Guenzberg so well in the patterning of his life-history, derive? And whence did Guenzberg acquire the expertise, so deftly employed in ’Avi’ezer, in depicting the shifts and vagaries of power, its deployments and combinations? It is instructive, in this respect, to view ’Avi’ezer not so much within the context of Rousseauian autobiography as within that of his own literary productions—most notably his histories, Hatsarfatim berusiyah137 and Pi haherut,138 whose focus is upon contemporary events and in

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which Guenzberg allowed himself considerable poetic licence. Alan Mintz writes that: ‘What is exciting in reading the central sections of ’Avi’ezer is the sense that we are watching Guenzberg, under the pressure of describing the turbulent conflicts of his own history, forging that language which he will later use so eVectively to describe the aVairs of nations.’139 Mintz is certainly on the right track in noting the correspondences between ’Avi’ezer and Guenzberg’s historical narratives; the faulty chronology here, however, sets the argument awry. Guenzberg’s Wrst published work, Galut ’erets hahadashah ’o massa’ Columbus (Vilna, 1823), ‘describes the aVairs of nations’; Guenzberg, it appears, had completed this book by 1821—seven years, that is, before ’Avi’ezer was begun.140 And, in 1845, when Guenzberg was most likely in the midst of preparing his Wnal version of ’Avi’ezer, he had all his major historical works—some of which remain in manuscript to this day141—behind him.142 What we may discern in ’Avi’ezer is Guenzberg’s availing himself of the vocabulary of warfare and high diplomacy—a language that he had already mastered in his earlier histories—in his recasting of his years of childhood and adolescence into narrative. Or, since Guenzberg appears to have been writing and revising ’Avi’ezer throughout the years in which the majority of the histories were written, perhaps the relationship between the histories and the autobiography admits of a more dialectical explanation. Guenzberg’s exercise in autobiography honed his skills in the art of individual characterization, the depiction of inner states of mind. These skills he then brought to bear in the writing of his histories, employing them to good eVect most notably in his depiction of the motivations and emotional waverings of Napoleon—a man who exerted upon Guenzberg an especial fascination, even a certain attraction.143 And Guenzberg, in his writing, or rather rendition, of the history of his era acquired, conversely, the skill of sustaining a fluent and exciting narrative in Hebrew whose subject is the wide panorama of contemporary events. This skill stands him in good stead in ’Avi’ezer, as the development—or, rather, thwarting—of the sensibility of the protagonist is charted against the backdrop of the wider social context that Guenzberg would indict. The histories, moreover, provided Guenzberg with the means whereby the banal and quotidian of which he has to relate in ’Avi’ezer are endowed with the dimensions of the epic.

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

There is a certain irony implicit in this mutual and dialectical transposition of techniques of narrative and characterization from histories of Europe in the throes of revolution and national renewal to an autobiographical account of the Wrst Wfteen years in the life of a Jewish boy in the Pale of Settlement. The spheres are so incommensurate. On the one hand, ancient dynasties are toppled; vast armies traverse the European continent wreaking havoc along the way; internal squabbles, fractional disputes of momentous consequence for the shaping of international destinies, occur on all sides behind the lines. The action of ’Avi’ezer, by contrast, takes place within a geographical expanse of a dozen or so Verst; in place of massive military campaigns, battles between rival schoolboy gangs, the stalled attempts of a young boy to ‘storm the fortress’ of his child-wife; in place of strategic deployment of vast forces throughout the Continent, ragged processions of wagons wend their way, the hapless Guenzberg ensconced in their midst, from the parents’ house to that of the in-laws and back; and, most crucially, in place of high diplomacy aVecting the destiny of nations, the weighing-up and exchange of a helpless child in a market dominated by arbitrary fluctuations of wealth and Yihus. It is not unlikely that Guenzberg himself would have been aware of the almost comical disparity implicitly revealed in his transposition of techniques from his histories to the microcosmic domestic and smalltown environment that is the arena for ’Avi’ezer.144 Guenzberg, elsewhere in his writings, evinces acute distress at the political powerlessness of the Jewish people in an era of national upheaval in Europe. Thus he writes, in his history of the Damascus blood-libel, Hamat Damesheq:145 The lot of the Christians is, indeed, preferable to that of the wretched Jews in their adopted land. For the Christians can, at least, place their faith in the regents of their faith, both in near Turkey and in distant lands. But for the Jews, in their destitution, there is no king, no ruler in near or distant lands to intervene on their behalf. Strangers are we throughout the earth; there is none to protect us from any impending evil . . . Nor do we stand up, arms bared, to protect our souls when men rise up against us, rather do we raise our tear-Wlled eyes in pleading: ‘Do not destroy Jacob, for he is tiny!’146

The expression of these and similar sentiments leads Klausner, with some justiWcation, to see in Guenzberg a proto-Zionist thinker.147

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Guenzberg was enthused by any manifestations of Jewish political initiative; hence his admiration for Adolphe Crémieux and Moses MonteWore—to whom he dedicated Pi haherut148—and his support of the 1846 Altaras scheme, whose failure, according to Tsitron, wreaked upon him a profound disillusionment.149 While it is, perhaps, an exaggeration to see Guenzberg as a proto-Zionist, it would not be too farfetched to discern in ’Avi’ezer an implicit critique of the involuted and ultimately self-defeating political structure of a community wherein such power as there is is dissipated in marriage negotiations, inter- and intra-familial squabbles and the like. There is, moreover, a certain analogy to be drawn between the powerless protagonist of ’Avi’ezer, whose destiny is determined by forces beyond his control, and the position of Israel among the nations as this is understood by Guenzberg. This posited connection between Guenzberg’s histories and his autobiography is also of signiWcance from the literary-historical aspect; for Guenzberg, largely by dint of his histories, but also of his epistolary collections, is generally recognized by Jewish literary historians as being the founding-father of modern Hebrew prose-style.150 ‘His translation of Campe’s Discovery of America and Politz’s Universal History’, writes Dubnow, ‘as well as his own history of the Franco-Russian war of 1812, compiled from various sources, were, as far as Russia is concerned, the Wrst specimens of secular literature in pure Hebrew, which boldly claimed their place side by side with rabbinic and Hassidic writing.’151 And the publication history of Guenzberg’s histories and epistolary collections attests to the extraordinary influence these works had upon his own and the succeeding generation.152 The fact that many of the prose-techniques evident in the histories—and, indeed, in the original pieces in the epistolary collections—must have been initially reWned in the seventeen-year-long process of the writing and revising of ’Avi’ezer, is suggestive of a crucial and hitherto unacknowledged link between the stirring of the autobiographical impulse and the dawning of modern Hebrew literature.153 Guenzberg’s contemporaries, however, felt the force of his proseinnovations through the reading of his histories and epistolary collections, not of his autobiography. It is not unlikely that the manuscript of ’Avi’ezer enjoyed some limited circulation amongst select groups of

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

the Vilna Maskilim,154 but the work was not published until 1863— seventeen years, that is, after Guenzberg’s death and at a remove of some thirty-Wve years from the inception of the project in 1828. The reasons for this delay in publication are not entirely clear. Family censorship may have played some part in the matter—Guenzberg’s widow cannot, after all, have been overly pleased at her depiction in ’Avi’ezer.155 Then again, the explicit sexuality—even crudity—may have led the family and/or Guenzberg’s copyist, Ya’aqov Katznelson, to refrain from publication. Even upon publication, however, in 1863, ’Avi’ezer does not appear to have been met with any great enthusiasm. The work, in contrast to Guenzberg’s epistolary collections, each of which ran into several editions, and his histories, the majority of which went into two editions, was only printed once. Nor have I found a single contemporary review of the book. Klausner, surmising from these publication data a lukewarm response to ’Avi’ezer, sees this as indicative of the provincialism of the Hebrew-reading public in the sixties, seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century.156 Provincialism and narrowness of literary purview may indeed have played their part; but the phenomenon of the seeming lack of response to ’Avi’ezer is, I believe, best seen within the wider purview of the theoretical model as outlined above. It was noted above that a key symptom of the establishment of a literary Weld or circuit of autobiographical relations is the marked diminution of the time-lag between the writing and the publication of an autobiographical work. While the time that elapsed between the writing and the publication of ’Avi’ezer is considerably less than with any of the premodern works discussed above, this seventeen-year time-lag is still indicative of that temporal lapse between autobiography as ‘text’ and autobiography as ‘discourse’ as discussed above. Hans Robert Jauss is enlightening in this respect: The way in which a literary work, at the historical moment of its appearance, satisWes, surpasses, disappoints, or refutes the expectations of its Wrst audience obviously provides a criterion for the determination of its aesthetic value. The distance between the horizon of expectations and the work, between the familiarity of previous aesthetic experience and the ‘horizontal change’ demanded by the reception of

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the new work determines the character of a literary work, according to an aesthetics of reception . . . 157

Perhaps the ‘horizontal change’ demanded by ’Avi’ezer upon its reading-community was simply too wide to be breached. Indeed, that ’Avi’ezer was published even in 1863—six years, it should be noted, before the publication in full of Mapu’s ’Ayit tsavua’ and thirty-Wve years before the appearance of the Wrst near-complete translation into Hebrew of Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte—was, most likely, more by dint of the proven success of the author’s previously published works and the extraordinary reputation he enjoyed among the Vilna circle of Maskilim, than by virtue of the literary innovation that the work represented.158 And, once published, even the most stalwart of the aWcionados of Guenzberg’s epistolary collections and histories must have been somewhat baZed by ’Avi’ezer. With the swiftly changing landscape, moreover, of Hebrew literature from the 1860s to the Wnal decade of the nineteenth century, ’Aviezer would, in terms of Hebrew style and of ideology, already have appeared somewhat antiquated to a more intellectual turn-of-the-century Hebrew reader.

Autobiographies in Dialogue: From ’Avi’ezer to Hatt’ot ne’urim It is quite possible that, even after its publication, ’Avi’ezer would have remained an essentially hidden text—albeit exerting a subterranean influence upon such literary innovators as Abramovitsh, Feierberg and Berdichevsky159—had the work not come to the notice in 1864, shortly after its publication, of an embattled nineteen-year-old Maskil, Moshe Leib Lilienblum.160 Lilienblum, by the time he came, in 1873, to chart his path from the Orthodoxy of his childhood, to Haskalah, to the depths of nihilistic despair and resignation, found little to commend in Haskalah literature, whose irenic platitudes, he claims, had precipitated his decline into that ’Olam hatohu or ‘world of confusion’/‘purgatory’161 in which he found himself at the time of writing his ‘great confession’, Hatt’ot ne’urim.162 These Haskalah books, however, protestations notwithstanding, left a deep and lasting impression upon Lilienblum. Only through the example of the literary forebears whose

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noxious influence he sought in Hatt’ot ne’urim to expose and exorcise was he enabled to achieve his own autobiography—and the work that would guarantee him a place in Jewish literary history. And to no work was he more indebted than to ’Avi’ezer; in stark contrast to an earlier generation of readers, Lilienblum, from his post-Haskalah perspective, sees in ’Avi’ezer the only work of Guenzberg’s of any enduring signiWcance; his dismissal of Guenzberg’s historical works is curt—‘he also translated various books that have no connection with Jewish life apart from the pamphlet, Hamat damesheq, that is only a small chapter in the history of our people in his time.’163 The most eloquent testimony to this indebtedness occurs within Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim itself. Since, moreover, the passage in question constitutes the Wrst example of autobiographical intertextuality in Hebrew literature, I shall quote it in full: Shadal164 wrote in one of his essays in Hamaggid (if I remember correctly, at the beginning of his Toldot),165 that biography is preferable to the novel; the latter is but the product of the author’s imagination, whereas the former tells of true events, as they actually occurred in the real world. I cannot agree with him completely in this respect, for I have read many autobiographies, including that of Shadal himself, that I have found quite worthless . . . and, on the other hand, I have read novels that have, in certain respects, proved most edifying. There is, for all this, a grain of truth in his contentions . . . There are two types of biography: biography proper, in which one man relates of another, and autobiography, in which there is an identity of author and subject. The former is, for the most part, written solely through the merit of its chosen subject in order to make known to the public the life-history of an esteemed thinker or man-of-action. Such lifehistories may, in themselves, be mundane in the extreme, their signiWcance deriving solely from the personality with whom they are connected. A biography of this type must, therefore, relate the lifehistory of a man well-known, whether for his deeds or his genius, to a public eager to know more of the life of one it holds in high esteem. Autobiography, on the other hand, is written solely by virtue of the events recorded therein that are worthy of being publicized in their own right, not by virtue of the man who experienced them. It is all the same to the public whether this man is famous or not; for in a biography of this type, it is not the personality who is the main

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focus of interest, but rather the events narrated. Of the Wrst type of biography, there are numerous examples in Hebrew, but of the second only two are known to me: Toldot shadal and ’Avi’ezer by M. A. Guenzberg. Toldot shadal is as empty as the seven ears of corn Pharaoh saw in his dream, and was written by Shadal solely as a means of self-enhancement, in view of the fact that he had already made a name for himself in Jewish circles and was held in aVection by many readers. Were the same things to be told of a completely unknown man, no signiWcance whatever would accrue to their recall. ’Avi’ezer, by contrast, was genuinely written on account of the events themselves that are therein recorded. Guenzberg himself was not the axis around which all else revolved; the events he describes were, rather, worthy of being recorded in their own right, if only to expose the educational mores of Russian Jewry. ’Avi’ezer, however, only narrates of what befell the protagonist in the years of infancy and childhood; of what occurred to the protagonist in his later career, his reaching maturity and his initiation into the real world, it does not reveal. The young men of the country of my birth would, in my opinion, have derived much beneWt from such an account. It is this lacuna that I hope to compensate for in the present work that I write in which I shall narrate the events of my life from the years of childhood to the reaching of maturity.166

Lilienblum, in his ‘Quasi-Introduction to the Reader’,167 is, of course, much indebted to Guenzberg’s preamble to ’Avi’ezer; the biography/ autobiography distinction is the same and the phrasing is, at times, near-identical. By his essential ceding, moreover, of the account of the years of early childhood and Heder to Guenzberg, Lilienblum implies, in eVect, that ’Avi’ezer should be read as part 1 of Hatt’ot ne’urim.168 Thus he writes, with respect to his early education: ‘Of the manner of my education, I have nothing special to relate. The education that M.A. Guenzberg received, and that he described in detail in his wonderful book ’Avi’ezer, was that received by the majority of the Jews of my part of the world, myself included among them.’169 And it is largely by virtue of this act of literary supersession that ’Avi’ezer is secured so crucial a place in the history of Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe. A similar process of reclamation of a relatively neglected text—albeit more belated and necessitating translation—has been observed above with respect to the reception of Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte in

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

Jewish Eastern Europe. ’Avi’ezer, however, albeit vindicated of its previous neglect, was, as an autonomous text, to be very much cast in the shade by its strong successor, Hatt’ot ne’urim. Rarely is the work mentioned in Jewish literary history and criticism if not in the same breath as Lilienblum’s autobiographical writings.170 But the achievement and innovation of ’Avi’ezer should not be underestimated, nor should the value of the work be seen solely to derive from its contingent relation to Hatt’ot ne’urim. Comparison of the respective publication data of these two works is, in this respect, revealing. That ’Avi’ezer was, indeed, before its time is itself attested by the relative indiVerence, engendered by unfamiliarity, with which the work was initially greeted. Lilienblum, by contrast, reports that in 1876, when he received a hundred copies of Hatt’ot ne’urim from his publisher, in return for the money he had laid down for one printing, he sold them all ‘with no eVort on my behalf ’.171 The appearance of Hatt’ot ne’urim in the interregnum period between Haskalah and the emergence of post-Liberal ideologies in Jewish Eastern Europe was timely. ‘The book Hatt’ot ne’urim’, writes Berdichevsky, ‘was a bill of divorcement, handed over by one generation to another, that a new generation searching for new paths delivered to a generation that was caught up in the web of the antiquated and the obsolescent.’172 The ‘horizon of expectations’ of the Hebrew reader had, moreover, by 1876, with the burgeoning of the Haskalah novel in Hebrew or Yiddish, whose focus is upon contemporary Jewish life, considerably expanded. It is signiWcant, in this respect, that the Wrst part of R.A. Braudes’s Hadat vehahayyim, a novel based on Lilienblum’s early struggles for religious reform in Lithuania, appeared in the same year as Hatt’ot ne’urim, whose narrative encompasses precisely the same years in the life of the protagonist.173 Hatt’ot ne’urim marks a crucial stage in the indigenization of the Rousseauian autobiographical genre in Jewish Eastern Europe. It was noted above that, with the transition of autobiogaphy from one culture to another, there is an increasing movement from an ineluctable dependence, on the part of the pioneers of the genre in the ‘host culture’, upon the foreign ‘colonizing’ (Gusdorf) example, to a greater degree of autonomy and national distinctiveness as evinced in the autobiographical productions of their successors. This movement from dependence

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to autonomy is well demonstrated by comparison of ’Avi’ezer with Hatt’ot ne’urim. Guenzberg gleaned much of his literary technique and his political and psychological acuity through his work as translator; and in his Hebrew writings, as he himself says, he ‘conceived German thoughts and clothed them in the purity of the Hebrew tongue’.174 For Lilienblum, by contrast, knowledge of the outside world—‘Enlightenment’—came by way of the Hebrew language; Hebrew, as a written language, valid in its own right for the depiction of contemporary events both in journalistic and in novelistic format, was for him a given in a way that it could never have been for Guenzberg.175 Thus, unlike Guenzberg, Lilienblum, while he knew both of Rousseau and Maimon and had, in all likelihood, read their autobiographies,176 is enabled, in a way that Guenzberg is not, to disregard this ultimate precedent in favour of more proximate Hebrew sources. It is, indeed, primarily in works of the Hebrew and Yiddish Haskalah, to which references abound in Hatt’ot ne’urim, that Lilienblum Wnds precedent, both for his unencumbered biblical/Mishnaic style of Hebrew narration, and for the patterning of his life-experience in autobiographical format.177 On the vertical axis, then, Lilienblum eVects the confluence of the autobiographical stream, which up until now had existed by and large outside the sphere of Jewish literary discourse, with the rising tide of a ramiWed national literature in Hebrew and Yiddish, whose most signiWcant expression was the novel. From now on, Jewish autobiography in Hebrew and Yiddish develops, as does non-Jewish autobiography, in an organic and dialectical relation with other indigenous varieties of literary expression—the novel, poem, essay, feuilleton and so forth.178 There is also here an important horizontal dimension to be taken into account; for Lilienblum’s disabusal of the illusions of Haskalah, his withdrawal from the struggle for religious reform, coincided with his exposure to the positivist stream in Russian thought—Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, Belinsky.179 And, within the wider context of Russian intellectual history, much the same process of indigenization of Rousseauian autobiography was taking place in the mid-nineteenth century as has here been noted vis-à-vis Jewish culture in Eastern Europe in the later years of the nineteenth century. Chernyshevsky in particular, a thinker who exerted a strong influence upon Lilienblum, was instrumental in

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the ‘Russifying’ of Rousseau and of the autobiographical; he worked upon a Russian translation of the Confessions during his imprisonment.180 Hence Irina Paperna, in her superb study of Chernyshevsky: The concern with psychological introspection and the intense interest in personality that prompted Chernyshevsky to scrutinize his mental life in a diary were part of a general cultural wave in mid-nineteenthcentury Russia. Symptomatic of this concern was the intense interest in Rousseau, especially in his Confessions, shown by Chernyshevsky’s generation, including Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, and the growing interest in memoiristic and documentary literature (Russian translations of Chateaubriand’s Memoires d’outre-tombe, Lamartine’s ConWdences, the letters of Benjamin Constant, and Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit appeared during these years).181

Both on the vertical axis, then, of a nascent national literature, and on the horizontal, of the rising tide of Russian populism, the ‘culture-historical moment’, to use Erik Erikson’s term, was ripe for the appearance of Hatt’ot ne’urim, as within the wider literary context it was ripe for Tolstoy’s Childhood—a reframing of the Rousseauian confessional within a speciWcally Russian context.182 The influence of Hatt’ot ne’urim upon Lilienblum’s contemporaries, most notably Feierberg and Berdichevsky, may already be traced by the late 1890s. By the early 1890s, however, this monumental testimony of utter despair, signed and sealed by ‘a wretched one of the earth’,183 posed Lilienblum with a considerable dilemma. Reeling from the shock of the 1881 pogroms, which experience struck him in many respects with the force of a revelation,184 Lilienblum felt compelled to submit his entire Weltanschauung, gained as it had been at the cost of much suVering, to a radical and thorough-going re-evaluation.185 In practical Zionism, he Wnds eventually an ideological synthesis of several key factors in his spiritual/intellectual universe: his previously held positivist beliefs, the inescapable awareness of the speciWcities of Jewish fate, and the vestigial traces of Jewish faith that had survived the ‘days of chaos and confusion’. Imbued with this new, quasi-Messianic, faith in a terrestrial salvation for the Jewish people in the here-and-now, how was Lilienblum to reconcile the self of Hatt’ot ne’urim with the self of the early 1890s after the blinding infusion of sense, certainty and purpose that arose from the ashes of his previously held convictions? This, actually, is neither an

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unfamiliar nor an unprecedented problem for the autobiographer; Wordsworth, to cite a famous example, felt constrained to submit his 1805 Prelude to the most thorough and far-reaching revisions after his conversion to Christianity.186 This, however, was not the option chosen by Lilienblum; he chose, rather, to transform Hatt’ot ne’urim from a complete and uniWed work whose culmination is despair, into an autobiographical prelude, functioning much as does the ‘dark night of the soul’ in Christian confessional literature, to the ideological redemption of the author.187 This he eVects by appending a ‘part 3’ to the book Hatt’ot ne’urim of Tselafehad bar hushim, ‘the lost one’, which he entitles Derekh teshuvah.188 Actually, already in July of 1877, Lilienblum, himself alarmed perhaps by the extreme negation of Hatt’ot ne’urim, had in mind a part 3 of his autobiography, for which he had begun to gather material. Thus, in the midst of an extensive programme of secular studies, Lilienblum writes to Morris Winchevsky in a letter of July 16, 1877: ‘Since I am making a copy of this letter for myself, it will be subject to a day or two’s delay. I beg you, pray for me my friend, that I succeed in attaining my life’s goal. Then I shall print the third part of my book, in order to point to others the way of return (Derekh teshuvah) from the sins of their youth, in which the present letter will also be included.’189 By 1892, however, when Lilienblum came to embark upon this sequel to Hatt’ot ne’urim, his concept of Teshuvah, which in 1877 he equated with secular studies, Shtudium,190 had undergone a total transformation, reacquiring in the process much of its traditional religious connotations. The ‘return’ charted in this part 3 to Hatt’ot ne’urim, whose narrative covers the years from 1876 to 1881, is now to the people—the catalyst and climax of the work the dying of the old self and the rebirth of the new in wake of the shattering impact of the 1881 pogroms upon the consciousness of the narrator. Hatt’ot ne’urim thus, when refracted through the prism of Derekh teshuvah, becomes transformed from tragedy to a necessary stage in the purgation of the soul in order to achieve a higher illumination. Lilienblum’s strategy succeeded; the teleological progression from Hatt’ot ne’urim to Derekh teshuvah is, to this day, rarely questioned: Lilienblum, as Mintz writes, ‘was transmuted in the annals of Hebrew literature into a mythic Wgure: the great truth teller whose quest for truth could Wnally not resist the logic of Jewish history’.191 It is char-

Domesticating Rousseau: Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer

acteristic that Berdichevsky, shortly after the publication of Derekh teshuvah in 1899, raised a lone voice of protest against the superimposition of this account of Zionistic ‘return’ upon Hatt’ot ne’urim.192 While the conjoining of Derekh teshuvah with Hatt’ot ne’urim robs the latter work of much of its sting and existential cogency, it also succeeds in releasing the work from the speciWc determinants of time and space in which it was originally written. Thus, underlying Hatt’ot ne’urim and Derekh teshuvah when taken as a composite, is a powerful mythic structure of separation, initiation and return—even of dying and rebirth—that confers upon Lilienblum’s autobiographical oeuvre the imperishability and multifacetedness of an archetype. Lilienblum’s life-history, as this is presented in Hatt’ot ne’urim/Derekh teshuvah, becomes the paradigm, par excellence, for the experience of his own and of a succeeding generation of Jews in Eastern Europe and for the translation of this experience to autobiography. The underlying archetypal structure of the oeuvre in its entirety proved, moreover, of more enduring and cogent appeal than did the overtly Zionistic conclusion to be inferred from its redeeming apotheosis. Thus, such unlikely political bedfellows as Menahem Ussishkin, Sh. Niger, Shimon Dubnow, Sh. Z. Ansky, Morris Winchevsky, Shai Ish Hurwitz—the list could be multiplied—could discern, in this tripartite autobiography, paradigm and pattern for the comprehension and shaping of their own life-histories.193 Influences, indeed, is too weak a word to use in describing the impact of Hatt’ot ve’urim/Derekh teshuvah upon the consciousness of a generation of Jewish intellectuals in Eastern Europe; we have to do here with the problematic interstices between the individual and the collective, between literature and life. It is extremely diYcult to determine, that is, the precise relation between the discrete and idiosyncratic data of Lilienblum’s life-history, as they are presented in his autobiography, and the self-understanding, literary self-presentation, even cultural experience of many of his generation. I have found no better, nor more concise, formulation of this problem than that with which Irina Paperna opens her study of Chernyshevsky: A work of literature is an intrinsic structure, created out of a particular life-experience, individual and historical; in turn, it exercises a formative influence on the life of the individual and society. But is it possible to trace the transformation of personal experience into the structure of a literary text representative of a historical epoch

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and the text’s reverse influence on the experience of others? This task is closely connected to the traditional aesthetic problem of the relationship between art and life, or reality.194

It is precisely in terms of the dialectical transformation from life to literature and back to life that Hatt’ot ne’urim/Derekh teshuvah and their reception are best approached. With Hatt’ot ne’urim/Derekh teshuvah, the autobiographical modality is eVectively assured a central place in the literary discourse of the secular, or secularizing, intelligentsia of Jewish Eastern Europe. With respect, however, to the central thesis of the present work, it may be noted that the three-fold pattern of separation, initiation and return as underlies Hatt’ot ne’urim/Derekh teshuvah is well applicable to the larger literary-historical phenomenon of which these works form a part. An essential ‘pre-condition’, pace Gusdorf, for the emergence of modern Eastern European Jewish autobiography was the separation from the linguistic and geographical ambience of the experiences therein described; this separation was followed by an initiation into the literary modalities of the ‘West’; this initiation eVected, the way was laid for a belated and, as it happens, triumphant, return of the autobiographical to its source.

Seven

RamiWcations of the Self: Cultural Landscapes of Jewish Autobiography

Autobiography Against Autobiography: Traditionalist Versions of the Self Autobiographers, in any culture, are a minority. And in Jewish society in Eastern Europe, from the mid-nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century, they are a minority within a minority; for autobiography in Jewish Eastern Europe remains almost the exclusive domain of those who have either broken with religion entirely, or whose faith in the verities of revealed religion has become considerably eroded. A cursory glance at some of the autobiographical writings of those who did, in one guise or another, stay within the fold, serves only to underscore this point. It should, Wrst of all, be noted that such autobiographical testimonies stemming from Orthodox circles as do exist made a rather belated and tentative appearance on the literary scene in Jewish Eastern Europe. The Wrst memoiristic production of this type, Tsvi Hirsh Lipschitz’s Midor lador, did not appear until 1901.1 Bal Makhshoves, who Wnds in this work important historical and ethnographic testimony to a now-obsolescent era in Jewish history, expresses relief that the Orthodox have ceased2 to direct their energies to ‘societies for the defenders of the faith’ and have now begun to provide us with memoir-literature.3 He fails, however, to note, in his review of Midor lador, that the implicit intent of the ‘societies for the defenders of the faith’, and of the type of memoiristic document of which Midor lador provides one of the earliest examples, is very much the same—that the latter, indeed, arises in no small part from the former. He thus reads the work in precisely the way that its author, Tsvi Hirsh, would not have intended—as an ethnographic relic. So, Tsvi Hirsh’s better-known brother, Ya’aqov Halevi Lipschitz, who had a hand in the preparation of Midor lador, felt constrained in

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his own autobiographical work, Zikhron ya’aqov,4 to incorporate sizeable sections of Midor lador, with additions of his own, in order to make the implicit intention (Kavvanah) of his brother’s work explicit.5 Since the publicistic intent of Midor lador was not adequately pronounced, writes Ya’aqov Halevi, many readers—and certainly Bal Makhshoves would be among them—‘derived pleasure from the portraits and depictions’ therein contained, without understanding the underlying motivation of the work. This motivation, as it is understood by Ya’aqov Halevi, is no less than to provide a systematic and comprehensive rebuttal, a photographic positive of the negative image of Jewish life as this is presented in the literature of the Haskalah, most notably in the autobiographical writings of the Maskilim. Seen in this light, then, autobiographical productions deriving from Orthodox circles constitute deliberately revisionist histories of the self that avail themselves of the means of the ideological adversary. It is to the above-mentioned Ya’aqov Halevi Lipschitz, secretary and right-hand man to Isaac Elchanan Spector, that we owe the most powerful and sustained revisionist autobiography of this type. It is no coincidence that Lipschitz was one of the foremost—if not the foremost—instigators of the Orthodox counter-oVensive against the Haskalah in Jewish Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; his skills as tactician earned him the sobriquet of the ‘Jewish Bismarck’.6 Lipschitz makes no bones of the avowedly revisionist tenor of his work.7 Lilienblum is in many respects the bête noire of Zikhron ya’aqov; Lipschitz takes occasion more than once to cite the evidence of Hatt’ot ne’urim in order to impugn the integrity of its author, and he goes out of his way to set the record straight with respect to the supposed persecutions suVered by Lilienblum at the hands of the Orthodox in Vilkomir.8 Lipschitz is, indeed, well-versed in the art of his opponents; there is scarcely an implicit or explicit critique of traditional Jewish society levelled in the autobiographical texts of the Maskilim that does not meet its implicit or explicit rebuttal somewhere in the three volumes of Zikhron ya’aqov. The ‘Jewish Bismarck’ is seen at his most adept when, as an addendum to Part I of Zikhron ya’aqov, he cites extensively from the ‘confessionals’ of returnees to the fold after the 1881 pogroms—including, it should be noted, Zalman Epstein9—author, as has been noted above, of one of

Ramifications of the Self: Cultural Landscapes

the earliest depictions in Hebrew of the Eastern European Jewish childhood—alongside the earlier pronouncements of these men concerning the necessity of inner reform of Jewish life as a prerequisite for full emancipation in an unprecedented era of liberalism.10 Here Lipschitz has the autobiographical stream in late nineteenth-century Hebrew literature serve as the premise of its own negation. The irony and fascination of Zikhron ya’aqov lies in that Lipschitz, while he shows little aptitude for and less interest in the artistry or ‘design’ (Pascal) of autobiographical or historical writing, does on occasion evince a keener awareness of the historical currents of his age than do some of the ‘emancipated’ autobiographers from the modernist camps with whom he takes issue.11 Zikhron ya’aqov is arguably the most forthrightly revisionist of the very few autobiographical documents of Orthodox Eastern European Jewish provenance. But it is not unique of its kind. Comparable in intent is Ephraim Deinhard’s Zikhronot bat ‘ami,12 another book that reads as a systematic defence, in autobiographical format, of the institutions of traditional Jewry against the critiques of the Maskilim. Deinhard was, in many respects, an intemperate crank, and his Werce opposition to the Haskalah derives, to a far greater extent than is true of Lipschitz, from personal animosity and, to judge from the wildness of much of his polemical writings, from a markedly litigious and volatile temperament.13 The compulsion of each, however, to write autobiographical testimonies, does not appear to have arisen from within, so much as to have been spurred by the reading of autobiographical accounts by those who lay outside the sphere of the Orthodox. And each derived the literary means of his defence from the camp of the opponents; the means, that is, if not the message of modernity—insofar as these are at all separable—were adopted by these authors.14 It is surely, however, diYcult, if not impossible, as Bartal argues with respect to Zikhron ya’aqov,15 to adopt and internalize the media of modernity without undergoing some inner transformation in the process. The autobiographical view of man is a Pandora’s box: once opened, it is no easier to forget, to expunge from consciousness, than it is to forget the historical view of the order of things with which it is allied. Likewise the oppositional character of these texts necessitates that the texts of the adversary whose white spaces they seek to make

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black and vice-versa must constantly be held up to consciousness. The heuristic dilemma, moreover, of subscribing to and writing within the context of the autobiographical and the historical, while simultaneously espousing an a-historical counter-autobiographical traditionalist world-view, are insurmountable.16 Thus Barukh Halevy Epstein on the traditionalist perspective he wishes in Meqor barukh to promulgate and apotheosize: Further on in this work . . . I shall set things down concerning the negative attitude of our forebears in the previous generation toward any thing or matter containing new Wndings in opposition to the received and in opposition to what is transmitted from one generation to the next, and not only in things concerning religion and law and paths of study in whatever manner or form, in the face of which ‘they stormed heaven and earth’, but also in worldly aVairs and ways of life they felt the same way; and the talmudic dictum was ever upon their lips . . . ‘The new is forbidden from the Torah.’ And the Gaon, the author of the Tsemah david, while he was wondrously wise in philosophies and sciences . . . lays down a great principle in his books and says: ‘Above all else, we shall not seek new things, for we have nothing save what our forebears have bequeathed to us.’17

The gulf that separates these two mentalities is poignantly exposed in Epstein’s observation concerning the forced closure of the Volozhin yeshivah: ‘The elders of the generation referred to this event as “the destruction of the small temple’”, while the young called it “a national crisis”.’18 Orthodox Jewish autobiographical works thus constitute a zone of conXicting discourses; these are texts that, in a manner suggestively reminiscent of Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon, are destined to be at odds, even at war, with themselves. This inner divisiveness is nowhere more apparent than in the one work of Orthodox provenance that may be compared to Zikhron ya’aqov in terms of scope, intent and ambition, Barukh Halevy Epstein’s abovecited Meqor barukh, which, we are informed in the subtitle Will Include the Account of My Forebears’ Life and of My Own, Together with Memoirs of the Life of the Previous Generation. Begun in Pinsk, then under German occupation, during World War I, the four volumes of Meqor barukh were Wrst published in Vilna in 1928. I have found no direct evidence of Epstein’s having been directly inXuenced by Lipschitz, though parts of

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Zikhron ya’aqov were published before 1928. The two works, however, evince extraordinary parallels, both in terms of content—one key event in the history of Haskalah in Russia is related in both works in nearidentical terms19—and in the manifestly revisionist, anti-Haskalah intent that informs their counter-construction of the recent past from traditionalist perspective. But Epstein is less of a battle-axe than Lipschitz, more self-reXective, anxious, and self-revelatory; the ambivalences generated in and by the autobiographical enterprise itself are thus closer to the surface, more keenly felt and elaborated upon in Meqor barukh than in Zikhron ya’aqov.20 And it is precisely the anxiety and duality and ambivalence of this conXicted text, with its Wssures, waverings and contradictions, that are so revealing in the present context; thus I shall devote considerable space to the work. Consider, for example, the following asides to the reader that interrupt the Xow of recollections in Meqor barukh: And since memories of the serene peaceful days of childhood are pleasing to me, as to all men, and sweet are the vistas of life from the beloved years of childhood, they and their notions, imaginations and fancies21—I recall with pleasure and especial tranquility of mind what occurred to me then with regard to this matter in the period when buds and Xowers were Wrst implanted in my soul and my mind, then when the paths of my spiritual life were all strewn with lilies, bearing blossom and their perfume emanating myrhh and sweet odors and all choice scents; and I am immersed entirely in the midst of a garden of Xowers and beds of balsam, and behold I am tender and good, bedewed and refreshed, in all my thoughts and mood, at a time when I had not seen nor felt any shade, cloud or shadow upon life, and my Torah illuminated my spirit and soul, my world appeared to me as a Garden of Eden and mankind as angels, I knew no concerns and encountered no sorrow, I did not worry nor did I fear, but studied in tranquility, studied and trusted that all my bounty was in the future and God was with me . . . Oh, where are you, where are you happy days, those beloved happy days! How I suVer at your loss, valuable beyond all measure incommensurable with any wealth!22 Oh days, beloved hours, pleasant moments, where are you? Where are you? Where shall I Wnd you? How shall I attain you and how shall I embrace you now? But no, you will never return, and you cannot

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return, for you no longer exist, you have vanished, passed from the world of reality like yesterday has passed and is no more, and is no more. Alas! Alas!23

The above passages—quite unlike anything to be found in Zikhron ya’aqov—would strike a note of recognition to any reader even slightly acquainted with the classics of European autobiographical literature. Epstein’s Xorid asides replete with rhetorical questions are so highly reminiscent of the paean to childhood in chapter 15 of Tolstoy’s Childhood as to be suggestive of direct inXuence: Happy, happy never-returning time of childhood! How can we help loving and dwelling upon its recollections? They cheer and elevate the soul, and become to one a source of higher joys . . . Do in afterlife the freshness and lightheartedness, the craving for love and for strength of faith, ever return which we experience in our childhood years? What better time is there in our lives than when the two best of virtues—innocent gaiety and a boundless yearning for aVection— are our sole objects of pursuit? Where now are our ardent prayers? Where now are our best gifts—the pure tears of emotion which a guardian angel dries with a smile as he sheds upon us lovely dreams of ineVable childish joy? Can it be that life has left such heavy traces upon one’s heart that those tears and ecstasies are forever vanished? Can it be that there remains to us only the recollection of them?24

Whether the proximate source for Epstein’s asides is Tolstoy—and ‘the great writer, Tolstoy’ does receive mention in the volumes of Meqor barukh25—there can be no doubt that Epstein is here writing squarely within the discourse of Rousseauian autobiography. Epstein is as wellversed in the Haskalah literature against which he wrote as is Lipschitz; his acquaintance with Hebrew autobiographical discourse is attested to by the fact that he actually includes a citation from Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer within the work,26 and he also appears to make reference, albeit oblique, to Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim.27 That he should include an approving citation from the highly sexually explicit ’Avi’ezer within Meqor barukh is all the more to be wondered at, given the strictures we Wnd in this book concerning the lax morality of modern Hebrew literature, which Solomon Schechter refers to as “prostitute literature”; Epstein cites this approvingly in a lengthy section of

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Meqor barukh entitled ‘Clean Language’.28 Waxing rapturous over the memories of childhood is deWnitely ‘a new thing’ within the context of rabbinic literature; notwithstanding the prooftext he adduces from the Jerusalem Talmud, ‘and so our wise men may their memory be blessed proclaimed in context similar to this: “More pleasing one poor quality date that we ate in our childhood than a peach we ate in our dotage”’,29 Epstein was not bequeathed this mode of discourse from the perennial springs of knowledge and wisdom as handed down by Torah sages from generation to generation.30 Epstein here extols a romantic, feeling-based mode of memory deriving not from the anamnesis of a storehouse of impersonal and eternal verities but from what is ‘newly’ experienced within the delimited, ephemeral sojourn of the individual in this world. Such memory is utterly at odds with the trans-personal, long-duration memory and the scholastic mnemotechnics employed for its retrieval, whose cultivation Epstein commends at some length elsewhere in Meqor barukh as an essential antidote to the enfeeblement of Torah-memory in the modern world through excessive dependence upon the printed word.31 Sentimental and breathless as they may be, Epstein’s encomia to the world of childhood are suggestive of a genuinely felt need for purely autobiographical expression entirely at odds with the alternatively polemical and hagiographic manifest intent of the work. Again, much as with Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon, the eVect of the autobiographical in Meqor barukh is destabilizing of the larger design and intent of the work. The subversive potential of the autobiographical is brought out in Epstein’s account of the St. Petersburg banker Abraham Zak’s oVer of a position in his bank to a ‘young man’ in Epstein’s household, much to this young man’s excitement at the vistas of acquisition of wealth and learning thereby aVorded him. This oVer sparks oV a major controversy in the family-circle: For according to the strength of religious feelings that reigned in those days in the homes of the pious, those steadfast in the faith of Israel in the kingdom of Lithuania, the parents of this young man feared, that should he establish permanent residence in St. Petersburg, in the midst of young Maskilim, it was ‘possible’ that the strength of the religious spirit would gradually wane, and therefore

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they did not allow him to go to St. Petersburg. A short verdict and a swift decree!32

The issue splits the family into two camps, those pro and con the young man’s accepting this oVer; emotions run high and there ensues a bitter, protracted and vociferous period of intra-familial discord. The young man himself, consumed with anger, exchanges sharp words with his parents. When no consent is reached, it is decided to refer the matter to the young man’s grandfather for the Wnal deliberation. Accordingly, the grandfather summons the young man for an audience. In opening his adjudication, he registers disagreement with the assessment of the young man’s parents—aVording the latter a momentary heartbeat of optimism—to the eVect that it is ‘possible’ that a removal to St. Petersburg may be injurious to his moral well-being. Acceptance of Zak’s oVer, the grandfather continues—puncturing the young man’s initial excited, anticipatory thought-bubble with a needle—does not so much render it ‘possible’ that the young man may go to waste as inevitable: Zak’s employees are a bad lot and St. Petersburg is a perilous city for a youthful and inexperienced Jew.33 At this point, ‘the son grew angry and was bitterly enraged’; he protests to his grandfather that he himself resided in St. Petersburg for many years, and yet has he not remained as true to his religion as ‘the most pious of the pious of Israel in the depths of the land of Lithuania who has never in his life laid a toe beyond his own town?’34 All to no avail: all hopes for the journey to St. Petersburg are decisively quashed by the grandfather’s intervention; as for the young man, ‘Behold, he is still in the life-situation of “the Jews of the Pale” till this very day!’35 “After much time had elapsed since I composed the story of this event with “that young man”, Epstein continues: I repented that I had rendered him with a hidden face (‘incognito’ in non-Jewish languages), since I had no excuse nor pretext to spread a veil over him to disguise him; and so I shall remove the mask from the face of this young man, and I shall let it be known that ‘this young man’ was I and no other! It was myself to whom the winning lot fell and yet it was not destined that I draw its prize . . . ; and God forbid that now I should feel resentment toward my grandfather who prevented me from going to St. Petersburg: in the span of my life since then and until today it has been impressed upon me in no small mea-

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sure, that for one whom life has destined for pain like me, there will not avail any strategy or struggle to sweeten the bitterness of his life, whither he turn, to the right or to the left his bad luck lurks and will catch him in its embrace never to let him go! . . . And I recall concerning my grandfather’s behaviour toward me in this matter the saying of the Sages their memory be blessed in Midrash Rabbah (Bere’shit 74): ‘The stringency of fathers is preferable to the iniquities of children.’ God is righteous in all His ways and may my grandfather rest in peace for eternity.36

The clash of conXicting impulses as evinced in the above account is jarring; Epstein enacts the duel that forced his family into two opposing camps within the microcosmic arena of the self. On the one hand, he adopts the classic Rousseauian strategy of confession as accusation, pointing the Wnger at the other. Sensing that he is here undermining the revisionist intent of his narrative—to provide an irenic and idealized account of his forebears and ‘the life of the previous generation’— and sliding into the refractory discourse of Haskalah autobiography, with its abundant depictions of familial disharmony, he beats a tactical retreat by passing himself oV as ‘incognito’. Becoming enraged at and verbally contesting the grandfather, the patriarch of the family, the archetypal embodiment of the synthesis of Torah and Derekh ’erets (‘worldly/practical aVairs’) of the ‘previous generation’—the Wgure of the Zeyde/Grandfather even retains a certain aura in the corrosive discourse of Haskalah autobiography—marks an especially rude eruption in the overall construct that is Meqor barukh. In revising the text, however, with the passage of time,37 the autobiographical animus—in both senses of the term—reasserts itself: the face revealed upon the removal of the ‘mask from the face of this young man’ is that of a markedly angry, rueful and disillusioned older man trapped within ‘the life-situation of the Jews of the Pale to this day’. That he is so trapped—bear in mind the ‘life-situation’ of Epstein, in Pinsk under German occupation, in which ambience Meqor barukh was conceived—undermines, posthumously, the rectitude of his grandfather’s counsel. Writing, as he says elsewhere in the text, in the shadows of ‘the heavy and massive clouds that hang over the skies of my melancholy and wearisome existence’,38 his resentment toward the injury inXicted upon his self by this episode—notwithstanding his

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clearly compensatory protestations to the contrary—appears to have festered. The rabbinic dictum concerning the ‘stringency of fathers’, the proclamation of God’s righteousness and the pious entreaty for his grandfather’s tranquility beyond the grave, rather than squaring oV the text with aYrmative resolution, sets oV a process of mutual selfcircuiting of its glaringly incompatible components. Seeman and Kobrin note such lapses of traditionalist composure elsewhere in Meqor barukh, in Epstein’s negotiations of the borders separating traditional Jews from assimilators and converts, Jewish and gentile talmudists, male and female Torah-scholars; that Epstein would even linger upon these perilous fault-lines and indeed open them up is in itself indicative of the dialogic complexity and ambivalence of Meqor barukh by contrast to the ideological monotone of Zikhron ya’aqov.39 Highly germane in the present context is Seeman and Kobrin’s sensitive and insightful discussion of Epstein’s portrayal of his maternal aunt, Rayna Batya, the wife of Naphtali Tsvi Yehudah Berlin, in the chapter of Meqor barukh devoted to her, entitled ‘Wisdom of Women’. In oVering my explication of this chapter less from the aspect of gender than as dovetailing with my observations concerning the autobiographical problematic, I am indebted throughout to Seeman and Kobrin’s elucidation. ‘Wisdom of Women’, like the narrative of the Zak job oVer, is set against the background of familial tension: Rayna Batya’s aspiration to encroach upon the male domain of Torah-study, and her resentment at her exclusion from this domain, sows discord in Epstein’s uncle’s household; it is analogous in all respects to the discord occasioned in Epstein’s home by the latter’s desire to transcend the limitations of the given, and leads moreover to neglect of her domestic duties. Like the ‘young man’ in the above-cited account, she ‘is portrayed as chaWng against the limitations of her position, yet largely remaining faithful to a traditional worldview’;40 like him, too, ‘to whom the winning lot fell’, she is so near and yet so far from the object of her desire. As the wife of the most celebrated head of the Volozhin yeshivah, Torah is ever before her eyes and ears, yet not within her grasp; her capitulation to the status quo is, moreover, like that of the ‘young man’, secured at the price of an inextinguishable anger.41 Throughout his account of Rayna Batya and their tempestuous debates on the gender/learning divide, Epstein assumes the posture of the grandfather

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vis-à-vis himself in the St. Petersburg controversy—this notwithstanding the fact that in biological terms Epstein, then a young teen, could well have been Rayna Batya’s grandson.42 In the double-mirror logic of these two accounts, his is now the constraining voice of tradition, and it is he who ultimately, or so it seems, prevails upon Rayna Batya to desist from her hubristic desire to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and resign herself to the lot designated the female as dictated by tradition. Rayna Batya’s ultimate acknowledgement of defeat, however, like Epstein’s before his grandfather, is expressed less in terms of recognition of the superior wisdom of her interlocutor’s arguments than in yielding to force majeure. She expresses her resignation in a spirit and in terms almost identical to those of Epstein, his hopes having been dashed of rising beyond the circumscribed ‘life-situation of the Jews in the Pale’, even at one point employing the same phrase adapted from Genesis 24:49: ‘Turn to the right, turn to the left.’ When I had expounded these words before my aunt, she reXected a great deal, and seemed to consider all the things which I had said . . . After many thoughts and deep ones, she said to me: ‘What can be done? Yes, yes, thus it is. “Turn to the right and turn to the left”; in the end it is for us oppressed and disgraced women to bend our heads beneath our evil fortune. Righteous are You, God, for all that has been decreed concerning us. “Your Torah is certainly true” [a paraphrase of Psalms 119:42], and “Your laws are a deep abyss” [Psalms 36:7]; “There is no speech nor are there words” [Psalms 19:4]. “Blessed are You who created me according to Your will.”’ Afterward, she turned to me and said, ‘Just as everything has an end and a limit, so let there come an end and a limit to this painful matter.’ From that time on, she never spoke on the subject again.43

The multiple parallelisms between these two accounts in which Epstein and Rayna Batya function essentially as Doppelgangers raise the possibility that Rayna Batya serves, to a degree, as a source of vicarious autobiographical identiWcation for Epstein. Like the anonymous ‘young man’ in the narrative of the St. Petersburg controversy, she provides the compunctious autobiographer with an ‘“incognito” in non-Jewish languages’. Rayna Batya is the least ‘Xat’ of the array of personalities depicted in the volumes of Meqor barukh. Epstein’s depiction of her husband is, by contrast to the nuanced psychological

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portrait he paints of the wife, by-and-large conventional and hagiographic; with the latter and with other exemplars of life lived according to Torah with which Meqor barukh teems, the speciWc life-instances he recounts, as is typical of rabbinic biography, serve by and large to illuminate the global virtues of the Torah-centric universe he depicts rather than aVord insight into individual character.44 Such high stylization is well illustrated in Epstein’s account of a domestic catastrophe in his grandfather’s house: a brand new, particularly Wne set of engraved crystal goblets, decanters et cetera—a ‘complete’ Wt for twelve persons, with all manner of decorative appurtenances—procured and conveyed from abroad during one of the grandfather’s business excursions, at high expense, aggravation at customs, is smashed to smithereens when the domestic servant who is bearing it trips and falls before the assembled guests. At this point the matron of the family, Epstein’s grandmother, faints and is revived twice, and the entire family, along with the neighbours invited, fall into a Wt of hysterical weeping. Initially, the grandfather remains calm, justiWes the calamity by choice rabbinic citations; he puts his coat on in preparation of afternoon prayers in the Beit-Midrash, whence he proceeds with saturnine countenance. On returning home, he Wnds the family, old and young, disconsolate—still weeping and wailing with heartbreaking clamour. No longer able to retain composure and contain his own upset at what has happened, he himself submits to the contagion and bursts into weeping ‘at their pain and bitterness’. Epstein here appends the following footnote to this seemingly spontaneous belated overXow of suppressed emotional distress: And this is according to what is said (Sanhedrin, 104, b) on the verse in Lamentations (1:2), ‘She weeps bitterly at night’, that anyone who weeps at night, those who hear his voice weep with him; (and so it appears, the word Tivkeh is read as Tevakeh in Hiphil [actually this would appear to be a Piel construction, M.M.], to others [that is causing others to weep, M.M.]), and there is a story told there concerning a woman Rabban Gamaliel’s neighbour whose son died, and she would weep for him at night, and Rabban Gamaliel heard her voice and wept with her until his eyebrows fell out, until his students noticed this and removed her from his neighbourhood. And this is like what happened here to my grandfather, who because of the

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weeping of the members of his family at night he too was moved to weep with them, as is the nature of things, as explained. (There follows a further explication of a proof-text from Mo’ed qatan in justiWcation of the grandfather’s weeping.)45

Not only are the sections devoted to Rayna Batya in Meqor barukh the most biographical as opposed to hagiographical, they are also, as Seeman and Kobrin note, the most autobiographical.46 Epstein’s departure both in terms of style and content from the conventions of rabbinic discourse in his depiction of Rayna Batya did not go unnoticed by later editors of the work. ‘Uncomfortable with the tone and content of Meqor barukh’, Seeman and Kobrin note: The English translation of sections from the fourth volume of Epstein’s memoirs, published in 1988 for an Orthodox Jewish audience in the United States as My Uncle the Netsiv, systematically omits or tampers with every statement of outrage or despair attributed to Rayna Batya . . . Less blatant but even more sweeping is the omission of any reference at all to the section on ‘Wisdom of Women’ in Aaron Z. Tarshish’s brief restatement of Meqor barukh, published in Israel in 1967.47

The instinct of these editors was, from their own perspective, surely correct. In lending Rayna Batya voice in Meqor barukh with which to express, in the most forceful of terms, her discontent and anger at the status quo in which the ‘new is forbidden’, Epstein undermines the manifest intent of his text. Indeed, the willingness to engage at all in highly emotional exchanges with a member of the opposite sex with none other present—let alone upon gender/Torah controversies that obviously impinge upon sore spots in the marital relations between his interlocutor and the sainted Netsiv—is implicitly transgressive and troublesome. Thus Seeman and Kobrin: ‘Despite his aggressive polemic against Rayna Batya in Meqor barukh, Epstein’s decision to narrate “Wisdom of Women” dialogically enables her powerful presence throughout the chapter to destabilize the very worldview he is ostensibly defending.’48 In the process, moreover, of these dialogic encounters with Rayna Batya, whose ‘I-Thou’ character provides such a contrast to the grandfather/grandson confrontation with respect to the Zak invitation, the self is subjected to scrutiny and emerges in an unexpected

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light that both casts shadow upon and highlights cracks within the author’s self-stylized persona. In giving autobiographical voice to the ‘thou’, Epstein, moreover, by process of dialogic refrain, appears to break free of the restraints elsewhere imposed in Meqor barukh upon free expression of the ‘I’ of the author—such restraint as prompts him to camouXage this ‘I’ beneath the ‘incognito’ of the ‘he’. The open expression of self, the intellectual and emotional freedom of discourse in Epstein’s account of his interactions with Rayna Batya, stand in contrast to the extreme circumspection and restraint imposed upon him by the towering presence of the Netsiv. In the presence of the latter, Epstein is utterly awestruck, indeed for the most part struck dumb. Thus Epstein describes his worshipful attendance upon the Netsiv as the latter is engaged in his correspondence: And sometimes, as I was reading his letters immediately upon their having left his hand, and he felt and recognized in me that I was expiring with longing to read them with avidity, he would ask me aVectionately: ‘Well, do these letters Wnd favour in your eyes?’ And I, my face was covered with shame at this question and I blushed and was silent.—49

The Netsiv, as depicted by Epstein, is certainly a formidable Wgure and not one to inspire intimacy, the exchange of conWdences or open expression of emotions—the acronym of his name, ‘Netsiv’, in biblical Hebrew ‘pillar’/‘prefect’/‘garrison’, is fortuitously appropriate. A man of supreme self-restraint, lapidary composure, one disapproving of emotional display, even of emotion, the Netsiv emerges in Epstein’s account, as he does in that of his son by his second wife, Meir Berlin,50 as the polar opposite in temperament of the sickly, high-strung and volatile Rayna Batya.51 In a section of Meqor barukh devoted to ‘The Conduct and Spiritual Disposition of My Uncle in Life’, Epstein highlights as a dominant character trait of the Netsiv his almost Prussian devotion to regimen and regularity: And as with the qualities of his soul, so did he excel in the procedure of his external behaviour and in his way of life in general, in his love of order, purity and cleanliness, in ordering each and every thing, sacred books and secular appurtenances, all in its accorded place, every-

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thing Wnding itself in its right place; and in general he loved to arrange everything prudently and with precise calculation, prior consideration and requisite preparation for all that he had to say. And he loved and respected the man who clung fast to order, in speech and deed, in all his projects and aVairs, sacred and secular . . . And may his portion and peace be allotted him in the Garden of Eden that he graced me in teaching me how to follow this straight and desirous path . . . 52

Subsequent to this characterization, in a chapter devoted to the Netsiv appropriately entitled ‘A Well-Ordered Life’, Epstein provides a description of his uncle’s epistolary techniques: And the action of writing itself was also swift and deliberate, and I scarcely recall an instance that even a slight error slipped into his letters, in gender tenses etc.; and also the idea that he wished to conceptualize he would express without hesitation, directly, clearly and lucidly, without eVort and strain, and everything proceeded from his hand as if from a machine, aligned and made straight, brief and to the point, and without excess or deWciency, like a coin from the mint.53

Such awe-inspiring exactitude, self-assurance, precision and calm in a man are scarcely conducive to the type of open dialogic encounter that Epstein can engage in with Rayna Batya in their kitchen debates. And it is thus to be wondered at that even in the presence of the Netsiv Epstein strains for expression of autonomous voice. In the chapter ‘A Well-Ordered Life’, he provides two accounts of his expression of his own opinions to his uncle—one that met with approbation and one for which he was decisively slapped down. That, however, the young Epstein has to summon all the emotional strength available him in speaking up in the presence of the Netsiv is apparent from the depiction he gives of his Wrst successful interjection in the discourse of his uncle. It is not, however, without considerable trepidation that he speaks up; thus, at many years’ remove, he recalls his Wrst successful interjection, in terms of an ingenious Talmudic gloss in support and embellishment of an opinion expressed by the Netsiv apropos of the correspondence he is engaged in: And I recall with especial pleasure what happened to me with him concerning this opinion, something that brought upon me a hug of

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love from him with a blessing of the soul; for once, when he expressed this opinion of his before the men who surrounded him, myself included, I gathered strength unto my soul and I put on a spirit of boldness and I approached him, and with a slight tremor in my voice, through fear of the awesome exaltation my soul felt toward him, I said to him . . . 54

The Netsiv’s approbation of this precocious super-commentary leaves him beside himself with joy: Thus were my words before my grandfather, and oh how I recall with great longing how, upon hearing these words of mine, he called upon me to come close to him, and with abundant love he clasped my forehead with the full span of the palms of his hands, and with satisfaction and heartfelt pleasure he said to me in the presence of those who were with him them: ‘blessed (‘Barukh’—also Epstein’s Wrst name, M.M.) are you and blessed is your reasoning, for well, well indeed have you deliberated, my son, God be with you!’ Oh, how my soul yearns for you, moment, dear beloved moment, my succour, my resplendence, my treasure, my diadem, my renewal and my consolation!55

There is a certain dissonance here between the aVectionate, yet stylized, conferral of approval of Epstein’s intellectual ability—the Netsiv’s placing of the palms of his hands upon the young man’s forehead is the rabbinic equivalent of the formal bestowal of knighthood with a touch of the sword on the shoulder—and Epstein’s Xorid and unrestrainedly emotional response to this symbolic act. Evidently emboldened by this act of grace on behalf of the Netsiv, Epstein, in an interaction with his uncle that appears to have taken place later on the same day, tests the waters of this new-found intimacy by going so far as to answer the Netsiv back, somewhat cheekily to boot. The interaction concerns the seemingly petty issue of whether, in addressing an envelope, the region of a major city—Odessa here is the city in question—should be included as a part of the address. Epstein assumes that the latter is the norm, but the Netsiv argues that only with smaller, lesser-known towns and villages, is it necessary to include indication of region: And I said to him: ‘But surely, the addition of indication of the region will cause no damage nor harm’; and he answered me: ‘The

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damage and harm that may possibly arise from this, is that the postal oYcials here and all along the way to Odessa and in Odessa itself, and all who see this will laugh at the writer for his indicating to the oYcials the whereabouts of Odessa!’ And upon seeing that now I had found favour in his eyes, to the extent that he engaged in conversation with me on worldly matters, a rare phenomenon in his conduct, uncharacteristic of his spiritual deportment and modus vivendi, and that, moreover, he pointed these things out to me so gently and pleasantly and with feelings of aVection, there were aroused within me feelings of courage and daring and I restrained the feeling of awe at his majesty that constantly encircled me as a breastplate whenever I was in his presence and I mustered strength within my soul and I said with somewhat lowered voice: ‘So what if they laugh?’ And behold, what can I say, there was then fulWlled in me the saying of the Sages of blessed memory ‘at the completion of his words a man is held accountable’ (Pesahim 53, 2), and only just had these words escaped my mouth, as if in the Xash of an eye he changed his whole stance and attitude toward me, he changed the tone of his voice from soft to hard and from pleasant to caustic, and he spoke to me with a strong intonation, stretching out the enunciation of each word, with the intention that his words penetrate the depths of my soul and this is what he said and how he said it: ‘The man—who—does not care— that others laugh at him—there is lacking in him—the feeling of human—dignity’ . . . 56

Nor does this agonistic encounter end here; Epstein, even though at this point he felt as if he ‘crashed down to earth from the heavens above’ and ‘lost his balance’ in his ‘spirit’ and his ‘body’ and his ‘entire being’, comes back with a further demurral, brief but no less cheeky and inherently subversive of the Netsiv’s disquisition than his ‘So what if they laugh?’57 Bombarding him with proof-texts, actually placing books beneath the eyes of his precocious interlocutor, the Netsiv puts an end to these rejoinders and perorates with a sermonette on the virtue of self-respect/dignity that Epstein highlights typographically in bold, centered, oversized print.58 The above accounts of Epstein’s interactions with the Netsiv betray a latent ambivalence toward the imperturbability and emotional asceticism of this paradigm of Torah authority. On the one hand, his stance is of worshipful awe as, standing at a respectable distance from

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the Netsiv, he observes with wonder this perfectly functioning embodiment of Torah at his work—such observing he refers to as a ‘lesson’: And amongst the other things that I loved and concentrated my mind and my emotions to analyze and consider his deeds and his way of doing things—was this, to watch and observe, analyze and survey, watch over and comprehend with an open eye and with intense and especial attention . . . his work at his writing desk in his oYce in the foyer of the yeshivah, how he would work like a machine in arranging the many and various letters every day . . . 59

On the other, he craves from the Netsiv a quasi-maternal emotional intimacy—‘longing for him and his deeds and everything to do with him and his spiritual way as if for the bosom of beloved parents”60— that the latter is indisposed by temperament and oYce to provide. And why, given his awe of the Netsiv, does Epstein answer him back, testing his limits? Epstein himself, in recalling his emotional state at the time, implies that his impudence was largely involuntary: ‘And without forethought and pretty much with no aim nor purpose I let forth from my mouth these words’.61 His impulse to question the judgment of the Netsiv, then, appears to have emotional origins that Epstein himself cannot fully account for. Such acting/speaking according to the promptings of the heart runs very much against the grain of the spiritual deportment that Volozhin, as exempliWed by the bearing of the Netsiv, seeks to instill and that Epstein claims to have imbibed. In fact, several times in Meqor barukh Epstein underscores the importance of weighing one’s words carefully through intellectual deliberation prior to giving utterance; in his introduction to the work he writes that in composing his memoirs ‘there never departed from my mind, that not everything that comes to mind is worthy of being spoken’.62 There is a distinctively unorthodox streak in Epstein that in his more unguarded moments, when he ‘lets forth . . . words without forethought’ et cetera, casts ripples upon the surface of the ‘wellordered life’ of the Lithuanian Orthodoxy he comes to depict and commend. Surely it is this streak that prompts him, elsewhere in the book, to go out of his way in the defence of the most contentious and controversial Hasidic Tsadiq of his day—and beyond his day—Nahman of Bratslav, a man whose life was anything but ‘well-ordered’ and

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whose temperament and teachings constitute the polar opposite of those of the ‘Netsiv’. ‘He was a single and exceptional character’, Epstein writes, amongst all of the many ‘Tsadiqim’ of his time, and the members of his generation were unable to reach a proper understanding of his opinions, of his spiritual path and his temperament, of his actions and of all that pertained to him, because his words and deeds were wondrous, and sometimes even extremely strange and illogical in the extreme; thus, for example, he would attempt to arouse controversy against himself, saying: ‘Controversy raises and elevates the human spirit.’63

Epstein further endorses—on the strength of ‘his books and what I have heard of him’—Nahman’s ‘strong strength of imagination’: ‘His soul swam in an ocean of imaginings and his brain encompassed a wealth of conceptions.’64 Head/heart, intellect/imagination, reason/feeling—these are precisely the polarities bared and explored by Epstein in his reconstructions of his debates with Rayna Batya. Epstein’s interactions with the Netsiv in his oYce provide an odd sort of mirror-image to these kitchen controversies; while, in the female domain of the kitchen, Epstein assumes the role vis-à-vis Rayna Batya of the male pillar of Torah authority—not, as will be seen, without some acute ambivalence on his behalf—in the male domain of the Netsiv’s study the relations are reversed. In this latter domain Epstein’s stance vis-à-vis the Netsiv is more akin to that of the chaWng, emotional Rayna Batya; his ‘expiration with longing’ to read the Netsiv’s letters and his blushing at the Netsiv’s ironic enquiry are also oddly maidenly. The contrast between Epstein as creature of feeling and the stern rectitude of the Netsiv and the world he represents is brought home in Epstein’s account of his re-encounter with the Netsiv in 1892, some Wfteen years after his sojourn in Volozhin, when he receives his uncle as a guest at his home in Pinsk after the forced closing of the yeshivah. And I remember, that even though my pleasure and contentment with all of the honour and pleasure I derived on his account was boundless and beyond calculation—nevertheless in the Wrst days of his stay my joy and pleasure were mingled somewhat with feelings

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of sadness and pain, to the extent that I was almost stunned; and the reason for this was that in relation to me, to my Xesh and blood [’Atsmi uvesari; see especially 2 Samuel 13–14. Epstein here makes coded reference to his consanguinity with the Netsiv.], I found in him a severe and inexplicable change from the time I left him in Volozhin in the years of my youth, and this change was so apparent and glaring that it did not cease to trouble my spirit and distress my soul all day and all night; it lay in this, that for the duration of the many years I was at Volozhin, and that I dwelt within the walls of the beloved yeshivah and I sheltered myself beneath the shade of my uncle, I did not consider his relations to me and all that had to do with me and the concerns of my life as anything less than the relations of parents to children, of beloved and dear parents moreover all of whose attention is devoted to the success of their children, and even he from his side adopted me and raised me as a son, as a trusty teacher he taught me, and gave comfort to me as father to son, and thus my emotions and feelings toward him were as those of children to beloved parents . . . and it was as if my entire soul was entrusted to him and I placed my spirit in his hands, as I have described this more than once in the previous chapters;—But now, upon arriving at my house, he began to speak to me in the second-person plural, referring to me as Ir, instead of in the second-person singular, Du, as he always used to speak to me and I—to listen; and upon hearing this from him for the Wrst time, my heart skipped a beat as he spoke, and I felt myself shamed and crushed, as if I were somehow oppressed in body soul and spirit, and as though the whole world was on my shoulders and I was beside myself; And when I felt, that it was not within my strength to bear and to tolerate and to endure this emotion any more, for truly I considered this to be a sort of humiliation, a stain of disgrace upon my soul, and I felt drained of strength—I girded myself with strength and courage and I implored him to do me the favour of speaking to me in the second-person singular, as the two of us were always accustomed to do, because with the opposite of this I was beside myself as if my life were a burden to me; And his answer was: ‘Even though this is a major request and diYcult for me to fulWll (and I did not know why, but I did not Wnd strength within my soul to ask him about this), but what can I do, for now I am a guest and it is my duty to follow the directive of the homeowner, thus I have conceded to you (in Wrst-person singular), I

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have conceded to you, and let it be according to your words,’ and he stressed the words ‘to you to you’, and my spirits were restored.—65

There is a collision here of feeling, aggrievedness, uncontainable hurt, with the steely reserve of Volozhin. This, Epstein’s last account of extended interaction with the Netsiv to be found in Meqor barukh ends, much as does his last reported interaction with Rayna Batya, on an unsettling note of emotional irresolution. And in alignment with the reversal of relations—Rayna Batya vis-à-vis Epstein vis-à-vis the Netsiv—here Epstein is Rayna Batya to the Netsiv as Rayna Batya had been to him. Speaking of the structure of the communications between Epstein and Rayna Batya, Seeman and Kobrin note that ‘Barukh . . . responds . . . but without relating successfully to the deeper frustration that clearly motivates her’.66 Precisely the same could be said of the Netsiv in the above scenario: it is clear that the Netsiv’s reluctant concession to Epstein’s request that he address him by the intimate Du is not granted through consideration of the latter’s emotional distress and umbrage, but solely in accordance with rabbinic dicta concerning the obligations of a guest to his host; tellingly, Epstein does not append in a footnote here, as he does constantly elsewhere in explication of the actions of Torah-sages, proof-texts in support of the Netsiv’s deference to the will of the host of which there is an abundance. It is hard to believe that Epstein’s spirits were really ‘restored’ at the closure of this episode, as it is hard to believe that Rayna Batya had made peace with her lot at the end of the chapter ‘The Wisdom of Women’; there remains the nagging question as posed by Epstein in parentheses: Why was this request to be addressed as an intimate so ‘major’ and ‘diYcult’ for his uncle to fulWll— especially since, by this time, he had taken Epstein’s sister as his second wife after the passing of Rayna Batya? The tone in which Epstein relates this incident betrays a persistent hurt and chagrin at what he perceived and perceives as unconscionable rigidity and insensitivity: the language runs away with itself, synonym upon synonym piling themselves up as he details his emotional distress. This voluble, rambling, even slightly hysterical unburdening himself of the heart provides an utter contrast with the deliberate, objective machine-like precision and concision of the Netsiv’s letters, their words cast as metal in a foundry, as they are held up as counter-autobiographical paradigm of

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interpersonal communication earlier in Meqor barukh. If there is a precedent for the discourse Epstein here adopts within the world of forebears that he portrays in Meqor barukh, surely, again, this would be provided by Rayna Batya. And within the autobiographical context, the most telling of the multiple mirror-reversals to be encountered in the depictions of Epstein’s relations with the Netsiv in apposition to those with Rayna Batya, is that whereas Rayna Batya’s emotional anguish is occasioned by her inability to gain access, from the less emotionally constricted autobiographical zone of the ‘winterstove in the kitchen’,67 to the chilly Lithuanian ambience of extreme emotional restraint regnant within the oYce of the Netsiv, Epstein seems to be straining in the opposite direction.68 Caught between these two powerful personalities, the Netsiv and Rayna Batya—analogous to the ‘two mountains’ of Y. L. Peretz’s famous story69—who dominate the narrative of his sojourn in Volozhin, a certain bipolarity emerges in his accounts of his relationship with each. Emblematic of the complexity of the representation of Rayna Batya in Meqor barukh and the investment of self in this representation is Epstein’s action of actually aiding Rayna Batya in compiling a roster ‘of learned Jewish women ranging from Bruria of the Talmud to near contemporaries like the rabbanit from Shklov, Tzertal, daughter of Rabbi Joshua Halevi ’Ish Horowitz . . . who is wise and distinguished in Torah and the sciences like one of the whole men’—nor does this roster conWne itself strictly to rabbinic circles: Grace Aguilar and Emma Lazarus here Wnd mention. (Epstein later included this roster of female notables within Meqor barukh.)70 In aiding and abetting Rayna Batya in this fashion, eVectively fanning the embers of her gendered discontent, Epstein crosses the line from ‘enabling’ to colluding; it is as if, in the midst of the St. Petersburg controversy, his grandfather had provided him with a crib-sheet of rabbinic prooftexts that would justify the acceptance of the Zak oVer. Epstein, moreover, leaves no room for doubt that while he, as the voice of tradition, ultimately emerges as victor in his superior mastery of Halakhic argumentation over Rayna Batya, this is a hollow victory. In judging, he is judged and in a manner very similar to the negative dialectics of Gei’ hizzayon, the moralizing traditionbound discourse he sustains is cast into less than favourable light in face of the existential/autobiographical anguish of the recipient of his

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wisdom. Thus, having bettered Rayna Batya in a debate concerning the validity of a rabbinic proof-text she cites in her favour, he writes: These words of mine were like a spark in a barrel of gunpowder. With an outraged spirit, riotous in bitterness, she said to me: ‘This is what the author meant who wrote “one man in a thousand have I found” [Ecclesiastes 7:28], and you are mean-spirited like all the men!’ After speaking to me these words she hid her face from me and cast her eyes into one of the books on the table. I departed her like one accursed and reprimanded.71

Indeed, at a remove of four or Wve decades from the events recounted, Epstein’s recall of his forcing Rayna Batya into Halakhic submission aVords him neither pleasure nor satisfaction—elsewhere in Meqor barukh he relates instances of his juvenile Talmudic acuity with evident pride. In a rueful confessional passage he even wishes upon himself the silence that his argumentation ultimately reduced Rayna Batya to, reproaching himself now with proof-texts as once he had reproached her: When I had grown older and remembered these things, I was greatly pained. Even now, as I bring to memory this whole incident and arrange it in a book, my soul is bitter within me because of this weakness, that I spoke always without prior thought . . . Why did I not make use of our Sage’s advice: ‘Always judge your words before they leave your mouth’? . . . why did I need this trouble, to sorrow the sensitive heart and soul of a wise and ill woman, and to bring upon myself her feelings of anger, her outraged countenance, her troubled heart . . . Why did I not adopt the maxim, ‘silence is beautiful’, so that she, in largess of spirit and with a good heart, could have thought that my silence indicated agreement, and there could have been peace with us?72

One of the formulations of Bakhtin, although written in a very different context with very diVerent literary considerations in mind, is oddly resonant in the present context: Direct auctorial discourse is not possible in every literary period; not every period commands a style, since style presupposes the presence of authoritative points of view and authoritative, durable, social evaluations . . . When there is no adequate form for an unmediated

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expression of an author’s intentions, it becomes necessary to refract them through another’s speech. Moreover, the tasks facing literature are sometimes such that there is no other way open to implement them than by means of double-voiced discourse.73

Meqor barukh is a ‘double-voiced’ text par excellence in ways diVerent and beyond the diVerential purview of Bakhtin. And the refraction ‘through another’s speech’ within ‘The Wisdom of Women’ is, in a sense, doubly refracted: Epstein’s self is here refracted through the speech of Rayna Batya in measure as Rayna Batya’s self is refracted through his. A sort of perpetuum mobile is initiated here as the voices, the text, and indeed the silences—that willed retrospectively by Epstein and that assumed by Rayna Batya—constantly answer each other back; and the phenomenon of ‘answering-back’ is central both to the Rayna Batya narrative and to that of the St. Petersburg controversy. Thus, as Seeman and Kobrin note, it remains unclear who has the last word, or last silence, in Epstein’s account of his debates with Rayna Batya in the ‘Wisdom of Women’ chapter: ‘Missing here is the relative closure of previous chapters. Rayna Batya never makes peace with her condition in Meqor barukh, and it is left tantalizingly unclear whether or not Epstein intends that we, as readers, should make peace with it.’74 That Epstein should entitle his chapter ‘The Wisdom of Women’ rather than ‘The Wisdom of Men’—for it is the latter that seemingly prevails—unless he is being sarcastic, which would be thoroughly out of character—further compounds this indeterminacy. Meqor barukh, by analogy to the household of the Netsiv therein depicted is a house divided—not only is the work ‘double-voiced’, it is also ‘double-discoursed’. The collision within the work of mutually incompatible/opposing cultural sensibilities and their attendant literary discourses manifests itself in particular in the sui generis and chaotic structure and style of the work. As Epstein explains: The examiners of the soul (psychologists) speculate, that according to the form and style of writing and syntax it is possible to discern approximately the structure of his [the writer’s, M.M.] soul, his temperament, nature and humour of the writer, his emotional and spiritual make-up; and a French saying has it ‘Le stule [sic, M.M.] c’est l’homme’.75

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In few ambiences could BuVon’s maxim have applied with greater cogency, in manners unbeknownst and probably unimaginable to its coiner, than in Jewish Eastern Europe: ‘style’—sartorial, tonsorial, rhetorical, cantorial, gesticulatory, literary perhaps above all,76 infra and extra-ethnic, gendered—-within the traditionalist and non-traditionalist world, and the twilight zone intersecting the two—assumed an extraordinary signiWcance in this ambience, especially in this period of massive cultural change. It is thus not without some anxiety that Epstein, a noted author of Halakhic commentaries, makes a decided stylistic departure from rabbinic literary convention in undertaking to write an autobiography. That Epstein is acutely and self-consciously aware that he is here doing something ‘new’ is apparent from his introduction to the work, tellingly entitled ‘Introduction (To Make Known the Cause of My Occupying Myself With a Type of Literature Like This)’: Never in my life did I consider undertaking a literary project like this as in this book: to . . . recall memories of former days and to inscribe them in a book; for I thought that this is not my métier and this business is not part of my calling; Indeed, time contradicts old considerations and builds new roads in the course of the world in general and in the life of individuals in particular—this did time teach me . . . that there is a time and season for every task . . . And I shall relate the circumstances of this lesson: Then at the beginning of the year 5677, the eighth of Tishri, (3/16 September 1915), the second year of the World War, when the German soldiers besieged the city in which I dwelt, Pinsk, and captured it; and until the war would run its course they saw Wt to seal the city oV from all directions, and they rendered it blockaded and quarantined from the remainder of the world ‘None may leave and none may enter’, and this situation lasted for nearly three years . . . and everyone in its midst was rendered as though at a loss without knowing whither to turn in their material concerns and more than this—in their higher concerns, for the devastation and horror knew no bounds, and the confusion and agitation together with the dreadful scarcity of food-supplies that struck terror and consternation upon all of the inhabitants imprisoned in the blockade—all of this surpassed endurance, and it was too much to bear . . . And then I came to realize that to occupy myself with profound intellectual literature as was my custom—this was not the time nor the place, for ‘I grew weary of my groaning and found no

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respite’; and I pondered a literary undertaking on an easy and slight matter, that would be commensurate with the physical condition and mental energies in those days at that time. And while I was deliberating upon this idea of mine and turning it around in my head and beholding with my eyes all the terrible trials and tribulations that befell us—as if of itself there arose in my mind the memory of the days of the previous generation with their peace and tranquility, and my soul was cast down, and I said: it is worthwhile and appropriate to provide to the children of this benighted period a faithful depiction of the life of our forebears in the previous generation, that they should know the extent of the loss we have suVered. And while I was immersed in applying myself to this task of mine, little by little there was gathered and assembled a large compilation on this matter, of a proportion and scale that I had not imagined nor expected. And in the hope that this work of mine will Wnd esteem amongst the children of this generation, I began to organize and edit it to the best of my ability; and may this hope of mine not be disappointed. And here I should add that in the duration of the labour, by the way of and by the way of the way of, from one thing to another and one matter to another, there were compiled and composed by me many literary things, in very great number, in quantity and quality, and these include revelatory innovations in Biblical and Talmudic literature, some of which adhere to the ordering of the material in the book, and some of which relate to the Weld of general literature; and in order that these latter do not distract the reader of the book, I created a section for them in the introduction to this book, which it too in its proportion and scale, will be considered a large book, as the reader will see and realize.77

From the above it may be gleaned that Epstein places no great store on the writing of autobiography per se; a ‘type of literature like this’ (Min sifrut kezo), ‘easy and slight’ (Qal verafeh) commensurate with the physical and mental depletion imposed by circumstance upon the author, is decidedly subsidiary to the type of ‘profound intellectual’ literature the author would apply himself to under normal circumstances—biblical and Talmudic commentary and response, that is. (The above passage would provide strong corroboration to the Shatsky/Roskies ‘crisis’ theory of Jewish autobiography.) The Xoodgates of memory having been

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opened up, however, Epstein Wnds himself unexpectedly overtaken by his project. The war years in blockaded Pinsk thus constituted for Epstein a period of autobiographical hibernation from his customary literary and intellectual activity that is his true ‘métier and calling’. The process, however, does not end here: life having returned to normal—relatively speaking—with cessation of hostilities and lifting of the blockade, Epstein submits the material he has composed in the war years to an extensive process of revision and elaboration. As noted above, from his references to having written the Wrst draft of some of the accounts he includes in Meqor barukh many years previously, this secondary revision appears to have been undertaken over a considerable period of time: that the book did not appear in print until 1928, the above-cited introduction being undersigned with this date,78 lends strength to this supposition. In the ‘duration of this labour’ revision ‘by the way of and the way of the way of ’ (Derekh ’agav ve’agav de’agav), Meqor barukh takes on a very diVerent complexion. From an ‘easy and slight’ provisional autobiographical diversion Epstein steers the discourse of the composition away from a ‘type of literature like this’ to such ‘profound and intellectual’ ‘literary things’ as exercised him in the remainder of his literary works—one of which, a commentary on the Jerusalem Talmud, is also entitled Meqor barukh. Now the memories of the life of the ‘former generation’ are to be interpolated with Torah commentaries, ‘in very great number’: ‘revolutionary innovations (Hadashot unetsorot) in Biblical and Talmudic literature’. Or is it, rather, that the Torah commentary will be interpolated with autobiographical memories—that as with Yagel, the life-history will essentially constitute an interruption to the higher theological discourse in which it is set? The ‘Introduction’ that Epstein sets aside for inclusion of these ‘other literary things’ accrued in the course of his editing and revision of the autobiographical material written during World War I actually constitutes by far the largest section of a very large book. Eight hundred and Wfty-Wve pages long in a large format volume,79 the ‘Introduction’ opens, aside from an exhaustive sixty-eight-page list of contents, a massive (eighty-eight pages) complexly tabulated ‘Literary Apparatus’ (literally, ‘Literary Key’/Mafteah sifruti). The apparatus comprises:

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Reference to the Notes, Explications and Innovative Interpretations In the Bible, the Talmud, Aggadot and the Scriptures in this Composition Arranged According to the Order of the Biblical Books, the Talmud, the Aggadot and the Rabbinic Authorities There Will Also Come Here The List of Notes, Explications and Innovative Interpretations To Be Found In the Versions and Concerning the Prayers and Liturgical Hymns note Many of the Scriptures and Citations of the Sages, Relating to the Matter Discussed in the Composition Are Brought Here in Citation Alone, Without Some Note and Without Some Innovative Interpretation They Are Not Included in this List80

This title-page to the impressive exemplum of rabbinic listology that follows is surely bizarrely situated within the introduction to a text that purports to be essentially autobiographical—as Epstein assures us it is in his preface (Haqdamah) to the introduction (Mavo’).78 This incongruity is heightened by Epstein’s insistence upon including at the top of every other page of Meqor barukh—aside from the tables—the caption ‘My Memoirs’. A brief review of the topical list of contents of Epstein’s gigantic Mavo’ further underscores the disparity. A random sampling from hundreds of possible examples: ‘An Explanation of the Term “Yeshivah” in the Sense of a House of Study’; ‘the Design of Yeshivah Buildings at the Time of the Talmud’; ‘Strategies for the Strengthening of Memory’; ‘He Whose Father Is a Convert Is Referred To by the Name of His Grandfather’; ‘An Explanation of the Term “Entering the Waterhouse” Employed by the Sages to Indicate Urination’; ‘The Identity of Meaning of the Roots Parash, Pashar, Patar, Batar, Shabar’; ‘On the Author of the Book of Job’. In fact, the autobiographical content of the Mavo’ is virtually zero; a large portion of the volume is taken up with linguistic excursi—Hebrew/Aramaic letters that are interchangeable, root-formations in these languages the ordering of whose letters may be transposed, rabbinic acronyms, notarikon, et cetera—Pilpul, in short, to the untrained eye. The Mavo’ thus actually presages the volumes it introduces in which, quantita-

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tively speaking, Torah-commentary far outweighs autobiographical narrative—with the signiWcant exception of the chapter devoted to Rayna Batya, where the converse holds. It seems that upon returning to the ‘easy and slight matter’ of his autobiographical writings Epstein seeks to make of them something ‘diYcult and large’: something in which he succeeded—Meqor barukh is undeniably both. In short, he wishes to make of a ‘Bukh/Bikhl’, as Haskalah books were referred to in traditionalist circles, a ‘Sefer’ (‘holy book’); Epstein himself always refers to Meqor barukh as a Sefer, and so is it termed on the title-page. Certainly Meqor barukh has all of the external characteristics of a Sefer: the large format; the title itself taken from Proverbs 5:18; the rabbinic approbation;82 the plethora of citations; the disregard of conventional punctuation; the employment of multiple fonts within the text. But an autobiographical Sefer is a contradiction in terms, and Epstein’s attempt to write simultaneously in two antithetical modes of literary discourse results in massive stylistic and structural dissonance reXective of the cognitive dissonance occasioned by the juxtaposition of incompatible, even mutually exclusive, mentalities. That such idiosyncratic structural/generic hybridity is not only peculiar to Epstein but of more wide-ranging import is attested to by comparison with the one text of traditionalist provenance to which Meqor barukh does compare, Lipschitz’s Zikhron ya’aqov. Thus Bartal on the latter work: From the formal aspect it is assembled from various fragments including letters, pamphlets and newspaper articles. Each discrete volume is accompanied by ‘approbations’ from Lithuanian rabbis or excerpts from reviews of the previous volumes . . . As a historical study it deWes characterization, for sections of personal memoirs are combined with wide-ranging conclusions and far-fetched doctrines concerning the history of the people and the universal history of mankind.83

Epstein himself appears to have been well aware of the incongruity of his undertaking: already in the ‘Preface’, as cited above, he states in so many words that in fact he is writing in a double-register—Torah commentary and autobiography—and that the one discourse may not always ‘adhere’ to the other. Such lack of adherence is graphically illustrated on the not-infrequent occasions when the commentary, in

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the form of footnotes teeming with rabbinic proof-texts, supplants the narrative of the life-history or family-memories set in larger type as superscript. Thus, in describing the conduct of his grandfather, in the course of four pages, the footnotes/commentary allow Wrst four lines of superscript, then three, then none, the following two pages being devoted in their entirety to the ‘Continuation of Note 1’.84 Here, the autobiographical narrative eVectively serves as a footnote to the footnote. This double-discourse—on the one hand the non-linear/a-chronological, citational, impersonal, scholastic discourse of the Sefer; on the other the accounting of the formation of self through and by time and its vicissitudes, the inarticulate stammerings of the heart at especially vivid and aVecting moments of recall of the autobiographical discourse—throws the text of Meqor barukh into disarray. Epstein is conscious and self-conscious of his departure in Meqor barukh from both the rabbinic discourse to which he wishes to adhere and the ‘new’ confessional discourse to which he is drawn by temperament and existential circumstance: this polarity of discourse Wnds its metonymical representation in the Wgures of the Netsiv and Rayna Batya. This extreme self-consciousness and self-defensiveness is attested to by his inclusion in Meqor barukh of a section entitled ‘To the Judgment of This Book’, in which he responds at length and with ample scriptural citation to objections raised by ‘friends and acquaintances who have seen this book while still in manuscript’.85 Such authorial anxiety can only have been compounded by the fact that Epstein intended his work for a wide and variegated readership: ‘Every single person, from whatever city or state, from whatever faction or ideology, from whatever viewpoint and from whatever leaning, if only he is bestowed with knowledge and intelligence in general and with a taste for memories of former days in particular.’86 Currying the approbation of the secular Hebrew literary elite, he sent a copy of Meqor barukh in the year of its publication to the most celebrated of the number of Volozhin rebels, drop-outs/refugees, who played so disproportionate a role in the shaping of modern Hebrew literature, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, with the request that he pass the work on to his literary colleagues.87 Caught uneasily between two stools, Epstein thus seeks all the harder to explain, apologize for and justify his literary endeavor before the eyes of the traditionalist ‘pro-

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spective reader’ and of one better-acquainted with the conventions of secular literature—autobiography included. Indicative of this double-discourse/double-addressee is the footnote that Epstein appends to a sentence in which he refers, in quotation marks, in accordance with the rhetoric of secular literary discourse, to ‘the heroes of my memoirs’ (Gibborei zikhronotay). ‘Heroes’, he explains in this note, when employed in contemporary literary discourse, may denote ‘central characters’: Contemporary writers are accustomed to refer to the person concerning whom they speak in their disquisition or story or what is then going on by the terms ‘the hero of the story’ or ‘the hero of the day’, and they intend by that to indicate, that he is the focus of the story or of that day, upon whom everyone’s attention is focused, everyone talks about and of whom everyone is sentient and aware; and truly this is a pleasing term in and of itself, but we do not know what is the connection between all this and the term ‘hero’, and in what lies the heroism here? And we may Wnd some explanation of this in that the term ‘hero’, besides its straightforward, general and accepted meaning—one endowed with almighty strength and vigor—[there then follow several biblical citations in which the word ‘Gibbor’ carries an alternative connotation, M.M.] may also comprise someone exceptional in spiritual attributes or qualities of soul . . . referring not to physical might or muscularity, but to the might of spirit and soul, and also to one who is industrious and diligent (in non-Jewish languages ‘energy’). And it is in this latter sense that the term will be here employed.88

A similarly dualistic tenor is struck in the following authorial apologia for the style/structure of Meqor barukh whose, purpose, it appears, is to appease both those who would view autobiographical self-accounting as marginal to Torah-commentary and those who would hold to the contrary: And so sometimes I dilated on things from one matter to another and one thing to another, by the way, incidentally, associationally (Derekh ’agav, ’agav ’orha va’agav gerara’)89; and even concerning such matters, that are not strictly necessary to the main purpose of the composition, because the setting down of things in a book ‘by the way’ (Derekh ’agav) is customary and accepted in our literature,

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and has been followed in every place and at every time in various fashions and in various formats, whether in continuation of things in their place within [the page], or at the side of the page, on the margins of the page, in the form of a note beneath an extended line, or at the end of the book; and the reason for this is simple, for such is the property of the spiritual capacities of man, in his ideation and thought, that one business gives rise to its fellow, and there is no check on the spirit at the moment in which the things are emerging into consciousness; and sometimes the eye of the writer will take pity on them [and refrain from omitting them], in considering, that if he does not put them down in writing, it is possible, that they will lose their way and descend into the abyss of forgetfulness, aside from which in his opinion by omitting them he would withhold beneWt from the readers. And this custom (the setting down of things and matters ‘by the way’ and ‘incidentally’) was found worthy of being accommodated also in our ancient literature, Talmudic and Halakhic literature, in whose name we glory in and in whose light we warm ourselves and whose resplendence is upon us, and this custom is considered in it as one of the essentials of ordering and one of the arrangements of matters, and it shines upon the land and its dwellers.90

This oddly Proustian Derekh ’agav technique—the above passage occurs in an entire section of Meqor barukh itself entitled ‘By the Way’/ Derekh ’agav—renders Meqor barukh hybrid and bizarre, both as Bukh and as Sefer. Thus Bialik, who was captivated by the sheer oddity of this literary production, writes to Epstein in 1928, shortly after having received his complementary copy of Meqor barukh: My master the esteemed rabbi! Only a few days ago did the gift that he was so good to order for me from afar reach me and I have already devoured two complete volumes of the three volumes of Meqor barukh, and I am still not satiated. A veritable encyclopaedia! The peddler’s casket! His honour strings pearls upon pearls from the Pentateuch to the Prophets to the Hagiographa and from them to Halakhah and Aggadah and even to words of science and scholarship, and from them again to pleasing discourse of wise scholars requiring study. Indeed, these memoirs are sui generis in both form and content, and there is nothing like them in the entire memoir literature that I have encountered in my life and until this day. His honour binds two diVerent worlds together, the external and the internal,

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in which he lives, and ushers us into all their innermost compartments . . . And if his honour threw all of this variegated and multicoloured material into one pot, then there would emerge from his hands an entire library of books in subjects that are entirely diVerent from each other. Those accustomed to seek order in what they study will Wnd, of course, Xaw in this chaos, but there will be some who Wnd in this a Xavour that commends itself, a unique, exotic oriental Xavour.91

Bialik’s culinary metaphor for Epstein’s compositional method may well have been prompted by Meqor barukh itself; in the introductory volume Epstein writes that the ‘notes, innovative interpretations and explanations of the words of Torah and literary matters and ethical conduct and etiquette from what the Almighty had bestowed me with and from what I found in the name of writers and books; and even though the mix was not lacking without these additions—nevertheless they may be considered as spices and condiments thrown in to season the main-courses of the meal’.92 This tasty ‘mix’ of autobiography, ‘notes’ et cetera brings no writer/ editor more to mind than S. Y. Abramovitsh’s ‘Mendele the Bookseller’. Mendele himself employs the culinary metaphor for his editing of manuscripts on more than one occasion.93 As a ‘Jewish chef ’, moreover, Mendele is particularly adroit at ‘spicing up’ autobiographical manuscripts, lending them that ‘unique, exotic oriental Xavour’ that is to the taste of his largely traditionalist clientele.94 Mendele’s dialogue with the Maskil (Daytshl), whom he has commissioned to prepare for him a Yiddish translation of the autobiography written in German of one ‘Hirsh Rotman from Russia’ that has fallen into his hands, provides a parodic mirror-image of Epstein’s embellishment and re-editing of the autobiographical material from which Meqor barukh was generated. Mendele has just laid eyes on this translation for the Wrst time: ‘On the other hand’, said I to the Daytshl with a hint, ‘On the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt, upon my life, if you were to somehow make comments (notes) on the story, because this is today very much in vogue. Reb Leml, may he live long, the one who prints stories, is a maestro at this. He spins out notes that are utterly fantastic, without rhyme or reason. He’s something else, as I am a Jew. Believe me— when it comes to Jews I know a thing or two. With Jews, you only

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have to spin their heads, one word may not belong with the other, so long as there is something to tease out, or even better to quarrel over. The more you are understood, the less you will be admired . . . Reb Leml, may he live long, is no man’s fool, he understands this full well . . . For example, if someone says something that is quite beside the point, he starts convoluting, teasing things out, and before you know it a note is thus created, which tear into it as you will, you will never get to the bottom of ’ . . . ‘No, Reb Mendele’, the Daytsh responded, ‘No. Prattling away for the sole purpose of confusing someone, that I cannot do . . . I write only what I feel, what I think. If that’s all right by you, Wne. If not, be my guest and send your story to Reb Leml.’ ‘God forbid!’—I yelled out in agitation . . . ‘Very well, let my story be without notes . . . I also know how to spin heads. I know the art just as well as him . . . Aside from that, I have already written a long introduction. In my opinion it is worth a hundred notes. Never mind, it too is enough to drive a man to the sickbed. It will do the job by itself, and one can be glad enough for that. Even though here and there one can understand it somewhat, and furthermore, on the other hand, whoever does not like it can skip over it and begin the story proper right away.’95

Epstein himself may not have been overly oVended by the above comparison; elsewhere in Meqor barukh he compares the deliberately ungrammatical and highly Yiddishized style of the Hebrew letters in Perl’s anti-Hasidic satire Megalleh temirin favourably with the pretentious diction of the ‘pampered aesthetes’ from the Haskalah camp.96 Abramovitsh is, aside from all else, a brilliant literary theoretician and the above dialogue actually encapsulates the issue here under discussion: as a purveyor of the ‘new’ and foreign genre of autobiography to the Eastern European Jewish readership, Mendele senses that literal translation of the text is inadequate—in order for the work to be accepted within its new ‘horizon of readership’ there must also be a more radical translation of discourse.97 Is it coincidental that, as Miron points out, ‘every one’ of Abramovitsh’s ‘longer narratives’ is, in formal terms, autobiographical—‘presented as the history of a “real” person, written or told by himself ’ and then extensively edited by Mendele for domestic consumption?98 Another category of autobiography from a more traditional, or Orthodox, perspective, arose from within the circles of those who occu-

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pied an intermediary position on the religious/secular spectrum, enjoying a more-or-less easy communion with individuals from both groupings. Within the Orthodox camp, religious Zionism was the ideological position most conducive to free intellectual exchange between those whose primary allegiance was to received tradition and those who aligned themselves with ideologies of nineteenth-century provenance. Autobiographical writings, gentler in tone and less revisionist in intent than those of Lipschitz, Epstein and Deinhard, did arise from these circles—though in no great number. Yitshaq Nissenboim’s ’Alei heldi,99 Ya’aqov Mazeh’s Zikhronot,100 Rav Tsair’s Pirqei hayyim and Massekhet zikhronot,101 Rabbi Binyamin’s Mizevarov ve’ad kinneret102—on a sliding scale of traditionalism—provide some of the Wner and better-noted examples from within this category. Within the present context, it is not possible to do justice to these writings, their subtle variations, nor to place them within the context of others, no less distinguished, of their kind. It should only be noted here that such autobiographical and memoiristic productions arise not even as a reaction to, but rather as a natural, be it egregious, oVshoot of precisely that secularizing sphere of intellectual and literary relations that proved most receptive to the autobiographical genre and hence mentality. With respect to the above observations concerning the structural, or a-structural, properties of Zikhron ya’aqov and Meqor barukh, it is telling that in measure as the spectrum shades from traditional to secular these texts are markedly less hybrid and idiosyncratic in formal terms; Bialik, by contrast to his comments on the ‘oriental chaos’ of Meqor barukh, congratulating Nissenboim—another Volozhin graduate—on his ’Alei heldi, writes that the work ‘reads like a novel’.103 Autobiographical testimonies of Orthodox Eastern European Jewish provenance are best understood as an epi-phenomenon of the autobiographical stream whose ultimate source derives from Rousseau. One work in particular, however, does provide an extremely signiWcant exception to this rule: Seder ’eliyahu, by ‘Eliyahu Dovid Rabinowitz-Te’omim, or, as he is better known, the ’Aderet. This, to my knowledge, is a work unique in kind, written, moreover, by one of the leading rabbinic scholars of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. Seder ’eliyahu, in terms of theme and design, owes nothing to the European autobiographical tradition as this developed since Rousseau; indeed,

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in contrast to Emden, the sources for Rabinowitz’s world-view and literary style appear to be entirely indigenous. Nor does he shy away from self-exposure: Poverty, suVering, loss and emotional pain are openly depicted in this book, thus rendering the profound faith of this extraordinary man, which breathes from each page, all the more impressive. Seder ’eliyahu appears, however, to be indicative of no wider trend in the history of nineteenth-century Eastern European Orthodox Jewry. Immmanuel Etkes, in a monograph that deals of an aspect of the inner life of nineteenth-century Lithuanian Orthodoxy and draws extensively from Seder ’eliyahu, himself notes the egregiousness of this work.104 This egregiousness is perhaps reXected in the publication data of the work: A small section alone of the work was Wrst published in 1905, and Seder ’eliyahu was not published in its entirety until 1983, with an introduction, it should be noted, by Avraham Bick—an autobiographically infected threshold traditionalist Wgure—who was responsible for the republication of Emden’s Megillat sefer.105

Semiotics of Autobiographical Behaviour By no means, then, may it be claimed that the autobiographical impulse or its literary expression constituted a universal aspect of the Jewish experience of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The appearance alone, however, of deliberately executed revisionist autobiographies by defenders of the faith does attest to the disproportionate inXuence that the autobiographical writings of the new intelligentsia had upon the shaping of the perceptions of an era. The autobiographical, moreover, played a decisive rôle in the selfperception of this intelligentsia both at the level of individual and of collective consciousness—the two are dialectically entwined. There was scarcely a signiWcant literary or intellectual Wgure of the Jewish cultural renaissance in Eastern Europe as did not, in one form or another, bequeath autobiographical testament: Y. L. Gordon, S. Y. Abramovitsh, Y. L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem (Rabinovitsh), Sh. Dubnow, H. N. Bialik, Ahad Ha’am (Ginzberg), H. Zhitlowsky, N. Sokolow, R. Brainin, M. Y. Berdichevsky—the list could continue and would include many other lesser luminaries. Mutual encouragement from within these cir-

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cles of the intelligentsia for the writing of autobiography was by no means lacking. Sholem Aleichem, M. Ben-Ami (Rabinowitz), Dubnow, Yosef Klausner—inter alios—urge Mendele/Abramovitsh to write his autobiography.106 Y.H. Ravnitsky and later Shmuel Niger suggest that Sholem Aleichem write his autobiography,107 an undertaking he already had in mind since 1895, at the age of thirty-Wve. This longcherished and massive project—the complete autobiography, prematurely curtailed by the author’s death in 1916, was to constitute some ten volumes—was undertaken when a wealthy oil-merchant from Baku and admirer of Sholem Aleichem, Shmuel Shrira, oVered, in 1913, to lend Wnancial support to the project.108 Sholem Aleichem also urges Yekhezkel Kotik to complete his Mayne zikhroynes, the Wrst volume of which left a deep impression upon him.109 Y.L. Peretz’s preamble to his Mayne zikhroynes, written in 1913, takes the form of a letter responding to the ‘editor’, here unnamed, who had requested of him that he ‘write about himself ’.110 This editor was Shmuel Niger, who published the Wrst installments of this autobiography in his monthly Di yidishe velt in 1913.111 Israel Zinberg, in preparing material for the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia, approaches Y. H. Brenner—who had actually conducted his earliest autobiographical experiments in letters written, at the age of only seventeen or so, to his childhood friends, notably Uri Nissan Gnessin—in 1909, with a request for the ‘history of the days of my life at length’.112 Bialik is approached for his autobiography by Yosef Klausner, and it goes to form the basis of the Wrst biography of the poet.113 David Frishman responds gladly in 1898 to a request from the literary biographer Shmuel Tsitron for autobiographical material with a short but highly revealing autobiographical essay.114 Bialik requests memoirs of Tsitron, Shimon Bernfeld and Shai ’Ish Hurwitz.115 Shimon Dubnow, shortly after having embarked upon his own autobiography, goes to some lengths to persuade the seemingly reluctant Ahad Ha’am to write his autobiography, as indeed had several others over the years.116 As with Sholem Aleichem, from Ahad Ha’am’s response—he writes circa 1924—to Dubnow’s repeated urgings that he write his autobiography, we learn that this was an issue with which he had long been preoccupied: ‘Over thirty years ago, I began to notate the memories of my own life with the intention of continuing to my dying day.’117 That Ahad Ha’am, a sort of secularized avatar of the

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Netsiv, for whom impersonality and self-eVacement were cardinal aspects of the model Jewish personality,118 should have been ‘infected’, to use Tolstoyan parlance, by autobiography, demonstrates how heavily imbued with autobiographical consciousness this ambience was. Bialik and Ravnitsky later came to Ahad Ha’am’s aid in this task by providing him with a questionnaire, the response to which is later appended to some previously written autobiographical sketches.119 Bialik also was amongst the friends who called upon E. E. Friedman to write ‘a lengthy and detailed autobiography’.120 Friedman later read parts of his autobiography at clandestine Hebraist meetings in Moscow in the early 1920s at which Ya’aqoh Mazeh also recited his memoirs.121 Mazeh’s Hebraist associates convinced Mazeh of the signiWcance of assigning his oral memoirs to print, a task that they took upon themselves.122 Bialik and Ravnitsky, along with Alter Druyanov, later played a role in the institutionalization of this request for autobiographical material; in their 1914 public announcement calling for the gathering of material for the historical/ethnographic periodical Reshumot, they laid much stress upon the value of memoir and autobiography for their project. It appears that of all the categories of material enumerated in their detailed announcement, the response to the request for autobiographical material yielded a particularly rich harvest; the ‘Memoirs’ section of the Wrst edition of Reshumot published in 1918 is by far the largest of this extraordinarily rich and massive collection, comprising in all almost Wve hundred pages.123 A related phenomenon to this extraordinarily intense period of autobiographical give-and-take124 is that of the literary lexicon. The Wrst lexicon of this type, Nahum Sokolow’s Sefer zikkaron lesofrei yisra’el hahayyim ’itanu hayom125 included a section devoted to autobiographical sketches of some of the writers included therein. The preface to Sefer zikkaron actually uses the term ‘’AutobiograWah’ in describing this section—only the second instance of the term I have found in Hebrew literature.126 Of the two hundred and seventy or so writers included in Sefer zikkaron, only thirteen are represented in the autobiography section. It is quite probable, however, that the majority of writers included in Sefer zikkaron sent their autobiographies to the editorial department of Ha’asif and that these formed the principal source for the encyclopaedic entries in part I.127 The next major project for a Jewish liter-

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ary lexicon was that of Zalman Reizen, for his massive Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur prese un Wlologye—a much-expanded and altered version of a previous one-volume lexicon published in Warsaw in 1914—which appeared in four volumes from 1926 to 1929. In gathering material for this lexicon, Reizen prepared a detailed questionnaire, concerning the life and works of the author, Wve thousand copies of which were distributed.128 Since the completed Leksikon comprised over two thousand entries, and Reizen had in hand material for at least one supplementary volume,129 it is not unlikely that he received, at a conservative estimate, a thousand responses to his questionnaire. Much of this material—the extent of the lacunae is diYcult to determine—is to be found in the Vilna Shrayber collection in the Yivo Archives in New York.130 A similar method to that employed by Reizen was adopted in the post-Holocaust continuation of his lexicon, under the supervision of Shmuel Niger and Yankev Shatsky, Leksikon fun der nayer yiddisher literatur,131 and was more recently adopted by the editors of Yedi’ot genazim, whose Wrst volume appeared in Israel in 1961.132 These lexicon projects should be viewed not only as a stimulus to autobiographical production but also as a reXection, a symptom of a ramiWed and already existent autobiographical impulse. First, the intimate bond between the life-history of the author and his literary oeuvre is, by the compiler of the lexicon, implicitly taken for granted. The novelty of this presupposition is diYcult to underestimate; this type of bio-bibliographical lexicon is unimaginable at any other period of Jewish literary history.133 The following remarks by Tsvi Malter in the 1899 preface to his translation (from the English translation of the German original) of the fourth section of Moses Steinschneider’s Jewish Literature are telling in this respect: Thus when a book is written about a literature such as this and its creators in one of the European languages for Christians, or Jews who do not know this literature in the original, and the writer numbers, for example, amongst the leading Talmudists Rabbi Yehoshua Boaz Ben Barukh then the Christian reader or the Jewish of the type mentioned knows all that is within his capacity to know, that is that this above-mentioned Rabbi Yehoshua was a Talmudist and not a poet or philosopher. The author is unable to inform him of the content and form of his book and if he provides him with its title alone

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he will do nothing to deepen his knowledge, for this reader has never in his life cast eyes upon the Shiltei gibborim commenting upon Rabbi Ya’aqov Falk, and even if he had seen it, he would not know its nature and importance as does the authentic Jew, who studied Rabbi Ya’aqov Falk and his commentators. When it comes to the Hebrew reader, the case is to the contrary. The majority of our readers are utterly ignorant of the names of the authors of the many books that they have read and memorized so often in their youth, and in our presenting them with Rabbi Yehoshua Boaz, Yoel Sirkis and Moshe Lima they will have not the faintest idea who these people are and will not identify them with the authors of the books, Shiltei gibborim etc. that they know so well from their past. In short: for European readers the author is the cue to his book and for Hebrew readers the book is the cue by which its author is known.134

Second, the sheer volume of response to the Sokolow/Reizen projects attests to a coincidence of external stimulus with an innate disposition toward autobiographical self-expression that predated the lexicon announcements. The innate disposition that gave rise to the lexicon phenomenon and in turn was stimulated by it is also attested to by the practice of compiling personal archives: the preservation and assemblage of the scriptural deposits and material relics over a lifetime evince an implicitly autobiographical sensitivity. The auto-archivist, one who compiles a museum of the self, is always a potential, if not an actual, autobiographer. Rousseau himself assembled extensive archives in preparation for his Confessions,from which he cites extensively in the later books along with archival designation: ‘Packet A, No. 44’, ‘Packet C, no. 43’ et cetera.135 Thus in the preamble to Mendele/Abramovitsh’s autobiographical Shloyme reb khayims it is a box of buttons that ‘Reb Shloyme’ (Solomon Abramovitsh) has preserved, ‘the buttons of the one caftan I had to cover myself with when I wandered from my home in Lithuania as a boy, about forty years ago’, that serves as a catalyst in his acceding to his fellow-writers’ counsel that he embark upon his autobiography.136 It is worthy of note that Ahad Ha’am, for all his ambivalence to the autobiographical act, was an assiduous auto-archivist. Leon Simon reports that from 1896, when he came to Berlin to establish the literary periodical Hashiloah, Ahad Ha’am preserved copies of

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every letter he wrote; even prior to 1896, he had requested that his correspondents return the letters he had written them.137 And not withstanding his reservations concerning the self-consciousness of his earliest autobiographical narrative, written in the late 1880s, he faithfully preserved this text in his ‘archive’, placing it at the head of his Pirqei zikhronot completed in 1926.138 Ahad Ha’am thus shared with his interlocutor on the topic of autobiography, Dubnow, the autoarchival inclination, though not the latter’s enthusiasm nor capacity for the transformation of this raw material into autobiographical narrative, or, as Dubnow puts it, the ‘clothing’ of this material with ‘Xesh and veins’.139 For Dubnow, the construction of a personal archive was conducted with the same passion and methodological rigor that characterize his gathering together of historical material in the light of future synthesis; indeed, as shall be seen, Dubnow’s historiography rests in no small part upon the homology of the autobiography of the individual and the history of the nation. In fact, Dubnow appears to have been assembling a personal archive well before the discovery of his historical vocation: he preserved, for example, an autobiographical piece written in Hebrew at the age of fourteen or Wfteen (1875), the ‘half-decayed pages’ of which serve him as material for his autobiographical summation, The Book of Life, begun in the 1920s.140 Aside from genealogical material pertaining to his forebears, correspondence, extensive diaries from the teenage years onwards,141 Dubnow assembled material relics that would later serve him as aide-memoires in the re-creation of his past: a piece of bark cut from a birch in the forests surrounding his beloved summer-retreat in Finland, on which he had inscribed in Yiddish: ‘Here I prayed twice: Rosh hashanah of 5668 and 5670, midday, in the warmth of the sun, 3.9.1903’;142 a twig from a cypress rooted in the hillock in the seaside park in Odessa upon which Dubnow Wrst conceived of his universal Jewish history—this twig Dubnow preserved within his diary adjacent to the date on which it was plucked (January 14, 1914).143 Berdichevsky, likewise, began to assemble a personal archive at an early stage of his career— amongst other memorabilia, as has been mentioned above, the TeWllin that accompanied him on his Wrst journey from Russia to the West as a twenty-Wve-year-old. Like Ahad Ha’am, Berdichevsky began as a relatively young man, in this pre-Xerox-computer era, to request that his

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correspondents return to him the letters he had sent them; these he preserved in a special Wle entitled ‘Returns’/Nehzarim.144 In sheer quantity, at least, Sholem Aleichem’s personal archive quite possibly surpasses that of any other Hebrew or Yiddish writer of this generation; this is a man, after all, who, according to the calculations of the editors of the Wrst extensive anthology of his letters, wrote 1,100 letters in an eighteen-month period from 1888 to 1889.145 Especially worthy of note, with respect to Sholem Aleichem, is that this personal archive appears to have been assembled with half an eye, at least, toward posterity. The Wrst inkling, within his correspondence itself, of Sholem Aleichem’s peering over the shoulders of his immediate addressee to a future reader of his published correspondence occurs in a letter of 1902 to Mordechai Spector, who had apparently suggested that they burn their correspondence: ‘To the contrary, may history bear witness one hundred years hence to how two Yiddish folk-writers [Folkshraybers] . . . corresponded and how “Jargon” then fared. Imagine what sort of appearance we shall present to our great-grandchildren, for instance in Wfty or a hundred years from now, at a time when our bones have long rotted in the earth.’146 In 1912 he writes to the literary critic Bal Makhshoves: ‘Perhaps one day our letters will be published, when we are both, pardon the expression, six feet under.’147 More explicitly, he writes to a friend, Sh. Dobin, in the same year: ‘For goodness’ sake, do not lose my letters. I have heard that after my death there is a plan to assemble them and publish them in a book. Too bad I won’t be around then . . . I should have liked to see what the silly book would look like.’148 The above citations raise complex and intriguing questions with respect to the blurring of boundaries between the intimate one-on-one intersubjectivity of the letter and the more public performance of the autobiography; it is thus, I believe, with some justiWcation that Shmuel Niger views the documents and letters assembled in Y. D. Berkovich’s Sholem aleikhem bukh on a continuum with Sholem Aleichem’s autobiography, Funem yarid.149 Nor, in this era of personality worship of leading and not-so-leading Hebrew and Yiddish writers, which occasionally assumed, most notably perhaps with Y. L. Peretz, cult-like proportions, is the blurring of personal communications and autobiographical performance pecu-

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liar to Sholem Aleichem alone.150 S. Y. Abramovitsh’s renowned autobiographical monologues, delivered before individuals or a circle of acquaintances, for example, bear many of the hallmarks of structured performance pieces that simply beg to be preserved in memoirs—as indeed many of them were.151 The performance aspect of Mendele’s ‘conversations’—i.e., monologues—was not lost to his more percipient auditors. Hence Ya’aqov Fichman: Not only in his written works, but in every respect, Mendele was a man who was style through and through . . . Mendele stylized himself, and born actor that he was, he was constantly on stage, performing a rôle that was more than theatrical—for the rôle he was playing was none other than himself—his self-created hero . . . Nature and art combined—a peculiar admixture of which it is scarcely possible to provide a conception to those who have not themselves experienced it.152

No less of a master of the art of monologic verbal performance in the company of individuals or groups of acquaintances and intimates and no less of an ‘actor’ was Bialik, notwithstanding his frequent disclaimers of the inauthentic persona foisted upon him by his all-tooadulatory public. ‘I am the greatest actor in the world,’ he confessed to S. Y. Agnon, ‘for my disguise is lack of disguise.’153 This confession, which evinces a canny self-awareness, is corroborated again by the Wrst-hand observations of Ya’aqov Fichman, who notes that the oral performances of Bialik were, on occasion, marred by an excess of selfconscious artiWce.154 And, as with Mendele, there was a strongly autobiographical complexion to his conversations; he constantly returned to and elaborated upon key childhood experiences that formed the archetypal substratum of his literary oeuvre.155 As Sholem Aleichem wrote his letters with half an eye toward posterity, so it appears Bialik spoke. ‘In my conversations with Bialik’, writes Eliezer Sherman, ‘I remarked on a couple of occasions that it was a shame that he did not have, like Goethe, his Eckerman, or, as was the custom of the rebbes of a previous era, an amanuensis, a learned devotee who would write down the rebbe’s teachings and conversations and print them in a book. In response to my comments, Bialik said that he too considered that several of his speeches and private conversations were worthy of

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publication, and that he was aggrieved that his friends had not taken this upon themselves’.156 Mordechai Ovadyahu, having been caught ‘red-handed’ transcribing the poet’s conversation into his personal diary, reports that: Bialik, with a kindly smile, asked me to show him what I had written. Once my ‘guilty’ secret was exposed, he asked me to bring him everything of his that I had written down. Then, with a frown, his spectacles straddling his nose, he fell to reading with deep absorption. From time to time there escaped from his lips, in Yiddish a ‘meilenu-nishkushe’ [‘Well—OK—not bad’] and at a diVerent point ‘No, you didn’t succeed here—that is, it’s not your fault—’ . . . As he read, his pen made occasional corrections.157

Like Sholem Aleichem, though not to the same degree, Bialik appears to have held the possibility of the publication of his letters at the back of his mind. From an early stage he retained copies of his letters, or requested his addressees to return them. Thus, in the above-mentioned autobiographical letter to Yosef Klausner of 1903, Bialik requests that Klausner return the manuscript, upon completion of the latter’s biographical piece, since he does not have a copy at hand.158 Notwithstanding, moreover, his strict injunction to Klausner within this letter to allow no one other than he to read it,159 Bialik himself acceded to and assisted in its publication, albeit with emendations and omissions, in the jubilee volume devoted him in 1934.160 Again, in accordance with the collective image that emerges from the present study of a generation of intellectuals/writers that shared, mutually enabled, collaborated in the cultivation of intense reXection upon the biographical and autobiographical signiWcance of their own lives, Bialik was an assiduous auto-archivist. Thus Fishel Lachover, in an essay that made good for many of the biographical lacunae of Bialik’s early career, based upon material from Bialik’s own archives, registered some astonishment at this newly discovered treasure-trove: ‘Bialik was more diligent in the preservation of his correspondence than it is possible to imagine, and the bundles of letters from that period were discovered in the archive in scrupulous order, arranged alphabetically and, within each alphabetic entry, chronologically ordered.’161

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A related phenomenon to the autobiographical archive and the autobiographical letter, and one no less indicative of autobiographical consciousness, is the proliWc production, circulation and exchange of portrait-photographs in this period. Zalman Reizen, in preparation for his second, enlarged Leksikon, had included in his questionnaire a request for the photographic portrait of the writers responding to his appeal.162 To judge from the Wnal, richly illustrated, version of the Leksikon, a good number of writers had such portraits at hand; approximately one-third, at a rough guess, of Reizen’s entries are accompanied by a photograph. These data underline a trend that had been in the making for some years before the appearance of the Leksikon, a trend that actually was part and parcel of the constitution of the Hebrew and Yiddish ‘literary republics’163 from the last decades of the nineteenth century on. Bialik, for example, encloses a photograph of himself in the above-mentioned autobiographical letter to Klausner as a ‘keepsake’.164 In a further letter to Klausner, written some months later, Bialik sees Wt to enclose yet another photograph of himself: ‘I enclose herein my photograph with the greatest pleasure and aVection, only asking that you repay me in kind with your own picture, according to your promise that you are yet to fulWll.’165 By no means egregious, Bialik’s exchange with Klausner with respect to the portraitphotograph actually typiWes the writerly etiquette of the day. Evidence of the ritual exchange of the portrait-photograph is to be found in virtually every printed correspondence of Bialik’s Hebrew- and Yiddishwriting peers. Y. L. Peretz was actually in the habit of sending commercially produced postcard-portraits of himself to literary friends and associates.166 That he could do so without a trace of self-irony is surely indicative of the normative nature of this practice. A further indication of the degree to which the production, circulation and exchange of portrait-photographs had taken root is supplied by Ahad Ha’am’s vehement opposition to this practice in theory, but submission to it in practice, as cited in the Wrst chapter of this book. The cultural semiotics of the portrait iconography of the leading literary personalities of this period is a topic which, to my knowledge, has scarcely been touched upon and is well-deserving of study.

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Buried Autobiographies That the disposition toward the autobiographical in Jewish Eastern Europe was more diVuse and more ramiWed than publication data alone would suggest is further attested to by the existence of a considerable number of unpublished autobiographies of this period, aside from the manuscripts submitted for the lexicons mentioned above. Quite recently, a full-length Hebrew autobiography by an obscure Lithuanian inventor, Chaim Aronson, written in the 1870s and 1880s has come to light.167 One of the more remarkable aspects of this autobiography is that Aronson had no contact with the Hebrew writers of his day. His autobiography, begun at the same time as was Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim, appears to have been his only literary composition—certainly, nothing else of his has been published. Nor does he appear to have been inXuenced by any of the Jewish autobiographies with which he could have been acquainted—notably, Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte and Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer. Aronson’s is by no means the only Jewish autobiographical work to have gone unpublished until after the author’s death. The Wrst section of Y. L. Gordon’s autobiography from a manuscript held by Shaul Ginsburg was Wrst published in the Wrst volume of Reshumot in 1918;168 the entire autobiography, with further autobiographical fragments, was Wrst published as one work in 1928.169 An important autobiography, of which some fragments are missing, by the literary traveler and ethnographer of the Jews of the Caucasus, Yosef Yehudah Charney, was, likewise, published posthumously in the sixth volume of Reshumot.170 Autobiographical fragments by, inter alios, M. Z. Margoliot,171 Aizik Hirsh Weiss,172 and Reuven Brainin173 have only more recently been published for the Wrst time. An extremely revealing Hebrew diary for the years 1912–22 by the poet David Fogel appeared for the Wrst time in its entirety in 1990.174 Sections of a Hebrew autobiography which runs in the original manuscript to sixtynine typed pages by a Polish Jew, Yeshayah Heshl Perelstein—written in 1889, when the author was only nineteen years old and entitled with what appears to be deliberate resonance of Peretz Smolenskin’s autobiographically based Bildungsroman, Hato’eh bedarkhei hahayyim— have recently been published in English translation.175 Sha’ul Tcherni-

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khovsky’s recently published manuscript autobiography has been cited in the Wrst chapter of this book. The vast amount of autobiographical material by Wgures outside the public sphere, or all but forgotten Hebrew and Yiddish writers, assembled and on occasion solicited by Shaul Ginsburg, from which he drew copiously in his pioneering studies of the inner life of Eastern European Jewry, suggest that the Aronson and Perelstein documents represent but the tip of the iceberg of undiscovered autobiographical documents by lesser-known or otherwise unknown individuals.176 Yitskhok Rivkind, indeed, informs us that Ginsburg’s archive included a Russian manuscript of his own memoirs of childhood and early youth, which has not, to my knowledge, been published to date.177 Much other autobiographical material—including the memoirs of Sh. Y. Bik178 and the two-thousand page diary of Isaiah Bershadsky—appears to have been lost or destroyed.179 Most tantalizing is the major autobiographical work, entitled Bitseror hahayyim, that S. Y. Agnon had completed and prepared for press; it was destroyed in 1924 when his home in Beer Homburg was burnt down. An inkling of the scale of this work is provided by Agnon in a letter to Yosef Hayyim Brenner of 1920: Soon I shall be sending my story Bitseror hahayyim to press. God knows how diYcult this is for me. All of the memories of my youth, of the lives of my grandfather, my father and my mother may they rest in peace are bound up in this bundle [Bitseror hazeh], also the recollection of a thousand human beings will be included therein.180

A unique and complex category of unpublished or posthumously published autobiographical writings is that of Soviet Yiddish writers. We have here to do with texts written under the conditions of a totalitarian regime—texts, that is, written, some even in hieroglyph, with the speciWc intention of not seeing the light of day, not, at least, until some unspeciWed future when the yoke of oppression would have been lifted.181 The extent of these apocryphal writings—or to use the felicitous term of Eliezer Podriachik, Genize-shafungen (‘buried writings’ is an approximate translation, M.M.)—is diYcult to determine. It can, I think, be held in certainty that the trickle of such texts that have reached us represents but a fraction of these underground writings.182 In his classiWcation of these Genize-shafungen Podriachik sees

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their having Jewish national content as their deWning category and, more speciWcally, sympathetic depictions of pre-revolutionary Jewish society and culture.183 This is clearly an essential characteristic of these writings. No less central, however, from the evidence of the Genizeshafungen of Der Nister (Pinkhes Kahanovitsh), Meir Viner and Peretz Markish discussed by Podriachik in his article, is their autobiographical tenor, their concern with the self. Soviet conditions were as inimical to the autobiographically constituted, ‘bourgeois’, romantic self, as they were to nationalist deviationism.184 This overall negation of the pre-revolutionary autobiographical self manifested itself in Soviet Yiddish literary criticism by a marked hostility toward biographical and autobiographical expressions of identity that did not provide testimony, in Jochen Helbeck’s words, of the full trajectory of self-transformation from ‘human weed’ or ‘bad raw material, living in a similarly unformed or polluted social environment, to conscious, self-disciplined human beings residing in the well-ordered socialist garden created to an extent by themselves.’185 The Wrst fault, for example, that the “proletarian” literary critic, Avrom Abtshuk, found in Yiddish literature of the late 1920s was that “the writers are cutting themselves oV from real life and moving towards individualism and mysticism”.186 A chilling proclamation to the same eVect which was to prove tragically prophetic was made by Moyshe Litvakov in 1925: The reWned concentration upon the atomized bourgeois individual has become hollow and devoid of content, at a time when collective masses, proletarian and peasants, have begun to reveal in concrete manner their brilliant creative potential. The oneiric, slow-paced individualist-impressionistic style has become a sort of dissonance from the hereafter (Fun yener velt) at a time when mass-agitation has become the style of the epoch.187

Given such hostility to individualist lyrical introspection, backed up as it was by organized state-violence, and given, moreover, that any genuinely autobiographical self-accounting by the writers of this period had, by necessity, to depict the pre-revolutionary Jewish culture of their parents, siblings, grandparents with at least a grain of empathy, it is not to be wondered at that texts of autobiographical coloration be assigned to the Genize. To provide some idea of the critical abuse such

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self-accountings could bring upon the heads of their practitioners, consider the following citation from a 1932 Soviet publication, Problemes fun folkloristik: To pogroms of the Black Hundred, to one of the Wghting strategies of decaying Tsarism, the Anskys, exactly as did the Prilutskys, Bialiks etc., responded with a nostalgic Xight to the putreWed ‘patriarchal’ times, remembering with misty eyes all of their sweet tastes and smells, registering every pure and holy man, every smatter of grease on the old Kapotes [gabardines], every surviving trace of the nationalreligious onion in the holy Tekhines [Yiddish supplication literature, especially geared toward women] . . . Let us recall the old sacred taste of kugel, and the old echt-Jewish foodstuVs imbued with the primeval national spirit, in the old Shtraymls [fur-rimmed Hasidic hat], Kapotes and Shterntikhlakh [decorative traditional woman’s headgear]. Let’s immerse ourselves in the old bizarrely retrograde tales about saints, dibbuks, spirits, devils, miracles and wonders etc. which provided consolation to our holy great-great-grandfathers in the face of similar pogroms and misfortunes.188

The author of the above lines was Meir Viner, the Soviet literary critic whose work has survived the test of time more than any other. Viner thus shared, in his published works at least, the general distaste for both biography and autobiography current in the literary criticism of his time and place. Such distaste made of Shmuel Niger, who more than any other Yiddish literary critic espoused the biographical method, and of Zalman Reizen, precisely on account of his Leksikon, the bêtes noires of Soviet literary criticism and foremost representatives of ‘fascistic Yiddishism and its scholarship’. Thus G. Sheinin in his critique of the Leksikon: The methodological foundation of the Yiddishistic literary research is the biographical method, that derives again from the individualistic, idealist approach to history, as if it were the history of heroes. But also the biographical method is taken by the Kasrilevke [Sholem Aleichem’s Wctional rendition of his home-town Voronke in the Ukraine, M.M.] researchers ad absurdum: they have even begun to seek the secret of the writer’s work in his uncles (like Niger, for example, with Sholem Aleichem), or his grandmothers, dining-table depictions etc.189

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Viner, who referred to Sh. Niger as a ‘nationalist-fascist critic’,190 speaks in similar vein disparagingly of the two classic Yiddish autobiographical works, S. Y. Abramovitsh’s Shloyme reb khayims and Sholem Aleichem’s Funem yarid. He views these texts as lamentable manifestations of petty-bourgeois recoil from advanced capitalism that adduces to sentimental nostalgia for childhood and the recent past in face of the emerging reality of a proletarian-based economy.191 He lacerates the ‘bourgeois Yiddishistic’ and ‘philistine’ underpinnings of Max Weinreich’s biographical introduction to Solomon Ettinger’s collected writings192 and Yitshaq Dov Berkovich’s biographical and autobiographical Sholem aleikhem bukh—a work he depicts as ‘saccharine . . . saturated with family-cult’.193 In a work published in 1938, Lyrik un sotsializm, Viner characterizes the Yiddish poetry written in the two decades before 1917 in the following terms: ‘Chewing the cud of the all-important ego of the poet and his idle caprices, vacuous posturing of the self, all manner of aimless psychological posturing or formal coquetry’.194 ‘I have divided all the works of world literature’, writes Osip Mandelstam, ‘into those written with and without permission. The Wrst are trash—the second stolen air.’195 Precisely at the time when Viner was, as Podriachik puts it, ‘engaged with all his might in the battle for the Leninist process in literary criticism’—the latter half of the 1930s—he was in the midst of writing and planning a wide-ranging autobiographical work, only a small section of which was to be completed, that would encompass his experience from his years of childhood in Krakau (Viner was born in 1893) to the time of his establishing residence in the Soviet Union in 1926.196 Only in 1969 were the extant sections of the work discovered and the majority, but not all, published in Sovyetish heymland. Amounting to some Wfty printed pages (large format), these autobiographical chapters were topically rearranged by the two editors into two sections bearing the titles ‘Der zeyde Binyomen’ and ‘Yugnt fraynt’.197 To my knowledge, this text thus constitutes the most substantial and signiWcant autobiographical manuscript by a leading Soviet Yiddish writer to be published to date. At the time of publication of this work, writes Podriachik, who was responsible for its discovery, Viner’s autobiographical revelations and the revelation of Viner’s autobiography ‘astonished those who enjoyed a close acquaintance with Viner’.198 Viner’s work fascinates not in the least, quite aside from its rich bio-

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graphical and historical content, in its bearing unmistakable signs of the circumstances of its composition. Any written document, even one destined for the desk-drawer, had in the USSR not only to evade the strictures of the external censor but also those of the internalized censor in the mind.199 The end result of this process thus yields a document that calls for considerable deciphering. This element of internal censorship is attested to by the generic indeterminacy of the piece: Viner wavers constantly between open Wrst-person autobiographical expression and the third-person pseudonymous protagonist of the autobiographical Bildungsroman. The model for such a Yiddish autobiographical Bildungsroman may well have been provided him by Dovid Bergelson’s Bam dnieper, the Wrst volume of which, Penek, had appeared in 1932. Bergelson, in the latter work, circumvents the autobiographical taboo by endowing his clearly autobiographical protagonist, named ‘Penek’, with the class-consciousness of a seasoned commissar, and it is through this prism that the familial and social ambience of his childhood is refracted, sometimes cruelly so.200 Viner thus alternates at random within the text between the narrative perspective of a ‘Yoyel’ and that of ‘I’/‘we’.201 That Viner himself was aware of this generic indeterminacy is attested to by a revealing aside to be found in the margins of one of the manuscript pages: ‘Perhaps write the whole thing in the Wrst person’.202 And in one passage he pointedly calls attention to the autobiographical status of the document, lest the reader consider his prior depiction of the banquet furnished by his Grandfather Binyomen to the indigents of Krakau overly novelistic: ‘I know that many of the people whom I describe here recall in several of their characteristics Jewish beggars as described by other writers from many years back. I swear, however, that all of these people of whom I narrate, really were people that I saw in my own city, that I knew well . . . ’203 There is again here a fascinating parallel with Mandelstam, the narrator of whose tortuous crypto-autobiographical ‘The Egyptian Stamp’ exclaims: ‘What a pleasure for the narrator to switch from the third person to the Wrst! It is just as if, after having to drink from tiny inconvenient thimble-sized glasses, one were suddenly to say the hell with them, to get hold of oneself and drink cold, unboiled water straight from the faucet.’204 There is honourable precedent within the Yiddish canon for autobiography in the third person—both Abramovitsh’s Shloyme reb khayims

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and Sholem Aleichem’s Funem yarid are written in the third person. But if the third person is employed consistently within a clearly selfreferential text, this makes of the ‘he’ little more than an encoded ‘I’, which is almost automatically ‘cracked’ by the reader.205 Viner’s constant vacillation, to the contrary, between ‘Yoyel’ and ‘I’ suggests a text borne of conXicting motivations, or rather an autobiography that is constantly checked/stiXed by opposing forces. That the self-referential, autobiographical impulse is here primary, rather than the novelistic, is borne out by the fact that all other persons depicted in this work, that I, at least, can identify, including family members, Wgures of note in Eastern European Jewish intellectual life such as the neo-Hasidic philosopher Aaron Marcus, the historian and Krakau antiquarian bookseller Feivel Hirsh Vetshteyn, the Spinozist Maskil Shlomoh Rubin, the literary critic David Frishman—all acquaintances of Viner’s grandfather, Binyomen Landau—are depicted by their own names and are drawn, moreover, with an eye to historical and biographical verisimilitude. Viner’s concern for historical accuracy is also reXected in the notes contained in his archive pertaining to this work, which unfortunately were not published with the text. In these notes, according to Podriachik’s lamentably curt depiction: ‘Viner brings various facts concerning his grandfathers, B. Landau and L. Viner. These notes also contain interesting details concerning Meir Viner’s youth and childhood.’206 At several points in the manuscript, moreover, where names and books are mentioned and Viner is uncertain of their exactitude, he writes as a reminder to himself ‘Verify’.207 This is not to say that there are not moments in this work when the hand of the novelist comes to the fore; the depiction, for example, of Grandfather Binyomen’s beggars’ banquet is highly reminiscent of the panoramic crowd-scenes in the historical novels and short stories of Joseph Opatoshu.208 But since in his non-scholarly writing in Yiddish prior to the writing of this text Meir Viner had applied himself Wrst and foremost to the genre of the historical novel, it would be surprising indeed if the hand of the historical novelist were not to be perceived here.209 More problematic than the intrusion of Wctional techniques into this narrative—as argued above, such intrusion has marked a constitutional characteristic of autobiography since Rousseau—is the ever-

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present ideological interference to be detected in this text. Of course, no autobiography is devoid of the ideological, and the very writing of an autobiography is an implicitly ideological act and thus, as has been noted, held in suspicion by many contemporary commentators of more radical persuasion. When, however, the ideology overtly espoused by the autobiographer negates the self/autos and the individual life/bios in face of a determined and determining collective totality, the autobiographer’s left hand must constantly be seeking to qualify or erase what his right hand is in the process of inscribing. Thus Evgeny Dobrenko discerns in Gorky’s autobiographical trilogy a palinodic self-cancellatory deep structure occasioned by the lack of Wt between ideology and genre: At the heart of Gorky’s autobiography lies an unconditionally antiautobiographical principle. This is foremost a matter of Gorky’s anti-Rousseauianism . . . Gorky spoke out against individualism, against the . . . ‘independence’ of the individual from class inXuences and from the conditions of his era, against the cult of ‘social solitude’, and against the idea of an ‘exceptional personality’ as such . . . All of this could not but be manifested in the Gorkian trilogy: in autobiography the ‘auto’ was called into doubt.210

Jochen Hellbeck writes in a very similar vein concerning the Stalin-era journals, ‘Time and again, diarists wrote of their eVorts to merge their personal lives with “the general stream of life” of the Soviet collective. A private existence in distinction or even opposition to the life of the collective, however, was considered inferior and unfulWlled.’211 Ideological disruption of autobiographical memory in order to appease the external and internal censor is at evidence throughout Viner’s text, but no more so than in the sections devoted to his grandfather, a man whom he clearly loved and admired.212 Viner no doubt realized that in so aVectionate a depiction of a pre-revolutionary patriarchal forebear he was treading extremely dangerous ground—a similarly aVectionate memoir by the literary critic Boris Eichenbaum, depicting his Jewish forebears and published in 1929, was singled out for special indictment in the late 1940s.213 We learn from the memoirs of Esther Rosenthal-Shnayderman, who worked alongside Viner in the Institute for Jewish Culture in Kiev, that Viner was, from the onset of his arrival in the USSR in 1926, markedly ‘nervous’ in his new ambience

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and highly circumspect in the company of hard-line ideologues.214 He was composing these memoirs, moreover, in particularly dangerous times: his former colleagues at the Kiev Institute, Maks Erik and Yoysef Liberberg, were arrested in 1936; Erik died in captivity the same year after a failed suicide-attempt and Liberberg was shot in 1937;215 the entire Institute for Jewish Culture was liquidated in 1936.216 Consider, for example, the following passage in which Grandfather Binyomen’s thoughts—and note here the novelistic technique—are arraigned by a process of back-projection to the perspectives of Marxist/ Leninist teleology: Grandfather Binyomen contemplated: ‘Where do we learn from the holy books [Sforim] that the majority of mankind suVers deprivation through other men? Can this be some sort of new punishment from God? In which case, why is there nothing written concerning this in the holy books? Why is this not so much as mentioned? Why do they all hold their silence and feign ignorance? Perhaps the only people to consult in this matter are the younger generation?’217

If the ideological superimposition upon Grandfather Binyomen’s ‘contemplations’ appears superimposed, and out of accord moreover with the more authentic and historically believable image of the grandfather that emerges from Viner’s own text, how much the more so the following ‘special supplementary note’ that Viner had in mind to include in the depiction of his grandfather, as cited by Eliezer Podriachik: For whole nights long in a separate, unfurnished room in his apartment, Grandfather used to immerse himself in various books. Then he even consulted the Communist Manifesto . . . Grandfather discovered that his own beliefs and socialism were one and the same thing . . . Grandfather recited Kaddish for Naphtali Botvin (a Jewish communist sentenced to death in Poland for political assassination, M.M.), lit a Yortsayt candle for him and told stories about him.218

Thankfully, as Elias Shulman notes, Viner’s right hand prevailed over the left this time, and these episodes, which really strain all credibility, were not included in the body of the manuscript.219 Indeed, they are contradicted in the manuscript itself: in one passage, also highly suspect and tendentious, Viner depicts his father’s visit to the library of the ‘Ezra’ organization, seeking some answers to the ethical dilemma

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of Wnancial inequity that plagued him. After he asks the bemused librarian whether he had any volumes on this topic, the following dialogue ensues: ‘Librarian: “Zeydenyu, perhaps you mean socialism?” Grandfather used to hear that word as a curse upon the dissolute youth. “God forbid!” [Khasvesholem] He shook his head and hurried away.’220 In the above-cited notes concerning Grandfather Binyomen, autobiographical memory thus appears to submit, whether consciously or not it is impossible to ascertain, to the distorting imperative of ideological demands.221 It is in the most lyrical and passionate passages of Viner’s autobiography—those devoted to the friend of his youth, Yoysi Rotenberg—that we are witness to a counter-movement, whereby autobiographical memory asserts its own claims in face of ideological revisionism. Here, that is, autobiographical recollection gives rise to a moment of self-revelation and assertion of self without parallel in the remainder of the text. The following citation is not, it is true, entirely free of camouXage—the oppressive forces, for example, or ideological yoke from which Yoysi points a way of release are primarily represented in terms of enslavement to ‘divine powers’ and the ‘kingdom of heaven’. And the liberation experienced or longed for by Yoyel/Viner is expressed not directly but vicariously, through evocation of his friend from the past. Nonetheless, it is surely diYcult not to discern here the cri de coeur of one who, like Viner, had experienced the humiliation of a forced confession and recantation of his former works at an open plenum in Kiev in 1932:222 It was at that time that Yoyel liberated himself, not so much through inner waverings and doubts as through well-considered and conscious reXections, from all supernatural conceptions, and he experienced an extraordinary inner freedom. There sang within him the song of good, healthy youth, but more than this—the jubilant song of ecstatic liberation arising from the conviction that man is free. And it was this that so attracted him to this extraordinarily profound and winsome man, with whom in time he would form so close a relationship . . . Through him he experienced the unbounded and captivating joy of free thought, of liberating oneself from all inane dogmas, a taste of that philosophical freedom, of philosophy as understood by the thinkers of antiquity—the freedom to cast oV the yoke of all of

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the miseries that aZict mankind, from the oppressive yoke of the kingdom of heaven and divine powers. For Yoysi was imbued with the joy of free thought, which no one can so experience as he whose thought was at one time imprisoned, with that overwhelming philosophical joy, as experienced by the man who suddenly looks around him and sees that the shackles of religion are illusory, that man is free to do as he wishes, free, free, and he sings a song of exaltation. Such was the hymn that was sung without respite in Yoysi’s spirit . . . 223

The next citation concerns the invitations received by the ’Illui [‘genius/ prodigy’], Yoysi Rotenberg—whom Viner compares to the archetypal Eastern European Jewish free-thinker and autobiographer in modern times, Solomon Maimon—to attend rabbinic institutes of higher learning, with a stipend, including an invitation from Menachem Azariah Callimani to study for the rabbinate in Trieste. The autobiographical investment in the following passage scarcely requires elucidating: It anguished Yoysi that all types of people, whose opinions were most alien to him, consider him suitable to be an ideological servant, to harness him to themselves in order to provide them with intellectual sustenance. And then he decided to take upon himself a resolution, to indicate to them once and for all, that he does not belong to them, in any manner or form.224

The word employed for ‘harness’ in the above passage, Ayntsushpanen, is of particular resonance. It recalls the 1926 journal In shpan, whose programmatic manifesto to Dovid Bergelson calling for a wholesale reorientation of Yiddish literature in the USSR and Soviet ideology provoked considerable controversy at the time. Bergelson stated, inter alia, in this manifesto that the ‘bygone period’—that is, all that occurred before 1917—can no longer serve as material for Yiddish literature.225 ‘The aim of this journal’, Shmuel Niger writes, ‘was to harness (Ayntsushpanen, emphasis in original, M.M.) the Yiddish writers to the soviet wagon.’226 Viner, who heeded the call of In shpan and emigrated to the USSR in the same year this journal appeared, cannot have been unaware of this resonance. Such intellectual ‘harnessing’, at all events, appears to have been precisely the experience of Viner in the Institute for Jewish Culture of the Ukrainian Academy of Science, as this is depicted in the memoir of his former student, Esther Rosenthal-Shnayderman.227

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The manner in which Yoysi Rotenberg and his rôle in shaping the sensibilities of the young Viner are depicted points to a further signiWcant dimension of Viner’s autobiographical work; for any reader of the pages devoted to Yoysi who is well-versed in Yiddish literature could not but detect resonance here of the three classic autobiographical works of Abramovitsh, Peretz and Sholem Aleichem. In Yoysi Rotenberg we may discern a variant upon a Wgure that, since Abramovitsh, attains almost archetypal status in Yiddish autobiography: the mentor/muse or Goethean ‘daemon’, who awakens or reveals in the child or youth the hidden psychic sources that will be the wellspring of his future vocation. Almost invariably, this mentor/muse is one who stands on the periphery of traditional Jewish culture or bears some mark of exceptionality: an orphan, eccentric, artisan/artist/musician, heretic, philosopher manqué, rabbi or Melammed who gainsays or transcends the negative Haskalah stereotypes of these professions through innate dispositions of mind and heart that refuse, as it were, to be ‘civilized’. These muse/mentor Wgures frequently share in the retention of certain child-like or ‘naive’ qualities in Schiller’s sense of the latter term: the ability to pierce by a sort of X-ray moral vision the elaborate tapestry of disingenuousness and hypocrisy woven around adult morals and manners; above all, the capacity for play, whether in the realm of abstract concepts, the free Xight of the imagination in the spinning of fantastic tales, music-making or the creation of plastic art. It is thus that Abramovitsh in his Shloyme reb khayims depicts these muse/mentor Wgures as ‘grown-up children’—‘children they were and children they remained’.228 And thus Peretz’s depiction in his Mayne zikhroynes of Rabbi Moyshe Wahl: ‘Children were the love of his life. Whenever he appeared in the street or in the study house, he was immediately surrounded by youngsters, and stood barely taller than them, like a slightly older kid. His childlike trembling voice was like a Wne silver bell.’229 The mentor/muse may of course be a child, as Abramovitsh’s ‘Ben Zion’, the son of one of these ‘grown-up children’, ‘Hertzl the carpenter’.230 The purest representation of the child muse is the orphan ‘Shmulik’ in Sholem Aleichem’s Funem yarid, whose magical tales open the gates to the protagonist, ‘Sholem Nokhem Vevik’s’ rich fantasy world.231

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It is undoubtedly to this gallery of muse/mentor/daemons that Viner’s Yoysi Rotenberg belongs. Consider, for example, Viner’s initial depiction of the half-blind peripatetic young scholar in Hasidic garb, Yoysi Rotenberg, who appears literally to have materialized out of nowhere one Wne day on the streets of Krakau: One Wne morning, there began to appear on the streets of the city a young Jewish man from the provinces, whose appearance attracted the attention of all the passers-by and astonished them. It was apparent that he must have been fairly young, scarcely twenty-Wve years old. He had, however, a long unclipped mousy blond beard—not at all like a Jew. The whites of his eyes were blue, like those of a child, setting oV large black pupils. When he met someone whom he was pleased to see or who exercised his curiosity, his eyes would Xicker oddly and light up. He went around dressed in normal Hasidic clothing, like all pious Jews in a long cloth jacket, not an ordinary overcoat mark you, a long cloth jacket fastened at the waist, and a velvet hat. But for all this without Peyes, not a trace of them! His long trousers were tucked into white stockings, as worn by rebbes’ children . . . From these almost blind eyes and from his strange, remarkably beautiful face and the grace of his poise, there radiated such an uncommon, joyful, sincere goodness, naïve childishness, kindly disposition, warmth and largesse, that every passer-by could not but immediately discern this and, with a mixture of curiosity and wonder ask himself: ‘What sort of a man is this? Where does such a man come from? And what is he doing here?’232

In the above passage we Wnd all of the key characteristics of the mentor/muse archetype as this is developed in the Yiddish autobiographical tradition: an obscurity of origin; familiar, yet strange (Modne/ ‘strange’ is the constantly recurring epithet in Viner’s depiction of Yoysi), he escapes categorization within the familiar taxonomy of Eastern European Jewish culture; a spiritual and/or physical charisma, which exerts an almost magical irresistible attraction upon all who come within its orbit; and Wnally a naive, childlike quality, which draws to the muse adult and child alike. Compare Abramovitsh’s ‘Eizik the Blacksmith’ whose innate charisma drew people to him ‘as if by a magnet’, his ‘friendly smiling face’ that aVected the young Abramovitsh ‘like the bright sun emerging behind dark clouds’.233 It is

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Sholem Aleichem’s ‘Shmulik the orphan’, however, who provides the closest point of comparison to Yoysi Rotenberg. Just as Yoysi’s ‘shining eyes’ exert a special spell upon Viner, so for Sholem Aleichem, Shmulik’s ‘dreamy eyes’; like Yoysi, Shmulik’s eyes are partially turned inward, and ‘moist, as if covered by a shadowy haze’.234 This charismatic ‘shining’ of the eyes combined with their ‘partial blindness’ or ‘haze’ calls to mind the Aramaic euphemism for the blind, Sagi nehor, literally ‘plenteous of light’. Both works serve as testimony to the most noble and aVecting aspect of human capacities—friendship. Viner depicts his relationship with Yoysi Rotenberg, as does Sholem Aleichem, his with Shmulik, in terms of a Wrst love; for both writers their choice of so extraordinary a companion confers in turn upon themselves a sign of chosenness: Sholem became attached to Shmulik the moment they met. They shared breakfasts and lunches and became bosom friends—literally one body and soul . . . Shmulik’s dreams about treasures, magic stones and other good things are still ensconced in Sholem’s heart— perhaps in another form or guise, but he bears them to this day.235 It is no wonder that these two men, so diVerent in rearing age and way of life, embraced one another in a deep friendship, that for the older one was more warm, more moderated, for the younger— passionate love, almost inspired romance, with all the happiness that a love can give.236

Nor is Viner’s continuity with the Yiddish autobiographical tradition to be perceived in his depiction of Yoysi Rotenberg alone. The sections devoted to Grandfather Binyomen read on occasion like a palimpsest beneath which may be detected the silhouettes of paradigmatic representatives of the traditional world—including the old-style Maskil—to be found in the autobiographical works of Abramovitsh, Peretz and Sholem Aleichem. Of especial import in the sections devoted to Grandfather Binyomen and his ambience is the unmistakable aYnity in theme, content and style with Y. L. Peretz’s Mayne zikhroynes. Even Podriachik, while writing in the Soviet Union where such comparison would scarcely be construed as complimentary, cannot refrain from remarking upon this correspondence: ‘Grandfather Binyomen, his thoughts and deeds, provide the impression that he had been reared

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between the covers of Y. L. Peretz’s works.’237 To take but one example, Viner recounts that one of Grandfather Binyomen’s neighbours fell sick and required medical attention. Notwithstanding the fact that it was Sabbath, Grandfather Binyomen hires a droshke to alert a doctor. Returning to his neighbour’s house with the doctor he himself helps prepare a Wre in the stove, which ‘for him was a far greater act of heroism than risking his life in saving a drowning man”.238 He settles account with the coachman not with money but with a silver tobaccobox. Expiating for transgressing the Sabbath prohibition on labour, he subsequently ‘fasts eighteen fasts’. Whether this is Dichtung or Wahrheit, the parallels with Peretz’s most famous neo-Hasidic fable, ‘If Not Higher’, wherein is accounted the Nemirover rebbe’s sneaking oV incognito at the time of the penitential prayers in order to kindle the stove of a poor Jewish widow, leap to the eye.239 Viner’s indebtedness to Peretz in the framing of his autobiographical work is remarkable in that Peretz, of all of the classic writers in Yiddish literature, was accorded the most problematic reception in the Soviet Union. If considerable dialectic ingenuity was required on the part of Soviet Yiddish literary critics in the provision of apologies for Peretz’s earlier, more radical socialist-realist works, Soviet Yiddish literary criticism in general held up its hands in despair when confronted with the later ‘decadent’ and ‘reactionary’ period of his writings, to which the autobiography belongs.240 The general consensus of Soviet Yiddish literary criticism was that the late 1890s to Peretz’s death in 1915 marked a period of progressive—or, rather regressive—decline. Such decline was manifest, according to this scheme of things, in Peretz’s petty-bourgeois and ideologically retrograde nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary Jewish past; in terms of his poetics, this decline was reXected in a Xight from realism to symbolism, decadence, neo-romanticism, mysticism. Viner himself was well representative of this tide of Peretz criticism when he declared the sources of Peretz’s Hasidic and folkloristic stories to be ‘dusty old cobwebs with long-deceased spiders, a reservoir of perennial enslavement’.241 These lines were published in Shtern in 1935, at the same time, as Dalia Kaufman points out, that Viner must have been considering writing, if he was not in the actual process of writing, his thoroughly Peretz-inspired autobiographical work,242 whose sources could equally be described by a hostile critic

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as ‘dusty old cobwebs’ et cetera. What, after all, from such a hostile perspective, could be more ‘dusty’ and ‘cobwebby’ than Viner’s sympathetic and aVectionate portraits of Grandfather Binyomen’s best friends? Take, for example, Viner’s depiction of one of these, the traditionalist Maskil, rabbinic genealogist and historian of Jewish Krakau, Hirsh Feivel Vetshteyn: The second friend was called H. F. Vetshteyn. He already had a Mitnagdic, Maskil-type appearance. Dressed in a long overcoat, not mark you a long jacket, and a top-hat. His grey beard was immaculately combed and even very slightly trimmed. This man was a wellknown historian of the city, Krakau, and of course of the Jews in Poland . . . He was a second-hand bookseller in the Hospital Street . . . where the whole road was full of second-hand bookstores and there he had in the fore-gallery to a house his bookstore. He would sit there in a Yarmulke, and students, regular customers and scholars, Jesuits, would rummage in the mountains of books that were strewn around there. Leading experts in the history of Poland, in documents, in Latin documentary material would not infrequently come to his store . . . 243

Nor can Viner have been unaware of the article of his colleague, Nokhem Oyslender, published in a previous edition of Shtern in the same year as his own, that singles out Peretz’s Mayne zikhroynes for especial obloquy for their nostalgic, idealized and highly selective ‘rehabilitation’ of the Jewish past.244 It is a supreme irony that the Yiddish literary critic who, perhaps more than any other, reXected in his scholarly writings the treacherous cross-winds of Soviet literary ideology, should have added a link to the Peretzian ‘Golden Chain’, precisely at the point where this ‘chain’ severed its links most decisively with the ideological demands of engagé Jewish literary criticism of all stripes. Written in circumstances that could scarcely be less propitious for the writing of an autobiography, Meir Viner’s hidden manuscript testiWes to the insistence with which the autobiographical impulse demanded expression on the part of a leading Jewish intellectual of his time and place. No less signiWcant than the will to autobiographical expression is the literary form this expression assumes; for in framing the experience of his early years within the framework of received paradigms oVered him by previous Yiddish autobiographers, Viner

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demonstrates the degree to which autonomous and indigenous conventions for the patterning of the life-history had become imbedded in Yiddish literary discourse. Viner’s right hand continued and richened the most distinctively Yiddish autobiographical tradition that his left hand would assign to the trash-can of history. The following stanzas of the Soviet Yiddish poet Dovid Hofshteyn, capture this tragic dichotomy: It is diYcult to forget the sharp times past That have incised themselves deep in my Xesh Hearing the call from the depths Preserve yourselves, endure! . . . Not easy to forget the sharp times past Not easy not to repay love with love.245

Summons to Autobiography/Response ‘This incident is God’s punishment for neglecting to write your autobiography as a permanent record,’ said one of the group. ‘You’ve never listened, no matter how many times we’ve urged you.’246

All of the above is suggestive of an Eastern European Hebrew and Yiddish literary/intellectual ambience characterized by a state approaching autobiographical ferment. This impression, however, is very much belied by the tenor of the preambles of many of these autobiographical works. If these preambles are to be believed, it would appear that many members of this generation who left autobiographical testimony perceived the autobiographical less as a potentially liberating agent for expression of self than as a burden, even an imposition. Time and again in these preambles, there is a speciWc disavowal of autobiographical intent. The author is persuaded by importunate editors, literary associates—frequently better-known than himself— to write his autobiography. He eventually succumbs, but with extreme reluctance. Having capitulated, however, he is at pains to stress that in writing of his own life-history, it is not of the inner, hidden self that he would speak, but of the wider tapestry of the history of the Jewish collective of which his own self forms a slender thread. Thus

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Abramovitsh in his wonderfully ironic literary transformation of this scenario: ‘What you say’, Reb Shloyme answered, ‘may be true of the life of the people as a whole, but what’s so special about my life? What has ever happened to me, that makes my life deserve the distinction of being recorded? What has happened to me has happened to thousands of our people; it’s a familiar story. Is there any other people in the world among whom the life of every individual, from the moment he comes into the world until his last breath, goes on and on according to a single pattern as it does among us? The way they are reared and educated, the words of their prayers, the tunes of their hymns and liturgical poems are all identical; even their food and drink are the same. Who has ever heard of a people who at a given hour, say, Friday night, all over the globe are all eating Wsh, noodle pudding, and vegetable stew; and on Saturday morning, radishes, jellied cow’s foot, liver with onions and eggs, and dried out kasha with a marrow bone in it; on a certain day, kreplakh, on another day hamentashen, on another day twisted yellow khala with saVron. At the very moment when someone in Berdichev is singing “He who sanctiWes” on the Sabbath Eve, or shouting “He lives forever” on Rosh Hashana, the same tune and the same voice reverberate in Argentina at the other end of the world. We are an ant-hill, in which the individual has no existence apart from the community. In books on natural history, scientists devote a separate chapter to the genus of ants as a whole, but not to the individual ant.’247

The desired image of the self would, then, be that of a mirror, whose visage is solely deWned by the impassive gaze of the events and persons that happen to fall within its range. Thus ‘Hirsh Rotman’ in Abramovitsh’s Dos vintshWngerl, in the letter that accompanies his manuscript autobiography that he has sent to Mendele: There is there an entire depiction of my life . . . I am after all a part of the human collective for whom my life is there described. I am a thread interwoven together with them in that large swatch of material that goes in the world since time immemorial by the name ‘Jew’. Observing me they will at the same time observe their very selves . . . Having before them a mirror in me, they will see what their own faces look like.248

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This primary scenario of the autobiographical text, as sketched above in synthetic format, allows, of course, for considerable variation. The scenario in its essentials, though, is so often repeated as to become almost an item in the etiquette of the production and exchange of autobiographical texts that characterized Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the latter years of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century. This evident unease with the autobiographical testiWes paradoxically to the degree with which this literary generation had become infected with the genre; Berdichevsky’s ‘split’, equivocal negotiations with the genre have been traced above. There are strong grounds, however, for not taking these frequently encountered disclaimers at face value—at least, not all of them. Not infrequently, indeed, the degree to which the autobiographical is disavowed, or even berated, in these preambles, lies in inverse relation to the will toward—even need for—autobiographical self-expression as evinced in these very same writings. Thus Yehudah Leib Levin writes in the preface to his autobiography: The words of several of my admirers have persuaded me to write my autobiography. With reluctance, I take up my pen to recount the story of my life. As a rule, I dislike autobiography, seeing as for the most part it is not entirely truthful. For a man does not feel obliged to tell the truth about himself, nor is he even aware of his own defects. Since I take no pleasure in reading the autobiographies of others, nor do I assign any special value to them, it is with little enthusiasm that I write my own.249

Levin does not mention in this introduction that by the time he was ‘persuaded’ to write Zikkaron basefer in 1910, he had already written two short, revealing autobiographical pieces, and according to one of these, he had a full-length autobiography already planned in 1903.250 The disparity between the strength of the autobiographical impulse and the seeming disavowal of autobiography is even more marked with Reuben Brainin. Brainin, in a rambling and introspective preface to the Wrst volume of his selected works, that he entitles ‘Confessions of the Soul’, explains at length his reasons for declining the solicitations of the publishing house ‘Asaph’ for his autobiography. ‘One small corner, Brainin writes, ‘has remained in the innermost portals of

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my soul. There is hidden my secret of secrets and that I shall not reveal to you—my inner, innermost “I” which I shall never bring to the light of day.’251 In fact, the continuous outpouring of autobiographical writings that characterizes Brainin’s literary career constitutes one of the most sustained—and at times quite wearisome—exercises in self-examination in depth and from a number of angles in modern Hebrew or Yiddish literature.252 The examples of E. E. Friedman and Mordechai ben Hillel Hacohen, both writers whose claim to literary signiWcance rests primarily upon their autobiographical productions, are pertinent in the present context. Both writers, in the preambles to their works, go out of their way to minimize the extent of the purely autobiographical in their writings; the self forms the subject of their discourse only so far as this is reXective of aspects of the national experience of the period.253 Hacohen’s Wve-volume ’Olami and Friedman’s Sefer hazikhronot, however, reveal their authors to be men of some vanity, as, for an autobiographer, is appropriate. Much is related in these books that has little if any bearing upon anything other than the personal life of the author, and each of these men allocates to himself a more central position in Jewish history then is attested to by outside sources. Thus the characteristically malicious but not inapt verbal quip of S. Y. Agnon, as witnessed by Dov Sadan: ‘He is a typical representative of those memoirists who claim that everything already occurred in their own time, and every groundbreaking event occurred in their presence, the Zeitgeist of the generation and its achievements were entirely attributable to themselves.’254 Shimon Dubnow, a man who, as shall be seen, genuinely strove to fulWll the Delphic maxim, is almost alone of his generation in his unequivocal avowal of the autobiographical as a means of attaining self-knowledge and ultimate integration of the self, in Hegelian terms, at a higher level of synthesis. It is one of the paradoxes of modern Jewish literary history that the overt denial of the autobiographical clearly responded to some innate compunctions in the minds of one of the most autobiographically inclined groups of intellectuals in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. This paradox is nowhere better exempliWed than in the opening paragraph of the Wrst manuscript variant of Bialik’s above-mentioned autobiographical letter to Klausner:

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You made of me a modest request to write a brief summation of my biography—a request which I have found extraordinarily diYcult to fulWll. I was thinking to myself: ‘Before you request of me a brief summation of my biography—why not ask me Wrst of all if I have a biography?’ Upon my words, my dear friend, if there exists a man on this planet who has no ‘biography’—it is I. My biography is so commonplace and so similar to the biographies of all other men of the same background—that there is nothing to be learned from it, and one is compelled to admit that there is nothing within it that prompts further speculation.255

This from a man who, as has been noted, was driven in his writings as in his conversations to an almost obsessive re-exploration of and ‘speculation’ upon the years of his childhood. Nor should it be assumed that the autobiographical in Jewish Eastern Europe was a phenomenon conWned solely to the more rareWed strata of the intelligentsia. Important evidence to the contrary is provided by the YIVO autobiography competitions of 1932, 1934 and 1939.256 The Wrst of these competitions, organized by the YIVO section for the study of youth (Yugntforshung), was less widely publicized than the later competitions, and, being conWned to Vilna and its environs, of lesser outreach. Still, this competition alone yielded some thirty-Wve documents, constituting over two thousand pages of material.257 No doubt encouraged by this initial response, the Yugntforshung section of YIVO, under the direction of Max Weinreich, announced ‘a major competition for the best autobiography of a Jewish youth’ in the YIVO Yedies of early 1934.258 The competition, which carried several Wnancial prizes, was aimed at the sixteen- to twentytwo-year-olds of both sexes. The three principal stipulations for the autobiographies as laid down in the original announcement—honesty, accuracy and all-inclusiveness259—clearly have their ultimate source in the criteria established for autobiographical writing by Rousseau’s Confessions. A twenty-Wve-page minimum was stipulated and longer submissions were encouraged.260 Candidates were further encouraged to accompany their submissions with diaries, should these be available.261 The response to this competition exceeded all expectations. Already, by September 10, 1934, no less than 235 documents had been received, some accompanied by personal correspondence and diaries. It was thus

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decided to postpone the deadline for the competition from July 1 to October 15, 1934.262 In the ‘Preliminary Assessment of the Autobiography Competition’ published in the YIVO Yedies of November 1934, astonishment was again registered at the sheer scale of the response. YIVO, apparently, received ‘hundreds’ of enquiries concerning the competition, and the organizers estimated that ‘with no exaggeration’, the competition ‘drew the interest of several thousand young men and women’.263 Of those who showed interest, 252 had, by October 15, 1934, succeeded in submitting completed autobiographies. Only 15 percent of the participants submitted autobiographies of the minimum length of twenty-Wve pages; the average length was sixty pages. Forty participants submitted autobiographies of one hundred to Wve hundred pages long. The sum total of pages of all the autobiographies taken together was 14,200. Twenty-four participants, in addition, submitted diaries; the length of several of these ran to a thousand pages.264 The 1938–39 competition yielded similar results to that of 1934.265 It should also be noted that the Yugntforshung section of YIVO was not the only scholarly department of the organization to solicit autobiographical material. The historical section, for example, organized a competition for the best autobiographical depiction of the events of the World War I. Concerning this competition, we read in the Yedies fun YIVO of March–April 1939: The competition . . . has been greeted most sympathetically by the Jewish community, as is to be seen from very considerable number of responses. People from the most varied social-circles, community leaders, rabbis, teachers, workers constantly address themselves to YIVO with written enquiries concerning details of the competition. It transpires that not a few had already in hand completed memoirs of that tempestuous and horrifying period, not a few had even kept a diary, notating the events of that extraordinary period.266

In the Yedies fun YIVO of August–September 1936, we read the following bulletin: The Psychological-Pedagogic section and subgroup of Yugnt-forshung have received: Descriptions of the Heder following upon the questionnaires of the psych-ped-section—Dovid Neuman (Tarnopol); M. Tolpin (Ostra); L. Shtarkshteyn (Poltosk); Bentsiyon Bruker (Khelem).

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B. Braverman has sent (1) description of the Heder in Bilsk, (2) biography and a rich collection of personal documents concerning the life of a young Jewish man (3) rich collection of letters from young people. Ephraim Greenberg (Lipkon), a large collection of letters of a Yeshive-bokher; Kh. Pishtshatser-Mann (Brisk)—memoirs of a group of graduates of the Jewish Folkshul in Brisk (1924–1928); N.A. (Vilna)—description of a psychological disease of a young girl; X—diary of a mother about her little girl. ‘Young Poet’ (Brisk)— autobiography and diary; ‘Tsvi Simple Man’ (Poshet) (Warsaw)— autobiography; Leon Kahana (Lemberg)—diary of a young man; Sh. Bornshteyn (Khelem)—autobiography of a young man; Borekh Melamed (Slavetish)—autobiography of a young man.267

Weinreich, by now on American soil, writes in 1946 that, aside from the material gleaned from the three autobiography competitions: YIVO had already received by means of special arrangement other personal documents [it is not entirely clear to me what Weinreich means by this—more autobiographies in other categories? the various personal documents solicited by the branches and sub-branches of the organization, as in the preceding citation?] At the outbreak of World War II, the Vilna YIVO had in its possession approximately seven-hundred personal documents, the sum-total of pages being in the high six Wgures.268

In a follow-up competition held by the American section of YIVO in 1942 for autobiographies of Jewish immigrants to the United States, to be entitled ‘Why I left the homeland and what have I accomplished in America?’ two hundred-and-twenty-one autobiographies were received, constituting a total of twenty-Wve-thousand pages.269 All but twenty of these autobiographies were written in Yiddish. Just as with the European competitions, the institute was staggered by the number of documents received, and by their length: the average length of these manuscripts was 110 pages, and a twenty-Wve-page minimum had been stipulated. Many documents were accompanied by diaries, correspondence etc. And, as in Vilna, the institute was compelled to extend the original deadline several times.270 It would, of course, be absurd to argue from six hundred or so autobiographies to the mass of Eastern European youth in the inter-war period. That in excess of a thousand young men and women, however,

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should, at this juncture, have expressed interest in the writing of an autobiography, constitutes in itself a remarkable phenomenon. And that over six hundred youths—many in the most adverse of circumstances— should have succeeded in writing an autobiography within the span of several months is all the more remarkable. The young age of the majority of the contestants is also worthy of remark; for, as has been noted with respect to Berdichevsky, the urge towards autobiographical selfexpression manifests itself—in the modern period at least—generally speaking, at a later stage in life.271 The stimulus for these autobiographies did come from without, from those of a higher social and intellectual status than the great majority of contestants. Nor should the allure of the cash prizes to be awarded the winners of these competitions be underestimated.272 But, as Max Weinreich points out—and here there is some parallel with the lexicon phenomenon—active response to the summons for autobiography was conditional upon a prior and innate disposition toward autobiographical self-expression.273 Dozens of contestants, indeed, were explicit in their expressions of gratitude to the YIVO Institute for providing justiWcation and context for alreadyexistent stirrings of autobiographical consciousness.274

Matrices of the Jewish Autobiographical Self The writing, and indeed the reading of autobiographical texts,275 deserves, then, to be reckoned as more than a local, sporadic phenomenon in the literary and intellectual history of Eastern European Jewry. The signiWcance of the autobiographical phenomenon is not, however, attested solely by its relatively wide range and extent. Assessment of this signiWcance is inseparable from some account of the factors that gave rise to the origins, rise and persistence of the autobiographical at this particular juncture of Eastern European Jewish history. It is useful, for heuristic purposes, to divide these factors into the literary and the extra-literary—even though, as shall be seen, rigid demarcation between these spheres is scarcely feasible. A further distinction, concomitant to the hypothetical division of the literary and the extraliterary, is that between the design or form of autobiography and the impulse toward the autobiographical. While literary factors were most

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inXuential in determining the form of Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe, it is the wider socio-historical processes that must be taken into account in explaining the origins and persistence of the autobiographical impulse. With respect to the location of autobiographical mentality within its literary context, the emergence of the novel—albeit belated—plays as formative a rôle in the crystallization of autobiography in nineteenthcentury Jewish Eastern Europe as it did in eighteenth-century Western Europe. Many of the Haskalah novels that appeared in the constitutive years of both Hebrew and Yiddish belles-lettres—the Wfties to the eighties, essentially, of the nineteenth century—adopted the format of an autobiography, most notably Abramovitsh’s Dos kleyne mentshele (1864);276 Peretz Smolenskin’s Hato’eh bedarkhei hahayyim (Parts I–III, 1868–70; Part IV, 1876), Yitskhok Yoyel Linetsky’s wildly popular and much reprinted Dos poylishe yingl (1867–69).277 Or, as in Abramovitsh’s Wrst Hebrew novel, Limdu heytev, and in Smolenskin’s Ga’on veshever (1874), the autobiographies of one, or several, leading characters form discrete sections of the narrative.278 In Smolenskin’s Hato’eh there is included a depiction of one of the characters, known as ‘Dan’, commencing his autobiography, which he entitled Words of an Unfortunate: The Lifetime of a Lost Man in Whose Way God Above Placed Many Obstacles and Men Distorted His Ways and Brought Catastrophe Upon Him Written on This Scroll by the Unfortunate Man Himself.279 Failing the strength to put his suVerings on paper, ‘Dan’ eventually scraps this project.280 The title, however, Words of an Unfortunate/Divrei ’umlal, suggests that there may be some relationship here with Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim, undersigned by (the Hebrew contains, as noted above, an anagram of his name) ‘A Wretched one of the Earth’/’Umlal ba’arets. These early prose-experimentations in Wrst-person narrative stand in relationship to later autobiographical writing in Hebrew and Yiddish much as the novels of Defoe et alii do to Rousseauian autobiography in Western Europe. It is worthy of note in the present context that Robinson Crusoe, in Hebrew and Yiddish translation, was very inXuential in nineteenth-century Jewish Eastern Europe;281 Jacob Dinesohn, upon reading the Yiddish adaptation of Crusoe, entertained a fantasy of himself becoming a sort of Jewish Robinson Crusoe,282 and one of Sholem Aleichem’s Wrst literary productions, as a Wfteen-year-old, was a ‘Jew-

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ish Robinson Crusoe’ in Hebrew.283 For Eliezer Ben Yehudah, who spearheaded the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, his ‘Wrst taste of enlightenment’, from which time on ‘the Wre of love for the Hebrew language burned within me’, came by way of a Hebrew translation of Robinson Crusoe.284 The inXuence of Crusoe was of long duration; one of the YIVO contestants is moved to write an autobiography under the inXuence of his recent reading of Crusoe, which is entitled ‘Alone Among the Waves’.285 The epistolary novella à la Richardson, of which M. A. Guenzberg was, uncoincidentally, one of the pioneers in Hebrew literature, likewise provided important precedent for the direct transcription of experience and emotion in autobiographical format. Epistolary techniques, learned in no small part from the early Haskalah ’Iggronot or Brivenshteler, are employed extensively in the Haskalah novel; the fourth part of Hato’eh bedarkhei hahayyim forms, essentially, an epistolary novel in itself.286 Jewish autobiographers, in turn, avail themselves well of the epistolary technique as reWned by the Haskalah novel; the transcription of letters sent and received serves Lilienblum especially well in the dramatization of the narrative of Derekh teshuvah/ Hatt’ot ne’urim. From Lilienblum on, the Haskalah novel becomes the palimpsest that may be discerned—albeit on occasion dimly—beneath the overwhelming majority of Hebrew autobiographical productions of Jewish Eastern European provenance. The situation with Yiddish autobiography is more complex; with the emergence in the Wrst decades of the twentieth century of the non-Hebrew reading Yiddish writer—whether recruited from the ranks of the intelligentsia or from the working-classes—the link with the Hebrew Haskalah is considerably attenuated. Thus the literary work that spoke more than any single other to the hearts and minds of the YIVO autobiographers and exercised a formative inXuence upon the presentation of their life-stories was Romain Rolland’s wonderful Bildungsroman, Jean Christophe.287 The inXuence of the Haskalah novel—and here the arbitrariness of the proposed separation of literary from extra-literary factors in the emergence of the autobiographical in Jewish Eastern Europe becomes apparent—may not be conWned to the sphere of literary form and technique alone. Literature and ‘life’ were, in this ambience, extraordinarily closely interconnected and the phenomenon of the novel must, in itself, be accounted as an important stimulus to the autobiographical

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impulse. The writing and dissemination of a secular literature in Hebrew and Yiddish, directed primarily towards young Jewish men and women, were quite unprecedented in Jewish literary history. Small, and thus easily portable, these Haskalah books promoted a solitary experience of reading, conducive to reverie and introspection, quite diVerent from the for-the-most-part communal and vocal study of traditional Jewish texts in Heder and Beit-midrash and yeshivah.288 Haskalah literature abounds with idyllic, pastoral depictions of this new type of reading. Thus Reuven Asher Braudes in his novel Hadat vehahayyim: ‘The next afternoon Shmuel went out to the Welds and he found Shraga sitting beneath a lush oak tree, a little book in his hand.’289 And this is how Abramovitsh introduces himself for the Wrst time in the Xesh in his third-person autobiography: ‘A good looking boy with a broad forehead and curly hair emerged from the woods. He was absorbed in reading as he walked unaware of what was going on around him.’290 Bialik, in an early draft of his autobiographical SaWah, recapitulates anachronistically and with comic hyperbole this deWning experience of the prior generation of pioneering Maskilim: And it happened that there would alight upon me suddenly the spirit of ‘Dan’ [the same ‘Dan’ whose projected autobiography Smolenskin describes as cited above, M.M.] and of ‘Gideon’ as in Hato’eh and I would leap up and climb onto the trunk of a tree that had been lopped in the forest (Smolenskin and his ilk I used to read in private, in the thicket adjoining the suburb, though truth to confess, no one objected to my reading them in the open) . . .291

The reverie and introspection evoked in the reading of this literature were, it should be added, frequently accompanied by some feeling of anomie, as the high adventure, high-mindedness and romance portrayed in many of these novels juxtaposed themselves rudely with the humdrum realities of day-to-day Jewish communal existence.292 The Haskalah novel, moreover, with its numerous asides and addresses to the reader, opened up a more personal sphere of relations between writer and reader that is a pre-requisite both for the writing of and the demand for autobiographical literature. A direct oVshoot of this more intimate relation between author and reader through the medium of the literary work is, of course, the phenomenon of the lexicon, as discussed above.293

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The Haskalah novel, all in all, played a crucial rôle in the fostering of that ‘aVective individualism’, to use Lawrence Stone’s term, which provides the necessary ground, in consciousness, for the burgeoning of the autobiographical.294 Nowhere is this rôle of the Haskalah novel in fostering ‘aVective individualism’ more apparent than in the sphere of romantic relations. And in this aspect, no novel left so deep an impression as Abraham Mapu’s lascivious biblical romance ’Ahavat tsiyon; the impact of the Wrst reading of this novel—frequently the Wrst work of this type to be encountered by the proto-Maskil—is recorded by countless Jewish autobiographers.295 Not to be outdone in this respect is Yosef Klausner, who relates that his Hebrew teacher ‘gave me, as a child of nine, Mapu’s ’Ahavat tsiyon to read, which since then I have read twenty-three times in my life, and it cast a spell of enchantment upon my soul and made of me an eternal servant of Zion and of the Hebrew language’.296 The opening up of the Pandora’s box of eros and romance, for which the novel—especially ’Ahavat tsiyon—must be held, in part, responsible, engendered a clash between individual impulse and communal control that acted, doubtless, as a signiWcant spur to autobiographical self-expression. The revolution of sensibilities wrought by the Haskalah novel upon select circles of Eastern European Jewry thus takes within its orbit, but transcends by far, the realm of the “literary” as this may be more narrowly conceived. ‘AVective individualism’ is, however, a symptom in consciousness of the wider socio-historical process of secularization. And, allowing for the equivocations that surround this term and its particular complexities when applied to the Jewish situation, it is within the context of secularization that the emergence of both the novel and the autobiography in Jewish Eastern Europe should be viewed. The erosion of faith, the disintegrative eVect of urbanization upon communal life, the breakdown of the authority of the Qahal, the inability of traditional institutions to provide for the cognitive and emotional needs of the younger generation, the concomitant release of an unprecedented number of individuals from the bounds of the Jewish collective—this complex of phenomena has been well traced by historians of Jewish Eastern Europe.297 Jewish autobiography in Eastern Europe provides important historical testimony to a traditional society caught in the

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throes of a massive disruption; and, as a literary-historical phenomenon, the autobiographical modality is itself symptomatic of the historical processes which it recasts in literary format. It is no coincidence that the Hebrew literary critic for whom, as for no other, the crisis of secularism lies at the very heart of modern Hebrew literature—Barukh Kurzweil—should have accorded so central a rôle in his scheme of things to such autobiographical productions as Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim and Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte.298 A literary critic for whom the autobiographical holds no less a central place than it does for Barukh Kurzweil, but whose purview is wider and whose system is less totalizing, more nuanced, is Dov Sadan. Especially germane in the present context is Sadan’s essay ’El hashitin— actually a trilogy of essays written from 1932 to 1949 and later subsumed under one title.299 These essays deal, ostensibly, with motifs in the life and work of Bialik, but adumbrated therein are the rudiments of a wide-ranging socio-psychological theory of modern Hebrew literature—a thesis that applies with especial force to the autobiographical element in this literature. It is the depth psychology of Freud, commingled with fainter strains of the Goethean ‘Daemonic’ and Berdichevskian Qera’, that serves Sadan as the heuristic basis for the bold and impressionistic strokes of this densely suggestive essay. Sadan seems to subscribe here to the basic Freudian distinction between religion as ultimately incapacitating delusion, and art as potentially liberating and therapeutic illusion. With the tearing asunder of the religious-communal fabric of Jewish life, Sadan argues, the abyss of a primordial vacuity and horror is unsealed; it is only from within the vortical space thereby created that the individual, within his fullest capacity as artist, may emerge. Again, in line with Freud, Sadan appears, in this essay, to accept the principle of recapitulation, whereby ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. So, the disintegration of communal superstructures, at the level of the collective, Wnds its analogue, at the level of the individual, in the weakening of super-ego defences against the chthonic impulses of the id. It is only in the wake, then, of historical cataclysm, aVecting both community and individual, that the autobiographical emerges—indeed, becomes of central cultural signiWcance. ‘The void’, writes Sadan:

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besought a creation of the depths (ma’amaqim), an ars poetica under the sign of auto-emancipation, that would release itself from the functions of the community, with its practical and declared aims and would provide healing for the soul, threatened with destruction from the hylic forces of chaos and annihilation that lay within, in order to eVect a reconciliation of this soul with the tasks of the generation, the requirements of the community.300

To Bialik, whom Sadan sees as both encapsulating and transcending the experience of his generation, fell the lot of undertaking an Orphic descent, by the roads of autobiographical memory, to the netherworlds of communal and individual consciousness. Descent to the ‘depths’ is, for Sadan, equated with the autobiographical quest for self, as this is exempliWed by Bialik, whose poems Sadan sees as his ‘covert autobiography’ and whose prose as his ‘overt autobiography’.301 For Sadan, moreover, the earlier the strata of experience plumbed by the autobiographer, the more primaeval the ‘depths’ in their cosmic, supraindividual dimension that are fathomed. The task of the autobiographer, according to this model, is to mine the recesses of individual and collective consciousness for material that becomes transformed, through the alchemy of art, to the symbolic, whose dimensions are at one and the same time personal, national-historical and cosmic.302 The Jewish autobiographer, then, insofar as he succeeds in eVecting this transformation—and Bialik, according to Sadan, was only partially successful in this—performs a cathartic rôle for those who, in the midst of unprecedented historical crisis, have lost their religious-cultural moorings. Only when the chthonic forces of the ‘depths’ are brought to light is their capacity for destruction neutralized; once submitted to the transformative power of art, they serve, indeed, as agents of liberation.303 Sadan is considerably swayed by the force of his own rhetoric. There is here, as there is in Freud’s writings on religion, a decidedly mythic dimension in Sadan’s aetiology of modern Jewish literature and autobiography. There is a sense, moreover, in which Sadan’s argument recapitulates the scene of its own enunciation. Sadan moves from the autobiographical—the extraordinary impression left upon him as reader by Bialik’s works304—to the experience of the generation. And ’El hashitin itself, with its powerful imagery drawn from

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various layers of Jewish literature and its extraordinary Hebrew style, replete with allusion, stands as eloquent symbolic testimony to this experience. Sadan’s argument, though, for all of its rhetorical Xourish, its extravagant imagery couched in the language of myth, is considerably less fanciful than may, at Wrst blush, appear. ‘The bastard knows more about me than anyone has the right to’ was reportedly Bialik’s refreshingly down-to-earth response to the baroque ideational ediWce Sadan constructed around his person.305 The extraordinary response to the YIVO autobiography competitions in the period of profound historical crisis for Eastern European Jewry between the wars, and the catharsis eVected for many members of the intelligentsia by the reading of Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim, would appear to provide some empirical substance to Sadan’s formulations. It should, however, be noted that an autobiographical Ars poetica of the ‘depths’ was not all to have emerged from the ‘abyss’ that opened up in the wake of the secularization process that aVected a signiWcant section of Eastern European Jewry. The autobiographical quest for an abiding sense of certainty and source of regeneration in the self was but one response to the dissolution of traditionally legitimized cognitive and communal structures. It is within the wider context of the emergence of ideologies and of historicism that the nature and signiWcance of this autobiographical response are best understood. For the ideological, the historical and the autobiographical impulses arose, by and large, from the same circles of Eastern European Jewry, and each exists in dialectical relation with the other. Secular ideologies answered, broadly speaking, to very much the same needs as did autobiographical self-expression—most notably, the need to Wnd some Wxed centre, an Archimedean point in the face of massive cultural upheaval and dislocation. It is less than coincidental, from this aspect, that Bialik, who in his poems undertook an Orphic descent to the netherregions of self, should have sought refuge, as did many others, in one of the most totalizing ideologies of Judaism/Jewish peoplehood without God, that of Ahad Ha’am.306 The relationship between the autobiographical and the ideological is most apparent in those systems, as adumbrated especially in the publicistic writings of Brenner and Berdichevsky, which locate the nexus of Jewish identity and continuity in the individual.307 Paradoxically, however, there is a marked tendency

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of the ideological, be this Mitnaggdic Volozhin or Soviet Kiev, to submerge or neutralize the self that the autobiographical would foster and cherish. The emergence of the ideological is closely bound up with the emergence of historical thinking, the Wnal creature of the ‘abyss’ here to be taken into account. The triumvirate—autobiography, ideology and historicism—are dialectically bound in shifting and uneasy relation. Of the three, however, historicism is perhaps the most basic; for only the turn to the historical serves, as does no other of these categories, as the matrix for the remaining two. It would be no exaggeration to say that each of the major ideological movements in Jewish Eastern Europe turned to history for the legitimation of its desired vision of the future. The historian himself—and the Jewish historian in particular—approaches, as does the autobiographer, the temporal continuum from a more Janus-faced perspective than does the ideologue, whose orientation tends to be more futuristically inclined. Each leading Jewish historian of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped his material in accord with an implicit or explicit program for the present and future of the Jewish people. Again, the analogy with the autobiographer, who selects and shapes material from the life-history in accord with a perspective derived from the present, and whose present perspective is dialectically altered in this very process, is apparent.308 That a degree of historical awareness is no less indispensable for the autobiographer than it is for the ideologue has already been noted; Bal Makhshoves, it will be remembered, writing many years before Gusdorf, makes the speciWc equation between historical thinking and the autobiographical mode in his early essay on Jewish memoir-literature. It should further be noted, in the present context, that the two major Hebrew autobiographies of the nineteenth century—Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer and Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim—evince a convergence of the ideological and the historical in the recasting of their lifehistories. Guenzberg and Lilienblum alike were exposed to historical thinking, which provided them both with the genetic sense and with the empirical grounding for their critique of traditional Jewish society, before they turned their hands to autobiography. With the passage of time and the growing awareness that the society that the

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Maskilim castigated was threatened with extinction, the historical method is employed to more conservative ends by the Jewish autobiographer: Preservation through historical memory, rather than reformation through historical analysis, becomes the order of the day. Exemplary of this shift is S. Y. Abramovitsh; while his earlier works are noted for their corrosive satire of traditional Jewish modes and mores, his autobiography, Wrst published in its entirety in 1911, lapses frequently into tones of lyrical nostalgia and is replete with detailed and aVectionate ethnographic reconstruction of the world he once excoriated so mercilessly, but is now depicted in terms almost of an extinct civilization. Hence such asides as: It will suYce to describe here in detail one of the houses of Kapulie as an example, so that future generations may know what kind of dwellings our ancestors inhabited, the houses in which they lived out their lives together with their children of all ages, as well as their married daughters and their families.309

And, more pointedly, having provided a detailed depiction of the woman’s ritual of the making of the ‘Candle of the Dead’, with the accompanying prayer, before Yom Kippur: If anyone can Wnd it in his heart to laugh at this, or mock it let him do so. But then let him point to souls as pure as these, let him duplicate these tender feelings, these burning tears, this love of Torah and wisdom, this regard for one’s fellow men and mankind. Better yet, let him listen carefully to the prayers of these Jewish women, and discover what the ‘Jewish heart’ is all about. Let him listen . . . and hold his peace forever.310

This complex and dialectical nexus of the ideological, the historical and the autobiographical is no better illustrated than in the Wgure of an Eastern European Jewish intellectual who distinguished himself on all three fronts—Shimon Dubnow. A useful point of departure here is Dubnow’s Nahpesah venahqorah (1892)—his Wrst published essay in Hebrew and a crucial document in Eastern European Jewish historiography.311 This essay—albeit an adaptation of a previously written Russian article in line with the needs of a less acculturated readership—holds a special place in the Dubnovian corpus. The return to Hebrew, after a Wfteen-year absence, was accompanied by strong auto-

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biographical stirrings, further evoked by news of the death of his grandfather, which reached Dubnow while he was writing Nahpesah venahqorah.312 Nahpesah venahqorah is the Wrst historiographical manifesto to be written in Hebrew and directed speciWcally toward the Orthodox elements of Eastern European Jewry—the ‘rabbis and Yeshivah bokhers’.313 It is also the Wrst programmatic summons for the collection of historical material to be issued in Hebrew; the essay thus preWgures Bialik and Ravnitsky’s project of ‘ingathering’ (Kinnus), as it does the heroic work of the YIVO Zamlers. Dubnow, in his introduction to this piece, in clear and conscious echo of Ernest Renan,314 places history at the very core of Jewish existence. Jewish identity and continued survival rest, according to Dubnow, on three principal bases, or stages in a quasi-Hegelian evolutionary triad. A ‘family-feeling’, Wrst of all, based entirely on ‘materiality’, objective factors of blood-ties, gives way secondly to the hegemony of faith, whose basis is entirely ‘spiritual’; the ‘feeling of history’, the third factor, marks a Hegelian synthesis of the ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ and is, in eVect, the high point of Jewish spiritual evolution and, in the modern world, the sole all-encompassing force that unites the Jewish people. Primitive tribal loyalties have long been redundant in Jewish history; religious faith, from Dubnow’s nineteenth-century perspective, is subject to an escalating and inevitable process of erosion; history, generational memory—or, as Dubnow implies, racial memory, though this is distasteful to late twentieth-century sensibilities—is, in eVect, the last bastion of Jewish national identity and cohesiveness. ‘This historical awareness’, Dubnow writes, and here there is some adumbration of the supra-territorial cultural nationalism with which his name as an ideologue becomes associated, ‘is not dependent upon place, nor upon opinions and beliefs that adopt changing forms, but it is solely dependent upon memories of the past, which will never change and upon a mode of being which has become a second nature’.315 Dubnow’s theory of Jewish history was to receive more complex and nuanced formulation in his mature years. But contained in ovo in Nahpesah venahqorah are each of the major tenets of the Dubnovian theory of history and of Jewish nationhood.316 Noteworthy in the present context, however, are the implicit aYnities between the rôle played by history in the life of the people and that played by autobiography in the

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life of the individual. Most striking is the centrality accorded memory in Dubnow’s schema: ‘Innumerable memories of the past’, it is these, Dubnow writes, ‘that, throughout the ages, have formed the unbreakable thread that unites all of the dispersed fragments of Israel, whatever their aYliations, all of her sects and factions, scattered throughout the world . . . These indeed are the true core of Jewish identity’.317 When memory displaces notions of given and immutable essence as the locus of identity, the way is opened up for the autobiographical no less than it is for the historical. And what Dubnow calls for in Nahpesah venahqorah is, eVectively, the undertaking of a collective autobiography—a deliberate revival and ingathering of the memories of the past for the purpose of refashioning an identity whose contours have become blurred under the pressure of present circumstance. Note how the following pronouncements of Dubnow could, mutatis mutandis, apply with equal force to the writing of autobiography as of Jewish national history: The force of this historical awareness is qualitatively the same for believers and Torah-scholars as it is for free-thinkers and for the unreXecting masses. Only in terms of the degree of the working of this force may some distinction be drawn. On the one hand, it is felt with no undue self-reXection, almost as a natural sense; on the other hand, it is cultivated, expanded through reXection upon and analysis of historical events. The historical feeling within us requires—as does any other material or spiritual being—some spiritual sustenance in order for it to exist. Such sustenance may be provided by the memories of former days, of what befell the people from its inception to the present day. Jewish history is wondrously well-suited for the uplifting of the Jewish spirit, the kindling of the emotions, that the innermost sparks of Jewish being should warm the heart, at a time when an awesome chill threatens to engulf us.318

It is unclear whether the above-noted aYnities between autobiography and his historical formulations were apparent to Dubnow at the time of writing Nahpesah venahqorah. Since, however, he had Wrst tried his hand at the writing of an autobiography at the age of fourteen— precociously entitled ’Alilot neuray (‘Deeds of My Youth’)—and had made a second autobiographical sally at the age of twenty with a Russian piece entitled ‘Path of Thorns’,319 it is unlikely that the implicit

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aYnities between autobiographical self-accounting and historiographical method as adumbrated in Nahpesah venahqorah would have escaped him.320 In his later years, at all events, the aYnities between the autobiographical and the historical as are here intimated receive more explicit formulation. A crucial testimony in this respect is his essay ‘Integration of the Soul: Toward a Psychology of Memory’, which he appended, along with other ‘Thoughts’ to his Book of Life. First written in 1932, this essay was originally intended to serve as the Wrst chapter of the long-planned autobiography that Dubnow began working on in 1921.321 Dubnow recalls in this essay how the title page of his Wrst diary bore the inscription ‘Mnemosyne’, followed by the Delphic maxim and the famous Virgilian line, Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit. And memory—or, rather, active remembrance, stands at the very centre of Dubnow’s system—his historiography, his personal philosophy, and, of course, the book of his life. Identity, according to Dubnow in this mature formulation, is essentially constituted of memory and only by a process of active remembrance, or autobiographical stock taking, may the individual attain to the higher synthesis of self—the ‘integration of the soul’: Memory and active remembrance serve in the formation of the soul as cement, binding all our sensations together in a chain. A man who has lost his memory, who has forgotten his past, loses his individuality, becomes a distorted human-being. To a certain degree, those men are also defective who lack the ability to absorb themselves in their memories, to undergo periodically the process of transition from diVerentiation to integration of the soul: They lack wholeness, they have no spiritual aspect.322

And precisely the same active remembrance or autobiographical selfreckoning as is incumbent upon the individual is incumbent upon a nation; whereas for the individual autobiography serves as a means to ‘integration of the soul’, for the nation it is history that performs this task: I believe that the process of integration of the soul, as a means to self-awareness, may also be applied at the level of the collective. What active remembrance gives to the individual, gives to the people history. The greater the degree to which a people takes its past into

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account, the clearer is its national self-awareness; the stronger is the defence against national self-negation from the one side, and against distorted nationalistic emotions, or chauvinism, from the other. Only he who has followed the history of his people stage by stage, in relation to the history of mankind, in all the stages of its development— he alone will steer clear of biassed conclusions, which arise in the heat of various historical moments with their passions and impulses. In this lies the core of historism,323 a world-view that serves as a corrective to that blind dogmatism that is the source of so much evil in the life of mankind. The individual soul is a product of all that the individual has experienced in his lifetime: The collective soul is a product of shared collective experiences. In both cases, the unconditional prerequisite for self-knowledge is the workings of memory—active remembrance. If there can still be any doubt that Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine muses, one thing, for all this, is certain—that Clio, the muse of history, was her daughter.324

At evidence in this passage is a conXuence of the historical, the ideological and the autobiographical; indeed, it is possible to argue that not one of these aspects in Dubnow’s system may be understood without reference to the remaining two. National awareness that does not succumb to chauvinism, individuality that does not succumb to the cult of the individual—these are the essentially ‘autonomist’ ends to which, respectively, history and autobiography serve as means. No account of the historical/cultural moment of Eastern European Jewish autobiography would, however, be complete without mention of an extra-literary factor that would appear to be inexplicable by reference to any larger conWguration of social, literary or intellectual relations: orphanhood—or, more accurately, bereavement of one parent at a young age. There are some well-known orphans325 in non-Jewish autobiographical literature—Rousseau, Edmund Gosse, Stendhal, Gide and Gorky come to mind. But the ratio between those deprived of one parent in childhood and those who left autobiographical testament in Jewish Eastern Europe is quite phenomenal. And the sheer frequency with which the experience of orphanhood is depicted, the centrality that the theme assumes in this literature, makes of Jewish autobiography, in this respect, a law unto itself. Of the more major Wgures in Jewish Eastern European literary and intellectual history,

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who were deprived of one parent at an early age, and also left autobiographical writings, one may number Abramovitsh, Berdichevsky, Bialik and Sholom Aleichem, Daniel Charney. In the autobiographical writings of each of these latter, the orphanhood motif, while subject to much variation, is of central importance. No less central is the rôle of the orphan in the autobiographies of such lesser-known Wgures as E. E. Friedman, Buki Ben Yogli (Katznelson), Shimon Bernfeld and Ephraim Lisitsky. To these should be added those who were bereaved of one parent in childhood, who left autobiographical testimonies, but in whose writings the orphanhood theme is subject to lesser elaboration: Lilienblum, Rav Mordkhele (Tscheremerinsky), Yosef Charney, Tsvi Kasdai, Ya’aqov Mazeh, Ben-Ami (Mordekhai Rabinovitz), and, at the more Orthodox end of the spectrum, Ya’aqov Lipschitz, Eliahu David Rabinowitz (’Aderet), Yitshaq Nissenboim. To explore all of the ramiWcations of this subject would require a thesis in itself. The socio-psychological factors that such a study would need to take into account are, moreover, quite daunting: the sex of the parent of whom the child was bereaved; the number, age and sex of siblings, if any; the age and circumstances of the author at the time of writing the autobiographical account; the statistical typicality of this experience within the Jewish and non-Jewish context at a given period and place, and so forth. It should only be noted here that in the Wgure of the orphan there is a fusion of data from the personal history with the symbolic that served the needs of the generation well. The existential predicament of loss of faith translates well into the image of the fatherless child, and this defenceless child is, in turn, suggestive of the precarious position of the Jewish people as a whole. Thus Ya’aqov Fichman writes, vis-à-vis the orphaned ‘Hershele’ of Abramovitsh’s Be’emeq habakha’: However, for all that one may perceive in Hershele characteristics of Mendele himself, this is not essentially an autobiographical novel, even veiled. The conception and birth of Hershele, together with all that befell him in crossing the ‘vale of tears’, are but discrete episodes in one great drama: the life and tribulations of the Jewish community in the vast and arid desert known as Exile . . . We recognize the autobiographical threads that are woven into this tapestry—what he

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would later relate, in a state of profound emotion of his father, Reb Hayyim, and of his bitter orphanhood. Nevertheless, since it is here related of a Jewish child, of Jewish alienation, Hershele’s childhood, his longings, his suVerings, his orphanhood, the hurt and humiliation of that orphanhood—is, in eVect, the symbol of Jewish orphanhood. What occurred to Mendele, occurred to Bialik, occurred to Buki Ben Yogli, occurred, in fact, to all of us.326

Fichman’s assessment, written from an avowedly Zionist perspective, really only touches upon the surface of the extraordinarily complex relation between parental deprivation and autobiographical self-expression that is here evinced. Dov Sadan, an orphan, an autobiographer—especially of the years of childhood—and one who has explored the ‘depths’ of modern Jewish literature, suggests, in his autobiographical preface to the Wrst bibliography of his works, a more profound and complex association between the experience of parental deprivation and the autobiographical impulse: It seems to me that the history of my writing could be called the writing of my history, that the former is as dear to me as my own lifehistory is dear to me. This love arises from a combination of factors. The Wrst factor is the desire to confess, which is one of my fundamental traits of personality, and which gave rise to my memoirs which I began to write and publish when I was still relatively young . . . And now, the second factor, which is closely connected with the Wrst— the desire to confess—this is no other than the compulsion to confess, which urges me to take account of all that occurs to me and around me, of what I experienced, saw and read. This compulsion is rooted in the fundamental biographical datum that my mother, Charna, died while giving birth to me. Her father, my grandfather R. Alexander Zisskind, reinforced the whisperings of my conscience which was constantly bothering me: ‘Remember, and never forget, that your mother gave her life for you, and had she not sacriWced herself for you, she could have given birth to several like you. Since she gave preference to you over herself, it is your duty to live not only your own life, but her life and their lives.’ The combination, then of these factors—the wish and the compulsion to confess—this, so it seems, is the root-cause of my life-long custom of making a reckoning of all events, deeds, men, ideas.327

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Whether or not the truths derived from Sadan’s self-analysis are of more universal application remains unclear; the triad of orphanhood, guilt, autobiography is suggestive of the lines such an application may take. The parentless child, as he emerges from Jewish Eastern European autobiographical writings, presents, however, an enigmatic Wgure in whom the literary and extra-literary intersect in an exceedingly complex manner; he is, moreover, notwithstanding Fichman’s attempt to render of him an archetypal unity, of Protean countenance. To end a discussion that attempts to provide a heuristic framework for the autobiographical phenomenon in Jewish Eastern Europe with an enigma is, perhaps, Wtting, and serves as salutary reminder of what the greatest autobiographers have always known: Individuum ineVabile est.

“Time present and time past /Are both perhaps present in time future, /And time future contained in time past.” It remains to give some brief account of the vicissitudes of the autobiographical in Jewish literary history beyond the temporal parameters of the present study.328 As has been noted, with respect to Haskalah literary productions, the novel masquerading as autobiography served as an important waystage in the emergence of autobiography proper in Jewish Eastern Europe. It has also been observed that the history of autobiography, within any cultural context, remains closely bound with contemporaneous developments in imaginative prose. If there is one movement to be discerned in Hebrew literary history from the turn of the nineteenth century onwards, it is one that runs counter to the prevailing trends of the nineteenth century: whereas Wction masquerading as autobiography characterizes the earlier stage, it is the autobiography masquerading as Wction that becomes a pronounced aspect of the latter. Bal Makhshoves, oddly for one who had so espoused the cause of Jewish autobiography, viewed this Wn-de-siecle transfusion of the autobiographical to the Wctional with dismay: The colossal subjectivism of these writers in relation to their dwarfprotagonists, the excessive identiWcation of the author with his hero to the point that it becomes impossible to say whether this is an

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accurate description or the autobiography of an uninteresting man— in short the complete collapse of any authorial distance from his dwarf-like creation render these literary productions quite insipid.329

Concomitant with this shift, there was a marked move—more apparent in Hebrew than in Yiddish literature—away from the wide-ranging social novel, the Bildungsroman as characterized the period of the Haskalah, to the novella or short story.330 These two trends—the conXuence of the autobiographical with the Wctional and the diminution of perspective implied by the format of the novella—were actually initiated by Berdichevsky; ‘Gershayim’ is an especially prescient text in this regard. The consequences of these literary tendencies for Jewish autobiography were paradoxical: on the one hand, while full-length autobiographies in the traditional mode continue to be written, there is, in the most signiWcant Hebrew literary productions of the period, a tendency toward the dissipation of autobiographical structure; on the other, there is a massive expansion of the autobiographical into the realms of the Wctional, so engulWng as to render absolute distinctions between the two problematic in the extreme. Symptomatic of this dual process of dissipation and expansion, of which Berdichevsky was a pioneer, is a sundering of autobiographical form, or rather autobiographical forms, from autobiographical content. Diaries, jottings, letters, sketches, travel-impressions, fragmentary confessionals, are extensively employed in the literature of this period outside the framework of an openly declared and fully realized autobiography. Concomitant with this wholesale detachment of autobiographical forms, and with the preference for the miniature, there is a fragmentation of the autobiographical subject; he tends to become frozen at one stage of his development. The child-protagonist, on the one hand, maintains a continued presence, notable in the writings of Peretz, Frishman, Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch and Bialik; but this is a child who never grows up. On the other hand, many of the autobiographical protagonists of Berdichevsky, Brenner, Brainin, Gnessin and Nomberg appear to be stuck in late adolescence or early adulthood—the two life-stages are, in these works, not always easy to distinguish.

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If, as Philippe Ariès has claimed, ‘to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life’,331 then it is to the adolescent, as he is portrayed in early twentieth-century Hebrew literature, that criticism has accorded a special status. Contemporary critics were by no means unanimous in their assessment of this, frequently superannuated, adolescent. The Talush or ‘uprooted man’, however, became the focal point of literary criticism shortly after his appearance and it is to this Wgure that Bal Makhshoves above-cited barbs are directed; indeed, his is the Wrst image that comes to mind in characterizing Hebrew literature of the early decades of the twentieth century. Noteworthy is the absolute contrast aVorded by comparison of the unremittingly miserable, painfully selfconscious, torn and disenfranchised young adult of early twentiethcentury Eastern European Jewish literature and his European counterpart in the ‘century of adolescence’ as this is characterized by Ariès: ‘The Wrst typical adolescent of modern times was Wagner’s Siegfried: the music of Siegfried expressed for the Wrst time that combination of (provisional) purity, physical strength, naturism, spontaneity and joie de vivre which was to make the adolescent the hero of our twentieth century, the century of adolescence.’332 The tortured, self-conXicted adolescent is as appropriate a literary symbol, or projection, in this agonizing period of historical transition as is the parentless child. The two Wgures are, in a sense, mutually complementary; if orphanhood becomes symbolic of deprivation of the joys and certainties of childhood, so does extended adolescence that of the rewards and satisfactions of adulthood. From the perspective of autobiography, the man/adolescent Talush serves not—as does the Rousseauian child and as do some latter-day European and American literary adolescents—as an emblem of uncompromised self-hood; he provides, rather, a means of expression of an abiding lack of sense of identity, of loss of self. The titles of many of the Hebrew autobiographical novellas of the early twentieth century, and of the collections within which they were included, attest to a pervasive indeterminacy, marginality, displacement: ‘Across the River’, ‘Two Camps’, ‘From Two Worlds’, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’ (Berdichevsky); ‘From

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a Vale of Strife’, ‘Restless Agitation’, ‘Thither’, ‘In Dire Straits’, ‘Around One Point’ (Brenner); ‘Shades of the Living’, ‘Before’, ‘In the Vicinity of ’, ‘DeXection’ (Gnessin); ‘On the Other Side of Life’ (Ben-Tsiyon). The sense of marginality and displacement, as witnessed by these titles, was further accentuated by their authors’ perception that they were writing in a vacuum. This consciousness, albeit in part contrived, of writing for no addressee in an unspoken language, fostered a tortured, solipsistic prose-style that comes close, at times, to stream-ofconsciousness technique. Brenner, with some justiWcation, sees Berdichevsky as the pioneer of this ‘impressionistic literature of the isolated Jew’. It is characteristic of this ‘poetry of the individual’, he writes: To Xutter, to rustle at the slightest breeze, to be impressionistic and only impressionistic. Is it not unthinkable that the individual, when he comes to tell of himself, should have the patience—or, more accurately, Wnd the possibility—to give a detailed depiction of the world external to him—details which, in any case, scarcely interest him? Insofar as he gives some Xeeting depiction of nature and society, it will only be of that aspect which is essential to himself.333

The young Hebrew belletrist, Brenner writes elsewhere, can no longer write in the social-realist mode: ‘That is, describe the autonomous life of the Jewish people as it is, for he no longer sees around him the life that once existed in its Wxed and permanent form . . . So, out of necessity, he turns all his attention in increasing measure on the individual, the individual alone—his disposition, emotional life, his sadness and pain, his restlessness.’334 Brenner, here as elsewhere, evinces a keen awareness of the sociological matrix from which his own prose and that of his literary associates arose. The assessment, however, of one who deplored the ‘impressionistic literature of the isolated Jew’, whose cause Brenner pleads is here too good to forgo: ‘The heroes and heroines are either wounded warblers Xapping their wearisome wings against the impenetrable portals of the huge inWnite, or else boneless marmots cringing and crouching in helplessness and despair, brooding and moping in their dens over the utter vanity and purposelessness of existence, too paralyzed and exhausted to blow their brains out.’335 Rather, then, than charting the path of the autobiographical subject from the vantage-point of an achieved sense of identity, writers of the

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‘outpouring of the heart’336 such as Brenner, Gnessin, Nomberg chart the disteleological Xuctuations of the consciousness of their rootless protagonist. As a vehicle for expression of the self-in-chaos—the self, as Brenner says, as a ‘splinter’ of a social group in the throes of disintegration, ‘Xoating on the waves, the waves of despair’,337 the thinly disguised autobiographical novella served these writers well. Fulllength autobiography in the traditional mode poses, indeed, a problematic venture for young men in the second or third decade of their lives, suVering crises of identity. Thus ‘Gilpen’, the classically Talush protagonist of S. Ben-Tsiyon’s ‘Me’ever lehayyim’ (1904), a character who spends his entire time reading books, is struck, quite unexpectedly, by the undeniable impulse to write his autobiography. He stops reading and begins to write: But the whole business became complicated, began to ramify in directions that he had not in the least bit intended, and again, he was unsure what the point was . . . The autobiography begins from this aspect: proof of the admissibility of going with uncovered head while not at prayer, and the subsequent punishment for this—a stinging slap on the cheek delivered by his father in front of everyone in the study-house. And it ends—but with the ending there is no point-ofarrival . . . So what if he reads today about the problems of modern ideology? So what if in the course of his seven-year sojourn in Odessa he has read a thousand, two thousand, even three thousand books of every variety? So what if he forgot in a trice all that he had ever gleaned from these books and periodicals . . . ? He was seeking the direction, the feeling, the necessity that had led him along this long path—but he did not Wnd it . . . The accounting came to no more than an accumulation of temporal periods—but nothing came of it all. No sum total, no reckoning of the past, nor prospectus for the future.338

So, in a similar vein, writes Brenner’s ‘Feuerman’ in the preamble to the autobiographical Bahoref, published a year previous to Ben-Tsiyon’s Me’ever lahayyim in 1903: I have prepared a notebook of blank paper and I intend to write some sketches and notes from ‘my life’—‘My Life’—in quotation marks: since I have neither present nor future, the past is all that

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remains . . . Nevertheless, even though I am no hero, I wish to record this past of mine . . . the past of my absence of heroism. The past of heroes is written for the wider public and acclaimed by this public; my own past, the past of a non-hero, I write for myself and in secret.339

Bahoref, indeed, is ‘autobiography’ in inverted commas: Brenner avails himself of the autobiographical format in order to create the Wction that he is writing at a further temporal remove from the events therein related and from the vantage-point of an acquired sense of identity that the work itself belies. Bahoref ends appropriately with a bleak scene of indeterminacy: The autobiographical protagonist, ‘Feuerman’, with many blank pages still in his ‘notebook’, lies down in the snow at a railway intersection.340 According to Dan Miron’s reading, Ben-Tsiyon is here—and throughout Me’ever lehayyim with its ‘nowhere man’ protagonist, ‘Gilpen’— engaging above all in polemic parody of Brenner and the ‘impressionistic literature of the isolated Jew’, the latter extolled.341 Actually, I would trace the provenance of both of these passages to the much-parodied parody of the Rousseauian confessional, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, a work originally entitled A Confession:342 Only recently, I myself decided to recall some of my earlier adventures . . . Having decided not only to recall them, but even to write them down, now is when I wish to try an experiment: is it possible to be absolutely honest even with one’s own self and not to fear the whole truth . . . ? Rousseau, for example, undoubtedly told untruths about himself and even lied intentionally out of vanity . . . I, however, am writing for myself alone and declare once and for all that if I write as if I were addressing readers, that’s only for show, because it’s easier for me to write that way. It’s a form, simply a form; I shall never have any readers. I’ve already stated that . . . I don’t want to be restricted in any way by editing my notes. I won’t attempt to introduce any order or system. I’ll write down whatever comes to mind.343

Dostoyevsky’s parody is itself a tribute to the narrative model it violates. Likewise, that one from the ‘old school’ of Hebrew literature that held court in Odessa under the chilly auspices of Ahad Ha’am

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should have felt compelled to issue such a parodic rebuttal only testiWes to the ascendancy of the Wn-de-siècle Talush coterie and its indeterminate, interminable, ‘Xuttering’ autobiographical prose. More than this, parody itself may be infected by the virus that it seeks to replicate and ostracize in caricature. ‘Gilpen’’s autobiographical predicament, as depicted in the above passage, does bespeak a non-parodic truth concerning the dilemma posed by the compulsion to confess, on the one hand, and the unattainablility of autobiographical closure on the other. Indeed, one could well argue that Ben-Tsiyon, who had himself written a harrowing autobiographical account of his childhood, Nefesh retsutsah (1902), in which, amongst countless traumatic episodes of a similar nature, a ‘stinging slap on the cheek’ et cetera are depicted, a work whose structure is episodic and discontinuous and which yields ‘no sum total’, knew well whereof he spoke. Moreover, ‘Gilpen’’s life, from what we know of it from Me’ever lehayyim, does correspond in some essential details to that of its author: like ‘Gilpen’, Ben-Tsiyon’s quest for secular Bildung led him to an extensive sojourn in Odessa, where, like ‘Gilpen’ he taught Hebrew; like ‘Gilpen’ he made a return to his native town at around the time when this piece was written.344 Like ‘Gilpen’ also, the ‘accursed question’ of whether to write or not to write an autobiography vexed and preoccupied him: In my writing I always had to restrain myself and to stand guard, and I was always cautious like a man removing a nut from the pile and took heed lest all of the others would roll away and disperse in its wake. I feared to touch my inner self, lest the whole lot come crashing down on top of me—and then I would not be in control of the writing but the writing would control me . . . But I was always consoled by the awareness, that more than I wrote and revealed, I was capable of writing and revealing . . . A sort of Holy of Holies remained locked up then, that I did not grant myself permission to enter—until the great Day of Judgment in the future!345

All of these parallels are surely rather too close to the bone if Me’ever lehayyim was intended purely as transitive parody and dismissal; it is the latter, but it also has more than a little bit in it of the ‘autobiography in quotation marks’. If the whole ‘pile of nuts’ does not come crashing down here, more than one nut is deWnitely dislodged.

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The autobiographical novella—‘autobiography in inverted commas’— allows, as the traditional autobiography does not, for the re-casting of the unique data of life-experience not once, but repeatedly, from a variety of angles, in a series of autonomous literary units with variously boded-forth protagonists, each of whom reXects a facet of this experience. Such repeated refashioning of nuclei of autobiographical experience is marked in the writings of Brenner and Gnessin; again, this movement towards the dissemination of autobiographical experience may, in Hebrew literature, ultimately, be traced to Berdichevsky. Of all those who could trace Berdichevky as their ultimate literary forebear in the confessional/autobiographical mode,346 it was Gnessin above all who excelled in duplication and reduplication of the self in multiple avatars: indeed, in his most transparently autobiographical narrative, Beterem, the protagonist of which bears his own name (Uriel), there occurs an extended quasi-schizophrenic dialogue between ‘Uriel’ and his double ‘another Uriel’, the latter depicted as a being of Xesh and blood.347 Gnessin’s particular mise-en-scène of the classic Narcissus scenario provides pictorial illustration of the malleable, protean nature of the autobiographical self as boded forth in his writings: Naphtali turned in fright to the surroundings, congealed in light and silence, and then immediately began once again to peer into the tenebrous glistening water. A white lily protruded its head and stayed and diverted the silken Xow of water. His indistinct reXection Xoated, suddenly drew itself out and immediately contracted and fragmented, returned once again Wnding no repose for itself. In the clear sky, beneath the lush foliage of the inverted weeping willow, a peaceful moon Xoated in all its splendour.348

A not inconsiderable contributing factor to the shiftiness of Gnessin’s autobiographical persona may well have been the marked homo-erotic undercurrent in his writings; in this, as in other respects, Gnessin evinces strong parallels with Proust. Hebrew literature, by contrast to the other European literatures of its day, was markedly inhospitable to sexual inversion. Brenner’s observations concerning his intimate friend, Gnessin, are apposite in the present context: But it was as if he concealed himself . . . Not that he wished that he would pour his heart out to us—there was no need for this. In

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his countenance then, as in all he wrote, the compulsion to reveal and to let it all out and the compulsion to camouXage all his innermost emotions waged war.349

A similar shattering of autobiographical form upon impact of the autobiographical self-in-chaos may be observed in the oeuvre of Michel Leiris;350 in this respect these early twentieth-century Jewish autobiographical productions are harbingers of “post-modern” experimentations in writing of the self. Less inclined toward self-revelation than Leiris, however, the mantle, albeit Ximsy, of Wction proved, for these Hebrew writers, emboldening. Gordon Allport’s comments on the ‘effect of signing one’s name’ to personal documents are, in this respect, pertinent: ‘When names are not signed, the youth is more self-disparaging, but at the same time more ego-aggrandizing and self-inXating.’351 The intensely autobiographical novella of the Wn de siecle, however, suVered a progressive, but temporary, eclipse in Hebrew and Yiddish literature of the Wrst half of the twentieth century.352 The hardening of ideologies, both nationalist and internationalist, in the Jewish secular sphere proved, generally speaking, to be less conducive to autobiographical self-expression than to the memoir. On the one hand, with the shift of the centre of Hebrew literature from Europe to Palestine, there was a general shift of focus from the individual to the collective in the incipient stages of formation. On the other, with the radicalization of Jewish politics in the Yiddish literary sphere, the singularity— that is, autobiographicality—of individual life-narratives is frequently and in varying degree overwritten by a hegemonic class-narrative. In Hebrew literary discourse this shift coincided with a return to the wide-ranging social novel, which had all but disappeared from the literary scene in the immediately post-Haskalah period.353 This shift from individual to collective, from autobiographical self-exploration to more memoiristic modes of presentation, is actually foreshadowed in Lilienblum’s progression from Hatt’ot ne’urim, through Derekh teshuvah to Derekh la’avor golim;354 in this latter work, the self so painfully bared in Hatt’ot ne’urim has all but vanished. There are some notable exceptions to this redirection of literary focus from self to external world and the temporary hold on autobiography that characterized the vector of Hebrew prose in the Wrst half of

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the previous century. The autobiographical element that runs through the entire oeuvre of Dov Sadan, in Hebrew and Yiddish, is so pervasive and complex as to defy generic distinctions; his Wrst work of Hebrew prose to be published in book form was an autobiography.355 His essays are actually more autobiographical than his autobiographies proper; in the latter the inXuence of Agnon, his Galician Landsman, is so pervasive as to put himself in the shade.356 Agnon thus distracts Sadan from autobiographical exploration of the ‘depths’, much as, in his own formulation, Ahad Ha’am did Bialik. His autobiographical works are further schematized, de-individualized, by the underlying Zionist teleology that informs them.357 There is, likewise, a tremendous dispersion of strangely transmigrated autobiographical material in the works of Eliezer Shteinman, who, as did Sadan, continued to write in both Yiddish and Hebrew.358 Agnon himself represents a tantalizing autobiographical enigma. Just as Sholem Aleichem manages somehow to Wll his works, including his autobiography, with maximal tragic content without their becoming tragedy, so Agnon infuses his work with maximal autobiographical content without their becoming autobiography. His single-minded and lifelong devotion to the recreation in memory of the Buczacz of his childhood and youth runs like a thread through his entire oeuvre. Yet, the narrator, who is often clearly an autobiographical avatar of the author, generally referred to as ‘that man’ remains for the most part oddly detached, even from himself, deadpan, Chaplinesque; the self here is somehow hidden in plain view. It is as if Agnon perversely assigned himself the challenge of writing autobiographically without the intrusion of a self. Thus in his most sustained autobiographical enterprise, the unWnished Hadom vekhise’ the protagonist/‘that man’ is actually dead and the autobiographical recollections are those of a disembodied soul in the course of its transit from this world to the next. ‘The book of my memoirs’, he here writes: Is not a book in writing, but in order to render myself intelligible do I refer to it as such, for I am not writing my memoirs in a book. From the day I could think for myself I have not done as others do. And moreover, since all of the deeds of Israel are written in a book before the Almighty why should I waste time on something that is done better than any human being can do.359

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This self-conscious autobiographical oppositionism, while writing autobiographically, Wnds a revealing analogue in one of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s author’s notes to his autobiographical trilogy Love and Exile: While Love and Exile is basically autobiographical in style and content, it is certainly not the complete story of my life from childhood to my middle thirties, where the book ends . . . Actually, the true story of a person’s life can never be written . . . In the author’s notes to parts of this work, I call the writing spiritual autobiography, Wction set against a background of truth, or contributions to an autobiography I never intend to write . . . As a believer in God and His Providence, I am sure that there is a full record of every person’s life, its good and bad deeds, its mistakes and follies. In God’s archive, in His Divine computer, nothing is ever lost.360

This parallelism points to a deeper aYnity between these two writers who, in Jewish autobiographical discourse of the twentieth century, one writing in Hebrew in Jerusalem, one in Yiddish in New York, present mirror-images of each other. Just as Agnon is locked in a pattern of eternal memorial return to Buczacz, so Bashevis is to Warsaw and, to a lesser extent, to Bilgoray. The odd equation of maximal autobiographical content and minimal autobiographical self-revelation holds true for each of these writers. Each writer, especially in the post-Holocaust era, becomes in no small part a medium—both in the standard connotation of this word and in its psychic aspect—for the voices of the dead from a culture annihilated root and branch that only virtually exists in memory. Such mediumistic transmission of the voices, faces, deeds, characters of the dead and their landscape now laid waste entails temporary vacation of the self in trance—such vacation is foreshadowed by Berdichevsky, writing Miriam under impact of the news of the destruction wreaked upon his home-town and family in the Ukrainian pogroms of 1919, as discussed above. Thus Agnon in his 1963 story ‘Hasiman’: And for yet another reason I closed my eyes, that if I close my eyes I am as it were master of the world and I see what I desire to see. Therefore I closed my eyes and summoned my city to stand before me, it and all of its inhabitants, it and all of its houses of prayer. I set before me every man in his place where he would sit and where he would study and where his children in-laws and grandchildren sat,

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for in my city everyone came to prayer . . . After I arranged the people in the old Beit-Midrash that I frequented more than all the other places, I visited all of the other houses of prayer in my city . . . 361

And Bashevis: I like to write ghost-stories and nothing Wts a ghost better than a dying language. The deader the language the more alive the ghosts. Ghosts love Yiddish, and as far as I know they all speak it . . . I am sure that millions of Yiddish-speaking ghosts will rise from their graves one day and their Wrst question will be, ‘Is there any new book in Yiddish to read?’362

That each of these writers were born fabulists, endowed in equal measure with superhuman capacities of memory and imagination—where the one ends and the other begins is anyone’s guess—made of them in their respective lands living emblems of a lost Atlantis or Pompeii—endowed with almost mythical qualities by an admiring public. This adulation fostered an innate tendency in each man toward self-mythologization, selfmasking; in a strange variant of the Dorian Gray scenario, the mask appeared to adhere increasingly to the face. Each writer appears to have been aware of this and at some level wished to make amends by revealing cracks in the mask, exposing this persona as a fake antique. Thus Dov Sadan, in an inXuential reading of Agnon’s surrealistic, Kafkaesque stories assembled in his Sefer hama’asim, stories that took Agnon’s readership by surprise at the time of their appearance, sees them as a deliberate attempt on behalf of the author to reveal the cracks in the mask/persona of the traditionalist storyteller of previous generations that he had adopted in an attempt to ‘deXect himself from himself ’: ‘The surrealistic story is an autobiographical document par excellence, in which he bared and hinted at the tempest in the soul of the poet, the soul of a man thrown in confusion into a forest of doubts seeking protection for itself in a stronghold of simplicity and wholeness.’363 Lester Goran, a companion of Bashevis, reports that in his later years the writer had in mind a major autobiographical work, to be entitled God’s Fugitives: Singer told me one morning the time had come for the two of us Wnally to write a great book together. The book was to probe the depths of what he truly believed, he said, not the lies he had told in

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his autobiographies or the pretenses he had fed interviewers over the years. His genuine philosophies would be revealed, his feelings about Jews and gentiles and America, candid, no holding back. It would be a work that would change people’s mind about him. He had regretted falling into untruth; now, before it was too late, he and I would correct the misimpressions. He wanted at Wrst, he told me, simply to go through his autobiographical works with me and correct every misstatement he had made . . . ‘We can make a million, yes?’ he asked at breakfast. There was a slight tremor of anticipation in his hand for the work ahead of us. ‘Two’, I said, ‘one for each of us.’ ‘My friend, this book means so much to me I’d give you all the proWts. It must be written.’364

Agnon’s and Bashevis’ negotiations in and around the autobiographical, the constant dialectics of self-concealment and self-revelation and the high autobiographical stylization, manifest inter alia in their seeming negation of the genre, all attest dialectically to the autobiographical dominant of the literary discourse within which they operated. If one work, however, of later twentieth-century provenance stands in the direct line of the autobiographical eZorescence in Jewish Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it would be Ephraim Lisitsky’s ’Elleh toldot ’adam. Lisitsky’s work represents the high point of autobiographical intertextuality in Hebrew literature. Maimon, Berdichevsky, Bialik—especially Bialik—Lilienblum, Feierberg, inter alios, are eVortlessly invoked in the unfolding of his autobiographical narrative, written in a densely allusive Hebrew. This is a work woven of the strands of the Eastern European autobiographical productions of the Haskalah and Tehiyyah periods, which nonetheless bears the strong stamp of the individuality of its author. Most remarkably, this autobiography combines the intense introspection and unXinching self-exposure of the Talush novella with a panoramic range of landscapes from Slutzk to North America and of personalities encountered on the way—this reminiscent of the Haskalah Bildungsroman, to which should be added the American autobiographical saga novel à la Thomas Wolfe. Indeed, testifying to the long duration of the Haskalah or the anachronicity of Lisitsky—or both—‘Yosef ’, the leading protagonist of Smolenskin’s Hato’eh bedarkhei hahayyim aVords him a powerful source of autobiographical identiWcation. Thus, in his accounting of

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a train-journey to Boston: ‘I drew from my bag Smolenskin’s novel, The Wanderer on the Paths of Life, and immersed myself in readings of the wanderings of the unhappy wanderer, Joseph—my brother in sorrow, in whose sorrows I found some comfort. I read the descriptions of his wanderings and I saw myself as Joseph, in his image and likeness.’365 It is no coincidence, however, that Lisitsky’s autobiography was written from the outermost limits of marginality. Writing Hebrew in America in the late 1940s—and not in a major Jewish centre, but New Orleans—Lisitsky can distance himself from the turbulent ideological ambience that acted upon his contemporary Hebrew writers as a restraint to autobiographical self-expression. There is some irony in the fact that the man who left one of the Wnest autobiographical testimonies in Hebrew literature should have drawn ideological sustenance not from any variety of Zionism or Diaspora nationalism, but from a vision of the shared destiny of Jew, Afro-American and American Indian on American soil; it is this vision with which he closes his autobiography.366 It is this extreme ideological marginality, combined with the inbuilt sociological marginality of a Hebrew writer and teacher in America, that actually served as a further spur to Lisitsky’s autobiographical self-examination. The community of readers to which Lisitsky addresses this autobiography is, by this stage, predominantly Israeli and predominantly Zionist. He thus feels called upon to provide an Apologia pro vita sua in order to integrate himself within the community of readers he addresses, who may well ask: ‘What is this ardent Hebraist, who himself contrasts Abraham Mapu’s Bethlehem pastorals in ’Ahavat tsiyon that Wred his imagination as a child with the landscape of the Canadian village Ahmic Harbor, where he landed up,367 with its one Jewish family, about?’ The element of apologia, plea for the understanding of and the integration within his natural horizon of readers, is evident within the following passage, in which Lisitsky accounts for his elected vocation of Hebrew teacher and poet of American Indian and black themes in America—a vocation that gave him the strength to carry on after an attempt at suicide: What it (Jewish education in America, M.M.) needs is inspired and enthusiastic teachers, and above all, a spirit of dedicated pioneering, of Halutsiyut. Halutsiyut—that is the central dimension of Hebrew

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teaching in this country, not unlike the bold vanguard pioneering carried on in ’Erets yisra’el. Here you might call it rearguard pioneering. I took upon myself this pioneering task, and along with it, its inescapable burdens . . . American Hebrew poetry may be compared to a trailing branch of a creeping plant which, as it runs along the ground, puts down its own roots. As a limb it remains attached to the trunk, the trunk’s roots supplying it with its main nourishment . . . Thus in fact the trunk and the branch nurture each other . . . Like Hebrew teaching, Hebrew poetry in America, too, partakes of the nature of pioneering.368

As it happens, ’Elleh toldot ’adam was accorded an enthusiastic reception in Israel upon its appearance in 1949, testifying to the autobiographical hunger of a reading-community that had been deprived of such sustenance for some years. Added to which, in antipodean reXection of the reception of Bashevis’ recreation of the exotic and vanished tribe of Jewish Poland for an Anglophone audience, the sheer exoticism of a Hebrew autobiography peopled with French-Canadian lumbermen, deer-hunting North American peasants, ‘an elderly Scottish gentleman-farmer on whose heart and tongue lay only his native Scotland’,369 inter alios, must have considerably enhanced the appeal of the book for an Israeli reader. The eager acceptance of this work by the Hebrew readership conduced to a translation in English, published in 1959, some ten years after the Wrst publication of the work in Hebrew. This translation appeared in a pretty lavish edition—complete, as appropriate to the day, with Be-Bop style existential doodlings of what appears to be a multiple jazzy Russian or Greek Orthodox cruciWx on the dust-jacket, engraved upon the inner cardboard jacket also, put out by a major New York publisher (Bloch); the volume also includes a reproduction of what appears to be a gouache portrait of Lisitsky facing the title-page. Lisitsky’s original biblical double-entendre for the title of his autobiography—’Elleh toldot ’adam—‘This Is the History of Adam’/‘This is the History of Mankind’, is replaced in the English translation—that Lisitsky supervised—with the single-entendre, In the Grip of Cross-Currents, printed e. e. cummings style without capitalization and with the two words cross-currents hyphenated in heavier print and zigzagged at 33 degrees oblique to each other on the dust-jacket. De

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gustibus non disputandum, for a work originally written in Hebrew such extravagance was rare at that time; in many years of book-hunting, I have never seen so lavishly adorned a modern Hebrew secular work in translation of that decade or, come to that, later. Aside from a laudatory introduction by the doyen of American Hebrew letters, Hillel Bavli, there are citations on the dust-jacket of rave reviews from, inter alios, Hayyim Toren: ‘I do not hesitate to state that in our biographical literature this book is worthy of a place besides Bialik’s Yatmut. Both lifted from the circle of their lives and gave us to drink of the wine of misery, sadness and humiliation of their childhood . . . ’ Immanuel Bin-Gorion—the son of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky, and very much in the spirit of his father—echoed the latter’s evaluation of Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte: His autobiography . . . is a new Hebrew sprout in the eternal literature of ‘confession’ . . . We see again a Solomon Maimon knocking at the gates of the world. But this time it is not the man of acute mind, but the man of simple faith . . . ’Elleh toldot ’adam is one of the few books in Hebrew literature that, in their very conception, belong to world literature . . . 370

Less than a decade later, this avidity for the Rousseauian autobiographical confessional on behalf of the by now almost totally Israeli Hebrew readership is attested to by the rapturous reception accorded Pinhas Sadeh’s Hahayyim kemashal.371 This book, like Lisitsky’s autobiography, owes no small part of its appeal to its status as exotic travelogue, such as in previous centuries had been provided by the Jewish travel-account; amongst his projected titles for the work were The Journey and The Road of Time in the Midst of the Soul.372 Sadeh recounts therein his ‘Beat’ adventures in Frankfurt, Paris, London; by a strange stroke of synchronicity he appears to have been writing this book in 1956, at the same time as Kerouac was writing his On the Road—the two works bear some aYnity. By contrast to Lisitsky, however, Sadeh, in a deliberately Nietzschean gesture, seeks to sever all links with prior Hebrew or Yiddish autobiographical writings—and indeed with Augustine and Rousseau, whose confessionals he reports that he read at the time of writing Hahayyim kemashal, ‘but they were of no help to

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me’.373 In his diary written while writing Hahayyim kemashal, Sadeh speaks, ‘pour épater le Juif ’, of his identiWcation with Jesus, records citations inspirational in the composition of the work from inter alios Byron, Mussolini, St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians’ and Cardinal Newman.374 Regardless of the literary merits of this controversial and agonistic work, it did, according to no less an authority than Gershon Shaked, constitute a watershed in the development of Israeli Hebrew prose, this largely by liberation of individual voice aVorded by the confessional format from the dominantly collective tone of the literary discourse of the day.375 This confessional tenor also enabled the text to break through the relative literary provincialism to which Israeli Hebrew literature in the mid-Wfties was in general assigned: proleptic of future developments, the work appeared in English translation in the very same year as its publication in Hebrew.376 The colossal impact that Hahayyim kemashal made upon its readership is analogous to that made upon the late nineteenth-century Eastern European Hebrew readership by Lilienblum’s equally iconoclastic and agonistic autobiographical protest against the Haskalah literary canons of his day, Hatt’ot ne’urim. Analogous also to the Wn-de-siècle autobiographically fuelled rebellion of Berdichevsky and the Tse’irim—Sadeh’s shrill Nietzscheanism is on a par with that of the young Berdichevsky—against the proscriptive, Apollonian hold of Ahad Ha’am upon the Hebrew literature of that time. In my view, however, the oppositional expressions of self of Lilienblum, Berdichevsky and later Brenner, though well-prior to Sadeh, actually stand the test of time better than does Sadeh’s selfstyled ‘sort of journey through time to the midst of the soul . . . a sort of Tanakh of my own’.377 Most recently, the appearance of Amos Oz’s extraordinary autobiography, Sippur ’al ’ahavah vehoshekh—a work that most deWnitely does connect with its Hebrew predecessors, Bialik in particular—has created more of a stir in Hebrew literary circles than I recall since the appearance of A. B. Yehoshua’s Mar mani. When this book appears in English translation, I have no doubt that it will be acclaimed as a classic of contemporary autobiographical literature. What these literary dynamics do attest to is the marginal centrality/central marginality of the autobiographical genre in Hebrew liter-

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ary evolution. Autobiography as an ever-latent force, since its emergence in this literature, when it does come to the surface, leaves a catalytic impress upon subsequent literary developments. If the vicissitudes of the autobiographical in Hebrew literature from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present day present a complex picture, then in Yiddish all the more so. The sheer number of autobiographical productions in Yiddish, constituting the largest corpus of autobiographical writing ever written in a Jewish language, makes any generalizations all but impossible. Yiddish eVectively supplants Hebrew in the inter-war period as the principal language of autobiographical self-expression in Jewish Eastern Europe. Yiddish autobiography, moreover, is representative of a far wider range of classes, professions, ideological aYliations, than is Hebrew—nor is it so exclusively masculine. ‘Yiddishism’, in the broadest sense of the term, with its socialist underpinnings, empowered men and women who were neither writers, nor necessarily persons of cultural standing, to assign their life-histories to writing. Hence there is a far higher proportion in Yiddish than in Hebrew of autobiographers whose only published work was their autobiography. The geographical canvas reXected in these autobiographies is also far wider than with Hebrew; with the mass migrations of the twentieth century, Yiddish autobiography becomes of global dispersion. The linguistic and physical displacement from the matrix of Yiddish and the Ashkenazic culture from which it was inseparable—Eastern Europe and in particular the shtetl—instilled within Yiddish literature an inherently autobiographical bent. This is a literature assailed by a homesickness of cosmic proportions; the Yiddish-speaking environs of the Lower East Side of New York were conducive to a nostalgia for the Eastern European home-town and landscape that ran quite counter to the ideology that prompted a pioneer Zionist emigrant in Tel Aviv. A monumental testimony to this homesickness is the vast anthology Di idishe landmanshaftn fun nyu york, whose overall mood is well summarized by the following citation: Amongst the beautiful and strong emotions that a human-being possesses there holds a large place the longing for one’s town of birth, where one made one’s debut on the stage of life, and on the occasion of the twenty-Wfth anniversary of the Amdor Benevolent

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Society, I was overcome with a powerful longing for my beloved shtetl and by the desire to write down a few memories of the never forgotten Amdor of the past. Amdor! The cradle of my childhood, of my dreamful youth, how sweet and pleasing are the memories— of my years of childhood and youth!378

After the Holocaust Yiddish becomes the language of memorial and memory par excellence for the surviving remnant of Eastern European Jewry.379 This expansion of the autobiographical in Yiddish went hand in hand with the decline of Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism; indeed, a fundamental distinction should be drawn between Yiddish autobiographies written by those who wrote also in Hebrew and those whose sole literary language was Yiddish. In line with this general move toward expansion is the monumental expansiveness of many of these Yiddish autobiographical works. The two-volume autobiography or memoir is so common as to be almost the rule rather than the exception. Then, there are such gigantic works as Abraham Kahan’s Wve-volume Bleter fun mayn lebn380 and Y. Y. Trunk’s seven-volume Poyln.381 The only comparable work known to me, in terms of scale, in Hebrew literature is M. Ben Hillel Hacohen’s Wve-volume ’Olami. It is doubtful, indeed, whether any one study, or theoretical paradigm, could encompass Yiddish autobiography in all its variety; a full mastery of the sheer abundance of Yiddish autobiographical writing, moreover, would be a lifetime’s work. As mentioned above, I plan to devote a subsequent book to aspects of the Yiddish autobiographical bequest. The autobiographical voice in Yiddish, once so vital an element of the conWguration of Eastern European Jewish autobiography, is now all but silent. The future of Jewish autobiography—autobiography, that is, written in a Jewish language—lies in Israel. The unhappy correlation between autobiographical creativity and historical periods of cataclysmic change has been noted. With the chronic dislocation of many of the internal and external determinants of Jewish life in Israel in more recent years, the time would appear ripe for autobiographical exploration. There has of late, moreover, been a marked resurgence of interest—attested by republications—in the works of Berdichevsky, Brenner, Gnessin, Lilienblum, et alii. It is still too early to discern in which direction this re-encounter with the autobiographical heritage of

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Jewish Eastern Europe may lead. The general movement of autobiography from the periphery to the locus of much contemporary literary criticism and theory—to which the present study responds—cannot but have an impact upon future developments in Israeli literature. The future of the genre lies, as it always did, in the hands of a minority within a minority—a minority, however, that has left, and may still leave, some of the more lasting literary testimonies of modern Jewish history.

Reference Matter

Notes

Chapter One 1. ‘Hardly any form is alien to it. Historical record of achievement, imaginary forensic addresses or rhetorical declamations, systematic or epigrammatic description of character, lyrical poetry, prayer, soliloquy, confessions, letters, literary portraiture, family chronicles, and court memoirs, narrative whether purely factual or with a purpose, explanatory or Wctional, novel and biography in their various styles, epic, and even drama . . . ’ See Georg Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, tr. E. W. Dickes, 2 vols. (Westport, 1973), vol. 1, p. 4. 2. See William Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography (New Haven, 1980), pp. xi–xiii. 3. See James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, 1972), pp. 260–99. 4. Spengemann, pp. 132–65. 5. See Susanna Egan, Patterns of Experience in Autobiography (Chapel Hill, 1984), pp. 40–67. 6. See Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography (Princeton, 1985), pp. 3–56; Darrel Mansell, ‘Unsettling the Colonel’s Hash: Fact in Autobiography’, in The American Autobiography, ed. Albert Stone (Englewood CliVs, 1981), pp. 61–80. 7. See Spengemann, p. 189. 8. See Laura Marcus’s chapter ‘Saving the Subject’, in her Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester and New York, 1994), pp. 179–228; and on Jacques Derrida’s obsession with autobiography, both as practitioner and theoretician, see Joseph G. Kronick, ‘Philosophy as Autobiography: The Confessions of Jacques Derrida’, MLN, no. 115 (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 997–1018. 9. See Julia Watson, ‘Towards an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography’, in The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, ed. Robert FolkenXik, (Stanford, 1993), pp. 60, 61, 66, 71. 10. That the prime target of Watson’s essay is Georges Gusdorf ’s ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’, an essay written some quarter-century prior, is in itself testimony to this resilience.

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Notes to Pages 2–6 11. Marcus, p. 211. 12. Ibid., pp. 211–12. 13. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ghosts in the Mirror, tr. Jo Levy (London, 1988), p. 6. 14. See Marcus, passim, and esp. ch. 7, ‘Auto/biographical Spaces’, pp. 273–96. This drift is evident from James Olney’s anthology, Studies in Autobiography (New York/Oxford, 1988), in which two four-essay sections are devoted to ‘Ethnic and Minority Autobiography’ and ‘Women’s Autobiography’. For a combination of ethnic and feminist approaches, see Kenneth Mostern, Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, 1999); for the integration of neuroscientiWc research within the study of autobiography, see Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago, 1998), pp. 339–404, passim. 15. Olney, Memory, p. xv. 16. See Marcus, index under ‘Autobiography—Terminology’. 17. This indeWniteness actually licenses Olney to go beyond ‘graphe’ altogether, in his discussion—a wonderful discussion—of self-reXective aspects of the sculptures, paintings/drawings and installations of Giacometti, one of which is reproduced (on p. 269). See Olney, Memory, index under ‘Giacometti’. 18. Marcus, p. 294, p. 296, n. 59. 19. Spengemann, p. 185. 20. Sarah Pratt, ‘Angels in the Stalinist House: Nadezhda Mandelstamm, Lidiia Chukovskaia, Lidiia Ginzburg, and Russian Women’s Autobiography’, in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (Fall 1996, Whitewater, Wisconsin), p. 69. 21. Ibid. 22. See Paul John Eakin’s ‘Foreword’ to Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. and with a foreword by Paul John Eakin, tr. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis, 1989), pp. viii–xxviii, passim. 23. Lejeune in his 1998 foreword to the second edition of L’autobiographie en France (Paris, 1998), p. 5. 24. The term was Wrst coined, it appears, in 1797, by a reviewer of Isaac d’Israeli’s Miscellanies, but rejected by the same writer as ‘pedantic’. See Marcus, p. 12. It was Wrst positively employed as a generic indicator in 1809 by Robert Southey. See Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Turning Key (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 18–19. Herder and Goethe had a clear conception of autobiography as a discrete literary form before Southey’s neologism became current, Herder referring to Selbstbiographien and Goethe to the ‘so called Confessions of all ages’. See Misch, 1: pp. 2, 5. 25. See Philippe Lejeune, L’autobiographie en France (Paris, 1971), pp. 65–66. 26. Ibid., pp. 42–44. 27. Lejeune, On Autobiography, p. 144. 28. Nor are Augustine scholars, after Rousseau, unanimous in reading the work as an autobiography. Edward B. Pusey, for example, in the preface to his translation of the Confessions, argues in some detail against categorising the work as an autobiography. See Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, tr. and with an introduction by E. B.

Notes to Pages 6–9 Pusey (London, 1907), pp. xvii–xxi. For a survey of the debate, see Spengemann, pp. 213–18. 29. See, for example, Irving Howe, ‘The Self in Literature’, in his A Critic’s Notebook (New York, 1994), pp. 264–94; Olney, Memory, pp. 203–9, 405–22, passim. 30. Thus the title of the periodical published by ‘L’association pour l’autobiographie’, founded by Lejeune in 1991—‘La Faute à Rousseau’. See the preface to the collection of Lejeune’s articles published in this journal, in idem, Pour l’autobiographie: chroniques (Paris, 1998), pp. 7–8. 31. J. J. Rousseau, The Confessions, tr. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth, 1953), p. 3. See also the earlier ‘Neuchâtel’ preamble, in which Rousseau cites two possible precedents for his enterprise: Cardano’s Vita and Montaigne’s Essays. He gives short shrift to both; Cardano is too crazy, Montaigne the epitome of the ‘pseudo-sincere’. See Lejeune, L’autobiographie, p. 153. 32. See the psalmodic opening paragraphs of Augustine, Confessions, pp. 1–4; Karl J. Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago, 1978), pp. 22–23. 33. Jean Starobinski, ‘The Style of Autobiography’, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. J. Olney (Princeton, 1980), p. 8. 34. Rousseau, Confessions, p. 262. 35. Cardinal Newman being a case in point. See Buckley, p. 13. 36. Lejeune, L’autobiographie, pp. 45–46. 36. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), pp. 90– 91, 115–16. 38. Lejeune, L’autobiographie, p. 47. See also Brian Finney, The Inner I: British Literary Autobiography of the Twentieth Century (London, 1985), pp. 66–67. 39. For a detailed comparison of Clarissa and La Nouvelle Hélöise, see Joseph Texte, Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature (New York, 1929), pp. 227–54; for Rousseau’s own comparison of his La Nouvelle Hélöise with Richardson’s novels, see Confessions, pp. 502–6. 40. See Peter D. Jimack in his introduction to Rousseau, Emile, tr. Barbara Foxley (London, 1979) pp. x-xiii; Olney, Memory, pp. 414V; for Rousseau’s account of the experiences that gave rise to Emile, see The Confessions, pp. 400f, 406–408. 41. As cited by Lejeune, L’autobiographie, p. 155. 42. Amos Oz, Sippur ’al ’ahavah vehoshekh (Jerusalem, 2002), pp. 44–46. 43. Ibid., pp. 45–46. 44. See Weintraub, pp. xi–xii, 162–65, 191–95, 261–63. Cellini’s Vita is atypical of Renaissance depictions of the self in this respect, presenting his life history in some sort of chronological sequence. But he gives only the most desultory account of the years of childhood and adolescence which precede his Wrst apprenticeship as a goldsmith at the age of Wfteen. Michel Beaujour, in his Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, tr. Yara Milos (New York, 1977), privileges the self-portraitist’s liberation from the arbitrary shackles of chronological narrative. See Moseley, ‘Between Memory and Forgetfulness: The Janus Face of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky’, in Studies in Contemporary

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Notes to Pages 9–14 Jewry, vol. 12, ed. Ezra Mendelson (New York, Oxford, 1996), in which I apply Beaujour’s insights. 45. Rousseau, Confessions, p. 169. 46. As cited by Herbert A. Hodges, The Philosophy of Willhelm Dilthey (London, 1952), p. 275. See also John Paul Eakin, ‘Narrative and Chronology as Structures of Reference and the New Model Autobiographer’ in Olney, Studies. 47. Rousseau, ‘Neuchâtel’ preamble, as cited by Lejeune, L’autobiographie, p. 153. 48. Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (New York, 1954), p. 33. 49. Ibid., p. 67, p. 49. See also Finney, pp. 201–203. 50. Anthony O. J. Cockshut, The Art of Autobiography in 19th and Early 20th Century England (London, 1984), p. 36. 51. Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London, 1960), p. 85. 52. Rousseau, Confessions, p. 169. 53. See Richard N. Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Experience of Childhood (New Haven and London, 1984), pp. 27–30. 54. See Lejeune, L’autobiographie, pp. 74–76. 55. There is, of course, precedent for this meta-discursive collapse into the moment of recall and narration in the Augustine’s meditations on memory and time in the tenth and eleventh books of the Confessions. James Olney has made a brilliant and persuasive comparison between Augustine, in this respect, and Samuel Beckett. He makes an important caveat to this comparison, however: ‘Rousseau is the true centre of it all: without his achievement as the middle, Augustine’s would not be the beginning, Beckett’s would not be the end.’ 56. Rousseau, ‘Neuchâtel preamble’, as translated by Olney, Memory, p. 168. For the original of this passage see Lejeune, L’autobiographie, pp. 154–55. 57. See especially the foreword and Wrst chapter of Nabokov’s Speak Memory (New York, 1966); Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, tr. R. Howard (London, 1977); Finney, p. 118. 58. See Olney, Memory, index under ‘Beckett’. 59. Lejeune, L’autobiographie, p. 66. 60. See Felicity Baker, ‘The Object of Love in Rousseau’s Confessions’, in Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Patrick Coleman, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik (Cambridge, 2000), p. 174. 61. Olney, Memory, pp. 207–08. 62. Lejeune, On Autobiography, p. 143; and see idem, L’autobiographie, pp. 42–44. 63. Rabbi Binyamin (Yehoshua Radler-Feldman), in Kitvei r’ binyamin: mishpahat sofrim (Jerusalem, 1960), p. 147. 64. See Olney, Memory, pp. 207–08. 65. See Abraham Sha’anan, ’Iyyunim besifrut hahaskalah (Merkhavia, 1952), especially pp. 7–13, pp. 57–102; Yisroel Zinberg, Di geshikhte fun der literatur bay yidn, 10 vols. (Vilna, 1929), 7:150–5, 155–57. 66. Lejeune, On Autobiography, p. 143

Notes to Pages 14–17 67. For France (other than the Confessions), Chateaubriand, Memoires d’outre tombe, Wrst published in toto in 1849–59, Renan, Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse, Wrst ed., 1883; Germany, Moritz, Anton Reiser, 1785–90, Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, books 1–20, 1811–32; England, Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’, fourteen books, 1798–1805; Ruskin, Praeterita, 1885–89; Russia, Tolstoy, Childhood, 1852, Aksakov, Years of Childhood, 1858. 68. A major four-volume anthology containing much autobiographical material written by and about Jews in Russian has appeared, on which see the review of Alexander Lokshin, ‘A lotsman inem okean fun memuaristik’, in Sovyetish Heymland 7 (1987), pp. 109–12. 69. For German-language autobiographies reXecting the Eastern European Jewish experience, see Maria Klanska, Aus dem Shtetl in die Welt (1772–1938): Ostjüdische Autobiographien in deutscher Sprache (Vienna, 1994), a book that synthesizes a number of autobiographies into a thematic, collective portrayal of Eastern European life, thus de-individualizing this most individual of genres. 70. A. M. Dik, Mahazeh mul Mahazeh (Warsaw, 1861); Nokhem Meir Shaykevitsh, Shirei shomer vezikhronotav (Jerusalem, 1952). 71. See Dan Miron, Bodedim bemo’adam: lidyoqanah shel harepubliqah hasifritit ha’ivrit bithilat hame’ah ha’esrim (Tel Aviv, 1987), pp. 75–76. 72. See idem, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1973), pp. 1–34. 73. As cited by Benjamin Harshav, in his The Meaning of Yiddish (Stanford, 1990), p. 148. 74. For the impact of this shift of literary allegiances on the development of the Haskalah in Russia, see Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness, tr. Chaya Naor and Sondra Silverston (Oxford and Portland, Oregon, 2002), pp. 274–95; Khone Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish: peraqim letoldoteiha (Tel Aviv, 1978), pp. 261–93. For memoiristic accounts of the same process, see Pauline WengeroV, Rememberings: The World of a Russian Jewish Woman in the Nineteenth Century, tr. Henny Wenkart, ed. and with an afterword by Bernard D. Cooperman (Bethesda, Maryland, 2000), pp. 217–26; Avrom Kotik, Dos lebn fun a idishn intelligent (New York, 1925). 75. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford, 1990), pp. 7–58, esp. pp. 7–15, 36–44. 76. See Lydia Ginzberg, ‘Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts and Historical Identity’ in her On Psychological Prose, tr. and ed. J. Rosengrant (Princeton, 1991); Jane Gary Harris, Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth Century Russian Literature (Princeton, 1990). 77. See Miron, A Traveller Disguised, “Contents” page. 78. Daniel Charney, Barg aruf: bleter fun a lebn (Warsaw, 1935). 79. Wachtel, p. 63. 80. My impression is that the critical discourse surrounding Russian autobiography remains, by and large, the province of Slavicists and is yet to be integrated into

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Notes to Pages 17–21 the general study of the genre. Critical works that seek to provide pan-European synthetic surveys of autobiographical writing rarely engage Russian examples—even Tolstoy. 81. See Miron, Bodedim bemo’adam, pp. 283f; Dov Sadan, Bein din leheshbon: massot ‘al sofrim usefarim (Tel Aviv, 1963), p. 215. 82. See in particular his poem Gam behit’oruto le’eineikhem in which Bialik claims—in a manner that is to my mind unintentionally comical—that even though he may ‘Xash’, so to speak, and stand naked before his readers, this is a deliberate strategy of deception, a seeming self-exposure the better to conceal the true nature of his self. The game is developed when Bialik conWgures himself in this poem as a ‘lion in hiding’ behind the lines of his verse: the word used for ‘lion’, Lavi’, comprises the Wrst four letters of his last name. See H. N. Bialik, Kol kitvei (Tel Aviv, 1938), pp. 54–55. 83. Y. Fichman, Shirat bialik (Jerusalem, 1946), p. 209. 84. D. Miron, Hapereydah min ha’ani he’oni: mahalakh behitpathut shirato shel hayyim nahman bialik (1891–1901) (Tel Aviv, 1986). 85. See Dov Sadan, Midrash psikhoanaliti: peraqim bepsykhologiah shel y”h brener (Jerusalem, 1996); Ada Zemach, Tenu’ah binequdah: brener vesipurav (Tel Aviv, 1984); Menahem Brinker, ’Ad hasimtah hateveryanit: ma’amar ’al sippur umahashavah biytsirat brener (Tel Aviv, 1990). 86. See Sadan, Midrash, pp. 25–71. 87. See Avner Holtzman’s essay, ‘Beyom qayits, yom hom’, in his Temunah leneged ’einay (Tel Aviv, 2002), esp. p. 75, where Holtzman notes that Brenner refers in his correspondence to the Hebrew essayist Ahad Ha’am as ‘our father’. For Ahad Ha’am as ‘Daddy’ to Bialik, see Bialik, ’Iggerot hayyim nahman bialik, ed. and annotated by Fishel Lahover, 5 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1937–39)1:120. 88. Miron, Bodedim, pp. 106–108. 89. See Shlomo Grodzensky, ’OtobiograWyah shel qore’ (Tel Aviv, 1975), p. 94. 90. Yosef Hayyim Brenner, Ketavim, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1978–85), 3: 573–75. 91. Sadan, Bein din, p. 144. 92. The autobiographical element is predominant in many of the essays included in ’Orahot ushevilim: massah iyyun heqer—kerekh ha’ishim (Tel Aviv, 1977). This book is actually more autobiographical than Shlomoh Grodzensky’s Autobiography of a Reader. 93. Grodzensky, p. 181. 94. These two titles are of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky’s collections of strongly autobiographically tinged writings. 95. Brenner, Ketavim, 2: 1782–83. 96. See Bialik, Pirqei hayyim be’arba’ girsa’ot, ed. F. Lachover (Jerusalem, 1944); Zivah Shamir, ‘SaWah, shorshav useWhav’, in ‘SaWah’ levialik: hasippur ‘saWah’ umassot ’iyyun, ed. Zvi Luz and Zivah Shamir (Tel Aviv, 2001), pp. 138–43; A. Zemach, pp. 96–98; A. Holtzman, ’El haqera’ shebalev: mikhah yosef berdichevksky; shenot hat-

Notes to Pages 22–24 semihah (1887–1902) (Jerusalem, 1995), pp. 215–30. And see Shmuel Werses’ comments on the letter as a means of autobiographical expression for Sh. D. Luzzato (Shadal), in his essay ‘Shmuel david lutsato be’eynei ’atsmo: ’iyyun be’iggrotov ha’ivriyot’, in his Megamot vetsurot besifrut hahaskalah (Jerusalem, 1990), pp. 267–68. 97. Bialik, ’Iggerot, 1:18–19. 98. See Yosef Klausner, Historiyah shel hasifrut ha’ivrit hahadashah, 6 vols., second revised and expanded edition, 6 vols. (Jerusalem, 1952–1958), 1: v-vii. 99. See especially the essays on Bialik and Tchernikhovsky in Sadan, Bein din. 100. See Miron, Bodedim, p. 280. 101. See ibid., pp. 12–13. 102. See Miron’s memoir/literary-critical manifesto, ‘Pereq zikhronot min hareubliqah hasifrutit’, in ibid., pp. 9–19. 103. See Govrin, Me’ofeq ’el ’ofeq: g. shofman, hayyav viytsirato, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1982); idem, Hamahatsit har’ishonah: devorah baron—hayeha viytsiratah (Jerusalem, 1988); Bakon, Brener hatsa’ir, 2 vols.(Tel Aviv, 1975); Hayyim Be’er, Gam ahavatam, gam sin’atam: bialik, brener, agnon: ma’arakhot-yahasim (Tel Aviv, 1992). 104. On this literary critic’s fascination with the biographical, see the introduction to his wonderful series of essentially biographical vignettes, Temunah. Two lengthy essays in this book—they constitute about a half of the entire volume—are, since they treat of the experiences of the author’s parents, intimately autobiographical documents. 105. Amia Lieblich, ‘Writing Biography as a Relationship’, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues (Bloomington, Indiana, Spring, number 7, 5764/2004), p. 209. The works in question are idem, Conversations with Dvora: An Experimental Biography of the First Modern Hebrew Woman Writer (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1997); and Learning About Lea (London, 2003). 106. Instructive in this respect is that the biographies of both Yehudah Leib Gordon and Ahad Ha’am should have been written by historians. See Michael Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry (New York, 1988); Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley, 1993). 107. Mashera’iti: zikhronotav shel yehezke’l kotik, ed., annotated, tr. and with an introduction by David Assaf (Tel Aviv, 1998); Hayyim Chemerinsky, ’Ayarati moteleh, ed. annotated and with an introduction by idem (Jerusalem, 2002). 108. Puah Rakowsky, My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman: Memoirs of a Zionist Feminist in Poland, tr. Barbara Harshav with Paula E. Hyman, ed. and with an introduction by Paula E. Hyman (Bloomington, Indiana, 2002). 109. See Werses, Haqitsah ’ami: sifrut hahaskalah be’idan hamodernizatsiah (Jerusalem, 2000), p. 430. 110. Sha’ul Tchernikhovsky, ‘Me’ein ’avtobiograWah’, in Sha’ul Tchernikhovsky: mehqarim ute’udot, ed. Boaz Arpaly (Jerusalem, 1994). 111. M. L. Letteris, Zikkaron basefer (Vienna, 1869), pp. 1–8.

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Notes to Pages 24–31 112. M. Y. Berdichevsky, ‘Devarim ’ahadim ’al devar hatoladah veha’autobiographiah’, in Ha’ivri, vol. 13, no. 27 (Brody, December 1889). 113. See Bal Makhshoves, (Isidore Eliashev), ‘Undzer memuarn literatur’, in idem, Geklibene shriftn, 5 vols. (Warsaw, 1929) 3:58–70. 114. Yankev Shatsky, ‘Yidishe memuarn literatur’, in Di tsukunft, 30 (August 1925). 115. Sh. Werses, ‘Darkhei ha’autobiograWah bitequfat hahaskalah’ in Gilyonot, vol. 4 (1945). 116. Idem, ‘Hamaskil hayehudi ke’ish tsa’ir’, in Haqitsah ’ami, pp. 67–116. 117. Alan Mintz, Banished From Their Fathers’ Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington, 1989). 118. Ibid., p. 5. 119. Ibid., p. 6. 120. See Yehudah Ha’ezrahi, ‘Toldot shadal’, in Melilah, vol. 5 (Manchester, 1955), p. 236. 121. Mintz, pp. 14–15. 122. Ibid., pp. 130–131. 123. Ibid., p. 16. 124. Ibid. 125. Ibid., pp. 16, 22. 126. Ibid., p. 17. 127. Ibid., p. 18. 128. See ibid., pp. 117–18. 129. Ibid., p. 203. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid., p. 204. 132. Ibid., p. 130. 133. Mintz himself actually pioneered in his analysis of the literary rhetoric of so seemingly an objective, heavily-documented, reconstruction of the life as Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim. See Mintz, pp. 29–54. Ben Ami Feingold, following Mintz’s lead , further reveals the novelistic undergirdings of this text. See his ‘Ha’otobiograWah kesifrut’, in Mehqerei yerushalayim besifrut ’ivrit, (Jerusalem, 1983), 4:86–111. 134. See Sadan, Midrash, pp. 25–31. 135. See idem, ‘Orahot ushevilim, p. 130. 136. Mintz, p. 203. 137. Ibid., p. 59 138. See Shmuel Werses, ‘Haverim mesapperim ’al feierberg’, in his Mimendele ’ad hazaz: sugiyot behitpathut hasipporet ha’ivrit (Jerusalem 1987), pp. 119–36. 139. Sadan, Midrash, pp. 80–99. 140. Mintz, pp. 83–84. 141. For general discussions of the dilemmas posed by autobiography to New Criticism and vice-versa, see Marcus, index under “New Criticism”; Lejeune, Pour l’autobiographie, pp. 11–40, passim. 142. Ibid. p. 130. 143. Ibid. 144. Ibid., p. 201. 145. Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Repenting’, in his The Complete Essays, tr., ed. and with an introduction by M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 908. 146. See Brenner, ‘Bahoref ’, in his Ketavim, 1: 262–63.

Notes to Pages 31–36 147. As cited by Werses in his Biqqoret habiqqoret: ha’arakhot vegilguleihem (Tel Aviv, 1982), p. 126. And compare A. D. Friedman: ‘Surely one cannot demand of the man standing up and confessing before you, that he pays heed to the external form of his confession!’, as cited by Sadan, Midrash, p. 31. 148. See Zamir, ‘SaWah’, as cited above. And on Gilui vekhissui, see Nathan Rotenstreich, ‘ ’Al gilui vekhissui belashon’ ’ in his Sugiyot beWlosoWyah (Tel Aviv, 1961), pp. 398–408. 149. See JeVrey Shandler, ed. Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland Before the Holocaust (New Haven and London, 2002), p. 296; and compare ‘Forget Me Not’ in ibid., p. 123. 150. Rousseau, p. 574. 151. Rousseau: Judge of Jean Jacques: Dialogues, ed. by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, tr. by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly and Roger D. Masters (Hanover and London, 1990), pp. 5–6, passim. 152. See Amos Oz, Sippur ’al ’ahavah vehoshekh, p. 351. 153. See Mintz, p. 206. 154. In the post World War II centre for Hebrew literature, Israel, the conversion from Orthodox Judaism to secular belles-lettres that characterized the Eastern European period has until today been rare, thus altering the entire complexion of all forms of Hebrew prose and poetry. The ‘secularizing of the sacral and sacralizing of the secular’, in Bialik’s formulation, was a deWning characteristic of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the Eastern European period. See Bialik, ‘Gillui vekhissui belashon’, in Kitvei h.n. byalik, 3 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1935), 2.229. And see Sadan, ‘Bein qodesh lehol’, in ’Orahot, pp. 132–140. 155. Mintz, p. 205. 156. Shamir and Luz, p. 9. 157. Mintz, p. 18. 158. See Khone Shmeruk, ‘Yitshok bashevis: af di shpurn fun zayn oytobiograWe’ in Di goldene keyt, no. 115 (Tel Aviv, 1985), pp. 14–27. 159. See Baruch Kurzweil, ‘Be’ayot yesod shel sifrutenu hahadashah’ and ‘Hahashpa’ah shel WlosiWyat hahayyim ’al hasifrut ha’ivrit bithilat hameah ha-20’ in his Sifrutenu hahadashah: hemshekh ‘o mahpekhah (Tel Aviv, 1959), passim. 160. Samuel Becket, The Unnamable (New York, 1958), pp. 3–4, passim. 161. See Georges Gusdorf, ‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’, in Olney, ed., Autobiography, 41. 162. Taken from the song ‘All I Really Want to Do’. The pertinent verse runs: I ain’t looking to block you up, Shock or knock or lock you up, Analyze you, categorize you, Finalize you or advertise you. See Bob Dylan, Lyrics 1962–1985 (New York, 1985), p. 129.

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Notes to Pages 38–41

Chapter Two 1. In taking these sociological factors into account, there are deWnite analogies to the work of Pierre Bourdieu on the ‘literary Weld’, ‘market for symbolic goods’ etc. But his formulations are vastly more complex and ambitious than those employed here. See Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, tr. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, 1996). I have, however, adopted Bourdieu’s ‘Weld’ metaphor, alongside the ‘circuit’ metaphor here employed. 2. Gusdorf, ‘Conditions and Limits’, pp. 28–29. 3. Ibid., p. 30. 4. Ibid. 5. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500–1800 (London, 1977), chapter 7. 6. Lejeune, L’autobiographie, p. 65. 7. See, for example, Lejeune’s ‘Répertoire’ in ibid., where the publication details provided demonstrate the massive eZorescence of the autobiographical genre subsequent to the publication of Rousseau’s Confessions. 8. For Diltheyan approaches, see the studies of Weintraub and Misch; For Jungian, see those of Olney, Egan and Avrom Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Modern England (Berkeley, 1983). And for a useful overview of the signiWcance of Dilthey in the critical discourse of autobiography, see Marcus, chapter 4, ‘Autobiography and Historical Consciousness’. 9. Gusdorf, p. 29. Compare Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York, 1992), pp. 82–84. 10. The Yiddish literary critic Borekh Rivkin thus viewed Yiddish literature and language as a ‘kmoy-teritorie’ or ‘virtual territory’. See his Grunt-tendentsn fun der yidisher literature in amerike (New York, 1948), passim. 11. See James Olney, Tell Me Africa (Princeton, 1973), pp. 34–36; Leonard S. Klein, African Literatures in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1986), passim. 12. On Achebe, see Olney, Tell Me Africa, chapter 4. 13. See Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language (Chicago, 1980), especially pp. 252–58 and 642–50. 14. See Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ‘Inventing the Jew: Notes on Jewish Autobiography’, in The American Autobiography, ed. Albert A. Stone (Englewood CliVs, 1981), pp. 142–46. For a contrary view to the one advanced in the present thesis, see Cynthia Ozick’s ‘Toward a New Yiddish’, in her Art and Ardor (New York, 1983), pp. 154– 77. The Yiddish literary critic Bal Makhshoves was the Wrst to appreciate the signiWcance of the linguistic aspect for the study of Jewish autobiography. See his comments on A. Y. Papirna, who wrote autobiographical pieces in Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian in his (1910) ‘Undzer memuarn literatur’, p. 64. For a more inclusive and wide-ranging discussion of the phenomenon of Jewish writers in non-Jewish lan-

Notes to Pages 42–49 guages in the modern period, see Dov Sadan, ‘Massat mavo’, in his ’Avnei bedeq (Tel Aviv, 1982), esp. pp. 16–18, 26–28. 15. See Misch, pp. 668–75. 16. See Weintraub, p. 170. 17. Ibid., p. 116. 18. See Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. and with an introduction by Jean Gooder (Harmondsworth, 1995), p. xi. 19. Ibid., p. 343. 20. Lejeune, L’autobiographie, pp. 119–20. 21. Ibid., pp. 55–56; Paul Delaney, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1969), p. 111. 22. Lejeune, ibid.; Delaney, p. 111. 23. Lejeune, L’autobiographie, p. 107. 24. The literary/ideological diVerentiation of Hebrew periodicals and publishing houses from the 1890s on is well illustrated in Dan Miron’s analysis of the publication history of the poems of Bialik. See H. N. Bialik, Shirim (1890–1898), ed. with an introduction by D. Miron (Tel Aviv, 1983), ‘Mavo’ ’, esp. pp. 18–32. 25. See Sh. Niger, Leyzer, dikhter, kritiker (New York, 1928), pp. 541–43. 26. Inter alia, aside from those above-mentioned in the body of this chapter, the autobiographies of Sh. D. Luzzatto in Hamaggid; Sh. Y. Fin in Hakarmel; M. Z. Feierberg’s autobiographical Le’an in Hashiloah; Yitshak Yoyel Linestky’s Dos poylishe yingl in Kol mevaser. 27. See the texts presented by Lejeune in the second part of L’autobiographie en France. 28. See the Wnal chapter of Marcus’s book, titled ‘Auto/biographical Spaces’. 29. Hence the title of Bruss’s Wrst book on the subject, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore, 1976). For a useful discussion of Bruss’s work, see Marcus, pp. 262–66. 30. Elizabeth M. Bruss, ‘Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film’, in Olney, ed., Autobiography, p. 299. 31. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts, p. 31. 32. Bruss, ‘Eye for I’, pp. 296–97. 33. See Lejeune, L’autobiographie, pp. 24–30. And see Eakin’s discussion of the ‘pact’ in idem, On Autobiography, pp. vii–xv. 34. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 35. Ibid., p. 25. 36. Ibid., pp. 26–30. 37. Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris, 1975), p. 45. 38. Lejeune, Je est un autre (Paris, 1980), pp. 58–59. 39. It is worthy of note that the Hebrew word Sifrut/‘literature’, is itself of late coinage—according to Joseph Klausner, it was Wrst introduced by Abraham Ber

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Notes to Pages 50–51 Gottlober, the Maskilic mentor of Mendele. The novelty of the term is attested to by the fact that for decades after its coinage there was no general agreement on how to pronounce the word—Safrut or Sifrut. See Klausner, Historiah, 5:336. For the burning of Haskalah writings in Hebrew and Yiddish (sometimes entire editions of Haskalah works attested to by other sources appear to have been completely destroyed) and threats upon the lives of their authors by Hasidim, see Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish, pp. 239–41. It is no coincidence that Joseph Perl’s anti-Hasidic satire Megalleh temirin (Vienna, 1819) centres upon the attempts of a group of Hasidim to seek and destroy a Haskalah book. See Joseph Perl, Revealer of Secrets, tr. with an introduction and notes by Dov Taylor (Boulder, Colorado, 1997). 40. For a bold grappling with these issues characterized by a refreshing combination of Marxist commitment and intellectual integrity, see Mostern, chapter 2: ‘African American Autobiography and the Field of Autobiography Studies’. 41. For an overview of the generic innovations of nineteenth-century Jewish literature in Eastern Europe, one of which Niger enumerates as autobiography, see Sh. Niger, Dertseylers un romanistn, vol. 1 (New York, 1941), part 1. 42. Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’, p. 30. 43. D. Baron, The Thorny Path and Other Stories, tr. J. Shachter (Jerusalem, 1969), from the story ‘Family’, pp.1–2. 44. Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’, p. 30. For the impact of historical consciousness upon Jewish thought in the nineteenth century, see Nathan Rotenstreich, Hamahshavah hayehudit be’et hahadashah (Tel Aviv, 1966), especially pp. 21–23 and 147–51. For the uphill struggle of the Maskilim to instill historical consciousness amongst the masses of Eastern European Jews, and their own acute ambivalence concerning the substitution of providential historical schemes on the model of mediaeval and Renaissance Hebrew chronicles with Wissenschaft-style secular historiographic maxims, see Feiner, passim. Hayyim Gartner, in an important article tracing the emergence of a distinctively Orthodox variant of Hebrew historical writing in the nineteenth century, particularly in Galicia, sees as one of the cardinal distinctions between this traditionalist discourse and that of the Maskilim the lack of autobiography. Gartner makes a provocative contrast/parallel between the writing of Haskalah autobiographies and that of rabbinic genealogies, which Xourished in this period: ‘The undertaking of writing genealogies provides . . . an Orthodox mirror-image, even of the very practice of Haskalah autobiographical writing. The autobiography depicts the life-story of the Maskil as one who has cut himself oV from his roots at a certain juncture of his life and chosen to go his own way. Genealogical research is the mirror image of Haskalah autobiography, for its aim is to assist the writer, as well as his readership, to strengthen their hold on tradition through desisting from writing about themselves. Rabbinic chronology, by contrast to Haskalah autobiography, is written in the form of collective biography. The writer sees himself as a link in the midst of a continuum of biographies. In this manner, the researchers of rabbinic genealogy could interweave their own personal biography as a further link in

Notes to Pages 52–53 an unbroken and ramiWed rabbinic chain whose roots were embedded in the past.’ See Gartner, ‘Re’shitah shel ketivah historit ’ortodoqsit bemizrah ’eyropah: ha’arakhah mehudeshet in Tsiyon, Year 67, 3 (Jerusalem, 2002), pp. 326–27. 45. Bal makhshoves, Undzer memuarn literatur, pp. 58–59. See also Bal Makhshoves’ review of Zvi Lipschitz’s autobiography Midor dor in Seqirot ureshamim (Warsaw, 1911), especially pp. 77–78. 46. Gusdorf, ‘Conditions’, p. 30. 47. Bal Makhshoves, Undzer memuarn literatur, p. 61. 48. Ibid., pp. 69–70. Bal Makhshoves may, in this respect, be considered one of the intellectual forefathers of the autobiography competitions sponsored by YIVO in 1934 and 1939. See, on these competitions, Moses Kligsberg, Child and Adolescent Behavior Under Stress (New York, 1965); Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet, Marcus Moseley and Michael Stanislawski, ‘Introduction’ to Shandler, ed., Awakening Lives; Moseley, ‘Life, Literature: Autobiographies of Jewish Youths in Interwar Poland’, in Jewish Social Studies, vol. 7, no. 3 (Bloomington, Spring/Summer 2001). 49. Yitskhok Elkhonen Rontsh, Amerike in der yiddisher literature (New York, 1945), p. 201. 50. See M. Viner, Tsu der geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur in 19tn yorhundert 2 vols. (New York, 1945), 1: 9–22. 51. See Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and SelfIdentity in England, 1591–1791 (Stanford, 1996), passim. 52. See Watt, pp. 35–39. 53. See Texte, pp. 118–24. For the impact of Addison’s Spectator upon the young Rousseau, see Confessions, p. 110. 54. See Miron, ‘Lefesher hamevukhah basifrit ha’ivrit bitequfat ha “tehiyyah”’ shelah’ in Bodedim, passim. For a survey of the Hebrew novels that had appeared from c. 1867 to c. 1887, see David Patterson, The Hebrew Novel in Czarist Russia (Edinburgh, 1964), pp. 1–34. 55. See below for a discussion of the precise dating of the writing of Guenzberg’s autobiography. 56. See David Patterson, Abraham Mapu (London, 1964), especially pp. 96–107. 57. See Miron, Traveler, pp. 34–66. Aizik Meir Dik summed up his own career as a proliWc Yiddish novelist in the preface to his autobiography, written in Hebrew: ‘I debased the honour of my pen by writing various tales in the language currently spoken, to our shame and disgrace, by the Jews of Lithuania, Poland and Russia.’ Dik, p. 2. 58. For an overview of this period, see S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, tr. D. Friedlander, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1916–20), 3:58–65. 59. See Miron, Lefesher hamevukhah, in his Bodenim, passim; Gershon Shaked, Hasipporet ha’ivrit 1880–1980, (Tel Aviv, 1977), 1:25–27 and 485. 60. An important date, in this respect, is 1888, with the appearance of the Wrst volume of Sholem Aleichem’s Yidishe folksbibliotek. See Miron, Traveler, pp. 227–33.

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Notes to Pages 53–56 61. As cited by Nakhmen Meisel, ‘Sh. Dubnov un di yidishe shprakh’, in Tsum hundertstn geboyrntog fun Shimon Dubnov, ed. Meisel (New York, 1961), pp. 25–26. For Sh. Dubnow’s ‘Way to Yiddish’ (the title of Dubnov’s memoirs on this topic), see also Sh. Niger, Kritik un kritiker (Buenos Aires, 1959), pp. 318–32. 62. See Sh. Halkin, Mavo’ lasipporet ha’ivrit, ed. Z. Hillel (Jerusalem, 1958), pp. 271–90. See also Halkin, Zeramim vetsurot basifrut ha’ivrit hahadashah (Jerusalem, 1984), pp. 225–26. 63. See Thomas Philipp, ‘The Autobiography in Modern Arab Literature and Culture’, in Poetics Today, vol. 14, no. 3 (Durham, 1993). Philipp writes, on pp. 585–86 that the Wrst autobiographies in Arabic were published between 1926 and 1955. 64. Leading critics of Jewish literature—Sadan, Halkin, Shaked, Miron—have called attention to the signiWcance of a study of the translation of works written in non-Jewish languages for the understanding of Hebrew and Yiddish literature. Itamar Even-Zohar’s essay on this topic has achieved canonic status in Hebrew literary theory; see his ‘Israeli Hebrew Literature’, in Poetics Today, vol. 11, no. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1990), pp. 165–73. Not one of these critics, however, explores in depth the implications for Hebrew and Yiddish literature of the relative dearth of translations from Jewish to non-Jewish languages until the early decades of the twentieth century, and the highly selective character of these translations thereafter. Cynthia Ozick’s short story ‘Envy, Or Yiddish in America’ does, however—via Wctional projection into the minds of the untranslated Yiddish writers and their lust for translation à la Sholem Asch and above all Isaac Bashevis Singer—cast an unsparing spotlight upon this phenomenon. Instructive in this respect is the bibliography of ‘Yiddish Writings in English Translation’ appended to the most comprehensive overview to date, in English, of Yiddish literature, Charles Madison’s Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and Major Writers, Wrst published in 1968: this bibliography, appended to a book of over Wve hundred pages, constitutes all of three pages of the volume. See Madison, pp. 523–26. 65. Solomon Maimon, Hayyei shlomoh maimon, tr. Y. L. Barukh (Tel Aviv, 1942), pp. 170, 173–74. This preamble to the second book of the Lebensgeschichte is not included in the J. Clark Murray translation of the Autobiography. 66. Maimon, Autobiography (2001), pp. 55, 59. Compare Rousseau’s Confessions, pp. 86–89. For other parallels between the Confessions and Maimon’s autobiography, see F. Lachover’s introduction to Hayyei Shlomoh Maimon, tr. Y. L. Barukh (Tel Aviv, 1942), pp. 23–25, 27–28. Lachover does not remark upon the striking similarity between Maimon’s famous description of being locked out of Berlin and Rousseau’s of Wnding himself locked out of Geneva. Compare Maimon, Autobiography (2001), pp. 193–96, with Rousseau, Confessions, p. 47. Barukh, it should be noted, assigned cardinal cultural/historical signiWcance to autobiography. Thus he writes in 1910 of Lilienblum’s Hatte’ot ne’urim: ‘You will not Wnd a more superb cultural characterization, more distinctive and more authentic of life of the Jewish collective in the last two generations, than the biography of Lilienblum.’ As cited by Ben Ami Feingold, ‘Ha’otobiograWyah kesifrut: ’iyyun be ’hatt’ot ne’urim lem”l lilienblum’, in Mehkarei yerushalayim besifrut ’ivrit, vol. 4 (Jerusalem, 1983), p. 108, n. 52.

Notes to Pages 57–58 67. For a survey of Maimon’s Hebrew writing, see G. Kressel, Leksikon hasifrut ha’ivrit bedorot ha’aharonim, 2 vols. (Merhaviah, 1965–67), 2:356–61. 68. Y. Zinberg, Geshikhte, 7: Book 1: 181. 69. See Ritchie Robertson, ‘From the Ghetto to Modern Culture: The Autobiographies of Solomon Maimon and Jakob Fromer’, in Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies, vol. 7 (Oxford, 1992), p. 14. And thus, in his chapter ‘On A Secret Society’, Maimon feels it necessary to explain to the reader: ‘Chassidim is the name generally given by Jewish to the pious,’ etc. Such explanations would have been quite superXuous in an Eastern European Jewish context. See Maimon, Autobiography (2001), p. 151. The most authoritative translation of Maimon’s autobiography is undoubtedly that of Eliyohu Yankev Goldshmit to Yiddish: Shloyme maymons lebengeshikhte, tr. E. Y. Goldshmit, with intro. and annotations, 2 vols. (Vilna, 1927), a formidable monument to Lithuanian secular Yiddishist rigour. 70. See Lachover, ‘Introduction’, pp. 22–24, 35–37; On Moritz’s Anton Reiser, see Lachover, ‘Introduction’, Coe, pp. 35–37; Goethe had read and thought carefully about Moritz’s Anton Reiser, which he disliked, before he began to write Dichtung und Wahrheit; Weintraub, p. 345. 71. See Robertson, ‘From the Ghetto’, p. 18; Weissberg, p. 109. 72. Lachover, ‘Introduction’, pp. 22–23. 73. Ibid. For a photograph of the title page of the original edition, see Autobiography (1959), facing p. 33. 74. One of the most outstanding examples of this trend in German intellectual history is Franz Delitzsch (1813–90), the biblical exegete, who was the Wrst to study modern Hebrew poetry in his Geschichte der Judischen Poesie (1836), which remains a classic in the Weld. This unique conXuence of late eighteenth-century German Enlightenment thought and modern Hebrew poetics is manifested by Herder’s Vom Geiste der ebraishcen Poesie (Dessau, 1782–83). It has been suggested that Naphtali Herz Weisel (Wessely) undertook his epic poem on the life of Moses, Shirei tif’eret, a milestone in modern Hebrew literature, in response to Herder’s challenge to a Hebrew poet to write such a work. See Klausner, Historiah, 1:137–38. 75. Goethe, The Autobiography, tr. John Oxenford, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1974), 1:127– 56. For Goethe’s Yiddish writings, see Zalman Reizen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, vol 1 (revised and expanded edition, Vilna, 1928), pp. 596f. See also Mark Waldman’s superb study, Goethe and the Jews (New York, 1934), and especially pp. 36–70 for Goethe’s Yiddish compositions. The phenomenon of one of the Wnest minds of the nineteenth century applying himself to Hebrew in order to write Yiddish would have left a Jewish Maskil utterly aghast. 76. Zinberg, Geshikhte, vol. 7, book 1:162; Waldman, pp. 220–21. 77. Eliot on Maimon as cited by Jacob S. Raisin, The Haskalah Movement in Russia (Philadelphia, 1913), p. 88. For Eliot on autobiography, see Fleishman, pp. 236– 40. Eliot’s reading of the Lebensgeschichte surely inXuenced her depiction of the Jew in Daniel Deronda (1875). She even adopts the name of Maimon’s bosom friend, ‘Lapidoth’, for one of the leading characters in Deronda. See William Baker, George

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Notes to Pages 58–60 Eliot and Judaism (Salzburg, 1985), pp. 119–21. On Eliot and the Lebensgeschichte, see also Israel Abraham’s comments on Eliot’s annotated copy of the autobiography, ‘A Handful of Curiosities’, in his The Book of Delight and Other Papers (Philadelphia, 1912), pp. 242–46. Daniel Deronda became enormously inXuential in Jewish Eastern Europe. Shimon Dubnow saw Mordechai, the hero of Daniel Deronda, as the ‘ideal of a Jew’ and planned to write a biography of Eliot. See S. Dubnow, Dos bukh fun mayn lebn, tr. Y Birnboim, 3 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1962–63), 1:69, 182–83. A two-volume biography of George Eliot appeared in Hebrew in 1899: Y. A. Reizen, George Eliot (Warsaw, 1899). And see Shmuel Werses, ‘The Jewish Reception of Daniel Deronda’, in ‘Daniel Deronda’: A Century Symposium (Jerusalem, 1976), pp. 11–43. 78. Speaking of circuits, a contemporary twist in the picaresque history of the reception of this vagabond text is that one edition of Maimon’s autobiography—the J. Clark Murray English translation—has now been accorded the unusual status of being fully available online to internet browsers. ‘Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur’, to cite the unattributed motto with which Maimon concludes the Lebensgeschichte; see Autobiography (2001), p. 289. 79. See, for example, Moritz’s original introduction to the work as cited in Hayyei Shlomoh Maimon, p. 7; Weinberg, pp. 110–11. Typical is the assessment of James Henry Hallard: ‘one of the quaintest and most interesting and indeed most amusing life-records ever written.’ As cited by Noah Jacobs in his Maimon bibliography, ‘Hasifrut ’al shlomoh maimon’, in Qiriyat sefer vol. 41, no. 2 (Jerusalem, March 1966), p. 164. 80. This is how Maimon views himself as seen through the eyes of a prominent and prestigious Wgure in the Mendelssohn circle and student of Kant, Markus Herz. See The Autobiography (2001), p. 216. 81. See J. Clark Murray, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in ibid., p. xxxiii. 82. As summarized by Ritchie Robertson in his ‘Introduction’ to Karl Philipp Moritz, Anton Reiser, tr. and with an introduction by Ritchie Robertson (Harmondsworth, 1997), p. xviii. 83. See Liliane Weissberg, ‘Salomon Maimon Writes His Lebensgeschichte’, in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996 (New Haven and London, 1997), p. 109. 84. S. Maimon, An Autobiography, ed. and with an introduction by Moses Hadas (New York, 1947). 85. See Anna Robeson Burr, The Autobiography: A Critical and Comparative Study (Boston, 1909), index under ‘Maimon’; on p. 371, Burr comments that Maimon’s life ‘was one long irregularity’. Jacobs cites one other mention of the work in Theodor Klaiber, Die Deutsche Selbstbibliographie (Stuttgart, 1921); Jacobs, p. 258. Fromer’s recapitulation of the Lebensgeschichte appears to have been even more marginalized. Robertson writes that ‘of those reference books that mention him, the one with the longest entry by far’ occurs in an ‘anti-semitic’ compilation of 1929, ‘much of which consists of excerpts from his autobiography’. See Robertson, ‘From the Ghetto’, p. 29, n. 6.

Notes to Pages 60–61 86. Likewise the very astute treatment of Maimon in Sander L. Gilman’s Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, 1986); see also the article cited in the Jacobs bibliography, p. 256: Gershon Weiler, ‘Fritz Mauthner: A Study in Jewish Self-Rejection’, Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute, 7 (London, 1963), pp. 144–47. 87. On Maimon’s isolation in the context of Western and Eastern European Jewry, see Ya’aqov Rabinovitz, Maslulei sifrut, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1971), 1:18–19. 88. See the autobiographical testimonies of German Jews in the anthology by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehudah Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World (Oxford, 1980), chapter 6. 89. Philipp makes very much the same point in his survey of the emergence of Arabic autobiographical discourse; see esp. pp. 585–86, 601–02. 90. Luzzatto’s autobiography was serialized in Hamaggid from 1857 to 1862. Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer was Wrst published in Vilna in 1863, and Letteris’s Zikkaron basefer was Wrst published in Vienna in 1869. For a perceptive overview of these and other Haskalah autobiographical texts, see Werses, ‘Darkhei ha’autobiographiah’. 91. On Perl as the creator of the Wrst Hebrew novel, see Taylor, ‘Introduction’ to Perl, Revealer of Secrets, passim. On the inXuence of Maimon, see Perl, Ma’asiyot ve’igrot mitsadiqim ’amiti’im ume’anshei shelomenu, ed. and with an introduction by Chone Shmeruk and Shmuel Werses (Jerusalem, 1969), ‘Mavo’ ’, n. 12, pp. 39–41. 92. See Z. Reizen, Leksikon, 2:16. 93. See Lilienblum’s letters to Gordon written in 1872 in ’Igrot moshe leib lilienblum liyhudah leib gordon, ed. Shlomoh Breiman (Jerusalem, 1968). I also Wnd signiWcance in the fact of this publication in Kol mevasser, since it was in this journal that Yitshak Yoel Linetsky’s Dos poylishe yingl Wrst appeared in instalments in 1867. These instalments were such a runaway success with the readership that the editor of the journal, Alexander Zederbaum, published them in book form, with a previously unpublished second half, in 1868, under the title Dos poylishe yingl, oder a biogragie fun zikh aleyn. This work, probably the most reprinted secular Yiddish book of the nineteenth century, played a crucial role in introducing the autobiographical genre to a variegated and relatively extensive Yiddish readership. I am convinced that one of the most signiWcant models for Linetsky’s autobiography was Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte. Parallels between the autobiographies of these two authors, who rejected the world of their upbringing with a vengeance, abound: each heads his chapters with frequently ironic, seemingly jocular chapter headings that belie the painful emotional nature of their content; the depiction of each of their premature weddings is uncannily similar—in each, the bride steps on the groom’s foot during the ceremony, thus ensuring mastery over her betrothed; each man, forced prematurely into the marital condition and Wnding himself unable to perform sexually, is subject to the taunts and folk-aphrodisiac ‘cures’ of a domineering mother-in-law; each launches into a disquisition, interrupting the account of the life-history, on the relative merits and demerits of the Hasidim, the Mitnagdim and the Maskilim (such disquisitions are to be found, à la Maimon and, I believe, under his direct or indirect

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Notes to Pages 61–62 inXuence, in the later autobiographical works of Avrom Ber Gottlober and Yekhezkel Kotik); the narrative tone of each is almost unrelentingly picaresque. And so forth. If my surmise concerning the formative inXuence of Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte upon Dos poylishe yingl is correct, Maimon may have cast long shadows upon the subsequent development of Yiddish autobiography, and the satiric depiction of the Hasidim, a staple of this literature in all of its generic varieties. The Maimon/Linetsky parallel has not, to my knowledge, been noted in the substantial Yiddish critical literature devoted to Linetsky. For the fullest treatment of Linetsky’s Dos poylishe yingl, see David Goldberg, ‘Yiddish Satire and the Haskalah: The Case of Dos poylishe yingl’, Ph.D. thesis (Columbia University, New York, 1985). 94. Toldot Shlomoh Maimon, tr. to Hebrew by Y. H. Tavyuv (Warsaw, 1898). 95. Shloyme Maymon’s lebensgeschichte iberzetst fun daytsh, A. Y. Goldschmit (Vilna, 1927). 96. See Zalmen Reizen, ed., Fun Mendelssohn biz mendele: hantbukh far der geshikhte fun der yidisher haskole-literatur mit reproduktsies un bilder (Warsaw, 1923), p. 221. 97. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Konfessionen, tr. to Yiddish by D. Kassel (Warsaw, 1917). An undated edition of the Kassel translation of the Confessions preceded the 1917 edition. 98. On Kassel, see Leksikon fun der nayer yiddisher literature, ed. Shmuel Niger and Yankev Shatsky, 8 vols. (New York, 1956–81), 8:84–87. 99. Thus Avrom Yuditsky in a 1913 Hebrew review of Kotik’s work: ‘This book is new in kind, that up till now has been entirely non-existent in Yiddish literature, and whose lack has been keenly felt in our literatures, Hebrew and Russian. This marks the beginning of memoir literature that casts light upon the life of a previous generation and transports us to another world.’ As cited by Assaf in Kotik, Mah shera’iti, p. 49. 100. Shmuel Niger, in a devastating critique, dismisses this work as a dismal exercise in pretentious literary embellishment that utterly fails to capture the ‘soul of the child’. See Niger, Shmuesn vegn bikher, part 1 (New York, 1922), pp. 295–303, esp. p. 301. 101. See A. Litvin (pseudonym of Shmuel Hurwitz), ‘Yekhezkel Kotik un zayn kaviarnia’ in his Yidishe neshomes, 6 vols. in 4 (New York, 1916–17), vol. 3. These volumes have no concurrent pagination. 102. See Avrom Reizen, Episodn fun mayn lebn (literarishe episodn), part 2 (Vilna, 1929), pp. 209–10. 103. Thus Peretz on Kotik’s Zikhroynes: ‘To wander. That is our destiny! But with the book of memoirs in our hand. Recall everything, transcribe and recall! Leave the writing of the history of hoary times to the intellectuals—of recent times—to aged folk. Not “literary”, not fabricated (Gekinstlt). May it be related plainly, as a man talking to his friend, as one relating for himself and grandchildren. Like Yekhezkel Kotik’s Zikhoymes.’ See Y. L. Peretz, in his essay ‘Zikhroynes’, in Ale Verk, 18 vols. (Vilna, n.d.) 11:183.

Notes to Pages 63–66 104. On Smolenskin’s novel, see Patterson, The Hebrew Novel, passim; Klausner, Historiyah, 5:188–96. The popularity of the novel is attested by the numerous reprints of the work; see A. Ya’ari, Hasifrut hayafah be’ivrit (Jerusalem, 1927), p. 159. 105. Maimon was recognized, in his own lifetime, as an outstanding thinker, by Kant; see Raisin, pp. 85–86. Wilhelm Dilthey, who in many respects laid the foundations for the study of the autobiographical genre—see Marcus, pp. 135–48—was the Wrst to establish links between Maimon’s philosophical writings and the ‘idealistic’ philosophies of Fichte and Schelling. See Hugo Bergman, ‘Solomon Maimon’s Philosophy’, in The Autobiography, pp. 187–207, passim. 106. Smolenskin, Hato’eh bedarkhei hahayyim, 4 parts (Vilna, 1921), 1:150. 107. Compare especially M. Y. Berdichevsky, ‘Beyn hashemashot’, in the section Rishmei no’ar, in his Mibayit umihuts (Pietrokov, 1899), pp. 32–37, with two episodes in Maimon’s autobiography: his Wrst experience of drawing (pp. 27–28) and his Wrst sight of a naked girl (p. 49). See also Berdichevsky’s impassioned essay on Maimon and his autobiography in Peri sefer (Warsaw, 1911), pp. 36–44. In this essay Berdichevsky cites the naked girl episode from the Tavyuv translation he is reviewing, and comments ‘a great spiritual revelation!’, p. 37. On Berdichevsky’s self-identiWcation with Maimon, see Sh. Halkin, Muskamot umashberim besifrutenu (Jerusalem, 1980), pp. 60–62. On the tremendous impact made upon Berdichevsky by the Lebensgeschichte, one of the Wrst German books he read in his mid-twenties, see Holtzman, Haqera’, p. 52. 108. M. Y. Berdichevsky, Kol sippurei mikhah yosef bin-gorion (Berdichevsky) (Tel Aviv, 1951), p. 32. Berdichevsky corroborates the autobiographical identiWcation of this passage in the above-cited review of the Tavyuv translation, where he writes that he Wrst ‘hearkened’ to the entire Lebensgeshcichte in the original German ‘upon my also going to seek knowledge and cultivation, and I strayed afar . . . ’, Peri sefer, p. 36. 109. Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg), ’Igrot ’ahad-ha’am, 6 vols. (Berlin, 1923–25) 1:225. 110. Joseph Opatoshu, In Polish Woods, tr. Isaac Goldberg (Philadelphia, 1938), pp. 357V. 111. Dubnow, Dos bukh fun mayn lebn, 1:69. 112. See Zinberg, Di geshikhte, 7:1:165. 113. Alexander Harkavy, Peraqim mehayyay (New York, 1935), p. 3. Tselafhad Bar Khushim was the pseudonym under which Lilienblum wrote his Hatt’ot ne’urim. 114. See, The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr, tr. by Richard and Clara Winston and Harry Zohn (New York, 1991), p. 112. 115. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York, 1982), p. 252.

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Notes to Pages 67–69

Chapter Three 1. See, for example, Hiram Peri in his article ‘BiograWah ve’otobiograWah’, in Ha’entsiklopediyah ha’ivrit, 32 vols. (Jerusalem, 1949–80)7:289: ‘Biography is a composition that describes the life of a man. Autobiography is a biography written by its own subject.’ Jewish literary criticism, it should be noted, is not exceptional in this respect. ‘Before the 1930s’, writes Spengemann, ‘virtually everyone except a few journalists and German scholars considered autobiography a subcategory of biography.’ See Spengemann, p. 187. Serious attention to the deWnitional problems involved in the use of the term ‘autobiography’ only really began in the 1970s. See Spengemann, pp. 183–89; Georges May, L’autobiographie (Paris, 1979), pp. 9–16, 117–26. 2. See Ezriel Ukhmani, Tokhnim vetsurot: leksikon munahim sifrutiim, 2 vols. (revised and enlarged edition, Tel Aviv, 1986) 1:19; 2:56, 278. 3. Ibid., 2:253. 4. See Shatsky, Bal Makhshoves, and Peri, as cited above; see also ‘Biography and Autobiography’ in Encyclopaedia Judaica 4:1010–12; Bernard Weinryb, ‘Biographies’, in The Universal Jewish Encyclopaedia 2:356–58; Max Grunwald, ‘Memoirs’, in ibid., 7:457–59. 5. Also included in Misch’s History of Autobiography in Antiquity. See Misch, vol. 1, pp. 315–26. 6. The term Kinnus means literally ‘assembling’ or ‘collecting’. In a literary context, the term is generally associated with H. N. Bialik and refers to the systematic retrieval, publication, and preservation of the Jewish literary heritage. See Bialik, Devarim shebe’al peh, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1935), 1:64–73. 7. See Cecil Roth on Gei’ hizzayon and Hayyei yehudah, in The Jews in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1959). 8. See Shatsky, ‘Yidishe memuarn literatur’, in which he makes no mention either of Hayyei yehudah or Gei’ hizzayon. See also Shatsky’s review of Leo Schwarz’s Memoirs of My People, in which he faults Schwarz for his relative disregard of autobiographies written in Slavic languages. For, ‘in the last Wfty to sixty years’, Shatsky claims, ‘Jews in the Slavic-speaking countries have been more proliWc in memoirliterature than have those of the West.’ See Yivo bleter, vol. 23 (1944), pp. 390–92. 9. Leo Schwarz, Memoirs of My People Through a Thousand Years (New York, 1943), p. xiii. James Olney argues precisely this point in his essay ‘Autobiography and the Cultural Moment’: ‘The student and reader of autobiographies—the literary critic—who has taken them up so avidly in the past twenty years—is a vicarious or a closet autobiographer . . . ’ See Olney, ed., Autobiography, p. 26. See also Olney’s review essay, ‘(Auto)biography’, in The Southern Review (Baton Rouge, Spring 1986), pp. 42–43. 10. Schwarz, p. xiv. The emotional tenor of Schwarz’s introduction should be considered within the historical context in which he was writing, in the midst of World War II. Schwarz entered military service in 1942, at the time he was complet-

Notes to Pages 69–72 ing the manuscript of Memoirs of My People. See Schwartz, ‘The Role of Autobiographical Literature in Jewish Historiography’, preserved in the papers of Isaiah Trunk in the YIVO Archives in New York, p. 26. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. xv. 13. Ibid., pp. xv–xvii. 14. For a discussion of Schwarz as anthologist and his conceptualization of ‘Jewish Literature’, see Michael P. Kramer, ‘Race, Literary History and the “Jewish” Question’, in Prooftexts, vol. 21, no. 3 (Baltimore, Fall 2001), pp. 20–24. 15. Ibid., p. xxiv. 16. The bibliographical appendix to the book represents the largest bibliography to date, to my knowledge, of Jewish autobiographical texts. The degree of his immersion in the topic is attested to by the above-cited unpublished and undated lecture he delivered in YIVO in New York, ‘The Role of Autobiographical Literature in Jewish Historiography’. Here he writes: ‘In the bibliographical appendix to Memoirs of My People, which was not intended for scholars and thus was sampling, I noted about 600 printed items of autobiography. If we include items not mentioned there and those published since 1943, I think I can safely estimate a total of between 2500 and 3000.’ See pp. 10–11 of this document. Further in the same document, on p. 27, he appends a ‘Proposed Formulation for a Descriptive Bibliography of Jewish Autobiographical Literature’ from the biblical to the contemporary period in Jewish and non-Jewish languages. Sadly, this project was never realized. 17. Schwarz, Memoirs, p. ix. 18. Ibid., pp. 15–17. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., pp. 25–27. 21. Ibid., pp. 29–31. 22. The term ‘additive autobiography’ was coined by Weintraub and proved of much avail to him in his discussion of mediaeval texts. See The Value of the Individual, pp. 49, 54–57, 63–64, 65, 68. For a similar distinction—one it should be noted more likely, in the present climate, to be made by historians than by literary critics— see Delany, pp. 1–5. Philipp, writing of Arabic autobiographical productions in the pre-modern period, writes that ‘it would be more appropriate . . . to speak of autobiographical materials rather than Arabic autobiography.’ Philipp, p. 574. 23. Shatsky and Roskies, it should be noted, are not alone in this assessment. See, for example, Bal Makhshoves’s above-cited ‘Undzer memuarn literatur’, pp. 61V.; Eisig Silberschlag, From Renaissance to Renaissance: Hebrew Literature from 1492–1970, 2 vols. (New York, 1973), 1:26–28; Abraham J. Mesch in his introduction to his translation of Nathan Neta Hannover’s Yeven metsulah, entitled Abyss of Despair: The Famous Seventeenth-Century Chronicle Depicting Jewish Life in Russia and Poland During the Chmielnitzki Massacres of 1648–1649 (New York, 1950); Rav Tsa’ir’s (Chaim Tschernovitz) review of Zalman Epstein’s autobiography of childhood in his Massekhet zikhronot (New York, 1945), pp. 160–62. This basic assumption concerning the essentially non—or even anti—autobiographical nature of Jewish literature—principally that written in Jewish languages—has proven extraordinarily

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Notes to Page 72 tenacious, to the extent of attaining almost creedal status in Jewish scholarship. Natalie Zemon Davis’ recent explorations in the Weld of early-modern Jewish autobiographical writing are essentially informed and formed by this concept. See her ‘Fame and Secrecy: Leon Modena’s Life as an Early Modern Autobiography’, in The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s ‘Life of Judah’, tr. and ed. Mark R. Cohen, with introductory essays by Mark R. Cohen and Theodore K. Rabb, Howard E. Adelman, and Natalie Zemon Davis and historical notes by Howard E. Adelman and Benjamin C. David (Princeton, 1988), pp. 50–70, passim; idem, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge Mass., 1995), chap. 2, ‘Arguing with God: Glikl Bas Judah Leib’. Likewise Mintz, as discussed above. Schwarz, in his introduction to Memoirs, pp. xxv–xxvi, seems to subscribe to this credo. Interestingly, though, in his unpublished YIVO lecture, subsequent to the anthology, Schwarz calls into severe question and seeks to refute the ‘working hypothesis . . . found expressed or implied in the work of the major historians of Jewish history of the last century’, that ‘the Judaic cast of mind has produced a reserve which frowned upon personal expression’. See idem, ‘The Role’, p. 1. 24. See A. Z. Rabinowitz, Jean Jacques Rousseau (Warsaw, 1899), p. 81. 25. Shatsky, in his review of Schwarz’s Memoirs of My People, p. 389. 26. David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 134. That Roskies makes an exception of Kabbalistic literature in this respect is interesting. Gershom Scholem, the founding father of the study of Jewish mysticism, saw precisely in the Kabbalist’s disinclination toward autobiographical self-expression a crucial point of diVerentiation between Jewish and other, notably Christian, forms of mystical literature. See Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1961), pp. 15V. For an intuitive and original explanation for the Kabbalist’s dislike of self-expression, see Hannah Arendt’s review of Scholem’s Major Trends, in her The Jew as Pariah (New York, 1978), pp. 99–103. Roskies comments have, I feel, actually been prescient of some reconsideration of the autobiographical aspect of Kabbalistic literature. See especially Mikhal Oron, ‘Halom, hazon umetsi’ut besefer hahezyonot ler’ hayyim vital’, in Mehkerei yerushalayim bemahashevet yisra’el, vol. 10 (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 300– 309; Hayyim ben Joseph Vital, Jewish Mystical Autobiographies: Book of Visions and Book of Secrets, tr. and with an introduction by Morris M. Faierstein (New York, 1999), pp. i-xxii. 27. Shatsky Wrst advanced this thesis in his 1935 article in Tsukunft. Worthy of note is that one of Shatsky’s Wrst articles in Yiddish dealt with the ‘Cantonist’ experience as reXected in memoirs. See ‘Di kantonistn in der balaykhtung fun di poylishe memuaristn’, in Shtromen (Warsaw, 1922). Shatsky’s reading of Schwarz’s Memoirs of My People, he says, reinforced him in the opinion that Jewish autobiography is most likely to be written in times of national catastrophe. See Shatsky’s review of Schwarz, pp. 388–89. See also Shatsky, ‘Yidishe memuarn literatur fun der velt milkhome un der rusisher revolutsie’, in Tsukunft (New York, 1926). Shatsky evinced an abiding fascination with Jewish autobiography; see the bibliography of his works

Notes to Pages 73–75 prepared by Mordechai Kassover and Menasheh Unger, Yankev Shatsky: bibliograWe (New York, 1939), and the subsequent completion of this bibliography by Eliezer Malakhi in Shatsky bukh, ed. Y. Lifshits (New York, 1958), pp. 327–368. Shatsky’s understanding of Jewish autobiography is not without its autobiographical basis. In the midst of writing these articles on Jewish autobiography, Shatsky had, in 1931, written an autobiography that he appended to letters to his wife, under the title Mayn oytobiograWye. This almost embarrassingly self-baring document reveals a ‘mind at the end of its tether’: ‘I am a neurasthenic’, he writes: ‘My life has been a failure. Once more oV the “rails”—but so perhaps it has to be’ (p. 111). A sense of personal catastrophe,—‘standing before the abyss’, intimation of an early death, recent suicidal ideations,—appears to have been the catalyst for his writing of this ‘lifeconfession’ (p. 110). Applying to himself the thesis that, contemporaneously with this, he was developing concerning the distinctive psychological motivations behind Jewish autobiography in general, Shatsky writes: ‘Happy men do not Xee to the past and immerse themselves again in waters through which they have already swum once. Only a man who wishes to Xee from reality—because it is atrocious to him (and perhaps he is atrocious to it?)—only such a man seeks the life-raft in the calm waters of his childhood past. It is certainly not healthy to ruminate over one’s own soul and make a spectacle of one’s own ego.’ See Mayn oytobiograWye, ibid., pp. 109– 18. This nexus between the writing and the reading of autobiography, the ‘ruminating over one’s own soul’ (Zikh tsu griblen in der eygener neshome) and over that of others, is highly pertinent in the present context. 28. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, p. 135. 29. Bal Makhshoves makes a similar point; see Memuarn literatur, pp. 62–63. 30. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, p. 135. One wonders whether Georg Misch’s massive History of Autobiography from Antiquity to the Middle Ages was included in Roskies’s research. While one may question Misch’s conclusions and his Diltheyan epistemology, the evidence amassed by him in these volumes would suggest that while the writing of autobiography proper may be culture- and time-speciWc, the ‘will to bear particular witness’ is as ‘innate’ as any literary expression can be said to be. Misch’s life-long research, at all events, cannot be left entirely out of account in the formulation of such statements. 31. Shatsky, ‘Yidishe memuarn literatur’, p. 486. 32. Ibid., p. 487. 33. See Moshe Eliyahu Jak (Jaranansky-Jak), ‘Ro’eh ve’eino nir’eh’, in Hatequfah, vol. 16 (Warsaw, 1922), pp. 515–21. 34. Reb Mordkhele (Mordechai Tschemerinsky), ‘Ayarati Mottele’, in Reshumot, ed. H. N. Bialik and Y. Ravnitzky, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv, 1926), pp. 123–25. 35. Roskies, Against the Aocalypse, p. 137. 36. H. G. Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography (New York, 1934), p. 12. See also Finney, chap. 10, ‘The Double Perspective: The Self and History’. 37. See Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, tr. and ed., From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (New York, 1983), pp. 7–9.

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Notes to Pages 75–78 38. See Roskies’s chapter ‘The Self Under Siege’ in Against the Apocalypse, pp. 133–62. This chapter, in which Roskies brings together an astonishingly wide range of texts within a unifying theoretical perspective, is something of a tour de force. 39. Though Shatsky, in acclaiming the memoirs of Vladimir Medem writes that the latter ‘combines the honesty of a Rousseau with the broadness of an Aksakov’. See ‘Yidishe memuarn literatur’, p. 486. 40. See Davis, Women, p. 21. 41. Alan Mintz hints at such a connection in his treatment of Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg’s ’Avi’ezer. See Mintz, p. 27. 42. For a counter-argument, unconvincing to my mind, to Lejeune’s assertion that ‘there can be no timeless deWnition of autobiography, nothing that is which might hold works as distant from one another in historical time as the Confessions of Augustine and La Regle du jeu [Michel Leiris’ autobiographical exploration published in 1948, M.M.] together, as evidently belonging to the same literary genre by virtue of the way they intrinsically are’, see John Sturrock, The Language of Autobiography: Studies in the First Person Singular (Cambridge, 1993), p. 286. How can a text—or anything else, come to that—‘intrinsically be’, in the absence of a reader informed and disinformed by the readerly/generic conventions of his/her/our day? Again, the crucial distinction between the autobiographical and the autobiography applies here: to make the legitimate argument that both testaments of the Bible, for example, contain novelistic, even autobiographical, elements, is a far cry from deWning the book as either or both. 43. See Delany, pp. 1–2. 44. See Buckley, p. 18. 45. Sturrock, pp. 22–23, notes the disparity between the reading of Augustine’s Confessions by the ‘student of autobiography’ and its reading, over the centuries, by ‘those who share or aspire to his Catholic faith’, for whom the work is not an autobiography but a psalmic profession of the greatness and goodness of God. Paul Valery, according to Lejeune, was the Wrst to read the Discours de la Méthode as an autobiographical text. See Lejeune, L’autobiographie, p. 59. 46. See May, pp. 20–23. 47. Letteris, Zikkaron basefer, pp. 1–8. 48. Rousseau, Confessions, Cohen translation, p. 17. Stephen Spender describes this as ‘an extraordinary passage which deserves to be illustrated by Mr. James Thurber’. See Stephen Spender’s essay ‘Confessions and Autobiography’, in Autobiography, ed. Olney, p. 120. The spectre of Letteris standing before the ‘throne of the Almighty on the Day of Judgment’ with Zikkaron basefer in his hand is no less worthy of illustration. 49. Letteris also curried the Haskamot or ‘approbations’ of Orthodox rabbis for his Hebrew translations from European literature—a further incentive to cautionary bowdlerizing. See Kressel, Leksikon: 2:247–49. 50. Letteris’s translation of Goethe’s Faust, entitled Ben Avuyah, Wrst appeared in Vienna in 1865. Smolenskin’s critique of the work, his literary debut in Hebrew,

Notes to Pages 78–81 was published as a supplement to Hamelits in 1867. For an account of the controversy that this critique sparked oV, see F. Lachover’s essay ‘Goethe basifrut ha’ivrit’, in his ’Al gevul hayashan vehehadash (Tel Aviv, 1951). 51. Letteris, pp. 2–3. 52. There exists the possibility of direct Carlylean inXuence upon Letteris. Heroes and Hero-Worship was Wrst published in 1841. Letteris was acquainted with English literature, whether in the original language or in German is unclear. He translated Byron’s ‘Hebrew Melodies’ and ‘Darkness’ into Hebrew. See Klausner, Historiah 2:396. 53. Letteris, p. 2. 54. See Alexander Altmann, ‘The Delphic Maxim in Mediaeval Islam and Judaism’, in Biblical and Other Studies, ed. Altmann (Harvard, 1963). 55. Ibid. 56. For example, in Tikkunei zohar, 130b, as cited by Altmann, p. 208. 57. Letteris, pp. 3–4. 58. Ibid., p. 3. 59. Letteris, on p. 5, cites as his source for these memoirs a French anthology, Collection des mémoires relatif à la révolution d’Angleterre. I have been unable to locate this source. 60. Ibid. 61. Letteris is probably referring to the preface of De Termino Vitae (1639). 62. Letteris, p. 6. 63. Melitsah, originally a term of approbation, but carrying in contemporary Israeli Hebrew a pejorative connotation, refers to the highly artiWcial mosaic of biblical phrases which became, until the innovations of M. A. Guenzburg, the standard prose-style of the Maskilim. See Patterson, The Hebrew Novel, especially pp. 100, 107–10. 64. Letteris, pp. 3 and 5. Letteris would have been constrained from using the term ‘autobiography’ by the conventions of Melitsah, which demanded a biblical paraphrase of foreign terms. See Dan Ben Amots, Kelil tif’eret hamelitsah (Tel Aviv, 1985), under the entry ‘Autobiography’ on p. 12. 65. See the autobiographical preambles assembled by Lejeune in L’autobiographie, especially Rousseau’s ‘Neuchâtel’ preamble, pp. 152–53; and Restif de la Bretonne’s introduction to Monsieur Nicholas, pp. 161–63. See also Andre Malraux, AntiMemoirs, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York, 1968), pp. 1–9. 66. Mintz, p. 8, addresses this issue. 67. Megillat ’Ahima’ats was Wrst discovered by Adolph Neubauer in the Cathedral Library at Toledo in 1895. A critical edition of the text was Wrst published by A. Kahana in 1922. Since then, two further editions of the text have been published. 68. The autobiographical account of an anonymous pupil of Abraham AbulaWa, to be discussed below, was Wrst published by Gershom Scholem in Qiriat sefer, 1 (1924). The complete edition of R. Hayyim Vital’s Sefer hahezyonot was Wrst published in Jerusalen in 1954, ed. A. Aescoly. Oron, p. 308, adduces the testimony of Vital’s son and grandson that Vital never intended his work to be made public.

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Notes to Pages 81–85 69. In a strange, highly theological essay, quite unlike his ‘Conditions and Limits’, Georges Gusdorf, in tracing the autobiographical impulse to the book of Genesis, suggests the term ‘scriptures of self ’. See Gusdorf, ‘Scripture of the Self: “Prologue in Heaven”’, in Olney, ed., Studies, pp. 112–27. Debora Shuger, writing of representations of the self in seventeenth-century England, employs the term ‘lifewriting’. Her caveat concerning this all-embracing term may well be applied to the Jewish texts here under discussion: ‘The memoirs, diaries, epistolary collections, hagiographies, character sketches, and royal lives that constitute seventeenth-century life-writings do not, as the catchall label suggests, add up to a genre; they neither belong to a single literary genealogy nor establish an intertextual order among themselves.’ See her ‘Life-Writing in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Coleman, Lewis and Kowalik, ed., p. 63. 70. See Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 4, p. 1011. 71. See Yosef Dan, Hasippur ha’ivri biymei habeinayim (Jerusalem, 1979), p. 217. 72. Cecil Roth, The Jews in the Renaissance (Philadelphia, 1959), pp. 105–07. 73. See Yagel, A Valley of Vision: The Heavenly Journey of Abraham ben Hananiah Yagel, tr. from the Hebrew, with an introduction and commentary by David Ruderman (Philadelphia, 1990) (henceforth referred to as Ruderman). 74. Yagel, Gei’ hizzayon, ed. Abraham Baruch Mani (Na-Amon, Alexandria, 1880). 75. For the circumstances of the composition of this work, see Ruderman edition, pp. 1–2. 76. Ruderman edition, p. 68. 77. See Dan’s note re this, Hassipur ha’ ivri, p. 205. 78. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 4:477. Moses Shulvass also devotes several pages to Gei’ hizzayon in his Hayyei hayehudim be’italiah bitequfat hareneysans (New York, 1955), pp. 203–7. 79. Dan, pp. 221, 217. 80. Ruderman edition, pp. 23–24. 81. Ibid., p. 309. 82. Ibid., pp. vii–ix. 83. Title page of Gei’ hizzayon as quoted by Yitshaq Ben Ya’akov in ’Otsar hasefarim (Vilna, 1880), entry 112. 84. Ruderman edition, p. 20. 85. Ibid., p. 71. 86. Ibid., p. 72. 87. Ibid., p. 86. 88. Ibid., pp. 86–96. The degree of Dante’s inXuence upon this text is contested. Roth and Dan viewed the work primarily under the auspices of Dantean inXuence, but Ruderman argues that Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy provides a far more signiWcant and formative precedent for Yagel. See Ruderman edition, pp. 45–50, esp. p. 46, n. 138. 89. Ibid., p. 100. 90. Ibid. pp. 277–79. 91. See ibid., pp. 28–36, for a detailed survey of Yagel’s stories and their Italian sources. 92. Ibid., p. 62.

Notes to Pages 85–91 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., p. 72. 95. Ibid., pp. 221–22. It was at the instigation of the Almagiati banking family that Yagel was imprisoned. 96. Ibid., p. 223. 97. Ibid., p. 223, n 1. Ruderman identiWes this woman as ‘no other than Boethius’s Lady Philosophy, as described in the Consolation’. The basic parallels in the two depictions leap to the eye. What we do not Wnd in Boethius, however, is the sinister, predatory, sexually threatening, noir/ ‘dangerous’ aspects of this Wgure as in the Yagel variation. Yagel’s depiction, later in the book, of the ‘mother of all languages’, well-endowed not only in philosophy, is even more lurid, graYtiesque: ‘a woman approached us, projecting the image of a nobleman . . . her head was like crimson wool and the lock of her hair was like purple, giving her a beautiful appearance. We recognized that she was a virgin because her head [literally hair] was disheveled. Moreover, her two breasts were like two fawns, twins of a gazelle [that were] beautiful in appearance. From these two wells Xowed fresh water that surged and became more powerful . . . ’ (p. 296). Very strange/normal, also, given the overtly moralistic nature of the work and its direct adjurations against ‘lusting after women’ (pp. 75–76) is Yagel’s account of his ‘entrance into the heavenly palace’: ‘We passed a small stream called the “passage of love” and this was its nature: When a man with passion and desire crossed it, he would tread over with his feet instantaneously; the water would become shallow so he would not feel it. However, a person lacking passion and desire would Wnd its appearance like mighty waters, and even a powerful stream would not [be able] to cross it. When I crossed the stream, we heard a pleasant and Wne voice singing from the music of Solomon . . . ’ (p. 313). The ‘third woman’s’ discourse that is delivered in this palace, the Yagels having successfully traversed, by her guidance, the ‘passage of love’, concerns the esoteric infrastructure of the universe. Her exposition on this topic is highly sexually explicit in its depictions of inter-planetary intercourse and the equivalent of these engagements in the intra-uniting of the various SeWrot of the Kabbalistic tree. See esp. pp. 325–29. I do think that in the depiction of these females, we may discern distinct echoes of Dante. 98. See Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, tr. and with an introduction by Richard Green (New York, 1962), p. 4. 99. Ruderman ed., pp. 226–28, passim. 100. Ibid., pp. 277–80. 101. Ibid., p. 32. 102. Ibid., p. 21. 103. See Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish: peraqim letoldoteiha, esp. pp. 86–89. 104. Dan, Hasippur ha’ivri, p. 217. 105. Ruderman edition, pp. 25–26. 106. See, for example, ibid., p. 87, 98–99. 107. For example, ibid., pp. 175–83.

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Notes to Pages 92–102 108. Ibid., pp. 211–13. 109. The stylistic laxity of the autobiographical sections of Gei’ hizzayon is attested to by the higher frequency of explanatory interpolations, compensation for ellipses, provided by Ruderman, by comparison with the remainder of the text. 110. Ibid., p. 180. 111. Ibid. , pp. 73–74. 112. Ibid., pp. 76–77. 113. Ibid., p. 78. 114. Ibid., p. 73. 115. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Carol Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas, 1990), p. 158. 116. Ibid., pp. 77–79. 117. Insofar as biblical precedents go, Yagel is indebted to the book of Job, as have been autobiographers to this day. Job, as has been mentioned, makes personal appearance in Gei’ hizzayon, and Yagel, indeed, is privileged to a personal audience with him (ibid., pp. 167–75). Elsewhere in the book, the father addresses Yagel in the words of Bildad to Job (p. 125). 118. Ibid., p. 98. 119. Compare Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris, 1972), pp. 172–74. 120. Ruderman edition, p. 195. 121. Ibid., pp. 224–25. 122. Ibid., p. 177. 123. Ibid., p. 49. 124. See Richard A. Green, in Boethius, p. xxiii. 125. Ruderman edition, p. 277. 126. Ibid., p. 280. 127. Ibid., pp. 271, 316–34. 128. Ibid., p. 277. 129. Ibid., p. 49. 130. Ibid., p. 64. 131. Ibid., p. 339. 132. Ibid. 133. At one stage, for example, the father, who appears to regard his son as something of a wimp, reminds the incarcerated Abraham that ‘many people have been imprisoned and have been aZicted by having their feet bound’: Joseph, he says, who ‘remained in jail for thirteen years’, Daniel ‘a precious man’, who ‘never gave up hope in his God when he was thrown into the lion’s den’, never raised their voice in complaint, but ‘received God’s punishment with love’ (ibid., p. 122). Israel Zinberg’s comment in the appendix he devotes to Gei’ hizzayon is wonderful: ‘Thus the son’s real life-depiction is intertwined . . . with a great deal of sermonizing, of which the author’s father is by no means unsparing (Gornisht kin kamtsen).’ See his Geshikhte, 4:477. I am reminded, mutatis mutandis, of ‘Izzy’ ’s lengthy moralizing address, lavishly furnished with scriptural citations, on behalf of the ‘Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’, to the mangy, half-starved mare who has just endured a severe beating by the cops, in Mendele/Abramovitsh’s Di klatshe. See S. Y. Abramovitsh, Ale verk fun mendele moykher sforim (Warsaw, 1928), 22 vols., 4:95–111. To pursue—or rather stretch—the analogy with later Yiddish literature, Yagel’s autobiographical narrative, especially when he gets ‘over-excited’ reads on occasion like one of Sholem Aleichem’s agitated, obsessive speakers in his ‘Monologues’ series. 134. Yosef Dan, as cited in Ruderman edition, p. 21. 135. Ruderman edition, p. 68.

Notes to Pages 102–4 136. Ibid., p. 8. 137. Ibid., p. 15. 138. Ibid., p. 2. 139. See ibid., pp. 61–63, 313–15. On autobiography as encyclopaedia and viceversa, compare Marcus Moseley, ‘Between Memory and Forgetfulness: The JanusFace of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky’, in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 12 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 78–117. 140. Dylan as cited by Mike Marqusee, Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan’s Art (New York, 2003), p. 224. Marqusee’s discussion of this song is highly original and suggestive and quite pertinent in the present context. 141. See Encyclopaedia Judaica, ‘Biographies and Autobiographies’, p. 102. Compare Meyer Waxman, A History of Jewish Literature, 4 vols. (New York, 1943), 2:508; Dan, Hasippur ha’ivri, p. 217; Daniel Carpi in his introduction to Modena, Sefer hayyei yehudah (Tel Aviv, 1985), p. 9. 142. Roth, Jews in Renaissance, p. 47. 143. See Davis, ‘Fame and Secrecy’, p. 70. 144. See Ruderman edition, pp. 26–27. 145. Modena was in fact world-famous in his own lifetime, far more so than Hayyei yehudah would indicate. At thirty years old, he composed a poem in Hebrew and Italian honoring the birth of the future Louis XII. He knew personally leading Christian ecclesiastics and notables from Italy, France, Ireland and England, who attended his sermons, and in 1611, he was oVered the chair of oriental languages in Paris. See Howard E. Adelman, ‘Modena: Autobiography and the Man’, pp. 19–49 passim, in Modena, The Autobiography. 146. Carpi edition, p. 18. The ‘Ambrosiana’ manuscript of Hayyei Yehudah is now kept in Milan. Mark Cohen’s argument, contra Carpi, that the latter manuscript is an autograph is convincing. See his ‘Excursus 2: Who Wrote the Ambrosiana manuscript of Hayyei yehudah?’ in Modena, Autobiography, pp. 284–93. 147. Modena, Autobiography, pp. 124–28 [74–77]. All references to Hayyei yehudah are cited Wrst according to the Cohen English translation, followed by the equivalent pagination in the Carpi Hebrew edition in square brackets. Venice became in the sixteenth century, with the establishment of Daniel Bomberg’s press, the centre for Hebrew printing in Italy. See Cecil Roth, The History of the Jews in Venice (Philadelphia, 1930), pp. 245–66. Venice was also an important centre for the publishing of Yiddish books; see Shulvass, pp. 207–09. Internecine rivalry between rival publishing houses led to government intervention and sporadic banning of the printing of Hebrew books. See Modena’s account of the printing of his Beit yehudah in Hayyei yehudah, pp. 141–42 [88–89]. 148. Thus, in the Ambrosiana autograph, we have an interpellation in another hand, in Latin, by a certain ‘Abraham Israel’, who adds to the roster that Modena compiled of the eulogies granted his writings by others, that of the author of a book entitled Dallaeus on the Oral Confession. See Modena, p. 174 [110–11]. Carpi, on p. 22 in his introduction, makes note of two further interpolations in the text by a later hand.

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Notes to Pages 105–6 149. Modena, p. 76 [32]. I have amended the Cohen translation here. Cohen translates ‘Yod’ei shemi’ as ‘others who know me’, implying that Modena is here conWning his readership to those ‘others’ he actually knew in his life. The implied readership of ‘those who know my name’ is far wider, encompassing both contemporary readers, who know of Modena, have heard of him, and future ones. Davis makes the claim, central to her larger thesis, that Hayyei yehudah ‘was not for the general Jewish public, let alone for gentile eyes’. (Davis, ‘Fame’, p. 66). She buttresses this assertion by pointing to the fact that ‘Modena’s funeral plan also had a warning in it: “Care must be taken lest someone lay hands on his manuscripts”’ (Ibid., p. 65). The latter clause is indeed to be found in the earlier of the two wills included in Hayyei yehudah; see Modena, p. 177 [114]. There is, however, no mention of ‘eyes’, Jewish or otherwise, just hands. Carpi’s suggestion that the phrase Shelo’ tishlot bahem yad should be construed as ‘lest they be stolen’ seems to me eminently sensible: autograph manuscripts, being unique, are inherently more valuable commodities than printed books—not to mention dangers of plagiarism, to which the Hebrew ‘lest a(nother) hand prevail upon them’ could equally apply. In his subsequent will, included in Hayyei yehudah, Modena bequeathes all of his manuscripts to his grandson, Isaac min halevi’yim; see Modena, p. 176 [113]. Isaac min halevi’im was himself a printer, apprenticed in the craft under Modena himself, and he served as both copyist and printer for Modena’s works. See Modena, English edition, index under ‘Halevi’im, Isaac min’. Nowhere, in either of these wills, does Modena specify that Hayyei yehudah, of all his manuscripts, should be certiWed ‘top secret’; the very fact that it was included within his bequest with the remainder of his manuscripts, bequeathed to a tried copyist and printer of his own works, undercuts Davis’s presumptions and the more global conclusions concerning Jewish autobiographical writing that she builds upon these. 150. These editions were apparently undertaken contemporaneously. The editors of the English edition were planning an even larger critical apparatus for the work, prior to the appearance of the Carpi edition. See Modena, Autobiography, p. xvii. 151. Shmuel David Luzzatto, ’Iggerot Shadal, ed. Eisig Graber, 2 vols. (Przemysl, 1882; Krakau, 1891), 1:287–93. 152. See Sha’anan, ’Hashpa’at rousseau ’al sh.d. lutsato’, in ’Iyyunim, pp. 102–15. 153. For the problems that Shadal, as autobiographer, encountered, see his letter of October 10, 1847; also his letter to Rappaport in Luzzatto, ’Iggerot, 2:1034–35. See also his letter of January 26, 1862, to L. Silberman, editor of Hamaggid, in which his autobiography was serialised, in ibid., 2:1388–89. Luzzatto’s fascination with the experience of childhood stemmed in no small part from his reading of Rousseau’s Émile, which he recommends in glowing terms to a friend in a letter cited by Zinberg, Geshikhte, 9:135. 154. See Werses, ‘Darkhei ha’autobiograWah’, pp. 175–83. See also Moshe Shulvass’s introduction to S. L. Luzzatto’s Italian autobiography, which Shulvass edited and translated, Pirqei hayyim (New York, 1951). The fullest discussion of Shadal’s autobiographical writings in Hebrew is Ha’ezrahi, Toldot shadal, pp. 223–39.

Notes to Pages 106–7 155. A year and a half before his Wnding the manuscript of Hayyei yehudah, Luzzatto had come across Modena’s Sha’agat aryeh and Qol sakhal. Luzzatto was the Wrst to ascribe authorship—and this he does unequivocally—of the heretical pamphlet Qol sakhal to Modena himself. Modena, he writes to S. G. Stern, on May 25, 1846, ‘was more of a reformist than Geiger—two hundred and twenty years ago! And in Italy!!’ (exclamations in original); see ’Iggerot, 2:980. Luzzatto here sparked oV a scholarly controversy that continues to this day. See Ellis Rivkin, Leon da Modena and the Kol Sakhal (Cincinnati, 1952), pp. 96–117; see also Adelman’s note on this in Modena, pp. 238–39. 156. I have drawn these biographical data from the excellent survey of Klausner, Historiah 2:50–78. 157. See Werses, ‘Shmuel david lutsato be’einei atsmo—’iyyun be’iggrotav ha’ivriot’, in Megamot, esp. pp. 267–69. 158. But Letteris, who corresponded extensively with Shadal, fails, for some reason, to make any mention of Hayyei yehudah in his survey of Jewish autobiography in Zikkaron basefer. 159. For bibliographical details, see Carpi edition, p. 18. 160. Isaac Samuel Reggio, Mazkeret Yashar (Vienna, 1849); on which see Werses, ‘Darkhei ha’autobiograWah’, p. 178. 161. Carpi edition, pp. 18–19. 162. See Kahana’s introduction to vol 1 of Sifrut hahistoriah hayisra’elit, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1922–23). Kahana is now a little-remembered Wgure, but he was inXuential in his day, as the numerous reprints of Sifrut hahistoriah hayisra’elit testify. Kahana also edited the Wrst printed edition of David Reubeni’s diary (Warsaw, 1922). Schwarz, in his Memoirs of My People, includes English translations of no less than nine sections culled from Kahana’s anthology and cites many others in his bibliographical notes. He makes generous acknowledgment of his debt to Kahana in his introduction, p. xiv. 163. Modena, Sefer hayyei Yehudah: kolel ’autobiograWah shel R. Yehudah Aryeh Modena utemunato, hotsi’ le’or ri’shonah ’im haqdamah vehe’arot, ed. Avraham Kahana (Kiev, 1911). 164. The classic example of such a text is the posthumously published three-volume memoir of R. Jacob Halevy Lipschitz, Zikhron ya’aqov. This memoir, the Wrst volume of which was published in 1924 by Lipschitz’s son, includes a photograph of the author, a preface and notes. The series of Xowery letters from leading rabbinic authorities with which each volume is prefaced follows, however, the traditional format. This work will be discussed in greater detail below. It should be noted, however, that Modena’s Historia de Riti Hebraici (Paris, 1637) features a portrait of Modena on the title page. Adelman and Ravid note that ‘this picture shows no sign of a head-covering, as would be required by Jewish practice and also Venetian law’. See Modena, p. 258, n. v. Modena’s Riti, however, was written for a non-Jewish audience; see Adelman in ibid., p. 29. This is the portrait that Kahana reproduced. That this ambivalence to portraits of authors persisted is attested to by Ahad Ha’am’s

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Notes to Pages 108–11 words on this issue: ‘In general, I am not drawn to the new customs gaining currency in our midst in recent years, with respect to photographs of more or less wellknown Wgures. Our people always honoured its most beloved men, but only their spirit and not the cast of their faces. This practice of circulating portraits of authors and public Wgures is taken from other peoples that have become accustomed from time immemorial to “idolatry” . . . but the people of Israel value the spirit and not the Xesh.’ See Yehoshuah, Ravnitsky, Dor vesofrav (Tel Aviv, 1926, 1937), 2:4. These considerations did not deter, however, this much-photographed man, from sitting for a highly idealized, almost iconic portrait by Joseph Teper. See Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg), Kol kitvei ’ahad ha’am (Tel Aviv, 1953), facing p. 1. 165. Modena, p. 75 [31]. The capitalized section here reXects the capitalization in the original manuscript, as reproduced in ibid., p. 74. 166. “Fat is his bread,’ Genesis 49:20. The reference is to the tribe of Asher. 167. See Asher Halevy, Die Memoiren des Ascher Levy aus Reichshofen im Elsass (1593–1635), ed., tr. and annotated by M. Ginsburger (Berlin, 1913), p. 3. 168. Modena, p. 76 [31]. 169. Yihyeh yaqar be’einei, ibid., p. 75 [31]. 170. See the classic anthology of Israel Abrahams, Jewish Ethical Wills, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1926), passim. 171. See especially ‘A Regimen of Self-Taxation and the Testament of Solomon Son of Isaac’, in ibid., 2:220. 172. Modena, p. 82 [37]. 173. Ibid., p. 76 [32], translation slightly modiWed. 174. See ibid., pp. xxvf. Again Davis is, in my view, wide of the mark in tracing a continuum from the ethical will to Hayyei yehudah. She traces a progressive expansion of the role of the ‘I’ of the ethical will over the centuries: the Jewish ethical will ‘encouraged’, according to Davis, ‘the writing about the self ’, and this led to ‘the next step’, which was ‘deciding to write “all”’, so that Modena ‘wrote his Wrst and second wills at the end of the manuscript; his Life has subsumed the ethical instruction’. See Davis, ‘Fame’, pp. 56–57. I would argue that Modena’s life does not ‘subsume’, on the model of the exemplum, but rather supersedes the ‘ethical instruction’. Ruderman, p. 27, makes the point, apropos of Davis’s argument, that while Modena ‘enumerates his sins’ he ‘experiences no change of heart’. 175. See the 1909 essay ‘ ’Al havidui’, reprinted in Michah Yosef Bin Gorion (Berdichevsky), Kol ma’amrei yosef bin-gorion (Tel Aviv, 1952), p. 347. 176. Modena, p. 75 [31]. 177. The relationship between Jerome Cardano’s De propria vita liber and Hayyei yehudah will be discussed below. 178. Modena, pp. 75, 108–09, [31, 62, 65–66]. 179. Ibid., p. 75 [31]. Translation modiWed. 180. Ibid. p. 76 [31]. Translation modiWed. The phrase that I have here translated ‘ridden with turmoil’, Seva’ rogez, is taken from Job 14:1. Modena’s identiWcation with Job is apparent from the onset of Hayyei yehudah; here there is a connecting

Notes to Pages 111–13 link with Yagel. Howard Adelman and Benjamin Ravid note that a further citation from Job (3:26) that occurs in the preamble ‘was often used by Modena, either wholly or in part at critical points of his life’. See Modena, p. 185, n. f. 181. Ibid., p. 76 [32]. By ‘body and soul’, Modena refers to his burial and funeral. Carpi takes this passage as evidence for his contention that the Ambrosiana manuscript of Hayyei yehudah is not from Modena’s hand but is rather a scribal revision of the original text. How, Carpi argues, could Modena have known in 1618 that he would write two wills: one for his ‘body and soul’ and another for his ‘manuscripts and printed works’ (Carpi, pp. 21–22)? This issue will be dealt with in greater detail below. But, it should be noted that Modena did not necessarily have two wills in mind when he wrote this sentence. Tsava’ati (“my will”) is in the singular here and the word ’Izzavon, which Carpi takes as referring to the second will, is never used with reference to a written document but refers always to the actual contents of the heritage that is to be bequeathed. 182. For a useful discussion of the diary/autobiography distinction, and a defense of the diary as a mode of writing faithful to the discontinuous, labile self of lived experience as opposed to the autobiography’s Wctive construction of coherent selfhood—and thus a salient corrective to my own discussion—see Felicity A. Nussbaum, ‘Toward Conceptualizing Diary’, in Olney, ed., Studies, pp. 128–40. 183. See Pascal, especially chapter 12. 184. See Rousseau, Confessions, passim, especially Book 10. 185. Lejeune, L’autobiographie, pp. 35–36. 186. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, tr. Peter Green (Harmondsworth, 1983), chapter 6; Dubnow, Dos bukh, 3:107–25. There is a striking parallelism in the decisions of Dubnow and de Beauvoir to switch from the retrospective, autobiographical mode of narration to the diaristic. In both cases, the prospects of autobiographical synthesis break down in face of the all-pervasive presence of Nazi terror, for Dubnow in Berlin in 1933 and for de Beauvoir in Paris in 1940. 187. See Olney, Metaphors of Self, especially pp. 38–45. 188. For a clear—and eloquent—statement of this distinction, see Daniel Stern, ‘Avant-propos des Mémoires’ (1833–1854), as cited by Lejeune, L’autobiographie, pp. 185–86. For a discussion of the distinction between diary and autobiography within a Jewish context, although of a later period than that covered in the present paper, see Max Weinreich, Der veg tsu undzer yugnt: yesoydes, metodn, problemen fun yiddisher yugntforshung (Vilna, 1935), pp. 149–68. 189. Thus, the Wnal sentence of the autobiography of Johann Dietz: ‘And in the year 1738 I died, my age being seventy-two years and two months.’ As cited, along with other examples, by E. Stuart Bates, Inside Out: An Introduction to Autobiography, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1936, 1937) 1:5–6. The temporally extended autobiographical ‘oeuvre’ of Michel Leiris is problematic in this respect. Leiris’s project suggests that the loss of an abiding sense of self in the modern world may render the autobiographical enterprise, as it has been hitherto understood, impossible. Leiris’s sense of the relativity of all linguistic constructs that seek to contain an ever-Protean self

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Notes to Pages 113–16 compels him to subject the data of his life-history to a constant process of revision, a project that can end only with his death. See Michel Leiris’s ‘Afterword’ to Manhood, tr. Richard Howard (San Francisco, 1984), pp. 153–64; the selections from Leiris’s autobiographical series La Règle du Jeu as presented by Lejeune in L’autobiographie, pp. 196–205; Germaine Bree, ‘Michel Leiris: Mazemaker’, in Olney, ed., Autobiography, pp. 194–207; Sturrock, pp. 256–84. 190. Hence the practice, quite common in Victorian times, of bidding the ‘Dear Diary’ ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’ and of greeting the diary with extravagant salutations after a prolonged period of absence. See Peter Gay, The Education of the Senses (New York, 1984), pp. 446–51. 191. Rousseau, Confessions, p. 28. 192. The term ‘solidity of self-image’ was suggested to me by Sturrock’s discussion of the failure of Michel Leiris’s autobiographical texts to deliver a ‘solid image’ of himself. See Sturrock, p. 284. Much of Sturrock’s discussion of Leiris is highly germane in the present context. See especially pp. 280–84. 193. Modena, p. 111 [64]. 194. Carpi’s contention hangs upon the assertion that reference to the two wills on the second page of Hayyei yehudah is a later, scribal interpolation. There is, as Cohen has noted, no calligraphic evidence here for a later addition, as there is elsewhere in the manuscript of Hayyei yehudah. This reference, as has been noted above, is not necessarily to two wills. See Cohen, in Modena, ‘Excursus 2’, esp. pp. 285–86. 195. Modena, p. 179 [115]. 196. See Cohen, ibid., pp. 284–85. Davis makes a strong case for the later dating of these interpolations in ‘Fame’, pp. 63–64, n. 38. 197. The omnipresence/‘omni-absence’ of death in autobiographical narrative has, of late, engendered a huge amount of critical/theoretical speculation. See Sturrock’s and Marcus’s indices under ‘Death’; Kronick, pp. 1013–15. 198. For the French original of this beautiful passage, see Lejeune, L’autobiographie, p. 168. 199. Ibid., p. xxii. 200. Montaigne was actually the Wrst to coin the term ‘essai’ for this new literary form. See Weintraub, pp. 178–80; J. M. Cohen in his introduction to his translation of Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Harmondsworth, 1958), p. 9. For a discussion of the belated appearance of the essay in Jewish literary discourse, see Moshe Vityes, ‘Essays and Essayists’ in Joseph Leftwich’s anthology The Way We Think, 2 vols. (London, 1969), 2:794–97. On Montaigne in relation to Modena, see Davis, ‘Fame’, esp. pp. 62–63. See, in general, on the relation between the ‘literary self-portrait’ and the autobiography, Beaujour, Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait; Moseley, ‘Between Memory’. 201. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, p. 235. 202. Modena, p. 82 [37]. Translation very slightly modiWed. 203. Rousseau, Confessions, p. 19.

Notes to Pages 116–20 204. Chateaubriand thus adopts as his epigraph for the Memoirs ‘sicut nubes . . . quasi naves . . . velut umbra’, a citation from Job 9:26. Implicit and explicit references to Job occur throughout the Memoirs, as they do in Modena’s Hayyei yehudah. 205. René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs, tr. D. Baldick (New York, 1961), p. 11. 206. See Goethe, The Autobiography,1:3–4; Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (Kingswood, 1928), pp. 5–7. 207. See Buki Ben Yogli (Yehudah Leib-Binyamin Katznelson), Mah shera’u ’einay vasham’u ’oznay (Jerusalem, 1957), p. 3; Eliezer Eliahu Friedman, Sefer hazikhronot (Tel Aviv, 1927), pp. 33–34; Ephraim Lisitsky, ’Elleh toldot adam (Jerusalem, n.d.), pp. 8f. S. Y. Agnon constructed an extraordinarily elaborate mythology around the scene of his nativity that receives its fullest elaboration in his bizarre autobiographical experiment, Hadom vekhise’. See Agnon, Lifnim min hahomah (Tel Aviv, 1976), esp. pp. 180–86. 208. See Thomas Mann, Stories of Three Decades, tr. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York, 1936), pp. 343–44. 209. Marc Chagall, My Own World, in Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative, with translations from Russian, Yiddish, French, German and Hebrew by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (Stanford, 2002), pp. 85–86. 210. See Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, 1972), especially pp. 297–334; Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings (New York, 1959), pp. 3–65; Lejeune, ‘Récits de naissance’, in Moi Aussi (Paris, 1986). 211. Such, for example, are entirely absent in the memoirs of Asher Halevi, whose entire account of his childhood—the Wrst fourteen years of his life are dispensed with in one page—he recounts ‘according to hearsay’. See Halevi, pp. 3–4. 212. See Patterson, The Hebrew Novel, pp. 71–79, and his Abraham Mapu, especially pp. 63–85. Mark Cohen provides an excellent appraisal of Modena’s Hebrew style. See Modena, pp. xvii-xxi. Modena’s brilliant wordplays on biblical and rabbinic citations foreshadow the stylistic revolution of Hebrew prose ushered in by Mendele (Abramovits) in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. See Bialik’s essay ‘Yotser hanusah’ in Kitvei h.n. bialik, 3 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1935), vol. 2:332–35. 213. Modena, p. 84 [39]. Translation slightly amended. 214. Adelman and Ravid make the suggestion that ‘possibly the prominence given by Modena in his adult recollections to this childhood episode reXects the major controversy over the ritual bath at Rovigo’. See Modena, p. 195. Modena makes no mention of this major controversy that blew up in 1589 and in which he was involved later on in Hayyei yehudah, however, and there is no intimation in his accounting of the episode of any subsequent signiWcance it may have. 215. Luzzatto, ’Iggerot, 2:1035. See also the letters to Silberman cited above. 216. See Luzzatto, Pirqei hayyim, p. 5. 217. See Rousseau, Confessions, p. 65. 218. See ibib., pp. 25, 32–33. 219. See Goethe, The Autobiography, tr. John Oxenford, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1974), 1:22–27, 42–46.

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Notes to Pages 120–23 220. With respect to other childhood events recorded in brief in Hayyei yehudah and likewise within the context of the larger framework of accounting of the self, Modena writes: ‘All these things that happened to me before the age of four I remember as if they happened only yesterday. And the thoughts I had then are still with me today.’ Modena, p. 83 [38]. 221. Modena, pp. 82–83 [38]. 222. Modena, p. 83 [38]. 223. Modena, p. 86 [41]. 224. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 142. 225. See Gusdorf, Auto-bio-graphie, pp. 354–55. The autobiographical passage from focus on being to that on becoming, Gusdorf here argues, should be seen as part-and-parcel of the revolution of heart and mind ushered in by Romanticism. 226. Modena, p. 136 [85]. See also pp. 88–98 [43–44]. It is worthy of note here that the ‘upper worlds’ are for Modena, by comparison with Yagel, of more minatory and malign aspect than consolational; the massive earthquake that attended his conception preWgures that wrath of the heavens with which he would be beset for the remainder of his days. 227. Berdichevsky Wrst published this account in the Wrst volume of his collection of Jewish legends in German translation, Der Born Judas (Leipzig, 1916). He later reproduced much of this account from the Kahana edition, with comments, in a review-essay ‘Romanim Noshanim’ in Hatequfah, 10 (1920): 513–16. The title of this essay is a pun and could be translated into English either as ‘Novels of Yesteryear’ or ‘Romances of Yore’. The essay is reprinted in Kol ma’amrei, pp. 327–28. 228. See Roth, p. 46; Cohen and Rabb, ‘The SigniWcance of Leon Modena’s Autobiography for Early Modern Jewish and General European History’, in Modena, p. 9; also Riccardo Calimani, The Ghetto of Venice: A History, tr. Katherine Silberblatt Wolfthal (New York, 1987), pp. 153–54. 229. The ‘troubles’ refer to the death of her son, Modena’s half-brother: ‘The mouth cannot describe’, writes Modena, ‘the pain and sadness that enveloped my mother with trembling, for she had loved him deeply and never forgot him until the day she died’. See Modena, p. 89 [44]. 230. For ‘Uvein kakh’, I have translated ‘and in the mean time’, where Cohen translates ‘anyhow’. This is rather important, since, as Edelman and Ravid note, there is some confusion about whether this account refers to events taking place in the spring of 1588 or 1589. If Modena were writing of 1589, this would mean, as they note, that Modena’s dream preceded his mother’s machinations to have him marry Esther. Translating ‘Bein kakh’ as ‘meanwhile’ or ‘in the meantime’ makes it clear that the dream took place after the match had been proposed. This makes altogether the more sense and is corroborated by the mother’s speaking of her Da’agotay (‘troubles’ or ‘woes’)—see above note—as experienced immediately after the death of her son, rather than a year later. See Modena, p. 199, n. v, ; p. 200, n. z. 231. Note 19, Modena, p. 91, explains: ‘That is to say the biblical verse “He who Wnds a wife Wnds goodness” (Proverbs 18:22) and not the verse “A woman more bit-

Notes to Pages 123–27 ter than death I have found” (Ecclesiastes 7:25)’. The allusion is based on B. T. Berakhot 8a. 232. ‘Temerity’ is ’Azut metsah in the original. Cohen translates this as ‘bold behaviour’, but this translation does not capture the pejorative connotations of the term. I have chosen the term ‘temerity’ as halfway between ‘bold behaviour’ and ‘brazenness’. 233. Modena, pp. 90–92 [44–46]. 234. Maimon, p. 49. 235. Ibid., pp. 51–52. 236. Ibid., p. 58. 237. On the practice of ‘dream divination’ in general, see Modena, p. 199, n. w. A similar dream divination concerning his wife-to-be is recorded in Hayyim Vital’s Sefer hahezyonot. Modena’s divination appears to depart from the norm in that it is visual, whereas ‘in the great majority of cases the response is provided in the form of verses from the Bible or sections thereof, from which the questioner is given to understand the hints and intentions of the respondent’. See Oron, pp. 305–06. Modena’s later dream of his dead father follows the conventional format. See Modena, pp. 94–95 [48]. 238. An adaptation of 2 Samuel 17:10. 239. The pun on ’Aryeh is embedded in the titles of four of Modena’s works: the above-mentioned Sha’agat ’aryeh, the Lev ha’aryeh, the Pi ’aryeh, and the ’Ari nohem. Modena loved to use his names—Yehudah and ’Aryeh—in the titles of his works, including of course Hayyei yehudah, and to explore the potential of these names for double-entendre in the body of his writings. See his auto-bibliography in Modena, pp. 124–26 [74–76], and the appended notes by Edelman and Ravid. 240. See Cohen, p. 91, n. 20. 241. See Zinberg, 4:183–85; Waxman, 2:571–79. So acerbic was Modena’s putative attack on Jewish tradition is that many suspected the Wrst editor of Qol sakhal, Isaac Samuel Reggio, of having written the work. On this controversy, see Ayzik Hirsh Weiss, Zikhronotay (Warsaw, 1895), pp. 158–60. It is characteristic that Qol sakhal should also have caught the eye of M. Y. Berdichevsky. See his Kol ma’amrei, pp. 324–25. For a spirited denial of Modena’s authorship of the Qol sakhal, see E. Rivkin. And for a lively assessment of the pros and cons for Modena’s authorship of the work, see Calimani, pp. 166–72. And see Edelman and Raviv, n. w in Modena, pp. 238–40. With respect to Modena’s capacity for self-projection, the foreword to his Historia de’ Riti Hebraici is suggestive: Modena claims that he writes ‘forgetting I am a Jew, fancying my self a simple and neutral reader’. As cited by Davis, Fame, p. 67, and see her n. 48 on same page. 242. Isaac E. Barzilay, ‘Modena’s Authorship of the Qol Sakhal’, in Salo Wittmayer Baron: Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, English Section, vol. 1 (New York and London, 1974), pp. 143–44. 243. Modena, p. 45. 244. The passive reXexive Nithpae’l verbal form that Modena uses for ‘I agreed’, as in the Cohen translation, ‘I agreed to marry the aforementioned Rachel,’ Nitratseti,

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Notes to Pages 128–35 underscores Modena’s submission in the face of force majeure; ‘conceded’ may be a better translation. 245. For the obstacles encountered by Hebrew writers of the latter half of the nineteenth century in attaining a degree of environmental—let alone psychological— verisimilitude in depicting scenes taken from day-to-day Jewish life, see Dan Miron, Bein hazon le’emet (Jerusalem, 1979), especially p. 100, pp. 229–31. 246. Vital makes some reference to his unhappy Wrst marriage—the spilling of seed in engagement with his Wrst wife consternated him in particular. Concerning his second and third marriages he remains silent. See Oron, p. 306. The most intimate revelation that Halevi provides of his marital life is his account of an involuntary nocturnal emission. See Halevi, pp. 32–33. But this account is incidental to the larger narrative. 247. See Maimon, p. 59. 248. The burial place of the Patriarchs and their wives. See Genesis 23:9, 19 and 49:29–32. Again, Modena is here spinning an elaborate pun. Makhpelah could also mean ‘doubling’, though the word was not used as such until modern times. The ‘doubling’ probably refers to the high rent and household expenses. There may also here be a pun within the pun; ‘doubling’ has gambling connotations, as with the ‘doubling-dice’ in the game of backgammon. 249. Modena, pp. 154–56 [99–100]. Translation revised. 250. Modena, p. 139 [87]. One wonders, though, given the tenor in which the engagement and marriage with Rachel is related, whether this Wnal eruption of resent had not been smouldering for a long time. 251. Modena, p. 160 [103–04]. 252. Modena, p. 170 [109]. Translation slightly revised. 253. Ibid., p. 164 [105]. 254. On p. 99, Modena refers to himself as tso’eq umishtateh, and on p. 100, Hitqatsafti veyatsa’ti mida’ati. 255. Ibid., p. 157 [101]. 256. See Cohen, ‘Excursus’, in ibid., p. 286. 257. Ibid., p. 165 [106]. 258. Ibid. p. 165 [106]. 259. See Kahana, Sifrut hahistoriah, 1:259–77; Schwarz, pp. 75–84. 260. Modena, pp. 76–81 [32–36]. 261. Ibid., pp. 122–28 [74–78]. 262. Ibid., pp. 160–61 [104–05]. 263. Roth, History of the Jews in Venice, pp. 212, 368; Roth, Renaissance, especially pp. xi-xii, 338–39; Carpi introduction, p. 11; Shulvass, index under ‘Modena’. Compare Zinberg 4:169. 264. Shulvass, p. 288. Compare Dan, Hasippur ha’ivri, p. 217. 265. See Sturrock, p. 65’ 266. As cited by Adelman, “Modena’, pp. 48–49.

Notes to Pages 135–37 267. See ibid., pp. 38–49, esp. pp. 38–39. 268. Davis, Women, p. 22. 269. Jewish historiography, in this respect, is corroborative of the seemingly extravagant claims advanced by recent editors of Burckhardt’s work that ‘Every important future historian of the Renaissance would attempt either to sharpen or to obliterate the image that Burckhardt had created. Rarely has a historical work had so persistent an inXuence. Indeed, the very notion that a new and unique civilization called “the Renaissance” existed in Italy in the fourteenth, Wfteenth, and sixteenth centuries seems to stand or fall with our acceptance or rejection of the Burckhardtian image.’ See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, tr. S. G. C. Middlemore, with an introduction by Benjamin Nelson and Charles Trinkaus, 2 vols. (New York, 1958), 1:3. A glance at Shulvass’s and Roth’s chapter headings is enough to reveal the indebtedness of these scholars to Burckhardt. Burckhardt also provides Zinberg with the framework for his discussion of ‘Italian Jewry in the Renaissance Period’ in vol. 4 of the Geshikhte. See Zinberg’s Burckhardt-inspired and highly emotional-freighted paean to the Renaissance. ‘Only under the blue skies of blessed Italy, under the bright rays of the Renaissance period . . . could there be awakened in man the feeling of self-consciousness, the respect for his human personality, the awakened sense of self ’ etc. See ibid., pp. 8–13, passim. 270. The standard English translation, ‘spiritual individual’, does not do full justice to Burckhardt’s conception. For a useful discussion of Burckhardt’s use of this term, see Weintraub, pp. 95–96. 271. See Burckhardt, 1:81. 272. Ibid., 1:143. 273. Ibid. 274. Shulvass, pp. 319–21; Fishel Lachover, Toldot hasifrut ha’ivrit hahadashah, 4 vols. in 2 (Tel Aviv, 1966), 1:9. 275. Burckhardt, 1:147. 276. The title of Burckhardt’s third chapter in part 2 of vol. 1:151–63. 277. Ibid., 1:157, 160–61. 278. Modena, p. 124 [74]. 279. Ibid., p. 178 [115]. Compare Burckhardt on the Renaissance ‘cultus’ of the grave, 1:154–62. 280. See Modena, p. 143 [90]; Shulvass, p. 327. 281. Burckhardt, 1:148–500. 282. Modena, pp. 160–62 [104–05]. But see Adelman, ‘Modena’, p. 47. Adelman demurs from this interpretation of Modena’s listing of his occupations, pointing out that many of them were undertaken simultaneously and that many of them were in fact overlapping categories. 283. Burckhardt, 1:272–78. 284. It is this aspect of Modena, but from the negative end of the spectrum, that underlies Zinberg’s portrait of the man.

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Notes to Pages 137–40 285. Ibid., 2:430–32; compare Shulvass, pp. 316f. 286. See especially the section ‘Miseries of My Heart in Brief ’ for Modena’s shorthand account of some of these feuds, pp. 165–70 [107–110]. 287. See Burckhardt, 2:484–509. 288. Compare Shulvass, pp. 183–85, p. 30. 289. Burckhardt, 2:429. 290. Modena, p. 136 [85–86]. Modena, in one of his letters, claimed that in view of the planetary constellations that determined his fate, it was beyond his power, good intentions notwithstanding, to be anything other than an inveterate gambler ‘as long as he lived’. As cited by Zinberg, with suitably opprobious commentary, in Geshikhte, 4:176. It should be noted that Zinberg, who in general extends a sympathetic hand to the ‘outsiders’ (Aherim) of Jewish history had, for some reason, little time for Modena, whom he portrays here and elsewhere as a gutless and callow individual. For a more sympathetic account of Modena’s gambling problem, see Adelman, “Modena”, pp. 41–43. 291. Finding the excesses of depravity and violence, as documented by Burckhardt, rather too strong for their tastes, these scholars do, however, imply that the Jewish Renaissance experience, albeit less dazzling than the Christian, was of a more wholesome and temperate nature. See Shulvass, pp. ix–xi and especially pp. 315–16; Roth, Venice, pp. 202–211. The distinction between Burckhardt’s Renaissance and the Jewish Renaissance is here, it should be noted, one of degree, not of kind. For a more recent evaluation of the applicability of Burckhardt’s construction of the Renaissance to the Jewish experience, see Arthur M. Lesley, ‘Hebrew Humanism in Italy: The Case of Biography’, in Prooftexts, vol. 2, no. 2 (Baltimore, May 1982), pp. 163–78. 292. Weintraub, pp. 73–74. 293. For negative evaluations of the Burckhardtian thesis as applied to autobiography, see Delany, p. 168; and Fleishmann, pp. 45–49. 294. Burckhardt, 2:328. 295. Ibid., pp. 328–33. 296. Burckhardt himself, relying principally upon information supplied him by Steinschneider, was one of the Wrst historians to treat of the Hebrew literature of this period within the larger Renaissance context. See 1:208–09. It would appear that he was only apprised of this information regarding Hebrew literary productivity in Renaissance Italy at a relatively late stage in the completion of his work. The subject is largely relegated to a lengthy and recondite footnote that could, with minimal adjustment, have served well in the main body of the text. 297. For a counter-argument, see Davis, ‘Fame’. 298. Modena, p. 131 [81–82]. 299. On the uniqueness of Cardano’s De vita see Burr, pp. 80–128, passim; Sturrock, p. 75. 300. For publication details, see Jean Stoner’s introduction to her translation of the Vita; Jerome Cardan, The Book of My Life (New York, 1930). All future citations from the Vita will be taken from the Stoner translation.

Notes to Pages 140–45 301. Davis, ‘Fame’, pp. 63–64, n. 38. 302. Ibid., p. 64. 303. Cardan, pp. 4–5. 304. Modena, p. 111 [63–64]. 305. Cardan, pp. 36–37, 196. 306. Ibid., pp. 164–65, 156–62. Apart from the dream cited above, see Modena’s account of his vision of his dead father in a dream on p. 94 [48]. 307. Cardan, p. 224. 308. Ibid., pp. 89–91. 309. Ibid., pp. 90–91. 310. Ibid., p. 94. 311. Modena, p. 150 [96]. 312. Ibid., pp. 75–76 [31–32], 108–09 [62], 111–113 [65–67]; Cardan, pp. 17, 37–39, 153–58, 197, 271–73. 313. See the chapter entitled ‘Concerning My Health’, in Cardan, pp. 21–26 and 280–84. For a schematic table of Cardan’s ‘physical conditions’ and ‘nervous symptoms’, see Burr, p. 99. Otto Fenichel, in his The Psychoanalytic Theory of the Neuroses (London, 1982), p. 251, cites French and Alexander to the eVect that ‘the attack (of asthma) is a sort of equivalent of an inhibited and repressed cry of anxiety and rage.’ 314. Burr, p. 89. There is actually an interesting phenomenological parallel between Burr’s treatment of Cardan and the recent Cohen edition of Hayyei yehudah. A central thrust in Burr’s study is to rehabilitate Cardan as an early-modern thinker of central signiWcance, rebutting the imputations upon his character and sanity levelled against him by Naudé to Cesare Lombroso. ‘Posterity has played the part of alienist to many a great name’, she writes, ‘but rarely has it been given so complete a history of the case’. See Burr, pp. 115–16. 315. Ibid., pp. 54, 73–74, 104–05, 151, 207, 277. 316. Ibid., p. 73. 317. Modena, p. 113 [66]; Cardan, p. 207. 318. Modena’s Wrst book, Sur mera’, written when he was thirteen years old and Wrst published in 1596, takes, in his own words, the form of ‘a dialogue in praise and condemnation of games of chance’. Modena, pp. 124 [74], 136–37 [85–86]. Modena, as possibly in the above-mentioned Qol sakhal, projects his own conXicting impulses onto an imaginary wrangle between two opposing parties, ‘Eldad’ and ‘Medad’. SigniWcant in this respect is that Modena initially chose to publish Sur mera’ anonymously. See Adelman and Ravid, ibid., p. 222, n. v; Yitskhok Rivkind, Der kamf kegn azartshpiln bay yidn: a shtudye in Wnf hundert yor yidishe poezye un kultur-geshikhte (New York, 1946), pp. 20–21, 185–87. Precisely the same psychological mechanism is operating here as when Cardan, in the above-cited passage from the Vita, constructs a mock trial for himself, serving simultaneously as plaintiV, counsel for the defence, and—by implication—judge. For Cardan’s Liber de Ludo Aleae, see Cardan, pp. 229 and 307. 319. Cardan, p. 224. 320. Burckhardt, 2:330. 321. Cardan, pp. 145–47. 322. Ibid., pp. 220–38. 323. Sturrock, pp. 77–79. 324. Modena, p. 100 [54]. 325. Ibid., p. 180 [116]. 326. Ibid., p. 90 [44]. 327. Ibid., p. 113 [66]. 328. Ibid., pp. 115–16 [66–67]. 329. Barzilay, pp. 153–55, passim. 330. Ruderman, p. 49.

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Notes to Pages 146–49 331. Sturrock, p. 81. 332. Ibid., p. 80. 333. Modena, pp. 94–95. 334. Shatsky, ‘Yidishe memuarn literatur’, pp. 484, 486. The two works mentioned by Shatsky are those of Uriel da Costa and Luzzatto. The status of da Costa’s autobiography is equivocal, since da Costa, while born in Portugal, wrote his autobiography in Amsterdam, where he ended his days. It should be noted that, within Ashkenaz, Shatsky evinces a decided bias toward autobiographies of Russian and Polish provenance. See his comments on pp. 485 and 486. 335. Ibid., p. 484. 336. Kahana, Sifrut hahistoriah, 1:259–318. 337. Schwarz, p. 68. 338. See Max Erik, Di geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur (Warsaw, 1928), pp. 394–96; Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:272–74. 339. Erik gives a good summary of the arguments pro and con a Yiddish provenance for Megillat ’eivah in ibid., pp. 412–14. Also, see Israel Zinberg, Kultur historishe shtudies (New York, 1949), p. 328. 340. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 5:41–43, 55–57; Dubnow, History, 1:131–38; Salo Baron, The Jewish Community, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1942), 2:190–200. 341. Scholem, Major Trends, p. 257; Dubnow, 1:134; Zinberg, Geshikhte, 5:133–46. 342. On the relation of Sephardic autobiographical literature to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, see Shatsky’s review of Schwarz’s Memoirs of My People, pp. 388–90. Interestingly, Shatsky, in his 1925 article, fails to cite either Yagel’s Gei’ hizzayon or Modena’s Hayyei yehudah, Sephardic autobiographical texts that cannot, even at the wildest stretch of the imagination, be related to the Spanish expulsion. 343. Yom Tov Lippman Heller, Sefer megillat ’eivah (London, 1955), p. 5. 344. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 1:150–52; Kahana 2:319–21. Roskies implies that Megillat ’eifah was written after Yeven metsulah in response to ‘those who felt that something more was needed’ in commemoration of the Khmielnitsky atrocities. Such a possibility is ruled out by the publication date of Yeven metsulah: Vinitsia 1653, two years after that of Megillat ’eifah. See Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, p. 49. 345. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 5:150–52. 346. See ibid., 5:153–55. 347. The 1896 Fischer edition printed in Krakau and reviewed by Berdichevsky in Kol ma’amrei, p. 321. 348. As the Khmielnitsky massacres are generally referred to in Hebrew literature. Tah ve tat refers simply to the date of the atrocities (1648–1649). Shatsky’s discussion of the Khmielnitsky memoirs follows immediately upon his comments on Megillat ’eivah. Also, see Roskies, pp. 48–52. 349. Kahana’s grouping is, however, thematic, not chronological: the two texts written in response to a personal calamity preceding the two Khmielnitsky memoirs. See Kahana, vol. 2.

Notes to Pages 150–52 350. Megillat ’eivah went into many re-editions after its Wrst publication and was translated into German and French. There is, however, some confusion over precise publication data of the various editions. The bibliographic details as provided by Max Erik, Heller’s grandson Abraham Grunwald, and Israel Heilperin do not tally. I have followed the dates and places of publication as provided by Heilperin. The autobiographical account written by Heller’s son Samuel, Wrst printed in a Vilna 1880 edition of Megillat ’eivah, was, it should be noted, considered by Steinschneider to be a forgery—an assessment with which Heilperin concurs. See Erik, Geshikhte, pp. 412–14; Grunwald in Heller, p. 41; and Israel Heilperin, Hibburei rabi Yom-tov Lippman Heller ukhetavav, Qiriat sefer, vol. 7 (Jerusalem, 1920), pp. 143–44. 351. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:273, and in his critique of Erik as cited above. 352. The section of the Seder mo’ed in the Mishnah, Tosefta and Talmuds that deals with the observance of Purim and the public reading of the Book of Esther is known simply as Megillah. 353. For a useful discussion of this sub-genre, see Kh. Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish: peraqim letoldoteiha (Tel Aviv, 1978), pp. 69f. For a more detailed treatment, including lengthy citations, see Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:307–09. 354. See Erik, Geshikhte, pp. 407–20; Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:272–73. 355. Thus Elhanan bar Abraham Helin, the author of Megillat vints, refers to Vincent Fetmilch, who instigated the expulsion of the Jews from Frankfurt-amMain in 1616, as the ‘new Haman’. As cited by Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:309. Megillat vints was Wrst printed in Frankfurt in 1641, but the earliest edition still extant is that of Amsterdam, 1648. See Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish, p. 69. 356. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:319–20. 357. Ibid., 272. 358. See Zinberg’s citation from the preface of one such prose work, Megillat shmuel, written in 1720, in ibid., 6:272–73. 359. Although Waxman does cite two examples of the communal lament written in Egypt—one from the tenth century C.E. and the other from the sixteenth; these, and the six hundred year time-gap is here instructive, appear to be relatively isolated phenomena in Sephardic literary history. See Waxman, 2:489. 360. See Erik, Geshikhte, pp. 394–96. 361. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:272–74. 362. Ibid., pp. 307–08. 363. See Shmeruk, pp. 69–70; Chava Turniansky, ‘Yiddish Historical Songs as Sources for the History of Jews in Pre-Partition Poland’, in Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 42–52. 364. Schwarz, p. 574. 365. Klog-lid is, in fact, a literal Yiddish translation of the Hebrew Qinah, ‘Lamentation’. For characteristic titles of these ‘historical poems’, generally referred to by their authors as ‘a new lamentation’, see Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:308, n. 29. 366. Megillat vints, as cited in ibid., pp. 309, 310.

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Notes to Pages 152–55 367. See Roskies, pp. 49–50. 368. Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:319. 369. See Erik, Geshikhte, pp. 412; Heller, p. 41. 370. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:272–73. 371. See Erik, Geshikhte, pp. 407–08. For Heller’s own reference to this custom, see Megillat eivah, p. 11. 372. See the preface to Megillat Shmuel, written in 1720, as cited by Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:272–73. 373. This story Wrst appeared in Ravnitsky’s journal, Der yid, in 1902 as part of a series entitled Seyfer habehemes. All citations are taken from the story as in Abramovitsh, Ale verk fun mendele, 15:37–65 374. See Zinberg, Geshikhte 5:123–24. 375. The opening section of Abramovitsh’s autobiographical ‘Shloyme Reb Hayyims’ had appeared in the same periodical, Der yid, in 1899. On the increasingly autobiographical tenor of Abramovitsh’s later works, see Viner, Tsu der geshikhte, 2:100V. The twin themes of the Jewish child’s dawning awareness of nature and his forced estrangement from the same by the imposition of his elders’ harshly utilitarian and myopically Talmudic regime recurs throughout Abramovitsh’s autobiographical writings. For thematic parallels to the Tosfos yon-tev kelbl in Abramovitsh’s autobiographical works, see especially Shloyme reb khayims, in Ale Verk, 18:42f and ‘Misefer hazikhronot’, in Kol kitvei mendele mokher sefarim (Tel Aviv, 1956), p. 374. 376. Abramovitsh, Ale verk, 15:46. 377. Ibid. 378. There is no mention of this curse, nor of any penalty for failure to observe the family Purim, in Megillat’eivah. See Heller, pp. 16–17. 379. Abramovitsh, Ale verk, 15:46. 380. Of all of the surveys of Jewish autobiography cited in this chapter, only Letteris fails to cite Gluckel’s Memoirs, this only because his Zikkaron basefer was published almost thirty years before the Kaufmann edition of the Zikhroynes. In the literary histories of Erik, Zinberg and Waxman, more space is allotted to Gluckel’s Memoirs than to the remainder of pre-modern Jewish memoiristic texts discussed when taken together. Gluckel’s Memoirs is the only pre-modern Jewish memoir to have been made the subject of a book-length monograph; see Nokhem MinkoV, Glikl hamel (1645–1724) (New York, 1952). See YeWm Yeshurun, ‘Glikl hamil—bibliograWe’, in Glikl Hameln, Zikhroynes, translated (beautifully) into contemporary Yiddish by J. Berenfeld, ed. and with an introduction by Shmuel Rozhansky (Buenos Aires, 1967). Checking against the Kaufmann edition, which is incredibly diYcult to read with its lack of punctuation and Old Yiddish orthography, I have always compared the Berenfeld translation with the various English versions of the text. 381. For a summary of the translation history of Gluckel’s Memoirs, see Robert Rosen’s introduction to The Memoirs of Gluckel Hameln, tr. Marvin Lowenthal (New York, 1977), pp. xiif; Shatsky’s review of this translation in Yivo bleter, 6 (1939), pp. 139–44; and more recently the important article of Dorothy Bilik, ‘The Mem-

Notes to Pages 156–58 oirs of Glikl of Hameln: The Archaeology of the Text’, in Yiddish, vol. 8, no. 2 (Flushing, N.Y., 1992), pp. 5–22. 382. See Bilik, p. 8. 383. See MinkoV, pp. 9f–11, p. 19. 384. And even then, the actual inXuence of Gluckel’s Memoirs could be but slight. Written in Old Yiddish, without punctuation and not according to Yiddish phonetic orthography, the text was, by the end of the nineteenth century, linguistically inaccessible to all but a handful of specialists. The Memoirs do, however, appear to have exerted some inXuence upon the autobiography of another Jewish matriarch, who recorded her life-history, as had Gluckel, for her children and grandchildren and to while away ‘the long winter nights’. Hinde Bergner, In di lange vinternekht: mishhpokhe zikhoynes fun a shtetl in galitsie (Montreal, 1946). On this work, begun in 1937, see Yankev Glatstein, In tokh genumen (New York, 1947), pp. 227–30; Dov Sadan, Avnei miftan (Tel Aviv, 1961), p. 173. The possibility of some inXuence of Gluckel’s Memoirs on Berdichevsky’s autobiographical writings will be discussed in the next chapter. With regard to the post-Rousseauian context of literary appreciation of Gluckel’s Memoirs, it is worthy of note that Nokhem MinkoV, whose monograph on the Memoirs has been cited above, was one of the founding members of the Yiddishist In zikh group, a self-conscious avant-garde whose credo was based on radical introspection. 385. Sh. Niger, ‘Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin’, in idem, Bleter geshikhte fun der yidisher literature (New York, 1959), p. 94; and see Bilik, pp. 17–21. 386. See Shatsky’s review of Lowenthal’s translation of the Memoirs, p. 139. Two incomplete German translations of the Memoirs preceded those of Pappenheim and Feilchenfeld. See ibid., pp. 138–39, for details; see Bilik, passim. 387. For details of Birnbaum’s translation, see Erik, Geshikhte, p. 406 and Reizen, Leksikon, 1:291. 388. The Life of Gluckel von Hameln (1646–1724), Written by Herself, tr. Beth-Zion Abrahams (London, 1962). Again, both of these fuller English translations were preceded by a translation of some sections of the Memoirs into English. For details, see Shatsky’s review of the Lowenthal translation, p. 139. For the relationship between the Lowenthal translation and that of Abrahams, see Bilik, pp. 12–13. 389. Zikhronot marat glickl hamil, tr. A. Z. Rabinowitz (Tel Aviv, 1930). 390. Glikl Hameln, Zikhroynes, tr. J. Berenfeld (Buenos Aires, 1967). 391. Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:273. 392. Ibid., p. 143. See also Zinberg’s review of Erik’s Geshikhte, in Kultur historishe shtudies, pp. 315–17. 393. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:279V, 286–92; Niger, ‘Di yidishe literature un di lezerin’, passim. For a masterly overview of the role of the Jewish woman as reader and writer of Yiddish literature prior to the Khmielnitsky persecutions in Poland, see Khone Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish befolin (Jerusalem, 1981), pp. 13–74. 394. Gluckel, p. 13. All citations from the Memoirs are taken from the Abrahams translation, unless otherwise noted; and see MinkoV, pp. 34–37.

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Notes to Pages 158–62 395. It was Kaufmann who Wrst entitled her book Zikhroynes or, as on the German title page, Memoiren. 396. Gluckel, p. 67. 397. Ibid., pp. 69–70; and see MinkoV, p. 37. 398. I am not convinced by Davis’s argumentum ex silentio that since Gluckel ‘never described herself as doing anything odd or new’ in ‘composing her memoirs’, she was aware of other early-modern Jewish autobiographical texts at the time of writing. 399. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:179–188; Erik, Geshikhte, pp. 294–301. 400. Gluckel, p. 7. 401. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:278–79. For a more detailed account of the function of Musar elements in Gluckel’s narrative, see MinkoV, pp. 34–67. 402. Gluckel, pp. 2–5; and see MinkoV, pp. 38–39; Gluckel, pp. 3–4. Chava Turniansky has made a detailed study of the manner in which Gluckel’s self-accounting was shaped by the Yiddish literary traditions with which she was acquainted and, conversely, of Gluckel’s reshaping of these received materials in accordance with the demands of the life-history. See Turniansky, ‘Vegn di literature-mekoyrim in glikl hamels zikhroynes’, in Studies in Honour of Chone Shmeruk, ed. Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendesohn and Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem, 1993), pp. 153–177. Turniansky’s article actually provides a Wrm scholarly foundation for many of MinkoV’s insights in his more impressionistic but very Wne study of Gluckel, which has provided me with a key to the text. 403. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of InXuence: A Theory of Poetry (New York, 1973); and also his Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York, 1982). For a useful summary of Bloom’s theory of inXuence, see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, 1983), pp. 183–85. 404. Both Erik and MinkoV remark upon Gluckel’s lively imagination and her natural descriptive abilities that seek some outlet in the Memoirs. MinkoV writes (p. 176) that ‘Somewhere, hidden and unbeknownst, there dwelled in her an artistic instinct. In that period, though, and in her environment, that instinct lived a repressed and downtrodden existence in the furthest recesses of the unconscious.’ See also Erik, Geshikhte, pp. 400–402. 405. Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish, p. 87. 406. Gluckel, p. 11; translation slightly modiWed according to the Berenfeld translation, p. 40. 407. Turniansky, p. 175. 408. Gluckel, p. 22. 409. Ibid. pp. 24–26, passim. 410. Turniansky, p. 175; Davis, Women, pp. 39–41, n. 136, pp. 244–45; Max Erik, Vegn altyidishn roman un novele: fertstntn-zekhtsntn yorhundert (Kowel, 1926), pp. 201–02. 411. See Turniansky, pp. 169–70. 412. Gluckel, p. 31.

Notes to Pages 162–71 413. MinkoV, pp. 90–97, points to elements drawn from the Yiddish knightly romance in Gluckel’s reworking of the Amnon/Tamar story in Book 6 of the Memoirs. 414. See, for example, ibid., pp. 98–99, and on her own betrothal, pp. 150–63 passim. 415. See the Berenfeld translation, p. 163. Abrahams omits the section in which this exposition occurs as ‘really wearisome religious moralizing’. See her n. 1 in Gluckel, p. 76. 416. Ibid., pp. 59–60; my translation. 417. Ibid., p. 60. 418. Gluckel, p. 31. 419. My translation from the Berenfeld translation, p. 70. Abrahams’s translation of this passage, p. 27, is considerably bowdlerized. 420. Gluckel, p. 25. 421. Ibid., p. 29. 422. Davis, Women, p. 41. 423. Ibid., p. 57. 424. Ibid., p. 55. 425. Gluckel, p. 112. 426. My translation from Berenfeld, p. 232. 427. Turniansky, p. 172. 428. Gluckel, pp. 109–10; translation revised according to Berenfeld, pp. 225–26. 429. Davis, Women, p. 48. 430. Rozhansky, introduction to Berenfeld translation, p. 15. 431. See in particular her account of the attendance of the thirteen-year-old future Frederick I of Prussia and Prince Maurice of Nassau at her daughter’s wedding—‘for a hundred years, no Jew had such high honour’—in Gluckel, pp. 77–80. 432. Gluckel, p. 113; revised according to Berenfeld, pp. 232–33. 433. Gluckel, p. 32; translation modiWed according to Berenfeld, p. 79. 434. Ibid., p. 32; translation modiWed according to Berenfeld, pp. 79–80. 435. Ibid., p. 33; translation modiWed according to Berenfeld, p. 81. 436. Gluckel, p. 40. 437. Davis, Women, p. 41. 438. Ibid., p. 58. 439. Thus Gluckel writes in Book 1: ‘When an animal falls and dies, it has no account to render to God. But as soon as the poor human being dies he must render his account to his Creator. Therefore well for us that we can prepare our accounts while yet we live.’ Gluckel, p. 3; and compare ibid., p. 47. On God as reader of the Memoirs, see Davis, Women, p. 53. 440. Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:277. And yet Zinberg, in his critique of Max Erik’s Geshikhte, faults Erik for not including Abraham Levi’s account of his Wve-year travels in his section on Old Yiddish Memoir Literature. See Zinberg, Kultur historishe shtudies, p. 328. On the Tekhine elements in Gluckel’s narrative, see MinkoV, pp. 20– 22, pp. 139–41. 441. MinkoV, pp. 23–24. For an example of such conventional and formulaic supplication, see Gluckel, pp. 73–74. 442. Gluckel, p. 33.

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Notes to Pages 171–76 443. Ibid. 444. Ibid., p. 45. 445. Ibid., p. 182; translation amended according to Berenfeld. 446. See Gluckel’s reworking of the biblical Amnon/Tamar scenario in Gluckel, p. 155. Here Gluckel’s story substitutes a royal chase for the biblical scenario of Absalom’s sheep-shearing expedition that laid the trap for the execution of Amnon (2 Samuel 8, 24–29. See MinkoV, pp. 91–92. The hunting/homicide scenario occurs in Yagel, p. 113. Ruderman comments wonderfully and wittily on this scene. He notes that: ‘When Yagel describes the hunt scene, he patently reveals a certain discomfort. He quickly passes over the details of the hunt and lets the boar kill the husband rather than allow his friend to become the murderer.’ See Ruderman, p. 31. Gluckel’s account, by contrast, allows for plain fraternally incited homicide, met with by her moral approval—‘God’s punishment is slow but sure’—at the summation of the tale. See Gluckel, pp. 155–56. 447. See, for example, Gluckel, pp. 31, 76. 448. Beth-Zion Abrahams, as cited by Rosen, p. xiii. 449. See Bilik, esp. pp. 8–10. 450. Lowenthal, as cited by Rosen, p. xii. 451. Ibid. Shatsky, albeit a ‘specialist’, does object that a great deal of ‘Gluckel’s own story’ is indeed omitted from the Lowenthal translation of the Memoirs. His strictures on the Lowenthal translation in this, as in other aspects, are justiWably harsh. See Shatsky’s review of this translation as cited above. 452. Ibid., p. xiii. There is an unintentional irony in Rosen’s remarks. Lowenthal is, of course, translating from a German translation of the original. For examples of some of Lowenthal’s most unfortunate coinages, see Bilik, p. 16. 453. Ibid., pp. 291–92, n. 26. 454. Beth-Zion Abraham’s translation is, it should be noted, vastly superior to that of Lowenthal, but even this translation suVers from considerable emendations. 455. It should be noted that in circles less receptive to autobiography than that of the Jewish intelligentsia—that is, the great majority of Eastern European Jewry— Hannover was known less as the author of Yeven metsulah than as that of the Kabbalistic prayer book Sha’arei tsion (Prague, 1677, and numerous re-editions). This work was extraordinarily inXuential in the propagation of popular Kabbalah in Eastern Europe. It is largely due to Sha’arei tsion that the popular ritual of Tikkun hatsot became so widespread in Eastern Europe. Aaron Walden, in his revised edition of Chaim David Azulai’s Shem hagedolim, makes no mention of Hannover in the section of the work devoted to personalities, or ‘great ones’. He does, however, include Sha’arei tsion in his bibliographical section. Of Yeven metsulah, there is no mention. See Aaron Walden, Shem hagedolim hehadash (3rd ed., Warsaw, 1879). See Y. Israelson, ‘Nathan Neta Hannover, zayn lebn un literarishe tetikayt’, in Historishe shriftn, vol. 1 (Vilna, 1929), pp. 17–18;, part 2, p. 75. For the practice of Tikkun hatsot, see Walden, ibid.; Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York, 1965), pp. 146–50.

Notes to Pages 176–80 456. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 4:83–84; Waxman, 2:160–62. 457. See Bialik, Devarim shebe’al peh, 2:191–92. The leading mediaeval pietist, Yehudah the Hasid of Regensburg (d. 1217), was adamantly opposed to the mentioning of authors’ names in their books. See Yosef Dan, ‘Letoldoteiha shel “sifrut hashevahim”’, in Mehqerei yerushalayim befolklor yehudi, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 1981), p. 99. 458. The notion of the ‘Collected Works’ (Kol kitvei, Ale shriftn) grouped under the name of the author is, in Jewish literary discourse, an entirely twentieth-century phenomenon. See also Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. H. Adams and L. Searle (Tallahassee, 1986), pp. 139–148. Foucault’s comments must be revised in view of the ‘author function’ in Jewish literature, which he does not take into consideration in his essay. 459. For a summary of this text, see Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:273. 460. I have been unable to locate this essay, cited by Kressel in the Leksikon, 2:740. 461. A. H. Weiss, Zikhronotay (Warsaw, 1895), pp. 10–12. 462. For several examples with bibliographical details, see Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:308–19, passim; Schmeruk, Sifrut yidish, pp. 69–71; Turniansky, ‘Yiddish Historical Songs’, pp. 44–45. 463. Amsterdam, 1648, and Frankfurt-am-Main, 1696. See Shmeruk and Zinberg, as in above note. 464. See Israelson, pp. 9f; and 23, n. 32 465. See Kahana 2:295; Roskies, p. 49. The veracity of this tradition should be accepted with caution, since it is attested to in only one source. See Israelson, p. 26, n. 46. 466. See Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:261. 467. Ibid. 468. See Kahana, 2:297; Israelson, p. 16. 469. Yeven metsulah ve’im sippur hagezerot ’ad shenat tarla’, ed. Ayzik Meir Dik (Warsaw, 1872). For editions, see Ben Ya’akov, ’Otsar sefarim (Vilna, 1880), p. 217, entry 129. Dik also translated Yeven metsulah into Yiddish. His translation Wrst appeared in 1861. See David G. Roskies, ‘An Annotated Bibliography of Ayzik Meyer Dik’, The Field of Yiddish, 4 (New York, 1980), p. 144, entry 32. 470. See Dan, Hasippur ha’ivri, p. 48, and the corresponding n. 6 on p. 255. See also Abraham Epstein, Kitvei, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1963), 1:198–99. 471. For publication data of Benjamin’s Travels, see The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, ed. Marcus Adler (London, 1907), pp. xiii-xvi; also Kahana, Sifrut hahistoriah, 1:200f. For the Yiddish translation, see Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:266. On Gelilot ’erets yisra’el, which was originally written in Yiddish and published in Lublin in 1635, see Zinberg, ibid., pp. 267–68. Further editions of the book in Yiddish and Hebrew translations appeared under diVerent titles so as to escape the ban of the Jesuits, who apparently burnt copies of the 1635 edition in Warsaw. See Viner, Tsu der geshikhte, 2:232. 472. On Benjamin the Second, see Salo W. Baron, History and Jewish Historians (Philadelphia, 1964), pp. 298–99.

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Notes to Pages 180–83 473. Abramovitsh, Kol kitvei, p. 57. 474. Ibid., p. 57. 475. See Dan, Hasippur ha’ivri, p. 57. For a full annotated version of this ninthcentury text written in the form of a rabbinic query (She’elah) to the Babylonian Exilarch, Tsemah Ga’on Ya’akov, see A. Epstein, 1:37–49. 476. See Kahana, 1:206–17; and, for the full Hebrew text with notes, Benjamin, The Itinerary. 477. Kahana, 1:206–17. See also the English translation of and commentary upon Petachiah’s account, in Elkan Nathan Adler, Jewish Travellers (London, 1930), pp. 64–91; S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History, 6:436–38, n. 91. 478. Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (Oxford, 1980), p. 203. On travel as metaphor in autobiography, see Egan, pp. 104–36, 138–43. 479. Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:266–68. 480. Idem, Kultur historishe shtudies, p. 328. 481. Waxman, 2:500–02. 482. See Dan, p. 217, Hasippur ha’ivri, and Carpi, in his introduction to Modena, p. 9. 483. Kahana, Sifrut hahistoriah, 2:66. 484. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1:1011. 485. See the title page of the Kahana edition of the text, published in Warsaw in 1922. 486. Schwarz (p. 570) refers to Eldad as ‘another personality of the ninth century of whom we have a bit of autobiography’. Kahana refers to Eldad’s travel account as ‘Memoirs’ (Sifrut hahistoriah, 1:21). Berdichevsky, in an essay the original provenance of which I have been unable to determine, includes Benjamin of Tudela’s travels under the category of ‘Memoir Books’. See Berdichevsky, Kol ma’amrei, p. 325. 487. For a representative section of Gershon ben Eliezer’s Gelilot erets yisrael, translated into modern Yiddish, see Viner, 2:223–32. See also Zinberg, Geshikhte, 6:267–68. 488. See Viner, Tsu der geshikhte, 2:232–33. 489. See Dan, Hasippur ha’ivri, pp. 51–53. See also S. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 6:220–21. 490. See Yitshaq Baer’s review of Aaron Zeev Aescoli’s edition of Reubeni’s Travels, in Qiriat sefer, vol. 17 (Jerusalem, 1940), p. 311. See also Moshe David Cassuto, ‘Mi hayah David Reubeni?’ in Tarbits, vol. 32 (Jerusalem, 1963), p. 349. 491. See Dan, Hasippur ha’ivri, pp. 58–61. See also Epstein, 1:24–26. 492. For a discussion of Midrashic and Talmudic sources for the Sambatyon and Ten Tribes legends, see Dan, Hasippur ha’ivri, pp. 58–61. See also A. Epstein, 1:16–26. For a good selection of material relating to this legend, see Nathan Ausubel, A Treasury of Jewish Folklore (New York, 1948), pp. 515–64. 493. Dan, Hasippur ha’ivri, p. 48.

Notes to Pages 183–85 494. A reproduction of the original manuscript, which was Wrst discovered by Graetz and subsequently lost, was published by A. Neubauer in Anecdota Oxonensia, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1893). 495. See Dan, Hasippur ha’ivri, p. 286; Schwarz, p. 573. Reubeni’s Travels also exerted considerable fascination for novelists and playwrights, including Meir Viner, Max Brod, A. A. Kabak, and Sholem Asch. For details of these and other works, see A. Y. Goldshmit’s introduction to his Yiddish translation of Reubeni’s Travels (Vilna, 1927), pp. i–iii. 496. Der sefer zikhroynes fun david hareubeni . . . yiddish mit a historisher ophandlung fun A. Y. Goldshmit (Vilna, 1927). 497. I have tried unsuccessfully to locate this article, which, according to Zalman Reizen, was published in the Vilna journal Letste nays in 1918. See Reizen, Leksikon, 1:490. 498. Farlag ‘Tamar’ of Joseph Kamermacher. 499. Thus, in Yiddish, Y. L. Peretz, Yekhezkiel Kotik and Peretz Hirshbein each entitle their autobiographies Zikhroynes. And, in Hebrew, A. H. Weiss, Sh. Berenfeld and E. E. Friedman entitle their autobiographies Zikhronot. Examples of such usage, in Hebrew and Yiddish, could be multiplied. Some comparison may be made here with the situation in France, where the term ‘Mémoires’, as a synonym for autobiography, has until most recent times been generally preferred to ‘autobiographie’. See May, pp. 117–22. 500. The original Hebrew text was Wrst published in Qiriat sefer 1 (1924), pp. 130–38. For an English translation, see Scholem, Jewish Mysticism, pp. 147–55. 501. First published as The Memoirs of a Siennese Jew (1625–1633) by Cecil Roth, in Hebrew Union College Annual, vol. 5 (Cincinnati, 1928), pp. 353–402. An abridged version of the text, minus Roth’s introduction and footnotes, is published in Schwarz, pp. 95–102. 502. Da Costa’s Exemplar humanae vitae was Wrst published by Philippe van Limborch in De veritate religionis christianae: Amica collatio cum erudito judaeo (Gouda, 1687). For an abridged English translation, see Schwarz, pp. 84–94. 503. The original Hebrew text with an English translation was Wrst published by Alexander Marx in the Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 8 (Philadelphia, 1917–18), pp. 269–86. Marx’s translation is reprinted in Schwarz, pp. 103–14. 504. Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 146–47. 505. See Roth’s introductory notes to the work, p. 355. 506. Roth notes (p. 360) that ‘if Joseph da Modena presents to us the type of the Ghetto Jew of the lowest class, his writing is no less characteristic. . . . The spelling . . . could hardly be worse, outraging even the loose standards of seventeenth-century orthodoxy. . . . Words are left out, words are put in, with a real disregard for meaning. The few Hebrew phrases reXect the utter neglect of his early education. . . . ’ This, however, should not be taken to detract from the value of the work as a historical document, all the more valuable for its touching upon aspects

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Notes to Pages 186–89 of day-to-day Jewish working-class life in seventeenth-century Italy, for which we have few other eyewitness accounts. See Roth, Memoirs of a Siennese Jew, pp. 358–59. 507. See Ginsburger’s introduction to Halevy, p. 5. 508. See Halevi, pp. 30–31. 509. Halevi’s citations from his funeral orations begin early on in the text; see p. 4. The weather bulletins occur throughout but become most pronounced in the latter pages of the text. 510. Da Costa did, however, as did Reubeni, become a Wgure of controversy and occasionally of identiWcation for a later generation of Jewish intelligentsia. Gutzkow’s German play based upon the life of da Costa played an important role in the popularization of da Costa and his life story. This play was translated into Hebrew by Sh. Rubin (Vienna, 1856) and into Yiddish by Y. Y. Lerner (Odessa, 1885). Gutzkow’s play had a great impact upon Sh. Dubnow, who identiWed with da Costa in his struggle against religious obscurantism. See Dubnow, Dos bukh fun mayn lebn, 1:120. See also Lilienblum, ’Iggerot M. L. Lilienblum le Y. L. Gordon, p. 119. For other modernist responses to da Costa, see Encyclopaedia Judaica, 5:987–88. 511. See the Chronicle of Ahima’az, ed. Marcus Salzmann (New York, 1924), and the abridged translation in Schwarz, pp. 3–14. On the genealogical element in Ahima’az and other contemporary texts, see S. Baron, Social and Religious History, 6:214–17. Genealogical excursi, however, also Wnd a place in post-Rousseauian autobiography and this in a seemingly unrelated manner to pre-modern precedent. A notable example of the same is Chateaubriand’s lengthy genealogical preface to the Mémoires d’Outre Tombe. Sartre employs the convention of the genealogical preface to deliberately ironic eVect in Les Mots, as, in the context of Eastern European Jewish autobiography, does M. L. Lilienblum in his Hatt’ot ne’urim, to be discussed in greater detail below. See May’s discussion of ‘La digression genealogique’, pp. 129–31. 512. Schwarz, pp. 106–07. For the original Hebrew, see Marx, p. 279. Since, in the following citations, the Marx translation is substantially revised, references are given throughout both to the Marx translation as reproduced in Schwarz and to the original Hebrew text as edited by Marx in the Jewish Quarterly Review. 513. Schwarz, p. 111; Marx, p. 283. 514. Schwarz, p. 111; Marx, p. 283. There is some echo of the ’Agedah motif also in the incident that immediately preceded this journey to the Melammed as reported by our author: The night before my father was to leave I stayed awake all night sewing sheepskins together, called Pelts, and I made a sort of long lower garment for myself and likewise something for my feet and I stole some shirts so that my father would not notice anything. Before daybreak I went to the place where they had prepared the sledges for my father and I lay down there. When my father came out to the sledges the sun had still not risen and it was still dark. He noticed something and, thinking that it was the household dog which had gone to lie down out there, he kicked it. I then spoke out: ‘Oh, father, it is I, your son, ready to serve you on your way.’ Schwarz, p. 111; Marx, p. 283.

Notes to Pages 189–92 515. Shemaryahu Levin, Childhood in Exile, tr. Maurice Samuel (New York, 1929), pp. 49–51. See also Moysheh Oyved, Visions and Jewels: An Autobiography (New York, 1926), p. 8: ‘When I was three years of age, my grandmother, Sarah Rebecca—peace be unto her!—took me, as Abraham had taken his son Isaac to the sacriWce—to the Cheder—the Hebrew school.’ For a similar employment of the sacriWcial motif as applied to the Heder experience, see Abraham Ber Gotlober, Zikhronot umassa’ot, ed. Reuben Goldberg, 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1976), 1:66–68. For the motif as employed within a semi-Wctional context, see Ezriel Nathan Frenk, Yitzhak me’ir be yalduto: mehayyei hayehudim befolin, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1904), 1:3–12. 516. See Simhah Ben-Tsiyon (Simhah Gutman), Kol kitvei s. ben tyiyon (Tel Aviv, 1959), pp. 32–34. This novella was highly inXuential in its day; see Y. Fichman in his introduction to Kol kitvei, pp. 16–17. 517. On Bouchard’s Confessions, written throughout in the third person, the protagonist assuming the name ‘Oreste’, see Coe, pp. 20–22. 518. Rousseau, Confessions, pp. 23–25. See also Coe, pp. 29–31. 519. The phrase Kero’eh beshoshanim, which I have followed Marx in translating ‘as I dwelt among roses’, has, it should be noted, erotic overtones, being an adaptation of Song of Songs 6:2 520. This was a widespread form of Jewish bibliomancy, attested to since Talmudic times. See Joshua Trachtenburg, Jewish Magic and Superstition (New York, 1984), p. 216. 521. Schwarz, pp. 113–14; Marx, pp. 285–86. There is an enigmatic jotting on the folio page that follows the autobiography, included in a list that the author subtitles ‘Memorandum of Things That I Vowed and Promised’, which runs: ‘When I was ill in Pisa I vowed to make great eVorts to take a wife, if possible before the end of the year. So I did [“made great eVorts”? or “took a wife”? M.M.] but I delayed a great deal and I did Wnding.’ The phrase that I have translated literally from the Hebrew ve’asiti motse’ as ‘I did Wnding’ makes no sense in Hebrew or English. It could be, though, that our author is making a play upon the word Motse’ as in Hayyei yehudah—to refer, that is, to Ecclesiastes 7:26, Umotse’ ’ani mar mimavet et ha’ishah, etc. ‘And I Wnd more bitter than death the woman.’ See Modena, p. 45. Should this be so, this means one of two things: either the author did succeed in taking a wife but found her ‘more bitter than death’, or his ‘delay’ was the result of his continued wantonness, which stood in the way of his conjugal aspirations. If the latter be the case, the remainder of the Ecclesiastes verse would apply well to the author: ‘whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands as bands: whoso pleases God shall escape from her; but the sinner shall be taken by her.’ For the author’s list of vows, not included in Marx’s English translation, see Marx, p. 286. Alternatively, this could well be an abbreviation of one of the many Yiddish expressions that have Moytse as a verbal compound or phrasal component. 522. Bourdieu, p. 310.

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Notes to Pages 195–98

Chapter Four 1. Since, in the period under review, it was only in Eastern Europe that Hebrew and Yiddish were the primary languages of Jewish autobiographical self-expression, it would be expected that only here would such inXuence be discernible. 2. Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer (Vilna, 1863), pp. 1–2. 3. Letteris, p. 6. 4. M. Y. Berdichevsky, Devarim ’ahadim, p. 96. This Brody paper, under the editorship of Ya’akov Werber, appeared alternatively under the title Ha’ivri and ’Ivri ’anokhi. Berdichevsky did not include this essay, to be discussed in greater detail below, in the Shtibl edition of his Kol ma’amrei. 5. R. Brainin, Ketavim nivharim (New York, 1917), p. x. 6. For Berdichevsky on Kahana, see M. Y. Bin-Gorion (Berdichevsky), Kol ma’amrei, pp. 245–46, 255–56. 7. Among the pre-modern Jewish autobiographical texts discussed by Berdichevsky are Modena’s Hayyei yehudah, see Kol ma’amrei, pp. 327–28; Hayyim Vital’s Sefer hahezyonot, see Peri sefer, pp. 25–26; Hannover’s Yeven metsulah in Kol ma’amrei, pp. 122–23; selections from David Reubeni’s and Eldad Ha-Danis’s Travels are rendered in Berdichevsky’s Me’otsar ha’aggadah, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1914), 2:38–39, 42–43; see also Tsava’ot vequntresim and Mipinqsa’ot yeshanim in Kol ma’amrei, pp. 315–17. 8. See above, Chapter 2, for Berdichevsky on Maimon. For Berdichevsky on Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim, see his Reshut hayahid be’ad harabim (Krakau, 1892), p. 33; Nemushot (Warsaw, 1899), pp. 58–59; Ba’erev (Warsaw, 1910), pp. 5–7. And, on the eVect of the reading of Hatt’ot ne’urim upon the autobiographically based character ‘Yeruham’ in Berdichevsky’s novel Miriam, see Berdichevsky, Roman gamur Miriam: mahadorah mehqarit, annotated and with an introduction by Zipporah Kagan (Haifa, 1997), pp. 207–08. Kagan’s superbly annotated text marks a milestone in Berdichevsky scholarship. All future citations from Miriam are taken from this edition. 9. See ‘Devarim shebeini uveinah: me’et gadi’el ben sodi, nimseru lidfus ’al yedei m.y. berdichevsky’ in Kitvei mikhah yosef berdichevsky (bin-gorion), vol. 3, ed. Avner Holtzman and Yitshaq KafkaW (Tel Aviv, 1998), p. 27. 10. Dan Almagor, ‘Demuyot-’av umatsavei mafteah besippurei m.y. berditshevsky’, in M.y. berditchevsky: mivhar ma’amarim ’al yetsirato hasippurit, ed. Nurit Govrin (Tel Aviv, 1973). 11. See ‘She’elot vehe’arot’, in Nemushot. 12. See, especially, the opening section of Book 11 of Miriam, to be discussed below. 13. See the lengthy genealogical account with which Miriam opens and ‘Arba’ah dorot’, in Mehe’avar haqarov (Warsaw, 1899). And, on the role of genealogy in Berdichevsky’s writing, see Rachel Katznelson-Shazar, ‘Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky’, in her ‘Al ’admat ’ivrit, pp. 41–44.

Notes to Pages 198–201 14. This narrative stance is particularly prominent in the collection Mehe’avar haqarov. The Wrst-person voice of the writer of the Pinqas surfaces repeatedly in Miriam. On this, see Dan Miron, ‘Mavo’ leMiriam’, in his Kivvun ’orot: tahanot basiporet ha’ivrit hamodernit (Tel Aviv, 1979), especially pp. 69–71. 15. See n. 18; Miron, ‘Mavo’ leMiriam’, passim. 16. ‘Hetsits venifga’ ’, generally considered to be Berdichevsky’s Wrst story, was Wrst published in Hamelits, vol. 28, no. 21 of 1.4.1888. The story is included as a supplement to Kol sippurei, pp. 321–23. On the story, see Dan Miron, ‘Re’shito shel berdichevsky hamesapper’, in Kivvun ’orot, pp. 19–20, pp. 21–23. 17. Most notably, the autobiographically based stories in Mibayit umihuts (Pietrokov, 1900) and Me’iri haqetanah (Pietrokov, 1900) and the two novellas, Mahanayyim (Warsaw, 1900) and ’Orva’ parah (Warsaw, 1900). On these early biographical stories, see Yitshak Bakon, Hatsa’ir haboded basipporet ha’-ivrit, 1899–1908 (Tel Aviv, 1978), pp. 13–47. 18. ’A velt mit veltelakh’ was Wrst published in Der tog of 29.2.1904. It was later included in Berdichevsky’s collection of Yiddish stories entitled Yidishe kesovim fun a vaytn korev (Berlin, 1924). All citations here are taken from the recent republication of a selection from the Yidishe kesovim edited by Shmuel Werses (Jerusalem, 1981). 19. First published in Hazeman, vol. 3, 1904. All citations are here taken from the story as reprinted in Berdichevsky’s Me’emeq hahayyim (Warsaw, 1912). Berdichevsky made extensive revisions to many of the earlier writings that he included in the Shtibl edition of his Collected Works (Leipzig, 1921–25). I have thus chosen to cite, almost invariably, from the earlier, unrevised versions. On the necessity for critical awareness of textual variations in Berdichevsky’s writings, see Shmuel Werses’s review of Yeshurun Keshet’s biography of Berdichevsky in Qiriat sefer, vol. 34, no. 2 (Jerusalem, 1959), pp. 153–58. 20. Berdichevsky, Yidishe kesovim, p. 89. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse Typology in Prose’, in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formal and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 185. 24. This was the name given Areh Leib of Shpole, on whom see Shimon Dubnow, Toldot hahasidut (Tel Aviv, 1930–31), pp. 312–13. And for a vitriolically sarcastic depiction of the Shpoler Zeyde, see Gotlober, Zikhronot umassa’ot, 1:175–77. 25. Berdichevsky, Yidishe kesovim, p. 89. 26. Ibid., p. 92. 27. For as fascinating depiction of the house of Ruzhin, drawn from popular tradition and Wrst-hand accounts, see Litvin, ‘Bay di rebeyim in tschartkov un sadegor’, in Yidishe neshomes, Wrst section of vol. 6. In Berdichevsky’s story, ‘Rokhele’ marries one of the Ruzhiner’s grandchildren, a marriage that is from the Ruzhiner’s side clearly dictated by pecuniary considerations. ‘When a Jew’, exclaims the folk-narrator,

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Notes to Pages 202–03 ‘even the greatest of magnates, even one not belonging to the dynasty, is oVered such Yihhes, naturally he is tickled pink and his generosity knows no bounds’ (Yidishe kesovim, p. 92). Berdichevsky had, prior to the writing of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, run into trouble with the Sadagorer Hasidim, for an imaginative depiction of the founder of the dynasty, Israel of Ruzhin, published in 1897 in the anthology Sifrei sha’ashu’im. The Sadagorer Hasidim gave intention of burning this anthology and applied such pressure upon the editor that both he and Berdichevsky felt constrained to issue open letters in Hamaggid in order to appease their opponents. See Sh. Werses, ‘Hahasidut be’olamo shel berdichevsky’ in his collection of essays Sippur veshorsho (Ramat Gan, 1971), pp. 108f. And for Berdichevsky’s sketch of the Ruzhiner, clearly, I think, ironic in intent, see ‘Arba’ah ’avot’, in his Sefer Hasidim (Warsaw, 1900). ‘Sifrei sh’ashu’im’ was published in Buczacz, the birthplace of S. Y. Agnon, and Agnon recalls that when he was found in the Tshortkow kloiz with the edition of the periodical that contained Berdichevsky’s piece, it was taken from him and burned. See Agnon, Me’atsmi ’el atsmi, (Tel Aviv, 1976), p. 262. 28. See Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish, pp. 198–234; the preface by Joseph Dan and the introduction by Arnold Band to Band’s translation of Nahman of Bratslav: The Tales, tr. Band (New York, 1978); Arthur Green, ‘Excursus II: The Tales’, in his Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (New York, 1981), pp. 337–71. On Hasidic motifs in Berdichevsky’s Yiddish stories, see Werses’s introduction to Yidishe kesovim, pp. xxxv-xxxviii. 29. For example, the constant play with light imagery, connected with the sun/Ner tamid motifs; the Garden of Eden; the Niggun (Hasidic melody); the Ben melekh/Bat malkah parallelism. 30. A process much similar to this may be observed in others of ‘Berdichevsky’s stories. Compare especially ‘Lehitsat han’al’, in Kol sippurei mikhah yosef bin-gorion, p. 117. And see Yosef Even, ‘Mehabber badui, mesapper badui, veqore’ badui besippurei berdichevsky’ in his Mivhar massot (Tel Aviv, 1983), pp. 5–27. 31. Berdichevsky, Yidishe kesovim, p. 91. The account of the count (Porets) bears remarkably strong parallels to Maimon’s depiction of Prince Radzivill in the Lebensgeschichte. Berdichevsky’s count makes a bet with another count that he will ride on a sleigh in midsummer, and upon his command ground sugar is piled knee-deep on the roads for this purpose. Compare Maimon (2001 ed.), pp. 83–85. 32. Berdichevsky, Yidishe kesovim, p. 90. 33. In the original ‘Etsel ’am lo’ yad’ati leshono, an adaptation of Jeremiah 5:15, nicely appropriate in this context. 34. Berdichevsky, Yidishe kesovim, pp. 92–93. 35. Ibid., p. 92. 36. On this theme, which is deserving of fuller elaboration, see Coe, pp. 184–89. And, in the present context, see especially Goethe’s depiction of his Wrst love for ‘Gretchen’ in The Autobiography, 1:171–228. 37. Mehe’avar haqerov, pp. 89–97. See, especially, the end section of this story, pp. 96–97, in eVect only a slight variation upon the end of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’. And

Notes to Pages 203–05 compare the sketch ‘Pat lehem’ in Me’iri haqetanah, pp. 92–94. And on the childhood romance theme in Berdichevsky’s stories, see Almagor, ‘Demuyot-’av’, pp. 229, 237–38. 38. See Bialik’s depiction of ‘Feygele’ in ‘SaWah’ in Kitvei H. N. Bialik, 2:119–21; S. Y. Abramovitsh (Mendele Moykher sforim), Shloyme reb khayim’s, in Ale verk, 18:68–70; Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Rabinovitsh), Funem yarid, 2 vols. in 1(New York, 1925), 1:195–200; Ephraim Lisitsky, ’Elleh toldot ’adam, pp. 45–51. And see Gotlober, 1:68–69. 39. Berdichevsky, Yidishe kesovim, p. 93. 40. Ibid. 41. Abraham (Arnold) Band, ‘Qera’ satan: ’al tafqid hasatan be’ippyun hagibbur haberdichevska’i’, in Sefer hayovel leshimon halkin (Jersualem, 1975), pp. 533–45. 42. Most notably by Shmuel Werses, in his above-cited review of Keshet’s M. Y. Berdichevsky: hayyav ufo’alo. See also Shmuel Y. Penueli, ‘M. Y. Berdichevsky hamevuqar vehamevaqer’, in his Sifrut kifshutah (Tel Aviv, 1963), pp. 352V. Avner Holtzman charts such a middle course in his study of Berdichevsky’s early years and provides a valuable summary and methodological evaluation of the dilemma posed by the undeniable auto/biographical element in Berdichevsky’s writings to scholars. See his ‘El haqera’, pp. 160–70. 43. In fact, Berdichevsky could trace an ancestry of seventeen unbroken generations of rabbis. See Rakhel Bin-Gorion, ‘Hayyei my”b’, in Berdichevsky, Kol sippurei, pp. 7–9. And, on Berdichevsky’s father, Mosheh Aharon Berdichevsky, and his congregation in Dubova, see Rokhel Feigenberg, A pinkes fun a toyter shtot (Warsaw, 1926), esp. pp. 8–10. 44. Berdichevsky, Reshut hayahid, p. 40. 45. Berdichevsky, Me’emeq hahayyim, p. 70. 46. The letter is published in Avner Holtzman, Hakkarat panim: massot ’al mikhah yosef berdichevsky (Tel Aviv, 1993), p. 71. 47. See Holtzman, Temunah leneged ’einay, p. 24. 48. Berdichevsky, Me’emeq hahayyim, p. 73. 49. See especially, ‘ ’Alya’ vekots bah’ in Hamaggid, year 33, no. 28 (Lyck, 19.7.1888), pp. 219–20 and no. 29 (26.7.1888), pp. 227–28. The suicide of two Maskilim of Bershad, where Berdichevsky lived during his brief second marriage, appears, from this article, to have impressed him deeply with the dangers of Haskalah. See Holtzman, ‘El haqera’, p. 173; Almagor, ’Arba’ hashanim hari’shonot biytsirato shel m. y. berdichevsky, in Peles: me’assef lezekher shmuel y. penueli, ed. Nurit Govrin (Tel Aviv, 1980), esp. pp. 136–38. 50. For a lovely description of these visits see Holtzman, Temunah, pp. 27–39. 51. See Werses’s introduction to Yidishe kesovim. And see Immanuel Bin-Gorion, ‘Leshonotav shel M. Y. B.’, in his ’Olam ve’olamot bo (Tel Aviv, 1986), pp. 71–79; Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, pp. 74–86. 52. Ben-Tsiyon Katz, in an early review of the Yidishe Kesovim, equates Berdichevsky’s return to Yiddish with a return to childhood memories and a ‘longing for

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Notes to Pages 205–08 his mother and her language’. See his ‘M.y. berditchevsky’s shriftn in idish’. This article is to be found in the Vilna shrayber arkhiv in the Archives of the YIVO Institute, New York, Document 8498. I have been unable to ascertain from which journal this clipping is taken. The compilers of a recent bibliography of works by and about Berdichevsky cite articles by Ben-Tsiyon Katz on Berdichevsky, but fail, likewise, to give publishing details. See Dan Almagor and Shmuel Fishman, Nahalat my”b: mafteah bibliograW liytsirot mikhah yosef berdichevsky (bin-gorion) ulhibburim ’al ’odotav (Tel Aviv, 1982), entry 1748. Nor are any further details included in Shmuel Werses’s review of this bibliography, which includes extensive supplements. See Werses’ review in Qiriat Sefer, vol. 62 (Jerusalem, 1982), pp. 684–700. 53. See Dan Almagor, ‘Demuyot-’av’, especially pp. 233–35. 54. Berdichevsky, Me’emeq hahayyim, p. 72. 55. There is a complex of associations in Berdichevsky’s writings between whiteness, light, candles—especially Sabbath candles—and evocation of the lost mother, whose name was Pearl. See Almagor, ibid. And see especially Berdichevsky, ‘ ’Oyvi’, in Me’emeq hahayyim, second cycle, pp. 77–79. The image of the Ner tamid is especially appropriate, as it was indeed as an ‘eternal light’ that Berdichevsky’s mother remained with him in his memory. 56. ’Zikhronot me’et Yossi tse’ira’ ’, in ’Otsar hasifrut, Year 4 (1892), pp. 552–55. 57. See Rakhel Bin-Gorion, p. 7. Many of the monologues in Yidishe kesovim fun a vaytn korev are addressed to ‘Reb Yossel’. See Werses’s introduction to ibid., p. xlix. 58. Berdichevsky, Me’iri haqetanah, p. 84. 59. For a representative, but by no means exhaustive, selection of autobiographical accounts of the impression made upon the child by the mother’s Yiddish stories, see S. Y. Fin, ‘Dor vedorshav’, in Hakarmel, vol. 4 (Vilna, 1879), pp. 74–76; Buqi Ben Yogli (Y. L. Katznelson), Mah shera’u’ einay vesham’u ’oznay (Jerusalem, 1957), pp. 12–14; S. Levin, Childhood in Exile, pp. 66–67, and especially pp. 77–79; E. E. Friedman, Sefer hazikhronot, p. 35; Yitshak Nissenboim, ’Alei heldi (Jerusalem, 1969), p. 5; Avrom Liessin, Zikhroynes un bilder (New York, 1954), pp. 84–86; M. Z. Feierberg, ‘Ba’erev’, in Kitvei mordechai ze’ev feierberg, ed. Eliezer Shteinmann (Tel Aviv, n.d.), especially p. 25. 60. Berdichevsky, Mehe’avar haqerov, pp. 64–65. And compare ‘Tsilelei ’erev’ in the same collection. 61. For an extensive study of Abramovitsh and the Mendele persona, see Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised. Noteworthy, in the present context, is one of Mendele’s later Hebrew stories, ‘Biyshivah shel ma’alah uviyshivah shel matah’. The Mendele persona in this story ‘breaks into two’ when recalling a particularly painful episode, clearly rooted in Abramovitsh’s biography—the death of the father when the boy was a child. The persona, however, emerges intact from this experience in which the speaker is Mendele: ‘I did not know who I was, what I was, whence I came, nor where I was. . . . Total chaos in my mind and nightmarish, weird images from the days of childhood to old age Xickered through my brain at random.’ (Abramovitsh, Kol kitvei, p. 426. At no point in this story, however, does the ‘I’ of

Notes to Pages 208–11 Abramovitsh overwhelm the folk-narrator and Xood the text as occurs in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’. And compare Brenner in ‘Befa’am hame’ah’, in his Ketavim, 3: 310: Mendele did not come to tell us about himself as did several of our writers who came after him. While he does, indeed, frequently address us in the Wrst person, this is not done to highlight the personality of the author but is, rather, an aVectation of his and no more. When he digresses, for example, in the mode of a Werther or Petshorin, on the two conXicting Mendeles and so forth . . . this is not for its own sake, e.g., in the name of self-revelation. 62. Mendele, ‘Shloyme reb Khayim’s’, in Ale verk 18:xxviii–xxix. 63. The subtitles respectively of ‘Me’ever lanahar’ and ‘Bil’adeiha’ are Zikhronot ’ozev and Zikhronot boded. See Berdichevsky, Mibayit umihuts, p. 95. 64. See Berdichevsky, ‘Leharhavat hasifrut’, especially the sections ‘Tsorekh viykholet besifutenu hayafah’ and ‘Mikhtav galui’, in Kol ma’amrei, pp. 153–58. 65. This polarity or Qera’ occurs repeatedly in Berdichevsky’s polemics with Ahad Ha’am on the role of Hebrew literature. See ibid., pp. 153–58, passim. 66. The ‘distance/relation’ paradox is central to all of the writings of Philippe Lejeune on autobiography and marks my theoretical point of departure here. See especially Lejeune, L’autobiographie, pp. 74–76. 67. Berdichevsky, Yidishe kesovim, p. 92. 68. See Almagor and Fishman, Nahalat my”b. And see Almagor, ‘Arba’ hashanim’, especially pp. 130, 136–38. 69. For a subtle characterization of the psychological complexity of the son of a rabbi who has departed from the ways of tradition in order to become a Hebrew (Yiddish) writer, See Dov Sadan, ‘Ben harov: vegn zalmen yitskhak anokhi’, in his Toyern un tirn (Tel Aviv, 1977), esp. pp. 40–42. 70. See the preamble to ‘Garei rehov’ in Berdichevsky, Kol sippurei, p. 260. And on Berdichevsky and memory, see the brief comments of Shmuel Halkin in Zeramim vetsurot, pp. 226–27, and Moseley, ‘Between Memory and Forgetfulness’. 71. Berdichevsky, Yidishe kesovim, p. 93. 72. See Berdichevsky’s essay ‘Lihyot o lahadol’, in Reuben Brainin’s Mimizrah umima’arav, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1894), pp. 93–104. And, on this East/West polarity, current in Jewish and non-Jewish circles of the day, see Shmuel Werses, ‘Ne’umo ha’aharon shel nahman be “le’an” umeqorotav’, in his Mimendele ’ad hazaz, pp. 137–57. 73. See the preamble to ‘Beseter ra’am’ in Berdichevsky, Kol sippurei, p. 235. Compare ‘Bein hapatish vehasadan’, in Me’emeq hahayyim, pp. 72–73. Berdichevsky’s association of Ars Poetica with ‘sin’ stems, in no small part, from a sense of guilt at having left the world of his forefathers and his family in pursuit of the vocation of writer, an aspiration foreign to that world. This association was, no doubt, strengthened by his later acquaintance with the Freudian ‘Id’ and Goethean ‘Daemon’. And see Almagor, ‘Demuyot-’av’, p. 227; and Even, ‘Mehabber badui’, pp. 6–7. 74. Rousseau, Confessions, p. 30. For an extensive discussion of the Eden theme in autobiography, see Egan, especially pp. 68–103. 75. See Fleishman, pp. 174–88.

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Notes to Pages 211–15 76. See Muir, pp. 33–34. Shlomoh Grodzensky, born in Grodno and taken to New York at the age of twelve, recreated the East-European Jewish shtetl in his imagination as a ‘lost garden of Eden’. He identiWed strongly with Muir’s autobiography. See Grodzensky, pp. 29–30. 77. See especially Berdichevsky, ‘Alya’ vekots bah’. And see Almagor, ‘Arba’ hashanim’, pp. 136–37. 78. Genesis 4:24. ‘Gershayim’ was published from April to June 1890 in Ha’ivri, vols. 26–27, 32–35. 79. Berdichevsky, Yidishe kesovim, p. 91. 80. For one of Jung’s deWnitions of the ‘Collective Unconscious’, see C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London, 1978), p. 82: ‘By this term I designate an unconscious psychic activity present in all human beings which not only gives rise to symbolic pictures today but was the source of all similar products in the past.’ Unlike Jung, however, Berdichevsky was impatiently dismissive of race-thinking. See ‘Hakol biyrushah’, in his Kol ma’amrei, pp. 120–21. It is unclear whether Berdichevsky had any Wrst-hand acquaintance with Jung’s work. He does, however, appear to have read Hermann Hesse, whom he recommended to Ya’akov Fichman. See Ya’akov Fichman, Ruhot menaggenot (Jerusalem, 1952), p. 276. 81. See especially, the essay ‘ ’Al ha’ahdut’ in Berdichevsky, ’Al ’em haderekh (Warsaw, 1900), pp. 67–69. 82. Ibid., p. 69. 83. Berdichevsky, ‘Lishe’elat he’avar’, in Din udevarim (Warsaw, 1902), p. 65. 84. The term is, of course, that of Henri Bergson, whom Berdichevsky, given his philosophical interests, may well have read; Matière et mémoire was Wrst published in 1896. A Hebrew translation of a section of Bergson’s work appeared in Hatequfah, vol 2 (1917), pp. 333–66. Zipporah Kagan notes the correspondences between Berdichevskian and Bergsonian concepts of time, but she does not expand on this. See Kagan, Me’aggadah lesipporet modernit biytsirat Berdichevsky (Tel Aviv, 1983), p. 19. 85. Berdichevsky, Beshirah uvelashon (Warsaw, 1911), p. 33. 86. See Immanuel Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, passim, and especially pp. 26– 27, pp. 93–100, 110–16; Bakon, Hatsa’ir haboded, pp. 35–37; Shalom Spiegel, Hebrew Reborn (New York, 1930), pp. 362–64. For a useful summary of Berdichevsky’s German studies of Jewish antiquity, see David Biale, Gershom Sholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge and London, 1979), pp. 39–43. 87. See Spiegel, pp. 331–74; Biale, ibid.; Halkin, Muskamot umashberim, pp. 101– 03. For a more extensive discussion, see Yehezke’el Kaufmann, Golah venekhar, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1929, 1930), 2:386–410. 88. See ‘Nussah’, in Berdichevsky, Din udevarim, p. 39; idem, Beshirah uvelashon (Warsaw, 1911), pp. 11–12. 89. See ‘Ta’un genizah’ in Berdichevsky, Din udevarim, p. 39. 90. Berdichevsky, Miriam, p. 106. In ‘Beseter ra’am’, Berdichevsky refers to the Books of Kings as Kitvei-hazikhronot lemalkhim. See Kol sippurei, p. 244. 91. Berdichevsky, Kol ma’amrei, p. 347.

Notes to Pages 215–17 92. For Berdichevsky’s identiWcation with Moses, see ‘Bein hapatish vehasadan’, in his Me’emeq hahayyim, pp. 76–77. On Uriel Acosta (and Spinoza), see ibid., p. 89. On Modena, see above. Berdichevsky’s supra-temporal model for Jewish continuity may have been in part inspired by Nahman Krochmal’s Moreh nevukhei hazeman, a book which made a profound impression upon him. See ‘Goyim ve’elohav’, in Berdichevsky, Mibayit umihuts, pp. 38–40. 93. Berdichevsky, Kol ma’amrei, p. 347. 94. Lilienblum was probably the Wrst to articulate this claim, which, as noted, is marked in but not peculiar to Jewish autobiographies. Hence the title of his work, Sins of Youth, not Sins of My Youth. Tolstoy, likewise viewing his childhood as typical, insisted upon the title Childhood, not My Childhood. See Gareth Williams, Tolstoy’s ‘Childhood’ (London, 1995), pp. 29–30. See M. L. Lilienblum, Ketavim autobiograWim, 3 vols., ed. Shlomoh Breimann (Jerusalem, 1970), 2:140–42; ’Iggerot m. l. Lilienblum le y. l. Gordon, p. 152. Such special pleading becomes almost standard in later Jewish autobiographies. See E. E. Friedman, pp. 3–5; Buqi Ben Yogli, p. 165; Brainin, Ketavim nivharim, p. x. 95. See Berdichevsky, Kol ma’amrei, p. 22. ‘I feel in my innermost being the burden of my inheritance, the suVerings of my life, of my soul which was driven out of the Garden of Eden.’ Brenner was perhaps the Wrst to remark upon this aspect of Berdichevsky’s autobiographical writings: ‘The anguish of the past was in fact the pain of the people, even when he seemingly places the individual and only the individual above all else.’ This, Brenner says, is a ‘passive, national anguish, a historical anguish based in time, not in place’. See Brenner, Ketavim, 3:831; Immanuel BinGorion, Qore’ hadorot (Tel Aviv, 1981), pp. 12–13; and F. Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1935), 2:63–64. 96. Underlining in original. 97. Berdichevsky, ‘Bil’adeiha’, from Mibayit umihuts, pp. 81–82. 98. See Bakon, Hatsa’ir haboded, especially pp. 41–47. 99. See ibid., pp. 42–43. 100. Ortsion Barthana adopts the Nietzschean model. See his Telushim vehalutsim (Jerusalem, 1983), especially pp. 86–90. 101. On the possible inXuence of Freud upon Berdichevsky, see Almagor, ‘Demuyot-’av’, p. 227. Oedipal motifs recur in a variety of guises in Berdichevsky’s works, including his Aggadic compilations. In Mahanayyim, especially, there is a clear conXation of the Oedipal motif with the theme of the Qera’. See Dan Miron’s essay ‘Hamifneh basipporet ha’ivrit hahadashah ’al pi mahanayyim’, in Hagut vesipporet biytsirat Berdichevsky, ed. Zipporah Kagan (Haifa, 1981); and Berdichevsky’s Yiddish story ‘Der oyrekh: A mayse-noyre fun an umgliklakhn, vos hot gevolt noykem zayn in zayn foter’, in Yidishe kesovim, pp. 42–43. On which, see Dov Sadan, ‘Sheloshah sippurim useviveihem’, in Moznayim, vol. 21 (Tel Aviv, 1965–66), pp. 354–62. The absence of any open mention of Freud in Berdichevsky’s oeuvre is strange and very Freudian. 102. This aspect of Berdichevsky’s anti Ahad-Ha’amist historiography is well explicated by Halkin in Muskamot umashberim, pp. 102–03 and Mavo’, pp. 405–07.

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Notes to Pages 217–20 103. Thus Berdichevsky writes of Feierberg that ‘he felt the great split in the soul of the Jew’. This split, he writes, is equivalent to a ‘universal pain’. See Berdichevsky, Peri sefer, p. 51. In ‘Tsorekh viykholet besifrutenu hayafah’, Berdichevsky equates the Qera’ with the ‘great tragedy that came with the creation of our people . . . a deep spiritual pain which aZicts every Jewish man and woman’. See Kol ma’amrei, pp. 154–55. 104. On Modena and Maimon, see texts as cited above. On Emden, see ‘Shtei nashim behayyei ya’aqov Emden’, in Kol ma’amrei, pp. 328–29. On Nathan of Nemirov, see ‘Zivvug ri’shon vezivvug sheni behayyei rav’, in ibid., pp. 329–30. Also, see ‘Be’ishah’, in ibid., p. 327. Erotic antinomianism is a leitmotif in Berdichevsky’s works, and his fascination with the perversities of Eros becomes, in his later years, almost obsessive, as evinced by ‘Beseter ra’am’ and, above all, Miriam. On this, see Spiegel, pp. 367–69; Joseph Reider, ‘Negative Tendencies in Modern Hebrew Literature’, Hebrew Union College Annual Jubilee Volume (Cincinnati, 1925), pp. 445–82. 105. For Berdichevsky on Vital, see text as cited in n. 87 above. 106. Romanim noshanim—‘Old Novels’ or ‘Romances of Days Gone By’. 107. For a deWnition of this term, see Biale, pp. 10–12. 108. See Gershom Scholem, Miberlin liyrushalayim: zikhronot ne’urim (Tel Aviv, 1982), pp. 119–20; Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, tr. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia, 1981), p. 136. 109. See Y. Zinberg, ‘Tsvey shites in yidishn lebn’, in his Kultur historishe shtudies, pp. 7–87; Shmuel Werses, Biqqoret habiqqoret (Tel Aviv, 1982), especially pp. 267–68. Zinberg wrote several articles on Berdichevsky in Russian, including the entry on Berdichevsky in the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia. See Almagor and Fishman, entries 1826–28. 110. See Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (London, 1969). On the Neumann-Scholem connection, see Biale, Gershom Scholem, pp. 145–47.’ 110. See Dan Miron, Biyyuto shel haz’enr hazar: leve’ayat ’amanut haroman shel shay ’agnon’, in his Harofe’ hemedumeh: ’iyyunim basipporet hayehudit haqlasit (Tel Aviv, 1995), pp. 307–43. Agnon, and Bialik, too, evinced extreme anxiety, with good reason, concerning Berdichevsky as precursor. On Berdichevsky and Agnon, see Avner Holtzman, ‘Berdichevsky ve’agnon: panim ’aherot’, in his Hakkarat panim, pp. 149–61. On Berdichevsky and Bialik, see Shmuel Avineri, ‘Bialik uverdichevsky: gillui vekhisui ba’arikhah’, in Ginzei mikhah yosef, ed. Holtzman (Tel Aviv, 1997), 7:169–90. 112. The autobiographical element is marked already in the second and third of Berdichevsky’s published articles. See his ‘Lag ba’omer’ in Hamelits, vol. 27, no. 96 (St. Petersburg, 30.9.1887) and ‘ ’Ezrat sofrim’, vol. 27, no. 142 (St. Petersburg, 26.6.1887). And see Almagor, ‘Arba’ hashanim’. 113. See Berdichevsky, ‘Hetsits venifga’ ’, and his ‘ ’Olam ha’atsilut, hashqafah ’al yeshivat Volozhin’, Wrst printed in Hakerem, Year 1, and reprinted with ‘Tseror mikhtavim me’et bar-bei-rav’ in Pirqei volozhin (Tel Aviv, 1984), especially p. 19. For biographical details see Rakhel Bin-Gorion, p. 8; Holtzman, ’El haqera’, pp. 31–33.

Notes to Pages 220–25 114. On this unhappy period of Berdichevsky’s life, see N. Shmuel Feinberg, ‘Berdichevsky terem shehitgallah’, in Ginzei mikhah yosef, vol. II, ed. Avner Holtzman (Tel Aviv, 1988), 2:32–38. 115. ’Tseror mikhtavim’, in Berdichevsky, Pirqei volozhin, p. 57. 116. Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, p.72. 117. In Ha’ivri, vol. 13 (27.12.1889). 118. See Almagor, ‘Arba’ hashanim’, p. 145; Holtzman, ’El haqera’, p. 187. 119. Hashqafotav ’al ha dat vehahayyim. This would appear to be an oblique reference to R. A. Braudes’s novel based upon Lilienblum’s campaign for religious reform in Eastern Europe, entitled Hadat vehahayyim (Lemberg, 1875). 120. Berdichevsky, ‘Devarim ’ahadim’, p. 96. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid. 123. See Maimon, Introduction to Book 2 in Hayyei shlomoh maimon; Shmuel D. Luzzatto, Pirqei hayyim, especially chap. 1. See also Lachover’s introduction to ibid., especially pp. 25–28; Werses, ‘Darkhei ha’autobiograWah’; Ha’ezrahi on Luzzatto; Berdichevsky on Maimon in Peri sefer, especially p. 40. 124. Almagor, ‘ ’Arba’ hashanim’, pp. 144–45. 125. Rousseau, 1:101–02. 126. Ibid., p. 275. 127. The essay is undersigned Be’er shahaduta’ Yabam. Yabam is an acronym of M. Y. B., and Be’er shahaduta’ refers to Bershad, where Berdichevsky then lived with his second wife. 128. Holtzman, ’El haqera’, p. 241. 129. See Berdichevsky’s letter to Aaron Kaminka as printed in Genazim, vol. 1, ed. G. Kressel (Tel Aviv, 1961), pp. 173–74. 130. The extent of Berdichevsky’s knowledge of European languages at this stage is unclear. Shimon Dubnow met Berdichevsky in Odessa in 1890 and reports that Berdichevsky could not then speak any European language ‘apart from Yiddish in the Ukrainian dialect’. See Dubnow, Dos bukh; 1:240–41. On the other hand, Berdichevsky’s early articles and semi-disguised autobiographical pieces suggest a fairly wide acquaintance with European thought which cannot have been derived solely from Hebrew and Yiddish translations. See Almagor, ‘ ’Arba’ hashanim’, p. 134. N. Shmuel Feinberg writes that, in 1889, Berdichevsky received packages of books, journals and letters from all corners of the land, written in Hebrew, Russian, German and French. ‘Even if he then had no good knowledge of any other language than Hebrew, still, he would pore over these foreign books and even write critiques of them, for his extraordinary genius grasped all that was written in the books in a foreign language.’ See Feinberg, p. 36. 131. See Irina Paperna, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism (Stanford, 1988), especially pp. 41–43; Robin Feuer Miller, ‘Dostoyevsky and Rousseau: The Morality of Confession Reconsidered’, and James P. Scanlon, ‘Chernichevsky and Rousseau’,

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Notes to Pages 225–28 both in Western Philosophical Systems in Russian Literature, ed. Anthony M. Mlikotin (Los Angeles, 1979). 132. German, because of its proximity to Yiddish and, in no small part, through the mediation of Mendelssohn’s Be’ur, became the primary language for the attainment of Haskalah in Jewish Eastern Europe. 133. See Miron, Re’shito shel berdichevsky hamesapper and Rakhel Bin-Gorion, p. 8; Holtzman, ’El heqera’, pp. 207–15. 134. See Rakhel Bin-Gorion, p. 8. 135. Ha’ivri, 26:212. 136. Berdichevsky, Kol sippurei, p. 221. 137. Ha’ivri, 34:273. This is, in fact, an authentic autobiographical detail. Berdichevsky’s stepmother brought two mentally disturbed daughters from her Wrst marriage to his father’s household. To be landed suddenly with two insane stepsisters was, naturally, a traumatic experience for Berdichevsky. This experience, it appears, forms the basis for Berdichevsky’s extremely disturbing story, ‘Mishenei ’avarim’, which Wrst appeared in 1909 and is reprinted in Me’emeq hahayyim, part 2, pp. 5–30. 138. Ha’ivri, 35:281. 139. See Miron, Re’shito shel Berdichevsky hamesapper, especially pp. 19–20; Almagor, ‘ ’Arba’ hashanim’, pp. 147–48. 140. Miron himself notes Berdichevsky’s indebtedness, in ‘Gershayim’, to the literary conventions of the Haskalah novel of the 1860s and 1870s. Berdichevsky was a great admirer, especially, of Reuven Asher Braudes. See his essay ‘Me’et le’et: broides vesmolenskin’, in Hazeman, vol 9 (Vilna, 6.2.1903); Reshut heyahid be’ad harabim, pp. 26, 34–35. 141. According to Rakhel Bin-Gorion (p. 10), the townsmen of Dubova, at the time of his homecoming in 1901, bore a grudge against Berdichevsky for his depiction of them in Me’iri haqetanah. 142. Not one of Berdichevsky’s articles or stories written in the Wrst six years of his career was included in this Shtibel edition. Fishel Lachover worked with Berdichevsky on the Wnal compilation and revision of his works for the Shtibel edition. See his memoirs on the project in Ri’shonim va’aharonim, vol. 2: especially, pp. 68, 70–71; for a detailed study of the various editions of Berdichevsky’s writings, see Holtzman, ‘Darkhei ’arikhah umivneh bekhitvei berdichevsky lemahadoroteihem’, in Hakkarat panim, pp. 195–213. 143. From 1899 to 1900, no less than nine books by Berdichevsky were published: two collections of stories; two novellas (Mahanayyim and ’Orva parah); four collections of essays; and Sefer hasidim, a work that deWes categorization. All of the stories, with the exception of three short sketches, were now published for the Wrst time. For bibliographical details, see Almagor and Fishman, Nahalat my”b, pp. 22– 23. For the problem of the instantaneous appearance of so much new material in Berdichevsky’s books of 1899 and 1900, see Holtzman’s study of the gradual com-

Notes to Pages 228–30 ing-to-be of one of these books, Sefer hasidim: ‘ ’Sefer Hasidim: nequdat hamotsa’ lesipporet shel m.y. berdichevsky’, in Hakkarat panim, pp. 26–45. 144. Holtzman notes that of the ninety compositions penned by Berdichevsky from 1886 to 1890, only two were stories. See his introduction to the ongoing and remarkable comprehensive edition of Berdichevsky’s writings, Kitvei mikhah yosef berdichevsky (bin-gorion), 1:13–15. It should be noted, however, that Berdichevsky’s ‘essays’ in this period are extremely hybrid and include numerous story-like and autobiographical digressions. 145. See Berdichevsky, ‘Peraqim mequtai’im misefer hazikhronot shel ’almoni’, in Ha’ivri, vol 5 (Brody, 19.10.1888) and vol. 6 (Brody, 26.10.1888); see also ‘Lag ba’omer’ and ‘ ’Ezrat sofrim’, in Hamelits vol. 27, no. 96 (St. Petersburg, 30.4.1887) and no. 142 (St. Petersburg, 26.6.1887). 146. Berdichevsky, ’Al ’em haderekh, p. 1. 147. Berdichevsky, Baderekh, Part 1 (Leipzig, 1922), p. 11; and see the introduction to Mahashavot vetorot, Part 2 (Leipzig, 1922), p. 13. 148. The essay Wrst appeared in the annual ’Otsar hasifrut, Year 4 (1891–92), pp. 1–40. All present citations are taken from the 1892 Krakau edition of the essay, as cited above. 149. Spiegel, p. 346. 150. Berdichevsky, Reshut hayahid, pp. 1–3. Compare this depiction of the Heder years with those in ‘Pat lehem’ and ‘Shebikhtav veshebe’al peh’, in Me’iri haqetanah. 151. Berdichevsky, Reshut hayahid, p. 40. 152. For a contextualization of Berdichevsky’s views in this essay on the the relation between individual and collective with his earlier statements on this topic, see Holtzman, ’El haqera’, pp. 240–46. 153. See Rakhel Bin-Gorion, p. 9. 154. Frishmann’s translation of Nietzsche was Wrst published in his journal ReshaWm in 1910. Berdichevsky adulated Frishmann, adopting him as a father-Wgure and literary guru at this period. On their relationship, see Yeshurun Keshet, M.y. berdichevsky: hayyav ufo’alo (Jerusalem, 1958), p. 68, 85, 90–97; and see Werses’s review of Keshet, p. 157; Moshe Ungerfeld, ‘Beyn mikhah yosef berdichevsky uvein david frishman: tseror ’iggerot’, in Me’assef ledivrei sifrut biqqoret vehagut, vols. 5–6 (Tel Aviv, 1965–66), pp. 619–36. In addition, see Berdichevsky’s eulogistic essay on Frishmann, Wrst published in 1902 and reprinted in Berdichevsky, Ba’erev (Warsaw, 1910), pp. 14–27. 155. Keshet, p. 85. 156. See Almagor, ‘ ’Arba’ hashanim’, and Berdichevsky, ‘ ’Al shulhan hasifrut’, published in the same volume of ’Otsar hasifrut as Reshut hayahid. 157. Berdichevsky, Reshut hayahid, pp. 29, 36. 158. Ibid., p. 24. For Berdichevsky on Boerne, see ‘ ’Al shulhan hasifrut’. 159. Berdichevsky, ‘Devarim ’ahadim’, p. 96. 160. Berdichevsky, Reshut hayahid, p. 35.

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Notes to Pages 230–33 161. See Sholem Aleichem and Y. H. Ravnitsky (‘Eldad and Medad’) ‘Qevurat sofrim, feuilleton’, that appeared in three installments in Hamelits, vol. 22 (St. Petersburg, 26.1.1893), vol. 25 (St. Petersburg, 29.1.1893) and vol. 27 (St. Petersburg, 1.2.1893). The critique was actually that of ‘Eldad’, Sholem Aleichem, as addressed to ‘Medad’, Ravnitsky. See Werses’s review of Almagor, pp. 692–93. ‘Eldad’s’ was not the only negative reaction to Reshut hayahid; the article created something of a storm which apparently left Berdichevsky in doubt about his literary abilities. 162. The common theme is that of conXict between obeisance to externally imposed obligations and an unreXective acting upon the promptings of the heart. The two sketches actually set each other oV in the most artful and subtle manner. 163. See Berdichevsky, Me’iri haqetanah, pp. 84–95. 164. See Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 93. 165. Maimon, The Autobiography (2001 edition), p. 76. 166. See Berdichevsky, Kol sippurei, pp. 3–7; Almagor, ‘Demuyot-’av’, p. 225. 167. Barukh Kurzweil, especially pp. 239, 244. 168. Berdichevsky opens this review with a citation from Boerne, which is of no great relevance, it should be noted, to the essay that follows. 169. The title page of Mahazeh mul mahazeh, best translated perhaps as ‘Two Faces of the Same Coin’ or, following Aldous Huxley, ‘Point-Counterpoint’, reads: ‘Mahazeh mul mahazeh; including a description of the days of Purim in my youth, as compared with our present manner of life. This is an extraordinary book, quite unprecedented in Hebrew literature.’ The book is indeed extraordinary, in that Dik attempts not only to describe the Purim of his childhood, but to recreate the festival through the eyes of the child. But Mahazeh mul mahazeh is uneven; Dik is prone to quasi-philosophical digressions which break the narrative Xow, as do the frequent—and fascinating—lapses into ethnographic detail. The childhood reminiscences end abruptly on page 37, giving way to a synthesis of rabbinic commentaries on the Book of Esther. 170. The didactic element is particularly obtrusive in Fin’s autobiography, where the narrative is punctuated at regular intervals by little essays on Jewish education reform. See Fin, ‘Dor vedorshav’, passim. 171. The Wrst section of Epstein’s ‘Yaldut’ was published in the monthly Ben ’ami in 1887. Further installments appeared in Hamelits. The complete text, consisting of a series of sketches from the author’s childhood written from 1885 to 1904, was published in Kitvei zalman epstein (St. Petersburg, 1905), pp. 160–232, under the title ‘Misefer hazikhronot leshlomo ha’elqoshi’. Epstein, it should be noted, was strongly inXuenced by Nietzsche (see especially ‘Hasefer vehahayyim’, in ibid., pp. 95–101) and by Rousseau—largely through the mediation of Tolstoy who played a vital role in introducing Rousseauian thought to Russian intellectual circles (see his ‘Leo tolstoy’, in ibid., pp. 51–62). Epstein’s ‘Yaldut’ impressed Bialik—see his letter of 20.11.1903 to Joseph Klausner in ’Iggerot H. N. Bialik, 1:144. Bialik was no doubt inXuenced by Epstein’s ‘Yaldut’ when he came to write his own memoir of childhood, SaWah, the Wrst sections of which were published in 1908 and 1909, a work that

Notes to Pages 233–34 Berdichevsky admired (see Peri sefer, p. 64). Berdichevsky’s nuanced and delicate evocations of childhood provide a refreshing contrast to Epstein’s ‘Yaldut’ and Bialik’s SaWah, both of which are baroque and overblown by comparison. On Epstein, see Fichman, Ruhot menaggenot, especially pp. 363–65; and Y. M. Ravnitsky, Dor vesofrav, 2:101–05. 172. See Feierberg, pp. 19–35. The measure to which Feierberg inXuenced Berdichevsky and vice-versa deserves further study. Feierberg’s letter to Ahad Ha’am of January 5, 1898, accompanying the submission of ‘Ba’erev’ for Hashiloah, reads in part like a paraphrase, on occasion virtually word for word, of Berdichevsky’s 1889 essay on autobiography (see Feierberg, pp. 159–162). Echoes of ‘Hetsits venifga’ ’ and ‘Gershayim’ may likewise be discerned in Feierberg’s writings. Berdichevsky was, in turn, certainly inXuenced by Feierberg’s recasting of autobiographical experience within an ‘Aggadic’ or ‘mythic’ framework, important diVerences as noted above, notwithstanding. Berdichevsky was generous in his acknowledgement of this inXuence—more generous in his essay on Feierberg as initially published than in the later abridged and revised versions that appeared in Peri sefer and Kol ma’amrei (see Luah ’ahi’asaf, Year 3 (1899), especially pp. 117–19). For motifs common to both Feierberg and Berdichevsky, see Kurzweil, pp. 247–48. 173. See Shaked, 1:214–15. For Brenner on Feierberg, see Ketavim, 2:271–73. For Shteinmann, see the latter’s introduction to Feierberg, pp. 7–17. 174. See Immanuel Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, pp. 59–60. 175. See especially, ‘Lihyot o lahadol’ (1893), ‘Reshuyot’ (1896), ‘Hurbano shel ’olam’ (1896), ‘Sheyode’a lish’ol’ (1896), ‘Rahashei lev’ (1897). For full publication details, see Almagor and Fishman. All of these essays appear in revised and abridged form in Kol ma’amrei. 176. First published in Hashiloah, 2:461–65. 177. See Brenner, 3:861–63. 178. Berdichevsky, Kol ma’amrei, p. 154. 179. Ibid., p. 155. 180. Such pessimism, however, was rather à la mode amongst Hebrew writers of this period and possibly gave rise to a heroic self-conception that acted as a Wllip to continued creativity. See, for example, the correspondence between Mikhah Yosef Berdichevsky and Yosef Hayyim Brenner,in idem, Halifat ’iggerot (1906–1921), ed. Shlomo Bartonov with an afterword by Immanuel Bin-Gorion (Tel Aviv, 1984), passim. 181. Ahad Ha’am adopted a relentlessly patronizing and condescending tone in his essayistic responses to Berdichevsky and the ‘young ones’. See especially his ‘Tsorekh viykholet’ (1897), ‘ ’Etsah tovah’ (1897), and ‘Mahapekhah sifrutit’ (1897), in Kol kitvei ahad ha’am (Jerusalem, 1953). On Ahad Ha’am as repressive mentor of Bialik, see Dov Sadan, Bein din leheshbon (Tel Aviv, 1963), pp. 10–13, and Dan Miron, Hapereidah min ha’ani he’oni, especially pp. 95–109. The Ahad Ha’am/Berdichevsky polarity has been dealt with extensively. See the works cited by Almagor and Fishman. For a study which brings to light some hitherto undisclosed aspects of this

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Notes to Pages 234–38 complex relationship, see Yosef Oren, ‘Tehillat hahitkatvut bein m. y. b. veahad ha’am’, in his Shevavim (Tel Aviv, 1981), pp. 109–35. 182. Immanuel Bin-Gorion discerns the hand of an editor in this thesis. See his ’Olam ve’olamot bo, p. 75. And see Gershom Scholem’s comments on this thesis, which was only Wfty-seven pages long, in Miberlin liyrushalayim, pp. 118–20. 183. See Rachel Bin-Gorion, p. 10; and Keshet, pp. 124–25. 184. As cited by Holtzman, ’El haqera’, p. 140. 185. Ibid. 186. Ibid., pp. 141–42. 187. Ibid., pp. 142–43. 188. Ibid., p. 143—eccentric placement of the Wrst question mark as in the original. 189. Ibid., p. 149. 190. The above is no more than a brief summary of Holtzman, ’El haqera’, pp. 139–53 passim. 191. See the testimony of Moritz Heimann, who gave Berdichevsky private tutorials in German in 1900 in order to facilitate the writing of this work, in ibid., pp. 152–53. 192. The letters written by Berdichevsky to David Pinsky from Weimar provide the most revealing insight to his sojourn there. See these and other sources cited by Holtzman, ’El haqera’, esp. pp. 144–47. 193. See Hans Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics (New York, 1965) pp. 210–11. On Weimar and Goethe, see Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (New York, 1897), pp. 390–92. 194. See Keshet, p. 125; Holtzman, ’El haqera’, p. 145. 195. See Genazim, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1961), in which is reprinted the BerdichevskyPinsky correspondence for this period, p. 265. 196. Keshet, p. 125. 197. As cited by Holtzman, ’El haqera’, p. 144. 198. See Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim, 2:63. The interweaving of ‘Truth and Poetry’ is as characteristic of Plutarch as it is of Goethe. 199. See Goethe, 1:124–46. For a detailed analysis of Goethe on the Bible, see Waldman, passim. Immanuel Bin-Gorion notes several correspondences between Goethe’s and Berdichevsky’s idiosyncratic reading of the Bible. See his ’Olam ve ’olamot bo, pp. 96, 100–110. 200. See Goethe, 1:171–228; 2:242–46. For Goethe, the brother/sister and ‘Wrst love’ motifs are linked, as they are for Berdichevsky. Compare Chateaubriand, pp. 62–66. On the sister/Wrst love theme in Berdichevsky’s autobiographical stories, see Almagor, ‘Demuyot-’av’, pp. 231, 237–39. 201. Keller’s Green Henry, written between 1846 and 1855, is essentially a recasting of Dichtung und Wahrheit within a Swiss setting. Berdichevsky makes speciWc reference to Green Henry in his introduction to ‘ ’Oyvi (sippur zikhronotay)’, in Me’emeq hahayyim, 2:75. ‘ ’Oyvi’ was Wrst published in 1909 and Berdichevsky says in the introduction to the story that he read this Jugendsroman (Roman ne’urim) ‘a long

Notes to Pages 238–42 time ago’. Compare this story with ‘Peace in Retirement: My First Adversary and His Downfall’, in Gottfried Keller, Green Henry, tr. A. M. Mott (New York and London, 1985), pp. 108–15. Ya’akov Fichman recalls that Gottfried Keller was one of the authors recommended him by Berdichevsky. See Ruhot menaggenot, p. 276. And see Holtzman, ’El haqera’, pp. 227–29. 202. See the selection of aphorisms translated from Berdichevsky’s German diary by F. Lachover and included as a supplement to Berdichevsky, Kol ma’amrei, p. 384; Almagor, ‘Demuyot-’av’, p. 227. 203. Marcus, p. 141. 204. As cited by Holtzman, ’El haqera’, p. 149. 205. Ibid., p. 145. 206. See his letters to David Pinsky in Genazim, 1:125–28. 207. As cited by Holtzman, ’El haqera’, p. 148. 208. In 1899, Berdichevsky retitled the Wrst projected book Der Abtrunnige. See ibid., p. 151. On Berdichevsky’s conscious adoption of ‘their language’ as a means of autobiographical self-distancing, see Holtzman ’El haqera’, pp. 105–08. 209. Ungerfeld, p. 634. 210. As cited by Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, p. 36. Berdichevsky switched the title from ‘Nishmat hasidim’ to ‘Mishnat hasidim’; later, when he included the essay in Sefer hasidim, he switched the title back. 211. Mimizrah umima’arav, vol. 4 (Berlin, 1899). The essay, as it is rendered in Kol ma’amrei, is heavily edited, and all citations are here given from the article as it appeared in Mimizrah umima’arav. On the essay, see Werses, Sippur veshorsho, pp. 109–11; Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, pp. 35–36. 212. See Ungerfeld, pp. 630, 631; Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, pp. 29–30. 213. Holtzman, ibid., p. 27. 214. See Cockshut, pp. 2–13. Not one of the English autobiographies discussed by Cockshut was published before the author (Bunyan) was thirty-eight. 215. See especially Berdichevsky, ‘Gershayim’, p. 268, and ‘Hetsits venifga’ ’, p. 324, and see Werses, Sippur veshorsho, p. 107. For a good summary of Perl, Erter and Galician anti-Hasidic parody, see Shimon Halkin, Zeramim vetsurot, pp. 147–87. 216. Berdichevsky, ‘Nishmat hasidim’, p. 55. 217. Ibid., p. 64. 218. Berdichevsky identiWed, as did many other Jewish autobiographers, with ’Aher/Elisha ben Avuyah. Lilienblum probably initiated this trend with his Mishnat’ elisha ben ’avuyah (1877). On Berdichevsky and ’Aher, see Zipporah Kagan’s essay, ‘Mesorot genriyot baroman “miriam”’, in Hagut vesipporet; Isaiah Rabinovitch, Major Trends in Modern Hebrew Fiction (Chicago, 1968), pp. 124–26. 219. Berdichevsky, Reshut hayahid, p. 40. 220. This is the famous ’Iggeret habesht that Shmuel Dubnow takes as the Hasidic manifesto par excellence. For an English translation, see Louis Jacobs, Jewish Mystical Testimonies (New York, 1976), pp. 148–56. For a redaction of the original text see Abraham Kahana, Sefer hahasidut (Warsaw, 1922), pp. 74–77. On this essay,

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Notes to Pages 242–44 especially with regard to Berdichevsky’s self-identiWcation with the Besht, see Bakon, p. 33, n. 13. 221. Berdichevsky, Nishmat hasidim, p. 64. 222. See Werses, Sippur veshorsho, p. 110; Yosef Klausner’s essay, ‘Bein hashemashot’, in Luah ’ahisa, Year 2 (Warsaw, 1899), especially p. 135. 223. See Bal Makhshoves, Seqirot ureshamim (Warsaw, 1911), p. 119. Also, see Shai ’Ish Hurwitz’s astonishingly vindictive attack on Neo-Hasidism, as represented by Berdichevsky et alii, ‘Hahasidut vehahaskalah’, in Hurwitz, Me’ayin ule’ayin (Berlin, 1914), especially pp. 181–83, 194–95, 200–01. On this essay, see Werses, Sippur veshorsho, p. 244. For the wider ramiWcations of this controversy, see Stanley Nash, In Search of Hebraism: Shai Hurwitz and His Polemics in the Hebrew Press (Leiden, 1980). 224. Mendel Piekarz, ‘Tsaddiq livnei ha’olam hehadash?!’, in Tarbits, vol. 51, no. 1 (Jerusalem, 1981), pp. 149–65. Comparison of Piekarz on Green with Hurwitz on Berdichevsky yields some striking correspondences. 225. Berdichevsky, ‘Nishmat hasidim’, p. 62. 226. Ibid. 227. Ibid., p. 61. 228. Ibid., pp. 59–60. 229. Most notably in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ and ‘Bein hapatish vehasadan’; and see Bakon, pp. 29–40, passim. 230. Berdichevsky met Buber in Breslau at the turn of the nineteenth century and Buber assisted him in the publication of some of his German translations of ’Aggadot. See Rakhel Bin-Gorion, p. 11. 231. For an English translation, see Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, edited and translated by Maurice Friedman (New York, 1966), pp. 47–73; see also Malcolm Diamond, Martin Buber: Jewish Existentialist (New York, 1960), pp. 8–10 and 111–13. For Berdichevsky’s review of Buber’s German translation of the tales of Nahman of Bratslav, see Peri sefer, pp. 30–33; and see Werses, Sippur veshorsho, p. 113. 232. Berdichevsky, Yidishe kesovim, p. 93. 233. See Green, pp. 337–72; Shmeruk, Sifrut yiddish, especially pp. 224–26; Nahman of Bratslav, ‘Me’avedat bat melekh’, the Wrst story in the Sefer sippurei ma’asiyot (Jerusalem, 1985), pp. 3–11, and the explication of the story in the Wnal section of the same volume, pp. 3–4. 234. Goethe, The Autobiography, 1:45–63. Compare especially the motifs of Wsh in the water (pp. 52–53) and the heavenly music coming from the garden (pp. 55–56). 235. Berdichevsky, Me’emeq hahayyim, p. 82. See also ‘ ’Ani teWllah’, in Berdichevsky, Sefer hasidim, pp. 75–76. 236. Werses, Sippur veshorsho, pp. 111–12. 237. Compare, as discussed above, the anti-Hasidic nuances of ‘A velt mit veltelakh’. 238. See Keshet, p. 135. 239. Ibid., p. 133. Keshet throws up his hands at this point and the adjective ‘German’, with reference to the diary, is printed in apoplectic, double-spaced capi-

Notes to Pages 244–48 tals, followed by an exclamation mark! For a Hebrew translation of sections of the diary, see Berdichevsky, Pirqei yoman: ’Amal yom vehaguto, tr. Rakhel Bin-Gorion (Tel Aviv, 1974). For a Hebrew translation of some meditations and aphorisms taken from the diary and thematically arranged, see M. Y. Berdichevsky, ’Imrot, tr. and with an introduction by Yosef Even (Tel Aviv, 1982). Yitshak KafkaW has made an almost complete translation of the remainder of the diary into Hebrew, appearing under the title of ‘Pirqei yoman’ in Holtzman, Ginzei mikhah yosef, vols. 4–7 (Tel Aviv, 1990–97). 240. See Keshet, pp. 13, 135–36. 241. Almagor, ‘Demuyot-’av’, p. 225. 242. See Immanuel Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, pp. 75–76, and also his afterword to Berdichevsky, Pirqei yoman, pp. 109–11. 243. Berdichevsky, ‘Pirqei yoman, 1908–1921’, tr. Yitshak KafkaW, in Ginzei mikhah yosef, 7:102. 244. Avner Holtzman, ‘ ’Ahavat rahel’, in his Temunah, p. 37. 245. See ibid., pp. 46–55 passim. Holtzman’s account is very moving in and of itself, in a manner virtually extinct in contemporary ‘academic’ discourse. His mastery of the materials is extraordinary and apparent in his earlier works. It is the mastery of emotional tone, the balance of scholarly rigor, compassion and empathetic reading—of ‘distance and relation’—that makes of his essay ‘ ’Ahavat rahel’, to my mind, a classic example of the Hebrew essayistic genre. 246. See the sections of the diary dealing with the earlier years in ‘Pirqei yoman’, pp. 103–7. 247. See Keshet, pp. 134–35; Yosef Even’s introduction to Berdichevsky, ’Imrot, pp. 10–11. While Keshet’s biography is old-fashioned and seriously inaccurate at times, it is often extremely insightful, and by no means redundant. Keshet’s insight is corroborated by Yosef Even’s study of Berdichevsky’s books of aphorisms culled from the diary. Pointing to the considerable editorial work Berdichevsky put into the selection, revision and classiWcation of these aphorisms, Even raises the possibility that Berdichevsky may have intended them for publication. 248. See Almagor, ‘Demuyot-’av’, pp. 225–26. 249. See the autobiography/diary distinction as discussed in the previous chapter. Also, see Berdichevsky, ‘ ’Ahdut veribbui’, in Beshirah uvelason, pp. 9–11. 250. See Berdichevsky, ‘Pirqei yoman, 1908–1921’, passim. 251. See Miron, ‘Hashe’ifah ’al haroman biytsirat berdichevsky’, in Kivvun ’orot, especially pp. 49–50. 252. The theme of the paired opposite is one that fascinated Berdichevsky, and one that recurs in various guises throughout his belletristic and publicistic works. ‘Recent Past’ and ‘Distant Relative’ are but two examples of oppositional pairing as employed by Berdichevsky in the titles of his works. See on this theme Band, ‘Qera’ satan’; and Yosef Even, ‘Tsemed haniggudim ketofa’ah tematit ukhetahbulah sifrutit besippurei myv’, in Mivhar massot, pp. 28–44. All of the following citations from the plan for Miriam are taken from Immanuel Bin-Gorion’s Hebrew translation from the German diary that appeared as a supplement to Berdichevsky, Kol sippurei, pp. 329–31.

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Notes to Pages 248–50 253. On Berdichevsky’s pseudonyms and the variant spellings of his proper name, see Almagor and Fishman, p. 122. Berdichevsky’s fondness for word-play is demonstrated also in the changes he made to some of the titles of his pieces. Hence ‘Tsillei ’avar’, Wrst published in Hazeman in 1905, is retitled, in its inclusion in Me’ever hanahar, as ‘Tsillei ’erev’. And ‘Nishmat hasidim’, upon its inclusion in the Shtibel edition of Kol ma’amrei is retitled ‘Mishnat Hasidim’—a retitling of a retitling of a retitling. 254. The name ‘Interlaken’ is retained in Daneben and in the Miriam plan. In ’Orva’ parah, it is Hebraicized as Ha’ir hagedolah bein hanahalim. See Yosef Even, ‘Sippuro hagermani shel miv “Daneben”’, in Mivhar massot, pp. 51–52. 255. See I. Bin-Gorion’s fascinating uncovering of the biographical basis for the stories ‘Bila’deiha’, Wrst published in Mibayit umihuts, and ‘Hahaverah’, Wrst published in Berdichevsky, Mishenei ’olamot (Warsaw, 1902), both of which stories centre upon a love aVair between a young Jew and a non-Jewish girl. Bin-Gorion, drawing upon letters and the diary in the Berdichevsky archives, makes a convincing case for the biographical grounding of this aVair, with a Finnish girl, in Berdichevsky’s experience as a student at Bern. See ’Olam ve’olamot bo, pp. 53–62. The theme of a love aVair between a Jew and a non-Jewish girl reappears in Mahanayyim. See also Werses’s review of Keshet, p. 157. 256. There is some precedent for this, as Berdichevsky, it seems, was writing some of his early autobiographical pieces in Hebrew, to be published in 1899 and 1900, at the same time as working on the German Weimar project. See his letter to David Pinsky of 12.7.1898 in Genazim, 1:264, and I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, pp. 60–61. 257. Berdichevsky, Pirqei yoman, detsember 1902–detsember 1904, tr. Y. KafkaW, in Ginzei mikhah yosef, vol. 5 (Tel Aviv, 1992), ed. Holtzman, p. 56. On the title ‘Zu Hause’, see Holtzman, ’El haqera’, p. 143. 258. See Goethe, 1:20; Keshet, p. 147. 259. The Goethean coincidence here raises the possibility that Berdichevsky’s choice of a woman as the central protagonist of Miriam may have been in part guided by the precedent of Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften. See Joseph-François Angelloz, Goethe, tr. R. H. Blackley (New York, 1958), pp. 219–29. 260. See Keshet, pp. 135–46, passim; Berdichevsky’s letters to Brenner from this period in Halifat iggerot; Shmuel Horodetsky, ‘Letsurato haruhanit shel bin-gorion’, in Hatequfah, vol. 13 (Warsaw, 1922), pp. 458–75, passim; Miron, Kivvun ’orot, pp. 50–52. 261. Berdichevsky, ‘Pirqei yoman’, 1908–1921, p. 73. 262. It is diYcult to date with absolute accuracy the precise point, in the Breslau years (1902–11), when the balance of Berdichevsky’s interests shifted decisively from belles lettres to the compilation, interpretation and rendition of the pre-modern Jewish literary heritage. See Rakhel Bin-Gorion, pp. 10–11; the letters cited in Horodetsky, especially pp. 466–67, 470f; Keshet, pp. 142, 281–84; David C. Jacobson’s review-essay ‘Fiction and History in the Writings of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky’, in Prooftexts, vol. 3, no. 2 (Baltimore, Maryland, May 1983), pp. 205–10.

Notes to Pages 250–54 263. Avraham Epstein, in his essay, ’Al derekh hasippur shel berdichevsky’, has remarked upon this dialectic in Berdichevsky’s works. See M. y. berdichevsky: mivhar ma’amrim, pp. 127–32. 264. As cited by Marthe Robert in From Oedipus to Moses: Freud’s Jewish Identity (London, 1977), p. 9. 265. See Miron, Hapereidah, passim. 266. In 1906, Berdichevsky began collecting material for a projected three-section, twelve-volume anthology of Hasidic texts. See Werses, Sippur veshorsho, pp. 111–12; and Horodetsky, pp. 467–69. 267. As cited by Horodetsky, p. 468. 268. See Kol ma’amrei, p. 291. 269. See especially, ‘Mahanayyim’, Kol sippurei, pp. 32–33; ‘Bein hapatish vehasadan’, in Me’emeq hahayyim, p. 72. 270. See Kol ma’amrei, p. 347. The essay was Wrst published in ReshaWm, vol. 1, no. 12. 271. This is an adaptation of Pirqei avot, 4:1. 272. See Berdichevsky, Beshirah uvelashon, pp. 24–25. Kibbush haruah was Wrst published in Haboqer, vol. 1, no. 157 (22.7.1909). On the essay, see I. Bin-Gorion, Qore’ hadorot (Tel Aviv, 1981), pp. 53–55, 88. 273. For a slightly diVerent formulation of the ‘split’ and its implications for Hebrew Ars poetica, see ‘Shirah ’ivrit’, in Beshirah uvelashon, pp. 32–34. Berdichevsky, writing in 1907, here speaks of a ‘third option’ for the Hebrew ‘poet’ that has of late appeared upon the horizon—Shirat haqera’ shebalev: ‘On the one hand, the poet wishes to break free of the burden of generations, and on the other, it is he who prolongs the chain; he himself, then, is but one more link in the chain that he would break. . Ineluctably torn, caught in the midst of oppositional extremes, the poet stands at the crossroads.’ 274. This, at least, is a metaphysical explanation for this shift. On a more mundane level, Berdichevsky seemed to experience some diYculty in getting his Hebrew works published. The German reading public of his day, on the other hand, proved receptive to his renditions of the Jewish ’Aggadot, from which he derived a modest income. For the publication-history of Berdichevsky’s German editions of ’Aggadot, new editions of which have continued to appear until recently, see Almagor and Fishman, pp. 53–54. Thomas Mann drew extensively on Berdichevsky’s compilations for his Joseph novel. See Scholem, Miberlin liyrushalayim, pp. 119–20; Keshet, p. 292; R. Bin-Gorion, p. 11; Jacobson; I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, pp. 11, 94–95. 275. On Berdichevsky’s change of name, see Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim, 2:63; I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, pp. 33–34, 93–94. And, on the impact of the Wrst reading of the Yossipon as a child, see the autobiographical story, ‘Bederekh rehoqah’, in Mibayit umihuts, pp. 41–43. 276. Ibid., 1:12. 277. The Wrst volume of Bialik and Ravnitsky’s Sefer ha’aggadah was published in 1908. See Berdichevsky’s rather jealous review of this Wrst volume, in which he

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Notes to Pages 254–59 criticizes Bialik and Ravnitsky for failings to which he freely admits in the prefaces to his own Me’otsar ha’aggadah, in Peri sefer, pp. 19–21. On the writing of Sefer ha’aggadah, see Ravnitsky, Dor vesofrav, 2:126–135. 278. See Bialik, ‘Lekhinnusah shel ha’aggadah’, in Kitvei, 2:258–59. 279. Ibid., p. 254. 280. See Berdichevsky, Beshirah uvelashon, pp. 18–19; Kagan, ‘Me’aggadah lesipporet modernit’, pp. 20–21. 281. Berdichevsky, Me’otsar ha’aggadah, 1:xii. 282. Ibid., xii–xiii. 283. Ibid., p. xiii. 284. See Ya’aqov Rabinovitz’s intuitive, but extraordinarily acute, assessment of the virtues of Berdichevsky’s assessment of the ’Aggadah as against that of Bialik and Ravnitsky, in his Maslulei sifrut, especially, pp. 210–14. 285. For a valuable and most lucid study of existentialist hermeneutics, see Van Harvey, The Historian and the Believer (New York, 1969); and see Wilhelm Dilthey, Pattern and Meaning in History, tr. and ed. by J. P. Rickman (New York, 1961), especially pp. 113–33. 286. Berdichevsky, Me’otsar ha’aggadah, 1:xvi. 287. All of his articles in this journal are now reprinted in Berdichevsky, Ketavim, vol. 2, ed. Avner Holtzman (Tel Aviv, 1996) pp. 13–62. 288. Ibid. 289. Ibid. 290. In ‘Shebikhtav vesheba’al peh’, the father orders the Wrst Melammed of the child-protagonist to wean him of the Mayses that distracted him from study of the Gemara. See Me’iri haqetanah, p. 85. 291. See the title page of Me’otsar ha’aggadah, vol. 2. 292. Minni qedem; see the title page of ibid., vol. 1. 293. Ibid., 2:xiii. 294. Ibid., 2:xiv. 295. Berdichevsky’s morale had indeed reached a low point in 1912. He was particularly frustrated by his inability to Wnd a publisher for his collected works. See his letter of 8.1.1912 to Horodetsky, as cited by Horodetsky, pp. 471–73. And see Keshet, pp. 168–69. 296. Ibid., 2:xiv. 297. Ibid. 298. Ibid. 299. Ibid., p. xv. 300. See ibid., 1:xvi. 301. See especially Berdichevsky, ‘Ziqnah uvaharut’ and ‘Harut veherut’, in Kol ma’amrei. On the Jew/Judaism polarity in Berdichevsky’s thought, see Kaufmann, 2:395–97. 302. See Berdichevsky, ‘Nishmat hasidim’, pp. 59–60; Me’otsar ha’aggadah, 2:xv. 303. See Reshut hayahid, passim; ‘Be’ad aherim’ and ‘ ’Al hamihyah’, both in ’Al em haderekh.

Notes to Pages 259–64 304. See especially Berdichevsky, ‘ ’Omanut veshirah’ in Beshirah uvelashon. 305. Contrast this situation with the hapless folk-narrator in ‘A velt mit veltelakh’, who is Wrmly subdued by the overseeing Mekhabber. 306. Horodetsky, p. 473. 307. See Almagor and Fishman, pp. 35–38, for Berdichevsky’s works that appeared in this period. See Keshet, p. 174. Almost all of Berdichevsky’s studies of early Judaism and Christianity were published posthumously; further material, now in the Berdichevsky archives, awaits publication. That many of these works were published at all is largely due to the single-handed eVorts of Immanuel Bin-Gorion to reclaim this aspect of Berdichevsky’s literary heritage for posterity. See his Qore’ hadorot and ’Olam ve’olamot bo, pp. 93–159. 308. See R. Bin-Gorion, p. 11; Keshet, pp. 174–76; Horodetsky, pp. 473–74. 309. See I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, pp. 33–34. 310. See I. Bin-Gorion, Qore’ hadorot, pp. 32–33. 311. Ibid., pp. 34–35. 312. See I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, pp. 33–34, p. 93; Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, pp. 199–200; Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim, p. 56. 313. See Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), pp. 2–6, 45; David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985), index under ‘Invention’. 314. Berdichevsky, Beshirah uvelashon, p. 33. Underlining in original. 315. See I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, p. 28; idem, Qor’e hadorot, pp. 19–35, passim. 316. See Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, p. 100; Keshet, chaps. 6–7, passim, esp. pp. 167–68. 317. See Keshet, p. 176; Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, p. 201; Immanuel BinGorion, Reshut hayahid (my”b be’esrim shenot hayyav ha’aharonot) (Tel Aviv, 1980), pp. 92–99, passim. 318. See F. Lachover, ‘Yemei Berdichevsky ha’aharonim’, in his Ri’shonim va’aharonim, 2: 70–78. 319. Berdichevsky, Me’otsar ha’aggadah, 1:xv. 320. See I. Bin-Gorion, Qore’ hadorot, pp. 34–35. 322. Horodetsky, p. 474. 322. Haboded bema’aravo. Berdichevsky is punning here on Ma’arav with an aleph—‘lair’, ‘lurking-place’—and with an ayin—‘West’. See I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, p. 6. 323. See Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim, 2: 55; and for a reproduction of one of Berdichevsky’s annotated pages, see Werses, Mimendele ’ad hazaz, p. 184. 324. Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim, 2:55, 60–62; Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, pp. 87–98. 325. See Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim, 2:70. 326. See Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, p. 148. 327. See Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim, 2:66.

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Notes to Pages 265–71 328. See Beaujour, p. 26. 329. Ibid., p. 27; compare Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. from the German by Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953), p. 336; Emile Male, ‘The Four Mirrors of Vincent de Beauvais’, in his Religious Art: From the Twelfth to the Eighteenth Centuries (New York, 1949), pp. 61–100. 330. See W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (New York, 1953), pp. 158–64; Douglas Archibald, Yeats (Syracuse, 1983), pp. 180–81. 331. On Berdichevsky’s preparations toward this Wrst edition of the collected works, and on the distress occasioned by the collapse of the project, see Immanuel Bin-Gorion, Reshut hayahid, pp. 36–40, 97–99; Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, pp. 199–201. 332. See Berdichevsky, Me’otsar ha’agadah, 1:xv. 333. See Horodetsky, p. 472. 334. As cited by Holtzman in Hakkarat panim, p. 200. 335. Ibid., pp. 200–01. 336. Ibid., p. 200; compare I. Bin-Gorion, Reshut hayahid, p. 98. 337. See Almagor, ‘Demuyyot-’av’, p. 226. 338. See Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, pp. 200–202; Werses, ‘M. y. berdichevsky— “ ’iyyun bimgorotav” ’, in his Mimendele ’ad hazaz, passim, esp. p. 183. 339. See Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, p. 200. 340. As cited by Beaujour, p. 32. 341. Ibid., pp. 33–36. 342. For the publication history of Berdichevsky’s German editions of ’Aggadot, new editions of which have continued to appear until recently, see Almagor and Fishman, pp. 53–54; see Keshet, pp. 173, 192; I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, p. 11, pp. 92–93; idem, Reshut hayahid, pp. 45, 60, 79–80. 343. On Berdichevsky’s reclusiveness in Friedenau, or Neveh shalom, as he called it, which grew more pronounced as he advanced in years, see idem, Reshut hayahid, pp. 622–64; Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, pp. 153–54; Fichman, pp. 272–73. 344. See the letters from these years in the published correspondence between Berdichevsky and Brenner and Horodetsky as cited above, passim; Keshet, pp. 166–73. 345. See I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, pp. 9–10, 82; idem, Reshut hayahid, pp. 228–29; and see the brief survey of the Berdichevsky archives, in Holtzman, Ginzei mikhah yosef, 3:12–13. For full publication details of the German collections of Jewish legend, see Almagor and Fishman, pp. 53–54. 346. See I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, p. 9; idem, Qore’ hadorot, pp. 24–27, idem, Reshut hayahid, pp. 78–79, 105–07. 347. See I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, pp. 80–82; Holtzman, Ginzei mikhah yosef, 3:10. 348. Ibid., p. 82. 349. See Fichman, p. 274.

Notes to Pages 271–76 350. See the above-cited survey of Berdichevsky’s library and archives in Holtzman, Ginzei mikhah yosef, vol. 3, especially pp. 10, 12, 14. 351. See ibid., pp. 26–32; I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, pp. 20–21. 352. See Berdichevsky, Kol ma’amrei, p. 345. 353. See Berdichevsky/Brenner, Halifat ’iggerot, p. 98. 354. See Berdichevsky, ’Imrot, p. 75; and on this aphorism, see I. Bin-gorion, Reshut hayahid, p. 200. 355. See I. Bin-Gorion, ’Olam ve’olamot bo, p. 82 356. See Beaujour, p. 26. 357. See Almagor, ‘Demuyyot-av’, pp. 225–26. 358. See Berdichevsky, ‘Pirqei yoman, 1908–1921’, passim. 359. The expansion of Berdichevsky/Bin-Gorion’s memory is attested to by his anamnesis of the true pattern of events surrounding the creation of mankind, which he places at the head of the revised version of ’Me’otsar ha’aggadah, Tsefunot va’aggadot, and attributes to ‘words of vision of the author’. See I. Bin-Gorion, Qore’ hadorot, p. 35. 360. See idem, Reshut hayahid, pp. 97–99; Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, pp. 201–03. 361. Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim 2: 68. Underlining in the original. 362. I am convinced that Berdichevsky, who delighted in word-play and doublesentendres, was aware of the dual signiWcation of the word Ma’arakhah, an eccentric choice, in and of itself, for the designation of a work into topical sections. 363. See Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, pp. 203–04. 364. See his introduction to Berdichevsky, Kol ma’amrei, p. 7, and compare the topical alignment of the Shtibel edition with that of the Tel Aviv re-editions by referring to the bibliographies provided at the end of both Kol ma’amrei and Kol sippurei. 365. See Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, p. 204. 366. See the notice, as published in Revivim (1913), for the forthcoming edition, as reproduced in Holtzman, Ginzei mikhah yosef, 5:118. 367. See Shmuel Werses, ‘Halikud bein zelalei hahayim: ’al me’ora’ Berdichevsky bishenat TaRaS’, in Holtzman, Ginzei mikhah yosef, 6:115. 368. See Y. L. Peretz, Ale verk, 12:5. Berdichevsky had a penchant for Peretz’s titles: He adopted or modiWed at least two of them for his own works, ‘Nishmat hasidim’, from Peretz’s Mishnat hasidim, and ‘Hetsits venifga’ ’, the title of his Wrst story (1888) was, in all probability lifted from Peretz’s story of the same name which appeared two years earlier. See Holtzman, Hakkarat panim, pp. 34–35, 98. 369. See Beaujour, pp. 26–28. 370. See Yates, passim. 371. See especially ibid., pp. 11–13, on the ancient memory treatise Ad Herrenium. 372. Berdichevsky was given, in his latter days, to muttering darkly about a ‘secret’ or ‘mystery’ revealed him through his scholarly enquiries into Jewish and Christian antiquity, which in his published writings, at least, appears not to have been divulged. See, for example, Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim, 2: 74–75; Bin-Gorion, ’Olamot ve’olamot bo, pp. 108–09.

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Notes to Pages 276–82 373. See I. Bin-gorion, Qore’ hadorot, p. 90. 374. Berdichevsky, Miriam, pp. 95–96 (my translation). 375. I. Bin-Gorion, ‘ ’Miriam’—si ’yetsirato shel myb vetakhlitah’, in Govrin, ed., M. y. berdichevsky: mivhar ma’amarim, p. 274. 376. See idem, Qore’ hadorot, pp. 85–86. 377. See Z. Kagan, ‘Darkhei shilluvah shel ha’aggadah be miriam lemyb’, in Hasifrut, vol. 4, no. 3 (Tel Aviv, July 1973), pp. 519–45. To give an idea of the extent of these “sediments”, Kagan’s commentary to the brief opening paragraph, in her annotated edition of the novel, of Miriam, which I have translated above, extends to two closely typed pages with myriad references. 378. See Miron, ‘Mavo’ le miriam, passim; Fichman, Ruhot menaggenot, pp. 221– 25; Kagan, p. 543, especially n. 32. 379. See Berdichevsky’s letter of August 8, 1898, to David Neimark, as reprinted in Holtzman, ed., Ginzei mikhah yosef, 4:62 and 63, n. 1. 380. Compare Kagan, ‘Darkhei shilluvah’, pp. 543–45, especially notes 32 and 33, which make very much the same point in aligning Miriam with the ‘encyclopaedic’, as this is understood by Northrop Frye. See also Hillel Weiss on S. Y. Agnon’s Hadom vekhise’, a work that displays some remarkable analogies with Miriam, in his Qol haneshamah: heqer ‘hadom vekhise’’ sefer divrei hayamim lesh”y ’agnon (Jerusalem, 1985), p. 13. 381. See Keshet, p. 176; Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim, 2:74–75. 382. See Yates’s commentary on the passage from the tenth book of Augustine’s Confessions, from which this citation is taken, pp. 46–47. 383. See Berdichevsky, Roman gamur, Miriam, p. 17; in English translation, idem, Miriam: A Novel About Life in Two Townships, tr. A.S. Super, with an introduction by Zipporah Kagan (Tel Aviv, 1983), p. 40. 384. Miriam, tr. Super, pp. 40–41, Roman gamur Miriam, pp. 104–05. 385. See Horodetsky, p. 474. 386. See Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim, 2:71–74; Berdichevsky/Brenner, Halifat ’iggerot, pp. 121–24. For a harrowing account of the ghastly circumstances surrounding Berdichevsky’s father’s death, see Feigenberg, pp. 99–107. 387. Thus, according to Lachover, with the arrival of his father’s widow and murdered brother’s family in Poland, Berdichevsky was fearful of an encroachment of that distance which enabled him to gain a perspective on his Eastern European past. See Ri’shonim va’aharonim, p. 76. 388. Miriam, tr. Super, pp. 259–61; Roman gamur Miriam, pp. 251–53. The stylistic modiWcations to the Super translation are my own. 389. For which see Kagan’s notes in Roman gamur Miriam, pp. 251–53. There is also here an invocation of one of Berdichevsky’s own earlier pieces, Ta’ut, written in 1910. See I. Bin-Gorion, Qore’ hadorot, p. 187. 390. See R. Bin-Gorion, p. 8; Lachover, Ri’shonim va’aharonim 2: 71. 391. Lachover, 2:70, 74.

Notes to Pages 282–87 392. Compare I. Bin-Gorion on Berdichevsky’s Qinim, written contemporaneously with Miriam, in his Qore’ hadorot, pp. 91–94. 393. See I. Bin-Gorion, Reshut hayahid, p. 105. 394. See Jean Pierre Vernant, ‘Mythical Aspects of Memory’, in his Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley, 1983), p. 91. 395. See Gershon Shaked’s masterly explication of this text, ‘Hamare’ot hari’shonim: ’al “saWah” me’et h.n. Bialik’, in Me’assef muqdash liytsirat h.n. bialik, ed. H. Barzel (Ramat Gan, 1975), pp. 145–61, esp. 155–56. 396. See especially Bialik, Devarim shebe’al peh, 1: 62–64. 397. Ibid., 2:32–34. 398. See Mordechai Ovadyahu, Bialik Speaks: Words from the Poet’s Lips, Clues to the Man, tr. A. El-Dror (Ramat Gan, 1969), p. 56. 399. See Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature, tr. H. Weyl (Princeton, 1968), passim. 400. The term is, of course, that of Joseph Frank. See his The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick and London, 1991), chaps. 1–3, passim. See also Sharon Spencer, Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel (New York, 1971), esp. pp. 142–46, 164. 401. The thesis is implicit throughout Beaujour’s study of the literary self-portrait. For a more cautious assessment of the parallelism between mediaeval formulations of memoria and modernist and post-modernist literary concerns, see Mary Carruthers’s ‘Afterword’ to her The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Mediaeval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 258–61. 402. See Goethe, 1:305; Almagor, ‘ ’Arba’ hashanim’, p. 148.

Chapter Five 1. Ber of Bolechow, Zikhronot (Berlin, 1922), and in English translation, idem, Memoirs, tr. Mordechai Vishnitzer (London, 1922). 2. Aaron Isak, SjelfbiograW (Stockholm, 1897). Nokhem Shtif rendered this text into a more readable literary Yiddish. See Aaron Isak, OytobiograWe, ed. and tr. N. Shtif (Berlin, 1922). 3. Jacob Emden, Megillat sefer, ed. David Kahana (Warsaw, 1896). 4. Mosche Wasserzug, Memoiren eines polnischen Juden, ed. Heinrich Loewe (Berlin, 1911). 5. Nathan of Nemirov, Yemei maharnat (Lvov, 1876). On the probable dates of the writing of Yemei maharnat, see Mordekhai Mantel, ‘Sefer yemei maharnat shel rabi natan minemirov: ’iyyun bibliograW’, in ’Alei sefer, vol. 14 (Ramat Gan, 1987), pp. 125–34. 6. These titles were, of course, bequeathed upon the works posthumously. See, on this phenomenon of re-titling, Chapter 3, above. 7. See Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: The Diaries of Buonaccurso Pitti and Gregorio Dali, tr. Julia Martines, ed. Gene Brucker (New York, 1967).

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Notes to Pages 287–90 8. See David Shahar, ‘Hashpa’ato shel binyamin franklin ’al teWsat tiqqun hamiddot basefer heshbon hanefesh ler. menahem mendel leWn’, in Tsiyon, 49, (Jerusalem, 1984), 2, pp. 185–92; Raphael Mahler, A History of Modern Jewry (London, 1971), pp. 594–95. Viner’s remarks on the Yiddish translations and adaptations of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe are also pertinent in this respect. See Viner, 1:255–64. 9. Compare Watt, pp. 60–93. 10. See Bick’s introduction to Emden, Megillat sefer (Jerusalem, 1979), p. 9. 11. For an account of the events surrounding the Wrst publication of the Wrst complete—or near complete—text of Megillat sefer, see Kahana’s introduction to the 1896 text. 12. The manuscript of Megillat sefer Wrst came to the attention of Kahana and Gurland in 1886. Gurland’s death in 1890 led to a temporary shelving of the project for its publication. See Kahana’s introduction. Berdichevsky, it appears, established close connections with Kahana and Gurland during his sojourn in Odessa in 1890. See Berdichevsky, ‘Zikhronot: letoldot r. perets ben moshe smolenskin’ in ’Otsar hasifrut, part 4 (Krakau, 1890), pp. 111–12. And see his obituary of Gurland in the same volume, ‘Mot yesharim’, pp. 147–52. It is not unlikely that Megillat sefer was an item in Berdichevsky’s discussions with Kahana and Gurland in this period. Gurland, it should be noted, discusses Megillat sefer and provides a section of the work in the same 1890 volume of ’Otsar hasifrut; see his comments on p. 415. 13. Berdichevsky, Reshut hayahid, pp. 24–25. 14. See Bick’s introduction, pp. 7–8; B. T. Katz, Rabbanut hasidut haskalah 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1956), 2:149–50; Jacob J. Schachter, ‘History and Memory of Self: The Autobiography of Rabbi Jacob Emden’, in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ed. Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efrom, David N. Myers (Hannover and London, 1998), pp. 440–42. 15. From Hame’assef of 1810, as cited by Kahana, p. vii. 16. There is a nice pun here in the original Hebrew between gillayon, ‘writing paper’, and legallot, ‘to reveal’. 17. Again, there is here a double-entendre between shiXut in its connotation of ‘modesty’ and the same word as denoting ‘lowliness’ or ‘baseness’. 18. Emden, Megillat sefer, p.82. All citations are taken from the Bick edition. Bick is the only editor of the work to have had access to the original manuscript, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Only recently did I read J. J. Schachter’s essay on Megillat sefer, from which I learn that the Bick edition is ‘absolutely and totally worthless’—too late to revise my citations according to the Kahana edition. See Schachter, p. 446, n. 13. Oddly, however, Schachter claims that Rousseau and ‘Solomon Maimon, too, promised to tell the “Truth”, whether this shows me, my family, my people or others in a favorable light or no.’ But Emden never made such a statement; in his case intimate disclosure was instinctive and uncontrived, not conscious, studied or deliberate. This is in line with Schachter’s argument that the selfrevelatory aspect is subsidiary in Megillat sefer to the work’s polemical purpose and has ‘thus distracted readers of the work [including myself and Berdichevsky, M.M.]

Notes to Pages 291–98 from what I consider to be its main purpose, its polemical intent’. See Schachter, pp. 441, 440, n. 78, p. 451. 19. As translated by Schachter, p. 431. 20. See Bick’s introduction, pp. 10–13; B. T. Katz, Rabbanut, 2:149–50; Berdichevsky, Shtei nashim behayyei ya’aqov emdin. 21. See Mortimer J. Cohen, Jacob Emden: A Man of Controversy (Philadelphia, 1937). And see Gershom Scholem’s review of this work in Qiriat sefer, 16 (Jerusalem, 1939–40), pp. 320–38. 22. Emden, pp. 85–86. And for Emden’s account of his wedding-day, see ibid., p. 63. 23. Ibid., p. 134. 24. Ibid., p. 15; see 2 Kings 4:8 and Proverbs 9:17. 25. ’Vehayah nissayon gadol gam mitsidi’, Emden writes in ibid., p. 85. 26. See M.J. Cohen, chapter 3. The precise date of these occurrences is unclear. 27. Emden, pp. 107–08. 28. Ibid., p. 108. 29. There is a double-entendre here in the word qerovah, meaning both ‘close’ and ‘a relative’. 30. Ibid., pp. 109–10. 31. See Bick, pp. 12–13; B. T. Katz, Rabbanut, pp. 149–50; Cohen, pp. 48–50. 32. M. J. Cohen, p. 49. 33. This aspect is noted by M. J. Cohen. See ibid., pp. 50–51. Compare Olney on Augustine in his Memory, esp. pp. 31–35. 34. As cited by Schachter, p. 442, and see his n. 82, p. 452; B. T. Katz, Rabbanut, pp. 189–90; Cohen, pp. 270–72. 35. See Richard L. Rubenstein’s psycho-analytic reading of the Midrashic glosses on the Joseph/Potiphar’s wife story in his The Religious Imagination (New York, 1968), pp. 77–78. 36. See Jean Starobinski, ‘Sur la maladie de Rousseau’, in his Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle (Paris, 1971), pp. 430–44. 37. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 11. 38. Rousseau, Confessions, p. 11. 39. As cited by M. J. Cohen, pp. 28–29. I have modiWed Cohen’s translation in accordance with the Hebrew original, as cited in ibid., p. 285. 40. Noteworthy here is the identiWcation with Job. See Job 6:12. 41. Emden, p. 82. 42. ‘Feet’ here may be intended literally or in its secondary biblical sense of ‘genitals’. 43. Ibid., p. 84; for further complaints, see Schachter, pp. 441–42. 44. Emden, p. 106–07. 45. Ibid., pp. 84, 135; and see Scholem’s review of M. J. Cohen, pp. 321–22. On Rousseau’s preoccupation with his penis, see Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York,

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Notes to Pages 299–308 1990), p. 9. Johnson sees this concern as a deWning characteristic of modern intellectuals, for whom he views Rousseau as the archetype. See his index, p. 375, under ‘Intellectuals: penile obsession’. 46. See Emden, p. 135; the section from Emden’s Megillat purim as reprinted in ibid., pp. 277–78; M. J. Cohen, pp. 59–62. 47. And see Emden’s two accounts of the circumstances surrounding his birth in Megillat sefer, pp. 37, 83. 48. Ibid., pp. 61–63. 49. Ibid., p. 63. 50. Ibid., p. 124. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., pp. 127–28. 53. Ibid., p. 260; and see Bick’s comments on p. 5. The constant reader’s asides in Megillat sefer further attest to Emden’s expectations for the work’s eventual publication; see Schachter, p. 438. 54. Ibid., pp. 124–25. 55. Ibid, pp. 110–11. 56. See Avraham Bick, R. yankev emdin (New York, 1946), pp. 94–95. Bick draws extensively from Megillat sefer in this biographical novel. 57. Maimon, chapter 13, ‘Endeavour After Mental Culture amid Ceaseless Struggles with Misery of Every Kind’, pp. 68–69. 58. Emden, p. 125. 59. Ibid., pp. 125–26. 60. See B. T. Katz, passim, esp. pp. 150–52; Azriel Shohet, ’Im hillufei tequfot: re’shit hahaskalah beyahadut Germaniah (Jerusalem, 1960), pp. 220–21. 61. In one responsum Emden speculates whether the castration of Wsh is permissible according to Jewish law. See B. T. Katz, Rabbanut, pp. 164–65. In another responsum Emden debates whether a Golem may be counted as a member of a Minyan. See Solomon B. Freehof, The Responsa Literature (Philadelphia, 1955), p. 248. 62. See B. T. Katz, Rabbanut, pp. 164–65; Zinberg, Di geshikhte, 5:246–47. 63. Emden, p. 126. 64. This eVectively narrows down the reading of such books to the bathroom and lavatory. 65. See Shohet, p. 220. Shohet points out that at the time Emden read this Crusoe rendition in Hamburg, the books of Rousseau enjoyed some currency in this city. See ibid., p. 326, n. 101. Could, then, Emden have chanced upon Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloise, Wrst published in 1761? 66. Emden, pp. 53–54. For the polemic relevance of Emden’s lengthy account of his father’s conXict with Hayyun, see Schachter, p. 434. 67. Ibid., p. 75. 68. Zinberg, Di geshikhte, 5:244. 69. See Emden, p. 37, for the Wrst account, and p. 83 for the second. 70. Ibid., pp. 59, 63, 68–69, 88–89. 71. For two examples of such glaring repetitions, see the variant accounts of his unsuccessful attempts at preparing his father’s unprinted responsa for publica-

Notes to Pages 308–12 tion in ibid., pp. 26, 30. And see the twin eulogistic paeans to the Hakham Tsevi, pp. 36, 72. 72. Ibid., pp. 206–08. 73. Ibid., pp. 124–27. 74. Ibid., p. 28. 75. A frequent refrain in Megillat sefer. See, for example: nashuv le’inyan (p. 35); nahazor le’inyan (p. 62). 76. Ibid., p. 96. 77. Ibid., p. 161. 78. Ibid., p. 53. 79. Ibid., p. 66. 80. Ibid., p. 119. 81. Ibid., p. 215. 82. Bereshit rabba 69:6. On Emden’s relationship with his father, see M. J. Cohen, pp. 27–31, 277. And see, esp. Megillat sefer, p. 53, where Emden writes, concerning his father’s controversy with Hayyun in Amsterdam: ‘Actually, it was this incident which prompted me to write this book, as a memorial to the wonders and mercies of the Almighty—may He be blessed. For the new is as the old; the father makes known his truth to the sons and all that befell the fathers, befell the sons. . . . For as occurred to my father—may his memory be blessed—occurred also to me with the Eibeschuetz aVair—exactly the same; what occurred to the father, occurred to the son.’ 83. Emden’s accounts, especially of his second and third marriages, are remarkably similar. See Megillat sefer, p. 201, 209–10. Cohen notes the recurrent themes in Emden’s accounts of his three marriages. See M. J. Cohen, pp. 33–40. And for recurrent patterns in Emden’s accounts of his business transactions, see M. J. Cohen, p. 288, n. 23. 84. See Emden, pp. 264–68. 85. Emden began Megillat sefer shortly after the outbreak of his controversy with Eibeschuetz in 1751 and continued writing the book until c. 1766. See Kahana’s introduction, p. v, and M. J. Cohen, p. 284, n. 5. That the writing of Megillat sefer was coterminous with the eruption and abatement of the Eibeschuetz controversy is no coincidence. The book clearly serves a polemic purpose. And that Emden perceived, with some justiWcation, that many of his accusations against Eibeschuetz fell on deaf ears, further fostered his innate tendency to perseveration. See Schachter, passim. 86. Kahana introduction, p. v. 87. Ibid. 88. See Bick’s preface, pp. 5–6. 89. See B. T. Katz, Rabbanut, pp. 151, 165. 90. See ibid., pp. 146–47, pp. 180–87. 91. See ibid., p. 183; M. J. Cohen, pp. 259–60; Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Mediaeval and Modern Times (New York, 1962), pp. 167, 174, 177, 187. 92. On Emden and Luzzatto, see B. T. Katz, Rabbanut, p. 175; M. J. Cohen, pp. 70, 169, 173. 93. Of Hebrew literary historians, Lachover has been foremost in claiming Luzzatto as the father of modern Hebrew literature. See Lachover, Toldot 1:14–49.

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Notes to Pages 313–14 Lachover’s claims have been sharply contended, most notably by Joseph Klausner. The literature on this issue is extensive. See Werses, Biqqoret habiqqoret, pp. 110–13; Shimon Halkin, Modern Hebrew Literature From the Enlightenment to the State of Israel: Trends and Values (New York, 1970) pp. 42–43; Ezra Spicehandler, ‘Hebrew Literature, Modern’ in Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 8, esp. pp. 176–78; Arnold J. Band, ‘The Beginnings of Modern Hebrew Literature: Perspectives on “Modernity”,’, AJS Review, vol. 13, nos. 1 and 2 (1988), pp. 1–27. 94. For Niger’s early formulations, see his introduction to Yonah Spivak’s play R. nakhman bratslaver: in geshtalt fun zayn ‘mayse mit di zibn betlers (Vilna, 1932). Part of the essay had previously appeared in Di tsukunft of October-November 1921. The essay is reprinted in Sh. Niger, Bleter geshikhte fun der yidisher literatur (New York, 1959), pp. 111–77; on the perception of Nahman as literary forebear of modernist Yiddish literature, see Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish, pp. 233–35; for a more recent assessment on similar lines, see Pinhas Sadeh, ’Aharit davar, to his edition of Nahman’s stories, Rabi nahman mibraslav, tiqqun halev: sippurim halomot sihot, nusah nivkhar ve’arukh me’et pinhas sadeh (Tel Aviv, 1981)—here Sadeh, removing Nahman entirely from his Hasidic milieu speaks of Nahman in the same breath as Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Bartok, Goethe, Blake. He also makes bold identiWcation of Nahman with himself—he claims, p. 248, that for Nahman, as for himself, ‘life was a parable’. Life as a Parable/Hahayyim kemashal was the title of his own autobiography. 95. See esp. Gottlober, 1:194–96. And see Niger’s discussion of Maskilic precedent for his thesis in his essay ‘Vegn dem onheyb fun der nayer yidisher literatur’, in Bleter geshikhte, pp. 254–64. 96. See Zinberg, Di geshikhte, 8:133–58; Halkin, Modern Hebrew Literature, pp. 32–33 and idem, Muskamot umashberim, pp. 43–44. 97. Niger, of course, is much indebted to the neo-romantic reassessment of Hasidism by Berdichevsky, Peretz, Buber, discussed above. 98. See Arthur Green, Tormented Master, pp. 45–46, 60–61, n. 79. Berdichevsky, characteristically, took note of this innovation of Bratslav Hasidism in an early essay. See the section devoted to Nahman in his ‘Letoldot gedolei yisra’el’, in Ha’asif, Year 4 (Warsaw, 1887), p. 71. And see idem, ‘’Al havidui’. 99. On the autobiographical aspect of Nahman’s tales see Green, pp. 1–22 and passim; Joseph Weiss, Mehqarim behasidut bratslav (Jerusalem, 1974), passim, esp. pp. 150–72; Yosef Dan, Hasippur hahasidi (Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 172–83; Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish, pp. 229–34; Joseph Dan’s preface and Arnold Band’s introduction to Nahman of Bratslav, The Tales. 100. Maimon, pp. 166–79. 101. See N. Sh. Feinberg, ‘Berdichevsky beterem shenitgallah’, in Boded bema’aravo’: mikhah yosef berdichevsky bezikhronam shel benei zemano, ed. and with an introduction by Nurit Govrin (Holon, 1998), pp. 106–07. 102. See Berdichevsky, Kol ma’amrei, pp. 327–30; see, in general, on the Haskalah/ Hasidism dialectics Shmuel Werses, ‘Hahasidut be’eynei sifrut hahaskalah min

Notes to Pages 314–16 hapulmus shel maskilei galitsiyah’, in Hadat vehahayyim: tenu’at hahaskalah hayehudit bemizrah eyropah, ed. Immanuel Etkes (Jerusalem, 1993). 103. Berdichevsky, ‘Letoldot gedolei yisra’el’, p. 73. 104. See Shatsky, ‘Yidishe memuarn literatur’, p. 484; Schwarz, p. 578. It is due to this dearth that the one autobiographical work almost universally cited with respect to the history of Hasidism in the eighteenth century is Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte. See, for example, Dubnow’s extensive citation from Maimon in his Toldot hahasidut, pp. 82–87. For the history of the movement in the early nineteenth century, the memoirs of Gotlober, likewise, provide an invaluable source. The possibility of the existence of much unpublished autobiographical material of Hasidic provenance, such as the Megillat setarim of Isaac Eizik of Komarna, should not, however, be overlooked. See a section of this extraordinary diary in English translation in Louis Jacobs, pp. 239–44. 105. See Dubnow, Toldot hahasidut, pp. 297–98; Zinberg, Di geshikhte, 8:135–36, 154–55; Eliezer Shteinman, ‘Tsiyyun limshorer’, in Hatequfah, 16 (Warsaw, 1922), pp. 499–501; idem, Be’er hahasidut (Tel Aviv, n.d.), pp. 206–16. 106. See Green, pp. 148–50. Eliezer Shteinman planned for many years to write a biography of Nathan, whom he perceived as a much-neglected Wgure in the history of Hasidism, but failed to realize this project. See Be’er hahasidut, p. 206. 107. Sh. Niger, Dertseylers un romanistn, p. 18. 108. See Nathan of Nemirov, Yemei maharnat (Jerusalem, 1982), pp. 8–9. 109. Shivhei haran was Wrst published as an appendix to the Sippurei ma’asiyot (Ostrog, 1816). Hayyei moharan was Wrst published in Lemberg in 1874. For bibliographical details of these and other Bratslav publications, see Gershom Scholem, Quntres ’elleh shemot (Jerusalem, 1928). 110. For an overview of these works from the perspective of modern biography, see Green, pp. 1–23. And see below. 111. The question of the temporal priority of the Hebrew or Yiddish written version of the Tales has been the subject of much controversy. The crucial rôle of Nathan in the scriptural transmission of Nahman’s teachings is not, however, put into question by this debate. For balanced discussions, see Band’s introduction’; Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish, pp. 219–23. 112. Niger draws the parallel between Nathan/Nahman, Boswell/Johnson and Eckerman/Goethe. See Bleter geshikhte, pp. 145–46. 113. Hame’assef devoted a section to the ‘biographies of the great men of Israel’. Euchel’s biography of Mendelssohn was Wrst published in Hame’assef, Wrst published in book form as Toldot harambaman (Berlin, 1789). Sh. Y. Rappoport’s numerous biographies of prominent Jews of the mediaeval period appeared, from 1828 onwards, in the Galician journal Biqqurei ha’itim. 114. Shivhei habesht was Wrst published in Hebrew (Kapust, 1814). For an excellent and concise discussion of Hasidic hagiography, see Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish, pp. 198– 234, passim. See also Viner, 1:29–33; Zinberg, Di geshikhte, 8:159–67.

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Notes to Pages 316–22 115. See Yosef Dan, Hasippur hahasidi, pp. 182–88; Green, pp. 9–20. 116. See Nathan’s introduction to Nahman of Bratslav, Sippurei ma’asiyot (Jerusalem, 1985), pp. 3–8. And see the introduction to Nathan’s ’Alim literufah (Berdichev, 1896), as cited in Kahana, Sefer hahasidut, pp. 386–88. 117. See the introduction of a later Bratslav editor to Yemei maharnat, pp. 3–6; the introduction to Shivhei haran and Nathan’s ‘prayer concerning the tales of the Tsaddiqim’, as cited in Kahana, Sefer hahasidut, pp. 341–42, pp. 380–82. 118. See Dan, Hasippur hahasidi, p. 184. 119. See Green, pp. 14–16. And see the passages as cited by Dan in Hasippur hahasidi, pp. 183–88. 120. See Green, passim; Yosef Weiss, ‘Megillat setarim le r. nahman mibraslav ’al seder biat hamashiah’, in Qiriat sefer, 94 (Jerusalem, 1969) pp. 279–97; idem, ‘Seder hadpasat liqqutei moharan (qama’), defus ri’shon’, in Qiriat sefer, 91 (Jerusalem, 1966), pp. 557–63; Mendel Piekarz, Hasidut braslav (Jerusalem, 1972), pp. 16–19. 121. For publication details of ’Emunat ’iteikha, a later selection of Nahman’s teachings, see Scholem, Quntres ’elleh shemot. 122. Yemei maharnat, p. 6. 123. Mantel, p. 125. 124. See Green, p. 8; Weiss, Megillat setarim; Piekarz, Hasidut braslav, pp. 16–17. 125. See the introduction of this anonymous ‘copyist’ to Yemei maharnat, pp. 3–6. The ‘copyist’ makes, at one stage, interpolations in the actual text. See ibid., pp. 19– 21. See further on this, Yosef Weiss, Megillat setarim, esp. pp. 283–84; Mantel cites a Bratslav source that identiWes the copyist as Rav Nahman Goldstein of Tcherin, see p. 125, n. 2. Mantel notes also, p. 128, a ‘family tradition’ recorded by Rav Avraham Kokhav-Lev according to which a considerable amount of material concerning intimate details of Nathan’s family life included in Nathan’s manuscript was omitted in the printed editions. 126. Yemei maharnat, pp. 7–8. 127. Ibid., p. 8. And for mother/child, suckling motifs in Nahman’s doctrine of the Tsaddiq/disciple relationship, see Green, p. 155. 128. Yemei maharnat, pp. 8–9. 129. See Green, pp. 68, 82–83. 130. Yemei maharnat, p. 34. 131. Ibid., p. 9. 132. See Yosef Weiss, Mehqarei hasidut braslav, pp. 74–77. 133. See ibid., pp. 66–72. Nathan does speak openly, at occasions in Yemei maharnat of marital tension. See esp. pp. 23–26, 106–07. He appears, however, from the evidence of his many letters to his son, to have been a loving father. See a recent reprinting of ’Alim literufah together with further epistolary material of Nathan’s not originally included in that volume, entitled Sefer ’alim literufah, mikhtevei maharnat (Benei Berak, 1982). And see the letters cited by Zinberg in the supplement to vol. 8 of Di geshikhte, pp. 247–49. 134. Yemei maharnat, p. 13. 135. See esp. ibid., pp. 44–46, 56–58. Nathan, as shall be seen, attempts to give the impression, in his own writings, that he enjoyed a special relation with Nahman,

Notes to Pages 322–31 not enjoyed by any other of the Bratslav fraternity. This picture, however, does not entirely accord with other Bratslav sources. See on this: Green, pp. 149–50; Piekarz, Hasidut braslav, pp. 12, 203–05; Ada Rappoport-Albert, ‘Shenei meqorot lete’ur nesia’to shel R. Nahman mibraslav le’eretz yisrael’, in Qiriat sefer, 46 (Jerusalem, 1970), pp. 147–53. 136. The term Hitqarevut is used speciWcally in Bratslav scriptures to refer to the establishment of a relationship between Nathan and Nahman. See the title-page of Yemei maharnat. 137. Nathan’s insensitivity to his wife is, at times, little short of astonishing; more astonishing, however, is that he actually makes written record of these incidents. Thus he feels no qualms about leaving his wife weeping in order to travel to Nahman, even though Nahman has expressly ordered his disciples not to come to him at that time. See Yemei maharnat, p. 33. On another occasion Nathan leaves his chronically ill wife alone at home with ‘some maid’, in order to travel to Nahman. See ibid., p. 47. 138. Ibid., pp. 34–37. 139. Since, however, Nathan is the chief source for his master’s teaching, as for Nahman’s journeys, this transposition should be perceived as dialectical rather than direct and uni-directional. 140. Green, pp. 83–84. 141. Ibid., p. 85. 142. Mantel, p. 131. 143. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (London, 1967), pp. 129–30. 144. Ibid., p. 132. 145. Here, some comparison may be aVorded with the principle of repetition, due to lack of autobiographical precedent, in Emden’s Megillat sefer. 146. Psychological waverings, acute bouts of self-doubt and depression, are certainly hinted at obliquely in Yemei maharnat, as they are in Nathan’s other writings. See Yosef Weiss, who perceives in the Hitqarevut the fortuitous encounter of kindred manic-depressives; Mehqarei hasidut Braslav, esp. pp. 77–83. 147. See Yemei maharnat, p. 98. 148. Lamentations, 3:51: ’Eyni ’olelah lenafshi mikol benot ’iri. Nathan, in citing this verse, intends an alternative reading, along the lines of: ‘My heart was aVected more, at what I beheld, than all of those around me.’ Nathan here plays upon the preposition min, in its partitive connotation, ‘of ’, ‘from’, ‘with’, and in its comparative, ‘than’. 149. Yemei maharnat, pp. 87–95, passim. See also Green’s translation of Nathan’s account of Nahman’s death that diVers, in many aspects, from my own, and takes in a larger section of the narrative; Green, pp. 278–82. 150. See Yosef Weiss, Mehqarei hasidut braslav, pp. 73–74. Confession, in the early years of Nahman’s ministry at least, appears to have been a signiWcant aspect of the Bratslav initiation process. See Green, pp. 45–46. 151. See Yemei maharnat, pp. 86–87. 152. Yemei maharnat, p. 146.

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Notes to Pages 331–35 153. Ibid., pp. 112–13. 154. See Yemei maharnat, p. 97. 155. Later Bratslav tradition indeed insists that Nahman’s teachings may only be studied through the mediation of the writings of Nathan. See Green, pp. 176–77, n. 25. 156. See Song of Songs 5:2. 157. See Jeremiah 20:9. 158. Yemei maharnat, p. 110. 159. See Piekarz, Hasidut braslav, p. 18. 160. See ibid., pp. 16–19. Much of Yemei maharnat, in its coverage of the years after Nahman’s death, is devoted to Nathan’s printing endeavours. 161. Underhill, p. 132; compare Shteinman, ‘Tsiyyun limshorer’, pp. 499–500. 162. On Bittul hayesh, an important concept in Hasidic thought, see Dubnow, Toldot hahasidut, index. See also Berdichevsky’s poetic formulation of this concept in Sefer hasidim, pp. 87–91. 163. This is in line with the dynamics of the master/disciple relationship in Bratslav Hasidism, as this is presented in Green’s analysis. The Wnal stage in this relationship, Green argues, is when the disciple’s discrete individuality has been erased, that he may serve, like a mirror, as an empty receptor for the radiance emanating from the master. See Green, pp. 155–59.

Chapter Six 1. See F. Lachover, ’Al gevul hayashan, p. 127; idem, Toldot hasifrut, 2:91. 2. On the place of Megalleh temirin in modern Hebrew literature, see Halkin, Zeramim vetsurot, pp. 163–71, 184–85; Taylor. And on the role of the epistolary mode in the development of modern Hebrew and Yiddish prose, see Halkin, Mavo’, pp. 242–43; Niger, Dertseylers, pp. 63–67. 3. For publication details of the various parts of ’Ayit tsavua’, see Patterson, Abraham Mapu, pp. 22–23. 4. See Dan Miron’s introduction to the republication of Abramovitsh’s Limdu heitev (Warsaw, 1862) in Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Limdu heitev (New York, 1969), pp. 1–88. 5. As exempliWed especially by Yitshaq Ber Levinson’s Te’udah beyisrael (Vilna and Horodno, 1828). On which, see Immanuel Etkes’s introduction to the facsimile edition of the work (Jerusalem, 1977), pp. 3–19. 6. On the section ‘Toldot gedolei Yisra’el’, in Hame’assef, see Zinberg, Di geshikhte, 7:105. And see Euchel’s preface to his Toldot harambaman, pp. 13–14. 7. The reference is to Euchel’s above-mentioned biography of Mendelssohn— the Rambaman. 8. Interestingly, here Guenzberg uses the term Goethe had created for autobiography. I have not found this term used elsewhere in Hebrew or in Yiddish writings, nor is the term attested to in Alexander Harkavy’s Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary (New York, 1928). 9. An anagram, in Hebrew, of Guenzberg. 10. Likewise an anagram of Polangen, Kurland, where Guenzberg lived from approximately 1817 to 1823. See Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:124.

Notes to Pages 335–40 11. M. A. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer (Vilna, 1863), pp. 1–2. 12. See David Maggid, R. mordechai aaron gunzberg (St. Petersburg, 1897), p. 31; Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:141. Many of these manuscripts may have passed to the hands of Ya’aqov Katznelson, a former pupil of Guenzberg’s and one of his principal correspondents. Katznelson’s papers were bequeathed to his relative and future Hebrew autobiographer, Y. L. Katznelson (Buqi ben Yogli), whence they passed, via Yehudah Leib Kantor, to the historian Shaul Ginsburg. Their present whereabouts is unknown. See Shaul Ginsburg, Historishe verk, 3 vols. (New York, 1937), 2:31–33; Buki Ben Yogli, pp. 84–86. 13. Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:138; Maggid, pp. 28–29. 14. See Maggid, p. 13. See Guenzberg’s obituary notice for Nathanson, in Pirhei tsafon (Vilna, 1841), pp. 51–53. 15. The reference is to J. F. Recke and K. E. Wapiersky, Allgemeiner Schriftstellerund-Gelehrten-Lexicon der Provinzen Livland, Esthland und Kurland (Mitau, 1829). See Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:128; Maggid, p. 15. 16. In the original, Medushati uven gorni, literally ‘My threshed and winnowed one’ (Isaiah 21:10). 17. Beni or benay—the original is unpointed. 18. Harkavy gives the meaning of Boygn as simply a sheet of paper. Here, however, Guenzberg presumably intends octavo sheets. Maggid, basing his calculations upon the eventual length of the printed ’Avi’ezer, estimates that one hand-written Boygn is equivalent to approximately twenty-one-and-a-half printed pages. See Maggid, p. 13, n. 3. 19. Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg, Devir, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1883), 2:73–74. The Wrst volume of Devir was Wrst published in Vilna in 1844, the second in Vilna in 1861. All references are here made to the 1883 edition. 20. This letter follows immediately upon the letter to Nathanson in which ’Avi’ezer is mentioned for the Wrst time in Devir, 2:74–75. 21. See Maggid, p. 20, n. 3; Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:126. And see the alternative account that Guenzberg provides in Qiriat sefer (Vilna, 1855), pp. 116–18, 120–27. 22. Mei soferim in the original. 23. Guenzberg, Devir, 2:88–89. 24. So Maggid surmises, p. 13. This is most probably correct. Shaul Ginsburg writes that Guenzberg was always in the habit of sending his manuscripts to Katznelson before publication. See Ginsburg, 2:32. Katznelson also served as Guenzberg’s copyist; see the letter in Devir, 2:127–28, that appears also to be to Katznelson. And see above, n. 12. 25. Ginsburg, p. 32. 26. Guenzberg, Devir, 2:89–90. 27. See Maggid, p. 32. 28. See Klausner, Historiah, 3:134. 29. See Moshe Leib’s introduction to ’Avi’ezer, pp. xvii–xix. 30. Zinberg, Di geshikhte, 10:108; Lachover, Toldot hasifrut, 2:91.

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Notes to Pages 340–45 31. See Maggid, p. 13, n. 3. 32. Zinberg, Di geshikhte, 10:108. 33. See the introduction to Guenzberg, Devir, 1:3. 34. Guenzberg, Devir, 2:123. See also Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:157; Maggid, pp. 13–14; Shmuel Tsitron, Yotsrei hasifrut ha’ivrit hahadashah (Vilna, n.d.), pp. 130–31. 35. The letter is addressed to Qerovi, ‘my relative’. Binyamin Nathanson’s Wrst wife was the daughter of Guenzberg’s uncle, Moshe bar Yosef Falk, so his son Mordechai was his cousin. See Guenzberg’s obituary notice, as cited above. At the end of the letter, Guenzberg bids the addressee convey best wishes to his father. 36. Guenzberg, Devir, 2:54. 37. See Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:135–36. 38. As we know, from other sources, that Guenzberg was in the last years of his life, especially, according to Tsitron, after the failure of the Altaras scheme to resettle a number of Jews in Algiers in 1845, in which he had placed high hopes. See Tsitron, Yotsrei hasifruit, pp. 140–42; Klausner, Historiah, 3:152–53. 39. See Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 6. 40. See Y. Klausner’s review of these translations in Historiah, 3:136–37. 41. See ibid., pp. 137–38. 42. Guenzberg, Devir, 2:88. 43. The previous letters in the series are dated 1845 to 1846 and appear to belong to the same cycle. 44. Guenzberg, Devir, pp. 127–29. 45. Ibid., pp. 128–29. 46. See Chapter Two above. 47. Maimon, Hayyei, p. 169. 48. See Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:136, for bibliographical details. According to Maggid, Guenzberg was fairly successful in gaining advance subscriptions for this book. See Maggid, p. 26. Guenzberg’s translations of historical works also came to the notice of the Russian government, thus further enhancing the prestige of such works in the eyes of Vilna Maskilim. See Y. Klausner, p. 133; Max Lilienthal, My Travels in Russia in David Philipson, Max Lilienthal, American Rabbi: Life and Writings (New York, 1915), p. 289. 49. See Guenzberg, Devir, 1:175–95. There are some slight textual diVerences between these chapters as printed in vol. 1 of Devir and in the 1863 edition of ’Avi’ezer. The most marked of these is the conXation of chapters 7 and 8 to form one chapter in the Devir version. It is unclear which of these redactions should be accorded temporal precedence. The Devir version, with its abbreviations and, on occasion, more fortuitous phrasings, is, on balance, preferable. 50. See Guenzberg’s somewhat condescending introductions to Qiriat sefer and Devir, vol. 1. 51. Guenzberg, Devir, 1:4. 52. See Mordekhai Levin, ’Erkhei hevrah vekhalkalah be’idiologiyah shel tequfat hahaskalah (Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 198–99. 53. Comparison with S. Y. Fin’s account of his childhood years in ‘Dor vedorshav’, written some Wfty years after ’Avi’ezer was begun, is instructive in this respect.

Notes to Pages 345–49 The self-conscious, didactic note is even more apparent in Fin’s autobiography than it is in Guenzberg’s. 54. See Berechiah ha-Nakdan, Fables of a Jewish Aesop, tr. Moses Hadas (New York and London, 1967). And on the rôle of the Mashal in early Haskalah literature, see Lachover’s useful survey in Toldot, 1:78–93. On the role of the Mashal in ’Avi’ezer and the tension between the ‘didactic’ and ‘confessional’ intentions of the author as these are manifest in the early chapters, see Mintz, pp. 26–27. 55. See Judges 6:11. 56. See Judges 7:24–27. And for the account, see Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 2. 57. Ibid., p. 3. 58. Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:153. Compare Maggid, p. 11, also with reference especially to this section of ’Avi’ezer. 59. The eclipse of God by nature is all but complete in ’Avi’ezer. While nature (Teva’) is invoked repeatedly throughout the work, references to God are extremely scarce. 60. S. Y. Agnon, in ‘Sefer takhlit hama’asim’, in Ha’esh veha’etsim (Jerusalem, 1974), p. 189. 61. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 25. 62. On the impact of this work, see Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 43–51. 63. Rousseau, Émile, p. 5. 64. Torah, in Guenzberg’s formulation in the introduction to Devir, 1:4. 65. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, pp. 3–4. There are some close parallels in this passage to Agnon’s depiction of the infancy of ‘Meshulam’ in Sippur pashut. See Agnon, ’Al kapot haman’ul (Tel Aviv, 1962), pp. 262–63. 66. Compare, especially, Rousseau, Émile, pp. 11, 14–15, 26–27. 67. The distinction between translation and original composition appears to have been more Xuid for Guenzberg than it would be for a present-day writer. He feels free, in his translations, to make liberal alterations to the original. See especially the translations of letters of Goethe and Heine, as these are interpolated in Guenzberg’s original composition, Riv mishpahah in Devir, vol. 1, and see Leyl shimmurim, his translation of Heinrich Zschokkes’s story, ‘Die Walpurgisnacht’, in the same volume. Guenzberg appears to have considered his translation of German historical textbooks into Hebrew as his own compositions. See his introduction to Hatsarfatim berusiyah (Vilna, 1884); Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:134. 68. As with Berdichevsky, it is extremely diYcult to determine the precise ratio of inXuences here, so much is the Lebensgeschichte permeated by the spirit of the Confessions. The theme of childhood theft, for example, Wrst broached by Rousseau, is as marked in the Lebensgeschichte as it is in ’Avi’ezer. 69. For a masterly explication of this shift in perspective within Rousseau, see Coe, esp. pp. 27–30. 70. It is noteworthy, in this respect, that not once in the opening chapter of ’Avi’ezer does Guenzberg speak in the Wrst person. Nor, indeed, does he in the

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Notes to Pages 349–54 autobiographical preamble, save in the guise of the Wctional editor of the work at hand. 71. Mintz, p. 26 72. See especially Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, chapters 7 and 10. Some of the same fables, it should be noted, that appear in ’Avi’ezer, are included in the ‘Mishlei musar (fabelen)’ section of Devir, vol. 1, where they are given a diVerent connotation. See Guenzberg, Devir, 1:196–211. 73. The employment of autobiography as a means of educational reform is even more marked in Fin’s ‘Dor vedorshav’. In the structuring of his autobiographical account of the childhood years, Fin is, no doubt, much inXuenced by ’Avi’ezer. 74. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 7. Compare Rousseau, Confessions, pp. 31–32, 169. This apology does suggest some Wrst-hand acquaintance with Rousseau, since Maimon in the Lebensgeschichte apologizes nowhere in this manner, speciWcally for the account of the childhood years. 75. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, pp. 7–8. 76. Ibid., p. 68. Note here, again, the strong parallels with Rousseau, Confessions, pp. 31–32. Noteworthy also is how the pervasive naturalistic metaphor serves Guenzberg, even here, as a fortuitous device for simultaneously entertaining and instructing the reader. In other such similes in ’Avi’ezer, Guenzberg explains the functions of thermometers, wind-vanes and magnifying glasses, as well as the constitution of a republic. 77. Burton Pike, ‘Time in Autobiography’, in Comparative Literature, 28 (Eugene, Oregon, 1976), pp. 334–35. 78. Compare, especially, the depiction of ‘Hirshele’ ’s childhood in Be ’emeq habakha’, which Wrst appeared in serial form in Hashiloah of 1897, with that of the protagonist of Shloyme reb khayims. See, on this, Viner, 2:160–62. 79. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 4. 80. Ibid., p. 10 81. Ibid., p. 13. 82. Ibid., p. 14. 83. Ibid., p. 15. 84. Ibid., pp. 31, 34. 85. Ibid., p. 34. 86. Ibid. 87. There are some close parallels here with Berdichevsky’s account of his childprotagonist’s Wrst reading of the Yossipon in ‘Bederekh rehoqah’, in Mibayit umihuts, pp. 41–44. And see Guenzberg’s later comments in ’Avi’ezer, p. 129. 88. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 35. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., p. 40; Mintz, pp. 27–28, highlights the power/powerlessness theme. 91. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 49. The critique of the shiddukh as mercantile exchange becomes standard in later Haskalah autobiographies and novels. While this theme, as has been noted, does appear in Modena’s Hayyei yehudah and in Emden’s Megillat sefer, the source for Guenzberg’s account is, no doubt, Maimon. See Maimon, The Autobiography, pp. 49–58. See also the very similar account of Sh. Y. Fin, in his ‘Dor vedorshav’, pp. 335–38. And on this theme see Patterson, The Hebrew Novel, index under Shiddukh, shadkhan.

Notes to Pages 354–61 92. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, pp. 67–68. This passage is replete with biblical and Mishnaic resonance of sacriWce, impossible to convey in translation. 93. Ibid., pp. 69–70. Again, in his conveyance of the pagan complexion of these festivities, the evocative potential of Melitsah is realized to a high degree. There is again a strong parallel in this account with Agnon’s depiction of the betrothal ceremony of ‘Hirshl’ of Sippur pashut. See ’Al kapot haman’ul, pp. 110–14. 94. Thus Guenzberg’s account of his experiences in his in-laws’ home essentially recapitulates those in the home of his natural parents, described previously. 95. Mintz, p. 28. 96. See especially Rousseau, Confessions, pp. 299–302. On this aspect of the Confessions see Starobinski, Jean Jacques Rousseau, pp. 430–44. 97. Maimon, The Autobiography, p. 62. 98. Umelekh ’alqum ’itam, an adaptation of Proverbs 30:31, literally, ‘a king who will not rise with them’. The meaning of the original biblical passage is obscure, but Guenzberg’s connotation in availing himself of the trope is not. 99. There is here a ‘multiple-entendre’ on the word bayit, meaning literally ‘house’, but also ‘household-family’, with subsequent connotations of ‘wife’, euphemistically extended to ‘pudenda’, ‘marital intercourse’. See Marcus Jastrow’s Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (Philadelphia, 1903), pp. 167–68. 100. Here Guenzberg avails himself of the prophetic denunciations of backsliding Israel in the Wgure of a whore. See especially Ezekiel 16:30; Jeremiah 2:20. 101. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 75. 102. In the original, Lemishkav dodim. Note, here again, the biblical resonance of one of the most sexually explicit prophetic denunciations of Ezekiel, couched in the metaphor of whoredom, abomination, harlotry. See Ezekiel 23:17. 103. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 77. 104. See Guenzberg, introduction to Qiriat sefer, pp. 4–5; Maggid, p. 11. 105. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 90. 106. Ibid., p. 102. 107. Mintz, p. 28. 108. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 76. And see Guenzberg’s epistolary story, ‘ ’Esrim ve’arba’ah mikhtevei re’im’, in his Qiriat sefer, esp. pp. 77–78. 109. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 95. 110. Ibid., pp. 124–25. 111. See Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 287–324; idem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays in Jewish Spirituality (New York, 1971), pp. 78–142; Biale, passim. 112. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, pp. 129–30. 113. Ibid., p. 128. 114. Mintz, pp. 28–29. 115. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, pp. 115–17. 116. Ibid., p. 119. 117. See ibid., pp. 117–18, 119. 118. Ibid., p. 118. 119. The opening hymn in the daily morning service, containing Maimonides’ thirteen principles of faith.

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Notes to Pages 361–64 120. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, pp. 118–19. 121. Ibid., p. 125. 122. Ibid., pp. 132–33. 123. Ibid., p. 134. 124. Ibid., pp. 134–35. 125. See Rousseau, Émile, pp. 228–78. 126. See ibid., pp. 224–25. 127. See Jimack’s introduction to Émile, pp. xx–xxii; Jean Guehenno, Jean Jacques Rousseau, tr. J. and D. Weightman, 2 vols. (London, 1966), 2:24–28. 128. See Rousseau, Émile, pp. 267–68. 129. See Yehudah Aryeh Klausner, Hanovelah basifrut ha’ivrit: bere’shitah ’ad sof tequfat hahaskalah (Jerusalem, 1957); Pauline WengeroV, Memoiren einer Grossmutter: Bilder aus der Geschichte der Juden in Russlands im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1908), 1:128; Gottlober 1:209–10; Buki Ben Yogli, p. 84; Shim’on Bernfeld, ‘Zikhronot’, in Reshumot (Tel-Aviv, 1925), 4:191. 130. See his acknowledgement of Zschokke in ’Avi’ezer, p. 134, and his abovecited rendition of a Zschokke story, ‘Leil shimmurim’, in Devir, vol. 1. 131. See Heinrich Zschokke, Meditations on Life, Death, and Eternity, tr. Frederica Rowan (Boston, 1883), passim. 132. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 128. 133. Ibid., p. 168. The crisis of religious faith, as this is depicted in ’Avi’ezer, is, for a historian, one of the most intriguing aspects of the work and, I believe, begs the question of the supposedly moderate complexion of the Lithuanian Haskalah. Compare Miron, Kivvun’ orot, pp. 26–30. On Guenzberg’s religious beliefs, see Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:141–51. Guenzberg was viewed with some ambivalence by the Orthodox in Vilna and his funeral sparked oV a Werce controversy between Orthodox and Maskilim. See the memoiristic accounts of Ya’aqov Mazeh, Zikhronot, 4 vols. in 2 (Tel Aviv, 1936), 3:143–58; Avraham Y. Papirna, ‘Zikhronot ushemu’ot’, in Reshumot, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1925), pp. 151–54. The complexities of this issue remain to be explored. 134. See Mordekhai Levin, pp. 115, 128–29, index under ‘Guenzberg’. 135. See Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, pp. 128–30. Noteworthy of contrast here is the forced happy ending of Guenzberg’s epistolary story ‘Riv mishpahah’, whose central themes are also parental conXict and the love problematic. See Guenzberg, Devir, vol. 1. 136. Given Guenzberg’s especial fascination with French history, it is unlikely that he did not acquire a reading knowledge of the language. Guenzberg’s son, it appears, knew French well enough to be qualiWed to teach the language, which surely attests to some knowledge on the part of the father. See Guenzberg, Devir, 2:57. 137. First published in Vilna in 1847. 138. First published in Vilna in 1846. 139. Mintz, p. 28. 140. See Klausner, Historiah, 3:127, 136–37. 141. See his introduction to Hatsarfatim berusiyah. 142. For dates of writing of these works, see Maggid, pp. 17, 22; Klausner, Historiah, 3:128–30.

Notes to Pages 364–68 143. Guenzberg wrote, in addition to Hatsarfatim berusiyah and Pi haherut, in which Napoleon Wgures prominently, a monograph on Napoleon entitled Toldot ben perat. Banned by the censor, this biography appeared in the posthumous collection of Guenzberg’s writings edited by E.Y. Shapiro, entitled Hamoriyah (Warsaw, 1878). See Maggid, p. 22; Klausner, Historiah, 3:129. Note how in the above-cited letter from Devir, vol. 2, Guenzberg compares himself, in his agitated state of mind, to Napoleon, idling away his time in Vitebsk. 144. Compare, in this respect, the preamble to Abramovitsh’s Bayamim hahem; Abramovitsh, Kol kitvei, p. 259; and Brenner’s preamble to his autobiographical novel Bahoref in Brenner, 1:95–96. 145. The publication history of this work is complex. The date of the work is given as 1860, though no place is mentioned. See Klausner, Historiah, 3:138–39; Werses, ‘Gilgulei shel hasefer “hamat Damesheq”’, in Qiriat sefer, year 17, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 1940), pp. 119–20. 146. Guenzberg, Hamat Damesheq (1860), p. 11; and see ibid., pp. 94–96. 147. See Klausner, Historiah, 3:144–45. 148. See the dedicatory preface to Pi hahirot. Hamat Damesheq was originally intended for MonteWore. See Guenzberg’s letter to MonteWore, included in Devir, 2:28–29. Guenzberg was presented to MonteWore during the latter’s visit to Vilna in 1846. See his description of this visit in Devir, 2:99–109. 149. See above, n. 38. 150. Sh. Y. Fin was probably the Wrst to recognize the cardinal importance of Guenzberg in the development of modern Hebrew prose. See Halkin, Zaramim vetsurot, pp. 286–93. See also Tsitron, Yotsrei hasifruit, pp. 128–35; Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:156–70, 432; Yankev Shatsky, ‘Kultur geshikhte fun der haskole bay yidn in lite’, in Lite, vol. 1 (New York, 1951), pp. 724–25; Lachover, Toldot, 2:88–89; Maggid, pp. 1–2, 9–15. 151. Dubnow, History, 2:134. 152. For publication details, see Yosef Klausner, Historiah, 3:136–38. 153. Dan Miron is, to my knowledge, the only literary historian or critic to intimate such a connection. But his comments are tangential to his leading argument, and he does not expand upon the point. See Miron, Bein hazon le’emet, p. 100. 154. See Mazeh, 3:145. And on the circulation of manuscripts amongst Maskilim in this period, see Shatsky, ‘Kultur geshikhte’, p. 747. 155. Guenzberg’s widow was, apparently, still alive in 1860. His brother, Moshe Leib, writes, in the introduction to Devir, vol. 2, that he published Hamat Damesheq ‘with the permission of your orphaned son and widow’. See Devir, 2:4. 156. Y. Klausner, Historiah, 3:139–40. 157. Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’, in his Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, tr. Timothy Bahti, introduction by Paul de Man (Minneapolis, 1982), p. 25. 158. The laudatory poem by Shlomo Zalman Zalkind and the preface of Moshe Leib Guenzberg to ’Avi’ezer are silent concerning the actual content or form of the

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Notes to Pages 368–72 book. Not as the Wrst Hebrew autobiographer is Guenzberg lauded in these prefaces, but rather as master of Sefat ’ever—‘the language of the Hebrew’; they could have served as well as frontispieces to any other of Guenzberg’s posthumously published works. See ’Avi’ezer, pp. i-xix. 159. On the possible inXuence of ’Avi’ezer on Mendele/Abramovitsh’s Ha’avot vehavanim, see Miron, Bein hazon le’emet, pp. 229–30. ’Avi’ezer, apparently, was the Wrst Hebrew work that Feierberg read. See Sh. Zetser’s memoirs of Feierberg in Kitvei m.z. feierberg, p. 171. The parallels between Guenzberg’s autobiographical preamble and that of Yosef Yehudah Charney, written in the sixth or seventh decade of the nineteenth century, are especially striking. See Y. Y. Charney, Toldot yemei hayyay in Reshumot, vol. 6, ed. H. N. Bialik, A. Druyanov, Y. H. Ravnitsky (Tel Aviv, 1930), pp. 125–26. 160. See Lilienblum’s account of his Wrst reading of ’Avi’ezer, in Hatt’ot ne’urim, in his Ketavim autobiograWim, 1:121. All citations from Hatt’ot ne’urim and Derekh teshuvah are taken from the Breiman edition. 161. See Lilienblum’s 1874 essay on Mapu’s ’Ayit tsavua’, ’Olam hatohu’, in Kol kitvei m.l. lilienblum, 4 vols. (Krakau-Odessa, 1910–14), vol. 2. 162. See the title page of the Wrst edition of Hatt’ot ne’urim (Vienna, 1876). 163. See Lilienblum, Kol kitvei, 3:240. 164. Shmu’el David Luzzatto. 165. That is, Luzzatto’s autobiography, Toldot shadal. 166. Lilienblum, Ketavim autobiograWim, 1:94–96. 167. Ibid., p. 94. 168. Mintz, pp. 29–31. 169. Lilienblum, Ketavim autobiograWim, p. 84. 170. See Klausner, Historiah, 3:153; Avraham Sha’anan, Hasifrut ha’ivrit hahadashah lizrameiha, 4 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1962–67), 2:30; Mintz’s discussion of ’Avi’ezer, on pp. 25–31, is quite cursory by comparison to his treatment of Lilienblum—a quantitative ratio that I reverse in the present chapter. 171. Lilienblum, Ketavim autobiograWim, 2:150, 163. 172. Berdichevsky, Ba’erev, p. 6. 173. The Wrst part of Hadat vehahayyim appeared in Lemberg in 1876. See Gershon Shaked’s introduction to the Jerusalem 1974 edition of the work. 174. Guenzberg, ’Avi’ezer, p. 66. Yehudah Aryeh Klausner notes that there is a degree of psychological penetration in Guenzberg’s translation of Zschokke’s Die Walpurgisnacht that is lacking in his original stories. See his Hanovelah, p. 130. On Guenzberg’s ambivalent and changing attitudes toward Hebrew, see Klausner, Historiah, 3:156–61. 175. Lilienblum’s Wrst acquaintance with Haskalah came by way of the Hebrew periodical Hamaggid, published in Lyck from 1856. See Lilienblum, Ketavim autobiograWim, 1:110. 176. The subtitle Lilienblum gave to Hatt’ot ne’urim, Vidui hagadol, ‘the great confession’, is suggestive of acquaintance with Rousseau. Lilienblum, from the evi-

Notes to Pages 372–76 dence of his publicistic articles and correspondence, was clearly familiar with the rudiments of Rousseauian philosophy. From a letter of 1871 to Y. L. Gordon it appears that Lilienblum had acquired a reading knowledge of French by this date. See ’Iggerot m.l. lilienblum le y.l. gordon, p. 130. For Lilienblum on Maimon, see Ketavim autobiograWim, 2:21. 177. On the relation of Hatt’ot ne’urim with the Haskalah novel, see Feingold, pp. 86–111. 178. From the literary aspect there is thus much truth in Shai ’Ish Hurwitz’s contention that ‘Hatt’ot ne’urim was to us, the Jews, what Rousseau’s Confessions was to France before the great revolution in the days of liberation’. See Hurwitz’s article, ‘Lilienblum vehashpa’ato ’al benei doro’, in Ha’olam, year 4, vol. 9 (Vilna, 1910), p. 10. 179. See Breiman’s introduction to Lilienblum, Ketavim autobiograWim. 180. See Paperna, p. 176, n. 6; Scanlon, ‘Chernyshevsky and Rousseau’. 181. Paperna, p. 42. 182. See Wachtel, pp. 36–44, esp. 43–44. 183. ’Umlal ba’arets in the original—an anagram, in Hebrew, of ‘I, Moshe Leib Lilienblum, the son of my father Rabbi Tsevi’. See Ketavim autobiograWim, 2:141. 184. See Mintz, passim, pp. 49–54, for a nuanced and sensitive discussion of this ‘conversion’; Breiman, introduction, pp. 39–40; and Lilienblum’s Hatimah to his later Derekh la’avor golim (Warsaw, 1899), p. 162. 185. See Breiman, pp. 57–59. 186. See Harold Bloom, ed. and with an introduction, ‘The Prelude’: Modern Critical Interpretations (New York, 1986), pp. 1–25. 187. According to a rumour cited by Ya’aqov Rabinovitz, Lilienblum explored another option—buying up copies of Hatt’ot ne’urim and burning or hiding them. See Rabinovitz, Maslulei sifrut, 1:173. 188. See the title page as reproduced in Lilienblum, Ketavim autobiograWim, 2:143. 189. Ibid., 2:160. 190. See Breiman, pp. 39–41. 191. Mintz, p. 50. 192. See Berdichevsky, Nemushot, pp. 59–60. 193. See the essays in the memorial volume of Ha’olam dedicated to Lilienblum, Ha’olam, year 4, vol. 9. On Ansky and Lilienblum, see Reuven Lichtenstein, ‘Ansky’s ershter aroysfor’, in YIVO bleter, vol. 12 (Vilna, 1937), pp. 443–53. Ansky actually entitles the Wrst chapter of his memoirs ‘Khatoes ne’urim’. See Sh. Ansky, Gezamlte shriftn, 15 vols. (Warsaw, 1920–29), 10:5–16. See also Ansky’s depiction of one of the characters in his novel, Pionern, swearing allegiance to the Haskalah while taking a copy of Hatt’ot ne’urim in hand, in ibid., 13:104. 194. Paperna, p. 1.

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Notes to Pages 377–80

Chapter Seven 1. Tsvi Hirsh Lipschitz, Midor lador: darkhei hahayyim hahomriim vehamusariim shel benei yisra’el bedor he’avar (Warsaw, 1901). 2. Bal Makhshoves writes c. 1911. 3. Bal Makhshoves, Seqirot ureshamim, pp. 77–78. 4. Zikhron ya’aqov, an uncompleted work, was Wrst published posthumously by Lipschitz’s son Notte, in 3 vols. (Frankfurt, Kovno, 1924–30). All citations are here taken from the 1968 facsimile edition of the work, for which the place of printing is given only as Israel. 5. Y.H. Lipschitz, 1:38–39. 6. See Rav Tsa’ir (Hayyim Tschernowitz), Pirqei hayyim (New York, 1954), pp. 151, 140–42. 7. See his preamble to Zikhron ya’aqov, 1:xxiii–xxix, esp. pp. xxvii–ix, where Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim is speciWcally cited. On Zikhron ya’aqov, see Israel Bartal, ‘“Zikhron ya’aqov’ ler” ya’aqov lipshitz: historiograWyah ’ortodoksit?’ In Mille’t (Tel Aviv, 1994), pp. 409–14; idem, ‘“True Knowledge and Wisdom”: On Orthodox Historiography’, in Studies in Contemporary Jewry: An Annual, vol. 10, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York, Oxford, 1994), pp. 178–92. 8. Y. H. Lipschitz, 2:77–79. 9. Lipschitz’s technique of the direct citation of letters concerning the disputes over religious reform prompted by Lilienblum’s early activity was most likely suggested by the Wrst part of Hatt’ot ne’urim. See, for example, ibid., 2:108–11. In ‘Zikhron ya’aqov’, pp. 413–14, Bartal discerns traces here of Haskalah parodic conventions, as exempliWed in Yosef Perl’s Megalleh temirin, in which the characters that are the butt of the satire undermine their own premises in being allowed to speak for themselves. 10. See his preamble to this section in ibid., 1:223. 11. Most striking is Lipschitz’s discernment of the material bases—improved communications, industrialization—for the emergence of modern Jewish ideologies. See, for example, ibid., 2:1–12. Compare Yisroel Sosis, Di geshikhte fun di yidishe gezelshaftlakhe shtrebungen in rusland (Minsk, 1929), passim. 12. Ephraim Deinhard, Zikhronot bat ’ami: leqorot hayehudim vehayahadut berusiyah bemeshekh qerov leshiva’im shanah (St. Louis, 1920). 13. See especially his extraordinary Mashgei ’ivrim: re’shit haskalat hahasidim bitequfat rodkinson vetotsa’otav besifrut hahayyim, hamahalakh hehadash vehabolshevism hasifruti (St. Louis, 1919). 14. Compare Bartal, ‘Zikhron ya’aqov’, pp. 411, 414. 15. Ibid., p. 414. 16. See Bartal, ‘True Knowledge’, esp. pp. 181–82. 17. Barukh Halevy Epstein, Meqor barukh, 4 vols. (plus a one-volume Introduction), in 3 (Vilna, 1928), p. 787. Since the volumes of Meqor barukh run in concurrent

Notes to Pages 380–84 pagination one to the other, I shall cite only the page number without reference to the volume. 18. Ibid., p. 2028. 19. This is the encounter between the reformist rabbi, Max Lilienthal, and Rabbi Isaac of Volozhin. See Don Seeman and Rebecca Kobrin, ‘“Like One of the Whole Men”: Learning, Gender and Autobiography in R. Barukh Epstein’s Meqor barukh’, in Nashim: Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues, no. 2, Spring 5759/ 1999 (Jerusalem, 1999), pp. 61–64. 20. Seeman and Kobrin, in their original and thought-provoking essay, highlight the ambivalence and crossed messages manifest in Meqor barukhh concerning ethnic and gender boundaries. 21. Epstein’s footnote: ‘And so our wise men may their memory be blessed proclaimed in context similar to this: “More pleasing one poor quality date that we ate in our childhood than a peach we ate in our dotage” ’ (Yerushalmi, Pe’ah, 87). 22. B. H. Epstein, pp. 1716–17. In translating Epstein, I adhere to his punctuation, even though it is unconventional—to take one example, he frequently uses a semi-colon in place of a period. This encomium to memories of youth is repeated almost verbatim on p. 419. 23. Ibid., p. 2008. 24. Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, tr. and with an introduction by C. J. Hogarth (London, 1976), pp. 40, 42. 25. B. H. Epstein, p. 1910. 26. Ibid., p. 1096. Here Epstein refers to Guenzberg as ‘a singular Wgure among the Maskilim of that generation’. Epstein also refers to Guenzberg’s Devir, ibid., pp. 752–53 (Meqor barukh). 27. Ibid., p. 1718, n. 1. 28. Ibid., p. 192. Epstein also makes reference in Meqor barukh to Emden’s noless-explicit Megillat sefer. See ibid., p. 1002, n. 2. 29. Epstein appends this citation as a footnote to the passage cited above, beginning ‘And since memories of the serene, peaceful days of childhood are pleasing to me. . . . ’ See Meqor barukh, p. 1716. 30. See David Kraemer, ‘Images of Childhood and Adolescence in Talmudic Literature’, in idem, ed., The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory (New York, Oxford, 1989), pp. 65–80, for the generally negative Talmudic evaluations of this period of life. 31. Ibid., pp. 59–60, and esp. 65–67. 32. Ibid., p. 880. 33. Ibid., p. 882. 34. Epstein’s grandfather, it must be said, had a point. Zak’s employees in his St. Petersburg Discount and Credit Bank included Grigori Bogrov, whose fame, or notoriety, rests upon his sharply critical depictions of traditional Jewish life published in the Russian periodical press of the early 1870s. It was Bogrov who Wnagled a position in Zak’s bank for the renegade radical Hebrew literary critic Avram Uri Kovner,

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Notes to Pages 384–97 a self-proclaimed nihilist, whose vitriolic polemical assaults delivered in the 1860s on the Hebrew literature of his day created an unprecedented furore in the Hebrew literary discourse of the day. ‘This new milieu’, he writes, of Zak’s Discount and Credit Bank, ‘which ran counter to my upbringing, my habits, my convictions, corrupted me’. When Kovner absconded from the bank with a forged check for 168,000 rubles, this created a national scandal. Kovner was imprisoned and subsequently exiled to Siberia. Both Bogrov and Kovner took for themselves non-Jewish spouses and converted to Christianity. For the Kovner citation above see Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ed. and with an introduction, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (London, 1967), p. 341. For a lively account of the entire Kovner aVair, see Shaul Ginsburg, Historishe shriftn (naye serie) vol. 2: meshumodim in tsarishn rusland (New York, 1946), pp. 157–93, esp. 168–73. 35. Ibid., p. 885. 36. Ibid., p. 886. 37. The above passage provides important testimony to the lengthy gestation of Meqor barukh, suggesting that the Wnal work as we have it consists in no small part of revisions of prior autobiographical notations and drafts. 38. Ibid., p. 1704. 39. See Seeman and Kobrin, esp. pp. 75–78, 85–87. 40. Ibid., p. 72. 41. On Rayna Batya’s anger see ibid., esp. pp. 77–81. 42. Ibid., p. 71. 43. B. H. Epstein, p. 1976, as translated by Seeman and Kobrin, p. 84. 44. See Seeman and Kobrin, p. 56. 45. Ibid., p. 986, n. 1. 46. Seeman and Kobrin, p. 79. 47. Ibid., pp. 74–75. 48. Ibid., p. 82. 49. B. H. Epstein, p. 2004. The suggestive em-dash at the end of this paragraph is Epstein’s own. 50. Meir Berlin, in describing his father’s refusal to display any emotion at the sudden death of his daughter-in-law on a Sabbath, until after the Sabbath had passed, characterized him as ‘one who governs all his limbs and emotions according to the law of the Torah’. See Meir Berlin, Fun volozhin biz yerushalayim: epizodn, 2 vols. (New York, 1933), 1:73–74. 51. B. H. Epstein, pp. 1949–50. And compare Seeman and Kobrin, pp. 72–73. 52. B. H. Epstein, pp. 1982–84. 53. Ibid., pp. 2006–07. 54. Ibid., p. 2005. 55. Ibid., p. 2006. 56. Ibid., p. 2004. 57. Ibid., p. 2010. 58. Ibid., p. 2011. 59. Ibid., p. 2000. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., p. 2010. 62. Ibid., p. 15. Compare p. 732. 63. Ibid., p. 1249. 64. Ibid., pp. 1249–50. 65. Ibid., pp. 2030–31. 66. Seeman and Kobrin, p. 78.

Notes to Pages 398–405 67. It is by this stove that we Wrst meet Rayna Batya in the chapter ‘Wisdom of Women’. See B. H. Epstein, p. 1949 68. The above discussion of Epstein’s straining against the limitations of Volozhin bears some parallels, I realized after writing it, to Dov Sadan’s comments on the role that Volozhin played in inhibiting the creative potential of Bialik. See Sadan, ‘ ’El hashitin: ’al h.n. bialik’, in his Bein din leheshbon, p. 9. 69. See Yitskhok Layb Peretz, ‘Between Two Mountains’, tr. Goldie Morgenthaler, in The I.L. Peretz Reader, ed. Ruth Wisse (New York, 1990), pp. 184–95. 70. B. H. Epstein, pp. 1954–55. 71. Ibid., p. 1963, as translated by Seeman and Kobrin, p. 81. 72. Ibid., p. 1963, as translated by Seeman and Kobrin, p. 81. 73. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse Typology’, pp. 183–84. 74. Seeman and Kobrin, p. 85. 75. B. H. Epstein, p. 1235. 76. Revealing in this respect is the observation of the Netsiv’s son, Meir Berlin, that what aroused the hackles of the traditionalists against the teachings of Yitshaq Ya’aqov Reines—himself a graduate of Volozhin—was in great part not the content of his teachings but that ‘he adopted a new style of writing Torah . . . The “new things” were also sought out in the form in which he wrote a large part of his books. This gave the impression, that in the diVerent style of Torah there also lay a diVerent content’. See Berlin, 2:395. Compare, in general, on the wider socio-cultural implications of changing Jewish ‘styles’ in the modern period, Eli Lederhendler, ‘Guides to the Perplexed: Sex, Manners and Mores for the Yiddish Reader in America’, in his Jewish Responses to Modernity: New Voices in America and Eastern Europe (New York, 1994), pp. 140–58. On the burning controversy concerning the retention of Jewish traditional clothing, versus the adoption of the garb of the Christian majority in Russia, that went so far as a petition by the Vilna maskilim, Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg prominent amongst them, in 1843, to the Russian government to compel the Jews to modernize their attire; see Israel Bartal, ‘Mordechai Aaron Guenzberg: A Lithuanian Maskil Faces Modernity’, in From East and West: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750–1870, ed. Frances Malino and David Sorkin (Oxford, Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 126–147, esp. pp. 134–37. 77. B. H. Epstein, pp. 1–3, passim. 78. Ibid., p. 17. 79. The Wrst 188 pages of the Introduction, consisting of the “Preface”, and the literary apparati, are numbered separately, the pagination of the Introduction proper then beginning anew. 80. Ibid., p. 96. 81. Ibid., p. 3. 82. The approbation, printed in centred, variegated type, is that of Abraham Isaac Kook. I actually Wnd it curious that more approbations were not included, given the prestige of Epstein as a Torah-scholar and his impressive rabbinic pedigree.

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Notes to Pages 405–13 Lipschitz’s Zikhron ya’aqov includes numerous approbations prefacing each of its three volumes. Could this indicate reservations concerning the work on behalf of prominent rabbinic Wgures? 83. Bartal, ‘Zikhron ya’aqov’, p. 409. 84. B. H. Epstein, pp. 994–97. 85. Ibid., p. 634. 86. Ibid., p. 16. 87. See Bialik’s response to this request in his ’Iggerot, 4:130. 88. B. H. Epstein, pp. 609–10, n. 1. 89. Bold type in original. 90. B. H. Epstein, pp. 610–11. 91. Bialik, ’Iggerot, 4:144. 92. B. H. Epstein, p. 633. 93. See Miron, Traveler, index under ‘Mendele Moykher-Sforim—“as a Jewish chef ”’, p. 343. 94. See ibid., index under ‘use of the Wrst person (stories presented as authentic autobiographical documents)’, p. 337. 95. S. Y. Abramovitsh, Dos vintshWngerl—most likely printed in Warsaw in 1866, though no date or place are provided on the title-page—as reprinted and re-edited in Mendele Mokher sefarim, Ketavim be’ibam, ed. Shalom Luria (Haifa, 1994), pp. 32–34, passim. 96. B. H. Epstein, pp. 780–86. 97. Compare Miron, Traveler, pp. 115–18. 98. Ibid., pp. 186–87. 99. Nissenboim, ’Alei heldi. I have used the Jerusalem facsimile edition of 1969. 100. Mazeh, Zikhronot. 101. Rav Tsa’ir, Massekhet zikhronot. And on Rav Tsa’ir as autobiographer, see Shimon Halkin, Derakhim vetsiddei derakhim besifrut, 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 1969), 2:271–90. 102. Rabbi Binyamin, Mizevarov ve’ad kinneret (Tel Aviv, 1950). The contacts of each of these writers with the leading luminaries of the Tehiyyah period were extensive. See Rav Tsa’ir, Massekhet zikhronot; and Rabbi Binyamin, Mishpahat sofrim; on Nissenboim’s connections, especially with Bialik, see his ’Alei heldi, index under ‘Bialik’. 103. Bialik, ’Iggerot, 4: 195. 104. See Immanuel Etkes, ‘Bein lamdanut lerabbanut beyahadut Lit’a shel hame’ah hatesha’ esreh’, in Tsiyon, vol. 4, no. 53 (Jerusalem, 1988), pp. 385–86. 105. See Bick’s introduction to Rabinowitz-Te’omim, Haga’on ha’aderet seder ’eliyahu (Jerusalem, 1983), pp. 5–6. 106. See A. Gurshteyn, introduction to Shloyme reb khayims, in Mendele Moykher Seforim, Gezamlte verk, vols. 3–6 (incomplete), ed. A. Gurshteyn, M. Viner, Y. Nusinov (Moscow, 1935), 6:8–9; Sh. Niger, Mendele Moykher Seforim (New York, 1970), pp. 212–13; M. Ben-Ami (Hayyim-Mordekhai Rabinowitz), ’Ishei dorenu (Tel Aviv, 1933), p. 121; Abramovitsh’s 1904 response to Klausner’s request, in Mabu’a: riv’on sifruti mada’i, ed. Menachem Ribalow, vol. 1 (New York, 1953), p. 111. 107. See Sholem Aleichem’s introduction, entitled ‘The History of “From the Fair” in Brief ’, in his Funem yarid, pp. 9–11. For the 1903 response to Y.H. Ravnitsky’s request for autobiographical material, accompanied by an autobiographical

Notes to Pages 413–14 synopsis that takes his life up to 1881, see Sholem Aleichem, Briv fun sholem aleikhem 1879–1916, ed. Avrom Lis (Tel Aviv, 1995), pp. 416–20. For Niger’s request for the autobiography see Sholem Aleichem’s 1913 letter to his son-in-law, Yitshaq Dov Berkovitz, Sholem Aleichem, Briv, pp. 128–29; Sh. Niger, Geklibene shriftn, 3 vols. (New York, 1928), 3:177–78. 108. See David G. Roskies, ‘UnWnished Business: Sholem Aleichem’s From the Fair’, in Prooftexts 6 (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 76–77, n. 3. 109. See Sholem Aleichem’s letter to Kotik that serves as a preface to Kotik’s Mayne zikhroynes, 1:9–12; Assaf, introduction to Kotik, Mashera’iti, pp. 37–39, suggests that Sholem Aleichem’s reading of Kotik’s memoirs was one factor in his resuming Funem yarid after a hiatus due to his ill health. 110. Y. L. Peretz, Mayne zikhroynes (Vilna, n.d.), p. 5. 111. See Peretz’s side of the correspondence with Niger concerning the Zikhroynes, in Peretz, Briv un redes fun y.l. peretz, ed. and annotated with an introduction by Nahman Meisel (New York, 1944), pp. 338–42. 112. ’Iggerot yosef hayyim brener, ed. and annotated by Menahem Poznansky, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1941), 2: 20. 113. See Bialik, ’Iggerot, 1:157–73. 114. ’Iggerot david frishman, ed. and with an introduction by E. R. Malachi (New York, 1927), p. 158. 115. See Bialik, ’Iggerot, 2:230, 236. 116. See Dubnow’s letters of January 22 and April 22, 1924, to Ahad Ha’am in Sefer Shim’on Dubnov, ed. S. Ravidowicz (London, Jerusalem, Waltham, 1954), pp. 273– 78; Y. H. Ravnitsky, ‘ ’Ahad ha’am (’al pi ’iggrotav)’, in his Dor vesofrav, 2:3. 117. As cited in Ravnitsky, 2:11. 118. See Zipperstein, pp. 7, 257, 322–23. 119. See Ahad Ha’am, Kol kitvei, pp. 491–96. 120. See Friedman, Sefer hazikhronot, pp. 3–4. 121. Ibid., p. 407. 122. See Saadiah D. Goldberg’s introduction to Mazeh’s Zikhronot, 1:7–12. 123. Alter Druyanov, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, and Yehoshua Hayyim Ravnitsky, eds., Reshumot, vol. 1 (second printing, Tel Aviv, 1925). For the original 1914 call for material, see pp. v-vii. 124. The above paragraph, it should be noted, presents only a sampling of the autobiographical relations that ensued in this period. 125. First published in Warsaw in 1888. I have used the facsimile edition, with an introduction and addenda by G. Kressel (Tel Aviv, 1980). 126. Sefer zikkaron, p. 3. The Wrst use of the word occurs, as cited above, in Berdichevsky’s article on Nahman of Bratslaw in Ha’asif. 127. See Kressel in his introduction to the 1980 edition of Sefer zikkaron, pp. 10–11. The original correspondence connected with Sefer zikkaron appears not to have survived. Further autobiographies were no doubt sent but not reXected in lexicon entries.

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Notes to Pages 415–17 128. See Zalman Reizen’s introduction to Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur prese un Wlologye, 4 vols. (Vilna, 1926–29), 1:iii–iv. 129. See Reizen’s remarks to the much-expanded version of vol. 1 of the Leksikon (Vilna, 1928), 1:ix. This was the only volume of the enlarged, revised work, which, from the evidence of these remarks, was in an advanced state of preparation to be published. 130. I have not reviewed this collection in its entirety. There is an extreme disparity in the length, signiWcance and quality of the autobiographical materials submitted Reizen. Included, however, amongst the responses, are several autobiographies ranging in length from Wfty to a hundred pages. Reizen’s correspondence with the authors contains a wealth of material relevant to the motivations of those that responded to the questionnaire, and to some of the preconceptions concerning the autobiographical genre regnant in this period. 131. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur, 8 vols. (New York, 1956–81). The original editors of this project, Niger and Shatsky, had both died within a short time of each other before the Wrst volume appeared. For the original autobiographical questionnaire that was publicized in the Yiddish press, see 1:xxi. 132. For the contents of this questionnaire, see Yedi’ot genazim, 1:54–56. 133. The relation of H. D. Azulai’s Shem hagedolim and Aaron Walden’s Shem hagedolim hehadash to the modern lexicon is as that of hagiography to the modern biography. On the latter work, see Dubnow, Toldot hahasidut, 3:383. These lexicons, it should be noted, are divided into two sections—one devoted to books, and one to authors. 134. Tsvi Malter, Devar ’el haqore’im in Moses Steinschneider, Sifrut yisra’el, tr. Malter (Warsaw, 1897–99), pp. 318–19. 135. See his preamble to Book 7 in Confessions, pp. 261–62, and for the cited examples of archival designation, ibid., pp. 419, 485. 136. S. Y. Abramovitsh, Of Bygone Days, tr. Raymond P. Scheindlin, in A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas, ed. with introductions and notes by Ruth R. Wisse (New York, 1973), p. 266. 137. Leon Simon and Yosef Heller, Ahad ha’am: ha’ish, po’alo vetorato (Jerusalem, 1955), p. 78. 138. Ahad Ha’am, Kol kitvei ahad ha’am, p. 466, note. 139. Sh. Dubnow, in his letter to Ahad Ha’am of April 22, 1924, in Sefer shim’on dubnov, p. 278. 140. Dubnow, Dos bukh, 1:63. 141. Ibid., 1:13–28, passim, for the reconstruction with the aid of source materials of the family-histtory prior to his birth; 1:70, for the ‘yellowing pages’ of the diaries, now written in Russian, that Dubnow had before his eyes at the time of writing of his adolescence. 142. Ibid., 2:103. 143. Ibid., 2: 142–43.

Notes to Pages 418–22 144. These Nehzarim proved a gold-mine in Holtzman’s meticulous reconstruction of Berdichevsky’s early creative period in his ’El haqera’, especially in his coverage of Berdichevsky’s Swiss/Berne interlude. 145. See the introduction to Sholem Aleichem, Oysgevaylte briv (1883–1916), ed. and annotated by Y. Mitelman and H. Nadel (Moscow, 1941), p. 8. 146. Ibid., p. 400, and compare p. 358. Spector’s suggestion that they burn their correspondence may have had something to do with Sholem Aleichem’s beginning to refer to Spector as his ‘wife’—the letter from which the above citation is taken is addressed to ‘my beloved wife Mrs. Spector, may she live long’ and in a subsequent letter written in the same month Sholem Aleichem spins out an elaborate metaphorical scenario that includes his impregnating ‘Mrs. Spector’. See also pp. 402–03. 147. Ibid., p. 551. 148. Ibid., p. 550. 149. Niger, Geklibene shriftn, 3:180. 150. See Miron, Bodedim, pp. 367–70. 151. See Abramovitsh, Ale verk, vol. 20: Zikhroynes vegn mendele; and vol. 21: Mayses vegn mendele. 152. Y. Fichman, in ibid., 21:205; compare Reuben Brainin in ibid., 21:143–45; Miron, Traveler, pp. 81–82. 153. As cited by Be’er, p. 190. 154. Y. Fichman, Shirat bialik, p. 378. 155. Ibid., pp. 276–82, esp. p. 281; H. N. Bialik, in Bialik Speaks, ed. Ovadyahu, esp. pp. 79–89. 156. Eliezer Sherman, Der mentsh bialik: zikhroynes un ayndrukn vegn der likhtiker perzenlikhkayt funem groysn natsionaln dikhter h.n. bialik (Philadelphia, n.d.), p. 6. 157. Ovadyahu, p. 13. 158. Bialik, ’Iggerot, 1:172; and for his later practice of retaining the manuscript and sending a typed version of the letter, see Bialik’s 1934 letter to David Rotblum, 5:318. 159. Ibid. 160. Lachover, in ibid., 1:157, n. 1. 161. Fishel Lachover, ‘Yemei bi’alik har’ishonim (te’udot hadashot)’, in Kenesset: divrei sofrim lezekher h.n. bi’alik, ed. Ya’akov Kahan and Fishel Lachover, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv, 1938), p. 48. 162. Zeizen, 1:iv. 163. On this appealing and suggestive term, originally coined by Albert Thibaudet, and its application to Hebrew literature, see Miron, Bodedim, pp. 9–19. 164. Bialik, ’Iggerot, 1:172. 165. Ibid., 1:187. 166. Peretz, Briv un redes, pp. 284, 286. 167. See N. Marsden’s annotated translation of this text for his Oxford 1977 D.Phil. thesis, ‘The Autobiography of a Russian Jew Under the Tsars (1825–1888)’. 168. See Y. L. Gordon, ’Al nahar kevar, in Reshumot, vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1918), pp. 69–96.

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Notes to Pages 422–24 169. Reprinted in Kitvei Y.L. Gordon, Sefer ri’shon, annotated by Saul Ginsburg (Tel Aviv, 1928). 170. See Charney, ‘Toldot yemei hayyay’, pp. 125–66. 171. By Ben-Zion Dinur in He’avar, vol. 15 (1968), pp. 254–58. 172. In Yedi’ot genazim, vol. 1, pp. 15–53. 173. By Mordechai Altshuler in Behinot, 6 (Tel Aviv, 1975), pp. 141–95. This section, it should be noted, constitutes only a fraction of Brainin’s autobiographical material that is yet to be published. See Altshuler’s preface. 174. David Fogel, Tahanot kavot, ed. Menakhem Perry (Tel Aviv, 1990); on which see Robert Alter, ‘Fogel and the Forging of a Hebrew Self ’, in Prooftexts, vol. 13, no. 1 (Baltimore, January 1993), pp. 3–13. 175. Eli Lederhendler, pp. 47–66. 176. See Saul Ginsburg, 1: ‘Forvort’, esp. pp. xi-xvi, ‘Hundert yor familiengeshikhte’, 2: 23–62. 177. See Rivkind’s bibliography of Ginsburg’s writings (1887–1932), appended to Ginsburg, 3:381. 178. See Zinberg, Di geshikhte, 8:207. 179. See Reizen, Leksikon, 1:390. Worthy of note, in this respect, is that many whose autobiographical works have been published—Dubnow, Brainin, Buki Ben Yogli (Katznelson), Gotlober—worked from now non-extant, previously written autobiographical sources. 180. S. Y. Agnon, Misod hakhamim: mikhtavim 1909–1970: agnon, brener, bialik, lahover, katznelson, sadan (Tel Aviv, 2002), pp. 29–30. 181. Eliezer Podriachik, ‘Genize-shafungen in der yidish-sovetisher literatur’, in his In proWl fun tsaytn (Tel Aviv, 1978), pp. 99–100. 182. Chone Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Literature in the USSR’, in The Jews in Soviet Russia Since 1917, ed. Lionel Kochan(Oxford, 1970), pp. 247–75. 183. Podriachik, ‘Genize-shafungen’, pp. 100–01. 184. Insofar as ‘autobiography’ was condoned by the Bolsheviks, it constituted a terrifying travesty of the genre; yoked to a pre-imposed Communist eschatology and widely employed in assessing the validity of applications for Party membership, Communist ‘autobiographies’ functioned essentially as inquisitional documents and, as Igal HalWn writes, ‘a daily means of control of the self ’. See Igal HalWn, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 19, and index under ‘Autobiographies’. 185. See Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts’, in Stalinism: The Essential Readings, ed. David L. HoVman (Oxford, 2003), p. 188. Thus Hellbeck cites the prospective title of the autobiographical novel ‘Stepan Podlyubni, the son of a kulak who lived in Moscow and tried to become a New Soviet Man’ hoped to write: The Life of an Outlived Class, Its Spiritual Rebirth and Adaptation to New Conditions. See ibid., p. 202. 186. As cited by Shmeruk, ‘Yiddish Literature’, p. 249.

Notes to Pages 424–27 187. Moyshe Litvakov, In umru, 2 vols. (Kiev, 1919; Moscow, 1926), 2:194; compare HalWn, pp. 59–60. 188. Meir Viner, ‘Folklorizm un folkloristik: etlekhe forhanokhes tsu metodologie fun folkloristik’, in his Problemen fun folkloristik (Kharkov, 1932), pp. 83–84. 189. G. Sheinin, ‘A yidishistisher kolboy’, in the anthology Fashizirter yidishizm un zayn visnshaft (Minsk, 1930), p. 114. 190. As cited by Elias Shulman in his essay, ‘Meir viner’, included in his Portretn un etyudn (New York, 1979), p. 87. 191. Viner, Tsu der geshikhte, 2:160–61, 247–75. 192. Ibid., 1:208–14. 193. Ibid., 2:235. 194. As cited by E. Shulman, p. 75. 195. Osip Mandelstam, ‘Fourth Prose’, in The Noise of Time: The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, tr. with critical essays by Clarence Brown (San Francisco, 1986), p. 181. 196. Podriachik, Vegn meir viners avtobiograWsh verk’, in Sovyetishe heymland, no. 9 (Moscow, September 1969), p. 84. The Wrst part of this introduction to the text is written by Podriachik, the second by the co-editor of the text, Moyni Shulman. 197. M. Viner, ‘Der zeyde Binyomen’, in ibid.; ‘Yugnt-fraynt’, in Sovyetish heymland, no. 10 (Moscow, October 1969). The degree to which, even at a remove of some thirty-Wve years from the writing of the manuscript and its published form is indicated in episodes omitted from the printed version that Podriachik, the manuscript being no longer in his hands, reconstructs from memory in an essay written once he had settled in Israel. See his ‘Genize shafungen’, pp. 110–11. A section of the autobiography depicting Viner’s years in Vienna when in his twenties has never been published. See Podriachik, ‘Vegn meir viners literarisher yerushe’, p. 10. 198. Podriachik, ‘Genize-shafungen’, p. 110. 199. Shmeruk, “Yiddish Literature”, pp. 247–48. 200. See, on this much-disputed text, Yehoshua A. Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry (1939–1953) (Boston, 1971), pp. 112–15. Particularly valuable is the assessment of Nakhmen Meisel, since it was he who initially played an important role in encouraging his close friend Bergelson to write autobiographically. Meisel notes that Bergelson’s bitterly sarcastic depiction of his family in this work was the result of ideological superimposition and did not at all correspond to the author’s true emotions. See his ‘Dovid bergelson un der nister’, in Meisel, Dos yidishe shafn un der yiddisher shrayber in sovyetnfarband (New York, 1959), pp. 181–83. 201. Moyni Shulman makes note of this alternation of persona in his section of ‘Vegn meir viners avtobiograWsh verk’, p. 85. 202. Ibid. 203. Viner, ‘Der zeyde Binyomen’, p. 111. 204. Osip Mandelstam, p. 162. For an invaluable decoding of this text see Clarence Brown’s introduction to ibid., pp. 37–55.

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Notes to Pages 428–35 205. See in general on the problem of autobiography in the third person, Lejeune, ‘Autobiography in the Third Person’, in idem, On Autobiography, pp. 31–52. 206. Podriachik, ‘Vegn meir viners avtobiograWsh verk’, p. 85. 207. M. Shulman, in ibid., p. 85. 208. Viner, ‘Der zeyde Binyomen’, pp. 107–14. 209. For Viner as historical novelist, see E. Shulman, ‘Meir viner’, passim; Podriachik, ‘Shaynendike shpliters’, in idem, In proWl, pp. 153–64. 210. Evgeny Dobrenko, ‘(Auto/Bio/Hagio)graphy: or, Life as Genre: Alesha Peskov—Maksim Gorky—Mark Donskoi’, in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (Lawrence, Kansas, Fall 1996), p. 48. 211. Hellbeck, p. 206. 212. On the exceptionally close relationship between grandfather and grandson, see the memoirs of Viner’s sister, F. F. Gross, written in 1968: F. F. Gross, ‘Mayn bruder meir viner’, in Pinkes far der forshung fun der yiddisher literatur un prese, vol. 2, ed. Hayyim Bez (New York, 1972), pp. 158–59. 213. Gilboa, pp. 175–76. 214. See Esther Rosenthal-Shnayderman, Af vegn un umvegn: zikroynes, geshneenishn, perzenlikhkaytn, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv, 1978), pp. 192–93, 203–04. 215. Ibid., pp. 234–36, 283. 216. Ibid., p. 283. 217. Viner, ‘Der zeyde binyomen’, p. 103. 218. Podriachik, ‘Vegn meir viners avtobiograWsh verk’, p. 83. 219. E. Shulman, p. 101. 220. Viner, ‘Der zeyde binyomen’, p. 105. 221. Much of what Nadezhda Mandelshtam writes on this topic is highly germane in the present context. See the chapter ‘Memory’, in her Hope Abandoned, tr. Max Hayward (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 178–91. 222. E. Shulman, pp. 104–06. 223. Viner, ‘Yugnt-fraynt’, pp. 111–12. 224. Ibid., p. 115. 225. See Niger, Geklibene shriftn, 1:157. 226. Ibid., p. 156. See also Niger’s open letter to Bergelson, responding to this manifesto in ibid., pp. 121–19. 227. See Rosenthal-Shnayderman, pp. 197–206, passim. 228. Abramovitsh, Of Bygone Days, pp. 330, 336. 229. Peretz, My Memoirs, tr. Seymour Levitan, in The I.L. Peretz Reader, p. 323. 230. Abramovitsh, Of Bygone Days, pp. 338–39. 231. Roskies, A Bridge of Longing, pp. 188–90. 232. Viner, ‘Yugnt-fraynt’, p. 109. 233. Abramovitsh, Of Bygone Days, pp. 329, 330. 234. Sholem Aleichem, From the Fair: The Autobiography of Sholem Aleichem, tr., ed. and with an introduction by Curt Leviant (New York, 1985), p. 10. Here I have modiWed slightly the Wne translation of Leviant, substituting his ‘slight Wlm’ with ‘shadowy haze’—in the original, ‘Din roykhl’. 235. Ibid., pp. 9, 13.

Notes to Pages 435–42 236. Viner, ‘Yugnt-fraynt’, p. 112. 237. Podriachik, ‘Vegn meir viners avtobiograWsh verk’, p. 83. 238. Viner, ‘Der zeyde’, p. 97. 239. Peretz, ‘If Not Higher’, tr. Marie Syrkin, in The I.L. Peretz Reader, pp. 178–81. 240. For a Wne survey of Soviet literary-critical reception of Peretz, see Daliah Kaufman, ‘Y.l. peretz in der yidish sovyetisher kritik (1925–1948) un di problem fun der literarisher yerushe’, in Di goldene keyt, no. 77 (Tel Aviv, 1972), pp. 145–59. 241. As cited by Kaufman, p. 153. 242. Ibid. 243. Viner, ‘Der zeyde Binyomen’, p. 94. 244. N. Oyslender, ‘Y.l. peretses ‘mayne zikrhoynes’: tsu der kharakteristik fun letstn period fun peretses shafn’, in Shtern, no. 2 (Minsk, 1935), pp. 66–79. 245. Dovid Hofshteyn, Lider un poemes, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1977), 1:210. 246. Abramovitsh, Of Bygone Days, p. 268. 247. Ibid., pp. 273–74. 248. Abramovitsh, ‘A mayse iber a mayse’, prologue to the 1888 version of ‘Dos vintshWngerl’, reproduced in idem, Ketavim be’ibam, p. 83. 249. Yehudah Leib Levin, Zikhronot vehegyonot, ed. Y. Slutsky (Jerusalem, 1968), p. 36. Levin’s Zikkaron basefer was Wrst published in Zhitomir in 1910. 250. For publication details of these, see Genazim, 1:111. And for a reprint of the autobiographical piece Wrst published in Hale’om, Jan. 1903, at the end of which Levin speaks of his plans for a future autobiography, see Zikhronot vehegyonot, pp. 111–15. 251. R. Brainin, Ketavim nivharim, pp. xi–xii. 252. Kol kitvei reuven ben mordechai brainin, 3 vols. (New York, 1923–40), vol. 3; R. Brainin; Fun mayn lebnsbukh (New York, 1946); Tsum hundertstn geboyrntog fun reuben brainin, ed. N. Mayzel (New York, 1962); see also Brainin’s essay ‘Hirhurei biograf ’, in Sifrut, vol. 1 (Warsaw, 1909–11), pp. 21–26. 253. See M. Ben Hillel Hacohen, ’Olami, 5 vols. (Jerusalem, 1927–1929), 1:1–4. In Kevar, pirqei zikhronot (Warsaw, 1923), Hacohen adopts the conceit of passing oV his own memoirs as the manuscript of a childhood friend in his possession that he is editing. Shimon Dubnow took Hacohen to task for employing this artiWcial device. See Dubnow’s 1924 letter to Hacohen in Dubnow, Dos bukh, 3:211–12. And see E.E. Friedman’s preamble to his Sefer hazikhronot, pp. 3–4. 254. Dov Sadan, Qa’arat tsimmuqim (Tel Aviv, 1950), p. 251, entry 496. 255. H. N. Bialik, ‘Qeta’im ’otobiograWim’, ed. F. Lachover, in Kenesset, vol. 6 (Tel Aviv, 1941), p. 6. 256. For the theoretical and intellectual context in Jewish and non-Jewish social sciences for these competitions, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘The Intellectual Background of YIVO’s Autobiography Contests’, in Shandler, ed., pp. xvii-xxvi. 257. Yedies fun YIVO, 8 (49) (November 1934), p. 13. 258. Yedies fun YIVO, 1–3 (42–44) (January–March 1934), pp. 4–7. 259. Ibid., p. 5. 260. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 442–46 261. Ibid., p. 6. 262. See Yedies fun YIVO, 6–7 (47–48) (August–September 1934), p. 2. 263. Yedies fun YIVO, 8 (49) (November 1934), p. 12. 264. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 265. Yedies fun YIVO, 9–10 (79–80) (November–December 1938); ibid., 1–2 (81–82) (January–February 1939); ibid. 3–4 (83–84) (March–April 1939). Of the approximately six hundred and twenty autobiographies yielded by all three competitions, four hundred and ten were recovered by YIVO after the war; they are now in the YIVO Archives of New York. This Wgure does not include the related personal documents—diaries, correspondence, etc.—gathered by the Vilna YIVO in the inter-war years. See Moses Kligsberg, Child and Adolescent Behaviour Under Stress: An Analytical Guide to a Collection of Autobiographies of Jewish Young Men and Women in Poland (1932–1939) (New York, 1965), pp. 3–4. 266. Yedies fun YIVO (March–April 1939), pp. 12–13. 267. Yedies fun YIVO (August–September 1936), p. 8. 268. Weinreich, in his introduction to Shmuel Schoenfeld, Zikhroynes fun a shriftzetser, published as one of the ‘YIVO Personal Document Series’ (New York, 1946), p. 5. 269. Kligsberg, ‘Sotsial psikhologishe problemen arum dem YIVO konkors af oytobiograWes’, in YIVO bleter, vol. 31, no. 3 (New York, 1943) 270. See the editorial notice in ibid., pp. 357–58. 271. Older contestants did, apparently, submit autobiographies. See Kligsberg, Child and Adolescent Behaviour, p. 10. It is interesting to speculate how much greater the response to YIVO European competitions might have been had they not been so exclusively directed to youth. In the 1942 autobiography competition sponsored by YIVO for Jewish immigrants to America, which yielded two hundred and twenty-one autobiographies, the average age of contestants was sixty. See Kligsberg, ‘Sotsial psikhologishe problemen’. 272. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett om Shandler, p. xx. 273. See Max Weinreich, Der veg tsu undzer yugnt, pp. 136–43. 274. Ibid., pp. 137–38. For examples of some of these very moving expressions of gratitude and indeed relief at being aVorded the opportunity of autobiographical confession, see Moseley, ‘Life, Literature’, pp. 19–20. 275. SigniWcant in this respect is that Weinreich’s Der veg tsu undzer yugnt, which draws extensively from the autobiographies submitted in the 1932 and 1934 competitions, had, by early 1939, been ‘completely sold out’. A new edition was planned with additions, including a review of the autobiographies submitted for the 1938–39 competition. See Yedies fun YIVO, 3–4 (83–84) (March–April 1939), p. 19. 276. The novel was originally serialized in Alexander Zederbaum’s Yiddish periodical Kol mevaser. 277. The Wrst part of Dos poylishe yingl was, again, published in Kol mevaser of 1867. The complete work was Wrst published by Zederbaum as a separate work in

Notes to Pages 446–49 1869. See Y. Riminik, ‘Tsu der geshikhte funem “poylishn yingl”’, in Tsaytshrift, vol. 5 (Minsk, 1931), pp. 181–208. 278. Of especial interest here is the heated debate between two of the characters of Ga’on veshever on whether Smolenskin’s Hato’eh should be taken as genuine autobiography or as Wction. See Perets Smolenskin, Ga’on veshever (Vilna, 1901), pp. 190–96. 279. Smolenskin, Hato’eh, 2:242. 280. Ibid., 2:257. 281. Viner, Tsu der geshikhte, 1:255–64, for Yiddish renditions; for Hebrew renditions of Robinson, see Ya’ari, p. 137. 282. Niger, Dertseylers un romanistn, pp. 79–80. ‘To become Robinson Crusoe’, Niger remarks, ‘is not the easiest of tasks for a Mohilev Heder lad.’ 283. Mary Waife-Goldberg, My Father, Sholem Aleichem (New York, 1968), pp. 41–43. 284. Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, A Dream Come True, tr. T. Muraoka, ed. George Mandel (Boulder, Colorado, 1993), p. 20. 285. Moseley, ‘Life, Literature’, pp. 27–28. 286. See Patterson, The Hebrew Novel, pp. 61–63; Miron, Bein hazon le’eme, pp. 293–94. 287. Moseley, ‘Life, Literature’, passim. 288. For a loving reconstruction of life in Heder and Beit-midrash combined with keen sociological insight, see Yekhiel Stern, Kheyder un beys-medresh (New York, 1950). 289. R.A. Braudes, Hadat vehahayyim (Lemberg, 1885), p. 84. The ‘little book’, it transpires, is the manifesto of Eastern European Haskalah, Yitshak Ber Levinson’s Te’udah beyisr’ael. 290. Abramovitsh, Of Bygone Days, p. 280. 291. H. N. Bialik, ‘Beveit ’abba’ ’, in Kenesset, vol. 3 (Tel Aviv, 1938), p. 7. And on this passage, see Miron, Bodedim, pp. 154–55. 292. M.L. Lilienblum, ‘ ’Olam hatohu’, in his Kol kitvei, 4 vols. (Krakau-Odessa, 1910–14), 2:109–49; idem, ‘Mah hi’ haskalah’, 2:113–17. 293. Compare Watt, pp. 174–208. 294. Stone, pp. 223–39; Zvi Woislavsky, Haroman vehanovelah basifrut heme’ah hetesha’ esreh (Jerusalem, 1961) esp. pp. 17–18, 45–46. 295. Dubnow, Lilienblum, Buqi Ben Yogli (Katznelson), Brainin, Friedman, Y. L. Levin and Tsvi Kasdai are amongst the autobiographers of this period who mention the profound impact of the Wrst reading of ’Ahavat tsion. See also the important speech of Dan in Smolenskin’s Hato’eh, 1:162. 296. Y. Klausner, ’OtobiograWah: darki liqr’at hetehiyyah vehage’ulah, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1955), 1:23. 297. See Ben-Tsiyon Dinur, Bemifneh hadorot (Jerusalem, 1955); Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis (New York, 1961); Arthur Ruppin, The Jew in the Modern World (London, 1934); Y. Slutsky, Ha’itonut hayehudit-rusit beme’ah hatesha esreh (Jerusalem,

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Notes to Pages 450–57 1970); Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1983); Immanuel Etkes, ‘Hahaskalah bemizrah eyropah: divrei mavo’ ’, in his Hadat vehahayyim. 298. See Kurzweil, pp. 103–04, 132, 257–58. 299. Dov Sadan, Bein din leheshbon, pp. 3–14. 300. Ibid., p. 3. 301. Ibid., p. 9. 302. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 303. Ibid., 3–5. 304. On the place of Bialik in Sadan’s thought, see Werses, Biqqoret habiqqoret, pp. 24–41. 305. Sadan, Belashon medabber be’ado: peraqim shebe’al peh (Tel Aviv, 1972), p. 57. 306. See Sadan, Bein din leheshbon, p. 9; Miron, Hapereidah, index under Ahad Ha’am; idem, Bodedim, pp. 121–23; Zipperstein, pp. 49–50. 307. See Kaufmann, vol. 2, passim, esp. the section ‘Torat hayahid’, pp. 410–15; Menachem Brinker, ‘Brenner’s Jewishness’, in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 4, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York, Oxford, 1988), pp. 232–49. 308. On ideology and history in general, see Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, London, 1985), pp. 68–71. On the rôle of ideology in Jewish history, see S. Baron, History and Jewish Historians; R. Mahler, ‘Hakitot hadatiot vehazeramim hatarbutiim bedivrei yemei yisra’el leshitat Dubnow’, in Sefer Dubnow; and see the symposium, ‘ ’Al hayahadut ve’al ’atidoteiha’, in He’atid, Book 4 (Berlin, 1912). 309. Abramovitsh, Of Bygone Days, p. 281. 310. Ibid., p. 302. 311. Shimon Dubnow, Nahpesah venahqorah (Odessa, 1892). 312. For the autobiographical circumstances surrounding the writing of this essay, which was dedicated to the memory of Dubnow’s grandfather, Ben Tsiyon, who ‘did not descend from the tent of Torah all the days of his life’, see Dubnow, Dos bukh, 1:252–55. 313. Dubnow, Dos bukh I:253. 314. Ibid., 2:242, recalls that in writing the Russian prototype of this essay, Dubnow built upon Renan’s concept of the nation, as expressed presumably in the latter’s ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une Nation?’. 315. Dubnow, Nahpesah venahqorah, p. 5. 316. For a superb treatment, see Jonathan Frankel, ‘S.M. Dubnow: Historian and Ideologist’, in Sophie Dubnow-Erlich, The Life and Work of S.M. Dubnow: Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish History, tr. Judith Vowles, ed. JeVrey Shandler (Bloomington, 1990), pp. 1–33. 317. Dubnow, Nahpesah venahqorah, p. 5. 318. Ibid., p. 6. 319. See Dubnow, Dos bukh, 3:127; Dubnow-Erlich, pp. 60–61. 320. I am indebted throughout this discussion to Robert M. Seltzer’s classic essay on the conXuence of the autobiographical, historiographical and ideological in the thought of Dubnow, ‘Coming Home: The Personal Basis of Simon Dubnow’s

Notes to Pages 457–68 Ideology’, in AJS Review, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 283–301. See esp. pp. 294–97. 321. Dubnow, Dos bukh, 3:108. 322. Ibid., 3:132. 323. With respect to this awkward coinage, see Seltzer, pp. 294–95, n. 31. 324. Dubnow, Dos bukh, 3:131. 325. The term will here be used, for convenience sake, to apply for the most part to children deprived of one parent. 326. Y. Fichman, in his introduction to Abramovitsh, Kol kitvei, pp. xxii–xxiii. 327. Sadan’s open letter to Getsel Kressel in G. Kressel, Kitvei dov sadan: bibliograWah (Tel Aviv, 1981), pp. 7–10. 328. Quotation is from T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, in his Collected Poems (1909– 1935) (New York, 1934), p. 213. 329. Bal Makhsoves (Eliashev), ‘Mihuts lemahanah’, an essay originally published in 1908, included in his Seqirot ureshamim, p. 126. 330. For a superb analysis of the shifts from novel to novella and back in Hebrew literature, and to a lesser degree Yiddish, from the Haskalah period until c. 1930, see Ya’aqov Rabinovitz’s 1931 essay, ‘Megamat haharhavah shel hasippur ha’ivri’, in his Maslulei sifrut, 1:77–89; compare Woislavsky. 331. Ariès, p. 32. 332. Ibid., p. 30. Compare Coe, pp. 175–79. 333. Brenner, Ketavim, 3:741, 745–46. 334. Ibid., 3:316. 335. Reider, p. 456. Compare Sh. Tsitron, ‘ ’Al devar hamahalakh hehadash besifrutenu’, in Hapardes, 3 (Odessa, 1895). 336. Brenner, Ketavi, 3:315–16. 337. Ibid., 3:315. 338. Simhah Ben-Tsiyon (Gutman), Kol kitvei, pp. 53–54. 339. Brenner, Ketavim, 1:95. 340. Ibid., 1:260–67. 341. Miron, Bodedim, pp. 250–60, passim, and on the passages here cited, p. 253. 342. This is attested to by Dostoyevsky’s 1859 letter to his brother, included in Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, tr. and ed. Michael R. Katz (New York, 1989), p. 93. 343. Ibid., pp. 27–28. 344. For an account of Ben-Tsiyon’s life see Y. Fichman, ’Ammat habinyan: sofrei ’odesah (Jerusalem, 1951), pp. 417–35. 345. Ben-Tsiyon, as cited in ibid. p. 426. 346. See his paean to Berdichevsky in his critical article ‘Shivrei luhot: luah ’ahi’asaf ’ in Uri Nisan Gnessin, Kol Kitvav, ed. Dan Miron and Yisra’el Zamorah, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1928), 2:99–100. The catalytic eVect of the reading of Berdichevsky upon the development of the writer is refracted in Gnessin’s Wrst imaginative prose-piece ‘Geniah’ (completed in 1902). The joint-reading of Berdichevsky with

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Notes to Pages 468–76 the protagonist’s love-interest ‘Geniah’ conduces directly to ‘the Wrst kiss of love in my life’! See ibid., 1:29–30. 347. Ibid. in his novel Beterem, 1:295–304. 348. Ibid. in his novella Beinatayim, 1:202. 349. Brenner, ‘ ’Uri nisan’, in idem, 3:158. 350. Massive commentary has accrued around the autobiographical project of Leiris, but the early essay of Germaine Brée remains particularly valuable. See Brée, pp. 194–206. 351. G. Allport, The Use of Personal Documents in Psychological Science (New York, 1942), p. 32. 352. On the return of the Talush in his Israeli avatar and the autobiographical form that accompanies him, see Shaked, Hasipporet ha’ivrit, 3:242–43. 353. Rabinovitz, ‘Megamat haharhavah’. 354. M. L. Lilienblum, Derekh la’avor golim. 355. Dov Sadan’s above-cited Mimehoz hayaldut was Wrst published in 1938. 356. At one stage in his autobiography Sadan actually cedes the narrative to a lengthy citation from Agnon’s Hakhnasat kalah—see Mimehoz hayaldut, pp. 28–29. He submitted sections of his autobiography to Agnon for the latter’s approval prior to the book’s publication and appears to have been immensely anxious about his response. See the correspondence between the two on the topic in Agnon, Misod hakhamim, pp. 274–83, esp. p. 275. 357. Shaked, Hasipporet ha’ivrit, 2:305–07. 358. Nathan Shaham, in his biography of his father, Shteinman, which is also a fascinating autobiographical work, recalls his shock at perceiving the autobiographical underpinnings of his father’s works when he Wrst read them as a thirteen-yearold boy. See Shaham, Sefer hatum (Tel Aviv, 1988), pp. 46–51. 359. S. Y. Agnon, Hadom vekhise’, in his Lifnim min hahomah, p. 201. 360. I.B. Singer, Love and Exile: A Memoir (New York, 1984), no pagination. 361. S. Y. Agnon, ‘Hasiman’, in his Ha’esh veha’etsim, p. 303. 362. As cited by Astrid Starck-Adler, ‘Bashevis’ Interactions with the Mayse-bukh (Book of Tales)’, in The Hidden Isaac Bashevis Singer, ed. Seth L. Wolitz (Austin, Texas, 2002), p. 120. 363. Sadan, Bein din leheshbon, pp. 200, 201. 364. Lester Goran, The Bright Streets of Surfside: The Memoir of a Friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer (Kent, Ohio, 1994), pp.139–40. 365. Ephraim E. Lisitsky, In the Grip of Cross-Currents, tr. Moshe Kohn and Jacob Sloan (New York, 1959), p. 143. 366. Ibid., p. 300. 367. Ibid., pp. 200–01. 368. Ibid., pp. 296, 299, 300. 369. Hillel Bavli, ‘Introduction’ to ibid., p. xii. 370. Both citations taken from the dust-jacket of Lisitsky, In the Grip of CrossCurrents.

Notes to Pages 476–79 371. First published in Jerusalem in 1958. 372. Pinhas Sadeh, 42 rishumim veyoman haketivah shel hahayyim kemashal (Tel Aviv, 1980), p. 93. 373. Ibid., p. 115. 374. Ibid., passim. 375. Shaked, Hasipporet ha’ivrit, 4: 104–06. 376. P. Sadeh, Life as a Parable, tr. Robert Friend (London, 1958). 377. Sadeh, 42 rishumim, p. 91. 378. Maks Yelinger, ‘A bisele alte zikhoynes’, in Di idishe landsmanshaftn fun nyu york, sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (New York, 1938), p. 179. And see, in ibid., pp. 203–30, the outpourings of nostalgia in the poems dedicated to the hometown included in this anthology. 379. See the pioneering anthology of excerpts from post-Holocaust, primarily Yiddish, memorial-books (Yizker-bickher), also generated by the Landsmanshaftn, Kugelmass and Boyarin, From a Ruined Garden; David G. Roskies, ‘Estates of Memory After the Holocaust’, in his A Bridge of Longing, pp. 307–46. 380. Published in New York from 1926 to 1931. The mean length of each volume is some Wve hundred pages. 381. Y.Y. Trunk, Poyln: zikhroynes un bilder, 7 vols. (New York, 1946–53).

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Index

Abelard, Peter, 43 Abrahams, Beth-Zion, 157 Abrahams, Israel, 109–10 Abramovitsh, Sholem Yankev (Mendele Moykher Seforim): autobiographical format, 409–10, 446; and Brenner, 541n61, 577n144; childhood accounts, 154, 352, 526n375, 540–41n61, 574n78; ethnographic reconstruction, 334, 454; father/son relationship, 540–41n61; on individualism, 439; influence from other writers, 368, 412–13; narrative style, 208, 454; personal archives/relics, 416–17; personality cult, 419; publication data, 45, 526n375, 584n95; structure/strategy, 208, 427–28, 448, 454, 459, 577n144; use of Hebrew, 15, 334, 517n212 ———. works cited: Be’emeq habakha’, 459–60; Di klatshe, 510n133; ‘Dos tosfos yontev kelbl’, 154–55, 526n375; Of Bygone Days (Hebrew, Bayamim hahem; Yiddish, Shloyme reb khayims), 416, 427, 433, 454; The Travels of Benjamin III (Hebrew, Mass’aot binyamin heshelishi) 179–80 Abtshuk, Avrom, 424 Abulafia, Abraham, 70, 185–86, 507n68 accounting procedures. See ledgers Achebe, Chinua, 41 acrostics, 150 Adams, Henry, 43 Adelman, Howard E., 135, 513–14n164, 514–15n180, 517n214, 521n282

the ’Aderet. See Rabinowitz-Te’omim, Eliyahu Dovid adolescent protagonists, 462–66 Aesopian fables. See fables African American themes, 474–75 African autobiography, 41 Aggadah/Aggadot/Aggadic compilations: Me’otsar ha’aggadah (Berdichevsky/Bin Gorion), 253–68, 278, 558n331, 559n359; as motif, 198, 352, 534n514, 549n172; Sefer ha’aggadah (Bialik), 254–55, 555–56nn274, 277 Agnon, Shmuel Yosef: and Bashevis Singer, 471–73; and Berdichevsky, 196–97, 220, 544n110, 560n380; birth and childhood, 517n207, 537–38n27; and Guenzberg, 346–47, 358, 359, 520n65, 523n93; influence on Sadan, 470, 472, 596n356; personality cult, 419; surrealism, 283, 472, 517n207; views on memoirists, 441 ———. works cited: Bitseror hahayyim, 423; Hadom vekhise’, 283, 470, 517n207, 560n380; ‘Hasiman,’ 471–72; Sefer hama’asim, 472; Sippur pashut, 358, 359, 573n65, 575n93 Aguilar, Grace, 398 Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg): arbiter of Hebrew literature, 209, 234, 477, 488n87, 541n65; autobiography, 412–14, 489n106; and Berdichevsky, 214, 218, 549–50n181; and Bialik, 19, 452, 470; and Brenner, 488n87; and Feierberg, 549n172; and

625

626

Index Maimon, 63–64; personal archives, 416–17; on portraits of authors, 421, 513–14n164 ’Aher (Elisha ben Avuyah), 241, 551n218 alchemy, 359, 361 alcohol, 186, 299 alienation, 361, 449–52, 459–60 allegory, journeys/journey motifs, 326–28, 332 Allport, Gordon, 469 Almagor, Dan, 198, 223–24, 226, 244–45, 247, 272 Altaras scheme (1846), 366, 572n38 Altshuler, Mordechai, 588n173 Ambrosiana manuscript, 104, 511nn146, 148, 515n181 American Hebrew poetry, 475 American Indian themes, 474–75 Amnon/Tamar story, 169, 529n413, 530n446 Amsterdam, 300–301, 304, 308 anagrams, 248, 446, 570nn9,10, 579n183. See also word-play and puns Ansky (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport), 73–75, 375, 567n113, 578n193 anti-Semitism, 302–303 antinomianism, 122, 127, 172, 217–19, 282, 355, 359, 544n104 apologia: and autobiography, 2, 46; B. H. Epstein, 406–408; Berdichevsky, 254, 258; Emden, 307; Guenzberg, 335–36, 344–45, 350–52, 574n74; Lisitsky, 474; Rousseau, 9–10, 334; Yagel, 91–92, 120 apostasy narrative, 27, 29, 35–36 ’Aqedah (“binding” in reference to Abraham’s binding of Isaac to the altar), 189, 534n514, 535n515 Arabic autobiography, 499n89, 503n22 archives, personal, 271, 416–21, 442–44, 587n144 Ariès, Philippe, 463 Aronson Hayyim (Chaim Aronson), 422 arranged marriage. See Shiddukh art/life dynamic, 376 Aryeh Leib of Shpole (Shpoler Zeyde), 201, 537n24

Asch, Sholem, 462, 496n64 Ashkenazic origins of autobiography, 147–75 asides. See reader asides Assaf, David, 24 astrology/astrologers, 113–14, 138, 141, 143–44 Augustine of Hippo, 484–85n28, 486n55; Confessions, 6–7, 42, 72, 77, 90–91, 279, 291, 295, 506n45 Austin, John Langshaw, 47 authors: autobiographical identification, 248–49, 387, 389–90, 441, 591n253; public recognition of, 176–77, 415–16, 472, 531nn457,458 autobiographical intent: Bakhtin on, 399– 400; and Jewish Orthodoxy, 377–80; pacts with reader, 48–50, 56; response to calls for autobiography, 438–45; Sadan on, 460–61 autobiographical novels. See novels autobiographical strategy: accounting procedures, 279, 287–88; genealogy, 70, 187, 198, 290, 307, 417, 494–95n44, 534n511; mathematics, 143–44, 146; mentor/muse relationships, 433–35; mirror and 39, 265–66, 272; preambles, 438–32; target audiences, 474–75; warfare/siege vocabulary, 357, 360, 364; wills, 142, 512n149, 514n174, 516n194; writing process, 333– 44, 412–21, 465–68, 589n200. See also motifs and themes; narrative style; novelistic techniques autobiography: buried autobiographies, 422–38; colonization theory (Gusdorf), 39–41, 46–47, 333, 371; Communist autobiographies, 588n184; compared to other literary forms, 7–8, 10, 28, 502n1, 506n42, 515nn182,186,188; cultural aspects, 40–41, 46–50, 71–75, 503–504nn22,23, 505n30; discourse/text dynamics, 37–46, 55–56, 64, 194–95, 367–68; emergence of in Western Europe, 39–43, 52, 286–88; feminist theory and, 3, 5, 23; as fiction, 26–30 461–73; as genre, 1–13, 38–40, 47–56,

Index 76–79, 139–40, 410, 483n1, 484n24, 506n42; and nostalgia, 351–52, 383, 454, 471–72, 478–79, 504–505n27, 597n398; as penance, 86; Renaissance era, 76–77, 90, 138–39, 185; Rousseau’s Confessions as model, 5–17, 37, 46, 442, 476, 486n55; secularizing nature of, 410–12; speech-act model (Bruss), 47–48, 50, 56, 62, 194–95. See also Jewish autobiography; memory; reading contexts ‘Autobiography of a Bohemian Jew,’ 185–95, 350, 507n68, 535n521 ’Avi’ezer (Guenzberg), 333–76; compared to other works, 187, 226, 231, 358, 359, 368–76; Mashal, 345, 349–51; origin of title, 345–46; parenting advice, 345–49, 352–53; preamble to, 334–36, 578n159; publication data, 336–37, 340–44, 366–68, 499n90, 571nn18–20,24; reader response, 337, 367–68, 370, 382, 578n170; sexual impotence and cures, 190, 355–60; silkworm/moth parable, 350–51; sources, 361–62; style/structure, 349–50, 354–55, 357, 360–67; wedding night, 357; writing of, 334–42; Yashish/old man episode, 359–63. See also Guenzberg, Mordechai Aaron Avraham Kokhav-Lev (Rav), 568n125 Azulai, H.D., 586n133 Ba’al shem tov, 239, 242, 252, 253 Badekns ritual, 125 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovic, 95, 121, 201, 399–400 Bakon, Yitshaq, 23, 216 Bal Makhshoves (Israel Eliashev): autobiography, 24, 51–52, 461–62, 492–93n14, 495n48; and Berdichevsky, 242; biography, 22; memoirs and historical awareness, 377–78, 453; publication data, 580n2, 595n329 Band, Arnold J., 204 Baron, Devorah, 20, 23, 51 Bartal, Israel, 379, 405, 580n9 Barthes, Roland, 11, 264–65, 269, 276, 277

Barukh, Yitzhaq-Layb, 496n66 Barzilay, Isaac E., 126–27, 144–45 Bashkirtseff, Marie, 247 Battista, Leon, 137 Batya Rayna. See Rayna Batya Bavli, Hillel, 476 Beaujour, Michel, 265–66, 269–70, 277, 485–86n44, 561n401 Beauvais, Vincent de, 265–66 Beauvoir, Simone de, 112, 515n186 Beckett, Samuel, 11, 36, 486n55 Ben-Ami, M. (Hayyim-Mordekhai Rabinowitz), 413, 459 Ben Eliezer, Gershon, 179, 182 Ben Eliezer Halevy, Asher. See Halevi, Asher Ben-Tsiyon, Simhah (Simhah Gutman), Nefesh retustsah, 189, 467; Me’ever lehayyim, 464–67 Ben-Yehudah, Eliezer, 447 Ben Yohai, Shimeon, 312 Benjamin, Israel Joseph, 179–80 Benjamin of Tudela, 179–80, 182, 531n471 Ber of Bolechow (Birkenthal), 286 Berdichevsky, Michah (Mikhah) Yosef (BinGorion): 219–62; age and autobiography, 445; as Bin-Gorion, 253, 262, 268–76; Breslau years, 229; childhood, 187, 203–206, 210, 231–33, 241, 244–51, 253–54, 257, 274, 279–81, 352, 548–49n171; collected works as encyclopedia, 262–68; Collective Jewish Unconscious, 213–19, 542nn80,84; counter-tradition theory, 212–19; diary, 244–47, 272, 552–53nn239,247; distance/ relation paradigm, 209–10, 227, 239–40, 246–47, 551n208, 560n387; early writings, 194–212, 554n262; essays, 212–19, 221, 228–31, 547n148; first publication, 537n16; on Green Henry (Keller), 238, 550–51n201; Hasidism, 241–44, 250–56, 313–14, 518n227, 537–38n27, 551–52n220, 552n223, 555n266; Hebrew literature, 233–34, 249–50, 473; hermeneutics of autobiography, 285; identification with Hamlet, 220–21; individualism and

627

628

Index Jewish identity, 452–53; Jewish counterhistory theory, 218–19; Kabbalah, 252, 256, 538n29; library, 271–72; marriages, 122, 245–46, 291–92, 537–38n27, 553n245; memory, 210–11, 213–14, 268–85, 559n359; negative response to, 546n141, 548n161; parents/family history, 205–206, 539n43, 540n55, 546n137, 560nn386,387; personal archives, 417–18, 587n144; personal/ national identity (Qera: ‘split’), 217–19, 243, 250, 253, 259–60, 440, 450, 541n65, 543n95, 544n103, 555n273, 556n301; place of, 23, 29; preoccupation with death, 110, 205–206, 210, 213, 220, 232, 245, 247, 276, 540n55, 560nn386,387; publication data, 227–28, 479, 546–47nn142, 143,144,148, 555n274, 556n295, 557n307; reclusiveness/ depression, 234, 544n110, 549n180, 558n343; religious study, 557n307, 559n372; in Russia, 204–205, 229; sense of displacement, 463–64, 543n95, 544n103; speculum/self-portrait, 277–78; Swiss/ Berne interlude, 248, 587n144; titles, 554n253, 559n368; use of term ‘autobiography,’ 585n126; Weimar, 235–40, 550n192; and Western European literature, 224–25, 501n108, 541n73, 542n80, 545n130, 557n322; Yiddish literature, 249–50; Yissurei hatoladah (the pangs of history), 216–17 ———. and other authors: Abramovitsch, 208; Agnon, 196–97, 220, 544n110, 560n380; Ahad Ha’am, 209, 214, 218, 234, 549–50nn180,181; ’Aher/Elisha ben Avuyah, 241, 551n218; Bal Makhshoves, 242; Bialik, 544n110, 555–56n277; Braudes, 546n140; Brenner 464, 543n95; Dubnow, 545n130; Emden, 289; Feierberg, 233, 549n172; Freud, 217, 543n101; Frishmann, 229, 547n154; Gnessin, 468, 595–96n346; Goethe, 236–39, 552n234, 554n259; Horodetsky, 252, 260, 267–68, 276; Kahana, 562n12; Keller, 238, 550–51n201; J. Klausner, 242; Lachover, 237, 262–64, 272–73, 546n142, 560n387; Lilienblum, 197, 221–22, 226, 230, 371, 373, 375, 545n119;

Maimon, 63, 208, 501nn107,108, 538n31; Miron, 226, 247–48; Montaigne, 212–13, 228; Nahman of Bratslav, 197–98, 201–202, 218, 243, 313, 585n126; Nietzsche, 35, 229–30, 232, 237, 243, 282, 477, 547n154; Peretz, 559n368; Rousseau, 223–25, 229, 232, 243; Scholem, pp. 218–19, 544n108; Schopenhauer, 242, 258, 262, 282; Sholem Aleichem, 230, 548n161; Zinberg, 219 ———. writing style: confessional, 110, 238, 241, 249; first-person narrator, 198, 226–28, 274; folk narrators, 200–207, 557n305; German language, 234, 244–47, 260, 262, 270, 550n191, 552–53n239, 554n256; Hebrew language, 266, 268, 554n256, 555n274; light motifs, 205–206, 538n29, 540n55; Mayse bukh technique, 198–200, 205–207, 243; narrative technique, 199–208, 211, 226–28, 274, 281–82, 537–38nn16,27, 540–41n61, 557n305; novelistic techniques, 462, 468; 553–54nn252; sister/first love motif, 550n200; wordplay and puns, 518n227, 554n253, 557n322, 559n362; Yiddish language, 200, 539–40n52 ———. works cited: ‘’Ahavat ne’urim’, 203; ‘’Al havidui’, 110, 215, 253; ’Al em haderekh’, 216, 228; ‘’Al shulhan hasifrut’, 232; Baderekh, 228; Batim-zikkaron, 207; ‘Bein hapatish vehasadan’, 199, 204–06, 244; ‘Bil’adeiha’, 216; Collected Works (Kitvei mikhah yosef bin gorion), 262–76; Der Born Judas, 270; Die Sagen der Juden, 270; ‘Gershayim’ 211, 225–28, 462, 546n140, 549n172; ‘Hetsits venifga’,198, 225; ‘Ich Roman,’ 244–51; ‘Kibbush haruah’, 253, 555n272; Me’ever lanahar, 236; Me’otsar ha’aggadah, 253–68, 274, 278; ‘Memoirs of Little Yossi’ (‘Zikhronot me’et yossi tse’ira’), 206, 231–33, 245; Mimerhavei ’ir, 269; ‘Nishmat hasidim’/ ’Mishnat hasidim’ 240–43; ’Orva’ parah, 248; ‘’Oyvi’, 204; Reshut hayahid be’ad harabim, 229–32, 548n161; ‘Romanin

Index noshanim’, 314; Sefer hasidim, 240–42, 258, 546–47n143; Tsefunot ve’aggadot, 260; ‘Tsorekh viykholet besifrutenu hayafah’, 233–34; Über den Zusammenhang zwischen Ethik und Aesthetik’, 234; ’The Mission of Our Lives’ (Hebrew, ‘Hamal’akhut behayyenu’) 271–72; Yidishe kesovim fun a vaytn korev, 209–10. See also ‘Devarim ’ahadim ’al devar hatoladah veha’auobiogrfiah’; Miriam: A Novel of Life in Two Townlets (Hebrew, Miriam: roman mehayyei shtei ’ayarot); ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ Berenfeld, Joseph, 157, 158 Bergelson, Dovid, 427, 432, 589n200 Bergner, Hinde, 527n384 Bergson, Henri, 542n84 Berkovich, Y. D., 418, 426 Berlin, Meir, 390, 582n50, 583n76 Berlin, Naphtali Tsvi Yehudah (the Netsiv), 386, 389–98, 406 Bernfeld, Shimon, 63–64, 413, 459, 533n499 Bershadsky, Isaiah, 423 betrothal/engagement negotiations. See Shiddukh Bevis of Hampton, 162 Bialik, Hayyim Nahman: and Ahad Ha’am, 19, 470, 488n87, 549–50n181; on authorial anonymity, 177; on his biography, 441–42; childhood, 352, 419, 442, 448, 548–49n171; correspondence, 21–22, 32, 406, 419–21, 441–42, 488–89n96, 587n158; Kinnus and Jewish literary heritage, 502n6; on Meqor barukh (B. H. Epstein), 408–09, 411; as Orpheus, 451–52; personal archive, 420; personality cult, 419; publication data, 493n24; Sadan on, 450–52; self–concealment/self revelation dynamics, 18–19, 251, 473, 488n82, 544n110; style and structure, 448, 451–52, 459, 462, 473; Volozhin, 583n68; writing of autobiography, 31, 413–14, 587n158 ———. works cited: Safiah, 32, 34–35, 283–84, 448, 548–49n171; Sefer ha’aggadah, 254–55

Bible as source material: dream divination, 519n237; limitations of vocabulary, 301; paganism, 252; paradigms, 181, 275, 345; use of phrases from, 507n63, 575nn98,102. See also specific books Bick, Avrom (Abraham Bick; Avraham Bick), 289, 303, 306, 311, 412, 564n56 Bik, Ya’aqov Shmu’el, 423 Bin-gorion, Immanuel: Berdichevsky diary entries, 245, 554n255; on Lebensgeshichte (Maimon), 476; on Lisitsky, 476; on Me’otsar ha’aggadah, 262, 558n331; on Miriam, 277; preserving Berdichevsky heritage, 270–74, 550nn182, 199 Bin Gorion, Rakhel, 234, 245–46, 546n141, 553n245 biography, 489n104; and autobiography, 7–8, 502n1; biographical vision, 121; centrality of, 22–24; collective, 494–95n44; Guenzberg on, 334–35; and hagiography, 207, 316–18, 586n133 Birnbaum, Solomon, 157 birth, and stars (Modena), 121–22, 518n226, 522n290 birth/infancy accounts: Agnon, 517n207, 573n65; Cardano, 140–41; Chagall, 117; Chateaubriand, 116–17; Emden, 297–98; Modena, 116–22, 143, 297, 518n226, 522n290; Nathan of Nemirov, 319–20, 328; Rousseau, 116, 297–98; Yagel, 518n226. See also childhood accounts Bloom, Harold, 159 body, Renaissance fascination with, 296–97 Boerne, Ludwig, 230 Boethius, 87–88, 97–98, 100, 508n88, 509n97 Bogrov, Grigori, 581–82n34 Bokher, Eliyahu, 89 Bolshevism, 588n184 Bomberg, Daniel, 511n147 Book of Genealogies (Hebrew, Sefer yuhasin), 187, 198 book titles, 176–77, 415–16, 463–65, 531nn457–58, 561n6 booksellers, 52

629

630

Index Botvin, Naphtali, 430 Bouchard, Jean-Jacques, 189, 191, 535n517 Bourdieu, Pierre, 191–92, 492n1 Brainin, Reuven, 196, 240, 412, 422, 440–41, 462, 588nn173,179, 593n295 Brando, Marlon, 92 Bratslav Hasidism, 197–98, 201–02, 218, 243, 313–21, 328–32, 566nn97, 98, 569n150, 570nn155, 163, 585n126. See also Hasidism/ Hasidic tales, Nahman of Bratslav, Nathan of Nemirov Braudes, Reuven Asher, 226–27, 371, 448, 546n140, 578n173, 593n289 Brée, Germaine, 596n350 Brenner, Yosef Hayyim: and Abramovitsh, 541n61, 577n144; and Ahad Ha’am, 488n87; autobiography/ideology mix, 452; and Berdichevsky, 464, 543n95; and Gnessin, 468–69; and Talush, 462, 464–65; on displacement, 464; novelistic techniques, 26–29, 30–31, 462, 465, 468–69; oppositional expressions of self, 477; place of, 19, 20, 26–27; publication data, 413, 479 ———. works cited: Bahoref, 27–29, 31, 35, 465–66, 577n144; Mehathalah, 21 Breslau, 229, 554n262 Bronte, Charlotte, 28 Bruss, Elizabeth, 47–48, 50, 56, 194–95, 285 Buber, Martin, 193, 243, 552n230 Buczacz, 470, 471, 537–38n27 Buki Ben Yogli (Katznelson) (Buqi Ben Yogli; Yehudah Leib–Binyamin Katznelson), 33, 187, 459–60, 571nn12, 24, 588n179, 593n295 Burckhardt, Jacob, 135–39, 142, 521n269, 522nn291,296 buried autobiographies, 422–38 Burr, Anna Robeson, 498n85, 523n314 calendars, 143–44 Campbell, Joseph, 117 capitalism, 287–88, 354, 574n91 Cardano, Girolamo (Jerome Cardan), 9, 42–43, 77, 90, 140–46, 485n31, 523nn313,314,318

Carlyle, Thomas, 43, 181, 507n52 Carpi, Daniel, 114, 515n181, 516n194 catastrophe-as-catalyst theory (Shatsky/ Roskies), 71–76, 148–49, 402, 504–505n27 Cellini, Benvenuto, 42–43, 76–77, 90, 134, 485–86n44 Chagall, Marc, 117 Charney, Daniel, 17, 459 Charney, Yosef Yehudah, 422, 459, 578n159 Chassidim. See Hasidism/Hasidic tales Chateaubriand, François Auguste René de, 43, 114–17, 517n204, 534n511 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Gavrilovich, 372–73, 375 child protagonists, 462, 547n87, 556n290 childhood accounts: Abramovitsh, 154, 352, 526n375, 540–41n61, 574n78; Ben–Tsiyon, 467; Berdichevsky, 187–89, 203–206, 210, 231–33, 241, 244–54, 257, 274, 279–81, 352, 548–49n171, 573n68; Bialik, 352, 419, 442, 448, 548–49n171; Dik, 232–33, 548n169; B. H. Epstein, 381–82, 581nn21,22,29; Z. Epstein, 233, 352, 378–79, 548–49n171; Emden, 298; Fin, 572–73n53, 574n73; Goethe, 120; Guenzberg, 341, 344–53, 574n74; Halevi, 517n211; Luzzatto (Shadal), 119–20, 512n153; Modena, 118–22, 517n214, 518n220; Rousseau, 334, 349, 352, 573n68, 574n74; Sadan, 460–61; Sholem Aleichem, 470; Tolstoy, 16, 382, 543n94, 548–49n171; Yagel, 118. See also birth/infancy accounts childhood and autobiography: early depictions of, 233, 352, 378–79, 548–49n171; Muir on, 10, 211; nostalgia for, 504–505n27, 539–40n52; place of, 9–11, 16, 30, 34–35, 350–52, 426; Renaissance, 485–86n44 Christianity, 359, 362, 365, 374, 557n307, 559n372 chronological narrative, 485–86n44 Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, The (Burckhardt), 135–39 class-narratives, 469 Cockshut, Anthony, 10 Cohen, Mark, 105, 122, 132, 511n146, 516nn194,200, 517n12

Index Cohen, Mortimer J., 295–96 Cohen, Shabbatai (The Shakh), 149, 176, 282 Collective Jewish Unconscious, 213–19, 542n80, 542nn80,84 colonization and literary tradition, 3, 39–41, 46–47, 54, 164, 333, 371 commerce. See capitalism Communist autobiographies, 424, 588nn184,185 community/individual dynamics, 73–74 confessions/confessional literature: as accusation, 385; as autobiography, 25–26, 76–77, 208, 289, 300, 491n147; Bratslav Hasidism, 313, 330, 566n98, 569n150; Christianity, 374; compulsion to confess, 186, 197–98; confession/didactic dynamic, 573n54; confession/self-restraint dynamic, 253, 336; Hebrew literature, 476–77; Judaism, 110, 185, 313, 330, 569n150; role of ‘self,’ 7, 336. See also Augustine of Hippo Confessions (Rousseau): as autobiographical model, 5–17, 37, 46, 333, 442, 476, 486n55; Haskalah movement, 79–80; influence on: Emden, 287, 289, 297, 311; Guenzberg, 335–36; Lilienblum, 579n178; Maimon, 25–26, 56, 195–96, 496n66; “Neuchâtel” preamble, 8, 11, 485n31; sexual frankness in, 356; writing of, 32–33, 112 Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius), 87–88, 97–98, 100, 508n88, 509n97 correspondence. See letters Crémieux, Adolphe, 366 culinary metaphors, 409 cultural landscapes, 377–480; autobiographical matrices, 445–61; autobiography as fiction, 26–30, 461–73; buried autobiographies, 422–38; community/individual dynamic, 73–74, 282–83; cross-cultural factors, 40–41, 46–50, 64, 505n30; cultural upheaval, 449–52, 500n103; Jewish Orthodoxy, 377–412; personality worship, 418–19; requests for autobiography, 438–45; semiotic behavior, 412–21 Costa, Uriel da, 185, 186, 524n334, 534n510 cultural ingathering (Kinnus), 455

Dan, Yosef on: Eldad’s Travels, 183; Nathan of Nemirov, 316–17; Yagel, 82–83, 90, 508n88 Dante, 95, 137, 508n88, 509n97 Davis, Nathalie Zemon on: Cardano, 140; ethical will, 514n174; Gluckel of Hameln, 164, 166, 169–70, 528n398; Jewish autobiography, 75, 503–504n23; Maimon, 104; Modena, 122, 135, 140, 512n149 death in autobiographical narrative: Agnon, 470–72; Berdichevsky, 205–206, 210, 220, 232, 245, 247, 276, 471, 540n55, 560nn386,387; Bashevis Singer, 472; Emden, 298–99, 308; Gluckel of Hameln, 154, 156–58, 164–66, 529n439; Modena, 106–108, 111, 113–14, 122–24, 129, 131, 137, 141–42, 146–47, 518n229; Nathan of Nemirov, 328–32, 569n149; omnipresence of, 141–42, 247, 269, 351–52, 504–505n27, 516n197, 540n61; Sholem Aleichem, 418 deconstructionism, 1, 4–5 Defoe, Daniel, 7, 28, 306, 446–47, 564n65 Deinhard, Ephraim, Zikhronot bat ’ami, 379 Deism, 361 Delitzsch, Franz, 497n74 deliverance scrolls, 147–55 denials/disclaimers, 438–42 depression/illness motifs, 129–31, 141, 297–301, 308, 339–41 Der Nister (Pinkhes Kahanovitsh), 424 Der yud (periodical), 157 Derekh ’agav technique in B.H. Epstein’s Meqor barukh, 407–08 Descartes, René, 77 Deuteronomy, Book of, 215 ‘Devarim ’ahadim ’al ha toladah ve ha’autobriografiah’ (Berdichevsky/Bin-Gorion), 24, 222–27, 229, 246 diaries, 90, 111–13, 244–47, 272 ,247, 423, 442–44, 515nn182,186,188, 516n190, 552–53n239, 587n144 Dickens, Charles, 28 didactic element, 53, 233, 548n170, 572–73nn53,54, 573n54 Dietz, Johann, 515–16n189 Dik, Ayzik Meir, 15, 179, 232–33, 548n169

631

632

Index Dilthey, Wilhelm, 9, 238, 501n105 Dinesohn, Yankev (Jacob), 446 dirges, 150–53 displacement, sense of, 463–65, 515–16n189, 543n95, 544n103 distance/relation paradigm, 209–10, 227, 239, 246–47, 541n66, 551n208, 580n387 Divine Comedy (Dante), 95 Dobin, Sh., 418 Dobrenko, Evgeny, 429 Dolitsky, Menahem, 275 domestic scenes. See families/family scenes Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Notes from the Underground, 466–67, 595n342 Double historicization (Bourdieu), 191–92 Druyanov, Alter, 414 Dubnow, Shimon (Shimon Dubnov): and Ahad Ha’am, 413; autobiographical strategy/structure, 454–57, 515n186, 588n179; and Berdichevsky, 545n130; on Da Costa, 534n510; on Daniel Deronda, 497–98n77; on Guenzberg, 366; ‘Historism’, 417, 455–58, 594–95nn314,320, 323; on ‘Iggeret habesht, 551–52n220; and Maimon, 64, 567n104; and Mapu, 593n295; memory and identity, 457–58; and Nathan of Nemirov, 314; personal archive, 417; use of Hebrew language, 454–55; writing of autobiography, 412–13, 441; on Yiddish literature, 53 ———. works cited: Nahpesah venhqorah, 454–57; Book of Life, 417, 457–58 Dubova, 205, 546n141 Dylan, Bob, 36, 102–103, 491n162, 511n140 Eastern European Jewry: autobiographical heritage, 479–80; cultural changes, 401; ethnographic portrayals of, 278–81, 334, 454, 548n169, 581–82n34; generational conflicts, 269, 273; historical consciousness, 453–58, 494–95n44; response to autobiography, 13–36, 49–50, 375, 445, 530n455; Western influences, 362, 497n74. See also Jewish autobiography Ecclesiastes, Book of, 52, 215, 360, 535n521

education: Heder (Yiddish: Kheyder), 188–89, 229, 350, 358, 370, 535n515; Jewish education in North America, 474–75; Melammed (Hebrew primary teacher), 188–89, 298, 347, 350, 353, 359, 433, 534n513, 556n290; reform, 548n170, 574n73; Rousseau on, 347–50; seventeenth–century Italy, 533–34n506 Ehrenpreis, Mordechai, 234–35 Eibeschuetz, Jonathan/Eibeschuetz Affair, 310, 565nn82,85 Eichenbaum, Boris, 429 ’Eldad hadani (Eldad the Danite), 179–80, 182–83, 532n486 Eliashev, Israel. See Bal Makhshoves Eliot, George, 58; Daniel Deronda, 497–98n77 ’Elleh toldot ’adam (Lisitsky), 473–76 Emden, Ya’aqov,(Jacob) 288–312; autobiographical intent, 290–91, 310, 328, 562– 63n18; and Berdichevsky, 289; biographical data, 289, 291–93; birth/childhood accounts, 297–98; father/son relationship, 307–310, 565n82; identification with Job, 563n40; illness/depression motifs, 297– 301, 308–309; lack of autobiographical precedent, 301–303, 306, 309, 314, 567n104; marriage, 291–93, 296, 299, 574n91; place of, 311–12; and Rabbenu Gershom, 296; and Rousseau, 287, 289, 290, 297, 311; secularism, 303–306, 564n64; sexual frankness, 291–95, 298–99; trial/deliverance themes, 300–301; word-play and puns, 562nn16–17, 563n29 ———. works cited: She’ilat ya’abets, 297–98. See also Megillat sefer Enlightenment movement. See Haskalah epistolary accounts. See letters Epstein, Barukh Halevy: and Abramovitsh, 409–10; autobiographical intent and strategy, 380–82, 384–91, 397–98, 400–10; childhood, 381–82, 581nn21,22,29, 583n68; and Guenzberg, 382; and Nahman of Bratslav, 394–95; publication data, 583–84nn79,82; rabbinic approbations,

Index 405, 583–84n82; and Rousseau, 382. See also Meqor barukh Epstein, Zalman, 233, 352, 378–79, 548–49n171 Erik, Max, 151–53, 181, 430, 525n350, 528n404, 529n440 Erikson, Erik, 373 Esther, Book of, 150–53, 525n352, 548n169 ethical will (Tsava’ah), 75, 109–10, 158, 171, 174–75, 198, 349, 514n174 ethnographic reconstruction, 278–81, 334, 454, 548n169, 581–82n34 Etkes, Immanuel, 412 Ettinger, Solomon, 426 Euchel, Yitshaq, life of Mendelssohn, 316, 335, 336, 567n113, 570n7 European literature, Hebrew translations of, 506–507nn49,50,52 Even, Yosef, 553n247 Ezekiel, Book of, 575n102 fables: Aesopian, 349, 573n54; Mashal (Hebrew fable or parable), 160, 345, 349–51, 573n54, 574n72 faith, loss of, 25–26, 33–36, 361, 459–60, 576n173 Faithful Friend story (Gluckel), 165–69 families/family scenes: death of parents/siblings, 122–24, 205–206, 518n229, 540n55, 560nn386,387; difficulties in portraying, 520n245; family feeling, 455; Family Purim, 153–54; father/son relationship, 269, 273, 307–10, 510n133, 540–41n61, 541n73, 565n82; gender/learning divide, 386, 389, 398–99; Grandfather Binyomen/ beggars banquet, 427, 428, 430–31, 435– 37; grandfather/grandson confrontation, 383–85, 389–90; parenting/parenting advice, 345–49, 352–53; tension, 8, 95–97,154, 321–22, 384–91, 400 family scrolls, 8, 17, 141, 151–55, 158, 177–78 Feast of Purim, 150, 151 Feierberg, Mordekhai Ze’ev: and Ahad Ha’am, 549n172; and Berdichevsky, 233, 544n103, 549n172; in Brenner’s Mehatha-

lah, 21; and Guenzberg, 368, 578n159; intertextuality, 473; Le’an, 25, 29–30, 35; and Lilienblum 373, Mintz on, 28; place of, 76, 187, 213, 233 Feilchenfeld, Alfred, 138, 174 Feingold, Ben Ami, 490n133 Fenichel, Otto, 523n313 fiction. See novels Fichman, Ya’aqov , 18, 23, 271, 419, 459–60, 541n80, 550–51n201 Fin, Shmuel Yosef, 233, 548n170, 572–73n53, 574n73, 577n150 first love, 203, 292–93, 435, 550n200 first-person narratives, 175–93; early versions, 446; lamentation and deliverance scrolls, 152–54, 178; national catastrophes, 151, 152, 451; omnipotence of, 198, 207– 208, 211, 226–28; by proxy, 180; publication data, 175–79; travel accounts, 179–85. See also childhood accounts; memoirs/ memoir-literature; narrative style; novels Fogel, David, 422 folk narrators, 162, 199–208, 211, 537–38n27, 540–41n61, 557n305 Foucault, Michel, 352, 531n458 Franklin, Benjamin, 77, 287 Freud, Sigmund, 217, 251, 450–51, 543n101 Friedman, David Aryeh, 491n147 Friedman, Eliezer Eliahu, 414, 441, 459, 533n499, 593n295 Frishman, David, 229, 240, 352, 413, 428, 462, 547n154 Fromer, Jakob, 57, 58, 60, 498n85 Frug, Shimon, 15 Frye, Northrop, 560n380 Fussell, Paul, 181–83 Galicia, 60–61 gambling, 130, 138, 142–46, 186, 520n248, 522n290 garden/Garden of Eden motifs, 202, 211, 538n29, 541n74, 542n76, 543n95, 552n243 Gardner, Alexander, 59 Gartner, Hayyim, 494–95n44 Geiger, Abraham, 106

633

634

Index Gei’ hizzayon (Yagel), 82–103; Amnon/Tamar story, 530n446; compared to other works, 97–98, 145, 172–73, 184, 380, 530n446; exculpatory passages, 91–93; as mystical ascent literature, 84–85, 87–88, 93–94, 97–98; publication data, 82–83, 102; structure, 84–85, 101–103, 383, 398–99 Genazim. See lexicons gender, gender/learning divide, 347, 386, 389, 398–99 genealogy, 70, 187, 198, 290, 307, 417, 494–95n44, 534n511 Genesis, Book of, 211, 387, 508n69 gentile/non-Jewish culture, 218, 303–306 German language, 14, 57, 234, 244–47, 260, 262, 304, 487n68, 546nn132,137 Germany, 60, 385, 401–403, 497n74 Gershon ben Eliezer of Prague, Gelilot ’erets yisra’el, 179, 182 Giacometti, Alberto, 484n17 Ginsburg, Shaul, 422, 423, 571nn12,24 Ginzberg, Asher. See Ahad Ha’am Gluckel of Hameln (Glikl of Hameln; Glikl Hameln), 103; daughter’s birth, 172–73; daughter’s wedding, 529n431; on death, 154, 156–58, 164–66, 529n439; marriage, 171–72; Messianic vistas, 171–73; sexual frankness, 162; writing style, 528n404, 529n413. See also Zikhroynes (Memoirs: Gluckel of Hameln) Gnessin, Uri Nisan, 19–20, 413, 462–69, 479, 595–96n346; Beterem, 468–69 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: on autobiography, 334, 484n24, 570n8; on the Bible, 550n199; childhood, 120; common motifs, 550n200, 552n234; community as subject, 74; Yiddish writings, 58, 497n75 ———. works cited: Dichtung und Wahrheit (Truth and Fiction), 43, 237–39, 244, 249, 333, 497n70; Faust, 77–78, 506–507n50 Goldberg, Leah, 23 Goldshmit, Eliyahu Yankev, 61, 184 Goran, Lester, 472–73 Gordon, Yehudah Leib, 412, 422, 489n106

Gorky, Maksim, 429 Gotlober, Abraham Ber, 493–94n39, 567n104, 588n179 Govrin, Nurit, 23 Green, Arthur, 242, 315–17, 326, 569n149, 570n163 Grodzensky, Shlomoh, 20–21, 542n76 Grunwald, Abraham, 525n350 Guenzberg, Mordechai Aaron, 333–76: Altaras scheme, 572n38; apologia, 335–36, 344–45, 350–52, 574n74; on autobiography, 334–35, 337, 570n8; childhood, 344–53, 574n74; on Christianity, 365; correspondence, 336–42, 571n20, 572nn35,43, 577n148; crisis of faith, 361, 459–60, 576n173; funeral, 576n133; gender bifurcation, 347; history writings/translations, 334–35, 363–67, 372, 453, 572n48, 573n67, 576n136, 577n143, 578n174; influence on other writers, 21, 368, 382; intent, 335, 337; marriage, 353–60, 362, 574n91, 575n94,99; motivation for, 349; parenting/ parenting advice, 345–49, 352–53; petition to change Jewish attire, 583n76; on religion, 360–63, 576n133; reputation, 26, 53, 65, 128, 184, 365–66, 507n63, 577–78nn150,158, 581n26; robbery, 338; translations, 573–74n70; writing process, 333–44, 572n49 ———. and other authors: Agnon, 346–47, 358, 359, 520n65, 523n93; Katznelson, 571n12; Maimon, 337, 342–43, 574n91; Rousseau, 196, 335–36, 347, 359, 362, 574nn74,76 ———. writing style: epistolary techniques, 343–44, 366–68, 447, 576n135, 577n153; foreign writing models, 333–34; illness motifs, 339–41; narrative style, 67, 233, 349–50, 573–74nn70,74; power alignment themes, 353–63, 574n90; sexual frankness, 190–91, 346, 355–60, 367, 575nn98,102; warfare/siege vocabulary, 357, 360, 364; word-play and puns, 570nn9,10 ———. works cited: Devir, 336, 338–39, 340–41, 344, 345, Galut ’erets hahadshah ’o massa’ Columbus, 364; Hamat Damesheq,

Index 365, 577nn145,148,155; Hatsarfatim berusiyah/; Pi haherut, 363–67. See also ’Avi’ezer Gurland, Hayyim, 289, 562n12 Gusdorf, Georges: on autobiography, 36, 50–52, 138, 483n10; on Book of Genesis, 508n69; literary colonization theory, 39–41, 46–47, 333, 371; on Modena, 518n225 Gutman, Simhah. See Ben–Tsiyon, Simhah Gutzkow, Karl, 534n510 Hacohen, Mordekhai Ben Hillel, 441, 479, 591n253 hagiography, 207, 316–18, 586n133 Ha’ivri (alternately named ’Ivri ’anokhi) (periodical), 225–26 Hakham Tsvi , 290, 307–308 Halakhah/Halakhic rulings and commentary, 135, 312, 398–99, 401 Halevi, Asher (Asher Halevy; Asher ben Eliezer Halevy): autobiographical intent, 185–86; childhood, 517n211; funeral orations, 534n509; marriage, 520n246; Memoirs, 186; and Modena, 108–109; narrative style, 287; weather bulletins, 534n509 Halfin, Igal, 588n184 Halkin, Shimon, 313, 332 Hallard, James Henry, 498n79 Hamburg, 168–69 Hamaggid (periodical), 119, 369, 493n26, 499n90, 512n153, 537–38n27, 578n175 Hame’assef (periodical), 289, 334, 567n113 Hamelits (periodical), 225; Hameln, Glikl. See Gluckel of Hameln Hameln, Mosheh, 156 Hamlet, 220–21 Hammaggid (periodical), 119, 369, 493n26, 499n90, 512n153, 537–38n27, 578n175. See also Haskalah Hannover, Nathan Neta, 69, 75, 148, 149; Neta’ sha’ashu’im, 176; Sha’arei tsiyon, 530n455; Yeven metsulah, 176, 178–79, 530n455 Harkavy, Alexander, 65, 570n8, 571n18

harlotry, 575nn100,102 Hashiloah (periodical), 31, 240, 416 Hasidism/Hasidic tales: anti-Hasidic satire, 410, 493–94n39; and B. H. Epstein, 394–95; and Berdichevsky, 200–201, 207, 241–44, 250–56, 313–14, 518n227, 537–38n27, 555n266; Bratslav Hasidism, 313, 315–21, 328–32, 566nn97,98, 569n150, 570nn155,163; hagiography, 207, 316–18, 586n133; ’Iggeret habesht, 551–52n220; impact on autobiographical writing, 61, 314, 567n104; and Maimon, 497n69; Neo-Hasidism, 243, 436, 552n223; as origin of Hebrew/Yiddish literature, 312–13; Sadagorer Hasidim, 537–38n27. See also Nathan of Nemirov Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment movement): autobiographic novels, 371, 446–50, 462, 470, 473, 546n140; and Berdichevsky, 205, 226–27, 253, 256; and Emden, 312; emergence of, 25–26, 60–61, 313, 359–60; and Lilienblum, 35, 368, 372, 578n175, 579n193; Lithuania, 576n133; and Maimon, 104; Maskilim suicides, 539n49; mentor/muse, 433–35; negativeness of, 378; opposition to, 379, 410, 493–94n39, 539n49, 579n187; parody and satire, 61, 241, 410, 454, 466–67, 493–94n39, 499–500n93, 551n251, 580n9; popularity of, 371, 448; and Rousseau, 13, 79–80; Russia/USSR, 60–61, 225, 381; social novels, 226–27, 462, 469; Te’udah beyisr’ael, 593n289; writing styles, 336, 448, 595n330 Hatt’ot ne’urim (Lilienblum), 368–76; compared to other works, 187, 226, 446, 453, 490n133, 579n178; iconoclastic nature of, 477; place of, 26, 28, 453; publication data, 61, 371, 578–79n176; responses to, 230, 371, 375, 378, 450, 452, 496n66, 578n170, 579nn178,187,193; strategy/ structure, 28, 372, 374–76, 447, 459, 473, 490n133, 578–79n176 Hayyei yehudah (Modena), 103–47; Ambrosiana manuscript, 104–107, 511nn146,148, 515n181; compared to other works, 6,

635

636

Index 104–105, 111, 133–47, 184–86, 198, 291–93, 311; funeral plan/wills, 512n149, 514n174, 515n181, 516n194; Mikvah episode, 118–21; publication data, 104–107, 176, 511n147, 512nn149,150; structure, 110–16, 290, 511n148 Hebrew autobiography. See Jewish autobiography Hebrew language: first use of word Sifrut (‘literature’), 493–94n39; limitations of, 301; Modena’s use of, 517n212; as primary autobiographical language, 536n1; secular writings, 366, 448, 491n154; as spoken language, 447; as written language, 372 Hebrew literature: and autobiographical genre, 33, 414, 477–80, 484n24, 585n126; and Berdichevsky, 233–34, 249–50; changing styles, 17–36, 464, 469–70, 476–77, 517n212, 595n330; and Guenzberg, 366, 577–78nn150,158; Hebrew novels, 372, 499n91; and Israel, 469, 491n154; literary criticism, 17–36; literary/ideological differentiation, 493n24; and modernism, 284, 285; origins of, 312–13; and Holocaust, 471–72, 479, 597n379; Renaissance contexts, 103–104, 157, 511n147, 522n296; secular literature, 366, 448–52, 491n154. See also Jewish autobiography Heder (Cheder), 188–89, 229, 350, 358, 370, 535n515 Hegelian thought, 455 Heilperin, Israel, 525n350 Heine, Heinrich, 24, 59, 60 Helin, Elhanan bar Abraham, 525n355; Megillat vints, 178 Hellbeck, Jochen, 424, 429, 588n185 Heller, Yom-Tov Lippman, Megillat ’eivah (Scroll of Enmity), 69, 147–55, 177, 525n350 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 484n24, 497n74 heroes, 407 Herz, Henrietta, 60 Hesse, Herman, 542n80 Hirshbein, Peretz, 533n499

history/historical awareness: in autobiography, 8–9, 452–58; and biography, 489n106; double historicization (Bourdieu), 191–92; Dubnow on, 417, 454–58; Jewish counter–history theory, 218–19; Jewish identity, 213–19, 451, 454–58; in novels and poetry, 151–52, 428; ‘pangs’ of history (Berdichevsky), 216–17; preservation through memory, 454 Hofshteyn, Dovid, 438 Holocaust, 471–72, 479, 597n379 Holtzman, Avner: on Berdichevsky, 23, 227, 234, 273–74, 539n42; on Brenner, 488n87; on Rachel Bin-Gorion, 245–46, 553n245 homesickness/nostalgia, 478–79 Horodetsky, Shmuel A., 252, 260, 263, 267–68, 276 homicide/hunting scenarios, 59, 87, 89, 141, 166, 170, 173, 282, 475, 530n446 Hurwitz, Pinhas Eliyahu, 360 Hurwitz, Shai ’Ish, 375, 413 hypochondria, 300 ideology: Bolshevism, 423–38 588n184; impact on autobiography, 1, 5, 11–12, 452–54, 469–70, 474–75, 589n200 identity: evolution of, 310; Jewish contexts, 213–19; loss of, 463–64, 515–16n189; and memory, 457–58; personal/national, 217–19, 243, 250, 253, 259–60, 424, 455–58 illness/depression motifs, 129–31, 141, 297–301, 308, 339–41 immortality, 136–37 individualism: affective individualism, 449; and autobiography, 114–15, 136, 138–39, 214–19, 332, 464; and Hasidic ethos, 313; individual/collective dynamics, 73–74, 229–30, 238, 270–72, 282–83, 332, 438, 449, 469; in Israeli Hebrew prose, 477; Tsaddiq/disciple relationship, 570n163; and romantic relations, 449; Soviet literary critics’ views on, 424 Institute for Jewish Culture in Kiev, 429–30, 432

Index intelligentsia, 412–21, 497n74, 530n455. See also Haskalah internal/external censorship in Soviet Russia, 427 intertextuality, 37–66; cross–cultural fashioning, 46–50; emergence of Jewish autobiography, 50–66, 80–82; first example, 369–70; high-point, 473; text/discourse, 37–46, 194–95, 367–68 Isaac min Halevi’yim, 135, 512n149 Isaac Eizik of Komarna, 567n104 Isaac of Volozhin, 581n19 Isaiah, Book of, 270 Isak, Aaron, 286 Israel/Holy Land, 99, 326, 469, 479–80, 491n154, 575n100 d’Israeli, Isaac, 484n24 Isserles, R. Mosheh, 296 Italy/Italian Renaissance: Hebrew literature, 60–61, 103–104; and Modena, 68, 103, 133–38; novellas, 85, 89–90; selfportraits, 76–77, 90, 265–66, 485–86n444; and Yagel, 68, 85, 90, 102 Jak (Jaranansky-Jak), Mosheh Eliyahu, 73 Jauss, Hans Robert, 367–68 Jerusalem Talmud, 403 Jewish autobiography: Ashkenazic origins, 147–91; atlas of, 67–68; attitudes toward, 17–36, 44–50, 415–16, 425, 438–45, 450–53, 474–80, 500nn99,100,103, 592n271; buried autobiographies, 422–38; catastrophe-ascatalyst theory (Shatsky/Roskies), 71–76, 148–49, 402, 504–505n27; conflicts in writing, 73–74, 282–83, 344, 467, 470–73, 503–504n23, 512n153, 544n110, 548n162; contexts for reading, 17–36, 67, 191–93, 279; counter-tradition theory (Berdichevsky), 212–19; emergence, 13–36, 49–66, 80–82, 286–88, 371–76, 411, 492n7; first use of term, 314, 414, 585n126; future of, 479–80; and Holocaust, 471–72, 479, 597n379; intertextuality, 50–66, 80–82; marginality/liminal status, 27–28, 59–60, 463–65, 474n, 496n64; matrices of,

445–61; Orthodox Judaism and, 377–412; polemic nature, 257, 307, 310, 379, 383, 389, 466, 563n18, 565n85, 581–84n34; precedent and tradition, 92–93, 110–16, 173, 195–96, 301–303, 306, 309, 314, 333–36, 492n7, 567n104; and Rousseau, 16–17, 54–56, 72, 105–106, 133, 158, 178, 184, 229, 232, 286–332, 371–76, 411; schema of, 56; semiotic behavior, 412–21; Sephardic origins, 82–147; tradition model, 61–62, 67–82; and Western Europe, 54–59 Jewish counter-history theory, 218–19 Jewish Enlightenment movement. See Haskalah Jewish identity, 213–19, 452–53, 455–58 Job, identification with, 510n117, 514–15n180, 563n40 Job, Book of, 78, 90, 101, 293, 300, 510n117, 517n204 Johnson, Paul, 563–64n45 Josel of Rosheim, 90 Joseph/Potiphar’s wife motif, 296 Jost, Isaac Markus, 78 journeys/journey motifs, 181–82, 188–89, 301–303, 323–28, 332, 342–43, 534n513. See also travel accounts Joyce, James, Ulysses, 284 Judges, Book of, 345 Jung, Carl Gustav, 542n80 Kabbalah/Kabbalistic literature: in Ashkenazic texts, 148; in Berdichevsky, 201– 202, 219, 252, 256, 538n29; confessions, 72, 185; pre–modern autobiography, 192; in Schwarz, 70, 81; Sefirot, 202; selfexpression, 504n26; Sha’arei tsiyon, 530n455; in Yagel, 85, 86 Kafka, Franz, 251 Kagan, Zipporah, 277, 536n8, 542n84, 560n377 Kahan, Avrom (Abraham Kahan), 479, 597n380 Kahana, Abraham (Avraham): calamity as catalyst theme, 149, 524n349; on Eldad,

637

638

Index 532n486; publisher of pre-modern Jewish autobiography, 133, 176, 179, 181, 197, 213; Sifrut hahistoriah hayisra’elit, 107, 122, 513n162; on Yeven metsulah, 176 Kahana, David, 61, 289, 310–11, 562n12 Kahanovitsh, Pinkhes. See Der Nister Kant, Immanuel, 242, 501n105 Kasdai, Tsvi, 459, 593n295 Kassel, Dovid, 62 Katz, Ben-Tsiyon, 289, 305, 539–40n52 Katznellenbogen, Zvi Hirsh, 338 Katznelson, Y. L. See Buki Ben Yogli Katznelson, Ya’aqov, 339, 342, 367, 571n12 Kaufman, Daliah, 436 Kaufmann, David, 158, 174, 178, 528n395 Keller, Gottfried, Green Henry, 238, 550–51n201 Kennedy, David, 59 Kerner, Mosheh, 149 Kerouac, Jack, On the Road, 476 Keshet, Yeshurun, 204, 229, 237, 246, 553n247 Khmielnitsky massacres, 73, 76, 149, 152, 178, 524nn344, 348 Kinnus (cultural ingathering), 68, 455, 502n6 Klanska, Maria, 487n69 Klausner, Joseph (Yosef Klausner): and Berdichevsky, 242; and Bialik, 32, 413, 420–21, 441–42; on Hebrew literature, 22, 493–94n39, 565–66n93; and Mapu, 449 Klausner, Yehudah Aryeh, 346, 365, 367, 578n174 Klog- lid tradition, 152–53, 177–79, 180–81, 198, 282 Kobrin, Rebecca, 386, 397, 400, 581n20 Kol mevasser (periodical), 61, 499–500n93 Kook, Abraham Isaac, 583–84n82 Kotik, Yekhezkel 24, 62, 290, 413, 500nn99,103, 533n499, 585n109 Kovner, Avram Uri, 581–82n34 Krakau, 426, 427, 434, 437 Krochmal, Nahman, 79, 543n92 Kurzweil, Barukh, 35–36, 232, 450

Lachover, Fishel: and Berdichevsky, 237, 262–64, 272–73, 546n142, 560n387; and Bialik, 420; and Guenzberg, 340; and M.H. Luzzatto, 565–66n93; and Maimon, 496n66; and Modena, 138; place of, 23 Lamentations, Book of, 569n148 laments/lamentation and deliverance scrolls, 147–55; communal, 525n359; first–person narratives, 152–54, 178; Kloglid tradition, 152–53, 177–79, 180–81, 198, 282, 525n365; prototypes, 150–53; publication data, 149–50 land coach incident (Emden), 302–303 Landauer, Gustav, 65 languages: Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism, 479; Jewish versus non-Jewish 41, 55, 57, 60, 220–21, 234–40, 244–51, 270, 303–06, 492–93n14, 551n208; linguistic philosophy, 41, 43–44, 47–48, 55–56, 64, 492–93{n14} Lazarus, Emma, 398 Lebensgeschichte (Maimon): comparisons with other texts, 56, 103–104, 188, 197, 231, 306, 499–500n93, 501n107; history and reception of, 56–66; intertextuality, 61, 473; online version, 498n78; publication data, 61, 184, 368; responses to, 476, 498nn79,80,85, strategy/structure, 56, 499–500n93 ledgers, 186, 279, 287–88 Lehrer, Seth, 97–98 Leiris, Michel, 12, 469, 515–16nn189, 192, 596n350 Lejeune, Philippe: on autobiography as genre, 5–7, 11–12, 48–50, 56, 76, 194, 485n30, 506n42; on autobiography as reading, 14; distance/relation paradox, 541n66; on pre-Rousseauian autobiography, 492n7 Leninist literary criticism, 426 Letteris, Meir Halevi: on autobiography as genre, 24, 78–79, 147, 333, 507n64, 526n380; lack of precedent, 61; publication data, 499n90; and Rousseau, 196, 335; translations, 506–507nn49,50,52; Zikkaron basefer, 77–80, 221, 513n158

Index letters, autobiographical correspondence, 7, 21–22, 35, 180, 505n30; as autobiography, 180, 343–44, 366–68, 416–18, 420, 447, 488–89n96; epistolary collections, 343–44, 366–68, 447, 576n135, 577n153 Lev tov, 166 Levi, Abraham, 170, 181, 529n440 Leviant, Curt, 590n234 Levin, Mordekhai, 363 Levin, Shemaryahu, 189 Levin, Yehudah Leib, 440, 593n295 Levinson, Yitshaq Ber, 440, 593n289 Levy, Hirsh, 163 lexicons, 414–16, 425, 445, 448, 586nn129–33 Liberberg, Yoysef, 430 libraries, 52, 271–72, 430–31 Lieblich, Amia , 23 Lilienblum, Mosheh Leib: autobiographical intent/strategy, 369–70, 374–76; and Berdichevsky, 197, 221–22, 226, 230; biographical data, 368; correspondence, 374, 499–500n93, 578–79n176; French language, 578–79n176; and Guenzberg, 26, 28, 65, 368–76, 453; and Haskalah, 35, 578n175, 579n193; influence on other authors, 21, 197, 373, 382; intertextuality, 369–70, 473; and Maimon, 372; and Mapu, 593n295; place of, 18, 26, 61, 64–65, 128, 187, 371, 374–76; pseudonym, 501n113; religious reform campaign, 35, 221–22, 545n119, 580n9; republication of, 479; and Rousseau, 578–79nn176,178; word-play and puns, 579n183 ———. works cited: Derekh teshuvah, 374–75; Derekh la’avor golim. See also Hatt’ot ne’urim Lilienthal, Max, 581n19 Linetsky, Yitskhok Yoyel: Dos poylishe yingl, 446, 499–500n93, 592–93n277 linguistics. See languages Linitz (Linetz), 279 Lipschitz, Tsvi Hirsh, 377–78 Lipschitz, Ya’aqov Halevi (R. Jacob Halevy), 378, 405, 459, 513n164, 580n9;

Zikhron ya’aqov, 377–81, 405, 580n4, 583–84n82 Lisitsky, Ephraim: ’Elleh toldot ’adam/In the Grip of Cross-Currents, 473–76; orphanhood, 187, 459 Liszt, Franz, 236 literary periodicals, 52 literary self-portraits, 9, 18, 90, 185, 265–66, 277–78, 561n401 Lithuanian Orthodoxy, 394–95, 412 Litvakov, Moyshe, 424 Litvin, A. (Shmuel Hurwitz), 62 Lokshin, Alexander, 487n68 Lowenthal, Marvin, 157, 174–75, 530n452 Luz, Tsvi, 34–35 Luzzatto, Moses Hayyim, 129, 312 Luzzatto, Shmu’el David (Shadal): ‘Ambrosiana’ manuscript of Hayyei yehudah, 105–106; autobiographical strategy, 223, 488–89n96; childhood, 119–20, 512n153; correspondence, 119–20, 512n153, 513nn155,158; lack of precedents, 61; and Lilienblum, 369–70; and Modena, 513n155; place of, 26, 565–66n93; publication data, 499n90, 512n153 Madison, Charles, 496n64 Magazin zur Erfahrunngsseelenkunde (periodical), 58–60 Maggid, David, 338, 340, 571nn,18,24 Maimon, Solomon: autobiographical intent, 56, 562–63n18; and Berdichevsky, 63, 208, 501nn107,108, 538n31; childhood, 187, 345, 348, 349, 573n68; as free-thinker, 432; and Guenzberg 342–43; and Hasidism, 313, 497n69, 499n500; influence on other authors, 337, 342–43, 372, 499– 500n93, 574n91; language-choice, 57; and Linetsky, 499–500n93; and Lisitsky, 476; marriage, 124–25, 128, 499–500n93; place of, 13, 25–26, 450, 501n105, 567n104; and Rousseau, 54, 56, 195–96, 223, 333, 335, 348–49, 496n66, 573n68; secular knowledge, 303, 450; sexual frankness, 190, 218, 356. See also Lebensgeschichte

639

640

Index Maimonides, 64, 575n119 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 1, 146 Malter, Tsvi, 415 Man, Paul de, 2 Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 590n221 Mandelstam, Osip, 426, 427 Mani, Abraham Barukh, 83 Mann, Thomas, 28, 117, 555n274 Mantel, Mordekhai, 326, 568n125 Mapu, Abraham, 334, 368, 593n295; ’Ahavat tsiyon, 53, 449, 474 Marcus, Laura, 2, 4, 238 Margoliot, M. Z., 422 Markish, Peretz, 424 Marqusee, Mike, 511n140 marriage/betrothal accounts: ‘Autobiography of a Bohemian Jew,’ 190–91, 535n521; Berdichevsky, 291–92, 537–38n27; Emden, 291–93, 296, 299, 574n91; Gluckel of Hameln, 171–72; Guenzberg, 353–60, 362, 574n91, 575n94,99; Halevi, 520n246; Maimon, 124–25, 128, 499–500n93; Modena, 122–28, 291–93, 518–19n230,231, 519–20nn244,250, 574n91; Nathan of Nemirov, 321–23, 568n133, 569n137; Shiddukh (betrothal negotiations), 122–25, 162–64, 168–69, 291–93, 296, 299, 354, 574n91 marriage-brokers (Shadhanim), 353–54 Marxist/Leninist teleology, 430 Mashal. See fables Mayse (Yiddish story), 170–71, 173, 174, 198–200, 205–207, 243 Mayse bukh, 158, 160, 162 Mazeh, Ya’aqov, 411, 414, 459 Medem, Vladimir, 506n39 Megillat ’Ahima’ats, 81, 507n67 Megillat ’eifah (Scroll of Darkness; S. Cohen), 149, 524n344 Megillat ’eivah (Scroll of Enmity; Heller), 147–55, 177 Megillat sefer (Emden), 288–312; alcohol/tea/coffee–drinking accounts, 299, 308; Amsterdam incident, 300–301, 304, 308; Hakham Tsvi account, 307–308; inspiration for writing, 310, 328; land coach incident, 302–303; Prague inci-

dent, 294–96; publication data, 286, 289, 310–11, 412, 562–63nn12,18; strategy and structure, 218, 290, 306–11, 564nn53,61 Meisel, Nakhmen, 589n200 Mekhabber, 200–207 Melammed, 188–89, 298, 347, 350, 353, 359, 433, 534n513 Melitsah (florid Haskalah Hebrew style), 79, 507nn63, 64 mementoes/relics, 416–17 Memoirs (Gluckel of Hameln). See Zikhroynes (Memoirs: Gluckel of Hameln) Memoirs of My People Through a Thousand Years (Schwarz), 69–71, 107, 133, 148, 502n8, 503n16, 513n162 memory: and autobiography, 268–85, 383, 500n103, 559n359; Collective Jewish Unconscious, 213–19, 542nn80,84; encyclopedic, 278–79, 560n380; and Jewish identity, 454–58; memory/invention dynamic, 261; nostalgia, 351–52, 383, 454, 471–72, 478–79, 504–505n27, 597n378; ‘store’ memory, 213–15, 383, 543n92 Mendele Moykher. See Abramovitsh, Sholem Yankev Mendelssohn, Moses: Be’ur, 546n132; Euchel’s life of, 316, 335, 336, 567n113, 570n7; Mendelssohn phenomenon, 58, 345; Phaedon, 360, 361; on the Zohar, 312 meni’ah/meni’ot (hindrance/s), 320–23, 325–28 Menorah circle, 69 mentor/muse, 433–35 Meqor barukh (Barukh Halevy Epstein), 380–410; compared to other works, 405–406; grandfather/grandson incident, 383–85; intent, 380, 401–402, 405–407; “Introduction” (Mavo’), 401–405; mirror reversals, 398; Netsiv chapters, 389–98, 406; publication data, 380–81, 389, 582n37, 583n68; Rayna Batya narrative, 386–91, 397, 400, 406; reader response to, 406, 408–409; St. Petersburg controversy, 383–85; style/structure, 383–86, 397–98, 401–10; writing process, 403

Index mercantile exchange, Shiddukh as, 354, 574n91 Messianic vistas, 171–73 Midrash/Midrashim, 238, 252, 256–62, 296 Mikvah episode (Modena), 118–21 Mimizrah umima’rav (periodical), 240 Minkoff, Nokhem, 156, 158, 170, 527n384, 528nn402, 404 Mintz, Alan, on: Jewish autobiography, 25–34, 503–504n23; Lilienblum, 374, 490n133, 578n170; novelistic technique, 490n133; power alignments in Guenzberg, 357–58, 364, 574n90 miracles/supernatural events: accounts of, 316–18, 431; dream divination, 123–25, 141, 519n237, 523n306; mystical ascent, 84–85, 87–88, 93–94, 97–98. See also mystics/mysticism Mirandola, Pico della, 137 Miriam: A Novel of Life in Two Townlets (Hebrew, Miriam: roman mehayyei shtei ’ayyarot) (Berdichevsky/Bin-Gorion), 199, 276–84; bookkeeper episode, 279; impact of pogroms, 280–81, 471; inspirations for, 237, 247–51, 278; role of memory, 278–82; structure, 277–78, 281–82, 285, 553–54nn252,259, 560n377. See also Berdichevsky, Michah Yosef (Bin-Gorion) Miron, Dan, on: Abramovitsh (Mendele), 410; Ben-Tsiyon, 466; Berdichevsky, 226, 247–48; Bialik, 19, 251; Guenzberg, 577n153; Jewish literature, 16, 20, 23 mirror and autobiography, 39, 265–66, 272, 439 mirror-reversals, 398 Misch, Georg, 138, 483n1, 505n30 Mishnah/Mishnaic literature, 273, 299, 575n92 Modena, Joseph da, 533–34n506 Modena, Yehudah Aryeh (Leon Modena): author portrait, 137, 513–14n164; autobiographical intent/strategy, 107–16, 512n149; autobiography, 136–37, 142–43; birth/ childhood, 116–22, 297, 517n214, 518n220, 518n226, 522n290; and Cardano, 140–47; death of half-brother, 122–24, 518n229;

dream divination, 123–25, 141, 519n237, 523n306; gambling, 130, 138, 142–46, 186, 520n248, 522n290, 523n318; Hebrew style, 118, 517n212; identification with Job, 514–15n180; illness motifs, 297, 300; Kahana as publisher, 107, 122, 133; and Luzzatto (Shadal), 105–06, 513n155; marriage, 122–28, 518–19n230–31, 519–20n244, 520nn244,250, 574n91; place of, 68, 104; puns and word-play, 126, 519n239, 520n248; Qol sakhal attributed to, 519n241, 523n318; as rebel, 513n155, 519n241; as Renaissance Man, 136–38, 511n145, 521n282 and Yagel, 514–15n180 ———. works cited: Magen vaherev, 127; Qol sakhal (The Voice of a Fool; attr. Modena), 126–27, 145, 513n155, 519n241, 523n318; Sha’agat ’aryeh, 126; Sur mera’, 523n318. See also Hayyei yehudah modernism/modernity: changing Jewish tradition, 583n76; impact, 11, 12, 73, 209, 251, 284, 285, 379, 382; pre-modern influences, 196–98. See also secularization/ secular Moll Flanders (Defoe), 7 Montaigne, Michel de, 9, 31, 42, 115, 212–13, 228, 485n31, 516n200 Montefiore, Moses, 366, 577n148 Moore, George, 74 morality/morality literature (Musar), 95–97, 158–67, 174, 198, 382 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 57–58, 343, 497n70 motifs and themes: family life, 8, 95–97, 154, 384–91, 400; first love, 203, 292–93, 435, 550n200; garden/Garden of Eden, 202, 211, 538n29, 541n74, 542n76, 543n95, 552n243; hunting/homicide scenarios, 87, 89, 141, 166, 170, 173, 282, 475, 530n446; identification with Job, 510n117, 514– 15n180, 563n40; illness/depression, 129–31, 141, 297–301, 308, 339–41; Joseph/Potiphar’s wife, 296; journeys, 181–82, 188–89, 323–28, 332, 342–43, 534n513; light, 205–206, 538n29, 540n55; Mayse (Yiddish story), 170–71, 173, 174, 198–200, 205–207, 243; music, 552n234;

641

642

Index nature, 350–51, 552n243; Oedipal, 543n101; orphans/orphanhood, 33, 187–88, 435, 458–61, 595n325; paired opposites, 248, 553–54nn252,255; Tekhines (supplications), 157, 158, 160, 170, 174, 177; trial/deliverance, 300–301, 320–23, 325–28. See also birth/infancy; childhood; death in autobiographical narrative; marriage/betrothal accounts murder. See homicide Murray, John Clark, 59, 60 mystical ascent (Yagel) 84–85, 87–88, 93–94, 97–98 mystics/mysticism, 326–27, 504n26. See also Kabbalah/Kabbalistic literature; miracles/ supernatural events Nabokov, Vladimir, 11 Nahman Goldstein of Tcherin (Rav), 568n125 Nahman of Bratslav (Nachman of Bratslav): and B. H. Epstein, 394–95; and Berdichevsky, 197–98, 201–202, 218, 243, 313, 585n126; birthplace, 239; death of, 328–31, 569n149; journey to Holy Land, 326; and Nathan of Nemirov, 314–15, 319–25, 330–32, 567nn111,112, 568–69nn135,136,139, 570n155; role in modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, 312–13, 566n94 Napoleon, 364, 577n143 Narcissus, 468 narrative style: atomization of, 350; diaristic, 515n186; folk-narrators, 162, 199–208, 211, 537–38n27, 540–41n61, 557n305; narrator as medium, 471–72; premodern modalities, 281–82; third-person, 49, 226–28, 427–28, 448. See also first-person narratives; novelistic techniques; reader asides Nathan of Nemirov, 312–32; autobiographical intent, 315, 317–18, 323–25; as biographer, 286, 316; birth/rebirth, 319–20, 328; depression/self-doubt, 569nn146,148; journeys/journey motifs, 323–28; marriage, 321–23, 568n133, 569n137; meni’ah/ meni’ot (hindrances), 320–23, 325–28; and

Nahman of Bratslav, 319–25, 330–32, 567nn111,112, 568–69nn135,136, 569n139, 570n155; place of, 313–14, 318, 567nn106,111. See also Yemei maharnat Nathanson, Binyamin, 336, 341, 572n35 Nathanson, Mordechai, 341 national literature, 371–76, 424 national/personal identity (Dubnow), 455–58, 594–95nn314,320 nature/civilization antinomies, 217 nature (Teva’), 346–47, 350, 573n59, 574n76 Naudé, Gabriel, 140, 142 Nemirov, journey to, 323–25 neo-Hasidism, 243, 436, 552n223 Nesvij (birthplace of Maimon), Guenzberg’s journey to, 342–43 the Netsiv. See Berlin, Naphtali Tsvi Yehudah Neubauer, Adolph, 183, 507n67 Neuchâtel variant of Rousseau’s preamble to the Confessions, 8, 11, 485n31Neumann, Erich, 219 New Criticism, 23, 30, 204 New Orleans, 474 New York, 65–66, 478 Nietzsche, Friedrich/Nietzschean thought: and Berdichevsky, 35, 229–30, 232, 237, 243, 282, 477, 547n148; on illness, 297; and Jewish intellectuals, 35, 217, 265, 275; and Sadeh, 476–77; and Z. Epstein, 548–49n171 Niger, Shmuel: on genre in Yiddish literature, 315; on Gluckel’s Zikhroynes, 156; on Hasidism, 332, 566n97; on ideology and literature, 432; on Kassel, 500n100; lexicon project, 415, 586n131; on Lilienblum, 375; on Nahman of Bratslav, 313, 566n94; psycho-analytic technique, 22–23; requests for autobiography, 413; on Sholem aleikhem bukh, 418 nihilism, 368, 372–73, 581–82n34 Nissenboim, Yitshaq, 411, 459 Nomberg, Hirsh Dovid, 19, 462, 465 non-Jews, portrayals of, 164 nostalgia, 351–52, 383, 454, 471–72, 478–79, 504–505n27, 597n378

Index novelistic techniques: fictional protagonist as autobiographical projection, 28–31, 225–27, 248–49, 427–32, 461–69, 470, 547n87, 556n290, 589n201; Gluckel’s Zikhroynes, 160–61; Lilienblum’s Hatt’ot ne’urim, 490n133. See also reader asides novels, as autobiography, 7, 26–30, 62–63, 173, 225–28, 234–6, 247–50, 301–03, 311, 461–80, 595n330; Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, 7, 306, 564n65; Haskalah novels, 446–50, 462, 470, 473; historical novels, 428; Renaissance novellas, 85, 89–90, 101; romantic literature, 57, 89, 162, 448–49; Rousseau’s Émile and La nouvelle Héloïse, 7; Russian, 588n185; social novels, 226, 462, 469; Talush (uprooted man) novellas, 463–67, 473–74, 596n352; Yiddish literature, 89–90 nowhere man, 465–67 Numerology, 143–146 Nussah (received tradition), 215 Nussbaum, Felicity A., 515n182 Odessa, 392–93, 467, 562n12 Oedipal motifs, 543n101 ‘Old Yiddish Memoir Literature,’ 170, 527n384, 529n440 Olney, James, 3–4, 11–12, 484nn14,17, 486n55, 502n9 Opatoshu, Joseph, 64, 428 Oppenheim, Moritz, 60 oral tradition, 318. See also Bratslav Hasidism orphans/orphanhood motifs, 33, 187–88, 205–06, 435, 458–61, 595n325 Orthodox Judaism: and Dubnow, 455; Emden as defender, 312; Hebrew historical writing, 494–95n44; Lithuanian Orthodoxy, 394–95, 412; response to European literature, 506n49; tradition and autobiography, 377–412 ’Otsar hasifrut (periodical), 231–32; Ovadyahu, Mordechai, 284, 420 Oyslender, Nokhem, 437 Oyved, Moyshe, 535n515 Oz, Amos: Sippur ’al ’ahavah vehoshekh, 8, 33, 35, 477

Ozick, Cynthia, 492n14, 496n64 paganism, 214, 237, 252, 354, 575n93 paired opposites themes, 248, 553–54nn252, 255 palmistry, 138 Paperna, Irina, 373, 375–76, 492–93n14 Pappenheim, Bertha, 157 parenting/parenting advice, 345–49, 352–53 Pascal, Roy, 10, 112 penile obsession, 298–99, 563–64n45 Perelstein, Yeshayah Heshl, 422 Peretz, Yitskhok Layb: child protagonists, 462; on Kotik’s Zikhroynes, 500n103; Mayne zikhroynes, 413, 433, 435, 437; personal photographs, 421; personality cult, 418–19; place of, 15, 412, 433, 436; publication data, 45; and Viner, 435–36 Peri, Hiram, 502n1 Perl, Yosef (Joseph Perl), 61, 334, 410, 493–94n39, 499n91; Megalleh temirin, 410, 580n9 personal archives, 416–21, 423, 442–44, 587n144 personal/national identity dynamics, 217–19, 243, 250, 253, 424, 438–40, 450, 455–58, 459–60, 541n65, 543n101, 544n103, 555n273. See also Qera’ personality cults, 418–19 Petechiah of Regensburg, Sibbuv ha’olam, 180 Philipp, Thomas, 499n89, 503n22 photographs/portraits of authors, 107, 421, 513–14n164 picaresque narrative, 301–303 Piekarz, Mendel, 242, 317 Pike, Burton, 351–52 Pinqas (Community Record), 198, 282 Pinsky, David, 550n192 Podriachik, Eliezer, 423–24, 426, 430, 435, 589nn196, 197 pogroms, 373, 374, 378, 471 pomegranate seeds, 361 positivism, 372–73 post-colonialism, 3 post-modernism, 1–2, 12, 469

643

644

Index power alignments, 353–64, 574n90 Prague, 294–96 Pratt, Sarah, 4–5 preambles, 8, 11, 334–36, 438–32, 577n144, 578n159, 580n7 pride/revenge, 137 Proust, Marcel, 120, 206, 468 Proverbs, Book of, 405, 575n98 Psalms, Book of, 86–87, 132, 215, 291, 387, 590n234 publication data: Abramovitsh, 45, 526n375, 574n78, 584n95; ‘Autobiography of a Bohemian Jew,’ 507n68; Berdichevsky, 227– 28, 479, 537nn16,18,19, 546–47nn142–44,148, 550n182, 555nn272,274, 556n295, 557n307, 558n331; Bialik, 548–49n171, 555–56n277; da Costa, 533n502; Dubnow, 594n312; Emden, 286, 310–11, 412, 562–63nn12,18; B. H. Epstein, 380–81, 389, 582n37, 583–84nn79,82; Z. Epstein, 548–9n171; Euchel’s life of Mendelssohn, 567n113; family scrolls, 177–78; first-person narratives, 175–79; Gluckel of Hameln, 156–57, 178; Guenzberg, 336–37, 340–44, 366–68, 499n90, 571nn18–20,24, 572n49, 577nn145, 155; Halevi, 185–86; Hannover, 178–79; Helin, 178, 525n355; Heller, 525n350; Kahan, 597n380; Klog-lider, 177–79; lamentation and deliverance scrolls, 149–50; Letteris, 499n90; lexicons, 586nn129,130; Lilienblum, 371; Linetsky, 446, 592– 93n277; Lipschitz, 580n4; Lisitsky, 475– 76; Luzzatto, 499n90; Maimon, 368; Megillat ’ahima’ats, 507n67; Megillat ’eivah, 525n350; Modena, 104–107, 176; Nathan of Nemirov, 318–19, 567n109, 568n125; Nietzsche, 547n148; Niger, 566n94; Podriachik, 589nn196,197; Sadan, 596n355; Sholem Aleichem, 495n60; travel accounts, 179–80, 183–84, 531n471; Viner, 589n197; Vital, 507n68; Yagel, 82–83, 102 publication factors: history and nature of, 43–46, 80–81, 412; role of editors, 550n182; translators/translations, 43–44, 59–62, 156–58, 173–75, 184, 496n64, 527n388, 573n67, 590n234

puns. See word-play and puns Purim, 150, 151, 525n352, 548n169 Pusey, Edward B., 484–85n28 Qera’ (‘split’), personal/national identity, 217–19, 243, 250, 253, 259–60, 440, 450, 541n65, 543n101, 544n103. See also personal/national identity dynamics Qol sakhal (The Voice of a Fool; attr. Modena), 126–27, 145, 513n155, 519n241, 523n318 Rabb, Theodore K., 122 rabbinic approbations, 405, 583–84n82 rabbinic commentary, 85 rabbinic genealogies, 494–95n44 rabbinic proof-texts, 399, 406 Rabbi Binyamin (Yehoshua RadlerFeldman), 13, 411, 584n102 Rabinovitz, Ya’aqov, 579n187, 595n330 Rabinowitz, Alexander Ziskind, 72, 157 Rabinowitz-Te’omim, Eliyahu Dovid (the ’Aderet), 411–12, 459 Radler-Feldman, Yehoshua. See Rabbi Binyamin Rappaport, Sh. Y. (Shir), 106, 119, 512n153 Rappoport, Shloyme-Zanvl. See Ansky Rav Tsa’ir (Hayyim Tschernovitz), 411 Ravid, Benjamin, 513–14n164, 514–15n180, 517n214 Ravnitsky, Yehoshuah Hayyim, 413, 414, 555–56n277 Rayna Batya (wife of Naphtali Tsvi Yehudah Berlin), 386–91, 395, 397–400, 406, 583n67 reader asides: Abramovitsh, 208, 454; Emden, 309–10, 563n53; B. H. Epstein, 381–82; in Haskalah novels, 448; Maimon, 56; and ritual apologia, 46; Rousseau, 9–10, 56, 120; Viner, 427 reader response to autobiography, 17–36, 44– 50, 375, 415–16, 474–75, 500nn99,100,103 reading contexts: Ashkenazic, 147–75; firstperson narratives, 175–93; Gei’hizzayon (Yagel), 82–103; Hayyei yehudah (Modena), 103–47; retrospective illusion, 6, 12; scrolls of lamentation and deliverance,

Index 147–55; Sephardic, 82–147; speech community, 47–48, 50, 56, 62, 194–95; tradition models, 67–82, 104; Zikhroynes (Memoirs: Gluckel of Hameln), 155–75 Reb Mordkhele (Mordechai Tschermerinsky), 73–75, 459 Reggio, Isaac Samuel, 106–107 Reines, Yitshaq Ya’aqov, 583n76 Reisen, Avrom, 62 Reizen, Zalman, 415–16, 421, 425, 586n130 Renaissance/Renaissance Man: Burckhardt on, 135–39, 142, 521n269, 522nn291,296; fascination with body, 296–97; Italy as centre, 521n269; Jewish Renaissance, 522n291; and Modena, 133–38; Renaissance literature, 9, 18, 31, 42–43, 76–77, 139, 522n296 Renan, Ernest, 455, 594n314 Reshumot (periodical), 414, 422 Reubeni, David, 90, 513n162, 536n7; Travels, 181–84 rhetoric of silence, 100 Rivkin, Borekh, 492n10 Rivkind, Yitskhok, 423 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 2 Robertson, Ritchie, 57, 60, 498n85 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 7, 28, 306, 446–47, 564n65 Rolland, Romain, 447 Romanticism, 518n225 Rontsh, Yitskhok Elkhonen, 52 rootlessness, 463–65, 515–16n189, 543n95, 544n103. See also Talush Rose, Neal, 326 Rosen, Robert S., 174 Rosenfeld, Alvin H., 492–93n14 Rosenthal-Shnayderman, Esther, 429, 432 Roskies, David G., 71–75, 402, 504n26, 505n30, 524n344 Rossi, Azariah de, 90, 305 Rotblum, David, 587n158 ‘Rotenberg, Yoysi’, 431–35 Roth, Cecil: ed., Memoirs of a Siennese Jew, 185, 533–34n506; on Modena, 103, 122, 133, 138; on the Renaissance, 68, 521n269; on Yagel, 82–83, 508n88

Rousseau, Jean Jacques: and autobiography, 5–13, 113, 223, 564n65; and birth/childhood, 116, 120, 211, 297–98, 334, 349, 352, 573n68; Hebrew monograph on, 157; illness motifs, 297–301; journey motifs, 181, 182; narrative style, 49; novelistic technique, 7; personal archives, 416; ‘Russifying’ of, 373; sexual frankness, 189–90, 295, 356, 563–64n45 ———. influence on other authors: Dostoyevsky, 466; Emden, 289, 290, 297; B. H. Epstein, 382; Z. Epstein, 548–49n171; Guenzberg, 362, 574nn74,76; Lilienblum, 372, 578–79n176; Tolstoy, 548–49n171. See also Jewish autobiography ———. works cited: Émile, 347–50, 362, 512n153; La nouvelle Héloïse, 7; Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, 12; Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques–Dialogues, 12, 17, 32–33, 491n151. See also Confessions Ruderman, David, 82–84, 90–91, 97–98, 100–105, 145, 508n88 Ruskin, John, 211 Russia/USSR: and Berdichevsky, 204–205, 229; Bolshevism, 588n184; buried autobiographies, 422–38; changing traditions, 370, 583n76; Haskalah movement, 60–61, 225, 381; Jewish intelligensia, 53–55, 225, 345, 373–74, 487n68, 548–49n171, 583n76; literary environment, 14–17, 34–35, 487–88nn68,80, 572n48, 588nn184,185; Soviet Yiddish writers, 423–38; St. Petersburg, 383–85, 581–82n34; Stalin-era journals, 429 Russian Jewish Encyclopedia, 413 Sadagorer Hasidim, 201, 537n27 Sadan, Dov: and Agnon, 441, 470, 472–73, 596n356; autobiographical intent, 20, 460–61, 470; and Bialik, 450–52; literary criticism, 18–20, 22–23, 29–30, 290, 470–73; publication data, 596n355; Volozhin, 583n68 Sadeh, Pinhas: Hahayyim kemashal/Life as a Parable, 566n94, 476–77, 597n371 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 534n511

645

646

Index Schachter, Jacob J., 562–63n18 Schechter, Solomon, 382 Scheid, Elie, 186 Schocken, Gershom, 60 Scholem, Gershom, 185, 219, 359, 504n26 Schopenhauer, Arthur: and Berdichevsky, 242, 258, 262, 282 Schwarz, Leo, 502–503n10, 503–504nn16,23, 532n486; Memoirs of My People Through a Thousand Years, 69–71, 107, 133, 148, 502n8, 503n16, 513n162 scrolls of lamentation and deliverance, 147–55 sculpture, 484n17 Searle, John, 47 secularization/secular literature, 366, 449–52, 491n154 Seeman, Don, 386, 397, 400, 581n20 Sefer, autobiography as, 405–406 self-in-chaos, 465, 469 self/self-knowledge as subject matter, 17–36; conflicts over, 31, 72, 159, 209, 217, 260, 344, 470–73, 503–504n23; cross-cultural fashioning, 46–50; ‘discovery’ of, 39; matrices of, 445–61; modernism/ post-modernism, 11–12; oppositional expressions, 477; in Renaissance, 76–77, 90, 265–66, 485–86n444, 521n269; in sculpture, 484n17; self-concealment/selfrevelation, 56, 473, 488n82, 562–63n18; self-mythologization, 472; self-portraits in literature, 9, 18, 90, 185, 265–66, 277–78; self-referentiality, 176–77, 182–83, 225; solidity of self-image, 516n192; traditionalist versions, 377–412 Seltzer, Robert M., 594–95n320 Sephardic literature and autobiography: communal laments, 525n359; Gei’ hizzayon (Yagel), 82–103; Hayyei yehudah (Modena), 103–47; Sephardic origins of autobiography, 82–147; Spanish expulsion, 524n342 ‘Seventeenth Century Autobiography of a Bohemian Jew,’ 185–95, 350, 507n68, 535n521

sexual frankness: ‘Autobiography of a Bohemian Jew,’ 190–91; Emden, 291–95, 298–99; Gluckel of Hameln, 162; Guenzberg, 190–91, 346, 355–60, 367, 575nn98,102; Maimon, 190, 218, 356; Modena, 126; Rousseau, 189–90, 295, 356, 563–64n45; Yagel, 89, 509n97 Shadal (Shadel). See Luzzatto, Shmu’el David Shadhanim (marriage-brokers), 353–54. See also marriage/betrothal accounts Shaham, Nathan, 596n358 Shaked, Gershon,18–19, 477, 496n64, 561n395, 596n352 Shamir, Ziva, 34–35 Shatsky, Yankev: catastrophe-as-catalyst theory, 71–76, 148–49, 402, 504–505n27; correspondence, 504–505n27; on da Costa, 524n334; on Gluckel, 530n451; on Khmielnitsky massacres, 524n348; lexicon project, 415, 586n131; on Medem, 506n39; on Memoirs of My People (Schwarz), 502n8, 504–505n27; source material, 68–69, 147, 148, 151 Shaykevitsh, Nokhem Meir (‘Shoymer’), 15, 53 Sheinin, G., 425 Sherman, Eliezer, 419 Shiddukh (betrothal negotiations), 122–25, 162–64, 168–69, 291–93, 296, 299, 354, 574n91. See also marriage/betrothal accounts Shloyme Vulf/Rokhele story (Berdichevsky), 200–204, 537–38n27 Shmeruk, Khone, 160, 493–94n39, 525n355, 527n393, 566n94 Shofman, Gershom, 19–21 Shohet, Azriel, 305 Sholem Aleichem (Sholem Rabinovitsh): autobiographical novels, 446–47, 470; on Berdichevsky, 230; childhood accounts, 426, 470; correspondence, 418, 585n109, 587n146; Funem yarid, 426, 428, 433, 435; Hebrew language, 15; narrative style, 17, 29, 428, 462, 470, 510n133; per-

Index sonal archive, 418; personality cult, 419; publication data, 45, 495n60, 590n234; and Viner, 435; writing of autobiography, 412–13 Shoymer. See Shaykevitsh, Nokhem Meir Shrira, Shmuel, 413 Shteinman, Eliezer, 314, 470, 567n106 Shtern (periodical), 436, 437 shtetl (village/small town) life, 51, 478–79, 542n76 Shtibel, Abraham Joseph, 262 Shuger, Debora, 508n69 Shulman, Elias, 430 Shulman, Moyni, 589nn196,201 Shulvass, Moses, 133, 134, 138, 521n269 silkworm/moth parable, 350–51 Simon, Leo, 416–17 Singer, Isaac Bashevis: and Agnon, 471–73; apostasy narrative, 35; autobiographical intent, 471–73; Love and Exile, 471; publication data, 45; translation, 496n64 Slavic languages, 502n8 Smolenskin, Perets (Peretz Smolenskin): influence on other authors, 63, 473–74; and Letteris, 78, 506–507n50; and Lilienblum, 446; and Maimon, 63; and Mapu, 593n295; novelistic techniques, 62, 303, 422, 446; and Rousseau, 178 Snodgrass, J., 59 Soave, Moses, 107 social novels, 226, 462, 469 Socratic dialogue, 361 Sokolow, Nahum, 412, 414–16 Song of Songs, 535n519 Southey, Robert, 484n24 Soviet Union. See Russia/USSR Sovyetish heymland (periodical), 426, 487n68 Spanish Expulsion, 73, 148, 524n324 Spector, Yitshaq Elchanan, 378 Spector, Mordechai, 418, 587n146 speculum/self-portrait (Berdichevsky), 277–78 speech community/speech-act model, 47–48, 50, 56, 62, 194–95

Spengemann, William, 4, 502n1 Spiegel, Shalom, 229 St. Petersburg, 383–85, 581–82n34 Starobinski, Jean, 7 Steinschneider, Moses, 415–16 Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, 310 Story Book. See Mayse bukh ‘straight’ autobiographies (Mintz), 26–27 Sturrock, John, 143, 146, 506nn42,45, 516n192 suicides of Maskilim, 539n49 supernatural events. See miracles/ supernatural events superstition, use of in Renaissance literature, 138 supplications (Tekhines), 157, 158, 160, 170, 174, 177 surrealism, 472 Talmid khokhem story (in Gluckel), 161–65, 168–69 Talmud/Talmudic literature, 252, 256–62, 284, 299, 383 Talush (uprooted man) novellas, 463–67, 473, 596n352 Tchernikhovsky, Sha’ul, 8, 24, 422–23 Tehiyyah/“Revival” period of Hebrew literature, 53–54, 584n102 Tekhines (supplications), 157, 158, 160, 170, 174, 177 Ten Lost Tribes, 180, 183 Teper, Joseph, 513–14n164 text/discourse dynamics, 37–46, 55–56, 64, 194–95, 367–68 third-person narrative, 49, 226–28, 448 Tinelli, Tiberio, 137 titles: as author identity, 176–77, 415–16, 531nn457,458; Berdichevsky use of, 554n253, 559n368; posthumously conferred, 561n6; rootlessness depicted in, 463–65 Tolstoy, Countess, 128 Tolstoy, Leo, 30, 62, 373, 487–88n80; Childhood, 16, 382, 543n94 Torah/Torah-study and commentary: authority from, 387–88, 393–94, 582n50;

647

648

Index and autobiography, 405–406; male domain, 386–91; Torah memory, 383 Toren, Hayyim, 476 totalitarian regimes, 423–38 tradition: autobiographical memory, 261, 386, 410–12, 435, 437–38; disruption of, 449–52, 500n103; double historicization, 191–92; ethnographic reconstructions, 278–81, 334, 454, 548n169, 581–82n34; gender and Torah study, 386–87, 398–99; Heder (Cheder), 188–89, 229, 350, 358, 370, 535n515; Modena’s attacks on, 519n241; and modernism, 583n76; received (Nussah), 215; Shiddukh (betrothal negotiations), 122–25, 162–64, 168–69, 291–93, 296, 299, 354, 574n91; and spiritual needs, 361; tradition/continuity models for study of autobiography, 67–82, 104 translators/translations: Gluckel’s Memoirs, 156, 158, 173–75, 527n388; by Guenzberg, 573n67; Lisitsky’s ’Elleh toldot ’adam, 475–77; Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, 59–61; Sholem Aleichem’s From the Fair, 590n234; significance of, 43–44, 173–75, 184, 496n64 transubstantiation, 331 travel accounts, 179–85, 282, 326, 531n471, 532n486. See also journeys/journey motifs Treves family, 105 trial/deliverance themes, 300–301. See also meni’ah/meni’ot (hindrances) Trunk, Yekhiel Yeshaya, 479 truth: and autobiography, 562–63n18; truth/fiction dialectic, 56, 237–39, 244, 249; Truth/Poetry, 550n198 Tsaddiq, Bratslav concepts of, 316–19, 321; Tsaddiq/disciple relationship, 570n163 Tsava’ah (Ethical Will), 75, 109–10, 158, 174–75, 514n174 Tschemerinsky, Mordechai. See Reb Mordkhele Tsevi, Shabbtai, 172, 359 Tsitron, Shmuel, 366, 413, 572n38 Turniansky, Chava, 160, 166, 528n402

Ukhmani, Azriel 67 Ukrainian pogroms (1919), 280, 471 Ukranian Academy of Science, 432 Underhill, Evelyn, 326–27, 332 United States, 52, 444 urbanization, 449 Ussishkin, Menahem, 375 Varnhagen, Rachel, 60 ‘A velt mit veltelakh’ (‘A World with Little Worlds’: Berdichevsky/Bin-Gorion), 199–212; folk–narrator, 199–204, 540– 41n61; Hasidic Mayse motifs, 199–200, 205–207, 243; publication data, 537nn18,19; Shloyme Vulf/Rokhele story, 200–204, 537–38n27; significance of, 250, 285 Venice, 511n147 Vernant, Jean Pierre, 282 verse, dirges written in, 151–52 Vetshteyn, Hirsh Feivel, 437 Victorian diaries, 516n190 Vilna, 442, 576n133, 577n148 Viner, Meir, 425–38; compared to other writers, 433–36; depiction of ‘Yoysi Rothenberg’, 431–35; Grandfather Binyomen/beggars banquet, 427, 428; indeterminacy of person in autobiographical narrative, 427–28, 431–32, 589n201; Krakau bookseller segment, 437; publication data, 589n197 ———. works cited: ‘Der zeyde binyomen’; 426–38; Problemes fun folkloristic, 425; ‘Yugnt fraynt’, 426–38 Vital, Rabbi Hayyim ben Joseph, Sefer hahezyonot, 128, 218, 507n68, 519n237, 520n246 Volozhin yeshivah, 32, 380, 395–96, 398, 583n68 Voskhod (periodical), 53 Wachtel, Andrew Baruch, 17 Wagner, Richard, 463 Walden, Aaron, 530n455, 586n133 Warsaw, 62, 471 Wasserzug, Mosheh, 286 Watson, Julia, 483n10

Index Waxman, Meir, 525n359 Weber, Max, 288 Weimar, 236–40, 550n192 Weinreich, Max, 426, 442, 444–45, 515n188, 592n275 Weintraub, Karl J., 138, 503n22 Weisel, Naphtali Herz (Wessely), 336, 497n74 Weiss, Ayzik Hirsh, 178, 422, 533n499 Weiss, Yosef, 317 Wells, H.G., 74 Werses, Shmuel, 24, 26, 106, 244, 275, 488–89n96 Wessely. See Weisel, Naphtali Herz West/Western Europe: attraction of, 218, 283, 303–305; emergence of autobiography, 39–43, 52, 286–88; impact on Jewish writers, 210, 242, 376, 497n74, 501n108, 557n322; sexual mores, 356 Wilde, Oscar, 93 wills, inclusion of, 142, 512n149, 514n174, 516n194 Winchevsky, Morris, 374, 375 Wolfe, Thomas, 473 Wolfson, Harry, 69 women: Jewish scholars, 398; ‘Wisdom of Women’ (B. H. Epstein), 386–91, 397, 400, 583n67; women’s literature, 157. See also ’Gluckel of Hameln wonder-stories, 200 word-play and puns: anagrams, 248, 446, 570nn9,10, 579n183; Berdichevsky, 248, 518n227, 554n253, 557n322, 559n362; Emden, 562nn16–17, 563n29; Guenzberg, 570nn9,10; Lilienblum, 579n183; Modena, 126, 519n239, 520n248; puns, 126, 248, 356–57, 518n227, 519n239, 520n248, 557n322, 562nn16–17 Wordsworth, William, 181, 374 World War I, 20–21, 28, 401, 443 World War II, 444, 491n454, 502–503n10, 515n186 Yagel, Abraham: birth/childhood, 118, 518n226; and Book of Job, 510n117; Dante/Boethius influences, 508n88,

509n97; father/son relationship, 510n133; and Gluckel, 172–73; imprisonment, 509n95; and Job, 90, 510n117; and Modena, 514–15n180; moralizing discourse, 95–97; narrative style, 111, 510n133; night– flight literature, 84–85, 87–88, 93–94; physical/metaphysical theology, 98–101; place of, 68; rabbinic commentary, 85; sexual explicitness, 89, 509n97; strategy/ structure, 84–86, 101–103, 383, 398–99, 403, 510n109; visionary/moralistic dynamic, 101. See also Gei’ hizzayon Yates, Frances, 276 Yeats, William Butler, 41, 266 Yehoshua, A. B., 477 Yehudah the Hasid of Regensburg, 530n457 Yelinger, Maks, 597n378 Yemei maharnat (Nathan of Nemirov), 312–32; anonymous copyist of, 318–19, 568n125; Bratslav conception of Tsaddiq, 316–19; death of Nahman of Bratslav, 328–31, 569n149; meni’ah/meni’ot (hindrances), 320–23, 325–28; publication data, 286, 318–19, 568n125; response to, 314–15; strategy/structure, 322–28, 570n160; travel motifs, 323–28 Yiddish language, 15–16, 444, 496n64, 536n1 Yiddish literature: autobiography, 14–17, 45, 53, 426–38, 478–79, 499–500n93; Berdichevsky views on, 249–50; diaspora, 478; genre contexts, 158–61, 315, 447; and Holocaust, 471–72, 479, 597n379; literary criticism, 22–23, 425–26, 436, 438; and Maimon, 337, 342–43, 372, 499–500n93, 574n91; narrative style, 200; non- Jewish sources, 160; traditions, 53–54, 61, 153, 434, 478, 528n402; as ‘virtual territory’, (Rivkin) 492n10 YIVO: archives, 415, 592nn265,275; autobiographers, 32–33; autobiography competitions, 442–45, 447, 452, 455, 495n48, 592n271; Schwarz lecture, 503–504nn16,23; Vilna shrayber collection, 415, 586n130

649

650

Index Yuditsky, Avrom, 500n99 Zak, Abraham, 383–85 Zalkind, Shlomo Zalman, 577–78n158 Zederbaum, Alexander, 61, 499–500n93, 592–93n277 Zhitlowsky, H., 412 Zikhroynes (Memoirs: Gluckel of Hameln), 155–75; Amnon/Tamar story 529n413, 530n446; compared to other works, 148, 149, 172–73, 175, 184, 530n446; Faithful Friend story, 167; motivation for, 157–59, 166–67; publication data, 156–57, 178, 528n395; significance of, 155–57, 526n380, 527n384; sources, 160–62, 170; strategy

and structure, 156–62, 166–75, 198, 290; Talmid khokhem story, 161–65, 168–69 Zinberg, Yisroel: Hasidism and modernity, 313; Renaissance, 521n269; Russian Jewish Encyclopedia, 413; travel narratives, 181 ———. and other authors: Berdichevsky, 219; Emden, 307, 340; Gluckel, 170; Hannover, 179; Heller, 150–53; Maimon, 57; Modena, 521n284, 522n290; Yagel, 83, 510n133 Zionism, 230, 362, 365–66, 373, 375, 410–12, 460 Zohar/Zoharic literature, 299, 312, 359 Zschokke, Heinrich, 362