Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, Volume One 9780804775045

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Memoirs of a Grandmother

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture e d i t e d by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Memoirs of a Grandmother Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, Volume One

Pauline Wengeroff translated with an introduction, notes, and commentary by shulamit s. magnus

stanford u n i ve rs i t y p res s stan f o rd, ca l i f o rn ia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the Lucius Littauer Foundation. 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, archivalquality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wengeroff, Pauline, 1833-1916. [Memoiren einer Grossmutter. English] Memoirs of a grandmother : scenes from the cultural history of the Jews of Russia in the nineteenth century / Pauline Wengeroff ; translated with an introduction, notes and commentary by Shulamit S. Magnus. 2 v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Translated from the German. ISBN 978-0-8047-6879-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Wengeroff, Pauline, 1833-1916. 2. Jews—Belarus—Minsk— Biography. 3. Jews—Belarus—Minsk—Social life and customs. 4. Minsk (Belarus)—Biography. I. Magnus, Shulamit S., 1950II. Title. DS135.B383W46613 2010 305.892'404786—dc22 [B] 2009029056 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard

For Ruthie, whose deeds of love and support surpassed themselves. —Ruth 3:10

Pauline Epstein Wengeroff, ca. 1908.

Contents

Note to This Edition, to Translation,   Transliteration, and Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments Map

ix xiii xviii



Introduction

1.

Preface by Dr. Karpeles

89

2.

Foreword to the Second Edition

91

3.

Preamble

93

4.

A Year in My Parents’ House I. Part One II. Part Two

97 97 149

5.

The Beginning of the Era of Enlightenment I. Lilienthal II. Yeshiva Boys [Bokhurim]

173 173 186

6.

In the New City I. It Was a Pretty Picture II. One Sabbath III. Eva’s Wedding

193 193 203 209

7.

The Change of Garb

219

Notes Bibliography Index

233 343 359

Illustrations follow page 77

1

Note to This Edition, to Translation, Transliteration, and Illustrations

This work seeks to make Wengeroff ’s writing accessible to a general audience possessing no background in Jewish culture and history or women’s history and writing, as well as to contribute to critical scholarship on these subjects. I have tried to meet the needs of these diverse audiences by presenting a readable and honest translation, annotated so that the historical events and figures that Wengeroff describes and the many traditional terms she uses are identified and explained, and Wengeroff ’s sometimes idiosyncratic use of the latter clarified. I have tried to minimize scholarly citations and discussion in my Notes to Wengeroff ’s text, keeping such for my Introduction to her work and its Notes so that readers can engage these as they wish. This is an unabridged edition of Wengeroff, with no changes to the original chapter structures or other emendations; no insertions, for example, of section breaks or headings not found in the original. There are several reasons to have preserved the content and the structure of the original. Wengeroff ’s Memoirs is an extremely significant, indeed unique, historical source that should be available to readers in its entirety as she constructed it. It is also a literary, as well as a historical work. Wengeroff was widely read in Russian, European, and Jewish literature. By her own testimony and that of others, she loved books and was herself a gifted and conscious writer. Her Memoirs is anything but mere recording. The work is deliberate and styled; she is its architect. Nothing can be removed from it without doing violence to the whole and to her intentions. Some of these intentions, I argue, were conscious, but many were not or were embedded covertly in the text,

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and it is only by reading the whole as she presents it that we can appreciate both her conscious and unconscious purposes. Even on the rare occasion when material might seem digressive or superfluous, precisely these departures, I argue, in a narrative notable for coherence, fluidity, and purposefulness, give crucial insight into Wengeroff ’s thinking and should not be effaced. Tampering with an author’s work not only does violence to the original but deprives readers of the right to their own judgments. Wengeroff badly wanted her work—her work—published and read. That is what this edition seeks to do. That said, all translation necessarily is interpretation, commentary. Words can be translated in a variety of ways, and my choices reflect my sense of what Wengeroff was conveying, in substance and tone. My choices necessarily reflect my reading of her even as I strove to render her faithfully and convey her voice, keeping my own interpretations in my Introductions to both of her volumes and their Notes and in my Notes to her volumes. I strove to produce a text that reads fluidly, as the original does. On the other hand, I did not wish to efface or “correct” the fact that this is a nineteenth-century text, written by a very bourgeois woman with a developed and stylized sense of propriety and self-importance; a woman born in 1833 and in her late sixties when she compiled this work, an age that society then—and Wengeroff herself, the self-styled “grandmother”—considered hoary old age. I seek to preserve her tone, with its more formal phrasing than is common in informal, contemporary, confessional writing about self and era. Thus, I avoid the use of very contemporary idioms or colloquialisms or other informal renderings that would distort the tone of the original. I occasionally connect staccato sentences or disconnect the more common very long ones, and in particular, change the passive voice, so common in German, to the active voice, except when Wengeroff ’s use of passive (e.g., about food being prepared in her parents’ home or ritual being performed) is meaningful, indicating that such work was done by servants, or when the passive truly obscures who was doing what. When such wording in the original conveys something meaningful, I remark on this in the Notes. There are places when Wengeroff inserts a transliterated Yiddish— or partly Yiddish—text, to which she gives a German translation of Hebrew terms. Here, I allow my translation of the Yiddish to be in-

Note to This Edition

fluenced by her German translation since my purpose is reading and understanding her, not the sources she cites, per se. When there is a parenthetical explanation of a term in the text itself, this is Wengeroff ’s explanation, not mine. When Wengeroff ’s text has Hebrew or Yiddish transliteration, I retain the spelling (and apparent pronunciation) as it appears (e.g., suke, ­mezuzaus, kauses) there, rather than transposing the terms into a Hebraicized form (sukkah, mezuzot, kosot) or into standardized Yiddish. I change the spelling only to conform to accepted conventions (e.g., kh for soft ch) for Yiddish transliteration except when another spelling is common (e.g., Hannukah). However, in my own Notes, except when paraphrasing her, I use the now more familiar, Hebraicized transliteration (e.g., motsi). Wengeroff ’s text often transliterates inconsistently (e.g., mah-nishtano/ manishtane); I retain the transliterations as they appear. I do not know what, if anything, this inconsistency may have signified (except surely that no copy editor corrected her text, which is attested in many ways, as I note in my Introduction to her second volume). Again, my principle is to preserve, not correct, Wengeroff ’s published original. For Yiddish, I follow the transliteration convention in Uriel Weinreich, Modern English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), xxi; for Hebrew, that in Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1972), 1:90–91. Readers should note that the final “e” in Yiddish terms, for example, suke or havdole, is vocalized: sukeh, havdoleh. There are some differences between editions of Wengeroff ’s Memoirs, mostly of minor significance; when warranted, I note them; otherwise, this translation is based on the second (1913) edition of Memoirs, noted there as revised. Aside from a photo of Wengeroff that served as a frontispiece in her editions, there were no illustrations or maps in Wengeroff ’s Memoirs. I felt, however, that it was crucial to include illustrations that would bring life to description that would otherwise remain obscure and inaccessible to contemporary readers and non-­specialists. This was particularly true regarding Wengeroff ’s depictions of traditional Jewish dress but is also true regarding girls’ and women’s ritual and study, often assumed to be non-existent in pre-modern Ashkenazic culture. To maximize their usefulness without suggesting that they were in the original, or unduly imposing on it,

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the illustrations are in a separate section rather than within the text. Since no photographs, of course, exist for the 1830s and 1840s, the years that Wengeroff treats in her first volume, I have of necessity used images from the latter half of the nineteenth century and from the following century. While I have tried to use images from Wengeroff ’s native towns and region, I have also used some from other areas, and I have used some stylized, posed portrayals, as well—an anachronism perhaps, or not. Wengeroff did not write a diary, but a memoir—a retrospective account, forged in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. Local variations notwithstanding, in their basic tropes, the behaviors and dress that she recalls are more accessible in later images or in those from other regions of Jewish eastern Europe than those Wengeroff inhabited, than not. While posed, studio portrayals present obvious problems, Wengeroff ’s Memoirs itself is a posed portrayal, her mind and her pen serving as studio, issues I treat in my comments.

Preface and Acknowledgments

I first became aware of the existence of Pauline Wengeroff and her memoirs while in graduate school and in my first teaching position at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. As I taught courses in modern Jewish history, modern Jewish thought, and traditional Judaism, I became determined to uncover sources and teach Jewish women’s history, as well. I developed a course on that theme; the first time, I believe, that such a course was offered in a rabbinical school. I also resolved to integrate women’s history into my other courses in Jewish history. At that time, in the 1980s, few scholarly sources were available. Aside from parsing biblical and rabbinic sources with an eye to women’s realities, all I could do was seek information about women by combing the indexes of books such as Louis Finkelstein’s Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages or, more abundantly, in S. D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society. Material by women was very rare and limited in scope, the only significant extant and available source by a female author being the memoirs of Glueckel of Hameln (Glikl Hamel), in the abridged translations of Marvin Lowenthal and (more felicitously), Beth-Zion Abrahams. Lucy Dawidowicz’s anthology, The Golden Tradition, had a few, priceless excerpts from the memoirs of women, among them, Wengeroff, which I made a staple in both my “general” Jewish history and Jewish women’s history courses. Gripped by what I read there, I went to the stacks of Columbia University’s library to find her volumes, then went in search of what I was sure would be a long list of scholarly works about her. To my amazement, I found nothing of substance. All that existed were a few short encyclopedia articles that focused as much on one or more of her accomplished children as on her. At the time, I was

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writing my doctoral dissertation, as well as teaching and administering full-time. I thought, let me survive this; then, I want to work on that: Wengeroff. The more I learned about Pauline Wengeroff and probed her writing, the more my fascination and conviction of her historical importance grew. I feel deeply privileged to have worked on her memoirs and to bring them to light in this edition, especially since she dearly wanted her work translated into English and made available to a broad public. She wanted her account of traditional Jewish life broadcast so that something of that life might be perpetuated or revived in some way and her story of its demise, and her place in that cultural loss, understood (and, I argue, forgiven). It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many who have contributed to my doing this work. A fellowship from the Yad Hanadiv Barecha Foundation launched me on this project, giving me sustained time to read Wengeroff and begin my translation of and research about her work in Jerusalem, with its rich archival and library resources and colleagues who heard my first presentations about the memoirs. A translation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities came at a critical juncture in my professional life and made it possible for my work to proceed. An appointment at Stanford University Institute for Research on Women and Gender provided colleagues for the early work the NEH grant so generously supported. A grant from the Legacy Foundation sustained this work and me, expressing confidence in the value of this project precisely for the broad type of audience that Wengeroff had sought. My thanks to all those at the Legacy Foundation and to the Community Foundation of San Jose under Peter Hero, as well as to a group of extraordinary individuals and foundations whose interest helped support this project: Betty Altman Aronow; The Altman Aronow Foundation; Rita Braun; Malka Drucker and Gay Block; Maureen and Dr. Alexander H. Ellenberg; Susan Ellenberg; The Friedman Family Foundation; Martin and Shoshana Gerstel; Helen Marchick Goldman; The Morris and Betty Kaplun Foundation; The Koret Foundation; Julie Krigel; The Estee Lauder Foundation; Eva Lokey; Florence and Steve Marchick; Ken and Barbara Oshman; Eli Reinhard; Amy Sporer Schiff; Beverly Slater; Ruth and Alfred Sporer.

Preface and Acknowledgments

The Dean’s Office at Oberlin College under Dean Jeff Witmer provided support that made the illustrations to this volume possible and helped support the cost of producing the Index and Bibliography, as well. Ruth Sporer adopted me and this project, taking us both under her wings in the most extraordinary ways. Ruthie believed in me; followed my research, thinking, and writing at every turn and contributed to them time and again with sharp insights and careful readings, as acute for substance as for typos and stylistic infelicities. There was never a time that I picked up the phone to discuss the latest find or thought or sent the latest article or draft and found Ruthie anything but the most attentive and acute of listeners and readers. This was true from the first drafts right up to her reviewing the final manuscript. At pivotal points, Ruthie gave loving and wise support that sustained me and literally allowed me to continue work. Ruth, whose middle name is Naomi, embodies the qualities of devotion and friendship of her biblical namesakes in equal measure to them; kishmoteha, ken hi: as her names, so is she. I hope this work in some measure returns what she has given me. It is dedicated with love to Ruthie. My cousin Al Sporer welcomed me to his home and heart time and again, helping in many ways; not least, with computer woes, and with trail mix and homemade lemonade discreetly left at my side in the final phases. Edie Gelles welcomed me warmly to California, from the first, extending generous friendship and collegiality. She has listened to my thinking about Wengeroff over the years and generously read drafts, giving insightful critiques, sharing from her rich experience as a biographer. Edie’s boundless sekhel (common sense), wisdom, compassion, kindness, and wit have been pivotally important in my work and my life as the walls around my work space, adorned with various Edie aphorisms, attest. Her friendship has been a most precious gift. Agnes Peterson of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University gave most generously of her time, reviewing every line of my translation of both Wengeroff volumes with her native German ear, and graciously answering many queries with erudition, solid judgment, kindness—and tea. I am very grateful for her help. My wonderful students, in my courses on Jewish Memoirs, Mem-

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Preface and Acknowledgments

ory, Jewish Women’s History, and East European Jewry at Oberlin College contributed with insightful readings of my drafts of Wengeroff and other memoirs we studied together. For the gift of being their teacher, and now for some, their colleague, I am deeply grateful. Colleagues have given generously of their time, interest, and expertise. With gratitude I acknowledge: Paula Hyman, Michael Stanislawski, Chimen Abramsky, Marion Kaplan, Michael Silber, Shlomo Avineri, Shmuel Feiner, David Assaf, Shaul Stampfer, Sidney Rosenfeld, Joshua Fishman, Kathryn Hellerstein, Zvi Gitelman, Barbara KirshenblattGimblet, Gabriella Safran, Natan Meir, Deborah Pearl, Joseph Rezits, Carolyn Lougee, Tom Newlin, Tim Scholl, Jenny Kaminer, and Chana Hashkes. To Paula Sliwinski and Barbara Sliwinski, thanks for help with Polish terms. To Brenda Hall, Wanda Morris, and Kathy King of Oberlin College’s Program in Jewish Studies and History Department, respectively, warm thanks patient help with computers, printers, and scanners, and to Wendy Kacso of Oberlin’s Office of Printing Services, many thanks for expert help producing the map for this volume. I cannot find words to acknowledge or thank Steven Zipperstein adequately for the friendship and support that he has given me and this project from its early to its final stages. However inadequate: thanks, Steve. I gratefully acknowledge librarians and archivists who extended their expertise: Ruth Flint, Elona Avinezer, Aliza Alon, and Zipora Ben Abu and all the superb staff at the Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem; Robert Salidini, Harold M. Leich, and Kevin M. Lavine of the Library of Congress, Music Division; Donald Boozer, Subject Department Librarian, Cleveland Public Library; Julie Weir, Eugene Owens, and Cynthia Comer of Oberlin College, and Alan Boyd, Director of its Library; and Gitta Bar-Tikva, Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem. For consulting about illustrations for this volume and associated technical issues, my thanks to Roberta Newman; Jesse A. Cohen, YIVO Institute, New York; Gioia Sztulman and Amalyah Keshet, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Chana Pollack of the Jewish Daily Forward. My thanks to Ms. Elektra Yourke for permitting me access to the papers of her father, Nicholas Slonimsky, one of Wengeroff ’s grandchildren, held at the Library of Congress, as well as access to family photos, and for permission to reproduce them in this work.

Preface and Acknowledgments

To Norris Pope, Judith Hibbard, Leslie Rubin, and Sarah Crane Newman of Stanford University Press, my sincere thanks and appreciation for their meticulous editorial work on this manuscript and for their graciousness during the process. To my steadfast friends, Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer and Katharina von Kellenbach, whose friendship, support, interest, and humor are a cherished gift, my warmest thanks. Chana Hashkes lent her interest and brilliance over Talmud and tea. Rachel Elior extended warm friendship and offered the most stimulating conversations and radical insights about women in male culture. During a critical time, several people extended extraordinary help that, while not directly connected to my work, helped keep me and therefore everything I did, afloat. With warmest and everlasting gratitude, I acknowledge Ruthie and Al Sporer, Connee and Gerry Spindel, Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, Steven Volk, and Rivka Haut. Thanks to Janet Davis for help in illuminating aspects of my approach to this work. Audrey Warner rendered extraordinary last minute help with the manuscript and gave cats and plants care that allowed me much appreciated breaks. Michael Leach gave warm support, understanding, proofreading, computer help, piano tunes, wafers, and much other sacred hilarity. Aharon aharon haviv: dear Natan Yehuda, may his light shine, my most precious gift, has been my joy and my light since he first appeared on this planet. He fills me with pride, wonder, and boundless gratitude. This is for him, and for the future. shulamit s. magnus, beachwood, ohio

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The Pale of Settlement and Kingdom of Poland, ca. 1850, with important sites in Wengeroff’s narrative.

Memoirs of a Grandmother



Introduction I loved books. How real the past was to them (speaking of her parents and family). —Pauline Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother (2:29; 1:87)

Why Does a Jewish Woman Write Her Memoirs? On July 20, 1898, as she records in her memoirs, an elderly Russian Jewish woman sat down “on a small bench under an oak in the woods” outside Minsk and gathered her memories of youth. “As chance would have it,” she writes, just that day, she had “bumped up against the strong box” containing the letters that she and her fiancé had exchanged during their engagement, in 1849. She “leafed pensively through the yellowed pages” and felt the “crusts of ice” that a difficult life had built up around her heart “gradually melt away.” One picture after another rose up, she said, “like sculptures” in her memory and would not let her be, stirring the wish “to record for my children all that I lived through, as a remembrance of their mother.”1 With these words, Pauline Wengeroff (1833–1916), author of an extraordinary set of memoirs about Jewish society in nineteenth-century Russia, gives us entrée to her methods, putative motive for writing, and the seductiveness and complexity of her narration. She sets a dramatic scene: a bench in the woods of summer (Minsk was known for its surrounding forests), to which she retreated after a chance encounter with some of the most emotionally charged mementos of her life—letters, she tells us elsewhere, that were her most cherished possession, every one of which she had saved.2 Yet this passage also tells us that, while Wengeroff originally may have preserved personal documents for sentimental reasons, she was now, as a memoirist, using them professionally, to ground and give immediacy to her narrative. Indeed, the story of her engagement is not the only place that Wengeroff uses ­contemporaneous

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Introduction

documentation to support her tale. In her anguished portrayal of the end of kashruth observance in her marital home, she embeds diary entries she made at the time into her retrospective account, the memoir. Wengeroff makes occasional but significant reference to sources written by others, as well: to a published collection of Yiddish folk songs when she records her own memories of such songs and speaks of the RussianJewish dialect; to books and periodicals when describing such major events as Max Lilienthal’s tour of the Pale; or when she even invites her readers to “compare Zeitschrift Voskhod.”3 Wengeroff then, uses external documentation despite asserting that she had, and relied on, a formidable memory. “Many incidents are imprinted in my memory like wax,” she declares in her “Preamble” to Volume One (1:1), “so that I remember them even now with perfect clarity.” Coming at the very opening of Memoirs, this declaration announces her credentials—betraying of course, her perceived need to do this. Having proclaimed herself a grandmother in the title of her work, she immediately warns against being dismissed as one. It is significant that Wengeroff returns to the theme of her memory’s authority at the end of her writing, late in Volume Two, where she asks, rhetorically, “Is my memory dull? . . . Does a dark gauze blanket my eyes?” To which she responds, “Oh, no. I am a true chronicler.”4 Effectively, then, Wengeroff brackets her work with assertions about her memory, regarding which we have precious corroboration from the Russian Jewish historian, Saul Ginsburg, who marveled about “the clarity of her memory” even in Wengeroff ’s last years, when he interviewed her in Minsk.5 Clearly, Wengeroff does not intend to impugn the credibility of her memory. Writing at a time that Freud and others were fundamentally challenging the factual reliability of memory, Wengeroff never even considers the possibility that memory is selective or biased. In her protestations, memory is all, or seemingly nothing, and she has it all. And yet, she buttresses her account with documentary evidence.6 Further complexities abound. Despite her attempt to assert the spontaneous nature of her urge to remember and write, the muse seemingly alighting on her on that bench in the woods, that very depiction betrays Wengeroff ’s self-consciousness as a writer. Neither serendipity nor fate led her that day to the strong box with its letters. Surely, this was not the only time since she first stored it that she happened upon it. As she

Introduction

details in Volume Two, she, her husband, and their children moved a great deal; the box would have been moved and handled many times to have followed her to Minsk. Moreover, she also tells us that she perused the letters from her groom “from time to time,” “conjur[ing] up” the happy days of her engagement at less happy times.7 This then, was a habit to summon pleasure, not a one-time accident. No force suddenly compelled Wengeroff to pore over those pages that day in 1898, much less write two volumes of memoirs as a result. She says she yielded to memory inexorably, its images rising and working their inevitable effect on her. Yet, to use her own metaphor, the pictures of her memory rose like “sculptures,” and there is no sculpture without sculptor. Ironically, Wengeroff presenting her drive to write as inexorable betrays just how conscious and deliberate this act actually was, down to her recording the exact date and location of her thought-gathering, a kind of detail Wengeroff rarely provides. In all this, we glimpse a central feature of Wengeroff ’s writing: the gap between an explicit story line and details she herself provides that subvert that same line. No minor gaps of fact, these disparities are more like detonations, though they lie so quietly in a dramatic and flowing narrative that we are apt not to notice them on first, or even second, reading. Wengeroff conceals in the act of revealing. Yet, she also reveals in the act of concealing. This dynamic is not the result of simple duplicity (if anything, it is duplicity of the complex sort, the first victim of it being Wengeroff herself), much less sloppiness or intellectual weakness. It arises because what Wengeroff is about is not simply recall, despite her own self-characterization as simply a “true chronicler,” but something quite different: memory— selective and crafted deliberately, if not consciously, with a purpose and a message.8 Despite her announced credential, Wengeroff was no “grandmother” in the usual sense of the term commonly preceded by “Jewish.” Her memoirs mention not a single biological grandchild (and she had quite a few), while her fury at her children—the four she mentions and the three she omits—the supposedly loving, or at the very least, attentive, audience for her memories (“the wish stirs in me to record for my children all that I lived through, as a remembrance of their mother”), burns hotly in her work. She omits all mention of the extraordinary accomplishments of several of her children; her ties to some very prominent

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Introduction

and wealthy in-laws; and not least, her acquaintance and correspondence with Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism.9 Wengeroff lavishly details food preparation and meals in her childhood home— that is, she describes her mother’s table and food rituals—but with a few notable exceptions, says nothing about her own table when she was matron of her own hearth. Wengeroff ’s recorded memory was no impulsive response to a chance encounter but a calculated decision driven by complex motives. No grandmother spinning tales, Wengeroff bears the weight of her life and of an age in Jewish history in her narrative. It is only with an appreciation of these complexities, especially the existence of both story line and counter-narrative in her writing, that we can begin to understand her and, to cite Ginsburg once more, “one of the best works of Jewish memoir literature.”

Who Was Pauline Wengeroff? Ah, a woman’s life! (1:176)

Pauline Wengeroff was born Pessele Epstein in 1833, in Bobruisk, northern Belorussia (which she and Jews generally referred to as “Lithuanialite”), in the Minsk district. She died in Minsk in 1916.10 Wengeroff is known for her memoirs, which were recognized as a major historical source from the beginning and which scholars have cited as a source for a variety of subjects, from traditional Jewish customs and folklore to modern Jewish assimilation.11 Her memoirs, however, have been largely excluded from treatments of modern Jewish memoir and autobiography and their place in the history of Jewish self-referential writing has not been reckoned.12 Wengeroff ’s childhood home was wealthy, prominent, and very pious, though some of her family held what were at that time, culturally forward-looking views on certain subjects. Her father, Yehuda (Judah) Yudl Halevi Epstein (ca. 1800– d. Warsaw, 1879 or 1880), like his father, Simon Semel Epstein (d. Warsaw, 1856), manufactured bricks and was a supplier and contractor (podraczik) to Nicholas I in some of the Tsar’s many road, canal, and fortress-building projects. Semel, “one of the great contractors in the region,” built his fortune in a major

Introduction

fortress-building and provisioning project in Bobruisk in 1810, before being summoned to Warsaw, Wengeroff says, to “take charge of the great fortress construction there.”13 In the 1840s, her grandfather built the “great road” connecting Brest-Litovsk and Bobruisk for the government, cutting the trip between the towns from two days to one, a shocking advance for that time.14 Around the time of Wengeroff ’s birth, her family moved to Brest-­ Litovsk, which Jews called Brisk. Wengeroff links the move to her grandfather’s relocation to Warsaw; Yudl probably took over at least a part of Semel’s business in the Lithuanian region, though Semel did not withdraw from it altogether, since Wengeroff details his periodic visits to her family, undertaken she says, in the context of business trips. Father and son did business together: her father’s factory produced “many millions of bricks,” stamped with his initials, “J.E.,” for the fortress in Brisk that her grandfather was charged with building.15 Brisk was considerably larger than Bobruisk and favorably situated at the confluence of the rivers Bug and Muchawiecz and the junction of commercial routes connecting Moscow, Warsaw, and Kiev (see the Map to this volume). It had been a major center of Jewish life for centuries under Polish rule and was home to prominent rabbinic figures of mitnagdic (anti-Hasidic) persuasion in Wengeroff ’s time. The town was also the site of a smaller, Hasidic presence of the Chabad school.16 There were many rabbis and scholars in the Epstein line. According to a great-nephew, of two sons, Semel dedicated Yudl to Talmud study after an inspiring encounter during adjudication of a business dispute: the rabbinic judge refused to take payment for his services, saying that money only caused worry while Torah study brought inner peace. Yudl had shown a proclivity for such study, and Semel now resolved that this son should be a “nazarite” for Talmud. After some years of successful study, Semel presented Yudl to the same rabbinic judge for examination as “delayed payment.”17 While already a married man and father of three, Wengeroff tells us (surely relating a family tradition, since this would have been prior to any recollection of hers, and probably prior to her birth), Yudl studied in the Volozhin yeshiva (talmudic academy), one of the most rigorous and prestigious of Europe, coming home only for holidays.18 Typically, even accomplished Talmud students would, after some years, turn to business to support their families (the alternative, a

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Introduction

rabbinic post, especially in desirable locations, was limited), and such it seems was Yudl’s path.19 His business was a substantial success, allowing him to provide his family an extremely comfortable life, as Wengeroff ’s account of material circumstances in her home makes clear, from descriptions of her mother’s jewelry and lavish dress by both parents; of rich family meals and furnishings; and of her house, which had several wings, a “parade balcony” and pillars, and which was home to a large, extended family and servants. Yet Wengeroff consistently and insistently portrays her father as absorbed in study, prayer, and sacred ritual (“the chief purpose of his life”), with all else, and certainly monetary affairs, circumscribed to set hours and decidedly secondary. She provides many details that corroborate this assertion and the family lore about Yudl’s proclivities.20 His diligence in sacred study even while running a major business and more, after he retired, would result in several large, published works whose erudition (bekiut) his great-nephew, Baruch ha-Levi Epstein, a renowned rabbinic scholar, notes.21 Oddly, Wengeroff gives us no background information whatever about her mother. Though she is a central, even a commanding, presence in Memoirs, Wengeroff never tells us even her first or last name, nor does she mention her place of origin or anything about her family, giving only some physical descriptions and psychological characterization. Her mother was “dressed magnificently” for the seder table, “young and pretty” around 1840, “her bearing modest and unassuming, yet selfassured. Her entire bearing, her eyes, expressed sincere, profound piety, calmness, and peace of mind.”22 “I can still see her before me now,” Wengeroff writes elsewhere, how she stood there, lost in thought, with eyes closed and arms hanging down, how she removed all petty, worldly things, and recited the silent shemone esre prayer. Her lips barely moved but in her features lay her praying soul!23

From an autobiographical essay by Wengeroff ’s brother, Ephraim, we get the following: My mother was blond, of quiet, unresisting, unpretentious nature and in every respect bodily and mentally different from my father [from whom Ephraim was estranged]. She married my father when

Introduction

she was thirteen years of age, he being one year older.24 [Ephraim too, omits her name.]

The ages of Wengeroff ’s parents at marriage are consistent with wealth. Only Jewish families of means could afford to marry off pubescent children, whose support for several years thereafter one of the families undertook in a traditional contractual arrangement called kest.25 Several of Wengeroff ’s married sisters and their husbands and children lived with her parents in such an arrangement until the family’s fortunes fell, and it was forced to move to a more modest dwelling; Wengeroff and her husband, too, would live in a kest arrangement for the first years of their marriage, though in the (less common) patrilocal setting. Such marriages, arranged by parents, usually through the agency of relatives or a paid professional, were typical for the rabbinic and business elite. Means and respectability, at a minimum, would have been required of any bride for Yudl Epstein, who possessed all the critical variables for a distinguished marriage match in traditional Jewish society: wealth and rabbinic yikhus (lineage), as well as his reputation for “learning.” From Wengeroff ’s many descriptions of her mother’s piety, we deduce that she came from a solidly religious, if not an eminent, rabbinic family (had there been such descent, we would have heard about it in some family source). We know that she read rabbinically authored, popular, but not simple, Yiddish-language ethical texts, as well as the Yiddish translation of and commentary to the Bible that was standard study material for pious women in eastern Europe.26 In the parlance of traditional society, which Wengeroff uses about her own engagement, citing the type of match her future in-laws were seeking, her mother was surely considered a bas tovim, that is, daughter of a fine family, or as Wengeroff defines it, “a daughter of a learned and religious man.”27 From one of Yudl Epstein’s books, we learn that his wife’s first name—he, too, omits her family name—was Zelde (and that he remarried after her death). He says that she was “wise, righteous, and high born.”28 She died in her sixties, sometime after the Polish insurrection of 1862.29 Wengeroff contrasts her parents’ personalities, saying that, “Father was sharp and strict where Mother was soft and fanciful,”30 a contrast echoed in her brother’s characterization, cited above. These assertions, however, particularly the description of the mother, do not accord with

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the many vignettes Wengeroff tells about both parents, in which the father, though deeply pious, religiously stalwart, and forcefully opinionated, is shown having much greater cultural openness than his wife, as well as psychological insight and a sense of humor, while the mother emerges as religiously severe, tyrannical, with tendencies of the fanatic. It is no accident, I believe, that Wengeroff denies the plain meaning of her mother’s imperious behavior, as Wengeroff herself presents this (she is after all, our sole source of information about her mother’s behavior), preferring to assert other, “softer,” aspects of her personality. Wengeroff too, was imperious. As for her brother’s similar apologia, as we shall see, he was estranged from his father and very close to his mother.31 Wengeroff ’s omissions are very significant; indeed, I argue that they are key to understanding her memoirs. But we should not assume the seemingly obvious from the omission even of her mother’s name: there is no trace in Memoirs of tension, much less alienation, between mother and daughter (we will not draw the same conclusion about Wengeroff ’s failure to mention several of her children). Wengeroff admired her mother to the point of awe, apparently naming a daughter Sinaida (­Zinaida, born in 1867) after her.32 Wengeroff ’s mother is a central figure in Volume One, which focuses on Wengeroff ’s childhood years, but she is a strong presence in Volume Two as well, looming as a model of pious fortitude and awesome (and much envied) parental authority, and cited as a figure of prescient wisdom. Understanding the role that Wengeroff depicts her mother and other women playing in the family and in the female religious culture of traditional Jewish society is central to understanding not only Wengeroff ’s childhood but her adulthood, worldview, and the core message of her memoirs. Traditional society, which formed Wengeroff ’s values, including those about gender, did not reckon lineage through the maternal line unless there was distinguished rabbinic descent, which would account in part, but I believe, only in part, for Wengeroff ’s omission of personal detail about her mother. Given what Wengeroff says about the effacement of women in Jewish modernity, it is precisely her mother’s power and significance in the home and the importance of women’s roles in traditional Jewish culture altogether, which I believe is largely responsible for Wengeroff ’s omission of personal detail about her. Her mother serves a larger, culturally symbolic purpose in the memoir.

Introduction

Wengeroff ’s reticence about basic biographical detail is hardly confined to this relationship, however. Although she criticizes her father’s failure to provide names and dates of family members in his books, she herself fails to do this. She never tells us her own birth year (though she gives information from which it can be deduced; that is, she neither fabricates a date, nor obscures facts from which it can be computed).33 Nor does she provide a comprehensive, systematic reckoning of her siblings—how many she had, their names, or birth order. As we shall see, this gap conceals a glaring contradiction, and I believe, a cover up. Knowledge of Wengeroff ’s siblings comes from vignettes with which she illustrates a point in Jewish culture or history and from personal details she mentions in passing. Readers interested in the most basic family information must comb through her entire narrative to reconstruct what we might expect to find front and center in memoirs of a grandmother. A few other family sources help—and muddy the waters further. Wengeroff frequently mentions sisters, referring to “older” ones: ­Cecilie, Eva, Kathy, Marie, and to “my youngest sister,” Helene. However, we also get “older” sisters with Yiddish names—Khashe Feige, Khenye Malke, Khaveleben. These are surely identical to some of those named above, referenced by their Jewish names, just as Wengeroff refers to herself, when recalling childhood and family dialogue, as Pessele. Wengeroff herself, however, never makes this clear.34 There was also, as we have noted, a brother Ephraim to whom she refers as “my older brother” several other times, also mentioning an “older” or “eldest” brother, meaning of course, that there was a younger one or ones.35 Indeed, there is a single, passing reference in Volume Two of Memoirs to a younger brother, eight years old at the time of Wengeroff ’s marriage (in 1850), thus, about ten years her junior.36 Yet she pointedly notes that Ephraim was “the only son in the house,” who as such, was called “the kaddish”: the child in families with only one son who would recite the memorial prayer for parents in the synagogue, a public act devolving only on males.37 Their father, she says, saw in Ephraim “a successor to his Jewish national conviction” (late nineteenth-century, secularized terminology that is surely her construction, not his) and introduced him to the Pentateuch, Prophets, and then Talmud. In his autobiographical essay,

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Ephraim relates that he began school at the age of four for basic studies (Hebrew alphabet and prayers), which was typical, traditional practice for boys; that he had private tutors in Bible and Talmud; and that he pursued the study of Russian and German “by stealth,” a common expedient for boys seeking “enlightenment” in the 1840s.38 A precocious student, “visionary” soul, and jolly prankster, Ephraim was spoiled by both parents and all his siblings, Wengeroff says. Both she and Ephraim relate that he chanted the weekly Prophetic portion in the synagogue, according to him, well before the age of bar mitsvah, supporting her depiction of him as the family’s precocious, precious son. Both say that he was particularly close to his mother, an assertion borne out by a powerful vignette Wengeroff relates in Volume Two from Ephraim’s adult years.39 Both also state, he with vehemence, that he was estranged from his father. Reconstructing from the references in Wengeroff, the family had eight children, six daughters and two sons, with Wengeroff somewhere in the middle. In his essay, however, Ephraim (who had a medical degree), states flatly that their mother “gave birth to eleven children, three sons and eight daughters,” only two of whom he insists (in an essay ostensibly about longevity in his family, written from a quasi-medical perspective), a daughter and a son, died in childhood. Thus, according to him, there were nine, not eight, children who survived childhood. Ephraim says he was the fifth child and gives information that would date his birth year as 1829, making him Wengeroff ’s elder by several years, according with her characterization of him as her elder brother.40 It is bizarre, of course, that a brother and sister who grew up under the same roof would give different accounts of the number and gender of their siblings. How, in particular, to account for Wengeroff ’s pointed recollection that Ephraim was the family’s “kaddish,” against his bland report that there was another brother who lived to adulthood and even married? (Significantly, Ephraim does not refer to himself as the family’s “kaddish.”) And what to make of Wengeroff ’s own slipped-in statement that there was a younger brother? I cannot account definitively for these disparities and contradictions. I will conjecture that the younger brother that she mentions died in childhood (in line with Ephraim’s account), an event Wengeroff does not recount because it happened after she married and left her parents’

Introduction

house, putting it outside her experience and observation. I will also conjecture that prior to this, another, older brother, closer to Ephraim in age, came to an ignoble end—converted—which for a rigorously traditional family like Wengeroff ’s, effectively would have meant his death, observed with all the mourning rites save burial—converts being excised from all contact with the family. Such a “death” Wengeroff would have experienced but not reported, for it would have given the lie to one of her central claims: that Tradition reigned supreme in her parental home and the society of her childhood (as we shall see, she gives the lie to this claim many times, but never explicitly). A converted older son would account for Wengeroff insisting that Ephraim was the family’s “kaddish” because the youngest brother would not yet have been born in the years Wengeroff describes in Volume One (1836 or so through about 1841). The conversion of an older son (and the death of a young one) would have lent particular urgency to Ephraim’s continuing his father’s religious legacy, accounting for Wengeroff ’s characterization, cited above. It would also account for the pressure the family exerted to have Ephraim marry a cousin he did not wish to wed, done as both she and Ephraim report, because Semel Epstein did not want the family’s fortune dissipated by Ephraim marrying outside the family (a converted son would have been disinherited; daughters would be dowered—meaning a loss of fortune to the family—but would not inherit, leaving Ephraim the sole heir). As Wengeroff relates in Volume Two, the family’s coercion of his marriage and his unhappy home life led Ephraim to emigrate to America, where he converted to Christianity for a time, according to her; in fact, permanently.41 The obvious question is why family facts do not matter to Wengeroff, or more precisely, why she neither systematizes nor fleshes out the details in a family chronicle, nor excludes them altogether and just writes an account of her times.

What Sort of Memoirs Are These? A good part of the answer lies in their full title: Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century. In her memoirs, Wengeroff uses her life as a

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prism to refract a tumultuous age in Jewish history, and her telling of her era, to make sense of (and I argue, justify and exonerate) her life. Wengeroff’s life straddled the boundaries of a largely undisturbed traditionalism in the first half of the nineteenth century and precipitous modernization in the second. Using personal experience, she testifies to both realities and to the road leading between them; first, by painting a rich portrait of the traditional Jewish culture she knew as a child and then, by rendering an anguished, angry tale of radical assimilation in the small but conspicuous group of upwardly mobile Russian Jews of which she had become a member as an adult. Wengeroff ’s first volume focuses on traditional Jewish society in Lithuania in the 1830s and 1840s, including a rich ritual world of women, and on the first inroads of modernity as the Russian Jewish enlightenment movement, the haskalah, began to coalesce. She illustrates traditionalism by taking the reader through a year’s cycle of Jewish festivals and observances as lived by her family. She gives important insight into the ways that deep cultural change occurs by showing the reactions of various family members to the first organized expressions of haskalah to reach Brisk and the conflict this set off among them. In her second volume, Wengeroff gives a graphic account of the unraveling of traditional society from the 1840s till the early 1890s, focusing on the dissolution of tradition in her family and its circle and on the devastating impact this disintegration had on women—on her, but also she insists, on Jewish women as a whole. The coupling of the personal and societal in Wengeroff ’s writing is intrinsic and systematic and, I believe, the most fundamental among a number of reasons for her writing. Wengeroff at times cannot resist including personal details or criticisms and grievances that do not illuminate social reality—her grandmother-in-law had whiskers; her step-mother-in-law was critical and domineering. But Memoirs—while also achieving other goals—to a remarkable degree does what Wengeroff promises in its full title: tell cultural history through the life of a grandmother, writing the personal as political. Because the personal is female in Wengeroff ’s case, her assertion of microcosm-macrocosm about her life and that of the Jews in modernity is remarkable and unprecedented in the history of Jewish literature. Wengeroff does not, after all, claim to write a “cultural history of Jewish

Introduction

women in the nineteenth century”—an unimaginable focus, certainly for anyone who wished to be published—but a cultural history of the Jews. Yet she does this through the lens of female experience. In writing this way, Wengeroff fits neither of the now-classic categories that Elaine Showalter discerned in English women novelists for the years in which Wengeroff lived and wrote: “feminine” (1849–1880, during which women “wrote . . . to equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture and internalized its assumptions about female nature”) or “feminist” (1880–1920, during which women writers “reject the accommodating postures of femininity and . . . use literature to dramatize the ordeals of wronged womanhood”)—that is, protest traditional women’s roles and limitations in patriarchal culture. Wengeroff certainly “dramatizes the ordeals of wronged womanhood” in Jewish modernity but hardly in a feminist voice. If anything, Wengeroff ’s writing best fits a form of women’s writing that Showalter dates as emerging after Wengeroff ’s death—“female,” dating since 1920, in which women “reject both imitation and protest—two forms of dependency—and turn instead to female experience as the source of autonomous art.” 42 Wengeroff, indeed, writes from a fiercely female perch as a woman about women and female experience. The sheer quantity of information she gives us about women in traditional and modernizing Jewish societies itself makes Memoirs a historical treasure. Her first volume affords rare insight into girls’ games and pranks; their religious and secular education; their religious socialization at home and in society; and their experience of and reactions to arranged marriage. The last is a central, excoriated theme in the famous autobiographies of the maskilim (practitioners of the haskalah), but the narration there is exclusively from the male perspective. In Wengeroff, we view that of brides—an older sister and Wengeroff herself. Her second volume gives readers a window into girls’ acculturation and women’s experience of modernization during the era of the Russian Jewish enlightenment, treated by the maskilim exclusively, and by scholars nearly so, from the perspective of men and male experience.43 In all this, Wengeroff ’s memoirs are in stark contrast to those of Glikl Hameln (1646–1724), the only possible precedent of a Jewish female memoirist Wengeroff could have had. Glikl’s memoirs were published for the first time two years before Wengeroff claims to have sat

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down on her bench.44 Wengeroff never mentions them (another of her notable omissions), but it is inconceivable that she, who was highly literate and attuned to the culture of German-speaking Jewry in particular, did not know of them or was uninfluenced by the fact of their publication, or as I believe, their content. Glikl’s memoirs are a rich source of information about the economic activities of the Jewish merchant (upper) class in central Europe in her time; about the nexus between economics and family ties in this class; and about the education, piety, and economic and family roles of women in this group. This is not however, because Glikl writes for this purpose. Readers must seek external sources to even identify the Court Jews, including women, that populate Glikl’s account, much less grasp their economic significance, or Glikl’s. Glikl does not write from the perspective of women. Of a woman, yes, but purely an individual, and a private one, at that. Wengeroff ’s perspective is fundamentally different. Her memoirs not only record women’s experience (or to be sure, her representation of this). They make it central to the tale of emerging Jewish modernity and to grasping what Wengeroff portrays as the fundamental tragedy of modern Jewish history: the loss of traditional Jewish culture. This catastrophe, she asserts, illustrating with the tragedies of her life, was a consequence of women’s loss of power in the Jewish family and thereby, in Jewish culture, a loss brought about by the arrogance and shortsightedness of modernizing Jewish men. Her narrative, then, is both woman-centered and gendered, telling us about culturally based relations between men and women in traditional and modernizing Jewish societies, and giving a particularly stark reading of the role of gender in shaping a different experience of Jewish modernity for women and men.

Naïve Women-Centeredness Wengeroff writes from a woman-centered perspective naively and unself-consciously, not as a feminist, that is, someone aware and critical of constructed power relationships between women and men in family, society, and culture that privilege men and subordinate women.45 Movements for women’s rights existed in Russia in Wengeroff’s time, and she was well aware of them. Her daughter Zinaida was a promi-

Introduction

nent Symbolist literary figure of the turn of the century and an avowed feminist who wrote about women’s rights, expressed radical critiques of marriage, and lived in a ménage à trois. Another daughter (Faina, omitted from Memoirs) attended medical school for a time, one of the first women in Russia to do so, and “planned to go into the country upon graduation to teach peasant women how not to be slaves.” A third daughter, Isabelle, had an abortion at the age of sixteen, an act associated with feminist radicalism at the time.46 As we shall see in Volume Two, Wengeroff mentions the Russian feminist movement of the fin de siècle in what I am convinced is a deliberate allusion (and retort) to Zinaida’s and Faina’s involvement.47 She does not cite this movement’s tenets as a reference for her own thinking or work, much less situate herself in its ranks. Nor does Wengeroff cite another potential model for Jewish women’s literary assertiveness: scholars have documented the existence of some thirty maskilot—women writers who advocated maskilic ideas and composed letters, essays, poetry, and fiction in Hebrew. Some of these women were published. Some were influenced by Russian feminism, decried the traditional status of Jewish women, and criticized rabbinic culture on that account—something Wengeroff never does. We cannot say for certain that Wengeroff knew even of those of the maskilot who were published, but this is at least a possibility. Avraham Mapu, creator of the modern Hebrew novel and a major figure in the haskalah—as Wengeroff notes in some detail, citing his main works and their literary significance—tutored Wengeroff’s son Semyon in German and Russian and “often” spent time in their home, for a “cozy little chat” and in conversation with her husband.48 Mapu corresponded with one of the maskilot, Devorah Ephrati, whose Hebrew letter to him was published in the Hebrew journal Hamagid in 1858—around the time that Mapu would have tutored Semyon.49 Thus, it is quite possible that Wengeroff could have associated herself with these women writers, had she felt that her work and theirs shared an essential affinity. Wengeroff writes from a woman’s perspective because this is what she knew, because her consciousness was forged in a traditional female culture of formidable potency from which, as I argue below, she never separated. Born of this experience, Wengeroff has a naive conviction of women’s cultural importance. She expresses that conviction in a central

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way in Memoirs, by locating women’s sphere—the family—and women’s experience, as the sites of radical cultural change, making these the epicenter of the upheaval that undid traditional Jewish society. This is in sharp contrast to the autobiographical writing of the maskilim, her contemporaries, who for all their focus on, and critique of, the traditional Jewish family make the intellectual struggle between science and rationalism against traditional obscurantism and fanaticism—the battle for “enlightenment”—the site of cultural change. Wengeroff ’s position is one that family and social historians readily take today but that was unprecedented in Jewish writing of her time, or until quite recently, ours. Even if Wengeroff had not told the story of Jewish modernity through gender and women’s experience, but written a memoir of women’s social and religious realities, this would have been remarkable, for writing normatively of human experience from the perspective of one of its genders has, until quite recently, been the exclusive prerogative of males. Writing at all—recording for transmission one’s version of reality—is an elemental act of power, which for most of history women have been denied. The traditional Jewish culture out of which Wengeroff emerged, obsessed with texts and scholarship, made learning imperative for males and the culture’s highest ideal, but tolerated for females only the literacy necessary for compliance with religious behavioral norms and an accompanying, appropriate piety.50 The haskalah sharply criticized the neglect of female education in traditional Jewish culture and advocated a certain level and kind of education for women, but it overwhelmingly saw women as consumers, not producers, of “enlightened” culture. To the maskilim, women were a “lower” population in need of cultural elevation, just as Jews in general, in this type of colonialist thinking shared by European and Russian statesmen and maskilim, were a “lower” population in need of “betterment.” The maskilim, who created a cascade of writing in several genres, were heirs to a vast tradition of male writing. Many of them had been groomed for the rabbinate, the height of literacy. The issue between them and the traditional authorities against whom they rebelled, was which men would control culture. That men did so was a given. As Iris Parush puts it, the maskil’s “ideal of the modern, well-ordered society was one in which the enlightened and educated man would have unchallenged authority.”51

Introduction

As a woman writer in the nineteenth century, Wengeroff could lean on no such tradition of cultural support. On the contrary, she had to counter norms that explicitly discounted women’s intellectual capacities or, if these were granted in extraordinary cases, denied the propriety of women pronouncing about anything beyond the familial sphere (which in pre-modernity, included the family business), to which convention assigned them, and that, only in private. Wengeroff ’s forthright pronouncement about her life and an age in Jewish history and her assumption of authority as a composer of memoirs is, on this count alone, therefore, extraordinary. Her work is full-length, coming to over 400 printed pages in two volumes. She gives a systematic, chronological, and thematic treatment of Jewish modernity from the time of her birth to the end of the era of the haskalah in Russia, with a message and theory about what went wrong: women’s loss of cultural power and the Jews’ progressive deracination, with the two in causal relation. Wengeroff, moreover, sought publication of her work on several continents (indeed, I believe, intended them for publication from the beginning), making her the first female memoirist in Jewish history to do this. Glikl Hamel intended her memoirs solely for her family’s eyes, telling us that she records details about her beloved first husband so that children too young at his death to remember him would have that information.52 While neither remembrance of her husband nor widowed loneliness, Glikl’s other stated reason for writing, exhaust her actual motivations—she was clearly a preacher, as well as a writer who reveled in the tale—Glikl could neither imagine nor would she welcome, thousands of perfect strangers, let alone Gentiles, poring over her words. In line with the purely private nature of her intended readership, Glikl did not even title her writing. The title by which it became known—“memoirs” (zikhroynes)—was assigned by her publisher centuries later.53 In late 1905 or early 1906, Wengeroff, by contrast, sent her first volume to Gustav Karpeles, editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, the foremost journal of German-speaking Jewry, seeking its serialization in this weekly (which, obviously, she read). In a letter dated January 1, 1906, Karpeles, a historian of German and Jewish literature, rejected this idea, he told her, because the material “would be completely swallowed up in so large a setting.” Instead, he advised, it

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merited ­publication as a book. It was surely Karpeles who shepherded Wengeroff ’s Memoirs to publication in 1908 by the Poppelauer House in Berlin. Poppelauer published his own writing, as well as other scholarly works of German Jewry, such as the Jahrbuch fuer Juedische ­Geschichte und Literatur in Deutschland (the Yearbook of the Society for Jewish History and Literature in Germany), which Karpeles, one of the Society’s founders, edited.54 Karpeles wrote the Preface to Wengeroff ’s first volume; she asked him to write one for the second, too, repetition he refused as “of course . . . quite impossible.” But, pronouncing the second volume “at least as interesting, indeed, to some extent even much more interesting [than the first],” and “convinced that it will be very widely read,” he offered to commend it in the Allgemeine Zeitung and the Yearbook for Jewish History and Literature, “to the fullest extent possible,” which of course, given his associations, was considerable.55 Lacking her desired second Karpeles Preface, Wengeroff produced her correspondence with him about it in Volume Two, published for the first time in 1910—a year after Karpeles died—effectively, wresting from him the endorsement she had sought. Nor was this Wengeroff ’s first foray into print. In October and November, 1902, she published excerpts (in Russian) from already-written memoirs in Voskhod, the Russian-language Jewish journal, published in St. Petersburg (which, as noted above, she cites in Memoirs). Voskhod was the voice of Jewish intellectuals who promoted Jewish acculturation, Russification, and loyalty to Russia, on the one hand, and Jewish cultural perpetuation, on the other. The paper also supported Jewish self-defense in the face of anti-Jewish violence. At the point that Wengeroff published there, the editorial slant of the paper was nationalist, even Zionist. Voskhod had a circulation of about 5,000 subscribers in 1902 (meaning that many more actually read it) and was the venue for some of Russian Jewry’s most distinguished writers, including Saul Ginsburg; Simon Dubnow, the great historian of eastern European Jewry; and haskalah’s poet laureate, Y. L. Gordon. It also featured translations of other, particularly German-speaking, scholars and writers, including Karpeles. Clearly, Wengeroff scored a coup in having her work published there.56 Notated as “translated from the German manuscript,” the material in Voskhod derives from what would become both Volumes One

Introduction

and Two of the Poppelauer edition and corresponds almost completely with those texts. By late 1902, then, within a few years of when she says she began to write, Wengeroff had at least portions of both volumes of her memoirs in hand and was already seeking publication.57 Indeed, the lines with which Wengeroff ends Volume One—“Today, such incidents seem impossible. But these outward torments and tragedies were but a miniature picture of the tremendous upheavals that were brewing”—are no way to end a terminal volume. They are a tease to entice readers to a sequel already in the works, and quite possibly, already written even as Wengeroff published her first volume. Volume One barely off the presses, Wengeroff in 1909 initiated a correspondence with Solomon Schechter, eminent scholar of rabbinic literature, President of The Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, and a member of the Publication Committee of the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) of America, seeking an English edition of her work, which now included a complete second volume. I suspect that Karpeles (who died in the summer of 1909), midwifed this contact as well: in 1895, JPS had published his Jewish Literature and Other Essays, a collection that included an essay on “Women in Jewish Literature,” a theme on which Karpeles had published a book in 1871.58 Wengeroff ’s proposal ultimately failed (as did her hope to get her work published in England), despite her persistent efforts over several years and Schechter’s strong support.59 But it is her initiative that is significant, testifying to Wengeroff ’s extraordinary ambition and assertion in the public sphere, one mark, among many, of her modernity. Indeed, Wengeroff seems to have leapfrogged entirely over the “anxiety of authorship” (in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s phrase) that inhibited women writers in general in the nineteenth century, inhibition that according to Tova Cohen, affected the handful of women who wrote in Hebrew, in particular.60 While Wengeroff does see herself as a grandmother of a certain type, an important self-conception to which we shall return in the Introduction to Volume Two, given her significant, at times, breathtaking, omissions and the overall nature of her memoirs, I have come to see her grandmotherly pose as precisely that: the ruse required for her to write, and especially, to be published. What other credential could an elderly woman without an ideological base or institutional context for

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her writing possibly have asserted if she wished not only to be read within her family or, samizdat-style, among acquaintances, but widely published, as clearly, Wengeroff did? The question, of course, is Wengeroff ’s intended and actual audiences, a subject to which we return in the Introduction to Volume Two. One thing of which we can be certain is that it was not her children (with the possible and limited exception of Zinaida), Wengeroff ’s remarks about this notwithstanding. Suffice it to say here that there was much that would have emboldened Wengeroff to think she would have a different, broader audience, receptive to her writing by the turn of the twentieth century. In this reading of the cultural moment, Wengeroff was fully vindicated: Memoirs was published and republished, during her life and posthumously.61 While there was still great resistance to Jewish women’s intellectual and literary authority, much had changed in Jewish culture since Glikl’s time—indeed, the publication of Wengeroff ’s memoirs shortly after those of Glikl should itself be seen as a signpost of that change. But clearly, Wengeroff was an audacious woman and her actions, trailblazing.

Memoirs as Literature, Social Observation, and History Wengeroff’s memoirs are first-rate literature, crafted by a talented writer who knew and loved literature. She cites not only traditional Jewish but maskilic writing and refers, as well, to German writers, including that staple of enlightened German Jews, Friedrich Schiller, and to Heinrich Heine. She cites Russian literature—the works of Turgenev and others and works by English writers, Benjamin Disraeli and Edward Lytton Bulwer, whom she read in translation. She says she “loved books,” and about several points in her life that she read avidly. Her love for German literature is confirmed by Vladimir Medem, one of the foremost leaders of the Bund, the Jewish socialist movement in Russia. Medem (1879–1923) grew up in Minsk where, he says in his memoirs, his assimilated parents socialized with “the affluent and educated [Jewish] intelligentsia” of the city, running a reading circle for the German classics in their salon. Recalling an evening, presumably in the 1890s, when someone read Heine or Goethe aloud, he writes, “I

Introduction

can still see a dignified old matron sitting there shaking her head to the cadence of the poems. ‘It was Pauline Vengerov,’ he says, ‘years before she wrote her memoirs.’”62 Wengeroff was a keen social observer with a fine sense of style, irony, tragedy, and humor and a sharp eye for the significant in the quotidian. The family vignettes with which she illustrates the generational and gendered culture wars of her childhood and adulthood sharply evoke these struggles. Hers is anything but the flat chronicling of mundane, or even historic, events that fill memoirs of lesser artistry.63 Surely, it was their literary qualities, as well their content and a sense of the public resonance they were likely to meet, that made literary men like Schechter and Karpeles champion their publication. Memoirs of a Grandmother is also notable for its sense of history. To continue the earlier comparison: Glikl’s traditional worldview is expressed as much in the ahistorical nature of her writing as in her moralizing. To Glikl, history is a static process in the hands of the Almighty, a tableau of divine will unfolding, with Jews acting out a drama of Sin, Exile, and (someday, in God’s inscrutable timetable) Redemption. Wengeroff, by contrast, is pervaded by an awareness of the role she and her contemporaries played in larger processes unfolding in their lives. In her telling, she and they are actors exercising fateful choices, if also victims of overwhelming social forces. This perspective is another powerful expression of Wengeroff ’s modernity, her nostalgia about tradition notwithstanding. Wengeroff does have a strong sense of fate; indeed, I argue that this plays a significant role in helping her deal with a profound sense of guilt for her perceived failures. But her determinism, while surely influenced by that of traditional Judaism, is much more psychological than theological, and as such, is a mark of her modernity more than any traditionalism.64

Memoirs of a Grandmother and Maskilic Autobiography For all the difference with the pre-modern Glikl, Wengeroff’s sense of self and purpose in her memoirs is in equally stark and significant contrast to that of the maskilim, her contemporaries. The maskilim pioneered a genre of Jewish writing about the self in the nineteenth century patterned consciously on Rousseau’s Confessions. Intensely

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personal probing of their childhood and adolescence, maskilic autobiography chronicled such matters as unfolding and dysfunctional sexuality, including impotence, as part of a larger goal of exposing the dysfunction of traditional Jewish society and their own evolving consciousness toward enlightenment. A number of motifs are staples in the canonical “greats” of this genre—Mordechai Aron Guenzberg’s Aviezer, Moshe Leib Lilienblum’s Hatot ne‘urim, and Avraham Ber Gottlober’s Zikhronot miyemei ne‘urai—and in the numerous spinoffs by others who followed their example. There is the demented melamed (the teacher in the traditional kheder [elementary school]), whose ignorance is matched only by his sadistic pleasure in tormenting babes barely out of swaddling clothes. The curriculum in these schools (Leviticus; Talmud; fables taken as verities) is similarly inappropriate because traditional society has no understanding of stages in childhood development (the maskilim were also deeply informed by Rousseau’s Emile). Useful subjects—mathematics, science, history, geography, European languages— are excluded, anathematized by a community ignorantly dismissive of their benefits. Equally prominent in maskilic autobiography are woeful tales of arranged childhood marriages to incompatible child-partners with demonic mothers, into whose clutches the adolescent future authors are delivered for miserable years of (matrilocal) kest. Finally, there is salvation from depravity and darkness: a maskil, a pivotal maskilic work, to show the hero the way of light and salvation.65 Maskilic autobiography was both critique and remedy. It castigated the insularity, xenophobia, superstition, and fanaticism of traditional Jewish society by depicting the authors’ miseries in it, and then revealed the route to “cure”: relentless probing and improvement of the self through rational inquiry and critical reasoning. Charting the process of progressive “enlightenment” through autobiography honed the authors’ rational self-awareness. It also had didactic value for the intended audience of unenlightened (male) readers, who would be guided in introspection, interrogation of their consciousness and intellect, and rational, empirical approaches to study and living through gripping tales whose tropes they could not fail to recognize. Intense focus on the self was to have far-reaching social repercussions. The difference between this solipsistic type of writing and Wengeroff ’s is fundamental.66 Wengeroff ’s voice is forthright in her narra-

Introduction

tive, but the focus is not on her evolving consciousness. Nor could it have been. Had Wengeroff written an autobiography in the maskilic, Rousseau­istic sense, she never would have found a publisher. The trajectory of a woman’s consciousness was not a subject that would have registered, much less resonated, in the Jewish reading public of nineteenth- or early twentieth-century eastern (or central or western) Europe. Her consciousness would have interested no one. As Wengeroff would lament, it did not even interest her husband and children. Her experience and her testimony of Jewish experience, on the other hand, would be of great interest, as Wengeroff sensed. But there was also no cultural context that could have produced a focus on self-consciousness in Wengeroff herself. In his masterly study of East European Jewish autobiography, Marcus Moseley traces how the Rousseauistic tradition was transmitted among the maskilim. While it was a major leap for any group of Jews to make an explicit intellectual model of a non-Jew, something Moseley rightly notes as a significant step in secularization, in Rousseau, the maskilim acquired a precedent that made their efforts in the Jewish sphere plausible. Even if this plausibility was in their eyes only, this sufficed. However fierce the traditionalist opposition, they knew that there was a great intellectual tradition in whose image they were fashioning themselves. And—there was a “they,” a group, however variegated, that shared a perspective and basic goals. The fact that the maskilim were an intellectual elite meant that communication was at the core of their activity; they were in active touch with one another, offering encouragement, critiques, strategies. Moseley rightly scores the existence and importance of maskilic intertextuality. Salomon Maimon (ca. 1753–1800) drew on Rousseau. Guenzberg drew on Rousseau and on Maimon. Lilienblum prominently cites Guenzberg, even referring readers of his autobiography to Guenzberg’s for an account of childhood since traditional Jewish boyhood was formulaic, devoid of significant individual variance, and Guenzberg literally had done a model job depicting it. Legions of other maskilim and later intellectuals would cite Lilienblum’s Hatot. Given who they were and what they were about, the maskilim had a medium—writing—and a network of communication from the beginning.67 The maskilim were thus able to create not just works, but a genre. No such option was open to Wengeroff or, even for some time

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later, to any Jewish woman, for whom there was no literary tradition, past or contemporary, in which she could see herself as a disciple.68 But if Wengeroff could not write an “autobiography,” as Moseley defines this term, neither, to follow him, did she write memoirs. Memoir, according to Moseley, focuses “not upon man’s [sic] inner being but upon his observable actions within the social [i.e., public] arena” (emphasis mine). “The focus of memoir,” he says, is exclusively adult. The memoirist provides the reader with an adult’s assessment of other adults whom he has encountered in the years of his maturity. An unobserved observer, his gaze firmly directed outward, the memoirist must present himself, insofar as he does present himself, as an adept sophisticate. The memoirist, unlike the child, moves in the corridors of power; the memoir is thus, and had been since Hellenistic times, a favoured genre of courtiers and politicians. The concern of the memoirist is . . . not with the self but with the other. The significance of this other is independent of personal consideration and arises purely from social consensus. Autobiography operates upon an entirely different set of criteria. For the autobiographer, the significance of the other is determined solely by the role that he or she plays in the formation of the “self,” regardless of social standing. Many of the 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 staff may thus achieve a prominence in the autobiography that would, in the memoir, be reserved for generals and prime ministers. Autobiography thus deals with the child’s perception of others who are, in society’s terms, more often than not insignificant—memoir with the adult’s encounter with men [sic] of prestige and position.69

But Wengeroff did write. Her perspective is the child’s and the adult’s. She wrote about childhood and adolescence, parents, teachers, playmates, and domestic staff (“autobiography”) and about great events and personalities, whose “corridors of power,” “prestige and position” (“memoir”) she, of course, did not inhabit. What she produced does not fit either of Moseley’s categories—whose boundaries Moseley himself violates when discussing quite a few (male) authors, testifying to the limits of their usefulness even for him.70 But these categories not only have limited usefulness; they can impede understanding. It is one thing to trace distinctions that illuminate the nature of literary genres and an-

Introduction

other to create categories, as in this case, which efface a major work, as well as significant realities of a larger literary and cultural history. Literary criteria that necessarily exclude Wengeroff from consideration cause us to lose sight not only of her but of crucial aspects of the larger Jewish society of her time—the conditions out of which she emerged, to which her work testifies; the problems and audience she sought to address; the larger cultural context that made it possible for her to write and be published; and the robust reception that greeted her work. Moseley’s definitional criteria derive from certain types of male writing yet categorize Jewish self-referential writing as a whole; Moseley’s title is not “Maskilic Autobiography” but “Jewish Autobiography in Eastern Europe.” This distortion is not uncommon. The very articulateness of the maskilim against the silence of the vast majority of Jews, and their enormous cultural influence, made their writing conspicuous, which has led to a presumption of normativeness: we have before us dramatic, explicit tales of “the odyssey” from Jewish traditionalism to modernity. Somehow, the contradiction between the justified emphasis on the specificity and uniqueness of the maskilic product and the assertion that this product is normative, has been missed. Maskilic autobiography has stamped our impression of traditionalism and modernity, of youth and coming of age in nineteenth-century eastern Europe, to such an extent that we can fail to see how atypical the maskilim were, despite the fact that they were an intellectual elite mostly from the middle ranks of Jewish economic society. Even the maleness of the accounts of this “male fraternity” has been overlooked until recently.71 The descriptions of male sexuality and impotence; forced and premature fatherhood; traumatic relations with mothers-in-law; frustrated relations with traditional wives; wife and family abandonment; divorce; inability to find or consummate satisfying relationships with other women; male bonding with other maskilim; and not least, dissatisfaction with traditional Jewish (rabbinic) study—derive from male experience and cannot be said to represent Jewish experience as a whole. Wengeroff ’s experience to be sure, is no more typical. Her wealth, education, and associations utterly preclude such characterization, while her memoir writing, as we have stressed, was extraordinary—atypical by definition. But most Jewish men did not write self-reflectively either. Typicality has hardly been the criterion for judging individual memoirs,

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or self-reflective writing in general, as significant for understanding the history of Jewish society and culture. Taking this precaution into account, Wengeroff ’s writing and its inclusion in discussion of self-conscious representations of the passage from traditionalism to modernity have much to offer our understanding of modern Jewish history. Wengeroff ’s work goes beyond adding a female voice to the male-authored canon of self-reflective writing about this, acting as a compensatory addition to androcentric literature.72 It highlights the reality of gender as a variable affecting the consciousness, experience, and expression of all who wrote about this passage, which can no longer be represented as oedipal rebellion (most sons did not rebel against their fathers in the first half of the nineteenth century; many did not do so even later). Wengeroff ’s account offers a counterpoint to an oedipal myth of Jewish modernity, not because she flatly opposed modernity or haskalah—she did not—but precisely because she shared and lived out many of haskalah’s core values. For all the manifold differences between her memoirs and those of the maskilim, grappling with them alongside one another adds a critical nuance to our understanding of the nature and emergence of Jewish modernity in eastern Europe as experienced by the articulate minority who wrote about this.73 Wengeroff ’s work must be read in its own right, not as a side show to canonized works that tell “the story” of the passage from Jewish traditionalism to modernity, but as an essential part of a reality broader and more variegated than that represented by what is actually a maskilic subset. In re-thinking Jewish self-reflective writing of the era of haskalah, the alternative to androcentric classification is not a return to the amorphous classification that Moseley rejects. Nor should we ignore writing by a woman because it does not conform to androcentric classification, make such writing anomalous against a maskilic norm, or marginalize it in a separate “women’s” category apart from Jewish writing that continues to be gendered male. Rather, our understanding of modern Jewish writing about self and era must be revised to encompass Wengeroff ’s writing. This edition of Wengeroff ’s work is meant to foster appreciation of the specificity of her writing, as well as its integration into the study of modern Jewish memoir and autobiography as a whole.

Introduction

Family and Society in Wengeroff ’s Childhood and Adolescence The haskalah in Russia took off as a movement during Wengeroff’s childhood. By the end of the century when she wrote, the era of hask­ alah had closed, overtaken by other cultural and political movements in Jewish society: varieties of Zionism, Jewish socialism, the birth of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. Haskalah was the leitmotif of Wengeroff’s life. We have touched on one major expression of the haskalah in eastern Europe—maskilic autobiography—and on some of the social criticism and alternative values conveyed there. To appreciate Wengeroff’s complicated and conflicted attitudes to traditionalism and modernity and to see how her writing enriches our understanding of haskalah and Jewish modernity in Russia, it is important to understand more about haskalah as Wengeroff and those she depicts perceived and experienced it.

Haskalah: Embracing Europe and Secular Culture Although rationalist and even text critical currents had long existed within traditional, rabbinic culture, an articulate movement for Jewish “enlightenment,” stressing the primacy of such endeavors and an open appreciation of secular study, began in the late eighteenth century. Early maskilim, in particular, stressed the compatibility of haskalah with Jewish tradition and noted the autochthonous roots of their rationalism and respect for Gentile wisdom in medieval Jewish philosophy and Renaissance writing, focusing particularly on Maimonides. But the timing of the rationalist turn in Jewish sacred study and articulated respect for Western knowledge testify unmistakably to the inspiration and influence of the European Enlightenment, whose emphasis on the rationalist, humanist faculties of mind and spirit inherent in all men (sic) made it easy, in the words of an early maskilic journal, for Jews to “embrace Europe.”74 Perceiving wisdom in the teachings of “the nations,” deeming such wisdom worthy of study in its own right and applying methods from this wisdom to Jewish culture was a revolution in Jewish religious and

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intellectual history and a fundamental reorientation of the Jewish stance to self and Other. The origins of this shift were linked to the beginnings of debate in European societies about the civic status of Jews and to actual steps taken under the Old Regime to ameliorate Jewish disabilities. Austria’s Joseph II, for example, abolished forced distinguishing clothing for Jews and the infamous Jewish “head tax” (Leibzoll), instituted economic liberalization in Jewry policy, and opened Christian primary and secondary schools to Jewish children. All those who would become maskilim, whether in central or eastern Europe, believed that a positive sea change was underway in the Jews’ condition in Europe and that this mandated a reciprocal response from Jews—away from traditional insularity to a new relationship with Christian society based on universal “brotherhood” and mutual tolerance. The perception of a fundamental, benign, shift in Christian Europe’s stance to the Jews made the call for Jews to appreciate and open themselves to European culture credible. From the beginning then, politics and public policy created the potential for new thinking to go beyond a handful of intellectuals to broader circles of Jewish society.75 The haskalah was a complex social and cultural phenomenon with diverse intellectual currents and regional differences, but perhaps its most fundamental characteristic was this call for reorientation of the relationship of Jewish culture and society to those of Europe. Maskilim not only asserted that “the nations” possessed wisdom but that Jewish culture, traditionally considered self-sufficient and superior because of its divine origin, was deficient without it. Whatever the dividing lines in the haskalah, this stance united maskilim from the movement’s inception to its end. This position enraged traditionalists, who denounced and persecuted those who would thus denigrate divine teachings, making them ancillary to those of the teachings of non-Jews. The battle lines on this subject were drawn at the outset of the haskalah in a now classic exchange in 1782. In response to the Edict of Tolerance of Emperor Joseph II of Austria, some of whose provisions are cited above, the maskil Naphtali Herz Wessely (Weisl) wrote a pamphlet entitled, “Words of Peace and Truth.”76 In it, Wessely posited two types of knowledge: human knowledge (torat ha’adam) and divine knowledge—“the study of the Torah of God.” In the former, Wessely included etiquette, morality, civility, art, languages, grammar, and natu-

Introduction

ral sciences—botany, anatomy, chemistry—which, he explained, are accessible by means of man’s “senses and reason,” not requiring divine intervention for their apprehension. This human knowledge, Wessely asserted, “is anterior to the exalted divine laws,” and its study should precede that of divine knowledge. A man lacking in it, even a Torah sage, is deficient. A man who has human, but not divine, knowledge, on the other hand, is still of service to humanity. “There is one people in the world,” Wessely wrote (this, at a time that the vast majority of Europe’s populations, excluding Jews, were illiterate), “who are not sufficiently concerned with human knowledge,” and have failed to instruct its youth in it: “We, the children of Israel. . . .” Persecution, to be sure, was responsible for this ignorance because Jews associated “human” knowledge with an oppressing Christian culture, but its consequences were no less damaging on this account. Now, under the “exalted emperor,” “words of peace and truth” had issued that herald a different era, which Jews must welcome. Within a few months, several major rabbinic figures fired incensed retorts to Wessely. David ben Nathan, rabbi of Leszno, Poland, condemned Wessely’s “eight chapters of bootlicking,” asserting that “what is primary remains primary and what is secondary remains secondary. . . . Our children shall study the sciences as an adornment; however, the foundations of their education will be in accordance with the command of our ancient sages of the Talmud. Our children shall be taught Torah. . . .” The great halakhist Ezekiel Landau of Prague denounced Wessely as “an evil man” who has “brazenly asserted that . . . etiquette is more vital than Torah . . .” wishing that his corpse “lie like dung upon the field.”77 What we now recognize as colonialist discourse is clear in all this: a “lower,” oriental culture is deemed in need of tutelage from a “higher,” European one. The message about needed “improvement” came from representatives of the “master,” non-Jewish culture (thinkers, bureaucrats, rulers), who pronounced on the “Jewish problem,” but it was also internalized and delivered by representatives of the subject, Jewish culture, the maskilim.78 Maskilim promoted a dual reform agendum: reforming the content and methods of traditional Jewish study and introducing a secular curriculum into Jewish schools. In the first arena, rational inquiry was to substitute for mysticism and casuistry; Bible,

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Hebrew language and grammar, and ethics were to overtake, if not supplant, Talmud study. In the second arena, Wessely’s tract had laid out the curriculum: history, geography, mathematics, and natural sciences; European languages; and “civility.” The haskalah developed very differently in eastern Europe than in German lands because of the radically different nature of east European Jewish society and of the Russian state.79 Tsarist Russia had excluded Jews until the partitions of Poland in the last third of the eighteenth century, when Russia annexed large portions of Poland, acquiring thereby the largest Jewish population in the world—over a million by the time of Wengeroff ’s birth and over five million by the time of her death (this, compared to hundreds of thousands of Jews in German lands). This population was also concentrated, the result of mandated Jewish residence in the Pale of Settlement. Within the Pale, Jews formed the majority (in some places, 80 percent) of the population, and a substantial minority (between 10 and 14 percent) of the overall population, a situation unheard of in the west. The vast majority of this population was traditional and unexposed to even the rudiments of European culture well into the second half of the nineteenth century, in contrast to the situation in central Europe, where widespread Jewish acculturation began in the first half of the century and progressed rapidly. The sheer numbers and concentration of the Jewish population fostered perpetuation of traditional (and then modern) forms of Jewish culture, including the use of Jewish languages: Hebrew, the sacred tongue of prayer and scholarship and especially, Yiddish, the spoken language of the Jewish masses throughout Wengeroff ’s lifetime. Russia’s economy remained overwhelmingly agrarian throughout Wengeroff ’s life, peasants constituting 80 percent of the population in the 1860s. The state was despotic and autocratic, lacking even the notion of government as Rechtsstaat—a society based on law. There was no independent judiciary until 1864; until that point, justice was an arm of autocracy (“despotism for all,” in the words of one scholar).80 By contrast, to varying degrees in different places, liberal economics and politics drove the states of central Europe to lessen anti-Jewish discrimination during the nineteenth century and hold out the promise of full equality or enhanced rights, which Jews could earn with appropriate civil behavior and religious and cultural reforms. Broad segments

Introduction

of Jewish society in these states experienced rapid economic gains in increasingly commercialized and monetized industrializing economies. By mid-century, most Jews were middle class in occupation, standard of living, and cultural habits—a remarkable record of mobility from the predominant poverty and traditionalism of Jewish central Europe (including France’s eastern provinces) at the turn of the century. Jews under the Tsars continued overwhelmingly in traditional occupations: as laborers; artisans; domestic servants; peddlers; petty traders and shopkeepers; synagogue, ritual, and community functionaries; innkeepers; and distillers. There was a large impoverished class, whose numbers exploded in the second half of the nineteenth century; a small, if very influential, wealthy class of merchants, industrialists, bankers, and financiers permitted to live outside the Pale, who resided in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as within the Pale (Wengeroff ’s husband would join the ranks of this group late in the century); and a class of relatively well-to-do provisioners, commission agents, exporters, and contractors to governing authorities (like Wengeroff ’s father, grand­ father, and father-in-law).81 Michael Stanislawski has shown that a turning point in the history  of the haskalah in Russia occurred around 1840, when the government of Nicholas I became proactive in bringing “enlightenment” to the Jews. Prior to this point, the government had no relations with the maskilim per se, considering all Jews equally fanatic and barbarian.82 Conversion of the millions of Jews deemed unrealistic, Nicholas and his advisors resolved to transform Russian Jews on the model of the acculturating Jewries of central Europe (as Nicholas’s Minister of National Enlightenment, S. S. Uvarov, remarked, “Believe me, if we had such Jews as I met in the different capitals of Germany, we would treat them with utmost distinction”). They thus came to recognize the boon represented in the existence of Europeanized, internal critics of traditional Jewish culture, the maskilim.83 The means to effect this transformation was the re-education of the Jews through a network of governmentsponsored, Jewish-run elementary and rabbinical schools featuring a reformed Jewish curriculum and secular studies. It was at the point of this policy shift that Europeanized Jewry, in the person of a model representative, Max Lilienthal, made a signal appearance on the Russian Jewish stage. In 1839, Lilienthal, a twenty-

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three-year-old university-educated rabbi from Munich (at the time, a rare combination), was tapped to direct a tiny maskilic school in Riga. Before taking up his duties, he spent time in St. Petersburg, where he impressed Uvarov. Within two years, Uvarov summoned Lilienthal to the capital for a far more ambitious mission: to head the reform of Jewish education in Russia. With this, educational reform passed from being the clarion call of a handful of beleaguered, self-designated mavericks to government policy, and “official enlightenment” of Russia’s Jews began. The maskilim and the Russian government certainly did not share all goals, and here, the analogizing of their colonialist attitudes to traditional Jews and Judaism ends. The haskalah never sought Jewish conversion or saw Europeanization or Russification as a route to Jewish cultural dissolution, which the government did. For decades, maskilim did hold an idealized, delusional view of Tsarist good will, based on their reading of government Jewish policy elsewhere in Europe. And they warmly welcomed the psychological and material benefits of government support: the government hired maskilim to staff the Statesponsored Jewish schools, providing them employment, crucial since one of the tactics of traditionalist opponents was economic boycott. Government support afforded their ideology official recognition and an institutional base, pre-requisites for coalescence of a Jewish enlightenment “movement.” With this, the haskalah was catapulted from margins to power, and traditional society was significantly disadvantaged in what had suddenly become a real contest for control of Jewish culture. This was so even though a maskilic, and even a university education, did not yet bestow enhanced civil status on Jews or permission to live outside the Pale (it did offer exemption from the dreaded military draft, about which, see further below). And it was so even though the majority of families continued to send their sons to traditional khodorim, not the State-sponsored Jewish (not to mention Christian) schools.84 Traditional culture was hardly bested, but it was significantly challenged by the new state policy toward haskalah. In 1841, Lilienthal began a series of government-sponsored travels to major Russian Jewish communities to sell the educational reforms to an overwhelmingly traditional, resistant, and suspicious Jewish population. His travels, which he describes in memoirs published in 1855–57, were a pivotal event in east European Jewish history and in the encoun-

Introduction

ter of central European (westernized) and east European (traditional, “oriental”) Jewries, the story of which factors in every account of European Jewish modernity.85 Lilienthal’s record of his tour reads like a Jewish version of the “white man’s burden.” It is replete with references to the “corrupt jargon” (Yiddish) of the natives, their “prejudices and superstitions,” sunk as they were in “the fathomless abyss of wild, unintelligible, yea incredible beliefs”; and with observations about “raven-haired beauties” with “ivory teeth” and black-eyed children.86 His memoir gives stark testimony to the divisions then tearing at traditional society, riven into camps of Hasidic and anti-Hasidic orthodoxy and proponents and opponents of haskalah, with the exotic figure of occasional daytshen (German Jews), such as Lilienthal himself, imposed on the masses of “Oriental Jews” of Russia. But Lilienthal also brings moving testimony to pensive cultural anxiety evoked by the prospect of haskalah, a position quite different from all-out opposition. For all that traditionalists saw their culture as divinely ordained, they also saw it as acutely fragile. In one of the most poignant vignettes of the encounter between Jewish traditionalism and modernity, Lilienthal records his meeting with the town preacher (Stadt Maggid) of Vilna. The meeting took place late at night at the request of the maggid after a day Lilienthal had spent touring the city’s Jewish schools, a report on which he was to give the government. Lilienthal records an exchange in which he, citing German Jewish experience, expressed (condescending) optimism about the salutary outcome of the pending reforms in Russian Judaism, and the rabbi expressed a far dimmer view of the state of German Judaism for having passed through this stage en route to enlightenment. According to Lilienthal, after some back and forth about this, the rabbi suddenly cried, “Doctor, I will tell you. We are ashes, all ashes; as soon as anyone touches us, the whole edifice will crumble to pieces!”87 This was the traditionalists’ fundamental fear of haskalah and modernity: they would destroy Judaism, and Jews, as such, would disappear. As we shall see, there was a direct echo of this fear in Wengeroff ’s parental home. The emergence of haskalah as an institutionalized threat to traditional society occurred just at the point in Wengeroff ’s childhood that

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her powers of observation were sufficiently developed for her to note Jewish responses to the changes unfolding. She does this in a large section of Volume One, in which she records her own family’s responses to, as she calls it, “The Beginning of the Era of Enlightenment: [part 1] Lilienthal.” 88 Brisk was on Lilienthal’s itinerary, and her family had direct contact with his “mission.” Lilienthal, too, writes of his experience in Brisk in his memoirs. While this account is brief compared to the space he devotes to the pivotal communities of Vilna and Minsk, where traditionalist opposition was organized, vocal, and (in Minsk), even threatening, Lilienthal makes two important observations about Brisk. “The Talmudists [Lilienthal means mitnagdim, opponents of Hasidism] were in the majority,” a state of affairs he approves (maskilim saw Hasidim as irremediably obscurantist while “Talmudists” at least, were rational). Second, he records that, I was well received by the congregation of that place. The young men, imbued with a better spirit and mostly well bred, tried their best to entertain me . . . [and] when taking leave of me . . . could not restrain their tears.89

As we have seen in his memoirs, Lilienthal does not underplay the opposition to his mission. On the contrary, traditionalist resistance— the more fanatic, the better—strengthens the justification for reform. His claim of a favorable reception in Brisk, therefore, is credible. Wengeroff moreover, backs it up. “There was a group of more than twenty young men,” she writes, “who thought the Lilienthal movement very important and who worked for it passionately within their circles.” Every day during his stay, she says, Lilienthal met with these young men, stressing the need for them to “acquire European culture,” painting images of them as future “men of culture.” 90 Although Lilienthal does not mention Wengeroff ’s family (or any other in Brisk) by name, among the “better spirit[ed], well bred young men” who greeted him were Wengeroff ’s brothers-in law, who, in her characterization, “rejoiced over the approaching reforms.” 91 More remarkable, her father was there as well. Yudl Epstein, as we have noted, was very pious. However, he was also from a particular school of rabbinic learning not unalterably opposed to aspects of haskalah. Up to a

Introduction

point, Yudl even welcomed the prospect that Lilienthal presented. As Wengeroff relates, One day, my father, returning from evening prayers, brought from the synagogue the electrifying news that the recent report [that, quoting her, “a fundamental transformation of the khodorim . . . was imminent”], in fact, was true. A doctor of philology by the name of Lilienthal had been commissioned by the Ministry for Popular Education . . . to travel throughout Russia to investigate the educational standards of the Jews of the country and to provide information about the melamdim, in whose hands the education of Jewish youth lay. A grand reform plan had been drafted in St. Petersburg. . . . Although my father was ortho­dox, he did not grieve too much over the impending reform because he himself constantly bewailed the terrible educational methods of the Jewish schools of Brest and wanted various improvements in this area (emphasis mine).

Yudl Epstein’s positive stance about the pedagogical aspect of haskalah, in stark contrast to the categorical, traditionalist opposition of many other Jews to Lilienthal and the reforms, reflects his association with the Volozhin yeshiva and the teachings of its intellectual and spiritual model, Rabbi Elijah, son of Solomon, the Vilna Gaon, and the yeshiva’s founder, Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner. Rabbi Hayyim established the yeshiva in 1803 to counter Hasidism by offering a vigorous alternative to that movement’s teachings and religious appeal to the young men of the day, and to establish a base from which to assert the primacy of talmudic study; the latter he felt was in general decline and particularly threatened by Hasidism’s emphasis on ecstatic worship. Following the Gaon’s approach, Rabbi Hayyim targeted pilpul—abstract, convoluted, and even absurdist, talmudic reasoning done for its own sake, without practical application, holding it responsible for the alienation that made young men vulnerable to Hasidism. Instead, at Volozhin, Rabbi Hayyim instituted the Gaon’s rationalistic approach to Talmud, described by the ­Gaon’s sons as “study [that] must be directed toward the truth . . . [with] the scholar’s desire to demonstrate intellectual skills [secondary] . . . to his commitment to the truth.”92 While Rabbi Hayyim continued his mentor’s opposition to Hasidism, he toned down the rhetoric, tactics, and purpose of the opposition, a legacy of relative moderation toward Hasidism that Yudl Epstein accepted and acted on when he arranged Wengeroff ’s marriage, as we shall see in Volume Two.

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Rabbi Hayyim also upheld the Gaon’s innovation, against centuries of Ashkenazic practice, of emphasizing study of all twenty-four books of the Bible, in addition to Talmud, to which end, the Gaon had asserted the necessity of correct grammatical knowledge of Hebrew. Both of these were core areas of haskalah-backed reforms as well. The Gaon advocated a systematic, phased approach to study of rabbinic literature, making the study of Mishnah, the law code to which Talmud is a commentary, independent of and prior to Talmud study. In short, he had what we would consider a modern, rational pedagogical sensibility. Finally, the Gaon had permitted his most intellectually advanced and religiously trusted disciples to study natural sciences (astronomy; geometry; geography) and foreign languages—not as ends in themselves, much less as alternative or superior systems of knowledge to Torah, but as necessary tools to the correct understanding of biblical and rabbinic texts. While there was a fundamental ideological and sociological difference between this stance and that of the haskalah, for which the Gaon and his disciples had no tolerance, there was also significant intellectual overlap, especially when compared to the categorical opposition in other traditionalist, particularly Hasidic, circles to haskalah and “alien wisdom.”93 This specific and circumscribed yet significant openness to areas of secular knowledge; rationalist, critical method in traditional study; and pedagogical method based on awareness of intellectual and psychological development, were part of ­Volozhin’s unique tradition. Wengeroff ’s report that her father lamented the educational state of the khodorim and welcomed the coming reforms on this account is evidence of crossover between Volozhin’s position and a central area of the maskilic agenda in the home of one Volozhin-affiliated householder. But Yudl went beyond mere interest or theoretical approval. Wengeroff says that when word came of Lilienthal’s arrival in Brisk, her father stated his intention of visiting him and even of bringing along his sonsin-law, whose upkeep under kest, of course, he had undertaken so that they would study Talmud. Her mother was opposed—Wengeroff ’s first mention of gender conflict about haskalah and modernity. But her father persisted, she says, because he claimed that the young men would otherwise find their way to Lilienthal themselves—intimation of loss of patriarchal control over the household that Yudl would soon acknowl-

Introduction

edge openly—but even more, she says, because of his strong desire to hear of the impending reforms himself. Wengeroff tells us that her father: took every opportunity to speak of [Lilienthal] and his great and important mission. It made him feel good and gave him satisfaction to debate the grand reforms with each guest and especially, with the young people, my brothers-in-law. He would become passionate during such discussions and applaud the fact that order would finally be brought to Jewish children’s education.94

From this we get an important glimpse into the complex, mediated ways that haskalah was processed in Jewish society, that is, not always directly through the efforts of maskilim. Here, we see a scholarly householder and pious stalwart of tradition learning of Lilienthal’s project and visit in the synagogue and returning home to act as a sympathetic agent of dissemination of this knowledge within his social and family circle—hardly the picture of surreptitious youthful rebellion that we get in maskilic memoirs or the either-or depiction of haskalah and traditionalist fanaticism presented in Lilienthal’s memoirs. We see further evidence of Yudl’s perspective, and the gap between this and that of his wife, in a vignette Wengeroff brings to illustrate generational differences about haskalah, but which also documents gender differences. Ever since Lilienthal’s visit to the town, her mother, she says, was very anxious lest the “new, foreign element infiltrat[e] her house . . . as it was [doing in] the homes of other Jews in Russia,” and “the word of God . . . be thrust aside”—the same traditionalist perception of the fragility of Judaism and its incompatibility with European culture that Lilienthal recorded in his memoirs.95 She began spying on her sons-in-law, one morning surprising one of them collecting insect specimens in the courtyard, using a scientific book to guide him. Stupefied that anyone, let alone a son-in-law of hers, could be interested in vermin (she came to understand, Wengeroff says, not indicating when, the desire of the young men to study Russian and German), and sensing that the interest was somehow dangerous, she reported the incident to her husband. Yudl, however, just “laughed heartily” about it.96 But we should not misread Yudl’s stance or the atmosphere in the Epstein home. Yudl wished certain educational reforms but had hardly joined haskalah. Wengeroff tells us that after hearing Lilienthal and the

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specifics not only of intended pedagogical, but also of curricular reform—certain Talmudic tractates were to be barred from instruction— her father was angry that Lilienthal had spoken in so Godless a manner, saying that Jewish youth were to be deprived of [certain Talmudic tractates] and that if necessary, one did not have to be guided by the laws of the Talmud.97

From vignettes of this same period that Wengeroff brings in Volume Two, we also learn that both her parents firmly resisted the encroachments of modernity in dress and behavioral norms. Both grasped the deeper connection, in Wengeroff ’s words, between “external behavior” and a “revolution of the inner person,” that would underlie appropriation of non-Jewish ways. As long as they could, they brooked no infraction of traditional norms in their home. Each parent, she relates, barred (different) daughters from the table unless they removed various new fashions deemed un-Jewish or immodest. Yudl caught a married daughter attempting to sneak out of the house to take the traditional Sabbath afternoon walk in the company of her husband (Avram Zak, later a prominent banker in St. Petersburg), rather than in the company of other women, and put a resolute stop to it.98 But, Wengeroff says, the younger generation was drawn inexorably to the intellectual aspects of haskalah and, clearly, to (middle class) European social customs, as the behavioral incidents just mentioned illustrate. Her brothers-in-law—and their Talmud tutor—obtained forbidden books and hid them in their Talmud folios. To prevent detection (so they thought), they chanted the contraband words (a passage from Schiller’s Don Carlos), in the characteristic sing-song of Talmud study. Wengeroff ’s mother, on patrol outside their study room one summer day in 1842, listened in, momentarily fooled by the traditional cadence. She quickly grasped what was really going on, however, and burst into the room, confronting the young men with a distraught outburst about sacrilege and “apostasy.” Such and worse scenes played out in the homes of “all” the friends of her brothers-in-law, Wengeroff says.99 Contrary to what we might expect, boys coming to Brisk from surrounding small towns and villages for (subsidized) Talmud study, she says, were particular sources of “correspondence and enlightened (apikursischen—liter-

Introduction

ally, heretical) books.”100 Reconnoitering like cats in the twilight hours, they would sneak into the courtyard of her house carrying “intellectual contraband,” waiting to slip into the study room, trying to evade her mother but not always succeeding. To avoid scenes, Wengeroff ’s brothers-in-law found hiding places in the hills, far from the house, to read the new literature and debate the maskilic program together with “like-minded followers” of Lilienthal.101 The “little books” in Russian and German gained de facto acceptance within the halls of pious homes—albeit only during the week, being cleared away for the Sabbath “like the rest of the weekday work.” Still, the material had traveled an enormous cultural distance, from banned heresy to mere khol (weekday items), in a very short time. The “rather large” maskilic circle in Brest, whom the older generation called “berliners,” after a reviled Moses Mendelssohn (she notes the linguistic innovation: a few years earlier, the traditional term, apikorsim [heretics] would have been applied) studied not only foreign wisdom. They examined the holy Bible itself critically—“with profane eyes”—and “its aura of inviolability disappeared.”102 Among “the [intellectual] elite” of the city, Ephraim and his brotherin-law, Avram Zak, continued Talmud study under the supervision of a melamed and Wengeroff ’s father, but also “arranged gatherings in which German classics and scientific works . . . especially ancient Greek writings, were read.” Women were admitted to these meetings, violating a basic norm of traditional society; Jewish women, she says, were particularly fond of some of the German writer [Heinrich] Zschokke’s characters (elsewhere, Wengeroff attests that she, too, was enamored of Zschokke’s work). The gatherings often took place on the Sabbath, a desecration in its own right in the eyes of the older generation. Wengeroff highlights the generational aspect of this cultural change and conflict, a core theme in Memoirs and a flat contradiction to one of its central myths. For all her repeated assertion that calm and peace (Ruhe) prevailed in traditional society (“It was a perfectly calm life!”) and that traditional parents ruled their homes, her own abundant testimony—her description of haskalah unfolding in Brisk ranges over both volumes—is that this was not, in fact, the case. “And so again, quarrels and vexation in family life,” she comments about the supposedly “­ordered” life in Brisk in the 1840s that elsewhere she attests included

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an explicit, brazen act of Sabbath violation: carrying in public. Wengeroff does not attribute this latter behavior to the maskilic circle of which her brother and brothers-in-law were a part, associating the violations simply with “freethinkers”—whom, she hastens to add, were rebuked by “the collective.” But if the two groups were not identical, this only attests a variety of types bursting the bounds of traditional society with impunity by this time, despite arousing traditionalist reaction.103 One of her brothers-in-law (the budding entomologist) found the persecution of his interests so intolerable that he fled the Epstein household, abandoning his wife for a time, a trope familiar in maskilic autobiography. Her parents, Wengeroff says, had trouble securing his return— with what assurances, we can only wonder.104 Yudl Epstein came to the sad realization that his authority had been undermined in his own home. In my reckoning (made difficult again, by Wengeroff ’s lack of precision about her family members), every adolescent member of her family was involved in some way, intellectual or behavioral, or both, in what she calls “the Lilienthal movement.” “After difficult internal struggles,” she writes, her father “had to admit that the fence around Judaism was broken.” He “was inconsolable,” she says, that his most precious values and observances “would now be ridiculed.” But, she says, he was “impotent against the spirit of the times.”105 Her mother bore this and additional psychological burdens from the unraveling of Tradition. Wengeroff ’s brothers-in-law were in technical violation of their prenuptial agreements: the whole purpose of their being supported by Wengeroff ’s parents under kest was so that they would study Talmud. Their behavior, of course, was sacrilegious. If, or rather when, word of it got out, it would humiliate the family and threaten its social standing, which could affect the marriageability of unmarried children, a financial, as well as social catastrophe. But there was another, peculiarly female aspect to Wengeroff ’s mother’s distress (and we would posit, to that of the mothers-in-law of other budding maskilim). Since women could not engage in the mitsvah (commandment) of sacred study (even if women “learned,” it would not have the status of fulfilling a divine command), they could only do so vicariously, through the learning of sons, husbands, and others they supported by donations to yeshivas, kollelim (academies for married men), local synagogue study halls—and through kest. Indeed, women were taught

Introduction

explicitly that they gained heavenly “merit” through their support of men’s Torah study; as stated in the Talmud (Berakhot 17a): “Wherewith do women acquire merit? By sending their sons to learn Torah in the synagogue and their husbands to study in the schools of the rabbis.” By neglecting their Talmud study, her sons-in-law were depriving Wengeroff ’s mother of vicarious fulfillment of this mitsvah—and its reward in the World to Come. This surely would have generated its own rage, sharpened by dependence and impotence, since women had no alternative but reliance on faithful male study. Interestingly, Wengeroff provides evidence that on some unconscious level she did not believe her own assertion that haskalah and its disintegrative effects simply “happened” even to her family of origin by external force. Early in Memoirs, she has two seemingly strange technical digressions, one about modes of conveyance (types of carriages, culminating in her noting the invention of electrical trams); the other about types of oils and progressive improvements in illumination—which she explicitly links to the progress of “enlightenment.” Striking in writing notable for its fluidity, the latter of these digressions interrupts her description of Passover in her parental home, the lengthiest description she gives of any holiday and, along with the High Holidays, the one to which she was most connected emotionally. Both digressions concern material, technological change that also symbolizes cultural and psychological change. In both cases, her family participated in or even facilitated change: her grandfather, as we have noted, built a highway that cut travel time in half between its end points, and her father, she says, readily availed himself of better means of illumination in his home.106 Wengeroff relates these changes with a tone of self-evident approval: she and her family—though not everyone, as she notes—agree about the benefits of technological progress. But this means, of course, that however traditional and pious, they were agents, and not simply victims, of change. Wengeroff ’s characterization of her father as overtaken and “impotent” in the loss of Tradition’s authority in his home is strikingly reminiscent, down to some of the same terminology, of the way Wengeroff will describe her own, far more extreme predicament with her own children. Her emphasis on impotence in the face of modernity, in particular, is noteworthy. It is a central motif in her self-perception and rationalization of her life.

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The Unnamed Mother and the Power of Women in Traditional Jewish Culture Wengeroff’s memoirs are a treasure of information about traditional women’s religious culture and sphere. Her writing on these themes constitutes a significant portion of the memoirs as a whole. Yet Wengeroff never presents this material as a subject in its own right. She does not aggregate it in a chapter and title it, as she does with her Lilienthal era material and other subjects she recognizes as such. Her lack of separate consciousness in this area is very significant. It surely does not reflect traditional denigration of women’s culture. Rather, it indicates how thoroughly the identity Wengeroff had forged as a child, in the sphere of traditional women’s society, continued to define her in spite of all the changes that she and Jewish society underwent during her life. A sense of rupture is a prerequisite for memoir writing (in obvious distinction from diary or journal writing but in distinction, too, from autobiography, where evolution rather than rupture is the focus). Memoirists have many motives for writing, but writing invariably follows recognition that a chapter in their (even young) lives has ended or that their lives are reaching an end.107 This is true for Wengeroff, as well, who wrote toward the end of her life, and (like Glikl), after her husband’s death. For the memoirist, awareness of loss impels the desire to perpetuate through recorded memory, lest oblivion overtake. Yet, for all Wengeroff ’s sense of past and mourning of lost tradition, it is precisely this sense of rupture that she lacks about traditional women’s culture. To be sure, she had long ceased living that culture, as well as in it (the two are not synonymous: one can carry behaviors outside of their original locus, which is what Wengeroff says she tried to do, and which her husband, and more broadly, modernity, blocked). She portrays women’s culture, like the rest of traditionalism, as having been overtaken by modernity and of course writes of it in the past tense. Wengeroff does not lack a sense of temporal rupture about traditional women’s culture; she is anything but out of touch with historical and social reality. But on the deepest level, she had not internalized a different gendered sense of self as a modernized Jew. She lacks psychological rupture with the traditional sphere of women. Since it continues to live in her psyche, she does not bracket it with a subject heading in Memoirs. Of course, maintaining a

Introduction

sense of herself as somehow still of that world in the face of social reality utterly at odds with this, would have required tremendous and ongoing psychic effort. This Wengeroff would have expended only if she viewed this part of her identity as essential to her Self and its loss, tantamount to death. Grasping this is crucial to understanding her. We have already encountered in Wengeroff ’s mother a woman of formidable conviction and assertiveness. There is nothing shy or retiring about her in any of the many vignettes Wengeroff presents about her. While this could simply be a reflection of her personality and to some extent surely is, given the behavior of women generally in the culture Wengeroff describes and what we know of this culture from other sources, the more compelling explanation for this assertiveness is cultural. The traditional Jewish culture in which Wengeroff ’s mother—and Wengeroff—were raised encouraged extreme competence and assertiveness in women, idealized rabbinic pronouncements about female modesty and deference to men notwithstanding.108 Paradoxical as this might appear, assertiveness and forthrightness did not develop despite and in conflict with traditional, patriarchal Jewish culture but because of it and were two of its intrinsic and necessary components.109 Nor, as is commonly asserted, is the emergence of strong, controlling, or dominating female types in Jewish society simply a consequence of the responsibility that many women in eastern Europe bore as breadwinners in impoverished or rabbinic families, in the latter of which, always a minority phenomenon, wives worked to free scholar-husbands for sacred study.110 Wengeroff ’s mother fit neither of these profiles. Nor did Wengeroff ’s well-to-do and assertive grandmother-in-law (whom she describes in the second volume of Memoirs), who ran a large inn, for which she cooked and baked; who in addition, had a “large” medical and midwifery practice and ministered to Jews and Christians at all hours of the day and night; and who dressed as a soldier to visit her kindly but ineffectual husband when he was imprisoned after being denounced.111 Nor for that matter, did Glikl or her remarkably enterprising grandmother fit either the profile of strong women who assumed assertive roles because of poverty or to enable a scholar-husband’s learning.112 The assertiveness of women in traditional Jewish society was the result of the interplay of the imperatives of the political status and economic activities of the Jewish minority and rabbinic reading of certain

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Biblical statements about women (a complex subject outside our purview here113), and of immediate relevance for us, of the bifurcation of traditional Jewish society into gendered and hierarchically ordered spheres. The male sphere, with the rabbinic elite at the actual, and certainly the idealized, apex, was superior; the female sphere, including but not limited to domestic and familial space, subordinate. Contempt for the female led to males relinquishing even the pretense of involvement in the sphere relegated to women; hence, women’s domination of that sphere and their sense of entitlement to exercise power there, but arguably, once that sphere declined, elsewhere, as well. For all the differences between Wengeroff ’s telling of emerging Jewish modernity and that of the maskilim, in the depiction of assertive women (not, to be sure, in their assessment of such assertiveness), Wengeroff and the maskilim agree, and their narratives are supported by a host of other accounts from nineteenth-century eastern Europe. The strength and assertiveness of traditional Jewish women—wealthy, as well as working class; from the merchant, as well as the scholarly class—derived directly, fundamentally, and necessarily from their subordination in traditional, patriarchal Jewish culture. For the majority of Jewish society, poverty (requiring women, as well as men, to support the family), and for a minority (the rabbinic elite), the pre-eminent value of male learning, achieved through women supporting the family, significantly contributed to female competence and assertiveness. Neither of these factors, however, created these traits, nor were they a peculiarly modern phenomenon.114 The dynamics of female power in a largely autonomous, subordinated sphere are in full view in Wengeroff ’s depiction of her mother and the women in her orbit and in the depiction of her parents’ relationship. The unnamed mother utterly dominates female space in Wengeroff ’s childhood home (it is crucial to note that “home” and “female space” were not synonymous; as we shall see, there was male space and gendered hierarchy in the home as well). But female space was extensive, and the mother’s will prevailed there—except when her husband expressed an opposing view, as in the case of their disagreement about Lilienthal. His, rather than her, assessment of the significance of the entomologist son-in-law also held sway. Traditional Judaism is fundamentally home-centered. Most of its numerous ritual observances take place there. There are no synagogue

Introduction

functions that cannot take place at home as long as a minyan (quorum of ten males aged thirteen and above) is present for prayers and activities that, like Torah reading, require a quorum. Some of the most basic and critical areas of Jewish ritual are in the sphere of women and under their control: the functioning of the ritual diet (kashruth) and control over the boundaries of sexual encounter between husband and wife.115 Wengeroff, not surprisingly, says nothing about the latter, but she writes in great detail about her mother’s dominion over kitchen and table. Much of this comes in her extensive portrayal of the preparations for Passover. This is the most labor-intensive of Jewish holidays, when the entire house is physically and ritually cleansed of khomets (leaven) and anything that had come into contact with it. Ovens, food storage areas, all cooking utensils and surfaces, tables, and cloths were all cleaned. Preparation for this holiday takes a full month, engaging every member of the family, as well as a considerable contingent of servants. The men of her family, Wengeroff pointedly notes (in what is surely a barb at her own husband and children), participated actively in menial and laborious work, no one considering “this work beneath them, since all that concerned Pesach [Passover] . . . was considered a religious act.”116 Thus, her learned father, scholarly brother, and her brothers-in-law hauled water for the baking of matses (the unleavened bread that is the only kind consumed during the eight-day festival); her father sanded down a wooden bench so that its surface would be new, cleansed of all contact with leaven. Sometimes, we see family members performing gendered acts, as when her mother does the female-associated ritual of “taking khale,” pinching off a piece of dough and tossing it into the fire to commemorate the requirement, lapsed since the destruction of the Temple in 70 c.e., of offering a portion [of grain] to the priests, as Wengeroff notes.117 On the eve of the holiday, her father performs the ritual search for and burning of the leaven, incumbent on the “head of household,” gendered male for such rituals. Sometimes, though, tasks are simply tasks and both sexes participate, as in scraping off the rolling pins used in the matse baking, lest any dough adhere there and rise, contaminating other dough and rendering pins and dough unfit for Passover use.118 The picture is of a household in dedicated, frenzied preparation, its members working in tandem like a calibrated machine. Over it,

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however, Wengeroff ’s mother looms as fearsome overseer, tyrant of kashruth supervision. She “flew into a rage” when a manservant gave the cook the wrong kind of matse (made from less stringently produced, though still kosher, Passover flour) for a fish stew. As a result, neither her parents nor a learned guest at their seder ate the stew. But her mother’s anger, Wengeroff says, was tempered by having been kept, by God, from transgression. She terrorized the cook for not having checked lest a grain had been left in the gullet of one of the poultry to be served at the seder meal (it might have fermented, becoming leaven), shrieking at the cook she seems to have hunted down (had the woman hid?): “There you are, you bungling thing! Where are your eyes? Were you blind, perhaps, at the koshering of the birds?”119 (to be deemed kosher, a properly slaughtered animal is cleaned, soaked, salted, rinsed, and drained, that is, handled extensively). Finding such a grain on her own inspection, her mother pronounces all the fowl slaughtered for her large family’s seder meal unfit, requiring of course a whole new set of poultry. Not only does this attest to this family’s wealth, and its labor supply—kashering is very labor-intensive. Wengeroff also makes no mention of her mother having consulted rabbinic opinion, or her husband’s, about the halakhic (legal) requirement of her (rather extreme) ruling. Her authority and discretion over kashruth were absolute. We see the self-confidence and sense of self-sufficiency of traditional women’s culture in other telling vignettes Wengeroff brings while illustrating her family’s observance of holidays. Describing the days before the Ninth of Av, the day of mourning to mark the destruction of Jerusalem, the first and second Temples, and other catastrophes in Jewish history, Wengeroff says: Once, on Friday before [the Saturday preceding the Ninth of Av], our mother appeared, looking agitated and serious, while we were sitting around the breakfast table. In her one hand, she held a wooden measuring vessel filled with black stuff, and in the other hand, a brush. We wondered what Mother wanted to do with all this. She climbed up on the sofa and with the brush, made a four-cornered black mark on the beautiful red wall paper. To our asking what this meant, she answered that this mark, which she called zekher l’khurban was to remind us that we are Jews in golus, that is, subjugated.

Introduction

It was the mother, then, who literally marked this household’s participation in one of the central myths of Jewish self-understanding: ­exile (note too, the precedence that ritualized memory took over decor in this well-appointed home). Wengeroff recalls her father and the young men of the house observing the traditional mourning rituals: walking shoeless and sitting on low footstools; it was, she comments, “as if they had lived through the destruction of Jerusalem themselves . . . How real the past was to them.” But then, she says, they went off to synagogue. The women observed the fast day at home, on the same low mourning benches, her mother leading the assembled in reciting the Book of Lamentations and associated elegies, amid much weeping. Wengeroff concludes the account with a throw-away comment that speaks volumes: “The boys, of course, had their own activities.”120 Whatever they were doing on this day was irrelevant. The women and girls had their own, sufficient religious sphere, here the perfect mirror image of women’s superfluousness in men’s spheres: the synagogue and study halls. The degree of women’s ritual self-sufficiency and self-confidence is seen at its fullest in Wengeroff ’s description of her mother’s observance of the eve of Yom Kippur—the day preceding the solemn Day of Atonement that had become a day of solemn observance in its own right in Ashkenazic women’s culture. First, Wengeroff describes the custom of kapores, a ritual of vicarious expiation performed on poultry, in which all family members participated. Then, however, she describes “the preparation of the Yom Kippur candles” (apparently, another term for memorial or yorzeit candles that burn for twenty-four hours), which she says, “was also a holy duty.” A female ritual expert, called a gabete, appeared early in the morning with “a whole pack of tkhines,” women’s petitionary prayers composed in Yiddish, “an enormous skein of twine, and a large piece of wax.” The gabete and Wengeroff ’s mother fasted as they prepared the candle, “because an empty stomach makes a person more inclined to weep, the soul more yielding.” The women began the holy work of making the candle “by reciting many tkhines amid fierce weeping,” then took the wick ball in their hands. Sitting about a meter apart, they began passing the cord back and forth between them. Weeping, Wengeroff ’s mother began naming all her deceased relatives, recounting their good deeds, and for each, a thread of the wick ball was drawn out, until all had

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been recalled and a suitably thick wick formed. In this manner, all the living members of the family were remembered, too.

When anyone was dangerously ill, Wengeroff continues, describing Ashkenazic women’s practice known from other sources, the circumference of the cemetery would be measured off with wick filament, which would then be stored away and used for the Yom Kippur candles, so great was their efficacy considered to be (see the photos in this volume of Yom Kippur candles set up for use in the synagogue and of gabetes).121 Wengeroff describes the two rituals—kapores and Yom Kippur candles—without noting that the latter is women’s ritual only. On the contrary, she says that the preparation of the Yom Kippur candles was “also a holy duty,” explicitly but matter-of-factly—the non-defensive tone is significant—putting this on a par with the other rituals of the day. The candle ritual had precise components and must have taken up much of the day—meaning that Wengeroff ’s mother was excused (or rather, excused herself) from domestic duties for performance of sacred ones— precisely the privilege that rabbinic law accorded men and denied women. The candle ritual had a liturgy, the tkhines, and a priestess-like functionary, the gabete, whose presence clearly lent the ritual efficacy or Wengeroff ’s mother would have just done it herself, as she did many others, from Sabbath candle lighting, to prayers, or New Moon and Ninth of Av observances. The fact that Wengeroff does not notice that the candle ritual is purely female testifies to the naiveté of her female identity and the degree to which female ritual was intrinsic Judaism to her—not, as we would see it, “women’s ritual,” but simply—Judaism. This was the legacy of having been socialized in the religious and ritual world of traditional Ashkenazic women, which as she shows, included a host of female religious functionaries fulfilling roles not ordained by rabbinic law in private, and in public, space—cemeteries, the streets—as well. These functionaries had titles and specific functions. As we have seen, there were gabetes (who were a fixture in her house and she says, in society), who tended in particular to the needs of the poor but who also, as in the candle ritual on the eve of Yom Kippur, functioned in the words of Susan Sered as “ritual experts.”122 There were zogerkes, who led prayers for the women in the women’s section of the synagogue;

Introduction

r­ eiseles, who accompanied brides as they bid farewell when leaving home for patri­local marriages; and gollerkes, who shaved the head of the bride the morning after the wedding.123 Toward the end of Volume One, Wengeroff gives a rich description of traditional Jewish marriage in which we see another expression of the power of women’s traditional sphere. Wengeroff ’s material is the arranged marriage of her elder sister Eva, which culminates in an elaborate, female-dominated ceremony on the morning after the wedding in which the bride’s hair is shorn by the gollerke, she is fitted with a matron’s cap, and is ceremonially introduced in her new visage to the world, including her husband. The only rabbinically ordained aspect of all this is hair covering for married women. The rest is creative women’s response to an opening perceived in the spare, androcentric requirement of hair covering for married women (women are consecrated through marriage to sexual exclusivity with the husband and marked as such and made less attractive to other men through covering of the hair, which is considered sexually alluring). Nothing similar is enacted on husbands who, technically, are forbidden sexually only to other men’s wives, but not to unmarried women, and who cover their heads, not their hair, as a sign of respect to God at all times and ages of life past infancy, not as a sexualized behavior. A gollerke presides over this ritual. Bridesmaids also play an important role. There are, in short, female ritual functionaries. The event is turned, in part, into a fund raiser for charity—looks at the bride in her marriage bonnet are auctioned off—thus attaching to the ritual an established and esteemed wider social function that surely enhanced its importance. But, most striking, this ceremony put affairs of the female world front and center and in mixed company. Unlike the other rituals we have noted (Yom Kippur candles; the Ninth of Av rituals), males are present at this one—but are passive and marginal—while women—the bride, her mother, the bridesmaids, the gollerke—are central. In short, the men in this situation are in the same position occupied by women in the synagogue and in male-gendered home rituals like kiddush (the sanctification of the Sabbath and festivals over wine). They are onlookers at a ritual created by women but functioning as if it were normative (ordained by rabbinic authority). There could be no better illustration of the remarkable, if sharply circumscribed, latitude accorded women

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precisely in so patriarchal a system, and the ways traditional women used this latitude to create loci of ritual expression for themselves, with the assent and collusion of men.124 We should also note how rare it is to find women’s experience of the traditional Jewish marriage rituals, and in particular, the hair shearing, given such prominent description. Rabbinic, encyclopedia, and even anthropological descriptions of traditional marriage do not mention the hair ritual; however, as even male sources attest, it must have been a profound and traumatic passage for women, whose hair (unlike that of boys) had been uncut since birth.125 Wengeroff ’s depiction of it here, and again in Volume Two, in describing her own “shearing,” as she calls it, certainly indicates as much.126 Not only would the woman’s look suddenly be radically different; the feel of shaved, stubbly hair, confined and pressing against the scalp by the marriage bonnet or wig would have been a new and constant reminder to her of her changed status. All this would not only signal the woman’s “unavailable” status in the world of men (an androcentric function), but would have been a ­female-centered rite of passage for the woman from the world of girls to that of women, signaling her new status to herself and to other women, as well as to men. Traditional women’s culture was not only religiously creative. It could be transgressive: fasting on the day preceding Yom Kippur is forbidden by rabbinic law (a prohibition most halakhic authorities understood to be of biblical origin, thus, of highest authority) since such fasting would compromise the ability to fast on Yom Kippur, which is a biblical commandment. On the contrary, eating on the day preceding Yom Kippur was held to be the equivalent of fasting on both days and was enjoined.127 And yet, traditional Ashkenazic women’s culture had elaborated a tradition of fasting on this day. If Yudl Epstein knew that his wife was fasting on the eve of Yom Kippur, obviously, he chose not to press the issue. If he did not know, that too, tells us much. Women’s culture relied on home and society for transmission, its educational structures largely informal. This was in stark contrast to male culture, with its study halls and yeshivas and the vast array of rabbinic works that formed the normative core of Judaism, mastery of which was the basis for ultimate status and power in the community. Home and society, however, afforded women a very large and effective field

Introduction

of operation. In a society sharply bifurcated by gender, children were socialized as Jews primarily, if not entirely, in the company of adults of their respective gender, who modeled the roles that girls and boys were expected to play as adults. We see this clearly in Wengeroff ’s first volume, with its many child’s-eye views of her mother’s behavior and that of the various female religious functionaries. We also see women’s culture perpetuating itself in the behavior of Wengeroff ’s older sisters. Wengeroff mentions her oldest sister, Khashe Feige, leading the younger children at home in prayers for Yom Kippur when “all the adults,” including their mother, were in synagogue, referring to this sister as “our teacher.”128 She also tells us that when her sister Eva tried to insist on meeting and speaking with her groom before the wedding ceremony, this effort was stopped cold by her sisters and her mother, enforcing conformity with traditional norms.129 We should not imagine that because traditional women’s culture had a distinct sacred sphere and because women’s presence in the synagogue was superfluous from the male perspective, that women were not in the synagogue or that this was male turf. This is a common misconception about traditional Jewish society.130 Wengeroff has numerous, matter-of-fact references to women’s presence in the synagogue, one of which, about her mother on Yom Kippur, we have just seen. In describing observance of the second Passover seder, she notes that her mother did not go to synagogue with the others because she needed to prepare the seder table, implying that otherwise she would have gone. 131 Describing Rosh Hashanah, Wengeroff says, “However early I rose, I do not remember having seen my mother or the other synagogue goers on this morning. All were already at prayers.”132 Describing her early married years, Wengeroff notes that her husband’s grandmother was regularly in the synagogue on weekdays—this, not in scholarly, urban Brisk, but a small Ukrainian town.133 Wengeroff ’s depiction of synagogue prayers (see, for instance, her description of the service on Tabernacles, when she describes the synagogue filled with the fragrance of the ritual ­citrons the men were using) testifies to her own presence there. The fact that she does not remark on this indicates that such presence was normal. Wengeroff gives us an (intentionally) hilarious depiction of the women’s section of the synagogue and the conduct of prayers there. Most women, she says, did not understand the Hebrew of the

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prayers (which is poetic and beyond the knowledge of most men, too), “and yet, there was a great need to pray on Saturday, and especially on holidays, nonetheless.” This need, given women’s physical segregation in the synagogue (the women’s section was often a separate room with only a small opening to the main, men’s, section) gave rise to professional prayer leaders, zogerkes, as she explains.134

Women’s Education Wengeroff may well have had a better-than-common knowledge of Hebrew for a female, given the level of Judaic education in her home and her own, formal education (see below). Such levels were not uncommon for girls in learned homes, particularly in the Lithuanian and Volozhin traditions. Education for girls also correlated positively with wealth: well-to-do families could afford fees for tutors or school enrollment and could dispense with children’s labor.135 In her description and explanation of the High Holidays and other festivals, Wengeroff brings translations and paraphrases of prayers. She could, of course, have been citing translations, but it is quite possible that Wengeroff understood these prayers, which after all, repeat every year. In bringing the translations, she focuses on their meaning and beauty: however it happened, she understood them. Indeed, she gives knowledgeable presentations on the meaning, laws, and customs of the entire cycle of holy and fast days, both those practiced in women’s sphere and those in men’s, such as kiddush, havdole (the ritual demarcating the end of the Sabbath and the beginning of the work week), waving the lulov and dwelling in the suke (rituals of the Tabernacles holiday), and blessing of the New Moon. However this occurred, Wengeroff had been taught and was clearly a willing student. We should not assume that Judaism was transmitted to girls solely by women or in the absence of any formal, institutional setting. Wengeroff clearly learned much from the men in her world, particularly her father. She opens her first volume and toward its end, she recapitulates with evocative and loving portrayals the sounds of Yudl Epstein’s early morning prayers. She depicts his religious sincerity at the High Holidays and Passover with deep admiration. She also learned from listening to him talk about affairs of the day. Her father was very forthright in express-

Introduction

ing his views and included in his talks tales of “famous men” (clearly, great rabbis), “their feats and religious habits,” and discussion of “Jewish law.”136 She writes, too, of other men whose piety she observed in her home or community (such as an emissary from the Land of Israel) and of individual male types (religious recluses, Talmud prodigies, a religiously motivated vegetarian) and movements—Hasidism, musar (the pietistic movement led by Rabbi Israel Salanter)—that stamped east European Judaism of her time and that were of course, male led. Contrary to stereotype, there were khodorim (kheder, plural) for girls (see Figure 5 in this Volume); young girls sometimes attended those of boys, as well. Wengeroff provides a lengthy, colorful depiction of her own induction into and study in a girl’s kheder, which her sisters also attended.137 In stark contrast to the memoirs of the maskilim and other male writers, Wengeroff depicts her melamed as kind, wise, and harmlessly bumbling if also, like all such teachers, desperately poor (the school was a room in his dilapidated house; he practiced kabbalistic healing and match-making on the side). Wengeroff does not specify what she studied in kheder—another stark contrast with the memoirs of the maskilim, where this information is central to their critique of the kheder curriculum and pedagogy. In her kheder, Wengeroff would have been taught, minimally, basic Hebrew reading-literacy (she says she was sent to school for “Hebrew instruction”), practically oriented to the prayer book, perhaps going as far as some comprehension, which she might well also have picked up at home. However she attained this level of literacy, she mentions, late in Volume One, that she “half-understood” the acrostic biblical poem Eyshes khayil (Proverbs 32) recited at the table on Friday nights; understanding biblical poetry indicates a significant level of Hebrew. She mentions her older sister “discuss[ing] a paragraph with the [kheder] rebbe” and “review[ing] it with the head assistant” but unfortunately, does not specify the text studied. It might have been the ­Tsenerene, the “women’s bible,” a Yiddish translation and commentary that we know her mother studied at home; other texts of halakhic and of kabbalistic bent, which we have seen, her mother also read, were available in Yiddish and therefore, to girls and women. In describing one of the holidays, she specifies that she had learned its meaning in kheder.138 While boys would be initiated in basic Hebraic literacy at the age of about three (Yiddish, the spoken language, as well as Hebrew and

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­ ramaic, the languages of prayer and scholarship, are written in the A same alphabet) and be quickly moved to (difficult) biblical and rabbinic texts (one of the chief complaints of the maskilim), girls never did this, formally at least; a rare few picked up this kind of learning on their own or with the help of a male relative.139 As Wengeroff herself acknowledges when noting that her step-mother-in-law knew Hebrew, the Hebrew “education of women, not only in Konotop [the Ukrainian hometown of Wengeroff ’s husband] but in all of White Russia in those days was a rarity.”140 She also mentions being tutored in Russian and German, lessons she says her mother arranged. This might strike us as very odd since we have seen that her mother was practically phobic about her sons-in-law studying any secular subject. In fact, this extreme double standard was typical of traditional Jewish society, sanction for it going back to the Talmud, where some sages permitted women the study of Greek poetry and sophism as “an adornment to the sex.”141 This tradition had been in place in Ashkenazic society for centuries; the seventeenth-century Glikl Hamel, who was highly literate and proficient in traditional Jewish texts available to women, mentions a step-sister who knew French fluently and played the clavichord, talents she put to sharp use on behalf of her father’s business.142 Precisely the intellectual pursuits forbidden to boys, especially study of European languages and literature, were not only permitted but encouraged for girls, for utilitarian, as well as symbolic reasons. Such study was seen as vital for the business functions women were expected to discharge, not necessarily in place of men, but simply—as seen in the lives of Glikl and other well-off women that Glikl mentions in her memoirs—as part of a productive household. Until the emergence in the nineteenth century of a modernized, acculturated Jewish middle class that absorbed from its European counterpart an ideal of female “domesticity,” Jewish society never had an ideal of female economic passivity, even for its elites, like that which governed the European nobility (and that the modern European bourgeoisie appropriated). Rather, productivity was the norm for women of all economic classes from rabbinic times on, for religious, cultural, political, and economic reasons. Idleness was presumed to breed boredom, which would lead to licentiousness.143 But toleration of Jews in Christian Europe was largely a function of Jewish economic usefulness to non-Jewish soci-

Introduction

ety, making group security dependent on productivity and specifically, wealth. Dispensing with the productive labor of half the population or rendering it ignorant of business affairs was, therefore, unthinkable.144 We see this dynamic at work in Wengeroff ’s childhood home, when she notes that her older sisters (but not she and the younger children of the family), were permitted to remain with her parents (plural) and her paternal grandfather, Semel Epstein, when they discussed business during his periodic visits.145 Age, not gender, determined the participants in this conversation. As a young married woman, Wengeroff worked in her well-to-do in-laws’ inn, something she notes without comment.146 The fact that she does not score this as an adjustment to married life and a new town and culture (an adjustment she otherwise details), indicates that Wengeroff saw work as normal and expected, a carry-over of responsibilities she had borne in her parental home once she was the eldest unmarried daughter there. In this capacity, she performed such tasks as marketing, where she was responsible for selecting the all-important fish for the Friday night Sabbath dinner, cooking it, and washing and ironing parts of her father’s Sabbath attire. Although her family’s circumstances were lessened by this point in her life, they still had servants, including a cook. Wengeroff ’s work was seen as preparation for an adolescent girl entering the pre-marital state because married women even in well-off homes were expected to be competent and productive—more—shrewd and canny. Wengeroff shows that she understood and welcomed this socialization, citing the chapter of Proverbs praising the “virtuous woman” (eyshes khayil), traditionally sung on Friday night in honor of the home’s matriarch—a poem that portrays a frenzy of productive female activity—saying she hoped to merit this recognition someday herself.147 Men’s work in pre-modern Jewish households was not conducted in separate “work” spaces; Wengeroff ’s father ran his business from home, supposedly “women’s space.” Wengeroff, like Glikl before her, witnessed her father’s business affairs and associates and apparently on the basis of this observation and business conversations to which she was privy, felt she had a good sense for business. Notably, we do not hear of Wengeroff ’s mother participating in the family business; she was certainly not the business partner that Glikl shows herself to have been to her first husband. Whatever Wengeroff knew of

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the business therefore came through contact with her father and other males in the family. Strange as it may seem, because women not only were exempt from the religious requirement of sacred study that bound men but effectively—with some notable exceptions—barred from it, secular study for girls violated no religious norm, whereas it was a grave violation for males, as we have seen in the reaction of Wengeroff ’s mother to the secular pursuits of her sons-in-law. The prohibition or license for each gender was the other’s mirror opposite. To my knowledge, this is the most extreme case of a gender-based distinction regarding a core practice in traditional society, involving not simply women’s exemption from an obligation binding men, but its violation. In all other areas of women’s exemption, for instance, laying tefillin (phylacteries) or guarding the integrity of the esrog (citron, used ritually during the Tabernacles festival) with its fragile but essential tip, exemption never progressed to sanctioned violation. On the contrary, there is a fascinating tkhine in which the woman specifically notes and asks merit for having guarded the tip of the esrog for the duration of the week-long holiday, even though ritual use of the esrog was binding only on men, not women.148 In the core areas of ritual observance that defined Judaism—the ritual diet, Sabbath observance—the same standard bound all adults, regardless of gender: food was either kosher or not; an action either permissible on the Sabbath and holidays or forbidden. Even the rules that are quintessentially associated with women under rabbinic law and that fundamentally define women in contrast to men—the laws of niddah (sexual abstinence and physical separation because of menstruation and post-partum bleeding)—were, of course, a single, shared system for married men and women. However, regarding secular study, the same activity was simultaneously forbidden and sanctioned, more—encouraged—depending on gender. The realm of the intellect, therefore, can be seen as the prime zone where gender was constructed in the traditional Jewish society, the fulcrum upon which the whole system of gender separation and distinction turned. In middle- and upper-class families, secular study for girls had both symbolic and practical value, with knowledge of European languages, literature, and music seen as a sign of “refinement” that improved marriage prospects; marriage matches, of course, being a major business upon which the economic health not only of the new couple, but their

Introduction

immediate and extended families, rested.149 This phenomenon—traditionalism that condoned and even encouraged secular study for women—coexisted with traditional Jewish society for many centuries. In the nineteenth-century context, however, it made for acculturation and secularization of Jewish women, who then served as vehicles of such influence in broader Jewish society (that is, on men), a process Iris Parush has richly illustrated.150 We can see clearly, however, that it was the larger cultural and political context (modernization in the context of hoped-for “betterment”), not the behavior itself (secular study), that fostered secularization. This dynamic—women receiving secular education and then serving as agents of broader acculturation in the nineteenth century—seems to have been a factor in Wengeroff ’s complex cultural makeup. Wengeroff ’s love of European literature did not begin with her assimilated lifestyle as an adult but when she was a child in her parents’ home. Her interest developed not surreptitiously, like that of her brother and brothers-inlaw, but with her parents’ knowledge, assent, and financial support. In her Preface to Volume One, Wengeroff says, speaking of her childhood years, “We learned German and Polish literature and also studied the Bible and prophets” (the inclusive “we” she uses in fact, refers only to the girls of the family; the curriculum she outlines is precisely that of educated girls from well-to-do homes. Her failure to realize this, to say, “we girls,” testifies to the self-sufficiency of her female experience and consciousness growing up). A few pages later, she notes, “My mother used to provide for Jewish tutors—a melamed and penmanship teachers—as well as for tutors in Polish and Russian151(emphasis mine). When Wengeroff was about fifteen years old, she says that she and several other girls “attended a private school where we were taught Russian and German” and that she continued to study these languages formally for several years, until her marriage.152 She reports reading Yiddish (Juedisch-deutsch) “adventure tales—G’dules, centure, wenture . . . Bobbe-meisses”—adding however, that “for the most part though, my heart was captivated by the rich, fantastic, oriental tales of ‘A Thousand and One Nights,’” from which her interest passed to Robinson Crusoe and the German writers [Heinrich] Zschokke and [Friedrich] Schiller.153 Crucially, she reports that it was she and her female fellow students who introduced Schiller to the “cultured (gebildeten) Jewish youth” (that is, males)

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of Brisk, including her brothers-in-law. This is what inflamed the young men’s enthusiasm for the poet’s work, leading to Schiller attaining prestige of reading place alongside, and literally within, the Talmud folios, his lines studied and parsed in the same manner as sacred text. We recall Wengeroff ’s depiction of her mother’s discovery of this sacrilege, a scene she recounts without acknowledging her role in fomenting the boys’ violation, of which indeed, she seems quite unaware, consciously, at least; a remarkable repression to which we shall return.154 In these same years, Wengeroff says she also read Russian writers, naming but not identifying them: [Alexander] Griboyedov, a playwright who composed satirical comedies, and [Vasily Andreevich] Shukovsky [Zhukovsky], one of the major figures of Russian romanticism, after Pushkin perhaps the most important poet of the first half of the nineteenth century, a man who composed “Byron-like” verse. And as a newlywed—that is, before her husband’s loss of faith—Wengeroff says she “read a great deal, mostly Russian,” from her in-laws’ library, since the “German books, like Schiller, Zschokke, Kotzbue, Bulwer, that I brought with me from Brest were thoroughly read through.”155 Clearly, Wengeroff had a significant secular literary taste, which she was allowed to cultivate in both her parental and her in-laws’ homes, and was steeped in the works of major German, Russian, and (in translation) English writers of her time. Interestingly, when she, her parents, and other family members met her groom-to-be and his parents to settle her engagement, she says “we spoke mostly Russian amongst ourselves” since the Epsteins’ and Wengeroffs’ different dialects of Yiddish (respectively, as she puts it, of “Russian-German” and “Lithuanian,” with the Wengeroff ’s Yiddish “imperfect”), made this their only common language. It is significant that both families knew Russian at this time; such knowledge was then very rare among Jews, who used Polish or Ukrainian for business with the non-Jews of the Pale (which as noted, was made up of formerly Polish lands annexed by Russia). For the Epsteins and Wengeroffs, however, Russian was a necessity since both families made their livings through business contracted with the government (the Wengeroffs had a government-leased liquor concession). Russian maskilim and the Russian Jewish intelligentsia, wishing cultural rapprochement with Russia, made Jewish acquisition of Russian a priority during the nineteenth

Introduction

century to signal Jewish identification with the country, as a means to cultural integration, to attain certain kinds of economic mobility (the practice of a profession, in particular), and to enable settlement outside the Pale of Settlement in Russia proper.156 While language acquisition does not necessarily entail cultural rapprochement—Ukrainian-­speaking Jews hardly became peasants, and Yudl Epstein was no Russifier— knowing the language of the political majority, especially against normative Jewish ignorance of it, put both Wengeroff ’s family of origin and the one into which she married in a culturally liminal state, which may have pre-positioned members of the younger generations of both families, subject in the 1850s and beyond to concerted assimilatory and Russifying pressures, for more radical behaviors. In describing her engagement, Wengeroff notes that her prospective groom, who passed her father’s test of talmudic knowledge (de rigueur in arranged marriage negotiations where there was any rabbinic learning), did not know German—obviously, something that was also inquired into as a desideratum. In another indication of Yudl Epstein’s forthcoming attitudes, she says that her father “expressed the wish that [her groom] learn” German “because in our country this was essential for social reasons” (would that she had explained this remark; presumably, it meant that German was needed for business with people across the nearby Prussian border). Equally telling, both the groom and his family considered this request appropriate and agreed to it. Wengeroff herself gave Chonon German lessons once they married.157 From what Wengeroff tells us, her husband’s eventual straying from tradition happened for reasons of its own, but it is significant that for all her traditionalism as a young bride, she was his avenue to the larger world of German-language culture, a perfect illustration of Iris Parush’s argument about women as agents of secularization. Significantly, Wengeroff never makes any connection from this to what followed in her husband’s path, denying the role, however unintentional that she played in the acculturation and assimilation that took place under her roof, of which she portrays herself as purely the protesting victim.158 Women’s traditional culture, certainly in the wealthier segments of Jewish society, was neither cut off from that of men nor from that of the best-educated elements of European society. Indeed, it was a potent model of what Wengeroff would later call “moderation”—of which

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women, she says, but not modernizing Jewish men—were capable. In Wengeroff ’s childhood—on the threshold of modernity but while traditional society was still intact—the various components of that culture coexisted and worked in tandem in a logic of their own. That inherently volatile mix would soon unravel, and its secularizing potential would be unleashed. One other element may well have contributed to the confidence and assertiveness we see in Wengeroff. There is no mention in Memoirs, in contrast to many other first-person accounts, that either, much less both of her parents, lamented the dearth of sons or the abundance of daughters in the family.159 Ephraim, “the kaddish,” had a unique status; was adored, yes, and spoiled, which Wengeroff does not say about herself or any of her sisters. But she relates stories that show that she felt loved and cherished—by her father, in particular—as a young child, an adolescent, and as a married woman.160 For all their power, traditional women were distinctly subordinate to men, as we see from a telling arrangement at her family’s seder table. Her parents, Wengeroff writes, were resplendent in new clothes for the holiday. The family’s manservant, too, received a new caftan for Passover and was even seated at the family table since “patriarchal custom declared that on this evening [Passover commemorates liberation from slavery in Egypt], all were equal—master and servant.”161 Even on this holiday, however, female servitude is as enduring as it is selfevident, overriding class distinctions. As the elaborate seder ritual begins, Wengeroff ’s father asks his wife to pass him the symbolic foods at the appropriate points in the liturgy and to fill his goblet with wine at the points that this is required. Wengeroff ’s sisters perform this service for their husbands, as well as for the young children, and “for the meshores [manservant], too, of course,” says Wengeroff, oblivious to the dissonance between the declared (if quite temporary) equality of male master and manservant and the unalterable servitude of women. Nor does Wengeroff make mention of female servants—the nanny, much less the cook—being liberated from obligatory service and welcomed at the table for the seder, or how they otherwise managed to participate in a seder, which is obligatory for all under rabbinic law. It is not her family’s practice, reflective of the prevailing traditional norms, that is being interrogated here, but Wengeroff ’s observations

Introduction

about it, decades later. Though Wengeroff, as noted, was well aware of European feminism at the time she wrote her memoirs, she never protests the subservience of women in traditional Jewish culture, or even perceives it as such, only once noting, in a factual aside and without lament, the differential treatment of boys and girls in traditional education.162 Of the twinned legacy of power and subordination, Wengeroff chose to hold on, psychically, to the power of women in traditional Jewish culture, a legacy she never came to inherit.

Nicholas I, Wengeroff, Haskalah, and Modernity The life and events that Wengeroff describes in Volume One of her memoirs took place during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825 to 1855. We have already noted the pivotal importance of his policies for the emergence of haskalah as a movement and for Russian Jewish culture as a whole. How Wengeroff depicts his government’s policies to the Jews, what she says and even more, what she omits, reveals much that is central to understanding her. If we had only Wengeroff and no other knowledge of who Nicholas I was in Russian Jewish history and in particular, in popular Jewish perception, the most salient fact we would know about him was that he was strikingly handsome, a fact confirmed by many other sources.163 Although Wengeroff describes the painful effects of some of his many anti-Jewish policies in detail and with sympathy, she does not actually attribute these policies to Nicholas, much less castigate him (or even his advisors) for them. Thus, Wengeroff writes a substantial section in Volume One about the outlawing of traditional Jewish dress, which Nicholas decreed in stages in the 1840s, but she uses this primarily as an opportunity to describe this garb (which, to be sure, yields one of the rich anthropological sections for which her memoirs were valued from the beginning). She does close Volume One with a description of some of the abuses that accompanied implementation of this decree.164 For anyone unfamiliar with the sadism of Tsarist officialdom’s Jew-hatred, the section makes excellent introductory reading. This choice of ending in a volume is significant. Just as the opening of self-conscious, carefully crafted memoirs is telling, so too, is the way the author closes such memoirs or, as here, a volume in a multi-volume

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work. In Wengeroff ’s case, it is not simply chronology (mid-century) that determines the cut off. Rather, in a brilliant stroke, she chooses to cap her first volume with a tangible illustration of the transition from tradition to modernity in the forcible imposition of westernized dress on traditional Jews, a perfect, non-fictional metaphor for the reality she alleges: that modernity descended like an avalanche on an unwilling, even hapless, culture. Acutely aware of the significance of clothing as cultural demarcation, she ends the first volume and segues to the second, supposedly yet unwritten volume, with the leading pronouncement we have noted above: “These outward torments and tragedies [humiliation and abuse of Jews wearing traditional dress after it was outlawed] were but a miniature picture of the tremendous upheavals that were brewing.” Although not her focus in the passage preceding this comment— which itself is noteworthy—Wengeroff is well aware of the “torments and tragedies” entailed in at least this policy of Nicholas. Earlier in the volume, again, not as her focus, she gives us another view of Jewish misery at the hands of Tsarist policy: Nicholas decreed that Brest Litovsk be depopulated to make way for construction of a fortress. This decree (which of course, was not anti-Jewish per se) brought great hardship, including to her family. Her father’s profitable brick works and the family’s magnificent home were destroyed. It was at this point that Yudl withdrew from business for study and completion of his books; the family never returned to its previous standard of living. Since their new dwelling was far smaller than the old, the multi-generational character of her household ended; her married sisters and their families moved out on their own. But property owners were compensated for their losses, however belatedly and inadequately, and re-established themselves in New Brest. In consideration of her father’s position and good relations with Tsarist officialdom, he was also allotted ample time to find new lodgings for his family. Destitute Jews, on the other hand, had their pitiful dwellings destroyed with no compensation and nowhere else to go and got no leeway with the eviction date. Wengeroff provides a chilling picture of their misery and despair, describing the merciless eviction she and her mother witnessed of a family of poor Jews literally thrown into the street by Tsarist police.165 Wengeroff then, had personal knowledge of the cruelty and ruthless-

Introduction

ness of Nicholas’s policies. The decree against Jewish clothing was a direct and intentional assault on the traditionalism she so defends (or, at least, memorializes). Indeed, no Jew alive during Nicholas’s reign could have been ignorant of other of his Jewish policies, issued in over 600 decrees during his reign, which Jewish opinion overwhelmingly perceived as hostile.166 These included: defining the (previously declared) Pale of Settlement to protect the Russian interior from nefarious Jewish immigration; expulsion of Jews from villages and from Kiev and prohibition of Jewish settlement within thirty-five miles of the border; censorship of Jewish books and closing of all but two Hebrew presses; a special tax to fund the State Jewish schools, which the vast majority of Jews shunned; and abolition of the kahal, the executive agency of traditional Jewish self-government, while retaining its tax-collecting functions on behalf of the government. Significantly, Wengeroff does not mention any of these policies. But by far the most glaring and revealing of Wengeroff ’s omissions about Nicholas is her failure, in depicting the 1830s to 1850s, to so much as mention his cantonist policy. In 1827, soon after ascending the throne, Nicholas made Jewish men eligible for conscription. As Michael Stanislawski notes, modernizing European states obligated Jews to military service as part of a process of civic inclusion and expansion of rights—emancipation. If Jews were to enjoy, or even aspire to, full citizenship, they were to share the burden of military service and demonstrate their proverbially questioned loyalty to the State. In ending the Jewish exemption from military service (granted because of conviction about Jewish cowardice and disloyalty), Nicholas was taking a step toward regularizing their status as members of the meshchane estate (townspeople), such regularization of course being the basic component of Jewish emancipation. Russia, however, Stanislawski argues, was distinct in making Jewish conscription not a part of larger, progressive policy but a goal in itself. Nicholas I was a martinet (one of his biographers depicts his childhood as “the education of a drill-master,” while a foreign critic of his rule characterized Nicholas’s Russia as “a state of siege transformed into the normal state of society”).167 There was no problem, individual or societal, even the Jews, that could not be corrected by military discipline and army service. As Stanislawski puts it, “how better to deal with an anarchic, feeble, and heretical group [like the Jews] than in the army?”168

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Nicholas harbored vehement anti-Jewish prejudice. In 1816, while still Grand Duke, he had made a tour of large sections of the empire, including areas in which the Jewish population was concentrated. Though he noted with astonishment that the Jews had remained loyal to Russia during the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, he characterized Jews as “absolute leeches, fastening themselves everywhere and completely exhausting” the provinces in which they lived. He continued to consider Jews, in the characterization of John Klier, as “backward, superstitious, isolated, dirty, parasitic, and unproductive. At their worst . . . capable of ritual murder.”169 Nicholas saw the army as a powerful tool of social engineering, particularly for the serfs. He used conscription against other, previously exempted ethnic or political minorities deemed problematic—Polish noble rebels, Finnish gypsies, Ukrainian Cossacks, among others—and the policy toward Jews must be seen in these larger contexts.170 In the Jewish case, however, as we have seen, religion itself was a central target for reform because above all else, Judaism was what made Jews “Jewish,” with all the negative traits attributed to that designation and deriving from it: their allegedly exploitative and parasitic economic activities and their linguistic depravity—their Yiddish vernacular. Klier dates a turn in “the common disdain for Jews expressed by Russian officials” to the time of Nicholas’s reign when Russia discovered “the rich legacy of Western Talmudophobia,” which convinced them that the negative traits of the Jews derived in particular from the Talmud. Jews would be rehabilitated either through a Europeanized Judaism, stripped of its talmudic base, or through conversion, for which the primary institutionalized site was cantonist units of the army, which to cite Klier, were “conversionary in intent.” Other religious minorities (Catholics, Uniates, Muslims) were subjected to conversionist pressure in military service, but conversion as a goal in the State’s Jewish policy was particularly realizable with conscripts who were minors well below the normal age of service, a use of the cantonist system that Klier characterizes as “original” in intent.171 The 1827 statute set the draftable age for Jews at between twelve and twenty-five, as opposed to the normal age of between twenty and thirtyfive. The term of service for those taken at or beyond the age of eighteen years was twenty-five years. Those taken at an earlier age would first serve in special, “cantonist” units, upon graduation from which,

Introduction

the standard term would commence. While others, including underage criminals and vagabonds, illegitimate children and children of political subversives, were drafted into cantonist units, the entire male Jewish population was made subject to this type of conscription. Jews could present only other Jews as substitutes for conscription, and Jewish communities were given the odious task of filling local Jewish recruit quotas. The 1827 statute promised religious freedom; recent research has shown that some adult Jewish soldiers were able to actualize this promise during and after Nicholas’s reign.172 This same research confirms the aggressive conversionist efforts undertaken in cantonist units. Jewish cantonists were denied access to religious services and personnel, Jewish communities, kosher food, and relatives. They were subjected to heavy conversionist pressure and incentives, including compulsory attendance at Christian worship, confiscation of Jewish ritual objects, punishment for Jewish observance and reward for conversion (punishments repealed upon baptism). Cantonists were forbidden to speak Yiddish and denied letters composed in Yiddish that came from home (effectively, barring contact with home). Priests were assigned to Jewish units and given special guidance to improve their effectiveness. The exact number who converted is not known; Stanislawski estimates that 50 percent of cantonists and a “substantial” number of adult Jewish soldiers converted.173 In 1842–43 alone, over 2,200 cantonists were converted. Between 1846–54, of 14,000 cantonists, nearly half converted.174 Mortality rates, too, were enormous, as young children, “their baby teeth . . . still falling out,” in the words of one report, bereft of parental care and subjected to merciless discipline and long marches in harsh weather, dropped from illness, exertion, and exposure.175 The cantonist episode was one of the most horrific in Jewish history. Since the State put the Jewish community in charge of implementing it, the draft greatly exacerbated class conflict in Jewish society and undermined traditional communal authority as the oligarchy of learning and wealth that dominated communal structures exempted their sons from the draft and met quotas with “undesirables” (largely the poor, though with non-conformists as well). Community leaders targeted young children, in particular. Because of early marriage, many adolescent males were already heads of families, and community leaders reckoned that their conscription would cause greater economic and social devastation

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than that of children. Thus, children well below the legal conscription age of twelve were taken; the records show many as young as seven and even younger. Stanislawski estimates that of some 70,000 Jews conscripted in Russia between 1827 and 1854, 50,000 were minors. The overwhelming norm for Jews, then, was conscription of children.176 People began hiding their children. The community then hired kidnappers, khappers (literally, grabbers), who worked as bounty hunters, collecting children for payment. They wrestled children from the arms of screaming mothers; took them by guile, seducing them with food or games. To spare their own children, some Jews would kidnap and deliver those of others to meet the statute’s substitution requirement. Jewish society was terrorized and traumatized by the cantonist episode, whose horrors played out publicly, in the streets, synagogues, and study halls. In his memoirs, Yehezkel Kotik describes a case from Kamenets, not far from Brisk, when three khappers descended on one eight-yearold, targeted because he was orphaned of his father (i.e., was economically marginal and lacked effective protection). The khappers came to the boy’s kheder, were beaten off, and pursued him elsewhere. Friends hid him for weeks, but the khappers lay in wait until they caught him in the street one day when he tried to sneak off to see his mother. The boy resisted and was beaten; his mother sat wailing outside the quarters in which he was held while the khappers filled their quota. “The heartrending cries of mother and son could be heard all over the township,” Kotik writes. All the kheder pupils witnessed the boy cast into the wagon that carried him away. One town on its route was Brisk, to which the distraught mother followed the wagon. But she was sent back from there to Kamenets where, after two days in bed, she died of grief. The boy himself eventually descended into a permanent stupor.177 This episode occurred during the Crimean War (1853–56) a few years after Wengeroff had married and left Brisk, but similar scenes played out all over the Pale during the cantonist years, which were coterminous with Nicholas’s reign (his successor abolished juvenile conscription on the day of his coronation), and that, foremost for our purposes, were utterly associated with it in Jewish minds.178 As a Yiddish folk song put it, “When Nicholas Pavlovich became emperor, Jewish hearts became sad.”179 It is impossible that in Wengeroff ’s large household, which included impoverished servants and frequent visitors from near and far, no one knew

Introduction

Jews victimized by the cantonist policy or witnessed its abuses, which were public by nature. If Lilienthal was the talk of the synagogue, community, and home of Wengeroff ’s childhood, surely, the cantonists were. The trauma of the cantonist era produced a wealth of folklore, folksongs, memoirs, and fiction, with which we know Wengeroff was familiar since she herself tells us that the “number of . . . folksongs [about the cantonists] was infinitely large” and refers us to some “gripping pieces” in Saul Ginsburg and P. S. Marek’s published collection, Yiddish Folksongs in Russia, presenting the text of several such songs “from my memory.”180 She does this, however, in the second half of Volume Two, while describing the mid-1860s, when she and her husband lived for a time in Helsinki, Finland, and were seeking a Jewish tutor for their older children. In the fortress in which they lived was a small group of former cantonists, one of whom, she says, was very learned in Talmud (he declined to tutor her son). She explains who “Nicholaievsker Soldaten” (“Nicholas soldiers”) were, first acknowledging that to “the initiated” the term “already said plenty.” She mentions the kidnapping of poor, unprivileged children, whose plight is conveyed in the sad ballads she reproduces. But her presentation of this episode, which foregrounds her memory as much as the suffering of the cantonists, is quick and distant, in sharp contrast to her treatment of topics that grip Wengeroff ’s emotions. And very delayed. Why did Wengeroff not present this rather prominent chapter in “the cultural history of the Jews of Russia in the nineteenth century” in her first volume, its chronological place? How could the cantonist episode have escaped Wengeroff ’s radar when she recalled “enlightenment” and the “Lilienthal era”? Class is certainly part of the explanation. Her father’s government connections and wealth shielded her brother Ephraim from danger as he came of cantonist, and regular conscription, age in the 1830s and 1840s. Early in Memoirs, she notes that her father was on friendly terms with the local commandant in Brisk and that high officials—a prince, the governor of Grodno province—quartered with her family. When her paternal grandfather came to Brisk for business, she reports that “many Christians—highly placed people from the army, engineers, construction commissars”—came to her parents’ house and that he played cards with them.181 She says that her father and the governor of Grodno province discussed many serious topics over long Sabbath dinners (in

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Russian, of course), remarkably, noting that “Relations between Jews and Christians were not yet poisoned by anti-Semitism”—this at a time when the cantonist policy had been in place for about ten years.182 Wealth utterly stamped Wengeroff ’s consciousness. She experienced times of economic uncertainty during her marriage but never actual want. She encountered poverty, of course; it was pervasive in Jewish society and appears numerous times in her narrative, as do perceptive observations about class differences in such matters as dress and food consumption. But in all of Volume One, Wengeroff never treats poverty as a subject in its own right, in the way, for instance, that she treats Jewish cultural “backwardness.” Even in Volume Two, when she explicitly scores Jewish poverty as a social problem, to which she and her husband made a significant response, she never questions or even notes her own immunity from it, though by the time she wrote, Jewish socialism had emerged as an organized movement, with a major center in Minsk, where Wengeroff spent much of her adult life and composed at least some of Memoirs.183 The way that Jewish poverty enters Wengeroff ’s narrative betrays an assumed imperviousness that is a hallmark of established wealth. Thus, Wengeroff in an almost bemused and certainly a distant tone, recalls her parents’ chief servant, who “lived with her husband in a mud hut near our brick factory,” and never appeared in anything but a tattered dress and mis-sized shoes that “fell off her feet at every step. Her feet were almost frost-bitten, even in summer. Her brown-blue frozen face was wrapped with a once-white calico cloth . . . Her small dull eyes . . . always expressed kindness and gratitude. Her . . . thin lips seemed to be able to say only: ‘Good people, warm me up and give me something to eat!’”184 Wengeroff had close playmates who were very poor. In her description of her kheder days, she paints an evocative portrait of the poverty of her melamed and his family, in whose house she took her lessons and spent long days. She details a Purim prank in which she and a sister donned the tattered clothes of their servants and pretended to be an impoverished abandoned wife (agune) and her mother, begging food and alms at her parents’ table, a scene meant to be amusing on this joyous holiday on which pranks and skits are performed. In a throwaway remark after describing the lavish Passover meals her family enjoyed, she says that poor Jews could only dream of such repasts. Of course, Wengeroff knew the face of Jewish poverty, and she expresses sincere

Introduction

sympathy for the poor people she describes. But all her descriptions assume class hierarchy and her superior and secure place in it. Wengeroff writes of straitened circumstances after the destruction of Old Brest and with it, her father’s brickworks and her family’s palatial home, speaking of the family’s more modest quarters in New Brest. Yet when she describes the celebration of her older sister’s wedding in that residence, she mentions spacious and well-appointed rooms—a banquet hall, a wedding hall—holding a good number of guests who enjoyed a fine meal. In her lived experience, this is relative poverty. Wengeroff ’s class is crucial to understanding her, but it is not the full or even the foremost explanation for her treatment of the cantonist episode. The contrast between her failure to place this squarely within her narrative about the 1830s and 1840s and the memoirs of, albeit male, memoirists, like Kotik (who were subject to conscription), is glaring. But gender and the lack of direct experience with conscription or the fear of it, do not suffice to explain this gap in her writing either. Wengeroff details many events and aspects of Jewish culture of which she had no direct experience, precisely because they are a central part of the cultural history of the period she narrates: the establishment of State-sponsored rabbinical schools, Hasidism, mitnagdism, Rabbi ­Salanter’s musar movement, Moses Montefiore’s visit to Russia in 1846. Nor is this the extent of the puzzle. Even when Wengeroff does write of cantonism, she does not criticize Nicholas for it or, except for using the term, “Nicholai Soldaten,” even associate him with it. But this, we recall, is consistent with her depiction of Nicholas’s decree prohibiting traditional Jewish dress, which she attributes to “the government”; with another “imperial decree” of 1846 that ordered the expulsion of all Jews living approximately within thirty-five miles of Russia’s western borders, which she says “ruin[ed] many thousands of families”; and with the decree ordering the eviction from and destruction of Old Brisk, which she attributes to Nicholas, but without a word of criticism. On the contrary, one of the most jarring, and the only truly bizarre section of Wengeroff ’s memoirs, is one she entitles, “It Was a Pretty Picture,” which opens as follows: It was a pretty picture as Tsar Nicholas I stood in the middle of a glittering retinue. His tall figure, bursting with health, towered over his surroundings. His military parade uniform, the firm close fitting

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dress coat with its bright crimson edging and sleeves, his chest decorated with the numerous stars of medals, his massive epaulettes, the blue, broad sash slung across his breast . . . all this lent his soldierly form an extraordinary appearance. His face with its well-proportioned lines, his clean-shaven double chin, with its full, blond whiskers, expressed a benevolent (emphasis mine), indeed, a cheerful excitement. His vigorously sparkling, grey eyes also shone. . . .

This is how Wengeroff introduces the story of the destruction and forced evacuation of Old Brest: Nicholas had come to survey the site of his future fortress.185 Even if she was unaware of the cantonist horrors as a child when she says she and her family saw the Tsar (and Tsarevich) up close, she knew about them as a memoirist, and she knew the fear and revulsion with which Jews regarded him.186 What could possibly account for her gushing portrait of this Tsar? Haskalah. Modernity. Not as foreign elements imposed by force against Wengeroff ’s will, but as intrinsic and chosen aspects of her own identity. The only elements in Jewish society who were not critical of Nicholas, indeed, who spoke positively of him, were the maskilim, for the reasons we have explored above.187 As we have seen, much in Wengeroff ’s writing shows that, for all her lament of the destruction of traditional Jewish culture and anger at modernity, she was a thorough modern, not just in lifestyle but in thinking and values. Indeed, she was a staunch adherent of the basic tenets of haskalah. We will explore this, as well as corroborating external sources, in the Introduction to Volume Two, but it is too crucial to omit discussion of it here because important expressions of Wengeroff ’s outlook come in Volume One: in her depiction of the Lilienthal era; in her sisters’ attempts to don westernized dress and one sister’s attempt to take the Sabbath afternoon walk in the company of her husband; in her description of her sister Eva’s wedding, and her own (in Volume Two). In all of this, Wengeroff does not give an uncritical reading of traditional culture. It is clear from her account of the Sabbath stroll, for example, that she sees nothing wrong with what her sister and brother-in-law attempted (she feels differently about unchaperoned time between unmarried young people of her children’s generation). She presents this episode as an example of traditional mores and the intrusion of modern ones and as evidence of the strength of (to her, much envied) parental authority in a still intact traditional culture.

Introduction

But she does not present separate walks as a value she herself upholds. Her sister Eva tries unsuccessfully to insist on seeing her chosen groom before her wedding ceremony and is brought into line by her mother and older sisters. But in describing her own wedding that occurred just a few years later, Wengeroff triumphantly stresses that mores had so changed that she not only saw but spent time with her groom at their engagement (hers, too, was an arranged marriage), something she clearly welcomed at the time and approved in retrospect—even while stating in Memoirs that precisely these sorts of seemingly small social changes were the harbinger of the larger destruction of traditional culture.188 It is clear that Wengeroff thinks that Lilienthal and all he represented were not only an irresistible force (which she clearly does believe), but a positive good. She reports Lilienthal’s observation about the “Semitic racial purity” and “black, clever eyes” of kheder boys with no comment, as a fact at no distance from her own perception (would her parents have described Jewish children focusing on “race” and physical appearance, rather than intelligence, learning, and piety?). Wengeroff describes Nicholas’s Minister for Popular Education, Uvarov, who led the State-sponsored reform of Jewish education, as “refined and humane,” a stance in line with more recent scholarship about him but hardly with the opinions of Russian Jews of her own time, who feared and distrusted Uvarov as an agent of State-sponsored conversion. Indeed, Wengeroff ’s account of Lilienthal’s time in Minsk and Vilna shows that she was quite aware of this popular perception—and that she shared Lilienthal’s view of things, not that of the masses.189 Most revealing, Wengeroff writes: . . . I want to cast a backward glance to the late 1830s, which was a culturally significant time for the Jews of Lithuania. I consider myself lucky to have experienced that period first hand, when the great reforms under Tsar Nicholas I brought about the spiritual, yes, even the physical regeneration of the Jews in Lithuania (emphasis mine). Whoever, like me, lived through the period between 1838 and today, took part in all the religious battles in the family life of Lithuanian Jewry and finally, observed the great progress made, must express his admiration for the idea of that reform legislation and bless it. Indeed, if you compare the generally uncultivated (emphasis mine), poor Jews of the 1840s with Lithuanian Jewry of the 1860s and 1870s, among whom

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today there are so many men of perfect European refinement; who have the most outstanding accomplishments in the most diverse fields of literature, science, and art, and who are not lacking for honors and titles from the outside world, you must even speak of it enthusiastically.190

Wengeroff refers to the beginnings of the “cultural movement among the Jews” (haskalah), as a “refreshing breeze” blowing through Brest and “all other Russian Jewish towns” (Was traditional culture not “culture”? Had the “air” in Jewish towns previously been stale?). She does not simply describe these changes. She identifies with them, using the same idiom about the changes that we have seen in Lilienthal and that were typically maskilic. Overtly, Wengeroff depicts tradition and modernity as mortal opponents, with tradition doomed in a struggle of classic, tragic character. She genuinely and deeply venerates and mourns lost tradition, and as we have said, carried a crucial aspect of its emotional footprint throughout her life. For all this, she was a modern by conviction, not just necessity; in her ideas and values, not just her material lifestyle. She does not articulate the fundamental tension in her consciousness in theoretical terms. She does not even acknowledge its existence. But it is there. Her story line—her myth, overt and accessible—is “lost tradition, cultural catastrophe, suppression and victimization of women.” But her countermyth is the cultural progress (“regeneration” was the buzzword of reformers of the Jews, Jewish and non-Jewish) and the personal benefits of modernity. To depict Wengeroff as simply “orthodox,” a nostalgic apologist for tradition, as her son and other writers do, is seriously to misread her and to miss the confusion and complexity in her that are so poignantly expressive precisely of the modern dilemma with which Wengeroff and her generation grappled.

Of Cultural History and Cultural Symbolism What would I not give to be able to hear this Song chanted so beautifully once more in my life! (1:59)

Wengeroff says that Nicholas I came to Brisk to survey the area for his projected fortress in 1835 and that she and her siblings witnessed this from “near our parents’ house, perhaps a hundred fathoms”

Introduction

from where Nicholas stood. We have seen the vividness of her physical description of Nicholas. She also details his puzzling gestures, so it turned out, as he surveyed the terrain, and describes the physical appearance of the Tsarevich, the future Alexander II, saying, “as I recall very well, even now.”191 To the best of our knowledge, Wengeroff was born in 1833, which means it is all but impossible that she was recalling an imperial visit that took place in 1835 unless she was born at the very beginning of the calendar year and the imperial visit occurred at its very end (in bitter winter) making her just short of three years old—the earliest age for conscious memory. Either this, or Wengeroff was born earlier than 1833; is mistaken about the year of the imperial visit, which must have taken place later than she states; is making up this entire, elaborate “memory” with all its colorful details; or is appropriating and presenting as her own the memory of family members who witnessed and spoke of the visit—also outright prevarication.192 Of these possibilities, I find the last two least plausible. Wengeroff selects, omits, and shapes information and her larger tale but does not invent out of whole cloth. She does not pretend in other instances to have first-hand experience she lacks, even when this would make for a better story. She tells us, for instance, that illness prevented her father from being part of a delegation that met Sir Moses Montefiore, the famous English philanthropist and activist on behalf of Jewish rights who visited Russia in 1846, though it would have been very impressive had he participated. She does not claim to have met, or even beheld, Lilienthal when he came to Brisk and her father and brothers-in-law met him (would we have known the truth had she claimed otherwise?). Regarding the visit of Nicholas and the Tsarevich, however, she stresses, in language she uses in other instances about significant memories, “as I can recall very well, even now.”193 Wengeroff says that Old Brisk was destroyed in 1836, but a history of its Jewish community dates the imperial decision to destroy the town as 1837, which would put Wengeroff between four and five years of age, quite capable of a conscious memory, possibly enhanced by family retelling, of Nicholas surveying the still-standing town.194 According to details I cull from her account, her family moved from Old to New Brisk only around 1840—the same year the town’s rabbi and community petitioned

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“the father of Russian Haskalah,” Isaac Ber Levinson, to plead with the government to repeal the expulsion order, set to take place in 1841.195 Indeed, most of Volume One depicts events prior to 1840 (describing the Tabernacles holiday of her childhood, she cites the 1838 price for the finest esrog). This means either that the better part of over 200 printed pages of memoirs comes from Wengeroff ’s earliest years, and she really has a remarkable memory, or not just the Nicholas episode, but all of Volume One is a fantasy. It is possible that Nicholas made more than one visit to Brisk in connection with the fortress project, which would have taken years to complete—he often personally supervised such things— and that Wengeroff witnessed such a later visit and is simply off in her dates. Whatever we can reconstruct about all this confirms Wengeroff ’s credibility as a witness to events she claims to have seen.196 Any unsettled ambiguities are quibbles that in any case do not bear on that to which Wengeroff gives paramount and compelling testimony: the Jewish passage from traditionalism to modernity and the cultures of both eras. In this regard, I want to note an episode in the move from Old to New Brest that Wengeroff, who omits so much from her narrative, chooses to emphasize. The community’s cemetery was to be demolished along with the rest of the town. Pleas to spare it were rejected. To protect the remains and  memorial stones from destruction, they would have to be dug up and moved to a new site, a horrifying desecration. The entire community, rich and poor, Wengeroff says, fasted on the day appointed for the disinterment—“a Monday, as I recall” (the Torah was read in the early morning service that she says the men “and many women” attended). Everyone participated in the harrowing physical work and in the procession, barefoot in penance, that carried the remains to the new cemetery. The day so grieved her father that she speculates that this, more than financial loss, caused him to retire from business. Perhaps this, too, was the cause for his penitential behavior of joining a Psalmreciting society of simple artisans. Other accounts of Jewish Brisk also record this mortifying event.197 For Wengeroff, however, obsessed with memory and with loss, with preservation from oblivion, we cannot but be struck by the symbolism of a community that literally dug up and transported its past to save it from destruction, physically carrying the past with it to the

Introduction

site of new life. The scene she so carefully records is perfectly expressive of the contrast between the traditional culture of Wengeroff ’s youth and the modern culture of her adulthood, which she characterizes precisely as insensible to memory. It is also emblematic of Wengeroff ’s own project of not letting memories and traditions slide into oblivion but rather of preserving and perpetuating them, in the hope that someone, even if not her own progeny, would cherish and remember.

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Figure 1. Women at a stream in Lithuania performing the penitential ritual, tashlikh, which Wengeroff describes. Tashlikh is performed on or around the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, at a source of natural water. Pockets are emptied and crumbs cast into the water, symbolizing the casting off of sins. Source: YIVO Photo Archive Record ID: 1960. Collection: LI Catalog #: LITH 18. Frames: 47783. Date: 1920s–30s. Photographer: Blue White Service.

Figure 2. A shames (synagogue sexton) in Warsaw lighting yizkor (memorial) candles on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Wengeroff describes an elaborate female ritual on this day, at which her mother and a gabete, a women’s religious functionary, made such candles after visiting and measuring family graves with the twine that would become wicks, all the while reciting tkhines, Yiddish-language petitionary prayers, in which they recalled the dead and prayed for the living. The women, Wengeroff says, fasted during this ritual even though fasting on the day before Yom Kippur is expressly forbidden. Source: YIVO Photo Archive Record ID: 5428. Collection: PO Catalog #: F4256. Frame: 29355. Date: pub. Oct. 13, 1929. City: Warsaw. Photographer: Alter Kacyzne.

Figure 3. Studio portrait of a gabete­—a female religious functionary who performed rituals for and with other women and organized charitable acts, a type Wengeroff describes as a fixture in her childhood home and in traditional society, and whose deeds she details. Pictured is Dvora Esther Gelfer (1817–1907) from Vilna, where she founded a charitable society ( gmiles khesed). Note her bonnet, prominent in Wengeroff’s description of women’s traditional garb. Source: YIVO Photo Archive Record ID: 7487. Collection IM Catalog #: 5180. Frame: 27963. Date: Before 1907. City: Vilna. Photographer n/a.

Figure 4. Studio portrait (ca. 1900) of Khane Dreir, a rabbi’s wife (rebbetsin), known for her charitable works, female behavior Wengeroff describes and lauds. Note the marriage wig (sheitel) and bonnet. Dreir was from Bobruisk, Wengeroff’s birthplace. Source: YIVO Photo Archive Record ID: 586. Collection: RI Catalog #: BOBROI 5. Frame: 45585. Date: ca. 1900.

Figure 5. A girls’ kheder (traditional elementary school), with a woman teacher. Wengeroff vividly describes her time in kheder with an impoverished male melamed, his wife, child—and chickens. Source: YIVO Photo Archive Record ID: 11213. Collection: IM Catalog #: 1699. Frames: 27731. Date: 1920s. Photographer: Alter Kacyzne.

Figure 6. Scene from a boys’ kheder. The melamed (teacher) stands at a shtender (lectern), much used in traditional society for “learning” (sacred study), which Wengeroff mentions her father using. Source: YIVO Photo Archive Record ID: 4858. Collection: PO Catalog #: 1347.03. Frame: 30280. Date: n/a. City: Kamionka Strumilowa. Photographer: n/a.

Figure 7. A behelfer, or assistant to the melamed (teacher) in a kheder, here shown carrying young charges to school. Wengeroff humorously recalls her own bumbling behelfer. Source: YIVO Photo Archive Record ID: 11024. Collection: IM Catalog #: 3621. Frame: 27729. Date: n/a. Photographer: A. Rotenberg.

Figure 8. Studio portrait of a traditional couple, Alte and Borekh Mortkhe Altshuler, from Minsk, where Wengeroff would spend much of her adult life. Note their traditional attire, a subject Wengeroff details, and their pose, modestly separated at the table, in line with what Wengeroff says about traditional gender etiquette, even for married people in public settings. Alte taught Yiddish to girls and was a zogerke, a women’s prayer leader, an activity Wengeroff describes. Source: YIVO Photo Archive Record ID: 1078. Collection: RI Catalog #: RECHITZ 1. Frame: 46436. Date: ca. 1900. City: Rechitsa. Photographer: G. Blumin.

Figure 9. A grandfather wearing his talis (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries), alongside his modern granddaughter, reading a secular book: a portrait of the radical generational change­—and continued family ties— that is a central motif in Wengeroff. This photo was taken in Wengeroff’s hometown of Brest-Litovsk, which Jews called Brisk. Source: YIVO Photo Archive Record ID: 6451. Collection: PO Catalog #: F0327. Frames: 43056. Published April 17, 1927. City: Brest. Photographer: Alter Kacyzne.

Figure 10. A matsa perforator, which Wengeroff describes being rolled through the dough used to make the unleavened bread for Passover, to keep it from rising. Utensils for making matsa; Sweden, Late 19th century; Iron. Source: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Figure 11. Isidor Kaufmann, “Study for a Portrait of a Jewish Woman.” In the painting, we see the marriage wig and headdress­—here, a wealthy variant embroidered with pearls, for Sabbath and festive use—which traditional women donned the morning after the wedding after a ritual shearing of their hair by a female religious functionary, all of which Wengeroff describes. Oil on panel. Source: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Figure 12. The Volozhin Yeshiva, founded in 1803 by Rabbi Hayyim Volozhin, a disciple of the Vilna Gaon, in which Wengeroff’s father, Yudl Halevi Epstein, studied as a married man. Much that Wengeroff says about her father and his outlook and the traditions of her childhood home reflects Volozhin’s particular traditions. Source: Wikipedia, “Volozhin.”

Figure 13. Several of the enormous, room-sized stoves used in Russia, which Wengeroff describes as one of her favorite childhood places. She and her younger siblings would make the precarious climb to the top, from which perch they would eavesdrop on the adults’ conversations. Source: Drawings of traditional stoves from Ukraine from V. P. Samojlovich, Narodnoe rvorchestvo v arkhitekture sel’skogo zhilishcha (Kiev, 1961).

1.

Preface



Gustav Karpeles

Jewish literature, unfortunately, possesses but very few memoirs. Of Jewish life in Russia, I know of only one, the Zapiski Evreia of Gregor Isaakovich Bogrov.1 To this work, which had given us a profound and genuine insight into the life and doings of the Jews in Russia at the beginning of the previous century, those of Pauline Wengeroff are now added as full equals. With heartfelt love and great piety, with rare fidelity and straightforward honesty, with gentle humor and refined psychological tact, she tells us of momentous episodes from a great transitional period in which enlightenment among the Jews in Russia began to pierce the haze that lay over Russian Jewry until then; of a tumultuous, fascinating, remarkable period whose history is yet unwritten and will only be writable when we will possess a whole series of such memoirs. In recent years, Russian Jews have stood at the forefront of public interest. Their lot and suffering have earned the sympathy of the entire civilized world.2 Naturally, there has been much interest in their peculiarities, their history, and their literature. Only through this interest will wider circles gain knowledge of what a fertile wealth of imagination and culture, poetry and talent, lies stored up in the Jewish towns and streets of the great Tsarist Empire, there impatiently awaiting the great painter and poet who understands how to exalt this treasure. When contemplating the cultural work that the memoirs of Mrs. Pauline Wengeroff portray so vividly, one is instinctively reminded of a remark by Nicholai Gogol in his classic novel, Dead Souls. The kibitka

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Preface by Dr. Karpeles

of the hero gallops with frantic haste over the broad, endless plains and disappears at last in the colorless distance.3 And do you, my Russia, not also rush forth like an unrestrainable three-horse team? The road beneath you steams, the bridges crack; you leave everything behind you. The onlookers stand, startled, and ask: Was it a lightening flash? What does this awesome haste mean? What mysterious power animates these horses? What kind of horse is this? Have you a whirlwind in your manes? . . . Have you heard familiar tones from above and stretched out now your iron body, without touching the earth with your hoofs, flying through the winds, as if driven by a god? Russia, whither do you hasten? Answer! No answer comes. One hears the bell of the horses clanging strangely; it moans in the wind and swells like a storm, and Russia pursues its audacious chase. . . .

Sharp ears will, perhaps, hear a part of the reply in the pages of this memoir, and alert observers will grasp the rapid course of the Jews of Russia from gloomy superstition and torpidity to the shining illumination of enlightenment and inner freedom. Then will the purpose of this amiable book, accompanied by my best wishes on its road to publication, be fulfilled. —gustav karpeles

2.

Foreword to the Second Edition

It fills my old heart with inner, grateful pleasure that my modest little book has found so warm a reception, above and beyond my expectations, that I must today, with a trembling hand, grasp the pen to give some words of preface to a second edition. May this little volume also find indulgent readers and bring them gracious and happy hours! My satisfaction over this will shed a golden radiant light over the night of my unsettled life and will be the most beautiful recompense for my complex, difficult work. —the author

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3.

Preamble

I was a tranquil child, deeply moved by every happy and sad event. Many incidents are imprinted in my memory like a stamp in wax, so that I remember them even now with perfect clarity. Indeed, what happened is fresh and alive before me as if it were yesterday. With every passing year, my need to record my experiences and observations grows, and now this rich material that I have gathered provides me with the most beautiful and consoling hours of my life, which in old age have become so lonely. They are joyous hours for me, when I take my notes in hand and often, with a silent teardrop or a restrained smile, leaf through them. Then I am no longer alone but in good and beloved company. Before my mind’s eye, seven decades full of turmoil and stress march past as if in a kaleidoscope, and the past becomes living present: a joyful, worry-free childhood in my parents’ home; in later years, more serious scenes of sorrow, as well as joy from the lives of the Jews of that time, and so many scenes from my own home.4 These memories help me over lonely, difficult hours and over the bitter disappointments of life, from which no one is spared. At such times, hope steals into my old heart that perhaps others, too, will not find it a wasted effort that I painstakingly gathered yellowed sheets of paper about the more important events and the cultural transformation of Jewish society in Lithuania of the 1840s and ’50s, a transformation that affected me, too. Perhaps it will interest the youth of today to learn how it once was. If I give something to even one of my readers, I will be richly rewarded. I was born in the beginning of the 1830s in the Lithuanian city of ­Bobruisk.5 Reared by rigorously religious parents, wise, spiritually

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r­ efined and noble people, I could follow the metamorphosis that Jewish family life underwent through contact with European civilization and saw for myself how easy rearing children was for our parents and how hard this same task became for us, the second generation. We learned German and Polish literature and also studied the Bible and prophets with great zeal, something that filled us with pride for our religion and tradition and linked us closely to our people. Biblical poetry became deeply imprinted on our innocent young minds and gave our souls ­purity and clarity, as well as energy and inspiration for the coming days. But how difficult it was for us then, in the great transitional period of the 1860s and ’70s! Yes, we had acquired a certain degree of European culture, but we knew there were yawning gaps everywhere. We sensed that there were still higher rungs to climb and, by harnessing our strength, we tried to make up in our children what was lacking in us. But sadly, in our excess zeal, we lost sight of the ultimate goal and forgot the wisdom of moderation. So we bore the guilt for the chasm that arose between us and our children and for their estrangement from their parental home that inevitably followed. While to us, obedience to our parents’ commands was sacred and inviolable, now we must submit to our children, subordinating ourselves utterly to their wishes. As was once the case with regard to our parents, so now a word from our children enjoins us to be silent, to hold our tongues, and if this was difficult once, long ago, perhaps it is even more difficult now. If we, as children, listened while our parents told us of all they had experienced, we now keep silent and take careful note, full of pleasure and pride, as our children speak about their lives and ideals. The obsequiousness we show our children turns them into egoists and tyrants over us. That is the dark side of European civilization among the Jews in Russia, where no other race so rashly and irretrievably surrendered everything, all remembrance of the past, with the adoption of western European culture, abandoning the religion of its people, violently rejecting all tradition. Our children had it easier than we did to attain a high level of culture and we were delighted because we had often cleared barriers and smoothed the way for them with hard sacrifice. They found everything ready for them: school mistresses, governesses, kindergartens, youth libraries, children’s theater, parties, appropriate games. By contrast, we

Preamble

as children had to make do with the courtyard of our parents’ house, where we romped around wildly with the children of poor neighbors, drawing our skirts above our heads, skipping and singing, “God, O God, send rain— for the sake of the little children!”

What a difference! This is the transformation that I have sought to portray here. I ask the reader’s indulgence. I am no writer and do not pretend to be one. I ask only that these notes be viewed as the work of an old woman who, lonely in the quiet twilight of old age, simply relates what she experienced and witnessed in an eventful time. Thus do I find the audacity for my book! I cannot send this little work, the intellectual child of an old woman, a “child born in old age,” as the Jews say, into the world without thanking my friend, Louise Flachs-Fockschaneanu, for her gracious encouragement.6

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A Year in My Parents’ House

I. Part One Summer and winter, my father used to get up at four in the morning. He was meticulous about not walking four ells from his bed without washing his hands.7 Before putting a bite into his mouth, he would recite the early morning prayers in a happy mood and then proceed to the room in the house that was his office. On the walls were many shelves in which numerous folios of the Talmud of all types and eras lay arrayed in good company with other talmudic and Hebrew works. Among them were old, rare editions of which my father was very proud. Besides a writing table, there was also a high, narrow table, called a shtender, as well as a comfortable arm chair and a footstool.8 My father would settle himself quietly in his chair, bring the candles that had already been lit by the manservant closer, open the large folios that lay there waiting since the evening before, and begin to “learn” in the familiar sing-song.9 So the hours passed until seven in the morning. Then he drank his tea and went to the synagogue for morning prayers. In my parents’ home, the day was divided and time designated according to the three daily prayer services. Thus, in the morning, we would say that something was “before or after davenen” (prayers); later in the day, “before or after minkhe” (the afternoon prayer). Twilight was called “between minkhe and maarev.”10 In a similar manner, the times of the year were called after the holidays; thus, it was “before” or “after Hanukkah,” “before” or “after Purim,” and so on.

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My father came home from the synagogue at around ten o’clock.11 Only then did business activities begin. Many people came and went— Jews, Christians, managers, soldiers, business associates—and so on, all of whom he dispatched by midday. Lunch was around one o’clock. After the meal, he took a short nap and after that, tea. By that time, friends with whom he discussed Talmud, literary questions, and important events of the day had already made their appearance. At the beginning of the 1840s, my father wrote a commentary to the Ein ya‘akov, which he called Kunmon bosem, and some ten years later, he had an extensive collection of his commentaries to the entire Talmud published under the title, Minkhas yehuda. He gave neither work to a retailer for sale and distributed them only to his friends, acquaintances, his children, and above all, to many batei midrashim (study halls) in Russia.12 Unfortunately, most Jewish scholars of that time and many centuries before it, including scholars of Talmud, made the great mistake of disregarding dates or not specifying them precisely. Thus, in his own work, my father gave his family tree, which numbered many rabbis and geonim beginning with his grandfather and going back ten generations, yet he noted none of their dates of birth and death.13 Of what value was the life of a single individual, when only Talmud study was the true wellspring of life? That is how my father felt, a man who, faithful to the teachings of his ancestors, devoted himself to their teachings and to the service of God. He usually said minkhe gedole (the afternoon prayer) at home, very early.14 For maarev, he went to the synagogue again, from which he returned at around nine o’clock for supper. Then he just stayed at the table, talking with us about this and that. He was interested in everything that went on in the house and with us children, sometimes asking about the progress of our lessons. (My mother used to provide for Jewish tutors—a melamed and penmanship teachers—as well as for tutors in Polish and Russian.)15 Here my father was told of all the happenings at home and in the city, while he for his part told us everything that he heard in the synagogue and the issues that had been discussed there. For us this was the best entertainment, the most interesting newspaper. We called these talks, “the slipper gazette.” In those days, unlike today, there were few newspapers, and they were not very accessible. My father had an impulsive nature and reacted to events with con-

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siderable emotion that he communicated to those around him. We children used to linger at the table, eager for his shrewd comments. He would tell us about famous men, their feats and their religious habits, and about Jewish law. We loved and respected him more than anyone else we knew. I still remember the names of two people he used to talk about. The first was Reb Selmele, the other Reb Heschele.16 Reb Selmele (a younger brother of Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner, whom I will mention later), a child prodigy, immersed himself in Talmud study so fervently that he often forgot to eat, drink, and sleep.17 He became weak and pale and his worried mother begged and begged him to eat, but in vain. So the mother used her authority: she appeared one day in his little study chamber with a piece of pastry in her hand and ordered him to eat, telling him that every day at this hour, she would bring him a pastry that he had to eat. The young man submitted to his mother’s will. However, before he began to eat, he recited the section, kibbud av vo’em from the Shulkhan arukh—the commandment to respect one’s father and mother.18 While still a child, the second, Reb Heschele, was very clever and witty, qualities he retained into later years. To him the kheder was an abomination, along with the rebbe and the assistant who forcibly dragged him to school every day despite the fact that, being a very highspirited child who loved his liberty, he resisted fiercely, hands and feet flailing. One day his father asked him gently why he so resisted going to kheder.19 “I am insulted,” he replied, “that the assistant drags me along the way he does, in such an undignified manner. Why is it that when someone wants your presence, they send you a messenger who politely invites you to accept the invitation? And sometimes you say, ‘Of course, I am delighted to come!’ and sometimes you say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ (that is, you go, if you want to, but I certainly won’t).” His father promised him that he, too, would now have the courtesy of an invitation, and he instructed the assistant to do just that. But the next time, when the assistant cordially invited the little boy to follow him, the boy answered, “Thanks, but no thanks!” Another time he put both socks on the same foot in order to make the assistant search endlessly for the other one.

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Both my parents were God-fearing, affable people of distinguished character. This was the prevailing type among the Jews of those days, whose life’s work above all, was love of God and one’s fellows. The better part of the day was consumed in Talmud study. Business was done only in allotted hours, even though my father’s business often involved hundreds of thousands of rubles. He and my grandfather Simon Semel Epstein belonged to the class of podracziki, contractors, who played an important role in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century because they had extensive business dealings with the Russian government, taking over the building of fortresses, highways and canals, and supply of the army.20 My father and grandfather were among the most highly regarded of these contractors, having distinguished themselves by rigorous honesty.*, 21 We lived in a large, grand house in Brest with many richly appointed rooms. We also had a coach and excellent horses. My mother and older sisters had much jewelry and beautiful, expensive clothes. Our house lay outside the city. To get to it, you first had to cross a long bridge that spanned the rivers Bug and Muchawiez and went past many small houses. Then you would turn to the right, go straight ahead for about 600 feet—and then you stood before our house. The house was painted yellow with green shutters. The outside had a large, venetian window, flanked on each side by two more windows. In front of it lay a narrow flower garden surrounded by a wooden fence. The house had a high shingle roof. The whole property, including vegetable gardens, was surrounded by a row of tall, white poplars that gave the house the appearance of the manor house of a Lithuanian lord. Jewish family life in my parents’ house, as in others in the first half of the nineteenth century, was very peaceful, pleasant, earnest, and sensible. It made a deep and unforgettable impression on my memory and that of my contemporaries. There was no chaos of manners and morals, customs and values, as is the case today in Jewish homes. Jewish life of *  It is a fact that my grandfather Simon Semel Epstein had the honorary title of freeman of a city conferred on him by General Deen, Chief of Works of the fortress construction in Medlin, near Warsaw, at the end of the 1820s. He was summoned from the provincial town of Bobruisk to Warsaw in order to take charge of the great fortress construction there, which was the reason that my father, Yehuda (Halevi) Epstein, moved to Brest.

A Year in My Parents’ House

that time was harmonious, with an earnest character, the only worthy kind of Jewish character. It is for this reason that the traditions of our parental homes have remained so sacred and beloved to us to this day! We, however, suffered much grief in forcing ourselves to submit in our own homes to a completely different way of life, which I daresay, bequeathed to our children few edifying and even fewer pleasant memories of their parents’ homes! Our parents’ pedagogical tools were love but also firmness. And the right remark helped resolve many a difficulty. An episode: One morning my father, having returned from the city, found me alone in the street, weeping. I believe a playmate had taken away my doll. He became angry that I had run out without an escort and asked snappishly why I was crying. I, however, was so upset that I was not able to answer him and began to sob even more violently. That made my father really irate, and he exclaimed: “Just wait, the rod will help you answer!” He grabbed hold of my hand and pulled me into the house. My father had a rod brought and got ready to thrash me soundly. I became completely still and looked up at Father dumbfounded—I was never punished with the rod—and sputtered in amazement, “But I am Pessele!” For I was convinced that my father did not recognize me and had made a mistake. And it is thanks to this self-confident behavior that I was spared the rod. Everyone standing around laughed and begged for leniency for me. I particularly loved to work in the vegetable garden, digging up potatoes and other vegetables. I would ask the half-frozen women first for the spade, then the rake, and would bustle about briskly until the sharp autumn wind drove me indoors. After all the vegetables from our garden were stored in the cellar, much was still bought in the market. Then the crucial work began: pickling cabbage, which kept many poor women busy for a full eight days each fall. According to Jewish law, one must search meticulously for and remove the little worms that nest in vegetables and fruit, but especially in cabbage, and every single leaf was taken off each head of cabbage, held up against the light and inspected closely.22 My pious mother was very meticulous in the fulfillment of

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religious rules and used to give the women a special reward for each maggot found if the cabbage was particularly fat and of the best quality, with few worms, because she was worried that the women would not be sufficiently attentive. I watched this work as happily as that in the vegetable garden because the women would sing all kinds of folk songs that moved me deeply and made me weep, but that also often made me laugh with all my heart. I still remember many of these songs that are so dear to me! It was a perfectly calm life! Nowadays, in the age of steam and electricity, it seems to me that we live much more quickly. The hurried bustle has also had an effect on people’s minds. We grasp many things much more quickly and comprehend so many complicated ideas without effort, whereas earlier, people could not grasp even the simplest fact. I will cite one example that has stayed with me all this time. In the 1840s, my grandfather built the great road from Brest to ­Bobruisk for the government. Along the route were mountains, valleys, and marshes, so that a wagon trip took two full days, while a person could have made the same trip comfortably on the main road in a day. Naturally, everything spoke in favor of the project, which was a considerable one for those days; but even in higher social circles, there were skeptics who expressed doubt and said: “As long as anyone can remember, it took two days to travel the road from Brest in Lithuania to Bobruisk, and here comes Reb Semel Epstein and tells us that he will cut it to one day’s travel. Who is he? God? Will he put the other stretch of road in his pocket?” In the second half of the seventeenth century the roads in Lithuania and in many parts of Russia were utterly desolate. Endless grasslands, marshes, and in some parts, virgin forest, stretched for miles, until the great Tsarina Catharine II had highways laid out, with birch trees planted on both sides. The side roads, however, remained very dangerous for pedestrians, whom people dispatched from place to place as couriers, as well as for travelers in sleighs and wagons. This was especially so in winter, in the deep snow. To overcome this danger, the mail coach was introduced. This consisted of the troika—the team of three horses—and the mail coachman, called a yamshezik, a rough, dull, and always-inebriated peasant who lived and died with his horses. The

A Year in My Parents’ House

kibitka, a clumsy little carriage, whose four heavy wheels were attached to two flat wooden shafts on which a half-covered hamper lay, was also much used; so was the telega, an equally podgy little carriage without a hood. The horses’ harness was made of thick leather, heavily embellished with sheet brass. The middle horse had a yoke over its head, with an immense bell hanging from the center. The post stations, at intervals of about twenty to twenty-five versts, had as clumsy and authentically Russian a character as the cart: a large room with white-washed walls; an enormous divan, covered with black oilcloth; a long, wooden table, also covered with oilcloth, on which a tall, narrow, dirty samovar, encrusted with green mildew stood; and a smoke-blackened tea tray with filthy glasses.23 The tall, thin station master, who was always drowsy, dirty, and unkempt even in the middle of the day and was dressed in the filthy uniform of a subordinate, with its tarnished, dull, brass buttons, completed the portrait of the typical post station, one that remains vivid before my eyes even after sixty-five years.— Only the wealthier people could use the mail coach, especially the higher-ranking soldiers and the couriers, who sent messages by horse from the capital cities to a provincial city, something people use telephones and telegraphs for today. The common people used simple wagons covered with canvas, which were drawn by two or three horses. The better types used the ­tarantass, a half-covered coach that rested on two thick wooden shafts, or a Fürgon, a carriage completely covered with leather, with a door in the middle. It was quite common to see these wagons, full of passengers, stuck in the open fields because of a snowstorm. It was only in the early eighteenth century that these inconveniences were remedied by the construction of the highways. Now no mountain, swamp, or forest prevented swift travel, and the carts moved along on straight and level roads. Security was enhanced by the fact that, aside from the post stations, guard houses with watchmen were also set up. More comfortable transportation made mobility possible for people; trade and commerce expanded amazingly quickly, and by the beginning of the 1840s, the need for even faster means of conveyance became clear. This is when they came up with the so-called diligence, a quite comfortable wagon with two compartments that carried twelve to fifteen people

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a day from place to place for a reasonable price. It was drawn by three horses and driven by a postilion, who wore a special uniform and played a traditional melody on his trumpet. In Russian Poland, people called this passenger vehicle a stenkelerke, after the entrepreneur; in East Prussia, it was called a journaliere.24 In general, people were very satisfied with this accommodation and thought there would never be anything better. For all this, however, by the mid 1850s, even in Russia, people knew about the invention of the railroad, and by the beginning of the sixties, you could already travel large stretches in the Tsarist Empire by rail. In the forties, it took seven days by mail horse to cover a distance of 800 versts; by the sixties, thirty hours by rail sufficed.25 No less significant was the development of train service within the cities. In the beginning, this was, for the “common people,” just a wretched little hamper wagon on wooden wheels, drawn slowly by horses harnessed with cords. For the better types, it was the so-called droshke or lineika, which still exists today: a leather basket hanging on straps between two shafts, in the middle of which a horse with a yoke over its head was harnessed. There was space for eight in the lineika. Four people sat back-to-back on one long, hard seat on each side. These carts shook and jolted the passengers on bumpy pavements for long stretches of time and gradually, were greatly improved, the droshke being mounted on low-lying straps and the seat furnished with feather cushions. Finally, rubber tires on the wheels put an end to the shaking and jolting and instead of the padding, came comfortable, broad sofa seats. At the end of the seventies, the horse drawn streetcar was introduced, and the first bicycles suddenly made their appearance until in the nineties, the electric tramway introduced a further improvement, which then was outdone by the automobile. Road building, which was responsible for all the improvement in communication, was arranged through contract tenders. In the late autumn every year, the Russian administration in Brest organized the torgy, the granting of contracts for construction work and supply. It was on this occasion that my grandfather usually came from Warsaw to see us. Many podracziki arrived from other cities, too. Elaborate preparations were made to receive Grandfather: express messengers—dispatch riders who changed horses at each post station—sent advance word to my father of the precise day of his arrival. Already in the morning of

A Year in My Parents’ House

the day in question, everyone in the house, but above all we children, were bursting with impatience and anticipation. At the appointed hour we proceeded to the parade balcony or even to the corridor, to find the right place between the pillars so that Grandfather would notice us first and foremost. All eyes were on the nearby bridge. The anticipation reached its tense apex. Finally, the bridge rattled, and we saw Grandfather’s grand, four-seat coach, drawn by four mail horses—but also pulled powerfully by our gaze. Each of us straightened ourselves bolt upright and swept the hair from our foreheads, our hearts pounding. Now at last, the wagon halted in front of the balcony. A tall, thin, blond servant in a uniformed top coat with a double collar bounded from the coach, opened the carriage door and helped my grandfather out. He was a venerable, distinguished old man, still vigorous in appearance, with a long, grey beard, a high, broad forehead, and large expressive eyes with a stern gaze. Yet his paternal eye rested with pride and tenderness upon his son. It just delighted the old man’s heart that despite his multiple businesses, our father still found time to study Talmud diligently. How often did the old man use to say that he envied my father his great talmudic erudition and the spare time he found for study. Grandfather greeted my mother first, but without a handshake.26 He embraced my father, my older brother, and my brothers-in-law; to my older sisters and us children, he turned with the words: “How are you doing, little ones?” But these few words were enough to make us jump for joy. Escorted by the whole host from the balcony, Grandfather then proceeded into the house. We small children were not allowed to enter the festively adorned rooms directly, so we found our return route left, through the door, arriving in our room through the main corridor. My elder sisters already had the right to spend the first hour together with Grandfather and our parents and to join in the discussion of business affairs. Only on the next morning were we little ones led by Mother to Grandfather, who fondly stroked our hair and cheeks. But it rarely went as far as a kiss. He had his servant give us good candies made in Warsaw and oranges that he had brought for us, but our “audience” lasted only a few minutes. We kissed the white, strong hands that reached out to us, wished this man, whom we loved and esteemed so highly, a good morning, bowed, and withdrew without addressing a superfluous word to him.

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As long as Grandfather stayed with us, there was a constant running to and fro in the house, a racket, a coming and going of guests and business connections, and in the courtyard, the arrival and departure of carriages and droshkes. The midday meal was taken later than usual. The large table from the dining room was set in the yellow salon; all the silver, crystal, and china tableware were used, and the table was ­extraordinarily lengthened because many guests were invited. From my eldest sister till the youngest, no child had a place at the long table. To our endless delight, a special table was prepared for us in the dining room, where our nyanya (nanny) Maryasha waited on us. She was a robust, rosy-cheeked maid with black, thick pigtails and a red shawl wrapped like a turban around her head. My elder sister, Khashe Feige, even brought us over tasty dishes, pastries, and so on from the great table. We were released from the strict discipline that prevailed there and, left to our own resources, enjoyed the most perfect liberty. In the evening, still other guests made their appearance, including many Christians—highly placed people from the army, engineers, construction commissars—with whom Grandfather played preference.27 A rich dessert was served from which we children again received our portion, and if we also got Mother’s permission to climb up onto the furnace in the dining room and kindle a light there, we asked nothing more from life. It was so snug on the furnace, so comfortable and cozy there, where even in daytime, semi-darkness reigned; and in a corner lay our dolls with their little beds, clothes, and all kinds of tin-plate pots, bowls, and such were found. Maryasha always stayed with us and spun many tall tales. Oh, there we children forgot the rest of the world. Let them shut us briskly out of the fine rooms! Here, we were content and felt lucky.28 My mother, however, only permitted the climb onto the furnace very reluctantly because it was very unstable. You had to put one foot in a niche made for this purpose, and with the other, quickly whirl around up in the air, during which you often lost your balance and crashed head first to the floor. There was plenty of danger, even above, on top; curious about the doings in the dining room, we would stretch our heads out over the ledge of the furnace, with the rest of our bodies suspended almost in air. Only when one of us plunged to the floor did we realize the danger we were in. Nevertheless, we often won permission to settle down for an entire evening on that place we so longed to be.

A Year in My Parents’ House

The top of the furnace was a roomy square in which you could only sit or lie down but not stand, because the ceiling was very low. In the room below, things were lively. Even after tea and dessert, much business was still discussed. The house was bustling, and calm returned only when Grandfather had settled all his business affairs. Grandfather had taken charge of construction of the fortress in Brest, for which my father had to supply many, many millions of bricks, all of which were stamped with his initials, “J. E.” At Grandfather’s departure, we received fine gold and silver medals. Grandfather departed, and the house became quiet once more, like after a wedding in the 1840s (not, though, after one in the eighties!). A short time afterward, a new, beloved guest drew near—the Hanukkah (dedication) festival, with all its gay and exciting goings-on. Already on the Sunday before Hanukkah, the candelabrum was brought out and shined. We children were on hand for the polishing, inspecting each and every little part and enjoying ourselves doing so. The lamp was made of braided silver wire in the shape of a sofa. The back bore an eagle, over which a life-size little bird with a miniature crown on its tiny head, sat on a throne. On both sides of the sofa were small tubes in which little wax candles stood stiffly, while on the seat stood eight miniature pitchers that held oil—in remembrance of the small pitcher of oil, as the Sages relate, which was once found in the Temple in Jerusalem after the expulsion of the enemy by the Maccabees, and which sufficed to illuminate the Temple for eight full days. In remembrance of this miracle, the Jews also celebrate each year, through the kindling of lights and oil lamps, the festival of the Maccabees, which above all, is a victory celebration.29 We children awaited the first night of Hanukkah, our hearts beating. Father performed his evening devotions, while our mother poured oil into the first little pitcher, leveled the wick in the little tube, and placed two wax tapers in the two small lamps found on either side of the “sofa,” and one in the crown of the little bird. We children stood around the candelabrum and followed each of her movements with devotion! Father fulfilled the ritual of lighting the first light of the Hanukkah lamp. He said the prescribed benediction while kindling a thin little wax candle, with which he lit the wick in the first little oil pitcher. Now began the evening festivities, because work was forbidden as long as oil burned in the little pitcher.

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There was such rejoicing for us children because on this night, we, too, were allowed to play cards! We brought out our pair of copper coins and acted like millionaires sitting around the table, joined by our young cousins.30 In the meantime, our parents, elder siblings, and some friends who had come to visit, formed a larger circle. On the fifth evening of this week, my mother sent invitations to all our relatives and friends. On this evening Mother also gave us children the Hanukkah gelt that we awaited with such excitement, which usually consisted of some new, shining copper coins.31 People stayed up longer than usual on this evening and also played cards longer, so an ample supper was necessary, at which the so-called latkes formed the main course.* For drinks, we had a kind of cold fruit soup, composed of ale, oil, and a little sugar. In addition, there was black rye bread, cut small and sprinkled with sugar and ginger. Roast goose was laid on with all possible fixings, both salted and sour, including always, of course, sour cabbage and gherkins. At the end, there was a rich dessert of sweetmeats and fruit, all of which greatly depleted both the wine cellar and the pantry. The guests inspected, judged, and praised the food.† The outcome of the card game could be read on our faces; many a one lost his whole Hanukkah gelt and struggled to hide the tears. Only one consolation remained: the hope that such gaming evenings would be repeated. Then, fortune would turn and fill up the empty purses once again. On such evenings, my father suspended his Talmud learning and joined the players though he, like my mother, had no notion of card playing. Dreidl playing, also called goor, was very popular, too. The dreidl was specially molded from lead. It had six sides but the bottom had a point so that the device could be twirled like a top. On each flat side, a Hebrew letter was stamped. If the dreidl fell on nun, the player lost. With a shin, the pool remained unchanged. If it fell on the heh, the player could take half of the pool. But if the dreidl fell on gimel, it was “goor”—the player could pocket the entire pool.33 After Hanukkah week, life in our home returned to its old pattern, *  Latkes are a kind of flinsen made from buckwheat flour with goose fat and honey (they were also made from wheaten flour with yeast, preserved fruits, and sugar) and are very tasty. †  The invitation read: “You are invited for latkes.”

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although quartering of soldiers or the visit of a highly placed military or civil official could disturb peace and quiet again. At the time, the fortress in Brest still had no palace, while my parents’ house was richly and comfortably appointed. The commandant of that time, Piatkin, who was friendly with my father, was in the habit of lodging important guests with us. I can still remember several of them very well; for instance, Prince Bebutov from Georgia, in the Caucasus, who later held a high office in Warsaw. He lived with us for a long time, was friendly to us children, and was very charming to all. He often brought us candy and honey cakes while we played in the flower garden in front of the window and spoke with us cheerfully in Russian. He had a servant named Johann, who was tall and thin, with a nose like a hawk and almond-shaped, piercing, black, fervent eyes. He would scramble like a cat to the outermost height of the highest poplar and ingeniously do the dschigetowka burduk while bowing to the ground from his fastest running horse, dashing to snatch up a small coin.34 He was very hottempered and you had better not irritate him or get in his way if he was agitated because he always carried a dagger with him; he once cut a dog that ran in front of his feet in two. Another time, he snatched a cock in flight and ripped its head off its body with his hands. We children were very afraid of him. The second guest whom I can still remember was the then-governor of Grodno, Doppelmeyer, who came to Brest often and always stayed with us. He was a very genial, portly, blond man, whom we received as a good friend. He considered it a duty to pay a visit to my parents whenever he came. If this happened on a Friday evening, he was treated to a piece of pepper fish, which he ate with great gusto. He also did full justice to the beautiful braided shabbes (Sabbath) white loaves. It must have been an agreeable picture, all my sisters and my brother, with their young, blooming faces and my parents sitting around the table because the governor paid my parents many compliments about it. He discussed various serious affairs with my father and remained talking until the end of dinner. Relations between Jews and Christians at that time were not yet poisoned by antisemitism . . .35 Among the guests in my father’s house was also a small Jewish man who came to us every year in midsummer and stayed with us for several weeks. He belonged to the sect called dovor min hakhai, that is, ­eating

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nothing from living things—now called vegetarians.36 He observed these precepts so strictly that he did not eat from utensils that had been used for a meat dish even once. My pious mother herself used to prepare food for him—soup from sour beetroot or sorrel, gruel without any added fat, prepared only with a little olive oil; in addition, walnuts in honey or radish in honey cooked with ginger, and tea and black coffee. He was a quiet, extremely modest man and was very much respected by all of us, especially by my father, who used to sit and dispute with him, bent over folios in his private room. Life in winter had a special charm for me. When it snowed heavily, I loved to go walking outdoors. In the twilight hours, when I began to freeze, I snuck into the “wing,” as the side building in the courtyard where my married sisters and their husbands and children lived was called.37 My visit there was directed at the nyanya (nanny) of my sister’s small son. The nanny often told me wonderful tales and sang very beautiful little songs. I usually found her rocking the cradle, which she kept moving with her foot, while her wrinkled, blue-yellow hands knitted a dark grey, coarse, thick woolen stocking. I crept on hand and foot onto the bed on which she sat and begged her with a string of flattery to give me the stocking to knit. “No,” she cried, “you will only let the stitches drop again, like you did yesterday. Go away!” “Khainke, Yubinke,” I began anew, “if you don’t give me the sock, then at least sing me the little song that you sing when you put Berele to sleep.” Peevishly she answered, “I don’t feel like singing.” “Are you sick, Khainke?” I asked her solicitously. “Leave me alone!” she cried, leaping up. But I did not let myself be scared off by her ill humor and repeated my plea, which I bolstered by kissing her wrinkled cheeks and caressing her puckered throat. “Mischelakhes!” (divine plague), she shrieked, “to be rid of you, I’ll sing to you already.” I sat myself upright, as if she could not sing without my preliminaries, and listened carefully. And she sang: Patty-pat little cakes, Buy dee-die little shoes,

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Little shoes buy. To kheder (school) the boy will fly, To kheder, He’ll study real well, Study some verses, So we’ll hear good news, Good news, He’ll give guidance, Real good guidance to people, He’ll decide ritual questions, Ritual questions. Give talmudic discourses, And people will reward him with a golden little charity box, And a little fine fur hat (shtreimel).38

“Oh, how beautiful, how beautiful,” I exclaimed, applauding. “But sing me another little song, Khainke.” “What a divine plague has descended on me today!” She jumped up shouting from her seat, so that a knitting needle fell in the cradle and the stitches slid off. Now I knew for sure that I would get to hear nothing more today. I remained sitting, until she, muttering and angry, had restored the stocking to order. She looked at me with a furious look from the side, as if it were self-evident that I was responsible for the mishap. I didn’t stir. And since she deemed my expression an acknowledgment of guilt, she was appeased once more. Of course, I also kept my promise to bring her a little something from my afternoon tea, to improve her mood. To get rid of me, she sang me a second song: Sleep my child, in peace, Close your pure little eyes. Below the child’s small cradle Stands a little white goat. The goat has gone to trade In raisins and almonds, The best wares. Berele will study Torah, Torah, Torah in his little head, Kashe, kasha, in his little pot, Smear butter on bread, Father and Mother lead Berele to wed.39

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It is noteworthy that the Jew in those days, even in lullabies, fantasized only about Torah study and going to kheder and not about hunting, horses, daggers, and war. Khainke got downright animated by her own singing and sang me a few more ditties. I must cite one more here: Little goat, amoat, Grows up in battle, Burning red, When Father strikes Mother, The little children mourn, Little goat, amoat, Grows up in battle. Blood oranges, here! When Father kisses Mother, The children break out dancing, here!40

It was surely the sight of my afternoon snack that urged her on to this encore. In the meantime, it had become quite dark. I ran hurriedly through the court back to the main building, where my brother and sisters were already eating heartily of the afternoon tea. Our nanny, Maryasha, could not manage cutting the bread and spreading preserved gooseberries—our favorite dish—at all. I took my piece and in a flash!—was once again on my way back to the wing-annex, where I was treated in a much more friendly way than before by the singer, who was now quite favorably disposed to me. And we consumed the dainty morsels together with pleasure . . . The greater part of the winter was over, and the Purim holiday with its excitement and delights and generous gift-giving was upon us. In those days, it was essential that we prepare needlework for our cousins and nieces for the shlakhmones presents.41 We worked feverishly day and night, and when everything was ready, we were delighted at the thought of how the recipients of the gifts would be almost envious from sheer admiration of our skill. The awaited day of Purim drew nearer. The day before it was estertaanes (the fast of Queen Esther) when all the older family members fasted. My sisters prepared tasty baked goods at home, hamantashen (three sided poppy-filled cakes) and monelakh (poppy cooked in honey), predominating. 42 If these turned out well, you could expect a good year. We children also

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had to help with this work; at least, we could nibble to our heart’s content. The whole day passed without the usual set meal times. But how thrilled we were to be allowed to join the adults in the evening and eat the cooked and baked splendors laid out! And above all was the joyous prospect of the next day! In the evening, we prayed at home. Later on, a large crowd from the neighborhood arrived, whereupon megilas esther (the Book of Esther) was chanted. And whenever the hateful name of Haman was heard, the men stamped their feet and the young people made an uproar with shrill gragers (rattles). My father was irritated by this and forbade it. But it was no use: every year, people did it again.43 Only after the chanting of the megile, which often lasted till eight or nine o’clock at night, did people proceed to the dining room and allow themselves to partake heartily of the abundant, appetizing dishes that stood on the table. Everyone hurried to help himself, in order to satisfy his loudly protesting stomach, which had not taken any food in more than twenty hours. By early morning of the next day, we children could not sleep from excitement and called to one another from our beds: “What is today?” “Purim!” sounded the exultant answer. And now we got dressed as quickly as possible. Joyful expectation turned to impatience. We wanted morning to become afternoon already, when the shlakhmones would be dispatched and received. My father and the young men came out of the synagogue, where a service for a minor holiday had been held, and the megile chanted again.44 Lunch (consisting of the four traditional courses: fish, soup with the indispensable Haman-ears, that is, three-cornered crepes; turkey, and vegetables), was taken earlier than usual so that the second meal, the sude (holiday meal), which was really the main event on Purim, could begin before evening.45 At the sude, the Jew—so went the custom—indulged in genuine or feigned joy and had to get a little tipsy. As far as I can remember, on this day every Jew was gay and merry. He permitted himself fine food and drink; and days in advance, went to however much trouble necessary to get hold of enough money for the banquet.

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We children thought only of sending and receiving shlakhmones. Finally, the great hour arrived when the readied gifts were laid out on a tea-tray. My mother gave the maidservant strict instructions about which gift was intended for whom, and in an anxious voice, quivering from excitement, forbade her to stop en route or speak with anyone, even in passing. She was to go directly to our aunt. My mother even specified precisely how she was to set out the tea-tray with the gifts on the table and how she was to present each person with his gift. At this point, we vividly imagined the cries of delight as our handiwork was displayed, and we pointed out each piece to the maid again and again. Finally, the girl went on her way and successfully reached her destination. “Have auntie’s children sent you?” the children there hastened toward the servant girl, asking hurriedly because, just as at our house, people there were also excited and impatient.46 “Yes!” stammered the besieged girl, who could hardly reach the living room with everyone following her, making an uproar and interrogating. Finally, they seized the trays, throwing themselves on the gifts in order to inspect, judge, and admire everything. The bungling girl did not do as we had ordered since the recipients just seized the gifts themselves. Then, the children got busy preparing particular gifts to be dispatched to us, which was done in the next fifteen minutes. But the poor messenger, who had been received with such jubilation, departed silently, almost unnoticed—and then was interrogated by us with similar impatience and excitement about whether people were astonished about the things we had sent, and what reactions our gifts had elicited. Then we received the gifts from our cousins, which far exceeded our expectations—or didn’t. Receiving them, we had to restrain ourselves to stay composed. We were not to show the messenger how impatient and curious we really were because Mother had given us strict orders to behave ourselves in a dignified way on this day. In the meantime, Purim spiels (scenes from biblical history, but particularly with a theme from the Book of Esther) were put on as skits. The first presented the scene with Ahashverosh (King Artaxerxes), as described in the megile—the one in which the King, Haman, Mordechai, and Queen Esther played the leading parts. A young boy in women’s clothes usually played Queen Esther, whom we followed with curious,

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excited eyes and gazed at in astonishment.47 The clothing of the other actors was not distinguished by particular cleanliness or elegance; the three-cornered hat with the feathered plume, epaulettes, and swordknot was made of dark blue and whitish-yellow pasteboard. The performance lasted more than an hour, and we followed it with the greatest interest. Then came the Joseph skit, playing upon the most interesting scenes of the Bible. All the plays were accompanied by much singing. I remember the melodies exactly—and the comical dance, too, which Zireleh Waans, a common woman, and a poor man, Lemele Futt, performed. They danced and sang along in jargon.48 We giggled to ourselves about their grotesque shapes and awkward movements. The most amusing thing for us children was the so-called “Ballad of the She-Goat.” An animal hide with a goat head on top was held up on two poles by a man hidden inside. The goat’s neck was hung with all kinds of colored glass beads and corals, silver and brass coins, little bells and other sparkling, glimmering stuff. Two large bells fastened on both horns rang shrilly and blended with the other little tinkling trinkets to make a most peculiar sort of “music.” The good man in the goat hide made all sorts of movements, dancing, leaping high and low. The leader of the She-Goat Ballad took charge of the singing with a merry, husky voice. The little ballad went as follows: On the high mountain, on the green grass, Stood a few modern Jews with long whips, Tall men are we, Modern garb do we wear, Our Father, Our King, Our hearts rejoice, Merry will we be, Wine shall we drink, We’ll drink wine, We’ll eat dumplings, And won’t forget God.49

The singer was a tall, lanky, fair youth who carried clay in our brick factory the whole year long and had the nickname, “the she-goat.” The spectacle was amusing for us small children, yet we still could not entirely restrain a certain anxiety. Soon after the “she-goat” appeared, we

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escaped to the furnace in the dining room, from where we could command a view of the proceedings with a greater feeling of security. And there we watched with interest how the “she-goat” guzzled down a glass of whisky that our mother had brought to the “goat’s” mouth. Then, Mother planted a large Purim poppy cookie into “her” mouth, which the she-goat, so it appeared to us, swallowed in an instant. We could not decide whether it was truly a she-goat or whether a human being was hiding in there. The thing seemed completely mysterious . . . Everyone laughed loudly at the jest and the clay carrier was sent off with a fat tip, for which he thanked us with comical gestures and blessed everybody. The scenes were put on in the dining room and were often interrupted by the many messengers bringing shlakhmones. The messengers waited impatiently for my mother’s instructions about sending the return gifts. On the long table, different kinds of expensive wines, En­glish port, the best liqueurs, rum, cognac, candies, oranges, lemons, and marinated salmon were laid out. My mother and older sisters parceled these costly things without stop onto dishes, tureens, and trays. There was no defined amount, no fixed number. A shipment usually consisted of a flask of wine or English port and a piece of lox, of fish, and some oranges or lemons. A gift composed like this was generally intended for a gentleman. The gifts for women consisted of cookies, fruits, and sweets. Lower-class people got honey cakes, nuts, and apples on a plate covered with a red handkerchief, whose ends were tied together in a knot below.50 I remember vividly an exciting event that happened one Purim. My mother had forgotten to return shlakhmones to a family friend.* She only realized this late at night, and she could not sleep from her distress over it. Early morning the next day, she quickly got dressed and set out for her friend to ask forgiveness and to swear that the mistake did not result from disrespect but from forgetfulness. This assurance was actually needed because the friend had, in fact, felt slighted and offended. Of such importance and significance was each Jewish custom in those days. The messengers came and went, and so the afternoon hours passed from one until six o’clock, bringing us children nothing but candy and *  The morals of those days required that the younger man or woman first send shlakhmones to the older.

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dainty tidbits. My father would use this time for his afternoon nap. When he rose, the steaming samovar with its fragrant smell of tea already awaited him on the table. Afterwards, he performed the afternoon prayer because the sude (festive meal) was close at hand. (According to religious rule, this had to begin before evening.) The large chandelier in the yellow salon was lit. All the wax candles in the sconces burned. The other rooms were also brilliantly lit. The table was laid anew with every imaginable chilled, appetizing dish. On this evening, special attention was given to the drinks, which otherwise were not common in our house. It almost seemed as if our father considered it a good and pious deed if everyone got himself a little tipsy on Purim. On this evening, we children played a practical joke, in which my older sister and I used the clothes of the nanny and the cook. Naturally, they were too long and too wide and trailed after us. My sister played a mother, I her daughter, whose husband had abandoned her in poverty, with a child. Good people were now to help us locate the husband, or else I would remain an agune (that is, I could not remarry) and must await his return.51 When asked where we came from, we answered with disguised voices, “From Krupziki.” Our demeanor and bearing were so composed and earnest that even our mother did not recognize us at first glance, let alone the guests. Father exclaimed, “How did the manservant dare admit these people into the dining room with the guests? What kind of nuisance is this?” We begged for alms in money or food, for we were hungry and had eaten nothing today—we spoke all this in purest jargon. Our pleas for food and drink were soon answered: people invited us to take a place at the table! We did this with feigned embarrassment, gaped at and admired everything that was placed before us, and did not spare groaning sighs, which brought our table mates to giggles. We were so well disguised, the fantastic head coverings were pushed down so deeply on our brows, that we could have continued the joke unrecognized to the end. As I can recall the time from my most tender youth until most recently, at my home we always ate, drank, and laughed a lot on Purim until daybreak the next day. Absolute levity reigned. All otherwise forbidden pranks and foolery were permitted and all discipline annulled. The holiday left behind the best memories and also tangible mementos: a handsome scarf; a small vial of perfume, which you turned over

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and over, back and forth in your hands to read the label—which you could already recite from memory—once more with fresh delight. The little flask was guarded long and carefully in the chest of drawers until it came into use at an important and appropriate occasion. On the very next day, shushan purim, my mother held long consultations with the cook about the massive preparations for pesakh (Easter).52 On that day already, the most important food, beetroots for borscht, was placed in a koshered tub.53 A few days later, Wikhne, the flour vendor, came in her indispensable fur coat and brought all sorts of flour samples for the matses. My mother conferred with my older sister in inspecting the flour, kneading dough from the samples, and baking small, thin cookies until the choice fell on an approved type of flour. A day before rosh khodesh (the New Moon) of the month Nissan, my older sister had to sew a sack (because Mother did not trust the cook to make it clean enough), something that had to be done carefully, at a secure distance from bread or groats. My mother was so meticulous in these Passover preparations that the cook often lost her temper about it and became rude. My older sisters prepared modern, handsome clothes for the holidays. A tailor, shoemaker, and milliners, with whom the affairs of this season were often debated quite loudly, began to frequent our house. Rosh khodesh Nissan drew near and the baking of the matses now began.54 This job was one household duty with which all the family members, even Father and Mother, were busy. Already on the day before, very early in the morning, Wikhne, the flour woman, appeared with the sack of flour under her fur coat, which now was covered in front by a long apron reaching up to her throat. My sister brought the white sack she had made out of thin linen into the dining room, and then Wikhne followed with the flour. Naturally, we children had to be there, too, in order to help carefully count the measured pots of flour. So and so many pots were counted; then the sack was tied up, put in a corner of the dining room and meticulously covered with a white linen sheet. We children were strictly forbidden to come anywhere near it with bread or other foods, something we found completely understandable. On the next morning, the indispensable chief servant of the household, the cleaning woman nicknamed Meshya Kheziche, appeared— the same woman who, at the beginning of autumn, had served as a

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supervisor of all the domestic household tasks. She was particularly experienced in laying in coal and storing vegetables in the cellar. She lived with her husband in a mud hut near our brick factory, for which she carried loam, but she stayed with us most of the time. She was truly a loyal soul who devoted herself utterly to each of us children. I never saw her except in a tattered, blue striped calico dress and a pair of very large shoes, which fell off her feet at every step; her feet were almost frostbitten, even in summer. Her brown-blue, frozen face was wrapped with a once-white calico cloth; a thin red woolen band was fastened around her brow and two ends of a veil hung like wings on her neck. Her small, dull eyes, sunk deeply in her head always expressed kindness and gratitude. Her enormously wide mouth and thin lips seemed to be able to say only: “Good people, warm me up and give me something to eat!” Every autumn, my sisters had a quilted skirt and other warm pieces of clothing made for her, but every attempt to warm up this creature, frozen through and through, failed. So Meshya Kheziche came. First, she received a dish full of hot groats soup in the kitchen and when she was satiated and had warmed up a bit, she stole through the door of the dining room, stuck her head in through the half-open door and announced herself. My mother ordered her to wash herself carefully; then a long, white chemise was drawn over the clothes on her haggard body and her head covering was wound around with a white linen cloth, which also covered her broad mouth. In this attire, which gave her a ghostly appearance, she now had to sift the flour for the matses. After she had blessed my mother with the words, “May you with your husband and little ones live to see the coming year in great joy!” she began to pour out one sieve after another onto the table prepared for this task. What a funny sight, to see this apparition at work! We children stood at a precise distance and watched attentively. Meshya Kheziche was strictly forbidden to speak, so that no drop would fall from her mouth into the flour.55 After finishing work, she spent the night in the kitchen and early in the morning scoured the large red chests in which linen was stored during the whole year. Though they never came into contact with any food, she seized them with her powerful hands and washed them thoroughly, so that they would hold the matses in perfect purity. Then came the wooden tables and the benches in turn, which all felt

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the force of Meshya Kheziche’s scrubbing brush. The many dozens of rolling pins and metal trays too, were not spared. Two large brass basins were also scoured and scrubbed mercilessly, red hot iron rods laid in them and first boiling, then cold, water poured on them—such a cleaning the Jews call “koshering”—until the water overflowed.56 Later, they were scoured yet again and then polished until they glittered. The most important thing at the baking of matses is the hauling of the water from a well or a river, which was considered a great mitsve (deed pleasing to God).57 The utensils for the matse water were two large wooden tubs covered with grey canvas and a bucket with a large ladle and two large poles. Any missing utensils, of course, were replaced. After the large kitchen in the courtyard, too, was thoroughly cleaned and the bricks of the oven were made red hot and kashered, many bundles of dry wood, which our trusty old caretaker Feivele had gathered for this purpose over the whole winter, were brought into the kitchen. The eve of rosh khodesh Nissan saw the most extraordinary drama in the courtyard in front of the well or at the nearby river: my father and my brothers-in law themselves carried the water-sheepskins, which they carried on the long poles to the well or river in order to haul water and bring it to the large kitchen, where the sheepskins were set on a hay-covered bench. My mother and we children ran now in front, now behind this odd procession. The young men were gay and cheerful; my father, on the other hand, was solemn, because to him, these customs were as holy as a mitsve. My brothers-in-law also brought the well-guarded, wrapped-up sack of flour into the large kitchen. Meshya Kheziche stayed there for the night in order to heat the oven the next morning punctually. Everyone went to bed on time in order to be able to be on hand early for the matse baking. The next morning, I rushed over immediately to the oven and watched, fascinated, how skillfully an old woman slid the round, thin matses into the oven, moved the half baked ones over to the side, gathered the ready ones with both hands and tossed them into a basket on the bench standing nearby, without breaking even one, despite their being so thin and fragile. Soon a job was assigned to me: I was to pass the cut pieces of dough to the women with rolling pins, who stood around a long table covered with metal trays. My older sister had always managed to outdo me in rising early; even now she told me with pride that she had already rolled out many matses that were already baked.

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I was very unhappy with myself, scolded myself for sleeping late, and tried to make myself the more useful now. Only then did I set my mind at rest about my getting up late since the great rushing about and standing around had thoroughly exhausted me. I washed my hands and went into the second room, where the dough was kneaded. There, a woman stood over a flashing brass basin and, without uttering a sound, kneaded one piece of dough after the next from measured flour and water. I made myself useful there, too, asking for the large ladle from the small boy who had to pour water into the flour. I performed this work slowly and calmly, here and there looking at the women kneading, all of whom, just like Meshya Kheziche, wore a long white chemise and an apron untied at the waist over their clothing. Their heads and mouths were covered up with white scarves, just like Meshya Kheziche. I helped until I was overcome by exhaustion. Baking the matses lasted for almost two days. My mother walked around, indefatigable, from time to time inspecting the rolling pins with which the women rolled the matses in order to scrape off any dough that had adhered there; my brothers-in-law and my brother, who were armed with small pieces of glass fragments, helped. The particles had to be removed because the stuck-on dough was already khomets (that is, leavened dough) and thus, was not allowed to be kneaded in with the matse dough, which was unleavened. The young men also helped by tracing the matses with a perforating wheel.58 It never occurred to anyone to consider such work beneath them since all that concerned pesakh, and especially the matses, was considered a religious act. On the next day, my mother inspected all the matses, of which there were often several thousand, to see whether perhaps a twisted or not fully baked one might be found because such a one was already khomets and would have to be discarded. In strict order, the flawless matses were now laid in rows in the large red chests, which were covered with a white cloth. My mother had taken one matse under the cloth and without looking at it, her eyes closed, broke it in half while softly reciting a benediction for this act. Then, still without looking at it, she flung this piece of matse back into the flames. This custom we called “taking khale.” It was to recall the portion due the priest.59 The next period of time until pesakh passed in ceaseless preparation of

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the household, clothes, and finery. Finally, the important day of ­pesakh eve drew near, on which the work reached its zenith!60 On the evening before, a ritual act was performed: bdikas khomets, that is, ridding the house of leaven.61 My mother went to the kitchen, had the cook give her a wooden spoon and some goose feathers, wrapped a white cloth around them, took a wax candle, and then wound the whole thing firmly with twine and brought it into Father’s room, where she laid it on a windowsill. These apparently meaningless items were to be used that evening in a religious act. After he had prayed in the evening, my father took the bundle, lit the small wax candle, and handed it to my brother, whose hand was to serve as a candlestick, and now the campaign against khomets set off through the whole house. Each windowsill, each nook in which one suspected food might have been taken, my father examined by the light of my brother’s wax candle. Any crumbs found were scraped into the spoon with the feather, after which my father said the appropriate prayer. We children sometimes made a joke in advance of all this, heaping up little crumbs everywhere, about which my father marveled, because the windowsills were usually cleaned with special vigilance on this day. So now he would examine the windows thoroughly, and my mother had to hurry to get the bread that was still on hand out of the house, because the law decreed that all bread found during the search of the house had to be gathered and burned. After this act was carried out, we ate somewhat earlier than usual in the evening. The bread, which had been hidden in the meanwhile, was now brought onto the table; the gathered bread crumbs in the spoon, however, were tied up in a cloth, together with the wax candle and the feathers, and were set very high on the chandelier in the dining room so that no mouse could reach them, since that of course, would scatter them all over again. We went to sleep on time in order to be able to get up the next morning very early because by nine in the morning, no morsel of bread or other kind of khomets was to be found in the house of a religious Jew. We children were awakened very early the next morning and told to eat breakfast and lunch at once. The traditional dish for this morning was simmered milk with white bread. But even at this early hour, a roast was already ready, from which many members of the household

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ate heartily. “And now quickly, quickly!” my mother urged everyone in the house; the domestic servants ate twice as much as usual, because no khomets was to remain. We children were having great fun and said goodbye to bread for a full eight days. The dishes were quickly washed, and Mother then ordered the manservant to bring everything into the dining room. From the expensive porcelain service down to the last copper casserole, all the pieces were placed pell-mell on the floor, the table, the windowsill. And then everything had to be packed up in large packing cases and brought to the attic, from where chests filled with pesakh utensils were then taken down. The dining room was again thoroughly cleaned, the windowsills covered with white paper. The large dining table was pulled apart, covered with a white cloth or paper, and then the table was drawn out to its entire length, covered with thick felt and a layer of hay and much grey linen, fastened with small tacks. After this operation, the pesakh utensils still had to be unpacked, which we children awaited with great curiosity, because each one of us had our own individual kaus (a small goblet of fine shape).62 But all this wasn’t enough! All over the place, in all the rooms, there was much of interest for us to see, especially in the courtyard, where all the wooden tables and benches were set out for kashering. The table or bench was scalded with boiling water, rubbed up and down with a glowing iron and then immediately doused with cold water on the other side.63 But aside from this spectacle, something else was just splendid and sublime: Father himself appeared in the kitchen doorway with the khomets from the day before in his right hand and had Feivele, the old caretaker, bring bricks and dry pieces of firewood. The old man saw to this in a flash, made a small hearth with the bricks, and laid the pieces of wood on it. My father laid the spoon with the crumbs on the pile and set the wood afire. We children ran back and forth to make ourselves useful, if at all possible. The parched wood caught fire immediately and one little flame after the next shot out of the pile. And we children would shout: “See, see the feathers are already singed! The cloth is burning already! . . .” At last, the flames devoured the spoon, too, and it did not take more than ten minutes for the auto-da-fé of the khomets to be finished.64 My father did not leave the scene until all vestiges of the pile were cleared away because, according to the law, one should not tread on the ashes, in order to derive neither use nor pleasure from them.65

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We children ran from there to the dining room where Shimen the meshores (the manservant) was busy unpacking the pesakh utensils. We wanted to help here, too, and to seize possession of our kauses (wine goblets) because the bokher (youth) smirked roguishly and said that we were not yet properly prepared. We were flabbergasted and looked at him perplexed and dismayed. With an air of indifference he declared that we were not yet scoured and kashered. “But why be kashered?” we asked. “Yes, yes,” replied our tormentor, “You must take red hot ­steindelakh (little stones) in your mouth, roll them around and after that, rinse your mouth with cold water and spit it out. Only then may you touch these utensils.” We had no answer to this and dashed crying into the kitchen, where my mother was up to her elbows in work. Just then, she was busy with the cook preparing the turkey, a gigantic bird that had already been slaughtered, plucked, singed, salted, and rinsed with water three times.66 Now it lay on the board, and the cook held it firmly with her two hands, as if it would otherwise have flown away, while Mother, armed with a large kitchen knife, executed the main cut. Not far off, to the right of the bench, lay a full-length, golden-scaled pike from the river Bug on a newly sanded board, awaiting skillful raking. On the left stood a scrubbed kitchen table, on which various basins, plates, forks, and spoons were laid, in addition to a large basket of eggs and a pot of matsemehl, which my sister had sifted evenly, and from which delicious tarts, almond cookies, and such would later be prepared.67 We wanted to ask my mother whether Shimen was right, but we remained standing, restrained by the sight of Mother’s hard labors. The hideous image of red hot rocks in our mouths wrung a faint sob from us, and my younger sister convinced me to interrupt my mother despite everything. But Mother preceded us. Our whispering had finally attracted her attention and, half surprised, half annoyed, she asked us why we had burst into the kitchen so abruptly. Here, in plaintive voices, we told her in jumps and starts what the wicked Shimen had told us. She did not understand completely and became impatient. Then she shouted suddenly: “What red hot stones? Who took them in his mouth? Who poured hot water over himself?”

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After a long explanation, she finally understood the true cause of our anxiety. She immediately had Shimen summoned and firmly forbade him from babbling such nonsense to us. To us, she said that we were to wash ourselves and put on clean calico frocks and that we would then be worthy of receiving our kauses. We dressed in an instant. Triumphantly, we ran into the dining room and helped wipe off the utensils. With this and similar tasks, half the day passed until our healthy stomachs reminded us that we had eaten nothing since nine in the morning. We already knew what we would be given. We were brought the large gonsher (a very broad flask) with sweet mead, which my mother knew how to cook to perfection, and a full colander of matses; until this day, these had been under strict guard, since pious Jews were not allowed to eat matses before the holiday.68 Our kauses were filled with mead, and then we began to eat the matses. One piece after the other was plunged into the mead and disappeared, ground between our teeth as between millstones. Finally, Mother came from the kitchen. My older brother also appeared and brought apples, walnuts, and cinnamon. From these, which he crushed in a mortar, he prepared kharauses, that is, a mass resembling clay that appears on the seder plate in the evening. This “clay” was to remind us that our ancestors kneaded bricks for Pharaoh in Egypt.69 After my brother was finished with this work, my mother had the dining table carried into the yellow salon and set up in its full length in front of the sofa. She covered it with a white damask tablecloth, which reached the floor on both sides. Then she had the servant bring the porcelain and crystal utensils, arranged them, and herself went to the cupboard, which held the whole silver service. The servant set out goblets and mugs, which were very beautifully wrought, on a tray. One tankard, especially, was particularly artistic, with ivory intarsia representing mythological figures. The lid and the handle were from heavy gold. My father had paid a few hundred rubles for the art work. Another rather large tankard was of embossed silver. Nearby stood large and small goblets made out of French coins. Soon came the fruit dealer (gereziche) with fresh green lettuce, which played an important role on this, the seder evening. The servant brought out of the kitchen a bowl full of hard-boiled eggs, a plate with freshly grated horse radish (called moraur)—a symbol with which to remember

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the bitter conditions under which our ancestors had lived in Egypt; then, a few roasted pieces of meat, the so-called zeroa, in remembrance of the korban pesakh, that is, the Passover sacrifice in the Temple in Jerusalem; further, a dish with salt water and some shmure—(guarded) matses.*, 70 All these foods my mother covered with a white cloth. Only the lettuce did she leave uncovered, so that it would brighten up the ­monotonous white of the table cloth, while the shining red wine in the crystal decanter was reflected again and again in the glistening polished silver candlesticks and in each crystal glass.71 While my mother was busy with the tablecloth and the preparation of the different symbolic foods for the evening ceremony, Father came in often, checking to make sure nothing would be forgotten. To crown all this work, my mother had a few down cushions and a white pique coverlet brought and prepared a comfortable seat for Father on his left, the so-called Hesse bed; something similar was prepared for the young men on two chairs near their seats.†, 72 Every corner of the house exuded cleanliness and comfort. Everyone felt the festive atmosphere that reigned in the house. Dusk slowly fell and tea time neared. We sipped and drank the fragrant drink with special pleasure because in this festive setting it tasted especially good. Everything sparkled and glistened. We even used new vessels for drinking water. Now, to the dressing table! It did not take long before my mother appeared, dressed magnificently, to light the candles.73 At the time I am describing, she was young and pretty. Her bearing was modest and unassuming, yet self-assured. Her entire bearing, her eyes, expressed sincere, profound religious feeling, calmness, and peace of mind. She thanked the Creator for the grace of allowing her and her loved ones to live to see this festival in good health.74 Her clothing was opulent, like that of an aristocratic lady of those days. Her entire manner radiated refined, noble lineage. Many of the younger generation might sneer and scoff at the words “noble lineage,” *  The wheat used for this purpose was cut, threshed, and milled in the field in the presence of the rabbi and several Jews. It was prepared under guardianship, hence, guarded matses. †  Probably a symbol for the liberation of the slaves—using a comfortable seat as a free gentleman would; or were Oriental customs preserved in this way, in holding a banquet half reclining on cushioned seats?

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as if there was no Jewish aristocracy! To be sure, the Jew had earned his title of nobility neither on the battlefield nor from royal palaces for heroic feats in battle. Spiritual life bestowed nobility on the Jews: active study of Talmud, love for God and mankind. And it often happened that these virtuous people also acquired wealth and honor. After my mother lit the candles, she said a short prayer, covering her eyes with both hands, as custom dictates. When she did this, we could admire the expensive rings on her fingers, upon which the candle light sparkled and glittered in all the colors of the rainbow. One ring I especially remember had a large yellow diamond in the middle, surrounded by three rows of white oblong diamonds. Now my older sisters appeared in rich attire. In the forties, instead of gold-embroidered, narrow skirts, women wore a broad, pleated skirt with neither the hoop wiring nor tight lacing that disfigure youthful bodies.* My four unmarried sisters, down to the very youngest, also wore jewelry. From the age of twelve, we young girls already had the obligation to light candles on the eve of festivals and the Sabbath.75 So we gathered, all of us, around the table, beaming in joyful anticipation of the seder evening. All the candles burned. At my father’s seat were two spermaceti candles, which were called the manishtane candles, after the so-called Four Questions posed by the youngest child at the table, lamps being completely unknown at that time.76 On long winter evenings in the 1840s, I used to sit with my sisters till late at night by the light of a tallow candle, doing our school lessons or reading the thrilling tale of Prince Bowe with his faithful spotted dog, without experiencing the slightest discomfort. The nature of the tallow candle with its thick wick made it necessary to use wick shears repeatedly, which today are considered an archeological curiosity. Spermaceti candles or oil lamps provided a better form of illumination, but both were only for the wealthy; ordinary people did not allow themselves such luxury. Toward the end of the 1840s, the stearin candle, which gave a somewhat brighter light and pushed the tallow candle to the background, came into use. In the sixties, along with the intellectual *  There is more detailed information about fashion and its transformation in the final chapter of this memoir.

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Enlightenment, the brilliantly burning petroleum lamp also came to Russia. That was a day everyone in the country jumped for joy. Everyone believed that with this, as with the wagons, the final word in human comfort had been spoken. Absolutely everyone bought lamps for themselves and learned how to use them: how much petroleum to pour inside, how wide, long, and thick to make the wick. For this, too, there were clippers, which were not, however, like the wick shears. In the first couple of years after the introduction of the lamps, even candlesticks were completely superseded—the peasants, too, who had till then used the pitch chip* or kahanez† for lighting, now bought lamps. Of course, the light of the petroleum lamps of that time, with their yellow-red flame, was glaring and hard on the eyes; for all that, the lamp factories worked unceasingly producing them. Countless gallons of petroleum flowed into the Russian Empire. The dominion of the petroleum lamp lasted until the eighties, by whose end it was displaced by the gas lamp, a new excitement for the people! Of course, this invention served only to light the streets of the cities and the houses of the wealthy. With a boasting sneer, the master of the household in the great city screwed open the spigot for gas lighting in his private room, in order to flood his guest from the provinces with sudden light. In the early phase, the new device also cost many human lives; the pipes of the street lighting exploded and were leaky, and in the houses, many people suffocated through escaping gas if the gas spigots were not firmly shut at night. Only much later did electricity make its entrance and, with its light and ease, eclipse the synthetic lighting that had prevailed until then. The seder table glittered. The meshores (manservant) had a new caftan on and his whole bearing exuded festive self-assurance, since on this evening he served as a kindness, a favor, not as an obligation, since he felt equal to his masters.77 He brought the silver basin with the tankard and many hand towels, and we awaited the men, who soon ap*  Pitch chip: Thin, wide shavings of very resinous wood that were set into a special opening in the chimney. A suffocatingly dense smoke darkened half of this flickering light. †  Kahanez: A small basin with molten lard, with a thin little wood splinter that was lit as a wick.

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peared from the synagogue.78 In the tone with which my father at his entrance proclaimed a loud, Gut yom tov! (a good holiday), we already felt a certain festivity, a pleasant gaiety. My father had my brother bring the entire collection of Haggadoth* and gave the children the blessing. Afterwards, we took our places at the table, by order of age, of course. On this day, “Shimen the Servant” was also allowed to sit at a corner of the table because patriarchal custom declared that on this evening, all were equal—master and servant. My father looked magisterial. His large, wise eyes, his noble features, all expressed an inner contentment and tranquility. His powerful, wide forehead testified to incessant thinking; his long, well-tended beard completed his venerable patriarchal appearance. His behavior toward children and everyone else inspired the respect due a venerable old man of eighty, though he was just forty years old. Without being vain (the seriousness of Jewish rearing prevented such frivolity), my father was very mindful of his appearance. His holiday clothing consisted of a long, black satin caftan, trimmed on both sides with two velvet stripes, next to which a row of small, black buttons was fixed. Completing his garb was a costly fur-trimmed cap called a shtreimel and a wide satin sash around his hips.79 Only the collar of his elegant white flax shirt was visible, setting off the luxurious black beautifully. Finally, there was the obligatory red foulard pocket handkerchief. My older brothers-in-law dressed like my father; with the younger one, European fashion was already evident: he wore a black velvet vest with a golden watch chain. My eldest brother, too, a clever, quick-witted child with large, grey, visionary eyes, dressed like the older men, though he was only twelve years old. In the preparation of clothing, great care was taken about shatnez. According to Jewish law, it is forbidden to wear woolen material that is sewed with flax twine, or even to sit on upholstered furniture or carriage seats covered with fabric and sewed with thread. A fur that was sewed with flax twine was not allowed to be covered with cloth; my father’s furs were sewed together with silk. The tailor was once caught using twine and had to undo everything piece for piece and sew it back together using silk cord.80 *  The prayer books that contain the story of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt.

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My father sat down comfortably in his seat, laid his magnificent snuffbox with the red foulard handkerchief on the table to his right, and began to recite the Haggadah. He asked my mother to pass him the individual dishes from the seder plate, and the younger men followed his example. Then, at Father’s special request, Mother filled the goblets with red wine. At this, my married sisters filled their husbands’ goblets, too, while our older, unmarried sister performed the function of pouring for us children and the other people at the table, and for the meshores, too, of course. Each man received three shmure matses on his plate, in between which the zeroa, a little of the prepared horse radish, a little lettuce, ­kharauses, a roasted egg, and a radish had already been placed.81 All this was covered with a white table napkin. Father took the goblet of wine in his right hand and said the kiddush prayer and emptied the cup.* After saying “amen,” everyone at the table followed his example. My mother refilled the cup, the other women did the same for their husbands, and the cups of the other people at the table, too, were filled with sweet red wine. Then Father took his table china with all the things found there in his right hand and raised it up while reciting loudly the section from the Haggadah, ho lokhmo anyo.82 The men at the table repeated the passage until the second section, the mahnishtano, the so-called Four Questions, which the youngest child at the table had to ask. These read as follows: “Why on all nights of the year do we eat leavened and unleavened bread, but tonight only unleavened?” and so on (see the Haggadah). Father answered, reading from the Haggadah in an emotional voice: “avodim hoyinu . . . ,” “We were slaves to Pharaoh in mitsraim, and had God Almighty in his omnipotence not then delivered us and not taken us out of there, we and our children and our children’s children would still be slaves, and even if we were all learned students of Scripture, it is still our duty to tell of the exodus from Egypt.”83 At these words, my father always broke into tears. He surely could and must thank his Creator with a full heart when he beheld the fine guests arrayed at the table and his handsome young wife and children in *  On Friday night, Saturday, and other festivals, each Jew must consecrate the holiday with a cup of wine; the prayer is called kiddush. The cup must hold a specified quantity, of which the greater part must be drunk.

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their bloom, sitting there, adorned with precious jewels! In comparison to the bondage of that time, he really must be considered a prince. Then followed the Psalms, which composed the Hallel prayer; and after the hand washing, the explanation of why we eat the many bitter herbs on this night.84 It was to remind us that our ancestors experienced great bitterness and that they had no refreshment but bitter herbs while they marched through the wilderness. At this, the men broke the middle of the three matses in two, laid one half under the cushion for the afikomen (dessert), distributing the other half in small pieces among those at the table as mautse (the first bite of bread, before which a blessing is said).85 Then we ate from the horseradish: first for moraur, which was dipped in kharauses and swallowed as quickly as possible since this had to be done without matses; then in the kaurakh, once again, a helping of horseradish, this time laid between two pieces of matse.86 For each custom, a prayer was first recited. In brief, on this night, we received horseradish in order to make us truly feel and experience; and with tears in our eyes, we did have to acknowledge that the life of our ancestors in Egypt had been bitter. Later, radish and eggs were dipped in salt water, which tasted better. Finally, the courses of dinner came in their proper order, beginning with peppered fish, followed by a rich broth with matsemehl dumplings, and ending with a fine fresh vegetable. Finally, each person at the table received a piece of the afikomen, which had been saved. Then the goblets were refilled with wine. We poured water over our hands, called mayim akharaunim (concluding water), over which a small prayer was recited, and then proceeded to say the Grace after Meals, for which one of the men at the table was usually honored as leader.87 At the end of the Grace, everyone at the table joined in with a loud “amen,” and only after every one had recited the Grace softly to himself were the cups emptied. And now, the second part of the Haggadah was recited. For the fourth time, the goblets were filled. This time, the large silver goblet was also filled and placed in the middle of the table, set aside for the prophet Elijah. This custom is explained in kabbalistic writings. According to kabbalistic teaching, everything that one eats or drinks in pairs (so-called kabbalistic zuges) is dangerous, or at least can have a dangerous effect. For this reason, to the four cups drunk at the seder, a fifth also had to be added.88

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We children firmly believed in the popular tradition that the prophet Elijah came in unseen and took a sip from the great goblet. Without moving a muscle, we stared at the cup and if the outermost surface layer so much as moved, we were convinced that the prophet was present and that made us shudder. All of the cups were then filled, and Father instructed the servant to open the door. Now we began to recite the section shfaukh khamoskho, following which came the concluding section of Hallel and at the very end, the allegorical little ballad, khadgadyo, khadgadyo, (one little kid, one little kid).89 With this and similar verses, the seder evening came to its end. Everyone had drunk his fourth cup of wine. On the faces of all the table guests, you could see the relaxation and excitement that came from unaccustomed drinking of wine. One after the other, my older and younger sisters left the table before the last verses were sung to the end, something that was not considered a religious offense or an insult to domestic discipline. Something held me back, however; I did not want to miss a thing. It was shir hashirim, the Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, every word, every sound of which I absorbed with all my soul.90 The magnificent blending of the notes had an intoxicating effect on my child’s heart. I listened attentively, entranced, as the whole Song was sung in recitative, in seven tones. My elder brother-in-law David Ginsburg particularly excelled at this, and his singing made such an unforgettable impression on my soul that even today, in my late old age, I still know the beginning by heart. What would I not give to be able to hear this Song chanted so beautifully once more in my life! Even my mother used to remain at the table. More than once my mother urged me to go to bed, but I begged to be allowed to remain, which she permitted for a little while. But since she noticed how exhausted I was, a second warning followed, and I repeated my earlier plea still more imploringly. Probably because it was so exceedingly heartfelt, I received permission. I tried not to appear tired and crept onto a large armchair in the corner, listening with soulful pleasure to the singing. But I did not last until the end and awoke on my bed as my nanny undressed me and laid me down. I was now wide awake, but soon fell asleep again in the most blissful frame of mind, awaking in the morning in the same happy and delighted

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mood. Everything in the house was magnificently decked out, with a festive, glorious Passover atmosphere throughout! Outside, the early spring sunshine shone down from the clear sky. The wind was mild and warm. All of nature seemed to have donned festive dress, like all of us at home. Oh, golden childhood in my parents’ home, how lovely you were! For tea, I got matses and butter. I was dressed in a new little dress and ran outside to the neighbor’s children, who already awaited me on the street. We skipped and sang: “Spring is here, summer has come, huha, huha! Huha, huha!” The women and men of the household had been in synagogue for services since early morning; the Prayer for Dew was recited on this day, a prayer that even today, traditional Jews recite fervently, although it has been beyond their personal interest for nearly two thousand years whether the grain in the field grows because of the dew from heaven, the grass becomes succulent from rich dew drops, or the new wine thrives and does not turn sour.91 This prayer continued to be recited according to ancient tradition, and of course, like most Jewish prayers, was done in a half-sing-song, at which the women shed abundant tears. A people, Lord Beaconsfield asserted, that twice yearly implores Heaven for dew and rain for the fields will surely possess its own land again one day.92 This shows how deeply the love for agriculture and for the soil is embedded in Jewish blood. Indeed, Jewish law ordains that a man first plant a wine garden, till his field, then build a house, and only then marry!93 Around one o’clock all the synagogue-goers returned home. Guests making their yom tov (holiday) visit had already made their appearance and were received with a variety of sweets and with wine. The midday meal consisted of the four traditional courses: the essential stuffed turkey neck; the tastiest and best kinds of vegetables that the Passover season offered, about which a poor Jew could merely dream on this holiday. These rich, sweet dishes, in addition to pepper fish and sumptuous knoedel (dumplings), made people very thirsty and they drank plenty of good, aged schnapps, red wine, and finally, apple cider beer. The end of the meal was followed by a general snoring in all the bedrooms, the kitchen, and the hayloft, while we children romped with

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abandon in the meadows and fields that lay near the house and played for nuts with the neighbor’s children. Absolute silence in the house lasted until six or seven o’clock. Then, tea was served. After tea, the men went for a walk without the women; the women, too, went out in the fresh air with their female friends, and then people proceeded to the synagogue for the evening prayer, since today began the sfire counting.*, 94 My mother did not go to the synagogue since, just like yesterday evening, the seder table had to be prepared. This evening also held special interest for us children. It was customary to do whatever was needed to keep the children awake, especially so that the youngest member of the family would, as tradition prescribes, still ask the four kashes (why do we eat unleavened bread tonight, and so on), and then, in order to make the historical drama of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt more detailed than in the Haggadah, discuss it with the older and younger house members. So, the children were given apples and nuts to play with, and we were in a very happy mood and stayed awake until the conclusion of the seder. Like yesterday, the table was richly set. But many dishes—especially the lettuce—appeared rather wilted. Only the freshly grated horseradish spread its sharp aroma. We did not wait for this second seder celebration, or even the meal, with impatience, as we had the first, since we all were still full from the rich midday meal. The evening meal was only ready at around ten at night, since nothing was permitted to be cooked during the day and only with the fall of darkness, when stars could be seen in the heavens, did preparation of the evening meal begin.95 It consisted simply of a borscht broth (soup made from beet roots) and boiled poultry; there was no roast, because the zeroa, the symbol of the burnt offering, was on the table.96 On this evening, Father usually asked with impatience about the food, since consumption of the afikomen and the conclusion of the seder ceremony had to take place before midnight.97 The particulars were the same as on the previous night, if they were also less festive *  Sfire counting: the days between Passover (pesakh) and Pentecost (shevuaus) are counted as a religious ritual. Once, during the sfire weeks, many disciples of Rabbi Akiva died in a plague and later, during the first Crusade, many anti-Jewish persecutions happened in this time, for which reason this time is considered a time of mourning.

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and followed more quickly upon one another. At this tempo, we did succeed in eating the afikomen before the midnight hour. After the conclusion of the second half of the seder, the Song of Songs was chanted again until well after midnight, to which I listened, upright, till the end. The following four days are called khol hamoed (work days, semi­festival days, on which life goes on almost as it would on a regular day and almost everything is permitted).98 In our house, of course, life resembled what it was on holidays: many guests came for tea and for midday and evening meals. Much effort was involved in guarding the shmure, the matses, and the vessels. More than once, we got angry at the servants, who often mixed up the utensils. I remember one instance: it was on erev yom tov (the eve of the holiday) of the last two festival days of Passover. A respectable number of chickens and “Indians” (turkey-hens) lay koshered, that is, slaughtered according to ritual prescription, plucked, singed, soaked, and salted. My mother then appeared in the kitchen, took a large knife and asked whether an oat or a barley-corn, with which the poultry had been fed, had not perhaps remained stuck somewhere, making the bird unfit for pesakh use. And sure enough! She found an oat grain in the gullet of one turkey, with which all its companions in misfortune were now also condemned; that is, they were considered to be khomets and could no longer be used. My mother was very angry about this, regarded the cook with a reproachful look, and a triumphant air and cried: “There you are, you bungling thing! Where are your eyes? Were you perhaps, blind at the kashering of the birds? You had still not noticed it, even now! I thank God for the favor that I found the little oat grain, or else you would have fed us all khomets!” Labor and cost were no object. The whole bird was removed and another had to be slaughtered, cleaned, and made kosher! Imagine the housewife’s irritation! It was late, and dinner time near! Nevertheless, a feeling of joyful satisfaction tempered her anger, because God had kept her from a transgression. Indeed, for pious Jews, strict observance of all the pesakh prescriptions was considered such a grave obligation that their violation was expected to be punished by untimely death.99 Thus was the death sentence carried out on ever so many hens and turkeys, although they loudly protested against this in the courtyard! In these days it also happened once that the servant gave the cook

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regular matse instead of shmure matse for the fish stew. A quarter of an hour before we sat down at the table, Mother arranged the savory cooked fish on a platter and discovered the error.100 She flew into a rage, and the servant heard his well-earned rebuke. The incident filled the whole house with uproar and righteous fury and neither my parents nor the melamed touched the ever-so-appetizing fish! Father, Mother, the melamed ate only of shmure matses and also had special utensils, while the other members of the household ate regular matses. Now came the last day of the Passover holiday. The eight-day torment over food, the meal preparations that had been endured so patiently and devoutly in our parents’ house, was over. In the twilight hour of the last day, the boys made fun in the courtyard of the synagogue, shouting, “Come to the khometsy borkhu (the first word of the evening prayer)!” My father came home from the synagogue and, standing at the dining table, made havdole, that is, he inaugurated the coming work week with a goblet of wine, and thanked God for having distinguished holidays and work days, light and darkness. At the end of the prayer, he emptied the cup and poured out the residue on the table, after which he sniffed a box filled with aromatic cloves, held his fingers up against the plaited, burning little wax candle, illuminating them, and then extinguished the fire in the remains of the wine.101 Now we were freed from all the pressure that the pesakh holiday, with all its magnificence, imposed; and spring with its delights, the joyous play outdoors, began for us children. At home, there was still a lot of work to be done until all the pesakh utensils, down to the last pot and dish, were gathered from all nooks and corners and put away again. In the evening, Shimen, the servant, fetched the great chests down from the attic and packed everything up so that on the next day, no further trace of the pesakh festival, made with so much toil, could be seen. According to religious prescription even the leftover matses were not allowed to be eaten; in many Jewish houses, people used to fasten a single, large round matse on a little string on the wall and keep it hanging the whole year as a reminder until the next pesakh. Right after the holiday, the various kinds of groats were examined to see whether ­mildew had perhaps developed during the eight-day holiday, since it was already very warm in our region at this time. At our house, of course, we no longer ate the

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preceding year’s groats, called yoshen. We waited for the current year’s groats, called khodesh.102 In our house, the first weeks of spring passed in the heavy mood of sfire time (from Passover until Pentecost), when any enjoyment, any sport, is forbidden.103 To go to a concert or the theater, to celebrate a wedding or even put on a new piece of clothing or new shoes, to take a foot bath even in pressing heat, were all strictly forbidden in my parents’ house.104 Only on Friday, after midday had passed, could we take a warm cleansing bath. All finery, like strung pearls and the embroidered head-band, were laid aside.105 People wore simple, old, used clothing. As opposed to their habit the rest of the time, my parents and siblings held back from all merriment during sfire time and almost never laughed or joked. My mother often promised us many nuts if we would remind her to count the sfire each night, but this reminder was completely unnecessary because she never forgot to count how many days and weeks in the sfire had passed. For me, spring had a particular attraction: the fields that lay near our house beckoned. I ran about in the brightest frame of mind the entire morning and plucked one marigold after another, rejoicing over each new blossom. With the help of my constant companion, Khaye, the daughter of the sheet-metal worker, I wove garlands out of these flowers of the field and also fetched many delicate forget-me-nots from the bank of the nearby river. We crowned our heads and thus adorned, returned home. In the company of the children of an indigent neighbor, I often launched expeditions into the brambles that surrounded the high mountains near our house and concealed innumerable, bright crimson, wild berries. We made long strings from these and adorned ourselves with them. Engrossed in these excursions, I often forgot to return home, and my mother would be overwhelmed with anxiety and worry about me. Everyone was already at the table, and I had still not returned home and had to be searched for. Among my most favorite places was the solitary hayloft where the fragrant hay lay piled up in a heap. I dug myself a kind of burrow up there and sat myself down in it, playing with my favorite kitten. I showed it how to stand and sit on its hind legs, rolled it up in my apron, pulled its ear, and cried into it: “Kittie, do you want kashe (mush)?”

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And the tormented little animal pulled its ear out of my hand and shuddered, which I took to mean “no.” Then I took its second ear and cried into it: “Do you want kugel (a rich Sabbath dish), perhaps?” And the kitten let out a loud “miaou,” which I took to mean “yes.” But this game did not detain me long. I bent forward over the board and, through the large openings in the stall, tossed down batches of hay to the horses, right in front of their heads, which they greedily devoured. To put an end to my dawdling, my roaming about in the hills through fields and bushes, and my dangerous crouching in the hayloft, my mother decided to send me to kheder (primary school) and to entrust me to the melamed (primary school teacher), with whom my older sister took Hebrew instruction.106 One fine afternoon in the middle of the most raucous play, I was suddenly called to the dining room by my mother, who stood at the window. There, already awaiting, sat Reb Leser, the melamed, and my mother said, turning to face him, “This is my Pessele. Tomorrow she will come with Khaveleben (my sister) to you in the kheder.” In my bashfulness, I barely dared attempt to raise my eyes to him. “But you may not bring your kitten with you to the kheder,” Reb Leser said to me. These words were not exactly calculated to make me feel drawn to him. Half the lure of something new that lay in the trip to the kheder was gone for me. I remained sitting, out of sorts and wondering what was to be with my kitten and my other splendid amusements now. I listened as Reb Leser said to my mother: “So then, on Thursday, the assistant will fetch her to the kheder.” Bidding a “good night,” he disappeared into the twilight. And now it was farewell to merry games with Khaye, the sheetmetal worker’s little daughter, who used to bring such pretty little pots with her, and with Peyke, who was so ingenious in puppet games, and ­Yenkte—how often did we sit there so cozily with each other, at the end of the large garden railing on a great wooden block, and tell each other sad and happy tales that made us weep bitterly or laugh heartily? It broke my heart to have to give everything up. Only my curiosity to see the arena of my new life consoled me a little. Soon after the evening meal, Mother advised me to go to bed in order to get up at the same time as my sister, early in the morning, and go with her to the kheder.

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My sleep that night was not as peaceful as usual, and I was on my feet even earlier than my sister. The nanny had to wash and dress me and even then, I still had to wait for my sister. The first day of school! The assistant appeared to collect us. I was very eager to see him. He was an extremely tall sprout of a youth with two long, thin blond ringlets in front of his great dog’s ears and a frightfully broad mouth.107 You could see his eyes only rarely since he wore his quilted kutschme,* which in the great heat, he himself had pushed onto his forehead as if it were stuck to his head for all eternity. You also would not exactly call his other clothing luxurious. Of his footwear, one shoe was so large that he lost it at every step, while the other fit so tightly that he had to drag his second leg behind, limping; obviously, the two shoes came from different pairs. He came from the kehile (community) of Sabludeve (here in the sense of “hole in the wall”) and was called Velvel. All this I discovered as he walked into the kitchen, through whose half opened door I stuck my head inquisitively. He was to receive his breakfast there; of course, he ate with us “days,” as we called it then, that is, on each day of the week he ate at the parents of a different student. 108 He came to us on every Tuesday. I just had to laugh at him. It was just too funny when this tall man sat down heavily right on the outermost edge of the kitchen bench, raising the other end up in the air, sending the bokher tumbling onto the floor, sprawled out clumsily to the length of him.109 Even our morose cook had to laugh at that. But this mishap did not stop the assistant from devouring his food with a true wolf ’s appetite. Done, our assistant consecrated our first trip to kheder with the exclamation, “Now, right foot!” En route, he brought up the rear, probably because of his unbalanced footwear. But he was soon tested in the role of valiant defender. A raving dog that followed us presented the occasion for this test. Seeking help, we looked to our protector—but he was the first to shriek pitiably. Despite his shoes he ran as quickly as possible, ever faster. We tried to catch up to him, but he was the better runner; we could not *  A high fur cap with a tip at the end.

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catch him. My sister seized my hand and in breathless anxiety, we repeated the little ditty, like a prayer: Doggie, doggie, do you want to bite me? Three little demons will come And rip you to pieces. Doggie, doggie, do you want to bite me? Three little demons will come and tear you to pieces. I am Jacob, you are Esau, I am Jacob, you are Esau!110

The speech had to be recited hastily, in one breath and without stirring from your place. We were utterly convinced that the dog would calm down and let us pass . . . Our “trusty” leader waited in his place, where he felt safe, until we came to him; then the procession moved on. On the way, my sister pointed out and explained everything that was new and noteworthy to me. We saw many stalls—the stands of shopkeepers—and had to push through crowds of people until we arrived at the kheder at around eight o’clock in the morning. Once, a long, long time ago, the little house had been painted yellow. Now, it stood sunk deep in the earth with little window panes that let in only a bit of light. The small house was surrounded by a prisbe (earthen bench), on which I saw my future fellow students, girls of about my age and my sister’s age, at various games. They stared at me with large eyes. We remained standing in front of the entry. The uninitiated could not easily find her way around here! My sister went forward first. She opened the door, sprang into the vestibule and stretched out her hand to me. I grasped it and stretched out my leg to find the threshold, which was a half-rotted piece of wood that lay sunken deeply in the clay floor. I had to stretch out my leg far ahead of me in order to feel the wood. I stretched forth my second leg, too, and made a brave step forward. My sister warned me against stumbling over the ladder leading to the attic. One step farther was a water barrel, on whose rim lay a large wooden water ladle, which later, would constantly beckon us children to drink. Beyond this was a bucket and a broom. To the left, I caught sight of a door that, instead of a latch, had a wooden stick as smooth as glass from heavy use. My sister opened the door and stepped into the school room

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and I followed her. We could not both stand upright comfortably. After one step, we bumped up against a bench, which was connected to a long wooden table on which all kinds of school and prayer books lay. On the other side of the table stood a similar bench that reached until the wall. I leave it to the imagination of the reader to estimate the width of this room! Reb Leser, the melamed, reigned over it from the summit of his table, from which point he could take in his whole domain at a glance. Reb Leser was a powerfully built, broad-shouldered man, and his great body completely covered the window next to which he sat. His sky blue, prominent eyes, before which a pair of small grey peyes (earlocks) moved incessantly, and his long face with its pointed grey beard, radiated self-assurance and pride. His brow with its strong, swelled vein testified to his energy. His dress was appropriate to his time and class: leggings bound tightly at the knees, thick grey stockings, gigantic shoes; his shirt sleeves of dubious cleanliness; a long spotted, dark arba kanfos*, 111 made of cotton substituted for a coat in summer (in winter, he wore a quilted coat). The small, black velvet cap on his large head completed the garb typical for a man of his station in those days. At the other end of the table sat the chief assistant, always in a stooped posture. He held a long, thin wooden pointer (called a deiteholz) in his hands, with which he showed the children the reading, letter by letter, line by line. He was charged with repeating the rebbe’s words for the pupils. He was always serious; had a nose in the shape of a spade, small, melancholy eyes and, in front of his ears, two long, black peyes that were in continual motion. We remained standing; we had to stand on the same spot. The rebbe rose as he caught sight of me, with a cry, “Ah!” Then he took me under his arm, raised me onto the bench and sat me down next to him. In the meantime, the pupils came running in around me, this newly arrived strange animal, to observe and exchange comments. My sister, who was already at home here, searched for her place but also looked toward me protectively. Anxiety, embarrassment, the many unfamiliar faces, the damp, stifling air in the room, the low ceiling, to which I looked up anxiously, all this and probably also, the after-effects of the fright with the mad dog, choked up in my throat, and I did not know what else to do but suddenly begin crying fiercely and bitterly. I was ashamed of *  A four-sided piece of cloth, on whose ends the tsitsis (ritual cords) were affixed.

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myself and reproached myself silently, but I still could not get a hold of myself. Reb Leser asked me to calm myself, promising me that today, we would not yet begin instruction. I could play with the students during recess. But the more he comforted me, the more abundantly my tears flowed. The rebbe finally guessed that it was the many curious eyes that frightened me, and he stamped with his large feet that everyone was to get up, crying: “Out, to the street, shikses!*, 112 What are you gaping at? Have you never seen anything like this?” At this command, they scattered in all directions and took up their play on the prisbe. I calmed down but would not dare move from my place. My sister discussed a paragraph with the rebbe, reviewed it with the head assistant, and then wanted to go out to play and take me with her. But I would not let myself be persuaded. After a while I heard that our gallant escort, Velvel, was missing. He was awaited impatiently since he brought nearly all the students their lunch. I was too busy with myself and the new territory and had barely thought about when and where we would eat lunch. The longawaited man finally arrived and was a sight to see: Velvel carried pots, jars, bowls, glasses, spoons of various sorts and sizes, bread and food, as follows: the pots and mugs were tied tightly to the long broad girdle around his waist and reached down well over his hips. The ingenious bokher placed the bread on his chest between his shirt and caftan; the filled, little dishes he placed one upon the other, pressing them tightly on his arm against his chest and holding them with his other free hand. The dessert, which consisted of nuts, apples, cooked beans, and peas, he secured in his long sack. Thus fitted out, the “ship of state” moved slowly toward its goal, the kheder. It was truly impossible for him to sit down anywhere. Finally, he arrived! The rebbe scolded him for his lateness, and he explained plaintively where and how long he had to wait for the food. “Bring the tin bowls and the metal spoons here quickly,” the rebbe now ordered, and his command was quickly executed. The rebbe poured our lunch out in a bowl. I got a metal spoon, the end of whose handle had a small hole, which signified that it was milkhig, that is, that it was to be used only for dairy foods. I turned the spoon over and over again in *  A scornful name that meant as much as “guttersnipe” for girls.

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my hands and could not figure out how to scoop anything out with it. I thought to myself: “What, am I to eat with this metal spoon and not out of my white porcelain dishes?” Tears again came to my eyes, and my throat tightened. The rebbe looked at me surprised and this time could not account for my tears. My sister, however, was more practical than I (a superiority she retained her whole life). She skillfully grasped a spoon, led one spoonful after another to her mouth, and enjoyed her food. When she was somewhat full, she asked me, surprised, why I was not eating. I didn’t answer her because I felt that at the first words, tears would burst from my eyes again even more furiously. I restrained myself, however, and drew a spoonful, whose contents I swallowed along with my tears. At the end of mealtime, the rebbe lifted me up from the bench and although the lunch experience had upset me, in my childish consciousness I tried to compare the advantages of eating in the kheder with the midday meal at home. Here, during mealtime, we were allowed to talk and drink to our hearts’ content, while at home this was only allowed after the roast. Here, we were allowed to get up from the table when we wanted; at home, only after Father had risen. Since I was thirsty again after eating, I was told about the large wooden ladle at the water barrel, which I could use. Then my sister took me by the hand, one student to another, and in her company, I finally made my appearance in the street and took part in the children’s play. This lasted until seven o’clock at night. Then we were called into the kheder premises to say the evening prayer.113 The assistant stood in the middle and we congregated around him. Our eyes directed to him, we repeated after him each word he pronounced, then quickly returned home. I returned so exhausted from the adventures of the day that I could tell my nanny only little about it. I drank my tea and fell asleep without supper. Yet I woke up the next morning with a certain impatience, very eager for the kheder assistant to come as fast as possible, that I might see again the face that just yesterday I found so distressing. But even more than this, I yearned to resume the games that had been interrupted. Velvel, the valiant guide, appeared at eight sharp, and this time we arrived at the kheder without incident. And now I also behaved differently. I studied for the first time with my rebbe; later I played with the

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other students.114 Hardly a week had elapsed, and I already felt very comfortable and knew every hiding place in the school. Aside from the long, narrow study room, there was also a long, dark passageway (any other name for it would be incorrect), in which the bedstead of the rabbi and his rebbetsin was located.115 In front of the beds, on two thick ropes stretched out over a beam, hung the cradle, in which their only daughter, little Altinke, lay. Everyone who wanted to go to the third room had to butt up against this cradle, which then kept on swaying for a long time. This room, like the bed and cradle linen, could in no way be called clean. But, as it is enjoined, you must be content with every­thing, and this the occupants of this dilapidated hut were, in the fullest sense of the word. They did not ask for more. Their one worry was that their “Altinke” (though already two years old, the child could still not stand upright), as the only one of four children left living, survive.116 They watched over and protected her like the apple of their eyes. On her neck she wore an amulet. It was a four-cornered disk cast from lead with a kabbalistic inscription and also a little mezuze (containing two paragraphs from the Torah). The little ribbon on which these things and also a wolf ’s tooth hung, stuck together because of the constant wetness from the saliva and the filth on child’s quilt-covered little body. This small, unlucky creature lay mostly in the cradle, since Feige, as the rebbetsin was called, had to run all kinds of businesses on her own, like baking honey cakes with anthelmintic herb, a plant seed that you put in honey cake to rid children of worms; cooking peas and beans, dainty morsels that the students bought from her every day. The hen and her chicks kept her especially busy. Of course, with all this work, there remained little time to carry the child around on her arm. Every day, she chose another of the students to help her in the domestic chores, and she discovered in me, too, a willing helper. Soon I was rocking her child (which I did, by the way, with great pleasure); helping her dust the scoop with flour when she had to push the bread into the oven; inspecting the colander where the hen laid her eggs every day (I would lay these over my eyes while they were still warm, which gave me such pleasure). The rebbetsin’s figure reminded you of a hop pole. She had unusually long arms, a long, thin neck that supported a horse head, small wandering eyes, big-boned cheeks and blue, thin lips that she had not pulled into a smile since childhood. Her long hawk nose covered half her

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mouth and gave her face the appearance of a bird of prey. Her long horse teeth and above all, the gaps between her teeth, made her pronunciation far from pretty. But that did not stop her from showing her ceaseless ability to talk to the whole neighborhood, from early morning until late evening. Soon I was also to discover that there was no jesting with the rebbetsin; a grasp of her hand was not exactly the touch of an angel. I had to leave my kitten at home but I made the best of it at the beginning because I found a substitute in the rebbetsin’s hens. I often went to the pripoczok (lower portion of the oven) to the brooding hens and watched how they sat carefully, wings spread on the eggs. During this time, their eyes expressed an almost human tenderness. The animal sat patiently without food and waited until you took her off and fed her. Thus, it happened once that I bent down to the hen in order to carry her away and feed her. From her seat, the rebbetsin discovered me doing this and was alarmed by the possibility that I might scare the hens and make them fly away. The eggs would then become cold and would no longer be hatched. Quickly, Feige leapt up at me, grabbed me roughly by the shoulder, and shrieked at the top of her lungs: “What are you doing? What mischief are you up to? Meshuggene, avek!” (get out of here!)117 I watched the rebbetsin panting in rage. The hen, in fact, saved herself from my hands and wriggled speedily in the direction of where Reb Leser reigned, settling down on a three-cornered shelf in the corner. She looked around with a loud cackle as if it pleased her here, then set out for Reb Leser’s head, bent down and left behind a souvenir of her stay. Then she flew, wings beating, to the shelf where the dishes and bowls stood and overturned everything, which naturally made a racket, and then searched for her hole in the pripoczok, where she finally calmed down. Reb Leser, on the other hand, could not calm down so fast. As the students sitting around the table pointed with a loud laugh to his head, he grasped his head covering and, shaking with rage, wiped off the memento that had been left behind, yelling and cursing in a loud voice. To his other half, he swore by all that is holy that he would slaughter all her hens the very next day. But our intrepid rebbetsin had other ideas and defended her little ward at the open door. She advanced her arguments, showing me to be the chief culprit in the disaster. Finally, the rebbetsin announced that her husband had absolutely no right to condemn the

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hen to death. Indeed, her outstanding defense plea was sufficiently powerful that Reb Leser came out the loser and was silenced, commuting the death sentence to a pardon. This event provided much material for discussion in the kheder and in the so-called shmolen gessel (the narrow little street). It had produced many onlookers who watched from their windows and were almost drawn into the fight. That evening I had a lot to tell my nanny . . . When Reb Leser had finally let his wife’s comments go unanswered, he did so with the self-consciousness of a man whose dignity, despite everything, was untouched. He had every reason for this attitude since he was not only very popular at home, in the school’s street, and in the shmolen gessel, but also far away in the kempe (Polish: island or spit of land) beyond the pond. It was to Reb Leser, the melamed, that people came when a child became sick or had a fever. He knew how to heal and how to pronounce a charm over an ayin hora (evil eye, evil glance). For this latter purpose, he would take a piece of the “victim’s” clothing, perhaps a sock or a vest, whisper a secret text, and spit three times on it. That alone sufficed to make the child recover, without him having personally seen him. The item was returned to the bearer with the words: “It will be well.” If someone had a toothache, Reb Leser would place him in the moonlight at the stroke of twelve, facing the moon, and would stroke now the right, then the left cheek, while murmuring mystical words. And Reb Leser was then certain that the pain would cease—eventually of course, only after a long time, or after the tooth had been pulled. Someone suffering from severe back pain had to stretch out full length on the floor; for a moment, Reb Leser, the bekhor (first born), stood with his foot on the patient’s back, and the patient recovered! Someone who wanted to buy a cow was convinced that she would give a lot of milk if Reb Leser had settled on the sale price after long bargaining. One word from Reb Leser’s lips made many things possible. These were his small sources of income. The shadkhen business, by contrast, brought him much more money.118 This activity yielded almost as much as his school and also had the advantage that it usually was preceded by a little glass of schnapps. After the success of a marriage, his friends—and enemies—always increased. Of the latter there were more! . . . But Reb Leser did not grow any grey hairs on that ac-

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count. To him, all parties were equally good. He ran this business in his spare time, between minkhe and maarev on Saturday evening, since the Jew of that time was in the right frame of mind to speak of such things after he had rested for twenty-four hours.119 Perhaps it was good that Reb Leser had so little time to spend on these matters . . . The memorable incident with the hen was enough to make me fed up with the inside of the kheder and to interest me far more in games outside. I attained great skill in many of them—in drawing games, for instance, in which you used a kind of primitive die made of bone; in a game played with nuts, and in pin games, pairs and single. One of my girlfriends was very adept at pin games and made me very jealous: she could hold a great number of pins in her mouth, under her tongue, and speak normally anyway. We played so much that we children often forgot the real purpose of attending school. I soon familiarized myself with the entire surrounding locale of the kheder and was in good standing with the neighbors. My special favorite was the small synagogue door-knocker, a thin, bent little man with a green-yellow goat face and bashful goat eyes, which betrayed that he was in pain.120 His whole life, he appeared to suffer from whooping cough. When we children caught sight of him in the street, we would run toward him and cry playfully, “To the synagogue! To the synagogue!” and accompany him for a stretch. Before the morning and evening prayer, he appeared, of course, in the synagogue’s street and summoned the community together with his remaining lung power, shouting, “To the synagogue! To the synagogue!” Then he would prop his hands up on his sides and for a long time, could not catch his breath for coughing. Besides this, he had yet another occupation: on every Friday, just before the beginning of the Sabbath, he ran to the Jewish shopkeepers and warned them to close their stores quickly. Finally, he also woke the community for slikhaus (early prayers during the week before the New Year’s festival and the Day of Atonement). The small, low kheder room could not accommodate all the students. Outside in front of the door, the burning blaze of the sun often drove us away, so we had to flee with our die and nut games to one of the many vestibules in the large synagogue opposite the kheder, where it was always cool and roomy. I never dared venture farther than into

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the vestibules, and I remember what a powerful experience I had when my playmates once induced me to set foot into the section where the men used to pray. The great room with its many benches and tables was impressive. In the middle of the synagogue was a four-cornered, raised stand enclosed by a low, carved railing; on this protuberance stood a narrow high table on which the Torah scrolls were laid during leienen.121 Behind it was a high gate whose two doors led to the oron-hakodesh.122 This holy ark was covered with a red velvet curtain, in whose center a magen dovid was interwoven.123 On both sides of this Jewish banner stood two upright, life size bronze lions, like sentinels. On the eastern wall, the mizrakh wall, were the places of honor for  the oldest and most distinguished Jews of the city of Brest. 124 There, the matan besesser pushke, that is, the box for secret donations, was found. When someone had a precious wish fulfilled or if a particular piece of luck happened, of which he could speak to no one, he would contribute something in total secret into this box. Particularly when someone wanted to ask something of God, he would put a contribution in. From the outside, only a small slot in a niche of the wall could be seen. In this opening, the donors cast their secret offerings, having anxiously made sure that no one had observed them.125 From the ceiling of the synagogue, painted sky blue with silver stars, numerous lamps hung down on chains. All this magnificence filled my child’s soul with reverence and awe. Whispering mysteriously, my escorts told me that under the high doors of the oron hakodesh was a cabinet with many sifrei torah (holy scrolls), and that from there a subterranean passage led to Jerusalem. On Friday evening, the reshoim (sinners) freed from gehenom (hell) gathered to set all kinds of mischief in motion. Yet other, similar fairy tales evoked fearful awe in me. The story of the lehmener goilem (clay figure), had a particular effect on me: on the oron hakodesh in the synagogue, there lay a great figure of clay, which once could do everything a living person could.126 The old kabbalists used such figures, which they equipped with amulets, hieroglyphs, and other symbols familiar to no one, and whispered incantations into the clay figures’ ears, enabling them to begin to move and perform all sorts of service, just like people. You had to specify in detail exactly and precisely everything that the figure was to do, for example, “Go to the door, take hold of the

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latch, push it down, unlock the door, close it, go to the house in that street, press down the latch, unlock the door, close it, proceed to the first room, go to the table at which my friend sits, tell him that he is to come to me today with the book.” The return route also had to be specified exactly to the figure, step by step, otherwise the goilem was likely to bring down the whole house in which the friend lived. He was truly a cretin, and still today the saying, “you are a lehmener goilem,” is an insult among the Jews. One time, I even dared to step into the great room alone, but I ran out, seized by an uneasy shudder, crying and screaming hard, and Reb Leser forbade me to go in there again without accompaniment. I can still see in my mind’s eye the beautiful, magisterial building in Moorish style, with its round glass tower, through whose panes the daylight fell and the interior of the synagogue was illuminated. When the city of Brest was demolished in 1836 and turned into a fortress, the synagogue also had to be demolished.127 The cornerstone that was found referred back to earlier centuries, to the days of Saul Wahl, who was elected king for a night by contending Polish factions. Wahl built the synagogue in memory of his deceased wife, Deborah.128

II. Part Two Six days after the rosh khodesh (New Moon) of Sivan (around May) came the shevuaus (Pentecost) holiday, a beautiful, pleasant festival about which the Jews said that you could eat everything and everywhere, while on Passover you could not eat everything, and on Tabernacles you could not eat everywhere, that is, you could eat only in the booth. That is why shevuaus lasted only two days . . . 129 Of course, there was a lot of preparation, even for this festival. The meaning of this holiday was explained to us children in the kheder as a commemoration of the day on which Moses received the holy tablets of the law on Mount Sinai. Three days before Pentecost (a period called shelausho yemei hagbole), the mourning of the sfire time ended and joy returned.130 People wanted to be compensated for the six weeks of deprivation. The children stayed in the kheder only half a day and made

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an unbridled tumult outside in the open, as well as inside the house. And at home, there was again roasting and baking, namely, many butter cakes! On this holiday you especially ate all milk and butter dishes. The traditional cheese blintzes with sour cream, a kind of flinsen, were essential. On erev yom tov, the eve of the festival, there was again much hurried work at home. All the rooms were bedecked with greens and magnificently lit.131 We children were dressed up and the table covered for supper. The windows of the rooms, ablaze with candles, stood wide open, and the warm, fresh spring air streamed in, without moving the flames of the many candles even slightly. They burned serenely and festively. The men came home from the synagogue, and we proceeded to the table. Right after the first course, a section out of the tiken shevuaus (liturgy for shevuaus night) was read by the men and after the second course, yet another part. After the meal, my brothers-in-law withdrew with their melamed to their study room to study the entire tiken shevuaus there until early morning.132 My elder brother-in-law undertook this prayer without a murmur. But the younger would probably have preferred a different pursuit. But that did not matter; the discipline and religious orientation of our house carried more weight than personal wishes and inclinations, even then, when the spirit of Lilienthal already buzzed in the heads of the young people.133 In early morning we went to the synagogue, where a festival service was held and akdames, an Aramaic hymn in honor of the Torah, was recited alternately, verse by verse, by the prayer leader and the congregation. On the second day of shevuaus, the megile (Ruth) was read, which often lasted until midday. At home, a happy mood prevailed: we drank fine, aromatic coffee and ate butter cakes and blintshikes and went outside to walk in the open air. Soon came summer with its splendors that we children enjoyed to our hearts’ content. The time from Pentecost until the seventeenth day of Tammuz (June–July) was for the Jew of the first half of the last century the most delightful and beautiful of the whole summer. But the progression of fine days was not to last too long for him, lest in his arrogance, he forget God. For this reason, I believe, after a short period of recuperation, a fast day was again enjoined for him. And so shivo osor betamuz (the seventeenth day of Tammuz), was already a fast day, fol-

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lowed by the so-called three weeks, which ended with a day of mourning, tisheb’av (the ninth day of the month of Av). The meaning of these three weeks of sorrow is as follows: on the seventeenth of ­Tammuz (July), Titus began the siege of Jerusalem, which ended with the destruction of the Temple on the ninth of Av.134 And again it was forbidden to pursue pleasure, to hold weddings, bathe in a stream, wear jewelry. In the last nine days, one also had to abstain from meat and on the ninth day, on tisheb’av, a mourning commemoration for the destruction of Jerusalem was held in the synagogue and at home. Once, on Friday before shabbes khazon (the Saturday before tisheb’av), our mother appeared, looking agitated and serious, while we were sitting around the breakfast table.135 In her one hand, she held a wooden measuring vessel filled with black stuff, and in the other hand, a brush. We wondered what Mother wanted to do with all this. She climbed up on the sofa and with the brush, made a four-cornered black mark on the beautiful red wall paper. To our asking what this meant, she answered that this mark, which she called zeikher l’khurben, was to remind us that we are Jews in golus, that is, subjugated.136 I still remember how on erev tisheb’av, that is, on the eve of the ninth day of the month of Av, my father and the young men removed their shoes and sat down on low foot stools. The servant placed a low, wooden bench before them and set out on it the pre-fast dinner that consisted of hard-boiled eggs dipped in ashes eaten with hard rolls.137 Moved, with an expression of deep sorrow on their faces, they sat there, as if they had lived through the destruction of Jerusalem themselves, seen with their own eyes the ruin of its splendor and its greatness. How real the past was to them; how deeply felt is the pain of the loss of the old homeland to the pious Jew even today. Then the men went to the synagogue in their stockings, without shoes.138 My mother and older sisters remained at home. Several foot benches were brought into a room and candles were placed on low tables and stools. We all sat ourselves down around Mother on the foot stools and began reading megilas echo (Lamentations).139 Mother wept, and we children wept softly with her. Then some kinos were read and our tears flowed abundantly.140 The boys, of course, had their own activities.141 On erev tisheb’av, the young kundesim (street urchins) used to throw round, green burs, like small potatoes, that were covered with thorns

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like pins and stuck to everything, onto the hair and socks of earnestly grieving old men, in order to irritate them. On the following day, deep mourning prevailed and a heavy mood lay on everyone. In the morning we were not allowed to wash ourselves even once; even we children fasted now and again for a few hours, and our parents praised our steadfastness. With all the greater appetite did we fall upon the food when half the day had passed. The house began to get more lively again; we tidied up the room, and in the kitchen things started to stir once more. We children took up our games and amusements.142 I particularly remember one of these games on one tisheb’av. A few days before, my brother had already agreed with his friend, today Doctor H. S. Neumark, that on this day he would bring my brother several hundred boys from the city khedurim to the suburb Samuchawicz, where they would pass the time with them in a way appropriate and respectable for this day; namely, in remembrance of the battle that took place some two thousand years before at the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, they would organize a fight. The boys had to bring their red-colored wooden swords, which every Jewish boy had on this day. For weapons, there were also bows and arrows, a club, and even a peasant whip. For all that, however, personal bravery with the clenched fist held first place. My brother and his friend chose an open space near our house on which the battle was to take place. The “soldiers” came singly and in bands. The warriors varied in size, age, and rank but in this army, such details were not important! Generals, colonels, and officers were commissioned, and the others then constituted the troops—the foot soldiers. My brother and his friend were named kings. Generals received little stars made out of paper and oak leaves and sashes of blue, red, or white glazed paper laid across their shoulders. The three-pointed hats were made of dark blue sugar loaf paper that the boys called kreplakh (crepes) and that were decorated with shrubs made of cock feathers. As insignias, the colonels wore strings of red berries around their shoulders; and for cockades, they gave the officers a large, yellow chamomile flower on the peak of their caps. The whole army was divided into two equal parts. Each king assumed responsibility over his army and drew up the soldiers in rank and file. The clothing of the kings was conspicu-

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ously different from that of other warriors; one king had a large hand towel; the other, a table cloth across his breast, and both wore innumerable medals, plucked from the fields and meadows: sunflowers, white, yellow, and red flowers in all sizes. And around the royal heads were large crowns woven of hemp stalks. Between both armies, a line was drawn, and now the signal to attack was to be given. But who should begin the attack? So someone cried out from one side: Shelakh, shelakh, shelakh! (Send out your troops!) To which the reply came: “My troops are sick.” Now one warrior from this army approached the king from the first army, grasped his hand and declared, raising his forefinger: “ The malakh (angel) sent you three sites. Do you see fire? Do you see water? Do you see the sky?” At the last question, the king had to look up to the sky during which time the messenger had to flee and cross the line if he was not to be taken prisoner. If he succeeded in crossing the line in due course, his people could start the battle first. They began with sword and bows but since these weapons broke into pieces in the first collision, the soldiers were advised to use their fists. The battle went on for a quarter of an hour without victory being decided. The yelling and screaming rose terribly. Then one of the kings waved a white handkerchief on a white stick and shouted loudly: “Enough! No more punching!” But the unrestrained boys did not stop at this and kept on going at the skulls and rears of the weaker until they had to be warned with blows to stop the game that verged on becoming serious. Most retired from the theater of operations with such medals as black and blue eyes, bloody noses, and injured bones. The kings consoled the brave champions, and we girls, who witnessed the engagement, brought fresh water, towels, and tablecloths from the house and discharged the duty of compassionate nurses, washing and drying the bloodied spots of the wounded. After peace was established somewhat, the army chiefs began to prepare the triumphal procession. We were sent to the house anew to fetch such essentials as a large brass basin, the brass tray of the samovar, and a few copper stew pots. The soldiers had paper-covered combs that were to be used as wind instruments and small, wooden whistles. The whole army was gathered again and arranged in place. Indeed, many a

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soldier could only stand on his feet with difficulty, but each one wanted to participate in the festive act that was now to follow. A few among the soldiers who knew how to use the vessels we had brought as musical instruments were chosen. The kings assumed a dignified bearing as they were greeted with an uproarious “hurrah!” and nodded acknowledgement with their wreathed heads. The procession set off. The brass basin, beaten with a powerful fist, made a deafening noise; the two casseroles, slammed against each other, a menacing one. The shrill tones of the pipes rang like a weak protest against this uproar and the tooting of the paper-covered combs added to the bizarre music. The soldiers also did their best with their voices, singing a retreat march with ferocious energy. With this clanging, the triumphal march slowly advanced. The majestic bearing of the kings had rightfully made them rulers among these boys. We girls accompanied the procession with applause and were delighted with the whole spectacle. We marched along the garden, past our house. Then the troops disbanded, and each king left the place with pride. The kings also parted from each other with gracious words, pleased with the success of the enterprise, which was long the talk of the whole town. Despite the bloody heads, our parents were very pleased with the doings of the war game. Apparently, Jewish custom strove to balance each mourning or fast day with a subsequent holiday. Thus, tisheb’av was soon followed by shabbes nakhmu, that is, the “consoling Sabbath.” God comforted His people and through the mouths of the prophets, promised them that the Temple would be rebuilt and would be even more magnificent than before.143 The Mother-city, Jerusalem, would arise anew out of her ruins. My parents believed in this promise with unshakeable conviction. They still had their illusions and hopes that sheltered them against despair and lent them the strength to bear the suffering of the present. Indeed, in that time, suicide among the Jews was the greatest rarity because Jews found consolation for all earthly suffering in faith in God’s word and in the solace of the world to come. This strong belief was also expressed in a little song that our pious, wise, good mother taught us: It went like this: The Jew, the Jew, an amazing creature, Regard him with awe, do not underestimate him! Though he belongs to the puniest of people,

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You meet him near and far. Ascend to the heights, You will find him, Descend to the depths, You will not escape him! Hide yourself in castles, He will still be near, Hide in huts, you will find him there, too! Tortured, tormented, bloodied, He persists in faith, does not lose his spirit! You believe him vanquished, Laid low to the ground, He rises aloft: he was only startled! One thing, however, his heart ever tells him: Whatever you suffer, God requites your pain!

Another little song she taught us is an allegory, a mix of Polish and old Hebrew. According to the most recent Jewish researchers in Russia, the Jews in Russia spoke only Russian mixed with Hebrew, and so, too, in Poland. This view is sustained by a great many folk songs, edited in a most recent collection by Saul Ginsburg in Petersburg.144 It always came back to the same notion; the allegorical allusion was always clear: that the Jews suffered because of the sins of their ancestors but that they maintained faith in God’s promise that they would again be raised up. My mother sang these little ballads with gleaming eyes and assured us children in the most blissful confidence that this promise would certainly be fulfilled. Only in ripe old age did I comprehend her fervor when she prayed, this genuine religiosity, and the frank power of a pure faith in God. I still see her before me, how she stood there lost in thought, with eyes closed and arms hanging down, how she removed all petty, worldly things, and recited the silent shemone esre prayer.145 Her lips barely moved, but in her features lay her praying soul! Pious submission, the awareness of sinfulness, a supplication for pardon, and hope for the mercy of God. Shabbes nakhmu brought a sense of joy back into Jewish life, and we hastened to make up for the deprivations of the time of mourning, when marriages and every kind of entertainment were forbidden, to set daughters or sons in golden fetters as quickly as possible! We were not to delay long because rosh khodesh Elul (the New Moon of September)

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followed right after the month of gaiety; and with the fluttering and blowing of the autumn winds and the fall of the yellow leaves, the time of shofar blowing following the morning prayer also began, for the whole month (the shofar is made out of a ram’s horn). It summoned us again for soul searching and concentration and stirred up remorse and repentance for sins committed during the whole year. Fasts, mortification of the flesh, and fervent prayers to the Creator were to prepare the way for pardon, and people performed many pious deeds. In most Jewish houses in those days, little metal collecting boxes with a locked lid were mounted on the wall of a room, mostly near the mezuzaus in the dining room. One of these little boxes was called the erets-yisroel pushke.146 Money collected there was allotted for Talmud students in Palestine and for elderly people in Jerusalem, most of whom had emigrated there to die and be buried in Palestinian earth. Indeed, these people imputed to this earth the power to preserve their deceased from decomposition, so that at the advent of the Messiah they would be raised from their graves in full vigor. Trusting in the inherent power of earth from Palestine, pious Jews living in Europe had little sacks of it brought over in order to have it strewn in their graves. In any case, it was the duty of the Jewish community to support those awaiting their death in Jerusalem until the end of their lives, and this was the purpose served by the contents of this box, which each year was taken by the erets-yisroel meshulakh (messenger).147 This man would travel all over the Russian Empire and when he came to Brest, he would stay with us. He was a vigorous man with a dark, sunburned face and wise eyes. At the table, he used to tell us all about Palestine, and we listened intently to these strange reports as if they were fairy tales. The second box was the Reb Meyer Balhaness (miracle worker) pushke.148 When anyone was threatened with catastrophe, or in case of illness or other danger, you put into this box the sum of eighteen kopecks, eighteen rubles, or eighteen ducats, each according to his means and the occasion. In any case, the declared value of the number had to correspond to the number eighteen because in Hebrew writing this signified the word khai (life). The solemn days of repentance did not affect us children very much. On the contrary, we enjoyed ourselves in the fine autumn season with its ripe fruit that we devoured. For a copper groshen that Mother gave

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us every day, we got an apron full of fruit and our young stomachs happily took the offerings of autumn. In our garden, too, the fruit was ripe, and eager hands and nibbling mouths lingered there. The tree boughs hung full to breaking and the vegetables stood high in brilliant colors. The cabbage was ripe. My older sister knew just how to make a little rolled light, like from a tallow, out of a stem. She cleaned the stalk, polished it, and put a wooden splinter, blackened in soot, at the tip, so that it looked just like a light. Late in the evening, she gave this little light to the cook or the servant. For a moment, the wood indeed caught fire but soon died out, which annoyed the person in question. We children looked on from afar, giggling in delight about the successful prank. This now became our amusement because we could no longer stay outside since it was already sharply cold. The days were becoming shorter and overcast. We no longer went so early to the kheder. We often had to play inside the kheder room because the rains of autumn drove us from the street. At home it became more and more quiet. My parents and grown siblings became increasingly serious the closer we got to the end of the month of Elul. The concerns of the slikhaus time were upon us.149 Even before the day dawned, the penitential prayers were said. These often were so extensive that, for instance, on erev rosh hashono, you had to rise very early in order to end the prayers (which were named after one particular prayer, zekhor bris, that is, “be mindful of the covenant”), in a timely manner.150 People considered the New Year festival very serious and holy, yet it was also a joyous holiday. At our house, all sorts of flat cakes were baked, jams in honey and sugar were prepared, and white bread baked in the shape of a circle, which was to symbolize the round year. The women generally wore white clothing, worn only on the New Year festival and the Day of Atonement.151 On the preceding evening, many candles were lit, over which the women pronounced the blessing. The mood, indeed, was festive but something melancholy also persisted, a certain seriousness hung over us. People wept at the evening prayer in the synagogue. I remember that our good father used to come home hoarse from weeping. But soon the festive feeling won the upper hand, and my father joyfully gave us the blessing and made kiddush (the consecration of the festival) in a cheerful voice.152

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First, we all poured plenty of water over our hands, then dried them off, sat down without a sound at the table, and silently joined in prayer when Father made the benediction over the two large loaves that lay covered before him. He cut one of them in two pieces, cut a slice from one part, which he dipped in honey, and softly murmured a prayer. Before he ate the first bite, he had to pronounce yet another blessing at the table. Now the children also received our mautses (the first bite of bread) with honey, and then we ate the rich evening meal.153 Although it only began at nine o’clock at night, we went straight to bed afterwards, so that we would be able to go to the synagogue first thing the next morning. However early I rose, I do not remember having seen my mother or the other synagogue-goers on this morning. All were already at prayers, and they returned home only at around one or two in the afternoon, exhausted but in high spirits. This was the effect of the prayers for this day—the sublime piyyutim poetry, the philosophical reflection about earthly, transient life, the righteousness and merciful forbearance of our one God, “who sits in judgment,” as it says in the text, “and does justice.”154 He opens the door to those who knock with sincere remorse, who restrains his anger in judgment and adorns himself as judge with kindness and clemency. He, who grants pardon to all sin, who lets his graciousness shine. He is angry for but a moment and great in forbearance. He is indulgent to the wicked as to the good. He, who persists until the evil-doer mends his ways.

My father used to repeat these passages from the prayer with the young people at the table, singing, and they wept at it . . . We refrained from an afternoon nap on the first day of the New Year because you were supposed to pray more than to eat and sleep.155 After the afternoon prayer, we went to tashlikh, that is, we set out for a stream where you said a short prayer and, as it were, shook off your sins and cast them into the water. At first, my father did not take this custom seriously and did not participate in it.156 From the river, we proceeded once more to the synagogue, where the evening prayer was said. At home, the women kindled candles once again. Father returned from the synagogue, again gave us the blessing, made kiddush over a goblet of wine and shekheyone over a fruit (benediction over a fruit that you had not yet eaten during the course of the summer).157 For this, my

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mother usually bought a water or sugar melon or a pineapple, fruits that were very rare in our region. After the evening meal, which also was eaten very early, everyone went to sleep in order to be able to begin the prayers in the synagogue early the next morning, which again lasted until after one o’clock. The next day was a fast day, called Tsom gedalya.158 Everyone fasted. No one dreamt of complaining, and so we afflicted ourselves on the third day, too. Following it were the Ten Days of Repentance (asseres yemei teshuvo), which fell between rosh hashono and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), and reached their high point and conclusion with the holy Day of Atonement.159 To this day, I remember with awe erev Yom Kippur (the eve of the Day of Atonement) in our paternal home, when our pious parents forgot their worldly concerns and lived only in prayer. As soon as morning dawned, we got ready to “strike kapores.” Each man took a rooster, each woman a hen; the birds were held by the feet and a special prayer said. When done, the worshipper would swing the bird three times around his or her head and then fling it away. It would then be slaughtered and eaten. The bread for Yom Kippur was baked in the shape of a ladder.160 The symbolic meaning of this was: every Jew should ascend to heaven by degrees to find pardon. The preparation of the Yom Kippur candle was also a holy duty.161 Very early on the eve of Yom Kippur, the old gabete Sarah (gabetes were old women whose self-appointed life’s work was to do pious deeds for the sick, the poor, and the recently deceased) came with a whole pack of tkhines—little prayer books composed in Yiddish-German for women only—an enormous skein of twine, and a large piece of wax. My mother used to eat nothing until the candle was ready because an empty stomach makes a person more inclined to weep, the soul more yielding. My mother and the above-mentioned Sarah began their work by reciting many tkhines amid fierce weeping; only then did they take the ball of wick in their hands. Sarah laid it in her apron, placed herself opposite Mother at a distance of about a meter, gave the end of the cord to my mother, and also pulled it toward herself. Now, with a weeping voice, my mother began naming all her deceased relatives, recounting their good deeds, and for each, a thread of the wick ball was drawn out, until all had been recalled and a suitably thick wick formed. In this

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manner all the living members of the family were remembered, too. When anyone became very dangerously ill, it was also the custom to measure the entire circumference of the cemetery with wick filament and then to use this string as a wick for the Yom Kippur tapers.162 We spent half the day cheerfully, yet already in a solemn mood. According to religious precept, people were supposed to eat much fruit and make a hundred brokhes (blessings).163 Then we went to bathe and wash. We dressed in white in order to appear before the Eternal Judge as pure and worthy. At the afternoon prayer (minkhe), you already had to beat your breast innumerable times, at which abundant tears flowed. The men had the synagogue beadle beat their backs, administering the so-called malkes. I remember that they all came out of the synagogue with eyes red from weeping and that the evening meal, prepared punctually, as is required, was taken in mute solemnity.164 The young people and we children were filled with anxious anticipation. We all kept silent under the weight of something inexpressible and profound. At the table Grace, the tears flowed; no one could hold them back. After eating, we all took off our shoes, and the men drew their long white kittels over their clothing. (To Jews, the white kittel was simultaneously a festive garment and a shroud.)165 A waistband and cap made of silver brocade completed the garb and now, for the third time that day, we went to the synagogue, cloaks around our shoulders.166 Before we set out, Father blessed each child and grandchild, even the youngest who still lay in the cradle, with fervent, sincere words, and abundant tears flowed down over his cheeks and those of the children on whose heads he laid his hands. Even the servants came over and remained standing at the threshold. All of them wept and bade each other maukhel sein, that is, begged for forgiveness.167 With an agitated voice, my mother too, begged forbearance if in the course of the year she had wronged or offended any of her subordinates. This welling over of noble emotion exalted our souls and bestowed on them solemn festivity and tranquility. And the conviction that God would forgive all transgression strengthened our resolve to begin now a new, purified, life. The souls of all the adults, who went to the synagogue for Kol Nidre, and of the children, who stayed home, were turned heavenward.168 All were in the grip of one idea: that on this evening, the great accounting of sinners would begin. The synagogue was brilliantly lit by many

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candles. There, at the solemn Kol Nidre prayer, before the open oron hakodesh (holy Ark of the Covenant), with the sifrei torah (holy scrolls), the congregation prayed. Hearts deeply moved, with one unanimous voice filled with repentance, people took back any offense that anyone had done to another during the entire year, rescinded any insult. They even forgave heretics any offense and iniquity. Each Jew wanted to free himself from sin and on this evening more than ever, recognized his weakness and the weakness of man in the great universe and in relation to the Creator with the words: “We humans are in God’s hands like clay in the potter’s hand . . . like stone in the sculptor’s hand . . . like silver in the goldsmith’s hand. . . . He fashions all according to His will.” After our parents went to synagogue, we children congregated around our eldest sister, Khashe Feige, our loving protector and teacher, who recited the evening prayer. We stood attentively near her and did not budge from our places. I heard her sob, and it put me in such fearful spirits. The whole house lay in deep stillness, the wax candles crackling mysteriously. I imagined what was taking place in heaven before God’s throne, how the assembled voices of the people implored God for pardon, and how even the angels stood there before the Almighty in awe and fear. But God, in His goodness, searched the hearts of the just and bestowed his mercy on those who repented sincerely of the sins they had committed.169 Around nine o’clock our sister told us to go to sleep. Our hearts, however, were so heavy that we pleaded with her to sit with us. And she did, until we fell asleep. On the following day, the mood of the synagogue-goers was more serious still, worldly things utterly removed. On the Day of Judgment, the great, holy Yom Kippur, the prayers are solemnly grave. The Lord God himself sits in judgment over the sins of mankind, which are recorded in a book in the perpetrator’s own hand. Here, however, in the synagogue the momentous prayer, unessane taukeff kedushas hayom, was read amid tears with hearts overwhelmed with remorse: The angels flutter and exclaim: “Behold! The Day of Judgment!” The great trumpet is blown, and it was decided who in the coming year would live or die a natural death or perish in treachery; who would be impoverished or become rich; who would be elevated or brought

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low. But repentance, prayer, and good deeds release one from the evil destiny. What is man? He comes from the dust and returns to dust. He is like a broken shard; like the filament of a blossom that fades; like the grass that withers, like the smoke that wafts away without a trace, like a dream that disappears. . . . 170

At home, things seemed gloomy. The window shutters were closed, and the room was not tidied. The sand-filled clay pots, in which the stumps of the candles from last night slowly burned, filling the air with their heavy smell, were left standing. Only at twelve o’clock did we children receive our tea and breakfast, which was also our midday meal; it consisted of kapores (cold chicken) and white bread.171 Then our girlfriends arrived, and our heavy sorrow gradually lifted. With dusk, things again stirred in the house. The rooms were brought into order once again, the tea table was set, many candles were lit, and a goblet of wine and a braided wax candle for havdole were prepared. The darker it became outside, the lighter it became in the room. By the time the synagogue-goers came home at around seven o’clock, the samovar (tea maker) already boiled invitingly on the table.172 They were all exhausted from fasting and praying, but no one took anything to eat; they waited patiently until Father and the others had washed and groomed themselves, since it had been forbidden to do this in the morning. Then our father made havdole, that is, he prayed over the goblet of wine, and only then did people sit down at the table, which was laid out with abundant cold foods and baked goods. Without considering the fact that people’s stomachs had not received even a drop of water for twenty-four hours, we now filled ourselves with sweet, sour, bitter, and salted foods. And our stomachs patiently received food and drink. Any trace of exhaustion or fatigue now vanished, and our faces radiated inner peace and contentment. Now we had the yomim nauroim, that is, the Days of Awe, behind us for a whole year.173 We children also felt the difference between yesterday evening and tonight. I was never very frivolous or mischievous, and I loved solitude, but the oppressive mood of erev Yom Kippur and erev tisheb’av really tormented me.174 After everyone’s initial hunger had been sated, people became very

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cheerful and our father, reclining in the great armchair at the head of the table, began, half singing, to recite to himself sublime passages from the liturgy of the day. The young men joined in, as did the cantor of the synagogue, a good friend of our family, who was often found in our house, and people delighted anew at the lyrical singing. People often remained till far past midnight in gay, high spirits. It did not occur to anyone to go to bed after the exertions of the day, though the next morning, with the first dawn of day, they had to appear in the synagogue again, in order, as it was called, to annul the slanders that Satan brought before the Almighty. Otherwise Satan could say to God, the Creator: “You see, Lord, yesterday you forgave your people their sins, and today not one of them is to be found! Your house is empty!” But Satan was not to triumph over the chosen people. And so all the pious people arrived at synagogue in the early morning hours,* if only for a short time, since a regular, daily service was said. My father proceeded straight from the synagogue to buy an esrog (fruit similar to a lemon) and a lulov (palm bough) and turned homeward, happy when he succeeded in finding a completely flawless esrog— a so-called mehuder. In the year 1838, such a thing cost five to six rubles, since at that time, transportation from Corfu, where they grew only in limited number, was fraught with many difficulties and dangers. Despite this, each of the young men of our house always received an esrog of his own. Each of these fragrant, magnificent fruits was carefully wrapped in soft hemp and stored in a silver container. This fruit was used in the morning prayers throughout the eight days of the sukes (Tabernacles) festival. The palm bough and the myrtles and willow branches, which according to religious law, went with it, stood in a large, earthen pitcher filled with water, and at home the mood became light and cheerful once again. 175 We ate, drank, and bantered to our hearts content. I often heard it said that in the four days between Yom Kippur and sukes, God did not examine or count the Jews’ sins . . . Many of the jokes were at the expense of the zogerkes. In the forties of the previous century, it was still quite rare for women among the common people to understand the Hebrew for prayers, yet there was still a great need to pray on Saturday and especially, on holidays. *  This early prayer in the synagogue was called, “In God’s Name.”

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There were some literate women who capitalized on their knowledge: for a small fee, they led the prayers on the above-mentioned days in the women’s synagogue.176 In the smaller Jewish towns, in the absence of such a woman, a man had to crawl into a barrel in the middle of the women’s section of the synagogue and from this rampart—surrounded by women—recite the prayers. As you can imagine, there were often comical scenes, and the barrel was an inexhaustible source of stories. The woman prayer leader was called a zogerke, the man, a zoger.177 Both had to lead the prayers in a tearful voice in order to stir the surrounding womenfolk to weeping. Among the members of the audience in our community was the wife of a butcher, who was rather deaf. She asked the woman leading the prayers please to raise her voice, for which kindness she would receive a large liver. This zogerke, however, answered her with a tearful, weeping voice in the prayer sing-song: “With the liver, without the liver, it’s the same.” The unknowing womenfolk standing around thought that these words were part of the prayer, and all exclaimed with weeping voices: “With the liver, without the liver, it’s the same.” After a certain section of the prayers, one of these women set out for home and met on the way another woman returning to the synagogue. The latter asked which prayer was then being recited and was told, “Nu . . . the liver prayer.” “But,” she said, “we never said this one before!” To which the other responded: “Today, maybe because it’s a leap year!”178 A succession of beautiful sights was offered to us children in the next days. My heart pounded happily in anticipation of coming things. Right after breakfast, we inspected the tabernacle.179 It was a spacious, oblong, high pergola with large windows, which was unused the whole year. For this reason, it first had to be washed, decorated, and made habitable, and the servant immediately set to work. For the next three days, until sukes, we were free; people did not learn or study, and it seemed to me that the young men, to a large extent, even neglected the daily prayers. Our kheder attendance had been discontinued entirely since rosh hashono because vacation for Jewish children lasted until the month of Heshvan (from September until October).

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On erev yom tov, every carpet in the house was brought into the tabernacle, and the young people, under Father’s direction, hung them as walls. People hauled mirrors and brought the furniture out of the dining room; even chandeliers were not to be lacking. On the evening of the first festival day, everyone dressed in festive garments. Our mother and the young wives lit the candles of the large silver candlesticks and said their quiet, devout prayer, while we all sat on the chairs around the table with great pleasure and admired the decorated suke (tabernacle). Its movable roof had already been taken down and replaced by pine boughs. It looked wonderfully strange. The many burning candles, the many-colored carpets, the high crystal mirror, the green pine roof and the blue night sky, with its silver twinkling stars shining in so cheerfully through the branches, lent the place a fairy-tale magnificence. Mother, festively dressed and wearing expensive jewelry, sat among her married and single daughters, who were all richly bejeweled. Then the men came home from synagogue, and it was the exquisite, patriarchal family portrait of the Jews of those days around the table. In their long, black satin coats (caftans); broad satin sashes; expensive, tall sable caps; and beaming, young faces, they surely looked better than the youth of today with their tail coats and white cravats and their blasé, weary expressions. Father gave us the blessing and everyone washed hands and blessed and took a piece of barkhes, which was dipped in honey.180 The evening meal, which began with peppered fish and ended with vegetables, was over. Many, for whom the autumn air was too cool, left the suke. Others yet stayed, sitting, talking. On the next morning, the first day of the holiday, a particularly festive service was held in the synagogue, and it was again an impressive sight as row after row of men, standing in their places with the slender green palm bough in their right hand and the sweet smelling, golden esrog fruit in their left, sang the song of praise, the Hallel, and then made the hakofes (circuit) around the synagogue, the cantor at the head.181 Around one o’clock, everyone returned home and now many guests, before whom we set out wine and sweets, came for the holiday. Everyone passed the afternoon according to his own inclination. Some slept, others went out walking. But no one forgot that they had to be in the

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synagogue at five o’clock for the afternoon prayer. The second festival day was about the same as the first. The following four days are the so-called khol hamaued days (semiholidays), on which traveling, trading, and buying are permitted. Never­ theless, the Jews of those days did not make any use of this liberty, and even poor craftsmen kept their workshops closed and gave themselves over to pleasure, peacefulness, and tasty morsels.182 On the fifth day, haushano rabbo, the whole night was again spent in reading certain sections from the Mishnah.183 According to popular legend, on this evening you could see the headless spirits of those destined to die that year. On this night, the heaven was to part and open and the pious, Godfearing Jew could see its magnificence! You only had to call out kol tov! (all the best!) quickly for every wish to be fulfilled. On this night the shames (synagogue beadle) also prepared the haushanes (three small willow branches tied in a small bundle) that each worshipper held in his hands during the haushano prayer in the morning service. This haushano prayer was done with great devotion amid tears. At its conclusion, the leaves of the willow branch were beaten off.184 For this day, the white bread was baked in the shape of a bird. According to folk belief, on this day the final decision was made in heaven about who was to live or die that year, and this bird would fly to heaven and bring back the determination on a scrap of paper. The eighth day of the Tabernacles holiday was called shemini atseres.185 On the evening before it, everyone again put on fancy dress. The next morning, the service in the synagogue began very early. People beseeched heaven for rain in the so-called geshem prayer, an imaginative poem. This prayer prolonged the service for more than an hour and had a solemn effect on the worshippers. On shemini atseres we ate in the suke for the last time, for lunch.186 Although the weather on the last days was changeable and often already sharply cold (sometimes, it even snowed, and we had to put on furs), we persevered nevertheless and took meals and even tea in the tabernacle, down to the last day. Old and young, even we children, strictly observed the religious regulations, so well did our parents know to enforce their wishes and their will at home. After the special service that is said following the last meal before leaving the suke, the furniture was brought back into the house, piece

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by piece, and the tabernacle, decorated so magnificently just before, stood empty and abandoned again, a true reflection of the glories of this world.187 Now came the last day of the Tabernacles festival, simkhas torah (rejoicing of the Torah).188 Why the joy? People used to say: “When the Jews received the Torah on Mount Sinai from Moses, they understood but little of its contents. However, when they had internalized the holy writ, they found in it their peace and joy.” And truly, this Torah became their pride, their national treasure for all time, despite the oppression, the persecutions, and the humiliations they had to endure. On simkhas torah this joy burst all bounds. On this day, you saw drunken Jews in the streets, something we otherwise only very rarely had occasion to experience. In our house, too, there was plenty of excitement. All kinds of drinks were prepared; the Jewish kitchen had to offer the best foods. Many guests were invited to lunch; the children and servants, too, were given full freedom, and strict discipline was abolished. My father, like all the guests, considered it a mitsve (a religious deed) to get tipsy at the table. My parents did not stop the young men when they danced and sang playfully, indeed wildly; Father even sang gaily along with them. Only the notes of the fiddle were missing, since the Jew was never allowed to touch a musical instrument on the festivals.189 There were also many religious table songs that made allusion to this joyful day and were sung in chorus. For my father, simkhas torah day had particular significance. As I have already said, my father’s main occupation was Talmud study, which he was even more eager to pursue whenever his business suffered losses. He would turn his back to the world, escape into his study room, and live only al hatauro ve‘al ho‘avaudo, as the Jew put it succinctly, that is, only in learning the laws and in prayer, which was the chief purpose of his life.190 Thus, from time to time, he would make a siyyum (that is, a conclusion); such an event was celebrated very joyously and brought respect and honor, especially when it was a siyyum over the whole shas, that is, completing study of the entire Talmud, whose extent and unfathomable depth our sages compared to the ocean! My father used to keep his siyyum for a simkhas torah.191 The gay bustle on this day lasted until evening. At the evening prayer, however, everyone became serious again. Father made havdole once

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more and now it was time to sing zmiraus, that is, pious songs. The great samovar boiled up and steamed on the tea table, and the devoted drinkers sat together cozily until late at night. With simkhas torah the high holidays came to an end. The very next Sabbath, called shabbes bereishis, was considered an ordinary one, since the first section of bereishis, that is, the beginning of the Bible, was read again in the synagogue.192 The day after simkhas torah was called issru khag and was also considered a holiday. The table, which was festively decorated all eight days, remained covered on this day too, which according to religious custom, was otherwise not the case on work days. Lunch was taken at an early hour and consisted of cold foods, left over from the previous day—a great many good, appetizing things: cold pepper fish, cold turkey hen, and so on. Only the borscht (a soup from sour beetroot) was made fresh.193 Holiday time was over. Life slowly returned to its old routine. But then, rosh khodesh (the day of the New Moon) brought a change in rhythm. According to Jewish law, on the tenth or twelfth day of each month the moon was blessed as it shone in the evening sky. As a child, I loved to watch through the window as my father, accompanied by ten other Jews, stood in the moonlight and prayed. With cheerful words his eyes turned heavenwards, and he praised the gentle moon. This usually happened on a Saturday evening.194 On erev rosh khodesh, that is the day before rosh khodesh, people in my parents’ house used to celebrate in their own way. Among the Jews of those days were many who fasted on this day and said special prayers. Many paupers, old, sick, and covered in rags; half naked men and women with twisted faces; young men, girls, and children, would come in groups to get rosh khodesh geld, because each Jew had to consecrate each day of repentance with good deeds. However, aside from this day, it was customary for many people to fast and dispense alms to the poor every Monday and Thursday.195 On these days you could also see the so-called gabetes in action. ­Gabetes are pious souls, good, selfless women, veritable religious patrons of the poor of the Jewish people. As soon as they had seen to everything in their own houses, their life’s work was, and to this day in Lithuania still is, to go from house to house in the poor section of

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town to alleviate suffering and want. They ran through the streets in pairs, begging provisions from grocers and shopkeepers in their stalls, and they came to all the private homes to ask for money or food, old clothes, and so on for the poor. I still recall most vividly one such gabete who often came to us. She was an angel of goodness and compassion. Her name was Itke the Fervent. She used to tell my mother about all the suffering and poverty in the city. With a heart overwhelmed with sorrow and grief on her face, she would assert, symbolically, that pearls and diamonds lay all over the street, but very few people took the trouble to gather them. By this she meant: one could do so many good deeds for the poor, yet almost no one bothered to. Only these “jewels,” maintained Itke, could a person take along after death to the world to come. On rosh khodesh, my mother usually distributed a handsome sum of money. Old men and women received a three-groshen Polish coin, that is, one and a half Russian kopecks. The younger the poor person, the less he got, down to the groshen. People gave children only a prute.196 This coin was a third of a Polish groshen, therefore a sixth of a kopeck. This coin was manufactured by the Jewish community in Brest-Lithuania, with government permission. I remember that this prute was only given to the poor and was not marketable in business. At first, it was struck in lead with the Hebrew inscription, prute akhas, that is, one prute. As there was misuse of it, however, the coin was abolished, and the prute was produced out of vellum, carrying the same inscription. This prute was approximately a finger in length and a half finger in width. The parchment money was soon abolished, too, and in its place came a prute in the form of a middling-sized round wooden button with a small indentation filled with red sealing wax, in which the word prute was embossed with the seal of the community.197 Strictly speaking, the distribution of alms was the only way in which erev rosh khodesh was celebrated.198 The following day, however, rosh khodesh itself, we considered a semi-holiday. In the synagogue the halfHallel prayer was said. At home there was good food for lunch and no handwork was allowed all day long.199 On the whole, rosh khodesh played an important role in the life of the Jews. It was customary to rent dwellings and hire servants on this date and to put off “important” housekeeping tasks—especially the “setting of the goose,” as it was then called, for this day. Thirty to forty geese used

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to be crammed into a narrow cage so that they could hardly move and were given a great deal to eat but very little to drink. With this course of treatment, they would become very fat. For exactly twenty-one days the poultry were fattened, which increased their fat and made their livers become large in their bellies. Then they were slaughtered; if you waited just one more day—so it was believed—the whole fattening would be wasted. On rosh khodesh Kislev, the geese were incarcerated and on the twenty first day, the slaughterer came at daybreak with his assistant.200 He drew the large slaughtering knife out of its leather scabbard, made it tremendously sharp, tested the edge on his nail and, accompanied by the cook and the night watchman, went with a lantern into the goose stall to carry out the death sentence of the geese. Of course, before he slaughtered the first goose, he said the prescribed prayer. After an hour, the work was done. The slaughtered geese were dragged into the kitchen where a pair of poor women plucked, pulled, singed, cleaned, and salted them and left them lying in salt a full hour. Then they were watered three times with cold water and were kosher.201 The fuss in the kitchen and in the whole house was enormous! We had to hurry because we needed a lot of fat, goose liver, and especially, the tasty cracklings for Hanukkah! Then there was first-rate liver and crackling pie and a delicious dish of steamed goose giblets. According to a superstitious or a mystical tradition, from rosh khodesh Kislev until rosh khodesh Adar, that is, for three months, the butcher had to eat a limb from the slaughtered poultry, a foot or a head or something similar, or else constantly be afraid of becoming lame. We would always leave him the left foot of each goose. Since, however, he could not consume this abundance, a broth was prepared for him from the many feet he had to consume. The roasting of the goose fat also had great significance. It had to take place in complete silence either before daybreak or late in the evening, so that no “evil eye” would fall on it—otherwise, all the fat would leak out of the pot! If however, only a quiet person did the roasting, then—so it was believed—the good house spirit would come in the form of a dwarf and cause the fat to well over the roasting pot. You would ladle it off into another vessel, so greatly would it increase, unceasingly, until all the empty utensils in the house, even the great water barrel, would be filled. Only then would the dwarf disappear.202

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From my description, the youth of today might conclude that life in a Jewish house in olden times, with all its customs and the stringency of its practices, was unbearably difficult. Oh, no! The Jews of that time had their great joys and enjoyed many delights, peace, quiet, and pleasure, but all of this was within the family circle, in their own homes. There was no flirting around in ballrooms, on trips, in spas, over mountains, and seas. They lived quietly, well, and long. They gave their God His due and took from life their due. Consecration and profound symbolism lay in the forms of life, something that simply cannot be said of the ceremonies and manners of contemporary society. Surely, these, too, aim to bring people closer to one another and create a higher form of community among individuals. But no one can deny that this bond seems paltry compared to that solid social bond that Jewish law prescribed and that the old Jewish way of life attained. One was orev for the other, that is, “surety,” and the formula kol yisroel khaverim (all Israel are fellows) and akhenu benei yisroel meant something!203 This became obvious when a Jew did not doff his hat to another.204 For this same reason, Jewish “freethinkers,” who publicly violated a religious commandment, were harangued with rebukes. If, for example, on a Saturday, when one was allowed to walk only a certain short distance and was not allowed to carry a walking stick, an umbrella, or a pocket handkerchief without an eruv (demarcation), a freethinker was seen on the street carrying such “burdens,” he would be met with hostile looks because he had repudiated the fundamental belief of Mosaic law: the belief in community and of the individual’s responsibility to the collective. The entire people had to make good the sins of the individual.205

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I. Lilienthal From old age, which a gracious destiny has allowed me to reach, I want to cast a backward glance to the late 1830s, which was a culturally significant time for the Jews of Lithuania. I consider myself lucky to have experienced that period firsthand, when the great reforms under Tsar Nicholas I brought about the spiritual, yes, even the physical regeneration, of the Jews in Lithuania. Whoever, like me, lived through the period between 1838 and today, took part in all the religious battles in the family life of Lithuanian Jewry, and finally, observed the great progress made, must express his admiration for the idea of that reform legislation and bless it. Indeed, if you compare the generally uncultivated, poor Jews of the 1840s with Lithuanian Jewry of the sixties and seventies, among whom today there are so many men of perfect European refinement, who have outstanding accomplishments in the most diverse fields of literature, science, and art, and who are not lacking for honors and titles from the outside world, you must speak of it enthusiastically.206 The masses often instinctively sense the onset of a great event. Throughout Lithuania, all of a sudden the report spread that a fundamental transformation of the khedarim (Jewish primary schools) was imminent: the melamdim (primary school teachers), who until then taught in the Jewish jargon, would henceforth be required to learn Russian so that they would be able to translate the Bible into this language for the schoolchildren. This rumor greatly worried the older men. Horrified, they contemplated the prospect that Hebrew, the word of God, would in time

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surely be neglected. The younger men though, among them both my older brothers-in-law, received the news with eager anticipation. But they dared to speak of the coming change only in whispers. The melamdim were simply desperate. . . . One day, my father, returning from evening prayers, brought from the synagogue the electrifying news that the recent report, in fact, was true. A doctor of philology by the name of Lilienthal had been commissioned by the Ministry for Popular Education (at whose head stood the refined and humane Minister Uvarov) to travel throughout Russia to investigate the educational standards of the Jews of the country and to provide information about the melamdim, in whose hands the education of Jewish youth lay.207 A grand reform plan had been drafted in Peters­burg; it was to begin in the rabbinical schools in Vilna and ­Zhitomir within a certain period of time.208 Although my father was Orthodox, he did not grieve too much over the impending reform because he himself constantly bewailed the terrible educational methods of the Jewish schools of Brest and wanted various improvements in this area. In fact, the task of spreading West European culture among the Jews was entrusted to the inspector of primary schools in Riga, Dr. of Philology Lilienthal, because he was a Jew of European education and at the same time, was versed in Hebrew and knew some Talmud.209 Lilienthal began his work by getting in touch with the most respected Jewish scholars, who had stood in closest touch with the people throughout their lives. Thus, he turned to the celebrated rabbi, Reb Mendele Lubavitcher, the head of a sect of Hasidim numbering more than 100,000 adherents in Lithuania and Belorussia, hoping to be able to win over this authority for his cultural reforms. Equally impressive, he took the trouble of meeting with Reb Hayyim Volozhiner, the head of the yeshiva of that town. The Minister summoned both men to Peters­burg for a consultation.210 Lilienthal had no success with all this because the mass of the Lubavitcher rebbe’s followers, driven by fear, having learned that the summons concerned great reforms in Talmud and Bible instruction, did not allow their adored rabbi to answer the summons. With all the means at their disposal, the Lubavitcher began to advocate passionately against the reforms, regardless of the consequences (compare Zeitschrift Voskhod, 1903).211

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In Petersburg, the authorities were enraged but Reb Mendele was punished with only a short house arrest. Reb Hayyim Volozhiner also refused the summons to Petersburg, excusing himself because of his advanced age: the journey to Petersburg would be too difficult for him. He suggested Reb David Bichewere in his stead, but this was not accepted. Thus did Dr. Lilienthal set out on his journey to the Jewish areas of settlement.212 A few days passed, and my father brought word that Dr. Lilienthal had already arrived in Brest, where we then lived, and said that he wanted to pay the doctor a visit, along with the young men, my brothers-in-law. My mother expressed no small astonishment about this, but Father got right to the point: if he did not take the young men to Dr. Lilienthal, they would find the way themselves. But I believe that was just a pretense: my father himself was very eager to make Dr. Lilienthal’s acquaintance in order to learn the details of the impending revolution in education as quickly as possible. My mother, however, had a great deal more insight into this whole matter than my father, and she, it turns out, was right. It is impossible to describe the joy of the young men at the prospect of soon calling on the interesting Dr. Lilienthal. My older brother-inlaw, who aside from outstanding talents and exceptional knowledge of the Talmud was ceaselessly diligent, was particularly happy. At the age of fourteen, he had already mastered almost the entire corpus of rabbinic scholarship. Dr. Lilienthal’s visit was over. My father had learned a great, great deal. First, no Hasid was to be a melamed. Second, every melamed was required to be fully conversant with Russian speech and writing and able to read German. Further, the melamed was required to be wholly versed in the Bible and all the prophets, without exception, and finally, the melamed was not to discuss the following tractates with those students already receiving instruction in Talmud: Baba Metsia (crop damages), Baba Kamma (the laws of exchange), and Baba Basra (building regulations). Dr. Lilienthal stayed in Brest for some time and, in accordance with his mandate, also visited many khadurim. He was horrified and depressed by the unkempt appearance of the melamdim but surprised and enchanted by the Semitic racial purity of the pupils, especially their

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black, clever eyes.213 He also witnessed a scene that deeply moved him because it convinced him of the great importance that Jews, even the poorest, put on their children’s education. One day, Dr. Lilienthal visited the city kheder and noticed that the melamed as well as the students were excited and awaiting an unspecified something. Soon after, a shabbily clothed Jew strode into the kheder, carrying on his arm his son of about six, who was completely enveloped in an enormous talis.*, 214 The mother followed in the father’s footsteps. Both wept from joy and sincere gratitude to God for having allowed them to live to see to this beautiful and great moment of bringing their son to kheder for the first time. The flock of schoolboys stormed in from outside to attend the proceedings, gaping. The melamed called out a loud, sholem aleikhem (peace unto you!) to the guests, rose from his place, and took the hero of this scene, his new pupil, in his arms. The little one, nearly weeping from surprise and excitement, was placed on the table and then on the next bench, where everyone gave him cookies, nuts, raisins, and sweets, an apron full of which his happy mother had brought along. All the onlookers congratulated the radiant parents on their son’s first day in school. The melamed sat down next to the little one, grasped the pasteboard on which the alef-beis (alphabet) was affixed, lay it before the boy, took a large stick in his hand, and then blessed the beginning of study with the wish that the youth be reared to torah-learning (that is, scholarship), khupe (marriage) and ma‘asim tovim (good deeds). “Amen,” said the parents and all the bystanders. After that, the melamed showed his student-to-be the alef (“a”) for the first time and after a few times, when the boy had repeated it like a parrot, also showed him the beis (“b”) and then the gimel (“g”), too. The mother, beaming with joy, feeling as if she had been transported to heaven, had forgotten everyone present. With overflowing hands, she dispensed all the dainty morsels; while for each letter, a malakh (angel) from on high threw down the best and most tasty tidbit before the future scholar, right in front of his nose. In this way, in the sixth year of his life, did the boy begin his compulsory education. . . .215 *  A four-sided, white woolen garment with dark blue stripes on its two ends and furnished on all four sides with tsitsis, the show threads. The Jews would lay this cloth around their shoulders at prayer.

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Every day during his stay in Brest, Dr. Lilienthal gathered around him many young people and spoke to them of the need to acquire European culture. He gave them useful advice and portrayed their futures as men of culture in fine images, thereby winning the hearts of the impressionable youths. These to be sure, remained faithful to the customs of their parents in religion, but in other respects, trod a new course and were progressively ever farther removed from the cultural perspective of the older generation—the characteristic feature of the Lilienthal era! From Brest, Dr. Lilienthal traveled to Vilna, to fulfill his mission there, as well. Then, a deputation of the provincial capital, Minsk, greeted him and invited him to come there.216 Dr. Lilienthal accepted the summons and went to Minsk, where he was received with the highest respect by the most distinguished Jews. Right after his arrival, an assife (general assembly) was called, at which he was expected to answer important questions; Messrs. S. Rapapport and O. Lurie led the meeting. The most important question was: what did the Minister for Popular Education actually have in mind with the reforms? In the end, were all the Jews of Russia only to be readied for baptism? If so, all the Jews would stand as one against this reform and bring it to naught because to take his religion from a Jew would be to make solid ground totter under his feet, and he would be lost. His own children would rebel against him. Dr. Lilienthal was shocked. He swore on a sefer torah (holy scroll) that he wanted to uphold Jewish national characteristics and Judaism and that he abhorred baptism. Weeping from emotion, he asserted again and again that he strove only for the best for the Jews. Finally, he succeeded in calming those assembled. In fulfillment of his ministerial mandate, he also came to the city of Volozhin, whose yeshiva (talmudic academy) was then at its height. A yeshiva is an educational establishment for grown men who had attained the highest level of knowledge in Talmud and were ready for a rabbinical position. There were three such talmudic establishments at that time: in Volozhin, Mir, and Minsk.217 Until this very day, money is collected for these establishments from the entire Jewish community; more than 200 young men received their instruction in each of them. Each yeshiva was an especially large building with several large, spacious rooms. A “head”—a kind of director—a great Talmudist, a religious, wise, very honorable man, presided over the establishment, while

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many melamdim—proven Talmudists—gave religious instruction. The contingent of students was comprised of all classes of the Jewish people, but mostly from the middle class, whose capital, in fact, supported the educational legacy. These lived mostly on scholarship from the institution. Young men from wealthy circles were also represented; most were already married men, fathers of several children, who lived here at their own expense.218 My father himself already had three children when he “learned” for the entire year in the Volozhin yeshiva. He only came home for holidays. In order to set people’s minds at ease, Lilienthal had to swear over and over again in Volozhin that he would have nothing to do with any effort to lead the Jews to baptism. Quietly, the cultural movement among the Jews commenced. The young people were energetic; the intellectual work began. It took little time and relatively little effort to carry out the reforms. A refreshing breeze blew through Jewish society in Brest and through all the other Russian Jewish towns. I have already written how my brothers-in-law rejoiced over the coming reforms. But they had to restrain themselves in order not to be obvious and offend my mother, who had a rather prophetic judgment against the changes.219 In the meantime, my brothers-in law were not the only ones in Brest excited about West European culture. There was also a group of more than twenty young men who thought the Lilienthal movement very important and who worked for it passionately within their circles. If they came up against someone with limited capacities, they still maintained that in the end, it would suffice if he could at least write an address in Russian. It should not be forgotten that my brothers-in-law and their contemporaries had very limited knowledge of European languages, consisting of reading and writing a little Russian and Polish, with their German more fluent. They had some notion of the classical literature of these languages and also knew some science. 220 The lower Jewish class, however, did not know how to write, read, or speak a European language. They spoke a sorry Polish; the Jewish merchant class perforce used a jargon of German and Russian, while the masses spoke a mixture of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian that served them in the markets with the villagers.221

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The revolution would only have far-reaching effects through the establishment of rabbinical seminaries run in the new spirit and thus arose the schools in Vilna and Zhitomir. The first students were mostly young men who had taken great pains to be accepted in the opening class. Rarely did their entrance to these schools take place without battles within their families. Those who did not manage to win this fight abandoned wives and children and fled to Germany, where they studied medicine, pharmacy, philology, or other subjects, often in severe hardship, with brilliant results. The city of Rossien in Kurland can number more than ten such knights of intellect—doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, philosophers, and poets, some of whom had studied in Russia, some abroad.222 Still today, there lives and works in Russia a professor of oriental languages who had passed his youth with Talmud folios and later became educated in this new way. Of course, he and his children are baptized.223 The Jewish astronomer, H. Z. Slonimsky, was also not held back by his considerable talmudic knowledge—it even might have contributed to his becoming famous in math.224 The majority of the students in the rabbinical schools had previously been Talmudists. They learned easily and most received gold medals upon graduation, just as did those who later on attended university!225 Even in this respect, Talmud study is good intellectual training, and added to this, was the love of knowledge, the vivacious character, and the intellectual energy of the Jews of those days. One day, after Dr. Lilienthal’s visit, we found the young men, my brothers-in-law, sitting next to each other, pensive, in their study room. “We will be able to find books,” said my intellectually curious older brother-in-law. “Only we must arrange how to set aside time from Talmud study for our new studies without drawing the parents’ attention . . .” at which the other one answered in his sluggish way, “Yes, of course! When you begin studying, I will join you.” Dr. Lilienthal had recommended first, study of Russian and then, as also very important, natural history and German literature. Some time after this, there were several disturbing incidents that were not without their comic aspects. Since the young people’s visit to Dr. Lilienthal, my mother was firmly convinced that a new, foreign element was infiltrating her house, just as it was the homes of other Jews in Russia, through which the word of God would surely be thrust

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aside. And she became very sad. She observed the behavior and activities of the young people unobtrusively but closely. My brothers-in-law had procured the necessary textbooks and begun to study, which naturally took place at the expense of Talmud study. Outwardly, they remained tranquil and appeared, as usual, to be busy with Talmud, but an alert observer could often discover under the large Talmud folios a volume of Schiller’s or Zschokke’s works. In the latter, Engelbert’s idyllic way of life especially enraptured the Jewish youth, while the Princess of Wolfenbuttel excited sympathy and compassion especially from Jewish women, and Schiller’s Marquis Posa served as a model for all the young men. A dull Russian grammar was also on hand, as was a natural history text, as well.226 Since the visit with Dr. Lilienthal, my father took every opportunity to speak of him and his great and important mission. It made him feel good and gave him satisfaction to debate the great reforms with each guest and especially with the young people, my brothers-in-law. He would become passionate during such discussions and applaud the fact that order would finally be brought to Jewish children’s education. But he was angry that Dr. Lilienthal had spoken in so godless a manner, saying that Jewish youth were to be deprived of the sections of Talmud mentioned earlier and that if necessary, one did not have to be guided by the laws of the Talmud.227 . . . It was one morning in the memorable summer of 1842 that my brothers-in-law, without suspecting that anyone could hear them, fetched the new books from their hiding-place, laid them on the open Talmud folios, and in collaboration with a third, Reb Herschel, a melamed from the kehila of Orlo, a genial man who possessed great talmudic knowledge, disputed a sentence in Don Carlos, screaming loudly.228 In order to prevent being taken unawares, they read and spoke in exactly the same sing-song in which they used to learn Talmud. Ever since Dr. Lilienthal’s visit, my mother seemed as if she were haunted by a ghost, and now she wanted to go to the young men’s study room in hopes of convincing herself that her tormented suspicions were indeed groundless and that the devil in the form of Dr. Lilienthal had not, after all, completely taken possession of her sons-in-law. She remained below on the steps leading to the study room, eavesdropping. Then she went up the stairs and again remained standing, listening in, and heard

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with delight how diligently the study was proceeding there. But as she neared the closed door and listened more attentively, horror and astonishment seized her. An awful expression of disappointment and anger distorted her face. Of omar abbaye, words that occur frequently in the tractates of the Talmud, she heard nothing.229 Only Marquis Posa, Duke Alba, and so on. “Is it really only with the sinful ‘little books’ that the young men busy themselves, then?” she thought, with a great ache in her heart.230 Quite some time passed before my mother could pull herself together. At which point, she grasped the door handle with a trembling hand, opened the door, and stood standing, speechless with anger, on the threshold. At the sound of the door opening, the three startled young men turned their heads around. They surely would have screamed had their breath not failed them. Their first move was to let all of the books slide under the table; they really did not want to defy Mother. It even pained them that these little books caused her so much grief; but the allure of the new, the attraction of studying foreign languages and sciences after the unvaried study of Talmud, was an irresistible compulsion. My mother regained her self-control and then cried loudly: “Oh, heaven, that I must see in my own house the word of God so mocked! In the same nigen (intonation) in which you learn Talmud, you now ridicule by reading these apikorsishe (apostate) little books!! And you too, Reb Hershel, do you need this?! What will you do with this knowledge in your kehile of Orlo? Do you, too, want to become an apikores (apostate) like my young men?” She was so agitated during this speech that her feet nearly failed her. The young men remained mute; their heads, turned left toward the window, were motionless. Since no answer, hence, no resistance came, Mother calmed down somewhat and quietly withdrew. It was not long after this that she surprised my older brother-in-law alone at a new kind of study. It was in early morning that same summer. The mountain near our house was still enveloped by a dark fog. By chance, I found myself in the courtyard and saw my mother come out of the house through the large door. I followed her. She made a few steps along the fence of the flower garden that ran along the house and stood, astonished.

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“Who is standing there?” she said as if to herself—or was it directed at me? She made another few steps and said in a loud voice, “For heavens’ sake! I believe it is David (my older brother-in-law)! What is he doing there?” she cried out and quickly drew near the corner of the garden, where an enormous old poplar stood. She was not mistaken: it was David. My brother-in-law had only a light khalat (dressing gown) on, whose waistband ends were flung loosely over one another, instead of being tied in a bow. His chest was exposed, his hair was disheveled, one peye (earlock) was pushed completely behind his ear, while the other moved on his cheek like a little snake. His black velvet cap still showed the clear traces of the down pillows he had recently slept on, and his bare feet walked stiffly in his slippers.231 The morning mist shrouded his body, which shivered from cold and dampness. His right hand worked forcefully, peeling the bark of the poplar, and my brother-in-law held out small insects that he tossed with disgust into a little container with a glass top. The scene must have been downright comic because my mother called out, half astonished and half amused, “What are you doing there?” “Nothing,” he answered laconically, without allowing himself to be disturbed in his work. “What is in the little container on the ground?” my mother asked further. “Nothing!” answered the startled nature investigator. “Why are you here so early?” inquired my mother. “Early! It’s not early at all!” answered the young man in the hope of thus escaping from the affair. But that was no use at all because my mother bent down over the lattice and chagrined, also uncovered a little book next to the container. Now she understood that both served one and the same purpose, and she quietly cursed Dr. Lilienthal. A despondent, expressive sigh escaped from my poor mother’s deeply grieved heart. She stood motionless for a while, looking at the thing before her. Then she turned to the right and went into the garden. The half-naked nature researcher divined her intention and hastily ran away, leaving all his things behind as loot.232 He lost a shoe in flight; his other essential pieces of clothing he held firmly with both hands.

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My mother quickly approached the poplar, took a look in the little container and discovered inside, to her indescribable astonishment, an ordinary housefly, a cockchafer, a small lady bug (“God’s little cow”), an ant, a termite, and still other insects, lanced on pins. She did not trust her own eyes, and the shrug of her shoulders expressed more than any spoken words could have: “Why would a person need such vermin?” But she was absolutely horrified when she took the book in her hands and there, next to the descriptions, also saw illustrations of some insects. As bad luck would have it, her eye remained fixed on a “domestic insect,” that cheerfully lay there, stretched out at full length. She shuddered from disgust. That the young people wanted to learn German and Russian, that, in the end, made sense to her. She eventually understood the delight in reading—she herself was very well read in Hebrew literature.233 But that anyone, and certainly her sons-inlaw, would interest themselves in how an ant moved or how many feet the cockchafer had, or what kind of eyes a green worm had, that she could not understand! She seized the trophies won in her early morning encounter and returned to the house by the same route the fleeing hero had taken a few minutes before and on which he had left his shoe as a sign of defeat. She took the shoe with her, too, brought everything into the dining room, and placed it all on the windowsill. In the meantime, my father had risen. When he learned about the affair, he laughed heartily.234 Such scenes played out not only in our house; all the friends of my brothers-in-law endured similar and even greater difficulties and unpleasant scenes. Indeed, for my brother-in-law David, such persecution got to be too much. One day, when he was called to lunch, he announced that he was sick and that same evening, without telling anyone anything, even his wife, he set off to his father, who was a rabbi, to Semyatitcz, a small town in Poland. He stayed there for some time. My sister and my parents were happy about it at first because they knew that he was now far from the Lilienthal movement, which was constantly growing. Later, though, they had great trouble getting him to return to Brest.235 My brothers-in-law now sought to prevent such scenes as I have described above and chose for themselves a quiet place that lay between

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the hills, far from our house. There they gathered their like-minded followers to debate many a book and resolve burning questions about the efforts to make education generally available. Despite much diligent exertion and a rare thirst for knowledge among this youth, there emerged no outstanding personality in Brest in this early period. But we must give the work of my brothers-in-law and their contemporaries tremendous credit and call them pioneers who smoothed many a road, considerably facilitating the possibility of study for the coming generations and overcoming many a prejudice. The three young men mentioned above were no doubt the first in Brest who reached out their eager, young hands to the tree of knowledge that Lilienthal had presented them and seized it with a passion. Despite his tremendous diligence and all his talents, my older brother-in-law strove in vain to find the spot where he could eat the apple; all his European experiments foundered on his Asiatic upbringing. With his expertise in Talmud, he could have accomplished much greater things for himself and for society. My younger brotherin-law was able to eat from the apple and in a short time, became a well bred man according to the notions of those days. Reb Herschel, the melamed, extended his plebian hands toward the self-same apple, grasped it, and took a good bite. . . . It didn’t take long before he was transformed from a “man from Orlo” into the interesting, cultured, Herr Hermann Blumberg. In short: the Jewish youth of Brest tasted of the tree of knowledge, more or less, but this had its price and the seeds that Dr. Lilienthal scattered in Brest bore beautiful fruit according to the nature of the soil. The first pioneers of culture held sway only during the first decade of that era and, ultimately, were condemned to cultural sterility since as I recall, from the ways of ancient Greece, unfortunately, they had chosen Epicurus and his ethic as a paragon. If, however, Dr. Lilienthal had such exuberant results, it was only because the intellectual ground in Russia was thoroughly prepared: the Jewish male child of those days (not, however, the female) was reared to learning from earliest childhood and later, while still in boyhood, was familiarized with scholastic intricacies, with many talmudic subtleties, and with a serious approach to life.236 Since no other kind of study diverted him, the young student could surrender himself entirely to

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Talmud study. He found his entertainment (hence, his affection) only at home, within the family circle, as well as in the modest family life of his friends. The youth of those days knew nothing of the numberless amusements we know today. And so, intellectually, the Jew of those days was, already in his youth, a complete, if also a parochial, person. With body and soul he clung to his tradition and his religion, which for him encompassed morality, ethics—the whole world. His Bible offered him sufficient knowledge of world history, from remote antiquity up until the Christian era. His prophets exalted his spirit and delighted his soul, giving it flight, filling it with rapture. The pride and self-confidence of the child and so, too, that of the Jewish man, already took root in his youth—something the non-Jews used to consider pride and insolence. The ethics of Jewish customs, their robust and simultaneously lofty view of life, made the Jew of those days into an early thinker and philosopher, who also found beauty in his religion. In those days, the Jewish people lived as if on an island, far from the rest of the world yet not, like island dwellers, uncivilized. The Jewish people were happy here on the island, where they possessed the world of the spirit unto themselves, with beliefs and traditions that furnished all delight in earthly life. And the hope for future life allowed this people to bear the suffering of the present. From this spiritual realm, no human power could expel them. Here, they were lords and masters.237 The time of sturm and drang of the Jewish youth of those days was spent on the school bench. No revolution, no love affair, swept him away from his contemplative path; neither did making a living since it was considered the parent’s sacred duty to provide for the son far beyond youth—even when he was already a husband and father of a family—since it was the greatest good fortune when the young husband studied Talmud without interruption. It was from this viewpoint that wealthy people chose mates for their daughters and sons: the bride above all must have a pretty figure and be clever and well-bred but she must especially be a bas tovim, that is, a daughter of a learned and religious man.238 I can attest that the parents’ choice, which was not misled by the god of Mammon, was rarely a mistake. In general, as I can remember, there were many very happy marriages in those days, when the morals of the young married couple lent their union solemnity and

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secured permanent fidelity. No disillusionments, no getting bored, no rush toward change, upset the harmony of the pair; and the true, divine spark of affection sustained the hallowed flame on the domestic hearth, a flame that no storm in life could extinguish. And in the cloudy days of autumn or even in the cold, short, solitary days of winter—in old age, when the fire was long since consumed—these sparks, still glowing beneath the ashes, would warm and maintain the often freezing souls. If the enlightenment shook this hallowed marital life and shattered many precious possessions, one should not forget that the glaring light of European culture broke through too quickly, without the gentle mediation of dawn, and blinded a startled youth. For the first adepts of civilization were already mature men, who until that moment had lived a practically ascetic life.

II. Yeshiva Boys [Bokhurim*] Toward the end of the 1830s, yeshiva boys constituted the learned proletariat in Brest, as in all of Lithuania.239 Their religious and intellectual education was systematically regulated; Jewish society saw to the many expenses entailed in it. Their physical care, on the other hand, was quite problematic and as a result, a sickly appearance was characteristic of the yeshiva bokhur.240 They depended completely on luck and on the kindness of their fellow Jews for their daily bread, their clothing, and their shelter. In the best case, they were given lunch, but even then, not every day of the week. For other meals, “he who dispensed food to the sparrow in the air” provided.241 They found their lodging in the botemidroshim, which were simultaneously houses of study and synagogues. In summer, they slept the sleep of the righteous on hard wooden benches, their fists under their heads; in winter, next to the heated oven. They received their clothing from generous members of the community, always at the wrong season: at the beginning of summer, quilted winter clothes; in late autumn, summer clothes and boots. Thus, in winter they froze; and in the summer, they perspired twice as *  Bokhur (youth, unmarried).

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much as the well-to-do. In this manner, they existed year in and year out, studying their Talmud with passion and persistence, until their twentieth year. Then they married, occasionally very advantageously, because they were respected and desired by wealthy members of the community since the people considered them good Talmudists and respectable, pious men.242 People used to divide these bokhurim into three classes according to their rabbinical expertise. In my parents’ house, a different member of these three classes received his lunch each day. The oldest of them was called Shamele. As a proficient Talmudist, he already belonged to the yeshiva bokhurim, the highest, third class. He was a quiet, cunning but clumsy, blond youth with good natured, blue eyes. Summer and winter, he wore one and the same long coattailed caftan, ripped at the elbows. The second bokhur belonged to the orem bokhurim, who took instruction in Bible and in the easier sections of the Talmud from the city melamdim and partially from the young and old Talmudists in the ­botemidroshim, who were versed in the laws.243 He was called Fishele and  was the true opposite of Shamele because he was lively, darkeyed, and always seemed agitated, thus earning the nickname, Fishele.244 The third was called Motele. He belonged to the youngest, lowest class, and was an itinerant bokhur. He was a calm, thoughtful, quietly reasoning youth by nature, the very type of the nomadic bokhur. Most of the boys came from the small towns and villages of Brest’s surrounding region in order to learn there. They had common sense, were quiet, and performed any conceivable service in the houses in which they received their lunch. They were particularly suited to bring correspondence and enlightened (apikursishen) books to the young men in the city during the intellectual upheaval of the Lilienthal movement.245 You could often see one or another of them in the twilight hours, reconnoitering like cats, sneaking into our courtyard with a bundle of this intellectual “contraband,” and watch them disappear in the darkness of evening on the steps leading to the study of my brothers-in-law. If my mother’s sharp eyes caught sight of them, things would go badly for them; on such a day, they would surely not be well fed in our house. As an autodidact, Fishele had gradually made himself into a very good pedagogue. He used to ask, half jokingly, half seriously, for people

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to help him turn himself from an orem bokhur into an oremann (poor married man). He soon married a fine girl and as an educated man, found good reception in respectable Jewish society. Shamele, on the other hand, as we later learned, did not conclude his life upon great Talmud folios. The Lilienthal movement left deep marks and steered the youth onto new paths even in the Orthodox circles of the lower Jewish class. After only a decade, you saw most of the Jewish children of the lower classes as well as the artisans on school benches, with European education the common property of the Jewish people. Common education produced an amalgamation, an equalization of patricians and lower people. The expert, the doctor, the lawyer, and so on, took the place of the traditional meyukhes (aristocracy).246 Meanwhile, if traditional Talmud study did not cease, it was valued in a completely different way. At the end of the 1860s, I found the three bokhurim described above in the same area, yet looking completely different. Little more could be asked of their outward appearance. Each one of these bokhurim could already read and write Russian and had some notion of world history. But each remained true to his old religion and had full confidence in God that a better time for his people would come. From the midst of this learned proletariat came the rabbis for the small Lithuanian towns, as well as the dayanim (judges) and the more hauro’os (teachers of law), who decided what was trefe and kosher and questions of ritual hygiene, and further, the magidim (popular preachers), the shokhtim (cattle and poultry slaughterers), the khazonim (cantors), and finally, the batlonim, poor Talmudists of all ages whom people paid to recite psalms, hymns, or mishnayos day and night at any joyful or sorrowful event, or at the side of the deceased.247 In most cases, an orem-bokhur became a melamed who first, however, had to work as an apprentice in a kheder for a few years, tutoring.248 A small fraction that called itself perushim (separated ones), split off from all these functionaries. They were young and old men whose one goal in life was to surrender themselves undisturbed, body and soul, to Talmud study. They passed their whole lives separated from wives and children, far removed from their homeland and the concerns of the world, to probe all the subtleties of knowledge and discuss various interpretations with others.249 These ascetics lived in the hole-in-the-

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wall town of Eyshishok in Vilna province on the sheer generosity of the members of the community, chiefly from the kindness of the fine women who sent food and drink to them at their study houses, which they considered to be a sacred obligation and a labor pleasing to God. Such women possessed barely fifty rubles, with which they did business and fed their husbands and children, who likewise, sacrificed day and night for Talmud study as the sole aim of life. In those days, the powerful notion of talmud torah, that is, supporting Talmud study— “learning”—was for the whole Jewish people as important as their concerns about making a living, something true today, sadly, for only a very, very few.250 The type of the itinerant bokhur, the wanderbokhur, is of course, of greatest interest. He had the blood of his amanuensis Wagner ever thirsting for something new to learn.251 Shabbily dressed, the wander­ bokhur used to go on foot from one kartzma (inn) to another on the main road, in those good old days of the forties and fifties, before there was a railroad in Russia. From time to time, he would succeed in getting picked up on a baued (a one- or two-horse cart covered over by a seasoned, stretched bale cloth), where the Jewish driver willingly cleared off half his place for him on the stool. In the baued itself, under the canvas roof, was a very cheerful crowd of every age, position, and breed. The wagon moved slowly forward since the hungry, overtired horses could only pull weakly. The passengers, therefore, had time to talk pleasantly, and the half frozen wanderbokhur listened to these true and made-up stories with close attention, taking everything in. How much romance did such a journey hold for a young, impressionable soul! It made for brooding and daydreaming. From such a wanderbokhur, a magid generally emerged. In his childhood, he had studied in his local talmud torah, a Jewish primary school maintained by every community of any size.252 Poor children, and particularly orphans, were accepted there already at eight years of age, to be taught Hebrew, writing, and Bible. Out of this school arose the three types of bokhurim described above. Many began the itinerant life in adolescence. After he had gotten his instruction in Talmud study already as an orem bokhur, he moved on to the next yeshiva, where his further education, lodging, and clothing would be taken care of free of charge because the Jews of all regions spent a great deal of money for these

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i­nstitutions, too. He stayed there as long as he wanted. No one, however hindered him from seeking another school when he was drawn to hear yet another teacher, to learn other laws and commentaries, because the Jew of those days believed that knowledge of the Talmud was as deep as the sea. At the new place, he got to know other people, customs, and practices. The road there was neither wide nor difficult and during the summer, he could go about in makeshift dress and barefoot if luck in the form of a wagoner, who came to his aid and brought him to an inn, did not strike him from time to time. There he would stay for a while with a Jewish arendar (leaseholder) in the village, hear fantastic tales, both truth and fiction, from various visitors in the inn, and leave there richer by many experiences.253 These three kinds of bokhurim can truly be considered captains of spirit. They had to fight need and hunger their whole life long and— they did not succumb. Their deep knowledge of the people’s lives, their miseries and joys, their customs and habits, and above all, their range of imagination, predestined the wanderbokhur to become a magid, and explained too, why the popular preacher was so admired, indeed, beloved, by the simple folk, and had so powerful an influence. Among the magidim there were outstanding figures, such as, for instance, the magid of Minsk, R. N. K., in the late 1840s, and the Kelmer magid, R. N., in the sixties.254 The former was a distinguished Talmudist and of the finest character who spoke truth to everyone; the latter was more gentle, more worldly. But they remained nomads, preaching in a different city every Saturday. They were not wealthy and mostly relied on hospitality yet did not live in want. Indeed, it was one of the most important rules of behavior that each wealthy balhabayis (head of family) would invite a guest home for a Sabbath meal. These guests usually arrived on Friday, on the eve of the Sabbath, when all labor and traveling, too, came to a stop. Then, the moderation in eating and drinking that held sway during the week gave way to exuberant consumption. Since such a guest arrived hurriedly and late at night in a place where Jews lived and had no time to seek lodgings, he would set out immediately for the synagogue, to pray. It was the duty of the shames (synagogue attendant) to apportion Sab-

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bath hospitality for this stranger, whom he was happy to see because he was a novelty for the members of the community. Now, it once happened that the magid of Minsk, whom I have mentioned, came to a small town to darshen (preach) there on Saturday. He arrived late on Sabbath eve, on Friday, and found his way to the synagogue, where the Jewish community, already peaceful and clean for the Sabbath, many with hair still damp from the bath, was already assembled for prayers. The magid prayed along with them, firmly convinced that at the conclusion of the service, he would receive a plaet (invitation).*, 255 How great was his amazement, indeed, his horror, when he observed that all the other strangers were divided up among the householders and only he was overlooked. All the householders already stood pressed upon one another like sheep at the small, narrow exit. He saw that he would soon be all alone in the prayer house, without food or kiddush.256 His desperate situation made him bold. He sprang nimbly onto the bime (the raised platform found in synagogues), pounded vigorously with his fist on the large prayer book and cried loudly: “Raboissai! (Gentlemen!) Wait, stay, I want to tell you something interesting!” In no time, heads turned to the speaker—they had not noticed him earlier. “I am an oirakh (guest),” he began, “arrived here at dusk, and as I see it, the dogs in this town are friendlier to strangers than the balbatim (householders)!” Naturally, these words had the desired effect. At first, everyone was speechless with surprise. And he continued: “Listen! I want to tell you. As I neared the town late in the afternoon, many dogs welcomed me with spirited barking. This one snatched me to him, the other wanted me all for himself. Here, however, many more people are gathered than there, dogs, and no one thought to invite me, much less snatch me.” These words infuriated the crowd, and one of the assembled came forward and shouted: “Who is this man that he dares to compare us to dogs? Where do you come from, wretch?” A full measure of not exactly sweet-smelling, loving words burst forth over the magid. He, however, was not at a loss for an answer, exclaiming: “Wait, wait just a bit, listen till the end, I ask you.” Everyone became quiet again. *  Issued, of course, by a ticket.

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“I am not yet finished. As the pushing of the dogs had become a little uncomfortable for me, I bent down to the ground, grabbed a rock and flung it among the pack of hounds, which in the first instant, worked very well. The passion to possess me subsided and the dogs took to their heels. Now at first, I did not know which of them my stone had struck, but I soon saw and heard how one dog took speedy flight with the others but was limping on one foot, howling and miserable. Now I understood that my rock had hit him.” These words roused the community still more. People forced their way to the speaker to learn his name. The crowd was very ashamed to learn he was the famous magid and tried to put everything right through deferential treatment. On Saturday afternoon, he preached in the synagogue before the entire assembled community, who listened carefully to the words of this pious man with pleasure and devotion. He reprimanded so many shortcomings and threatened hell for many sins, and the people wept. Finally, he promised Paradise in the world to come for good deeds, and the people rejoiced, since he had touched people’s hearts with such great wisdom and knew how to evoke the most exalted emotions. He also exhorted honesty in business in a kind way, called for honest weights and measures to be given, and commended diligence to the craftsmen and rebuked sloth and arrogance, telling witty bits of folk wisdom all the while. He exhorted the people to honor the Sabbath, to thank God for the gift that on this day, each Jew could rest, free from worry, surrender to spiritual delight, and come closer to God, his creator, something that work and troubles held back from him the whole week long. . . . On Sunday, this revered, popular preacher set off, escorted by many of the town inhabitants part of the way.

6.

In the New City

I. It Was a Pretty Picture It was a pretty picture as Tsar Nicholas I stood in the middle of a glittering retinue. His tall figure, bursting with health, towered over his surroundings. His military parade uniform, the firm, close fitting dress coat with its bright crimson cloth edging and sleeves, his chest decorated with the numerous stars of medals, his massive epaulettes, the blue, broad sash slung across his breast, his sword-knot with the sword on his left side, the three-cornered hat sitting crosswise on his head, its heavy, white plume of feathers—all this lent his soldierly form an extraordinary appearance. His face, with its well-proportioned lines, his clean-shaven double chin with its full, blond whiskers, expressed a benevolent, indeed, a cheerful excitement. His vigorously sparkling grey eyes also shone, while his strapping military bearing expressed lofty self-assurance. To his right stood the crown prince Alexander II who was yet a young man then, in 1835. He had a tall, heavy frame and in contrast to Tsar Nicholas I, who had light blond hair, Alexander had raven black hair, a thin, black mustache, and similarly colored eyes. His whole manner radiated gentleness and affability; not a trace of the self-confidence of his imperial father! Even then, the crown prince won the hearts of the people present, as I can recall very well, even now. And this sympathy he vindicated in 1861 when he liberated the serfs.257 Surrounded by numerous generals, adjutants, and engineers, the princes stood on the so-called Tatar mountain. The sleek, green grass lay like a velvet carpet at their feet; the dark dome of heaven arching

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over this majestic picture. The sun bathed it in a sea of light that broke into a thousand iridescent colors in the brilliant medals of the gold embroidered officials’ uniforms. To us children, this glittering spectacle appeared like a vision since we stood near our parents’ house, perhaps six hundred feet from the mountain mentioned above.258 Tsar Nicholas I pointed with his right hand in various directions. From the passionate arguments of the authorities, the surrounding crowd could surmise that an important question was being debated. Sometimes a general, sometimes an adjutant, was sent down from the mountain to inspect and survey our house and measure the green pasture meadows surrounding house and garden with a sash (in Russian measurements, one fathom) and then hasten back to the mountain to make his report. The gaping throng exhausted itself in a thousand conjectures and endowed each hand movement of the Tsar with a thousand meanings— except the correct one. We finally learned that the whole of the old city of Brest had been allotted by Tsar Nicholas I for a first-class fortress! The full significance of this project would soon become clear to every inhabitant of the city. A few months after the event I have just described, the homeowners of the city of Brest, Lithuania were notified by an imperial ukase that all of them were to have their houses appraised by a commission established specifically for this purpose. The government would pay indemnification and over and above this, would place a piece of land four versts, that is, 1.4 English miles away from the old city, at their disposal. The news was received with alarm. A certain presentiment stole into the hearts of the citizens that their ruin was at hand! For my parents, this project was a catastrophe because not only was our magnificent house to be demolished, but also the large brick factory that stood two versts behind the city! Since my father had assumed responsibility for the provision of many millions of bricks for the enormous barracks already under construction, his brickworks had yielded great sums every summer. My father recovered only with difficulty from the initial alarm of the new mandate. But he calmed down, as did the other property owners of the city, with the imperial assurance that the government would assume responsibility for all losses.

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The evaluation commission that the government appointed was to assess the value of all the houses of the city of Brest-Litovsk, and the government promised to pay very honestly and well. Then, the devil sent one of his messengers from hell in the form of a shady lawyer. A Jew by birth, he was very talented in handling lawsuits and drawing up petitions in Russian, which only a few, privileged people in the Lithuania of the 1830s—in which Polish still predominated—could do. But with these good qualities, this man was the embodiment of the most base unscrupulousness. This creature soon figured out how to win the trust of all the homeowners as well as the assessment commission, and all rushed to lay all their goods and possessions, which consisted mostly in houses, in his hands, so that he would represent their interests before the commission. It was not long, however, before he quarreled with both parties and charged before a higher court of justice that all the commission’s assessments were false! That a kernel of truth lay in this denunciation, I do not doubt. The interests of my poor parents, however, were badly damaged by this impetuous act. Since my father represented his own affairs before the commission and did not pay the shady lawyer, my father, too, was a victim of his tale bearing. It was not much longer before the order went out from a superior government court to discontinue the assessment of the houses until a new commission of inquiry was formed! That raised a general wailing, because every single homeowner knew that he would lose his property. And now we children heard no other talk at home, whether among family members or with guests, than the impending demolition of our magnificent house and the brickworks. And each word was uttered with rage over the vile, shady lawyer, David “the black,” who had caused such grievous distress in the city of Brest, Lithuania. Because of the denunciation of Rosenbaum (that was his family name), a second order soon came saying that in order to clear space even more quickly, each householder was to demolish his own house at his own expense or else be sentenced a monetary fine. Naturally, there was no discussion of new construction. The wealthy were no less helpless than the poor. Whoever could get hold of ready cash hurried to rent himself a new dwelling. But these were only a quarter of the great number of inhabitants of the city of Brest-Litovsk. The masses remained without a roof over their heads!

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The deliberations over buying a house in the New City of Brest, Lithuania and the impending move gave us children much to be excited about and busy with. I shuddered to think that I must soon be parted from my faithful playmates in the kheder and in our neighborhood in the outskirts of town (Samuchawicz), with whom we had played so happily, and that I now must leave the cozy nooks in their houses and ours. I had as sure a feeling as every adult in our house that my dear parents’ whole lives would undergo a complete upheaval. But we hoped that if the investigation proved the mendacity of the denunciation, all damages would be indemnified. By itself, the inquiry lasted a full fifteen years! . . . Time enough to expel some of the householders from their own homes, rob them, and plunge them into the greatest misery! Many became paupers, many emigrated! One heart-rending scene from that wretched time is still before my eyes and fills me with horror! It was on an autumn day of that terrible year, 1839, as the overcast sky hung like molten lead over the earth and over the souls of the citizens of Brest, Lithuania. The north wind blew cold and drove the street dust and the yellow, fallen leaves whirling before the gusts into the eyes of the pedestrians. I was with my mother on the way home to the outskirts of town (Samuchawicz); we had to pass the small, miserable little houses of the neighborhood. There we heard a confused pell-mell speech of Yiddish and Russian, a quarrel in Russian, an insult in the Jewish jargon, and loud weeping. My mother came nearer, leading me by the hand. It was a gripping tragedy that played itself out before us. The set date for evacuation had passed. Since the inhabitants of the house had still found no other lodging, the unfortunates believed that they would yet be able to remain in their old home. But they were mistaken. The police sent their officials with the order to insist on the evacuation and in case of resistance, to expel the homeowners from their houses by the letter of the law! This harsh command had just been carried out as we entered the little house. The mistress of the house, a sickly, wasted, spare woman with a twisted face, packed her goods and all her property in an old, green-painted crate. Her aged husband carried the smallest child on his arm. Next to him stood two more children, a boy of perhaps nine years and a girl of six, whose little hands and bare feet, frozen blue-

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red, shivered because their skinny bodies were covered only with tatters. On the table lay a half loaf of bread; in the oven, a few logs of wood burned, or rather smoked, on which their paltry meal was being cooked. The family was just about to eat when the messenger from hell came and announced that there was no room anymore here for the inhabitants. They were not to dare remain here even this very same day. There was no time anymore for the meal here, and the packing up and collection went on in all haste! Even in the most wretched household, so many little things had their worth, so long as they were not removed from their proper spot. When they were moved from their places, however, the worn out crockery fell apart. And where were these poor people to bring their possessions when they as yet had no shelter? They were hardly in a position now to rent even a small komerne (night’s lodging). Amid groans, laments, screams, and curses, the wife filled her crates halfway with her miserable possessions and then took the little one from her husband’s arm. The old man, however, now began to pack up his valuables—the large and small Talmud folios, his prayer books, which in those days every Jew, however poor he might be, possessed—and this man was a homeowner! Soon came the Hanukkah lamp, the wife’s four brass Sabbath candlesticks, the chandelier, the shabbes clothes, the long caftan, his silken belt and shtreimel (fur hat).259 The remaining household utensils, the water cask, the worm-eaten dining table, wooden benches, several wooden rods and so on, were flung onto the floor, and the poor people stumbled over it all several times. It was dreadful! My mother stood with me in the doorway and exhorted these luckless people to have courage and faith in God and even tried to subdue the frenzy of the police, who soon departed. My mother drew attention to the pictures, which forgotten in the turmoil, were hanging on the wall. There were Moses with the holy tablets on Mount Sinai, Jacob with his twelve sons, the twelve tribes of the Jewish people, and a picture of the menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum that stood in the Temple in Jerusalem. Mizrakh was printed on the picture (“east,” translated into German) because each Jew faced in the direction of east during prayer.260 With similar pictures, the Jew of those days sought to maintain his tradition, the brilliant former days,

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for his posterity! The head of household raised his eyes at my mother’s exhortation and wanted to take down the pictures, but the mistress of the home shrieked over to him with a voice choking with tears: “Let them stay here, these pictures! What use will we have for them in the komerne? It’s out with us! I am no longer a head of household; you, no longer a proprietor. We have no little workshop anymore! These pictures can go to the devil, like all our property! Oh God, why did you let me live to see this khurben (destruction)!” The old man patiently packed on. And when he had brought his wretched work to an end, he fetched a peasant’s wagon and loaded his possessions: the green-painted crate that contained the most important effects, the long wooden poles, and the bedding, in which they wrapped up the three children, who were shuddering from cold. A tattered, quilted cover was flung over the old stuff. The man, as the stronger of the two, still had the fortitude to glance back over the desolate rooms but found nothing more worth bringing out. Then calmly, with resolve, he raised the windows, the doors, and the window shutters off their hinges and carried them onto the wagon. “I can still get some money for these,” he said. The house stood there abandoned without doors, without windows—like a widow; a sight much more stirring than the scene of a fire. The clouds drifted in from on high, and the autumn wind swept in, howling through the lifeless rooms. And slowly the cart, sunk up to its wheels in mud, led the broken, despairing passengers over an unpaved country road, towards the New City, to a future without hope. My mother called a fervent, “God be with you!” to the poor people on the way. The landlady called back, “Be well.” The man wept. The children, however, accompanied these scenes with wails, and no one thought of comforting them because the grief of the moment absorbed all senses. I also felt that a frightful destiny had just been executed out here, and tears upon tears flowed from my eyes. At home, my mother related the scene we had just witnessed, and sadness descended upon all the members of the household. Each one of us had the painful sense that a like fortune could befall us soon, perhaps tomorrow.261 My married sisters understood that in the future, they could no

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l­onger live with our parents since my father would lose all his fortune with the landed property. They had to think about establishing their own homes—a novel proposition, as yet alien and unknown, although each already had a family, a few children. So carefree, so comfortable was life with a husband and children here in our parents’ home. And now it must change! Anxiety lay like a heavy stone on all our hearts, although the authorities treated my father without any harshness, in contrast to the other citizens in this horrible time. From time to time, they only asked him when he would move to the New City, to which he could only say that he had not yet bought a house. But even with the most benevolent intentions, the officials could not let us live in the Old City for long. One morning my father came from the New City and announced that for the time being, he would only rent one residence. He had also found one. Mother was to see it, and if it pleased her, we could soon move to the New City. I listened with the greatest interest. Despite the sorrowful scenes as our neighbors moved, I nevertheless felt a certain joyful excitement at the thought of the great changes coming. While the adults were dreading to think about the toil and inconvenience of a move, for children, moving to a new house had a certain fascination and pleasure. The adults might flee the deserted rooms, but the children ran around in them with pleasure and lay in wait gleefully for the echo of their loud voices. My mother set out with one of her older daughters to the New City and inspected the dwelling. There was no choice: it had to please her. We soon got to packing and clearing things out. Many pieces of our opulent furniture had to be sold since the small rooms in the New City would not accommodate them all. The move to the New City was to take place on a certain Tuesday. First, my married sisters were to move with their families. The appointed day approached. We ate breakfast all together—for the last time!—on the family table in our parents’ home. There was an eloquent silence; all were overcome by emotion that was hard to express in words! The sorrow of this moment was great. The new situation was harder to bear than damage caused by a fire. In the latter case, the force of the elements held sway—the Hand that we worship, even when it destroys! But to forsake a house and courtyard in the

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best condition and go from snug coziness toward the uncertainty of an obscure future, this was the torment of all torments! After breakfast, the wagons were loaded with my sisters’ furniture. My older sister, Khenye Malke Guenzberg, was led carefully to the street since she had just recently given birth to a little daughter. The delicate little creature was wrapped up in little cushions and coverlets and brought into the wagon, where the older two little children sat. The scene is before my eyes as if it were yesterday, how the old nanny, Rashke, lifted the baby out of her cradle in the empty room in order to bring her to my sister in the wagon, many hot tears running down her wrinkled cheeks. . . . From this day forward, patriarchal life in my parents’ home ceased!262 One member of the house after the other was severed. . . . Times completely different than any we had experienced until now came, and never again did all of us children come together under our father’s unbridled authority! In those days it also happened that the Jewish cemetery was transferred to the New City. With alarm and horror, the Jewish community in Brest learned that the ground in which many thousands of human bones had rested for centuries was to be used for the proposed fortress buildings and that the old cemetery with its ancient memorial stones was to be demolished. If the destruction of the Old City of Brest was a financial catastrophe, this information about the desecration of the graves had an equally devastating effect on people’s spirits. In vain were all efforts, petitions, imploring that the dead must be left to rest in peace.263 In vain; the authorities remained without pity and ordered the removal of the cemetery.264 And so it happened. The whole Jewish population, with the rabbi, Reb L. Katzenellenbogen at the head, multiplied its prayers and fast days.265 It was to no avail. We finally had to submit to the cruel order. A day was appointed on which this unheard of funeral of many thousands of corpses was to proceed. The whole Jewish community, young and old, rich and poor, fasted on that day. Everyone wanted to participate in the difficult work. After the men and many women, too, had prayed with crushed hearts in the synagogue in the early morning hours—it was a Monday, as I recall—and the weekly portion was read out of the holy scroll, the com-

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munity set out for the old cemetery and performed devotions there, too. Psalms were read, and the deceased were begged for forgiveness, as was otherwise done only at funerals, and people went about the sorrowful work.266 One of the Jews’ most hideous curses was: “May the earth cast up your bones!” And we saw this frightful curse fulfilled on these bones! A few days before, little sacks made of grey linen had been prepared, made to receive the remains of the dead. And these small sacks were entirely adequate to contain the whole person, who in life had been so proud, so self-assured, so insatiable, so untiring in desires and wants— all this had become a little band of dust, hardly a burden for one hand. The whole community participated in filling up the contents of the dug-out graves, tying up the sacks with a thick cord and piling these onto the wagons standing ready. Here, there was no distinction; rank and social position played no role. All were equal. The whole assembly was deeply moved by this act. Here, a family did not mourn for its members but an entire people for its profaned dead. At last, the graves were dug up, many wagons loaded with the light and yet very weighty contents, and covered with black material. The cantor began to sing a prayer, said kaddish (the usual prayer for the dead), and the great funeral cortege set off. Many followed the procession all the long way from the Old City to the New City barefoot.267 Such a funeral had never before taken place. The government had soldiers placed as an honorary escort in part, perhaps also because among the exhumed corpses were many victims of a great plague. The soldiers marched with trained weapons close by the wagons. The flock of citizens followed in deep silence. At the newly laid-out cemetery, near the village of Bereswke—six versts from the Old City—the little sacks with the bones of those on whose graves no tombstones had been found, were lowered into a mass grave, while the remains of the others were buried in individual graves, on which the old stones were reerected.268 There, today one can still read the Hebrew inscriptions that trace back several centuries. The gravestone of Rabbi Abraham Katzenellenbogen read, in translation: Here rests the great rabbi, our gaon and teacher, Abraham ben David, the former rabbi in Brest, Lithuania, died 1742.269

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Another tombstone read: Open the doors and let the righteous enter! Here rests the renowned gaon, the deceased, Joseph ben Abraham, may his memory be blessed. May his soul be admitted to the realm of everlasting life!

The date is effaced. On another stone, it says: Here rests the singularly virtuous rabbi and preacher, our teacher and guide, Kive’s son, Moses, deceased Monday, the eve of Yom Kippur, 5591 after the creation of the world.270 He is gone to that place where the light of his wisdom will shine eternally. . . . In his deeds, he speaks to us, and lives on after his death. . . . The fragrance of his flowering speech is imperishable.*

It was already dark as the mass burial in the new cemetery ended. After the work was completed, the crowd dispersed again, silently. Grief reigned in our house that evening. My parents were deeply affected by this difficult day. Moved to the core, they were speechless and turned inward, brooding. There was no talking; not a sound was heard. All were preoccupied with their thoughts about death and the transience of mortal life. On that day, the city of Brest could reckon many saints who forgot all worldly things and recognized the ephemeral nature of their existence. It is possible that this grievous day crippled my dear father’s energy. Truly, he never completely recovered from the heavy blow that tore him from his home turf. After fifteen years of many difficult legal proceedings, my father received a considerable sum for his properties from the government. But he was an old man, estranged from his businesses; a true recluse, a scholar whose energy would be productive only in his study room, with Talmud folios. Indeed, there were various orders for the fortress building, but it was as if Father had been pulled up by the roots—no more fruits would ripen.271

*  The gravestone inscriptions are the work of Mayer Yekhiel Halter, called “the renowned of the city of Brest.”

In the New City

II. One Sabbath With the move from the Old City of Brest in Lithuania to the New City, life in my parents’ home took on a completely different form. Whereas the old house was elegantly laid out, from the guest room to the carriage barn, here the small rooms were paltry. To be sure, the old mahogany wooden furniture, decorated with gold and bronze, was still there, filling up these old, small rooms, but oh, in what a state! Faded, shabby. Many mountings were missing pieces, many a table hobbled on one foot, the backs of the chairs no longer gave firm support, and the gold was rubbed off the frame of the great mirror. But the home is always a mirror image of its inhabitants! You could see that both had once known happier days. The material goods were basically solid and had provided good service and had fate now only cast a favorable eye on people and furniture, they could still have assumed their old glory! But fate was not gracious for a long, long time. Nevertheless, for my father, this period was one of the most meaningful. It brought the nobility of his personality to light. He had more time and opportunity than before to help those closest to him with word and deed and to win affection and respect in Jewish society through his great talmudic and other knowledge in Hebrew literature. After he had liquidated all his businesses, he devoted himself entirely to Talmud study and lived “al hatauro ve‘al ho‘avaudo” (to learning and service of God)! The day was divided in our house so as to leave as much time for Talmud study as for eating and sleeping. Even here, in this small house, his small private room was furnished with many shelves and many books were added to his previous library. There, in the beginning of the 1840s, he wrote the two books I have already mentioned. In the new house, too, my father used to get up at four in the morning, summer and winter, and recite his morning prayers, singing. These prayers had no cohesive style, it was more a recitative. But to my loving child’s heart, they were more alluring than the most beautiful melody. Among these tones, I used to awake and dream in a deep, religious frame of mind until daybreak. You might think that this way of living kept my father remote from us children and from rearing us, but this was not the case. He always had time and inclination to offer community affairs his

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greatest attention and to supervise the morals and behavior of his children with his tender, fatherly eyes and his prudent words. To be sure, much was changed under the new circumstances but our demeanor, our measured self-assurance toward the whole world, did not change; though with the loss of the great wealth in the Old City, that is, with the demolition of our house and the brickworks, my parents’ fortune was severely shaken. Many of the valuable things disappeared from the house, and yet the precious character of all the inhabitants remained steadfast. Even now, our house remained the gathering point of intelligent society. Any distinguished guest who came to Brest came to us first, where he was sure to be warmly welcomed. Under the present circumstances, our clothing was simple, but none of the children was envious of the fancy dresses of our girlfriends. Even now, life at home flowed in a normal, pleasant way. There was nothing special about the six days of the week. Friday, however, had a different character, because in the kitchen, preparations for the Sabbath were begun even before dawn—the splendid, great white loaf and many pastries, from whose raw dough my mother would pinch off a small piece over which she would pronounce a silent prayer and which she would fling into the flames.272 I gladly helped the cook and for this, got the first sweet to eat. I was then already fourteen years old. The members of our household rose early and breakfasted on fresh white bread with butter and coffee. I jotted down a list of all the necessities for the Sabbath, all the purchases that needed to be made in the market, set myself up with a hand basket and napkin, and set out for the market place, where I aimed particular attention at the first purchase, the fish, the foundation of a real Sabbath! My father put great stock in good fish. I bought the freshest pike, to which we Jews were particularly partial, proceeded to the fruit stands, and then hurried home, where I found my mother reading the Sabbath portion.273 At my appearance, however, she laid the Bible aside and inspected my purchases. My father also came out of his room, inspected the fish, and most of the time was pleased. He urged me to put a lot of pepper in the cooking and anticipated the meal with a hearty appetite. After I handed over the fish to the cook for cleaning, I put on a long apron and went on quickly to the washing of Father’s pocket handkerchiefs, his collars, and little muslin sleeves that needed to be dried and

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flat-ironed by evening when my parents dressed for the Sabbath. Then I proceeded to the cooking of the fish. My father liked to watch the process and grinning, praised my skill, tasted the sauce, and exhorted me again to add more pepper. After many trials and tastings, the fish was ready. I laid it on the bowl and placed it on a pot of hot water so that the sauce would not dry out. Once again, vegetables were tasted, anything missing added, and then the cook cleared room on the hearth. From there, I went to the tea table, where I prepared and poured tea for my parents and siblings. On Friday, tea was taken earlier than usual and drunk in all haste. Afterwards, I went through all the rooms to do last minute cleaning, putting in place sometimes one, sometimes another of the pieces of furniture, removing dust in the corners, and so on. In the meantime, the personal laundry had dried, and I got busy with flat-ironing. Afterwards, I distributed the clean laundry to my parents and siblings. Everyone in the house was getting dressed for the Sabbath. In winter, my clothing consisted of a little wool dress of blue, my favorite color; in summer, a stiffly flat-ironed cotton dress. My youth made up for the lack of velvet and silk. My parents went to the synagogue in clothes they wore only for the Sabbath; my mother of course, only after she had covered the table with a white table cloth and laid the two Sabbath loaves at the head of the table, which she covered with a little cover beautifully embroidered for this purpose. Then she blessed and kindled the candles and recalled the other two commandments binding on every Jewish wife.274 In this prayer, she thanked God that it was ordained that she light up the room for the Sabbath. While she was in the synagogue, we three girls were each required to kindle the two other candles on Friday evening in the chandelier of the dining room.275 In the other rooms, too, candles were kindled in the sconces and soon, the whole house shone in the gleam of candles. We girls, in fresh Sabbath attire, in rooms polished to shining, felt in that state of mind of which the Hasidim say that heaven lends us a neshomo yesseire (an additional soul) for the Sabbath.276 This was the only time in the week when we girls could sing our Russian, Polish, German, and Yiddish songs with total, full voices without being disturbed.277 Another time we danced, and our neighbor’s children joined in. We didn’t forget prayers, either! Meanwhile, the servant set the table for the evening meal. At Father’s place, I set the large silver goblet

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with the decanter of wine, and we awaited our parents’ return from synagogue.278 Father arrived and as soon as he called out, “Good Sabbath!” in his powerful voice, all the warm coziness of the Sabbath began for us. He spread out his hands, and we children received the blessing, the eldest first. Father’s face shone in the joyous peace of the Sabbath. In his laughing countenance, his tranquil soul reposed. Cares and troubles, with which he recently was so abundantly plagued, were dispelled, forgotten—by him, and by his household. He prayed over our heads, bowed with love and reverence, while he often clasped and caressed them. It never, however, came to a kiss or similar loving exhibitions since religion and moral views, according to the conception of that time, forbade this as wantonness. After we had all received Father’s blessing, Father and the other men sang verses, beginning with sholem aleikhem, “peace unto you,” with which every Jew received his Sabbath angel of peace. Following this was the song of praise for the industrious housewife, the eyshes khayil, the heroic wife, from the proverbs of King Solomon.279 “The woman, who rises when it is still night and prepares food for her husband and children and servants; her needlework and red woven belt win praise in the city gates. She is a diadem for her husband. Beauty and charm, however, are an empty bauble, fleeting; only the God-fearing woman merits all praise.” The men used to sing this song walking back and forth across the room in a beautiful way. I was a girl in my teens in those days and at the singing of this song, which I half understood, I used to swell with pride and I resolved to become worthy myself of this praise.280 My father made kiddush, drank more than half the contents of the cup, and then gave it to Mother, who sipped from it and passed it to us children, one after the other.281 Then, without a word, we proceeded to hand washing and made a blessing while drying them. This act, which despite the many people present was nevertheless done silently, often enticed us children to faint whispering, and even more often, to a contagious giggling. But a stern glance from Father banished all mischievousness. Father pronounced a blessing over the two loaves of bread, which were called lekhem mishne, cut one in two parts, ate a piece of it and spoke not a word until he had consumed it. All of us at the table also received a slice.282

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The fish was served up and a pious Sabbath hymn was sung with pleasant melodies. Then followed the fat, tasty noodle soup and a second song, at which we girls softly hummed along. We could not do this out loud because it was considered a sin for the men to hear women’s voices singing!283 The meal ended with a vegetable. At its conclusion, a dessert consisting of apples, roasted nuts, and cooked peas was served. The men donned caps once again and poured water that was called mayim akharaunim (final water) over their hands.284 One of the men of the table company would be honored at the recitation of the Grace after Meals; his goblet would be filled with wine, and everyone joined in with an amen at the right places.285 After supper, we did not remain together long. By ten o’clock, the whole house lay in deep sleep. True to his habit, my father awoke at around four in the morning. However, since he could kindle no light because of the Sabbath, he called the servant and told him to instruct the Christian night watchman to bring a light into the house. The servant soon brought Mikhalka, the trusty night watchman, who lit the candle in father’s private room and in the kitchen for the servant.286 Father sang a morning prayer, leafed a little through the large Talmud folio and drank his tea that had been prepared the day before on the large cook-oven and that stayed hot in hot sand until the morning. (The samovar was never set up on Saturday in my parents’ house, nor was any coffee or even any food cooked or warmed.)287 And now, in the darkness of the night, in the winter in deep snow, paying no heed to the frost, my father set out for the so-called ­khevra-tehillim beit hamidrash, that derived its name from the practice of saying all the Psalms, from beginning to end, every week. Every day, a portion was sung in chorus, in which one person in the community began with the first verse of the chapter and the community followed him. My father belonged to this society but took part in the singing only on Saturday. The members of this society consisted mostly of artisans, for whom it was impossible during the week to permit themselves this spiritual pleasure.288 Today, however, was the holy Sabbath day of rest that had begun the previous night. Every Jew had awoken at four in the morning physically and spiritually strengthened, and thought with delight of his community in the bet hamidrash, for which he set out immediately, and where he met his comrades in the brightly lit,

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well-heated prayer house.289 There is no prescribed way to sing these Psalms. Each Jew himself gave the appropriate melody to the words of the Psalms, which he completely understood and profoundly experienced—in which, indeed, he found his own life experience—because that melody came from his innermost soul. With these individualized sounds, he praised his Creator and sang “halleluyah.” So it went until daybreak, at which point the morning prayer, shakharis, and, later the midday prayer, musaf, were said and in between, the weekly portion of Torah was chanted. Toward eleven o’clock in the morning, each member of the community went home in the best of spirits, not least because he knew that his delicious lunch awaited him since yesterday. Everyone enjoyed a shalet and kugel that the Sabbath angel had cooked so sumptuously; this shalet, of which Heinrich Heine maintained that the inhabitants of Olympia in Greece ate ambrosia only because they did not know of shalet!290 We children were already in full Sabbath attire. Father blessed us and made kiddush over a cup of wine and we, too, had to sip from it. Following that, we nibbled honey cakes and marmalades in honey and sugar. Meanwhile, the servant served up salted, cold fish, hardboiled eggs with onion salad, goose liver, goose fat, radish, calves feet with eggs and garlic; the bitter, spiced herbs on which our ancestors already feasted in the wilderness delight Jacob’s descendants to this day. After the table company had stilled their first hunger, the shalet was served up. It smelled fine! Although the dish had stood in the oven for more than twenty hours, everyone partook of it; Jews had strong stomachs in those days. The fatter the kugel, the arch symbol of the Sabbath midday meal, the tastier the table company thought it was and the more favor it found! Today, too, pious songs, hymns about Sabbath peace in gay melodies, were sung in chorus. To sleep on the Sabbath after the meal was a mitsve—and we were pious! But now we children could romp in the dining room during the winter and in the fields, mountains, and valleys in the summer. In the late afternoon, the men again went to the prayer house for the evening prayer. It was dusk. At home, the third Sabbath meal was to be eaten. After their running about, even the children had a wolf ’s appetite. According to custom, fish and meat had to be eaten at this sholosh-suda (third mealtime) in the half darkness of evening. Now, too, beautiful hymns were sung and then the Grace after Meals recited. After

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that, everyone again went to the synagogue for the evening prayer, and it was already dark when the men returned, whereupon my father made havdole over a cup of wine.291 At that point, melodious zmiraus, that is, verses that made allusion to the coming week (workdays), to the sun, moon, and stars were again sung. Saturday evening was still a semi-holiday when no work was done. Around eleven o’clock, a dinner was again eaten called melave malke (parting meal) after the Sabbath queen.292 For this meal, a borscht was cooked from a brew consisting of poultry and beetroot, which was ready only by eleven o’clock since we were permitted to light a fire only when it was completely night. Everyone, even we small children, had to come to the table for this meal. Only with this late meal did the Sabbath celebration end.

III. Eva’s Wedding I was fifteen years old when my sister, who was two years older than I, was betrothed. Yes, she was betrothed and not (as girls today call it) got engaged herself. Our parents and those of the bridegroom dealt with each other through the marriage broker, the shadkhen, and agreed how much dowry, clothing, and jewelry from both sides of the marriage party was to be given. My sister did not see the face of her bridegroom, her life’s companion, at all, and she was not able to satisfy herself about whether she would be able to love him, and whether he suited her fancy and met the ideals that a girl privately formed about her intended. Our parents only informed her that a certain Mr. F., from the city of S., was seeking her hand in marriage and that, since he came from a good house, was wealthy, not repulsive, and already an independent businessman (indeed, he had already been divorced once), our parents found this a suitable match and had given their agreement. So now my sister had to do it.293 Far from registering the slightest hesitation about our parents’ words, my sister made no objection whatever. We just accepted what parents decided! That she was pleased with the choice, goes without saying; it was customary for daughters to marry this way and—they were happy in

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marriage. The girls of earlier times knew that the husband their parents chose for them was determined by God. God willed that he be her life’s companion, and so one submitted from the first moment to all the fortunes of married life with patience and resignation and arranged thought and action accordingly. Marriage of a man and a woman in those days was considered a holy bond that only death could sever, not like today, where the marriage is just based on the good will of the marriage partners.294 Rarely did dissension or discord occur in marriages contracted the old way. Most of the time, people led a happy, content life until old age, and such a marriage my sister also was allotted by dear God. Thus did my sister become a bride. From her bridegroom she received precious diamonds sent as a gift and very often, letters that she immediately answered. The exchange of letters was already not without a certain spiritual sympathy, affection, and fondness but were absolutely not emotional. For all that, however, it became clear that they longed for each other and awaited and received a letter with great joy.295 Thus five months slipped by. One morning, while my mother sat with us all at breakfast, she said to my sister: “I hope that your wedding will take place in three months.” At my mother’s words, my sister became pale. My mother began to reassure her cajolingly. With a smile, yet still seriously, she said: “It is time already, you are already eighteen years old!” My sister, however, made no answer, rose quickly from her seat, and went into her room, where she began to sob violently. One might well divine the emotions expressed in this stream of tears. Our mother, in any case, did not set great store by it. Indeed, my sister herself could not give any account for her tears. Perhaps they expressed wounded pride; she had not met her bridegroom in person and could do this only at the wedding. Now the preparations for the wedding began. First, the wardrobe! Fabric, material, linen, were brought from the shops. Ostensibly, however, my sister troubled herself but little with all this. She became pensive, quiet, and went around turned inward. My mother and older sisters prepared the sewing work. The bride, however, now wrote more frequently to her bridegroom, I suppose in order to recover her shaken tranquility. The answers were very kind. At the betrothal, our parents and those of the groom set the date of the wedding for a Thursday in the month of September, in the year

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1848.296 (It would be a rosh khodesh.) For this wedding, I would already receive a long dress—as the oldest girl in the house, hence also a candidate for marriage. The doings and preparations for the wedding made many claims on me. All day long, I was busy in the kitchen baking, roasting, cooking. But I loved this work while my sister preferred reading and needlework. My older sisters saw to the household furnishings and garments for the bride. For her wedding dress, she received a pale violet silk dress, trimmed with dazzling, white lace and a myrtle bridal garland and long veil, besides. (In comparison to the manners of those days, the dress was remarkably modern!) The Saturday before the set day was the eve-of-the-wedding party, called at that time, zemires.297 All the bride’s girlfriends and acquaintances came, and we were gay and danced till we dropped since we girls had to represent the young men, too—our religious upbringing forbidding dancing with men. My father and the male acquaintances looked on and were amused by the pretty sight of solo dancing and the Russian kasatzk, which is so rich in artistic dance forms, graceful movements, and turns. Soon came the gallopade in its turn, danced in pairs in a lively tempo in the circle of the salon, a stop made for a moment in each of the four corners of the room. And then there was also the jolly little dance, the begele, a kind of round dance, then the khosidl, to which a most merry tune with a flourish of trumpets and tambourines was played. Finally, a contra dance was also danced, gracefully and politely. The waltz, however, was not especially popular.298 The days from Saturday until Tuesday were full of excitement and work. But at night on these days, there was music to play a “good evening,” a dobri vetsher, for the bride; and on each morning, we heard a “good morning serenade,” dobri dien, at which we girls danced a jolly little dance. 299 The patriarchal practice, which required that a Jewish wedding last for four weeks, utterly prevailed. My sister hoped that her groom would arrive at least two days before the wedding and had become more cheerful in the last few days. However, as Wednesday of the final week neared and her hope was not fulfilled, she became cross and often cried privately, and her whole manner showed impatience. The preparations for the wedding took their course, and the set wedding day, a Thursday, dawned with glorious weather and sunshine—without, however, having brought the groom to our city.

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But it had hardly struck eleven o’clock when a dispatch rider brought the much awaited, happy tidings that the groom and his retinue had reached the last post station and had set out again. Quickly, we got dressed; breakfast was readied. I had to help and therefore was only half finished getting dressed up. The bride, however, did not want to get dressed until she had first spoken to her groom—a demand that sounds reasonable and moderate to us today. But just one sharp look from my mother and a word from her sisters were sufficient to have her abandon it. Soon my sister appeared, dressed as a bride; of course, she had scarcely even glanced in the mirror! Her sighs betrayed the storm of her emotions! It was the weight of custom of those days that made her become calmer and brought her to terms with getting first sight of her life’s companion only in her wedding dress. It had struck twelve. The invitation to the wedding had been sent to friends and acquaintances early the same morning, and a few guests had already arrived. Music rang out, and our parents walked with serious faces, agitated hearts, and tear-filled eyes into the wedding hall, holding on their arm the youthful, prettily adorned, excited bride. My sister was no great beauty, but her high stature, proud towering head, high forehead, and clever eyes led to the appropriate conclusions about her intelligence. The seriousness of this hour, it appeared, was bathed for her in the luster of romance and shed a mellow resignation and a submission over her austere features that of late we had missed in her. My father, in the meantime, had greeted the groom in his lodgings and could assure my sister with conviction that the young man was a kind person. Amid musical tones that moved you to tears, as was customary and fitting at these occasions, our parents led the bride into the middle of the wedding hall, where on a carpet stood an arm chair with a footstool; and with tear-filled eyes, they let the bride from their arms down onto it. She remained sitting, reflective, communing with herself. Anxious anticipation, joyous excitement, the thought of being tied for all one’s days, raged through her . . . Ah! A woman’s life! . . . How much does this one phrase convey. . . . ?300 Father withdrew but Mother and all of us, richly bejeweled, remained near her. It was just a short time before we heard the servant announce from the anteroom that the groom had driven up. My mother arose and cast an agitated look, also filled with motherly pride, at the bride whom

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she beheld before her, pale and motionless. With tender words she exhorted her again to fortitude and then proceeded to the second room to receive the welcome guests. Father already came to meet them in the anteroom, embraced and kissed the groom, and led him to the second room, to Mother, who according to the customs of that time, was not to express her joy or contentment through either a handshake or a kiss.301 But her eyes and some hasty words conveyed that she was pleased. The bridegroom seemed to pay but little attention to either Father’s tender embrace or Mother’s friendly words; his eyes eagerly and anxiously sought his heart’s desire.302 He peered over all who stood near him, way off into the second room, where the star of his future life shone towards him. The guests, led by my father, now went into the wedding room. My sister had risen from her chair and stood there, in her entire majesty, facing the groom, her eye turned steadfastly toward him, before which gaze he must have dropped his own, so I imagine, since his character was compliant, gentle, and peaceable, while hers, indeed, possessed little sentimentalism but was vigorously healthy, restrained—clear, like a winter day.303 Between the bride and bridegroom, too, even on this festive occasion, no handshake could be exchanged. Her whole appearance, however, had an electrifying effect on him. He could hardly compose himself, but murmured a few incomprehensible words, to which my sister gave a tempered response. The bridal pair were permitted to proceed to a second room, at first in the company of the parents on both sides, who however, soon made themselves scarce so that the young people could speak to one another without witnesses. If the saying, “I came, I saw, I conquered!” was justified anywhere, it was in this case! Hardly did a half hour elapse, and the young people returned to the wedding hall, beaming with joy. We hurried to eat breakfast; it took place in a large company and in a very gay manner. The crowd of invited guests had already assembled and since it was in late autumn and the day was short, we had to make haste: it was already three o’clock. People danced in the wedding hall, and the bride was also drawn into the whirl, which according to the notions of that time, was entirely in order. The bridegroom begged permission to remain in the dance hall; it was allowed, but not for long! Our mother proved to be much more generous on such occasions than

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Father. She sat down in a corner of the wedding hall and invited her future son-in-law to take a place near her. An hour must have slipped by in festivities and dancing; then my mother admonished the groom that it was time to go. He did this with a very low bow and a little smile to the bride. And now the ceremony of the so-called trimming and covering up began, which consisted of the bridal wreath and the veil being taken down from the bride’s head and the women and her girlfriends loosening the bride’s hair, which, today in particular, was braided in little tresses, and spreading it out over her throat and neck, during which time the music played only quiet tones.304 The wedding party, which just recently had danced so gaily, became hushed. A melancholy mood enveloped everyone. The badkhen or marshalik, as the toastmaster was called in those days, reminded the bride that this day marked an epoch in her life; she was passing to a new stage, and this day should be as holy to her as the Day of Atonement. She was to implore God to forgive her sins.305 The Jew of that time believed that parents were responsible for the sins of the children before God until their wedding day, but that after the wedding, each child was responsible for himself. No admonition was needed in my sister’s case! Her tears flowed freely and earnestly. After this speech, the bridegroom, escorted by his parents and guests, led by the local rabbi, came into the wedding hall, took the veil from a readied tray filled with hops and blossoms, and at the summons of the rabbi, veiled with it the head of the profoundly emotional bride.306 At this act, everyone present strewed hops and flowers on him and amid loud good wishes, embraces, and merry music, another good half an hour passed in which the bride was freed from her heavy bridal dress, dressed in a light, bright dress, had a light mantilla thrown over her, and the veil arranged and fastened on her head. Now we proceeded to the synagogue, not however, like nowadays, in coaches, but on foot through the often dirty streets. Jews considered the wedding ceremony a public act that must, therefore, be carried out under the open sky. People had to see the bride and groom, for perhaps someone knew that one of the bridal pair was already married!307 Soon after the bedeken, the bridegroom was led to the synagogue with music—a march was played—where he was placed under the canopy erected there. And now the musicians accompanied the bride, too,

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under the khupe with the same march. The bridesmaids placed the bride to the groom’s left, and the music ceased.308 The ceremony of consecrating the bridal pair began. The shames (synagogue beadle) filled a glass with wine, and a respected man was honored with the blessing over it. At a certain sentence, he paused. The beadle handed over to the bridegroom the wedding ring, which the latter held up high and with the lawful words, in the set rhythm—“harei at mekudeshes li betabaas zu kedas maushe veyisroel”—placed it on the index finger of the bride’s right hand. Then the so-called sheva brokhaus, the seven blessings, were recited over a goblet of wine, extolling the most beautiful virtues and noble emotions of the human heart, like love, friendship, constancy, and fellowship of the married couple.309 Then the ksube (marriage contract) was read out. This ran as follows: “This Mr. N marries this woman N. He obligates himself to be her husband, to provide her food, to clothe and to shelter her according to his means. She receives from Mr. N thirty gold coins.” The ksube was presented to the bride here, under the khupe. After the prayer over the wine was pronounced at the end, the bride and groom drank from the glass. The glass, however, was then put on the ground and the bridegroom had to shatter it with his foot!310 The wedding assembly shouted “mazel tov” (good luck), and the bridal pair strode arm in arm on the way home, accompanied by the thundering, deafening music of trumpets and the whole crowd, at which the old women in particular danced a roundelay just in front of the bridal pair, which passed for the greatest mitsve (that is, a deed pleasing to God): to be messame’akh khosen vekalo—to make merry the bride and groom. They danced until our home. There, the music ceased, and now it was time to see whether, and in part to make sure that, the bride stepped over the threshold first. To wit: an old superstition held that whoever of the bridal pair first strides over the doorstep would have the upper hand throughout their married life. All of the women took their jewelry off and laid it here on the threshold; the newlyweds must stride over it. Here, with us, this custom was discharged in cheerful good order, while among the simple people, this occasion very often became a hand-to-hand fray, in which the relatives of the bride tried to fight for the precedence of their protégée, while from their side, the relatives of the groom did the same.311

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You can just imagine this whole khupe march (wedding procession), with all the scenes described above, taking place in rainy weather under the open sky, where few of the dancers had umbrellas. Then there were bedraggled skirts and slippers and the poor bride had to listen to the most severe rebukes: since it rained at her khupe, she must have been downright sweet toothed and licked food from the casseroles before it was ready to be served. Amid a great throng, the bride and groom came into the house where the young pair was led into a room and with tea, broth, and dainty tidbits recovered from the exertions of the khupe procession. This was also a high time, because the bridal pair had fasted until after the wedding ceremony!312 The first bouillon given to the bridal pair was called “the golden soup.”313 Only the most intimate friends and the bridesmaids were allowed to go into the room of the bridal pair.314 The other guests took their leave in order to make their appearance two hours later for dinner, which was called khupe supper. At this meal, the assembled made all kinds of small, frivolous talk. After a luxurious meal that ended with a great drinking bout, the assembled company still remained sitting at the table. It was a custom that the bridegroom spice the meal with a talmudic oration (a droshe). Now the droshe gifts, that is, the wedding gifts from family, parents, and friends were presented to the newlyweds.315 The badkhen came into action again but now showed a more cheerful side of himself. He had to entertain the crowd with all imaginable foolery and improvise stories in verse; to say a comic little word to each guest, according to the size of the contribution, to be sure; and at last, to tell jokes but also bitter truths in humorous form to the bridal pair, too. Among these badkhonim were often highly ingenious people. One, Sender (Alexander) Fiedelmann, left behind a valuable collection of his humorous verses. Fiedelmann “operated” in Minsk, while a certain Motkhe Khabad and Eliyokum Badkhen were favorites in Vilna.316 The badkhen stationed himself on a stool and, holding the wedding present handed to him, proclaimed in a loud voice the name of the donor and with much exaggeration, extolled the value and the singular qualities of the gift. He expressed his khokhmes in a singing recitative, at which the gay table company laughed heartily.317 This jesting lasted until late in the night. The Grace after Meals was said, which ended

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with the sheva brokhaus over a goblet of wine, from which the bridal pair was given to sip.318 Then in its turn, came the so-called kosher dance.319 The bride, covered with her veil, was placed in the midst of the bridesmaids, one of whom had in her hand a silk, four-cornered handkerchief. The badkhen invited one of the men to dance with the bride, at which the bridesmaid gave the corner of the kerchief into the bride’s hand and presented the second corner to the dancer. They made the rounds in this way twice; the badkhen exclaimed, “Done!”—and the bride took a seat again amid her bridesmaids. In this manner, the bride danced with all the men present. This went on until long after midnight. The poor bride, however, was not allowed to lift her veil. Finally, before dawn, exhaustion drove everyone to rest. Everyone sought out some corner and nodded off blissfully. We awoke the next morning already late in the day. The bride remained in her room until my mother and older sisters came in the company of a simple woman, the so-called gollerke.320 This woman was armed with a great pair of scissors and, at my mother’s command, took possession of my sister’s poor head, laid it against her breast, and soon under her murderous shears, one lock after another of beautiful hair fell from my sister’s head, as Jewish precept prescribed. After scarcely ten minutes, the lamb was shorn. She was left with only a little hair over her brow, the better to sweep it under, because not one trace of her own hair was to appear. Then she received a smooth, closely fitting, silk cap on whose front was a wide, silk headband in the color of her hair which, according to the notions of that time, mimicked her hair very well. In pious Jewish houses like that of my parents, the old Jewish customs, which gradually came to be considered as laws, were observed as strictly as possible. The bride was crowned with a pretty, charming little bonnet, under which her youthful face appeared considerably older. She was led into the drawing room, where all the men of the house and many guests were already gathered. The bridesmaids covered her face with a white, silk cloth, and whoever wanted to see her face for the first time under the bonnet had to give alms for the poor; the bridegroom and the parents on both sides had to do this, too. Then, various opinions were given about her altered appearance, and soon there was a good-natured squabble underway.

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My sister and her husband remained living with us, at my parents’ expense. After they had left behind many beautiful presents for her, his parents returned to their home city, Sasslav. And a young couple lived the old life. . . . Only this sister was still engaged and married in the manner described here. My engagement, two years later, already had a different character. Indeed, the reform under the regime of Nicholas I had power­fully affected the Jewish way of life.

7.

The Change of Garb

It seems to me no accident that the word garb has almost completely disappeared from today’s vocabulary. In reality, it has only a literary use and is scarcely to be heard in colloquial speech anymore. It has had to yield to the word, fashion. To me, it appears that there is more to this than just a superficial substitute of one word for another. Psychology, the psychology of the times, is involved in this change. Is it really only chance that the word fashion is used, in most cases, in a wholly suggestive sense? If originally it signified only that something—an article of clothing, a book, a work of art—was particularly popular at a certain time, now its chief meaning is the ascendancy of a particular piece of clothing! The “spring fashion” simply means the new form that clothing has in spring. And when “a new fashion appears,” one thinks only of a new dress. Quick change is connected for us with the concept of fashion, as if by a rigid association of ideas. That which is modern will only enjoy a single day’s success. Fashion and garb are to each other like “hasty change” and “constancy.” At one point, of course, the notion of fashion and garb find a certain agreement! They both have an imperious character and compel behavior, as if they were forcing people under a yoke. And if some latitude remains for the individual to express his individual taste, the law of fashion still promotes uniformity and homogeneity. In earlier times, of course, dress had the task of differentiating certain groups of people from each other. Parisian fashion had not yet effaced all fine and gross nuances. Each people, each clearly differentiated class, had its own dress. People did not want to be lost in the great mass of humanity, but rather to be immediately recognized for what they were.

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Thus, dress represented tenacity, stability, and tradition, and the halo of the sacred bathed it in its glow. Only with this background can one understand how the ukase published in the year 1845 by the Russian government affected Russian Jews, how it compelled them to give up their old garb and accommodate themselves to the modern.321 The effect on the great masses was as terrible as a catastrophe. The result was fierce anger and only the feeling of their own powerlessness, their defenselessness—the anxiety of golus—prevented this exasperation from intensifying into a raging fury.322 If the Jews had been strong, organized, [and] powerful, then, the change of garb would have led to insurrections and revolutions. As it was, however, things remained at painful resignation. People mourned the old garb like a deceased loved one. More discerning minds quickly grasped that the change to modern clothing was to be just the first step on the road to a more comprehensive assimilation, which must reshape not just the forms of life but also the cultural outlook and the transmitted teachings of a specific religion: the customs and manners of the Jewish race. The ukase was labeled a gezere; not as one of the many gezeraus that befell the Jewish people but simply, “the gezere.”323 Many were of the opinion that the Jewish law of yehoreg ve‘al ya‘avor (that one must prefer death to violation of the law) must be upheld in these circumstances.324 But the Russian government troubled itself little about Jewish laws, about the agitated debates in the communities, the mourning and the laments of the devout, but stipulated a deadline at whose expiration, all the Jews in Russia, men and women, were to appear only in European-Russian dress. And this deadline, of course, was very near. Thus, the Jewish population had to give up the garb that had become dear to it. And whoever, like myself, has lived through the rapid change of fashions over the many decades (and as I often had to note, the tyrant, fashion, was not always guided by aesthetics) must admit that the sacrifice of the old garb was in many ways the surrender not only of a hygienic, but also of a truly becoming, costume. The men wore a white shirt, whose sleeves were fastened by small ribbons. At the neck, the shirt flowed into a kind of turned-down collar that was not stiffened or starched. At the neck, the shirt was fas-

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tened by white ribbons and was wound up in a bow with particular care; indeed, a certain extravagance developed in the choice of fabric for this little ribbon, which resembled a cravat. Even older gentlemen from distinguished homes often manifested a certain coquetry at the tying of this bow. Only later did wide scarves come into use. But in the families that stressed tradition, these neckties were forbidden, and the fact that they were labeled goyish shows the strong sensitivity with which even so small and truly harmless a deviation from the customary dress was taken.325 The trousers reached until the knee and were also laced up with ribbons at the bottom. The stockings were white and rather long. Low, leather shoes, which had no heels, dressed the feet. At home, the long khalat, which was made of expensive woolen material, replaced the coat.326 On weekdays, the poorer classes wore clothes of part-cotton material with thin, dark blue stripes; on holidays, of rissel, a stiff, woolen material. In summer, the poor dressed in nankeen, a cotton material with narrow, dark blue stripes; in winter, in grey, thick fabric. This ­khalat was very long and reached almost to the ground. The clothing alone would have been incomplete if a belt were not tied around the hips. Particular care was expended on this belt; indeed, it fulfilled a religious law. The obvious purpose was to separate the pure, upper body from the more squalid functions carried out by the lower body. Especially on the Sabbath and festivals, a particular extravagance was lavished on this belt. Even men of the lower class used to pick out a silk belt for solemnizing the festivals.327 On weekdays, the head covering of the poor was a cap with flaps on both sides that were turned up most of the time but in winter could be drawn down over the ears. On the forehead, as well as the side wings, these caps had three-cornered pieces of fur. People called these caps “rag hound caps.” I do not know where this name originated. Perhaps the ear flaps gave it this name; perhaps, though, the similarity with the head covering of the Laplanders produced this name. Under this cap, each Jew, whatever his rank or profession, wore a little velvet hat that usually never left his head. Indeed, it would have been considered a serious transgression to go about bekalus rosh—with a bare head. Of course, this little cap was not removed from the head when one went visiting neighbors, either.328

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Summer and winter, the well-to-do wore a sable cap and the ­shtreimel on Saturdays and holidays. It was high cap, came to a point, and was velvet—trimmed—if not always with sable, then still, with expensive fur. Under this cap, the peyes were visible—broad locks of hair that wound down almost under the lower jaw. 329 Curled peyes were considered especially beautiful, and it was the lofty ambition, not just of the lucky possessor of curly hair, but also of the straight-haired, to possess beautifully ringed peyes. The peyes were absolutely a requirement of the thinking man. A serious discussion was completely impossible without the men pulling their peyes with their index fingers. And not only at Talmud study was this play an almost automatic preoccupation. To a certain degree, people pulled their best ideas out of their peyes. And so, many a time, I have had the feeling that the study of Talmud has lost its intensity, its logical sharpness, because the peyes of the brooding scholar were no longer in his hand. There were people who, with particular pleasure, let their ample peyes grow as long as possible, down to their shoulders. In our city, there was a great scholar, an iluy,330 who wore tefillin the whole day, his head, of course, covered with long peyes that he stroked. Thus, similarly, Reb Yankev Meyer from Minsk—a devout man, who was revered almost as a saint and whose speeches never ended without him exhorting: “My children, give money for the poor”—wore his peyes over his tefillin shel rosh.331 The long coat of silk, the belt, the fur cap, and the famous peyes were now to be eliminated. Their fate weighed heavily on the men. Perhaps they would have borne it more easily if they had been permitted at least their sleeping ringlets. According to the notions of those days, they gave the Jews divine likeness. Now the tselem elohim of the Jewish people was taken away.332 In place of the old garb came a new one. The men had to wear a black coat that was to reach only till the knees. In place of the short breeches came long trousers that reached till over their boots. In summer, the men had to wear a hat; in winter, a cap. It was made of shapeless black fabric, had a peak in the front, and was called a kartus. The severe mandate of the Russian government, of course, covered only street clothes; the clothing regulation did not force its way into the house. And you can understand immediately, that at home, many,

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many Jews allowed themselves to wear the only clothing that pleased them—the old garb. When it was dark, too, you often saw Jews going about as before.333 Apparently, there were no objections about this from the Russian authorities. In the pitiful lighting that the relatively small towns had in the evening and at night in those days, dress would not be noticeable, anyway. That exceptions to the rules were possible is completely unsurprising, given the administrative technology of those days; indeed, with a certain payment, one could purchase continuation of the old garb for the duration of two years!334 The women underwent a change as radical as the men and, without risking the reproach of being called a eulogist of the good old days, you can truly say that the switch was not exactly becoming. Until then, the costume of the Jewish woman in Lithuanian Russia showed an oriental character in many details.335 It was multi-colored and for the wealthy, who expended really large sums for costly fabric and artistic jewelry, very expensive. A very long chemise was fastened high and made from the finest linen. Petticoats and trousers were unknown, even to the women of the most fashionable families. The long stockings of today’s fashion was not common; they reached up only until the knee. They were always white, and the women of wealthy families preferred filigree hose. Rubber bands were not at all in use at that time, so people held up the hose with broad satin ribbons (prinel) that were often embroidered with cross-stitches. Clasps from tin-plate or other metal were not yet at the disposal of the iron haberdashery industry, which had barely developed, and were not then available for women. Shoes largely resembled sandals; they were very low and had no heels. They were fastened to the foot by slender black bands twined crosswise, often up to the calves. These shoes were made of black woolen material or calf leather and were worn throughout the year. No one had any notion of high boots or galoshes in those days. As completely different, down to the smallest details, as the footwear of the old time was from the styles that came into use in the next eighty years, they nevertheless have a basic correspondence. Then, too, female nature could not be repressed, and in line with the character of that garb that with its gold jewelry showcased vanity, they chose very small, narrow sandals, causing many a woman to have a somewhat tripping gait.

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Over the shirt, women wore a bodice of silk; pink and red were especially favored colors. The bodice was fastened in front. Through large silver hooks, a broad silk band was threaded with the help of a silver needle, often eight centimeters long, in which the band ended. The high waistline was very short. On its lower edge, three cylinders, composed of cotton wool, were sewn on and were overlaid with stiff cotton. On this roll, the skirt rested. “Rested” is really the wrong term: it was much more of an ill-natured unrest, and it had the natural tendency to slide down from these reels. And just as with today’s fashion, when women are frequently forced to lace up their smocks, so did the Jewish women of that time labor hard to draw this skirt up on the cylinders, and it was quite common that the vexed women often rubbed the skin off their fingers with the continuous rearranging of the skirt. The sleeves were very narrow and so long they often reached the fingers. The whole bodice was edged with furs with which, of course, particular extravagance was taken. Elegant women always chose sable. The throat portion was closed with a stand-up collar that was never missing, even in summer. This bodice had roughly the form of today’s Figaro or bolero jacket. It was open in front so that the bodice was seen so widely that it was not covered up by the neckcloth. Karpo-voluska (carp scales) was the fabric for the bodice. This was the perfect name: they were silver-matte, gilded little flakes fastened so thickly next to each other that the wool weave could hardly be seen anymore. Today, one still sees such fabric only in costume masks. Extreme care was taken on the neck cloth, with silver and gold embroidered material that had a truly oriental design. Half moons were by far the most preferred. The upper portion was covered with white lace from France. This blond lace was made mostly from floss and line silk and had an exceptionally artistic design. The skirt had a really singular shape. It was extraordinarily narrow, hardly one stride wide, and naturally, always ankle-length. Most of the time, satin was preferred for this skirt. In intervals of about two crosswise fingers, long stripes of the finest, gold-woven fabric extended down the skirt. I still remember my mother’s dress precisely. The pattern of the trim was ellipses arranged in a row that encircled a fine little

The Change of Garb

petal. Only the foremost parts of the skirt were not furnished with this costly edging since they were covered by the pinafore. The pinafore was an absolute requirement for a complete costume. It was also worn on the street and, of course, at all festivities. It was long and reached until the hem of the skirt. Well-to-do women used silks or a white, costly cambric that was adorned with velvet flowers and artistically fine patterns and gold filaments. The poor contented themselves with woolen or cotton fabrics. Everyone in Lithuania called the material of the skirt, with its alternation between embroidered long stripes and satin stripes, “golden stripes.” Over this clothing, the katinka, a kind of cloak, was worn. The arms of this piece of clothing had a broad bell shape. They were puffy above and narrow below. This katinka was very long and in the front had very sleek expanses. The rear was fastened at the waist. Satin was used most of the time as fabric and since the katinka was mostly a piece of clothing for the cold parts of the year, it was quilted and lined with woolen material. Wealthy women had it lined with satin. I remember still that my mother, who was very careful to have proper clothing, wore a katinka lined with blue satin. This cloak, however, was only rarely worn as an overcoat, probably because it concealed particularly expensive clothing and did not allow the dress to be shown off. So it was customary to simply throw it over the shoulders so that the arms hung down under the back. Many a woman, especially the gabetes, those helpers of the poor, used to draw only one arm over, leaving the other to fall over their shoulders. Today we would consider this downright sloppy and unworthy of a refined lady. In those days, however, it was in accordance with one’s class. Thus do times and fashions change. By far, rich and poor alike gave the greatest attention to the headpiece. For the wealthy, it even represented one of the most important pieces of wealth. This headgear was made of a black velvet band that looked very similar to the kokoshik of the Russians. The edge was scalloped in extreme forms and was richly trimmed with large pearls and diamonds. This head adornment was worn above the brow. A sleek cap adjacent to it, called a kopke, covered the back of the head. In the middle of this kopke, a bow of tulle and flowers was fastened. Over the nape of the neck, from one ear to the other, a lace ruffle was

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drawn, to which little diamond earrings were mounted, close to the eyes, on the temples. Of course, earrings were not lacking either, and it was common for elegant women to wear very large diamonds in their ears. The handsome women showed themselves at their best in this jewelry, but you also have to grant that, as we say, the less pretty also appeared downright handsome in this head gear. This costly band formed a chief constituent of a woman’s outfit, and you could never see a woman without this finery. At the throat, necklaces of large pearls were worn that often had a marvelous, silver-grey gleam. Of course, fingers were graced with diamonds. Indeed, one can say that there was almost too much good and beautiful stuff: fingers disappeared completely under the sparkling, artfully crafted jewels. One might, perhaps, marvel over this ostentation with jewels, pearls, and precious metals and call the Jewish woman of that time tasteless, vain, and unbearably obsessed with dress. They certainly knew how to dress and adorn themselves. But the flamboyance was caused by economic considerations to some extent. Since the uncertain circumstances of that time—the piercing sense of precariousness—and furthermore, the uncertain legal circumstances, all-but precluded possession of real estate, a large part of movable capital was invested in easily transportable items of value. The husband’s solvency was measured by the wealth of jewelry that his wife wore. Festive moments—the high holidays, weddings—provided the occasion to display all this abundance. On lag ba‘omer, the thirty-third day of sfire time, between pesakh and shevuaus, on which the strict mourning of the sfire time could be suspended and on which an everincreasing number of summer wedding feasts was begun, people could thoroughly admire the whole display.336 And one could perhaps say that the women carried around with them all the easily transportable wealth of the house. I emphasize: the women, because for the men, any adornment was utterly despised. Indeed, in those days, it was not the general custom for men to wear even wedding rings. The head adornment of young women (“veil”) was, of course, much more modest but also very gay, almost fantastic: a yellow, green, or red bonnet of woolen material or calico, covered with a tulle or muslin veil, which was fastened at the neck in a large bow and whose ends

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hung down long. These ends were called foches. Many old women wore large, red woolen kerchiefs like a turban wound around their heads. This ­turban-like scarf was called a knup. The “veil” was never without a ruffle. Directly in the middle over the brow, a little silk ribbon, collected up into a point, was fastened with pins. On the crown were set tulle points in the shape of a little basket, called a koishel. Even the poor did not lack either a hair-colored band on the border of the forehead nor both loops, fixed near the eyes. The headdress of a girl was only slightly different from that of women’s garb, only the girls could still enjoy their beautiful hair. They, too, wore a kind of ribbon of thin, red woolen material, with a bow of the same material that was called tezub. The cut of the dress and the pinafore was just like that of the women, and they, too, wore low sandals. But they did not embellish the little bibs and the throat points, the socalled kreindel. Among the wealthy girls, the headband was of black silk net in which beautiful buds were embroidered with red-, blue-, or rosecolored silk. In shape, the bands were no different for rich and poor. The simple ones were called greishel; the silk tulle bands, Vilna knipel. Poor women hung onto their garb with singular devotion and even in the greatest need, people resisted all pressures, but never altered their clothing. I had the occasion to observe this tenacity in a famine year. Many people then came to our house to get bread. At that time, alms were dispensed in very decent ways. My good mother had fiveto-six pounds of heavy loaves of bread baked every day, which were deposited in a hall cabinet, whose doors were deliberately left open for the poor. Similarly, the buffet doors in our dining room always stayed open so that one or another of our visitors who had become impoverished in that difficult time could make good use of the stock stored up there: bread, butter, schnapps, cheese. We children were strictly forbidden to watch who came there. But who can completely suppress childish curiosity? From out of our secure hiding place, we saw people coming whose bearing, demeanor, and appearance bitter need had changed so much; not however, their garb. . . . Nevertheless, what tragicomic scenes were so often played out then! Just remembering them, a smile comes over me, but it is mixed with a deep sadness, with indignation, and with rage over the degradation people were subjected to.

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Thus, the following happened on a Friday morning in the summer of the year 1845. I found myself in the marketplace of the city of Brest, where many Jewish wives had gathered for shopping for the approaching Sabbath, when suddenly a great tumult broke out. Everyone was in confusion and thronged toward one point close by. Naturally, I also hurried to learn the cause of the uproar. From the crowd was heard now laughter, now groaning. At last, I reached the scene and encountered a shocking sight. I saw a Jewish woman with a bare head, in the literal sense of the words, since her hair had been cropped off according to the talmudic precept for married women. This hapless victim stood there in this way, surrounded by the crowd, completely terrified on the one hand on account of the sin of being bareheaded in public (which according to the Jewish view, was a great transgression); on the other, full of shame before the gaping crowd. With a voice choked by tears, she begged mercy of the policeman standing near her, who had—with none too tender a hand—torn off her head adornment and held it up high like a trophy and jiggled it, stirring the crowd to endless laughter. With one hand, the unfortunate woman tried to conceal her naked head with the corner of her apron, while with her second hand, she rummaged around in her satchel to get out the prescribed Russian cap that was stored there. All the while, the woebegone woman cried in the most pitiable tone: “Panotzik, Panotzik! Here, I have it; it is in the pocket of my clothes!”337 She finally placed the cap on her bare head, which it horribly disfigured. Only then did the constable compose himself and depart. Soon destiny brought a second victim. This time, it was a poor Jew who came to the marketplace in a long, coattailed caftan. The policeman greeted him derisively. While he called over a second policeman, he ordered the Jew—who was trembling from fear—to remain standing, seized a large shears that he always carried with him, and now—assisted by his colleague—cut off the long coattails of the caftan, in the style of a dress coat in which the pants became visible. Then he tore off the poor man’s head covering and cut off his peyes so close to the ear that the poor man screamed from pain. Thereupon he let his victim go, and the market crowd gave the Jew thus converted the accompaniment of loud hooting.

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Such actions occurred on the main roads, too. If a constable happened upon a Jew there dressed in the old garb and did not quite have a shears with him, he would not let this minor detail keep him from his duty. Instead of shears, he used a pair of stones and laid the Jew sideways down on the ground, spread the peye over a stone placed tightly near the cheek, and grated away violently until the peye was cut through. Of course, the poor Jew suffered hideous torment in the process. Today, such incidents seem impossible. But these outward torments and tragedies were but a miniature picture of the tremendous upheavals that were brewing.

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Notes

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One All references with volume and page number only are to Wengeroff’s Memoiren (1908 edition of Volume One and 1910 edition of Volume Two). All translations of Wengeroff are my own. 1.  Wengeroff, 2:28–29. 2.  Ibid., 2:54. These letters still survive among Wengeroff’s papers, housed in Pushkinskii Dom, St. Petersburg, fond 39 (P. Vengerova). 3.  With no further specifics, expecting her readers to recognize her reference, Wengeroff (2:156) cites the “first rate collection of Guenzberg and Marek,” a reference to Saul Ginsburg and Pesakh Marek, Yiddish Folksongs in Russia (photo reproduction of the 1901 St. Petersburg edition), ed. Dov Noy (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1991). On the journal Voskhod, see below. 4.  Wengeroff, 2:179. 5.  Saul Ginsburg, “Di tragedye fun a yiddisher froy,” in his Historishe verk, vol. 2 (New York: S. M. Ginsburg Testimonial Committee, 1937), 82. A scholar and author, Ginsburg was also a literary critic; from 1897, he was the editor of the book review section of the Russian-language Jewish paper, Voskhod; Yehuda Slutsky, Ha‘itonut ha-yehudit-rusit bame’ah hatish‘ah esreh [The Russian-Jewish Press in the Nineteenth Century] (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1979), 295. 6.  We might compare what Wengeroff does to what Lucy Dawidowicz says she demanded of herself before permitting herself to write a memoir of her year in Vilna on the eve of World War II (From That Time and Place [New York: W. W. Norton, 1981]). So distrustful was Dawidowicz of memory, particularly because hers was overlaid with grief and guilt (as was Wengeroff’s), that she allowed herself to write only after discovering a cache of letters she had sent to family from Vilna, which served as a contemporaneous documentary source of her time there. As Dawidowicz notes, “Since memory needs prompting and since the process of remembering may involve a process of refabrication, the memoirist needs documents to serve as the signposts on the route to historical accuracy” (“History as Autobiography: Telling a Life,” in What Is the Use of Jewish History? [New York:

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One Schocken, 1992], 26–27). Of course, this approach puts as much uninterrogated confidence in the “objective” value of documents to produce an unvarnished remembered tale as does Wengeroff’s similar confidence in “steel-trap” memory. But it at least acknowledges the vagaries of memory. On late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century approaches to memory as a faculty of mind and of culture, see David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). 7.  Wengeroff, 2:28. 8.  Works on the nature and function of memory and on self-referential writing in Jewish and other cultural traditions abound. Among those that have informed my thinking are: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982); Marcus Moseley, “Jewish Auto­biography in Eastern Europe: The Pre-History of a Literary Genre” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1990); Michael Stanislawski, Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004). See further, James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Frederic Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); David Gross, Lost Time, which also sums up and cites major recent works on the neurophysiology and psychology of memory. On works on the role of gender in self-reflective writing and on women’s writing, see n. 69. 9.  See Wengeroff’s letters to Herzl, dated Jan. 1, 1904, in Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, file Z1/354; May 25, 1904, in Pushkinskii Dom, St. Petersburg, fond 39 (P. Vengerova); Herzl’s letter to her, dated Feb. 1, 1904, in Theodor Herzl, Briefe und Tagebuecher (Berlin: Propylaeen, 1996), 7:520. On this correspondence and the larger issue of her omissions, see my Introduction to Volume Two. My thanks to Professor Shlomo Avineri for consulting about and helping to locate this correspondence. 10.  These are the details her son Semyon gives in his encyclopedia entry about his mother in S. Winiger, Groesse jüdische National Bibliographie, 6:258. Wengeroff, as we will note, does not state her own birth year but does give information from which it can be reckoned, e.g., that she was 15 when an older sister was married in 1848 (1:171, 173), among other such references. Some other sources give mistaken information. Entsiklopedia shel galuyot, vol. 2, Brisk de lita, ed. Eliezer Steinman (­Jerusalem: Sefer, 1954), 294 states that Wengeroff died in Germany; Ginsburg, “Di tragedye,” gives the year of her death as 1920 and stresses that she died past her ninetieth year—but if she was born in 1833, that would put her at age 87 at her death, even by his reckoning of her death year. I accept her son Semyon’s dates, which are those cited in entries about her by various scholars (see n. 11). 11.  From older works, see, e.g., Y. Yachinson, Sozial-economisher shteiger bei yidn in rusland in 19ten yh: Kvellenbuch fun memoiren un kinstlerisher literatur (Kharkov, 1929), which reprints selections of memoirs and other literature on various

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One themes and, under the heading “economic functions and life advances,” gives an excerpt from Wengeroff, translated into Yiddish, about her father and grandfather’s business; M. Beregovsky, “Yiddish klezmer, zeyer shafn un shteiger,” Sovetish ­Heymland 12 (1941): 417, who cites Wengeroff as a source on dance; Louis Greenberg’s classic, The Jews in Russia: The Struggle for Emancipation, 2 vols. in 1 (New York: Schocken, 1976 [first published in 1944]), 1:57, 62, which cites Wengeroff about traditional mores and ritual. Wengeroff is recognized in yizkor (memorial) books of the towns of her childhood and much of her adulthood—Brisk and Minsk—published in the aftermath of the Holocaust. See Steinman, Brisk de lita, 294; Shlomo Even-Shoshan, ed., Minsk, ir va’em, yahadut minsk mereshita ve‘ad 1917 (Tel Aviv: Orly Publishing, 1975), 1:31, 172, 200–201, 651, where the author, Sinai ­L eichter, cites Wengeroff as a source for Jewish employment of non-Jewish domestic help in Minsk and largely paraphrases her writing about the fear of an imminent pogrom in Minsk in 1881 and about her and her husband’s Jewish communal work there. Of more recent scholars who cite Wengeroff, focusing on Jewish acculturation and assimilation, see, e.g., Yehuda Slutsky, Ha‘itonut, 295; Mordechai Levin, Arkhei hevra vekhalkalah be’idiologiya shel tekufat ha-haskalah (­Jerusalem: ­Bialik Institute, 1975), who references Wengeroff extensively on a variety of topics; Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the ­Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, 2001); Paula ­Hyman, Gender and Assimilation: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995); Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004). Interestingly, Moshe Feinkind, Froeyn-rebeyim un barimte persenlichkeiten in poylen (Warsaw, 1937), does not treat Wengeroff; lest we think this is because he did not consider her Polish, Feinkind includes an entry on Glikl Hameln. Apparently, Feinkind did not consider Wengeroff traditional or rabbinic. Lucy S. Dawidowicz was the first to publish excerpts in English from both volumes of Wengeroff’s Memoirs in her anthology, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 160–68. The focus in these excerpts is on loss of tradition and the radical assimilation of Wengeroff’s two sons, whose conversions to gain university admission in the face of anti-Jewish quotas Wengeroff describes in her second volume; Dawidowicz places this material in a section of her book entitled, “The Quest for Education.” Dawidowicz effaces Wengeroff’s women-centered and gendered focus in some of her translation choices, on which, see my Introduction to Volume Two. An abridged English translation with various other emendations to the original appeared under the title Rememberings: The World of a Russian-Jewish Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Pauline Wengeroff, trans. Henny Wenkart (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2007) on which see further, n. 93). A Russian translation of Wengeroff’s Memoirs is Vospominaniia babushka: ocherki kult’turnoi istorii evreev

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One Rossi vxixveke, trans. and ed. M. Iagloma, G. Kazovskogo, and E. Vengerovi (Moscow: Mosty kul’tury, 2003). 12.  Marcus Moseley’s monumental Being For Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), does not have a single reference to Wengeroff. Mordechai Levin, Arkhei hevra, 74, includes Wengeroff in a list of memoirs of the period of the haskalah (including Y. Kotik, on whom, see below, and Mendele Mokher Sforim) that he uses as sources for “the maskilim in Jewish and Christian society.” His focus, however, is not on self-reflective writing per se. 13.  Characterization of Semel Epstein by Yehuda Slutsky, in Slutsky, ed., ­Bobruisk, sefer zikaron lekehillat bobruisk uvnoteha (Tel Aviv: Tarbut ve’hinukh, 1967), 24, 31; Wengeroff, 1:12–13. 14.  Wengeroff, 1:12–13. 15.  Ibid., 1:20. 16.  On the history of the Jews in Brest-Litovsk/Brisk, see Eliezer Steinman, Entsiklopedia shel galuyot, yahadut lita, ed. Natan Goren and Leib Garfunkel (Tel Aviv: Am Ha-Sefer, 1959); Aryeh Leib Feinstein, Ir tehilla, ha‘ir brisk ugedoleha (Warsaw, 1885; reprinted, Jerusalem, 1967); “Brest-Litovsk,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 4:1359–63. 17. “Nazarite” refers to the institution of biblical origin of abstinence from liquor by sacred oath but more generally, to one who takes an oath of extreme dedication and self-abnegation. The family tradition of Semel designating Yudl for ­Torah studying this way is recorded in Barukh ha-Levi Epstein’s memoir, Sefer mekor barukh im zikhronotei mehayei ha-dor ha-kodem, 4 vols. (Vilna, 1928), 846– 49. On the Epstein family’s rabbinic lineage, see 670–72. Baruch ha-Levi Epstein (1860–1942) was the son of Yechiel Michel Epstein, author of the Arukh ha-shulhan, a major halakhic work, and the nephew, brother-in law, and student of another rabbinic scholar, Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (the Netziv), who headed the Volozhin yeshiva in the second half of the nineteenth century. Epstein authored a major work of Talmud commentary, the Torah temimah. In his memoirs, Baruch Epstein refers to Semel Epstein as his grandfather’s uncle and notes his piety and learning. 18.  On the Volozhin yeshiva and its traditions, see Immanuel Etkes, “The Methods and Achievements of R. Hayim of Volozhin as a Mitnagedic Response to Hasidism,” [Shitato ufe‘alo shel r. hayyim mevolozhin keteguvat hahevrah hamitnagedit lahasidut], Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research, 38-39 (1972): 1-45 [Hebrew], and my Introduction to this Volume and nn. 19 and 93. On the practice of married men going off for prolonged periods of study, see n. 19. 19.  On the drive in nineteenth-century Lithuanian Judaism to produce significant numbers of laymen with advanced yeshiva learning, including married men who would leave families for months or years to study in yeshiva (men, that is, who were studying “for its own sake,” not rabbinic ordination), and the success of such efforts, see Immanuel Etkes, “Mishpaha ve’limud torah behugei ha-­lomdim ­belita bame’ah hayud-tet,” Zion 51 (1986): 87–106; Etkes, “Marriage and Torah Study Among the

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One Lomdim in Lithuania in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. David Kraemer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 153–78; Etkes, “The Relationship Between Talmudic Scholarship and the Institution of the Rabbinate in Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Jewry,” in Scholars and Scholarship: The Interaction Between Judaism and Other Cultures, ed. Leo Landman (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1990), 107–32; ­Etkes, The Gaon of Vilna: The Man and His Image (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 209–31. On the Lithuanian yeshivas in general, see Shaul Stampfer, Hayeshiva halita’it ­behit-havutah (Jerusalem, 1995); Stampfer, “Three Lithuanian Yeshivot During the Nineteenth Century,” [Hebrew], (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1981); Gedalyahu Alon, “The Lithuanian Yeshivas,” in The Jewish Expression, ed. Judah Goldin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 452–69; Steinman, Yahadut lita, 206–13. 20.  Wengeroff asserts the primacy of study and prayer in her father’s life several times, including at the outset of the memoirs, a significant placement, indicating the importance of this information in her own mind; see 1:5–9. Wengeroff notes that her grandfather, on his business-driven visits to Brisk, would remark with satisfaction about Yudl’s talmudic erudition and the fact that despite his business, he made time for sacred study; 1:17. Of course, insistence raises questions about the reasons and the perceived need for pointedness, a theme I treat in my “Sins of Youth, Guilt of a Grandmother: M. L. Lilienblum, Pauline Wengeroff, and the Telling of Jewish Modernity in Eastern Europe,” POLIN 18 (2005): 87–120, and to which I return in my Introduction to Wengeroff’s second volume. Suffice it here to say that it is not compensation for any lack of studiousness or accomplishment on Yudl’s part, unsubstantiated assertions to the contrary notwithstanding; cf. Bernard Cooperman, on which see n. 93. Many details she relates in other passing contexts (that is, without emphasis) confirm her assertion about the centrality of sacred study in her father’s life and its primacy over business. Thus, for instance, in describing a typical day in her parents’ household, she relates that her father would return home from the synagogue at around 10 a.m. (after having been there for about three hours) and take up his business, which he would wrap up by lunch time; 1:6. For other evidence, see n. 93. 21. Baruch ha-Levi Epstein, Mekor barukh, 849. Baruch halevi Epstein was a great-nephew of Yudl Epstein; Mekor barukh is his memoir; see above, n. 17. Yudl Epstein wrote Kunmon bosem (Scent of Cinnamon [Koenigsberg, 1848 or 1850]), a commentary to the Ein ya‘kov (a classic collection of talmudic legends by Jacob ibn Haviv); Minkhas yehuda (Yehuda’s Gift) (Warsaw, 1877), a collection of his ­novellae to the Talmud. The latter was an extremely ambitious undertaking, on which, Epstein declares in his extended title (see the Title Page), he had labored for forty years. Yudl Epstein was acknowledged and is memorialized as a local scholar in a town renowned for rabbinic scholarship; his name and works appear (numbers 54 and 55, in Hebrew letter-numbers) in a “List of Books by the Great [Sages] of Brisk de-Lita,” in Steinman, Entsiklopedia shel galuyot, 155. Ephraim Epstein, Wengeroff ’s brother (about whom, more below and in

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One her Volume Two), wrote an autobiographical essay entitled, “Why Do I Live So Long?” The American Academy Journal of Clinical Medicine 15 (April–May, 1908): 522–25, 677–80, in which he says that his father’s line, which could be traced to the sixteenth century, included “very few merchants . . . the rest were officiating rabbis and talmudists.” Surely he was conveying a family tradition that stressed the family’s values (scholarship over money); Wengeroff, too, stresses her father’s rabbinic lineage; 1:6–7. Ephraim describes his father and paternal grandfather as “tall, stout, and portly, active businessmen [who] lived well, used alcoholics and tobacco moderately, and drank much tea.” 22.  Wengeroff, 1:50. 23.  Ibid., 1:93–94. 24.  Ephraim Epstein, “Why,” 523. 25.  On marriage patterns in traditional and modernizing Ashkenazic Jewish societies, see Jacob Katz, “Marriage and Sexual Life Among the Jews at the Close of the Middle Ages,” [Hebrew], Zion 48 (1983): 177–216; Gershon David ­Hundert, “Approaches to the History of the Jewish Family in Early Modern Poland-­ Lithuania” and David Biale, “Childhood, Marriage, and the Family in the Eastern European Jewish Enlightenment,” both in The Jewish Family: Myths and Reality, ed. Steven M. Cohen and Paula E. Hyman (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 17–28 and 45–61; Gershon David Hundert, “Jewish Children and Childhood in Early Modern East Central Europe” and Immanuel Etkes, “Marriage and Torah Study Among the Lomdim in Lithuania in the Nineteenth Century,” both in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Reality, ed. David Kraemer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 81–94 and 153–78; Paul Ritterband, “Introduction”; ­A ndrejs Plakans and Joel M. Halpern, “An Historical Perspective on Eighteenth Century Jewish Family Households in Eastern Europe”; Lucjan Dobroszycki, “The Fertility of Modern Polish Jewry,” in Modern Jewish Fertility, ed. Paul Ritterband (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 117; 18–32; and 64–77; Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004); ChaeRan Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2002). 26.  Wengeroff tells us that when she was an adolescent, her mother “passed the day with prayers, reciting psalms and reading holy books like ‘Menoyres ha-ma’or and Nakhlas tsvi,’ (2:47) and that when Wengeroff returned from marketing on Fridays, “I found my mother reading the Sabbath portion” (1:164), surely a reference to the Tsenerene, the Yiddish “women’s Bible,” with Yiddish translation and commentary and homilies on each week’s biblical portion, which in the words of Chava Weissler, was “reprinted so frequently it might be considered a genre in itself”; Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 39. There are two works with the title Menoyres ha-ma’or (The Shining Candelabrum), knowledge of only one of which became widespread in Jewish society and was translated into Yiddish: a fifteenth-century work by Rabbi Isaac Aboab of To-

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One ledo, Spain. Aboab was one of the leading talmudic scholars of the day; he wrote a commentary to the Tur, a major rabbinic law code, as well as super-commentaries on the commentaries of medieval Judaism’s greatest sages, Rashi and Maimonides. He intended his Menoyres ha-ma’or (to retain Wengeroff’s transliteration; the Hebrew would be Menorat ha-ma’or), for a learned but popular (male) audience. Its purpose was to give instruction in practical religion and ethics so that these should be accessible to all (meaning, all men), even those not versed in Talmud and codes. The work is mystical in orientation, thematic and somewhat abstract, treating principles of conduct, which Aboab parses, and speaking of moral abstractions such as falsehood and flattery. It was “one of the most popular ethical books” circulating in Jewish society, reprinted many times and glossed with commentaries; Meyer Waxman, A History of Jewish Literature (New York: Bloch, 1943), 1:279–87. To make it accessible to women, it was translated into Judeo-German, which I assume is the version Wengeroff’s mother read because neither Wengeroff nor her brother Ephraim report that their mother had mastered Hebrew, which would have been extraordinary enough for them to note. Nakhlas tsvi (The Inheritance of Tsvi ) was a Yiddish translation of much of the Zohar, the central text of kabbalistic study, a mystical commentary to the Pentateuch. Nakhlas tsvi was first published in 1711 and was “part of the wave of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century popularizations of the Kabbalah”; Chava Weissler, Voices, 56. On the negative attitude to women in this work and the re-working of this denigration in women’s tkhines (Yiddish petitionary prayers; about which see below), a genre we know Wengeroff’s mother used extensively, see Weissler, 56–59, 91, 96, 99–102. 27.  Wengeroff, 2:33. For a description of the variables that went into a person being considered “fine” or “crude,” with good or low lineage, see Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl (New York: Schocken, 1962), 71–87, 271–77. 28.  Yudl Epstein, Minkhas yehuda, 4. He offers no further details about his wife, further confirmation that she lacked rabbinic lineage. 29.  Ephraim Epstein, “Why,” 522–23. Wengeroff refers in passing to her mother’s death and approximate year of death, 2:27. 30.  Wengeroff, 2:22–23. 31.  Ephraim Epstein, “Why,” 523; Wengeroff, 2:22. 32.  Wengeroff reports the birth in 2:163. 33.  Wengeroff criticizes her father’s lack of attention to his family genealogy in 1:6–7. For the information she gives from which her birth year can be calculated, see 1:2, 36, 37, 39, 67, 171, 173, 184; 2:16, 17, 28, 37. 34.  For references to Wengeroff’s siblings, see 1:17, 18, 44, 47, 171; 2:21, 29, 36, 37, 39, 50, 55, 67, 68, 69, 119, 150, 96, 102, 40, 54, 67, 72, 73, 119, 123, 154. 35.  Wengeroff, 1:48, 54. 36.  Ibid., 2:63. 37.  Ibid., 2:22. Having someone to recite kaddish was (and remains) an obsession in traditional Jewish society. Females did not do this since it required vocalization

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One in a synagogue service, forbidden to women (except in their own section, unheard in the main, male area; see below). The desire for a “kaddish” alone put primacy on the birth of sons, minimally, one, in traditional culture. 38.  Ephraim Epstein, “Why,” 524. Interestingly, Wengeroff omits this detail, stating only that Ephraim “studied Russian and German,” and also that “he sang with exquisite joy the songs of foreign peoples,” though she details elsewhere the bitter strife over precisely these sorts of intellectual and cultural pursuits in her parental home; see below. It is possible that Wengeroff omitted here reference to stealth and conflict for purely stylistic reasons since this is not the focus of this part of her narrative. But the omission seems to me more likely related to the way in which Wengeroff constructs the story of her brother’s conversion to Christianity, which she does referencing his interest in European culture—a telling omission, to which I shall return; see my Introduction to Volume Two, and my “Wengeroff in America” (forthcoming). 39.  Ephraim Epstein, “Why,” 523; Wengeroff, 2:22. 40.  Ephraim Epstein, “Why,” 522, 523, says he was 79 in 1908, which would have him born in 1829 and thus older than Wengeroff. On the matter of other sons in the family, elsewhere in his essay, Ephraim seems to contradict his statement that there were such others, writing, “the social life of a brother (my emphasis) with sisters . . .” and “At my thirteenth year . . . I together with my sisters . . .”; “Why,” 524. But see further for my conjecture to explain this. 41.  We know from both Wengeroff and from Ephraim that Ephraim converted in the United States. However, if my conjecture is correct, it would mean two conversions had occurred in one pious and learned family at a time when such behavior was rare. Regarding the possible conversion of an Epstein son in Brisk: Christian missionaries, especially those who had been born Jewish, were active in eastern Europe in this period and achieved occasional results. See, e.g., The Autobiography of the Rev. Charles Freshman (Toronto, 1868). Freshman was born a Jew in Micklosh (as he spells it), Hungary, in 1819 and ended up in Canada, where he converted and became a minister and where (135) he met Ephraim Epstein who by then, had also converted (about this episode, see Wengeroff’s Volume Two and my comments there). Freshman’s account gives us a sense of the methods used to entice Jews to the missionary’s message: he himself was slyly induced to accept a beautifully bound copy of a New Testament by a missionary while still in Hungary (53–54). Perhaps the most spectacular instance of a convert-missionary is Joseph Rabinowitz, who operated in Kishinev in the last decades of the nineteenth century; for a partisan account, see Kai Kjaer-Hansen, The Herzl of Jewish Christianity: Joseph Rabinowitz and the Messianic Movement (Edinburgh: The Handsel Press, 1988); for scholarly treatment, see Steven J. Zipperstein, “Heresy, Apostasy, and the Transformation of Joseph Rabinovich,” in Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, ed. Todd M. Endelman (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987): 206–31. On Jewish converts in Russia, see Michael Stanislawski, “Jewish Apostasy in Russia: A Tentative Typology,” in Endelman, Jewish Apostasy, 189–205; Shmuel Leib ­Tsitron,

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One Meshumodim, avek fun folk, tipin un silueten fun noentn over, 4 vols. (Warsaw: Achiasaf: n.d.); Tsitron, Mei’ahorei ha-pargod: mumarim, bogedim, mitkaheshim, 2 vols. (Vilna: Zvi Matz, 1923–25); Saul Ginsburg, Meshumodim in tsarishn rusland (New York: CYCO Farlag, 1946); my “Good Bad Jews: Converts, Conversion, and Boundary Redrawing in Modern Russian Jewry, Notes Toward a New Category,” in Boundaries of Jewish Identity, ed. Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff (­Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming). Raphael Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985), 207–9, writes of a relatively high number of conversions in Poland, particularly Warsaw, from the 1880s on; however, a trend was already seen among wealthy and “enlightened assimilationist” families in the first half of the century. Wengeroff relates the story (or what she thinks is “the story”) of Ephraim’s conversion and reversion to Judaism in 2:22–27. Ephraim does not mention the conversion of a brother, which seems odd since he himself had converted and so would be unlikely to suppress such information (unlike Wengeroff). Yet, in his autobiographical essay, Ephraim does not mention that he himself had converted, a striking omission; see my “Wengeroff in America.” Wealthy families (Jewish and otherwise) commonly would arrange marriages to close relatives to keep the family fortune within the fold; another of Wengeroff’s siblings also married a cousin, Avram Zak, also a grandchild of Semel Epstein. On Zak (also spelled Sack), who became a prominent banker in St. Petersburg and a financier of Russian railroads, see Volume Two. 42.  Elaine Showalter, “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” in Women, Writing, and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 22–41; Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). On applying these categories to Jewish women’s writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Tova ­Cohen, “The Maskilot: Feminine or Feminist Writing?” in POLIN 18 (2005): 57–86. 43.  On maskilic memoir and male experience of modernization during the period of enlightenment writ as Jewish experience as a whole, see further in this Introduction and my “Sins of Youth, Guilt of a Grandmother: M. L. Lilienblum, Pauline Wengeroff, and the Telling of Jewish Modernity in Eastern Europe,” ­POLIN 18 (2005): 87–120. 44.  On the publication history of the memoirs of Glikl Hameln, see Moseley, Being For Myself Alone, 155–75; Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5–62; Glikl, zikhronot, 1691–1719, trans. and ed. Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 2006), 34–56. Glikl’s memoirs are written in Old Yiddish; as Moseley notes, 527n384, few people could understand them until they were translated into German. 45.  My fuller definition of “feminism” is: a consciousness of and protest against structured power relationships in society and culture that define women

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One as ­i nferior and rightly subordinate to men and that enact disabilities and privileges, respectively, in law, economics, and social custom, buttressed and made plausible by legal theory and precedent; historical and/or religious narratives and myths; and psychological, pseudo-psychological, and philosophical theories. See also my “Kol Ishah: Women and Pauline Wengeroff’s Writing of an Age,” Nashim 7 (Spring 5764/2004): 28–64. By this definition, Reyna Batya, the learned and pious wife of Rabbi Isaac of Volozhin (n. 135), was on the feminist continuum, whereas Wengeroff was not. On definitions of feminism and the history and workings of feminism in European and Jewish societies, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness from the Middle Ages to 1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Karen Offen, European Feminisms: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Feminist Theory: A Reader, ed. Wendy Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski (London: Mayfield, 2000); Marion Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979); Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Hyman, Gender and Assimilation: Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, ed. Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tanenbaum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Tova Cohen, “The Maskilot: Feminine or Feminist Writing?” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry (2005): 18:57–86. 46.  On Faina and for the quote cited here, see Rosina Neginsky, Zinaida Vengerova: In Search of Beauty. A Literary Ambassador Between East and West (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004), 44. The information about Isabelle Wengeroff’s abortion comes from the memoir of her uncle, Nicholas Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch: A Life Story (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 15. On abortion as an aspect of Russian feminism at this time and on the Russian feminist movement in general, see Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Barbara Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000); “Transformation versus Tradition,” in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Engel, and Christine D. Worobec (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 135–47. On women physicians in Russia and their experiences in the provinces and among the peasantry, see Toby W. Clyman, “Women Physicians’ Autobiography in the Nineteenth Century,” in Women Writers in Russian Literature, ed. Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 111–25. On Jewish women studying medicine in Russia, see Carole B. Balin, “The Call to Serve: Jewish Women Medical Students in Russia, 1872–1887,” POLIN 18 (2005): 133–52. I treat the education and intellectual activities of Wengeroff’s children—and the existence of more of them than she writes about in Memoirs—in my Introduction to Volume Two; and my “Pauline Wengeroff,” in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, ed. P. Hyman and D. Ofer, CD-ROM (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2007); my “Kol Isha,” and “Sins of Youth.”

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One 47.  Wengeroff, 2:91, 94. 48.  Ibid., 2:143–44. 49.  On this correspondence, see Tova Cohen, “The Maskilot.” The existence of some maskilot was long known to scholars of the haskalah; Shmuel Feiner and Tova Cohen have recently discovered more of them and probed the significance of their writing for the history of the haskalah. See Feiner, “Ha-isha hayehudiyah hamodernit: Mikreh mivhan beyahasei hahaskalah vehamodernah,” in Eros, erussin ve’issurin, miniyut umishpaha bahistoriya, ed. Israel Bartal and Isaiah Gafni (Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 1998): 253–303; T. Cohen, “The Maskilot”; Carole B. Balin, To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2000); A Woman’s Voice: Sarah Foner, Hebrew Author of the Haskalah, trans. Morris E. Rosenthal (Wilbraham, MA: Daily International Publishers, 2001). 50.  On the theory behind the extreme double standard for women and men regarding sacred learning, see Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law (New York: Schocken Books, 1984) and further in this Introduction; for the intersection of this theory with social realities, see Grossman, Pious and Rebellious. On the accentuation of the standard for male learning in nineteenth-century Lithuanian Judaism, see the literature cited above, nn. 18–19. 51.  Parush, Reading Women, 50. On colonialist thinking in the discourse of modernizing Jews, including maskilim, about traditional or unacculturated Jews, see further in this Introduction. On the “crisis of postcolonial secularism” and its location in discourse about the “Jewish Question” in modern Europe, see Aamir R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), which came to my attention after I wrote this Introduction. There were a few maskilim who lauded female writers, among them Y. L. Gordon, one of the foremost spokesmen of haskalah; see Parush, Reading Women, 74, 84, 173, 194–95, 239; Stanislawski, For Whom, 28–29, 40, 45, 125–28. On the absence of women among the maskilim, maskilic critique of traditional women’s education and advocacy of women’s secular education, and fears of educated women, see Parush, 2–3, 71–75, 138, 170, 190–204, 245– 46. On maskilot, enlightened women who wrote in Hebrew and had connections to maskilim, and the revision of the view of the haskalah as exclusively male, see the work of S. Feiner and T. Cohen, cited above, and T. Cohen, Ha-ahat ahuvah vehaahat senu’ah: bein metsiut levidayon beteurei ha-isha besafrut ha-haskalah (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2002), and for a related argument, my “Sins of Youth.” On maskilic calls for modern education of women, see also Eliyana Adler, “Women’s Education in the Pages of the Russian Jewish Press,” POLIN 18 (2005): 120–32. 52.  Glikl’s memoirs have appeared in several abridged English editions and most recently in an unabridged Hebrew translation by Chava Turniansky (see n. 43), produced linearly alongside the originally published Judeo-German text. The best English edition is Beth-Zion Abrahams, The Life of Glueckel of Hameln, 1646–1724, Written By Herself (New York: Yoseloff, 1963). A flawed but readily

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One a­ vailable edition is The Memoirs of Glueckel of Hameln, trans. Marvin Lowenthal (New York: Schocken, 1977), on whose flaws, see Moseley, Being For Myself Alone and the literature cited there. For Glikl’s stated reasons for writing, see in the Lowenthal edition 1–5, 32, 79–80. 53.  Moseley, Being For Myself Alone, 528, n. 395. 54.  Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Karpeles, Gustav,” 10:802–3. For more on Karpeles and his relationship with Wengeroff and her work, see my Introduction to her second volume. 55.  Karpeles correspondence reproduced in Wengeroff, 2:3–4. See also the typescript copy of Karpeles’s letter to Wengeroff (signed by Karpeles), dated April 5, 1909, which expresses appreciation for the “extraordinarily important material” she had sent him about “modern Jewish history,” and thanks her for the service of illuminating a period previously steeped in “deep obscurity.” Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York, AR-B.828 V4/1; Pushsinskii Dom, St. Petersburg, fond 39 (P. Vengerova). 56.  On Voskhod, see Yehuda Slutsky, Ha‘itonut; “Voskhod,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 16:225–27. The material Wengeroff published in Voskhod is part of her description of Max Lilienthal’s tour of the Pale in 1841, which became part of Volume One, and Moses Montefiore’s visit in 1846, which became part of Volume Two— clearly, a deliberate coupling of two great public events in Russian Jewish history. But she also has material about the conflict within her family set off by Lilienthal’s visit and a description of the traumatic effects of Tsar Nicholas I’s edict forbidding traditional Jewish dress, as she witnessed these. On women who published in Russian Jewish periodicals, see Carole Balin, To Reveal Our Hearts (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2000). 57.  Wengeroff published even prior to this. According to Rosina Neginsky, she published a “short essay of her reminiscences, written in German . . . in the early 1890s,” in which Wengeroff mentions corresponding with Theodor Herzl; Neginsky quotes a letter from Wengeroff to her daughter Zinaida in which she boasts, “Nobody wrote to Dr. Herzl personally, and to nobody else he answered personally and with such a kindness; and nobody took such lively interest in the Zionist movement from its beginning and acted as I did. It is possible to see it in my article.” Neginsky, Zinaida Vengerova, 41–42. Neginsky does not say where Wengeroff’s article was published, only that Zinaida helped bring about its publication. Wengeroff also had a letter to the editors published in Die Welt, the Zionist weekly founded by Theodor Herzl, on Feb. 25, 1903; see her cover letter, Pushkinskii Dom, St. Petersburg, fond 39 (P. Vengerova). For Wengeroff’s correspondence with Herzl, see Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem: Z1/354 (Herzl); see also my Introduction to Volume Two. 58.  Gustav Karpeles, Jewish Literature and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1895). 59.  See my “Wengeroff in America” (forthcoming). On Schechter, see Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter: A Biography (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1948).

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One 60.  Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 49; T. Cohen, “The Maskilot,” 62. 61.  Volume One of Wengeroff’s Memoirs appeared for the first time in 1908; Volume Two, in 1910. Both volumes of Memoirs were published subsequently in 1913, 1919, and 1922. I treat their reception in my Introduction to Volume Two. 62.  Samuel A. Portnoy, trans. and ed., The Life and Soul of a Legendary Jewish Socialist: The Memoirs of Vladimir Medem (New York: Ktav, 1979), 21. 63.  Thus, there are memoirs written by women since Wengeroff, who like her, come to our attention because of their memoir writing, but whose works’ historical interest and importance are not matched by the artistry we see in Wengeroff, e.g.: Rosenthal, A Woman’s Voice; Hinde Bergner, On Long Winter Nights: Memoirs of a Jewish Family in a Galician Township (1870–1900) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Rachel Calof, Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 64.  On Wengeroff’s sense of historical agency, guilt, and powerlessness, see my “Sins of Youth.” 65.  The first maskilic autobiography, which launched the genre and was the model for subsequent works, was Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, 2 pts. (Berlin, 1792, 1793), itself modeled on Rousseau’s Confessions. On this and modern Jewish autobiography in eastern Europe, see Marcus Moseley’s masterly “Jewish Autobiography in Eastern Europe” and Being For Myself Alone. As Moseley notes in “Jewish Autobiography,” 498, there was scarcely a literary or intellectual figure in the modern Jewish culture of eastern Europe who did not write some form of autobiographical statement; these included Y. L. Gordon, Sh. Abramovich, Y. L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, S. Dubnow, Bialik, Ahad Ha’am, C. Zhitlovsky, N. Sokolow, R. Brainin, and M. J. Berditchevsky; see also my “Sins of Youth,” 89, n. 4. On Maimon, see Abraham P. Socher, The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Other important works on maskilic autobiography are: Alan Mintz, “Guenzberg, Lilienblum, and the Shape of Haskalah Autobiography,” in Association for Jewish Studies Review 4 (1979): 71–110 and Banished From Their Father’s Table: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Shmuel Vilnay (Werses), “Darkhei ha’otobiographia betequfat ha-haskalah,” Gilyonot 17 (1948): 175–83 and Trends and Forms in Haskalah Literature (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1990); David Biale, Eros and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 149–75; Michael Graetz, “Autobiography: On the Self-­Understanding of the Maskilim,” in German Jewish History in Modern Times, Michael Meyer, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1:324–32. On the scathing critiques of the traditional khodorim and melamdim, in particular, by the maskilim and intellectuals who followed in their wake (and on the remarkable turnaround in such evaluations by the end of the nineteenth century), see Steven J. Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle:

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One University of Washington Press: 1999), 41–62; Zipperstein, “Transforming the Heder: Maskilic Politics in Imperial Russia,” in Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven Zipperstein, eds., Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky (London: Peter Halban, 1988), 87–109. Unfortunately, English translations of the maskilic autobiographies, with the exception of Maimon’s, have not been published; Englishlanguage readers can get a picture of a traditional kheder, its curriculum, and the behavior of a melamed from a critical perspective in Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl: The Memoirs of Yehezkel Kotik, ed. David Assaf (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2002), 144–48. On the maskilim and their critiques of traditional marriage and difficulties establishing relationships with women, see David Biale, Eros; Biale, “Eros and Enlightenment: Love Against Marriage in the East European Jewish Enlightenment,” in Studies from Polin, ed. Antony Polonsky (London: Littman Library, 1993), 168–86; and my “Sins of Youth.” 66.  The characterization of autobiography as “implicitly solipsistic” is Moseley’s, “Jewish Autobiography,” 92. The title of his book about maskilic autobiography, Being For Myself Alone, itself makes this observation a central point. Many other authors have elaborated on this basic theme; see, e.g., Roy Pascal, Design and Truth; James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), and Olney, Memory and Narrative. 67.  See Moseley, 498. On the influence of Lilienblum’s work, we have the statement, e.g., of David Frischman, who said: “He was a hero. Once I even dreamed about him. . . . I came across a copy of Hattot ne‘urim. I read it and could not fall asleep. It was perhaps the most extraordinary confession of a human being that I had read in all my life. . . . I was drawn back to Hattot ne‘urim. I read it twice and then a third time.” Cited in Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition, 130–32. 68.  See Irena Klepfisz, “Queens of Contradiction: A Feminist Introduction to Yiddish Women Writers,” in Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women, ed. Frieda Forman et al. (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1997), 21–58, on the frustrated efforts of Yiddish women writers a generation and more after Wengeroff to have their work accorded respect and inclusion in the emerging canon of Yiddish literature (which might have been expected to be easier for women to crack than literature produced in Hebrew, the language of the scholarly elite) and the dismissiveness of Yiddish male writers and scholars of Yiddish literature toward their work. The work of the maskilot is now beginning to be seen as a genre in haskalah writing; see S. Feiner, “Ha’isha,” and T. Cohen, “The Maskilot,” but this was certainly not the case during their lifetimes, on which, see Cohen. 69.  For Moseley’s definitions of “autobiography” and “memoir,” and on the distinction and relationship between the two, see his dissertation, “Jewish Autobiography,” 2, 12, 38–39, and 45. These distinctions are based on typologies common in scholarship about self-reflective writing, which until very recently considered male writing the norm; see, e.g., Roy Pascal, Design and Truth. Scholars of women’s writing foreground the role of gender in such writing, and in the evaluation of it by critics, and interrogate the cultural assumptions that underlie the creation and

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One application of supposedly neutral, objective categories like “autobiography” and “memoir.” See Estelle C. Jellinek, Women’s Autobiography (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986); Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, eds., Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Shari Benstock, ed., The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, eds., Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Toby W. Clyman and Diana Greene, eds., Women Writers in Russian Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwoood Press, 1994); in that anthology, the Introduction and Toby Clyman, “Women’s Physicians,” xi–xvii and 111–26. Classic works on women’s writing are Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1929); Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Ballantine, 1988). 70.  See, e.g., Moseley, “Jewish Autobiography,” 492–93, 498. 71.  In Tova Cohen’s phrase, whose redundancy is apt; Cohen, “The Maskilot,” 58. 72.  On women’s history as compensatory to androcentric historiography (“add women and stir”) and on women-centered history, see Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981): 145–53; Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984). 73.  On this, see my “Sins of Youth.” 74.  In the words of the German maskilic journal Sulamith in 1809; cited in George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 7. Maskilim themselves and subsequent scholarship asserted a German-centric origin for the haskalah, which then was said to have traveled to eastern Europe; Wengeroff, too, associates haskalah with Germany and treats it as German in origin. This reading of the origins and spread of haskalah has been revised in recent scholarship; the work of Immanuel Etkes, Israel Bartal, and others has established, in Bartal’s words, “that the Haskalah movement emerged simultaneously in several centers, some in Central Europe, some in Eastern Europe, and that the movement had its roots in the intensive contact between the two parts of the Ashkenazi diaspora: the Eastern European and the Central European. . . . The emergence of the Haskalah [was] an all-Ashkenazi phenomenon that began on both sides of the line that divided Germany and the territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian kingdom”; Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772–1881 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 91. See also Bartal, “The Image of Germany and German Jewry in East European Jewish Society During the Nineteenth Century,” in Danzig, Between East and West: Aspects of Modern Jewish History, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 1–18 and Twersky, “The Heavenly City of Germany” and “Absolutism à la Mode

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One d’Autriche: The Rise of the Haskalah in Galicia,” in Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model, ed. Jacob Katz (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987), 33– 42; Immanuel Etkes, “The Question of the Forerunners of the Haskalah in Eastern Europe,” (Hebrew) Tarbiz 57 (1987): 95–114 and Etkes, “Immanent Factors and External Influences in the Development of the Haskalah Movement in Russia,” in Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model, ed. Jacob Katz (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987), 13–32; David Sorkin, “The Early Haskalah,” in New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (London: Littman Library, 2001), 9–26; ­David Fishman, Russia’s First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov (New York: New York University Press, 1995); Michael Graetz, “The Jewish Enlightenment,” in German-Jewish History in Modern Times, ed. Michael A. Meyer and Michael Brenner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1:261–380. On the haskalah claiming Maimonides, see James H. Lehmann, “Maimonides, Mendelssohn and the Me’asfim: Philosophy and the Biographical Imagination in the Early Haskalah,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, 20 (1975): 87–108. On early modern Jewish attitudes toward secular, particularly scientific knowledge, see ­David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). Perhaps the most extreme case of attempting to borrow legitimacy from within rabbinic Judaism for haskalah was the distortive effort of maskilim to depict the Gaon of Vilna (see further below), the greatest rabbinic mind and authority of his time, as a supporter of secular study. On this, see n. 93 and Immanuel Etkes, “Ha-gra veha-haskalah: Tadmit u’metsiut,” in Perakim be’toldot hahevrah ha-yehudit beyimei ha-beinayim uv‘et ha-hadashah, ed. I. Etkes and J. Salmon (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1980), 192–217; The Gaon of Vilna, 37–72; and further in this Introduction. 75.  Of course, not everyone believed that changes in state policy to the Jews were benign in intent or execution; on the contrary, such optimism was a minority view associated with maskilic circles. Those on the other side of this perception opposed haskalah and did all they could to stymie government-backed reforms. On the expression of this suspicion and opposition, see below. 76.  Excerpts from these documents are in Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Rein­harz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 36–40, 70–74. On Joseph II and his Jewish policies, see William O. McCagg Jr., A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 70–81. On Wessely, see in addition, Meyer, German Jewish History; Edward Breuer, “Naphtali Herz Wessely and the Cultural Dislocations of an Eighteenth-Century Maskil,” in New Perspectives on the Haskalah, ed. Shmuel Feiner and David Sorkin (London: Littman Library, 2001), 27–47. 77.  Cited in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew, 70–78. On the traditional stance toward “the nations” and their culture, see the excellent overview in Michael Meyer, Jewish Identity in the Modern World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990), 11–14, and in greater depth, Jacob Katz’s classic Exclusiveness and

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Schocken, 1961), which examines the mutuality of Jewish and Christian exclusiveness, contempt, and coexistence in pre-modernity. Meyer puts primacy on the intellectual movement, Enlightenment, more than the enactment of public policy, in explaining the turn of Jews from this type of thinking. 78.  If one continues this analogy, the traditionalists, who developed a strident new form of traditionalism in response to the “colonizing” threat to Jewish culture coming from non-Jewish but particularly from Jewish sources, functioned as “nationalists,” asserting the authenticity of “native” (traditional) Jewish culture against a Europeanized Jewish variant. The literature on colonialist and post-­colonialist conceptualization and discourse is vast; for one important statement, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). All scholarly treatments of the encounter of westernized Jews with “Ostjuden” (East European, traditional Jews)—or with Jews of the Middle East—depict condescending, supercessionist/teleological, and crusading attitudes and policies. The fullest treatment of this phenomenon with regard to East European Jews is Steven E. Asch­heim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), which also documents the flip side of this stereotyping, expressed in idealization of East European Jews and their culture; see also Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). For such attitudes and policies toward Middle Eastern Jews by French Jews, see Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar do not explore internal, Jewish orientalism in their Introduction to Orientalism and the Jews (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005). The shared colonialist discourse of non-Jewish officials and maskilim and religious reformers on both sides of the German-Russian border can be seen clearly in the stance of Count Uvarov, the Russian Minister of Education from 1833 to 1849; Ludwig Phillipson, editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Germanspeaking Jewry’s most important journal; Rabbi Max Lilienthal; and a group of Russian maskilim, about the need to import modernized rabbis from Germany to help in the cultural campaign to rehabilitate “the deplorable moral and intellectual state of Russian Jewry” (Meyer, “The German Model of Religious Reform and Russian Jewry,” in Danzig, Between East and West: Aspects of Modern Jewish History, ed. Isadore Twersky [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985], 67–91, 75). Several of German Jewry’s most prominent reform scholars and rabbis were invited to come on this mission to Russian Jewry or to recommend other suitable candidates. As Meyer notes, a group of Russian maskilim in 1840 explicitly backed this effort in the belief, in Meyer’s paraphrase (76), that “effective modernization could only come from German rabbis.” No less than 142 candidates from Germany responded to the call (we might term it a “mission”) to go to Russia. The

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One scheme ultimately did not eventuate (because of Nicholas I’s xenophobia following the revolutions of 1848), but the shared type of thinking underlying it is clear. As Meyer, “The German Model,” 78, notes, not all Russian maskilim saw cultural salvation for Russian Jewry as lying in the hands of rabbis in general, or German imports in particular; but this does not affect the main point here, about the presumed hierarchical, teleological relationship between traditional Jewish and enlightened European culture that underlay reformist government and maskilic thinking—with the crucial difference, noted in this Introduction, that maskilim saw matters in terms of invigoration and reform of Jewish culture, not evisceration on route to disappearance. Thus, for instance, Solomon Pucher, a graduate of the Crown Rabbinical Seminary in Vilna and a crown (modernized, governmentrecognized, as opposed to traditional type) rabbi of Mitau (with whom as we shall see, Wengeroff had direct contact), saw the Seminary as a conduit for the stream of modern culture into the existing riverbed of traditional Judaism, and modernized rabbis as types of gardeners, “tearing out the weeds and misshapen plants from the vineyard of the Lord” (cited in Meyer, 80–81). This sort of thinking about Jewish and European cultures persisted beyond Nicholas’s reign (he died in 1855) and the first period of the haskalah; in 1857, Pucher said in a statement about the goals of the crown rabbinical seminary in Vilna that it must be a “reflection of our Western, cultured brothers,” and that the purpose of gaining modern culture (Bildung) was “to reconcile Russian Jewry once again with life, to snatch its body from Asiatic disfigurement, to check the enslaving oppression of superstition”; cited in Meyer, 80. We see expression of the resentment that this condescension evoked in East European Jews in a folk ditty that Wengeroff cites from the 1830s, on which, see my n. 49 to Volume One of her memoirs and the ditty itself, 1:34. On this, see also Israel Bartal, “The Image of Germany and German Jewry” in Danzig, Between East and West, 3–15. Bartal argues that resentment, as opposed to adulation of German Jews as models of cultural perfection, emerged late in the century in eastern Europe (a “great turning” that emerged between 1860 and 1880). But in Jewish society as a whole, where such adulation had not taken hold—as opposed to the maskilic circles of Bartal’s focus—such resentment probably emerged much earlier, as the ditty Wengeroff cites would indicate. This popular resentment is distinct from the consistent hostility of traditionalist leaders such as Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav—articulated by the turn of the nineteenth century and even earlier that Bartal cites—as well as from the nationalist Jewish expression late in the century. 79.  On the emergence and expression of haskalah in eastern Europe, see Immanuel Etkes, ed., Ha-dat ve’ha-hayyim: tenua‘at ha-haskalah ha-yehudit be-mizrach eropa (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1993) and Shmuel Feiner’s Select Bibliography there, 456–75; Israel Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe; Slutsky, Ha‘itonut, 13–36. On the influence of German Jewish religious ideology on Russian Jewry, see Meyer, “The German Model,” 67–91. On the meaning and implications of the haskalah for community organization and coherence, see Jacob

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages (New York: Schocken, 1971). 80.  David Vital, A People Apart: A Political History of the Jews in Europe, 1789– 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Table of Contents title for his chapter 1:6; see also Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976). On the geographic distribution, selective density, and cultural distinctiveness of the Russian Jewish population, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 83–198 and the literature cited below, n. 81. 81.  For a comparative treatment of the political and legal status of the Jews of various countries in the nineteenth century, see Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katzenelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); for the countries of Eastern Europe, see Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe; Vital, A People; and Shmuel Ettinger, “The Modern Period,” in A History of the Jewish People, ed. H. H. Ben-Sasson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 727–1096. On the economic activities and profile of Russian Jewry in the nineteenth century, see Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jews under the Tsars and Soviets (New York: Schocken, 1987); Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia; Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871–1917 (New York: Schocken, 1977); Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983); Heinz-Dietrich Loewe, The Tsars and the Jews: Reform, Reaction and Anti-Semitism in Imperial Russia, 1772–1917 (Chur, Switzerland: Hardwood Academic Publishers, 1993), esp. 85–101; Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence; Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe; and Nathans, Beyond the Pale. For a map of the partitions of Poland, showing the areas annexed by Russia (which took far more territory than Prussia and Austria, the other powers that partitioned Poland), see Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe, 28. For a map of the Pale, with sites important in Wengeroff’s first volume, see the Map in this volume. 82.  Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 41–96. 83.  Cited in Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 45, on which the following relies heavily. On conversion as a desired, if partially implemented goal of tsarist Jewry policy and other tsarist goals, see further in this Introduction and nn. 166–74 below, and the literature cited there, particularly the work of John Klier. 84.  On delineation of the Pale (roughly speaking, Russia’s western provinces between the Baltic and Black Seas) and restricted residence as a tsarist policy pertaining to the Jews, see Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 36–37, and Stanislawski, “Russian Jewry, the Russian State, and the Dynamics of Jewish Emancipation,” in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, 262–81; John D. Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772–1825 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986); Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe; Nathans, Beyond the Pale. The provinces included in the Pale of Settlement were: Kovno, Vilna, Mogilev, Vitebsk, Minsk, Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev (excluding the city of Kiev), Ekaterinoslav, Kherson, Crimea, Poltava, Chernigov, and Bessarabia. For

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One other maps of the Pale, see inset to Klier; Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew, 379; Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 30. On the education of Jewish girls, see below. On the lack of tangible benefits to Jews attending State-sponsored schools at this point (this changed significantly under Alexander II), aside from the substantial one of exemption from the draft, see Nathans, 23–38. For some of the maskilim who became teachers in State-sponsored Jewish schools, see Slutsky, Ha‘itonut, 320 n. 65. 85.  David Philipson, ed., Max Lilienthal, American Rabbi: Life and Writings (New York: Bloch Publishing. Co., 1915); for the definitive treatment of the Lilienthal episode in Russian Jewish history, Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews. 86.  Then again, Lilienthal thought even Russian maskilim were “dirty, bearded Jews . . . barely touched by the rays of enlightenment,” as he put it in a letter to the Russian Ministry of Education; cited in Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985). 87.  Philipson, Max Lilienthal, American Rabbi, 295. 88.  Wengeroff, 1:118. 89.  Philipson, Max Lilienthal, American Rabbi, 362. 90.  Wengeroff, 1:126, 123. 91.  Wengeroff, 1:126. 92.  Cited in Etkes, The Gaon, 40. 93.  On the Gaon’s relationship to haskalah, see Immanuel Etkes, “Ha-gra vehahaskalah”; n. 74 and the literature cited there; and David E. Fishman, Russia’s First Modern Jews, 104–8. On the intellectual method of the Gaon and Rabbi Hayyim and their positions toward Hasidism and haskalah, see Etkes, The Gaon. On Rabbi Hayyim, in particular, see Norman Lamm, Torah Lishmah: Torah for Torah’s Sake in the Works of Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin and His Contemporaries (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1989), and for a personal (and girl’s) account of life in a prestigious rabbinic household in the Volozhin tradition, see Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage: A Daughter’s Memoir (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1995). See further, “­Volozhin,” “Volozhiner, Hayyim Ben Isaac,” and “Volozhiner, Isaac Ben Hayyim,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 16:214–19. For a sense of learning and the urgency about learning in Volozhin, see the excerpted memoir of Rabbi David Moses Joseph of Krynki, “The Volozhin Yeshiva,” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew, 394–95. On mitnagdic (as opposed to Hasidic) ultra orthodoxy, in which Volozhin was a major institution, see Immanuel Etkes, The Gaon and Rabbi Israel Salanter and the Musar Movement and Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Without cited evidence, Bernard D. Cooperman, in his Afterword to Rememberings, an abridged translation of Wengeroff’s Memoirs by Henny Wenkart, with other emendations of the original (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2000), 265–66, states that Yudl Epstein did not attend Volozhin or know its particular method of Talmud study and that he was not deeply learned. I accept Wengeroff’s assertion of her father’s association with Volozhin, not only because this is otherwise an outright fabrication, which is not characteristic of her, as I will elaborate,

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One but on the substantive grounds I discuss in this Introduction and much other evidence. Yudl Epstein was the very model of the learned householder (ba‘al ha-bayit) who put Talmud study above material gain that Volozhin strove to produce, in addition to lomdim, full-time Torah scholars. Thus, for example, Volozhin’s founder, Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin, recommended that ordinary householders divide the day between earning a living and Torah study, as opposed to scholars, who were to devote all but two hours a day to sacred study (Immanuel Etkes, Rabbi Israel Salanter and the Musar Movement: Seeking the Torah of Truth [Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1993], 47). This division seems to be exactly what Yudl Epstein enacted, according to Wengeroff’s description of his typical day. Yudl’s focus for his scholarly work on the Ein ya‘akov is also consistent with Rabbi Hayyim’s injunctions to his students (Etkes, Rabbi Israel Salanter, 52), as is his ritually washing his hands before taking even a few steps in the morning, as Wengeroff reports. Rabbi Hayyim died in 1821 before Yudl Epstein would have studied at Volozhin, but his method utterly stamped Volozhin under his son and successor, Isaac (“Itzele” of Volozhin). Though Yudl Epstein’s time in Volozhin would have preceded Wengeroff’s birth, or at least her conscious memory, she is clearly recording information passed down in the family, which had extensive ties to the statusladen Volozhin and its traditions and would surely have spoken of these with pride (see n. 17). We hear echoes of this, e.g., early in Memoirs (1:8), when Wengeroff cites stories her father used to tell of talmudic prodigies, one of whom was Reb Selmele, brother of Volozhin’s founder, Rabbi Hayyim. There is nothing to sustain the assertion of weak learning and much to indicate that Yudl Epstein was exactly what Wengeroff claimed: a very learned, studious layman. In the front matter to his Minkhas yehuda, Epstein states that he labored on the work for forty years, a claim I find credible given the magnitude of the work—over 6,000 entries in 489 pages (even if perhaps, he borrows the rabbinic convention in which the number forty signifies an extended period). Precisely because he ran a substantial business, completing such a work would take many years; he eventually hired an editor to help him. There is other, incidental evidence in Memoirs that substantiates the assertion of Yudl’s assiduous traditional study. In depicting the festival cycle of the year— not in other words, making a point of this—Wengeroff (1:111–12) describes her father’s yearly siyyum celebrations, marking his completion of a substantial body of study, something Epstein in his Introduction to Minkhas yehuda mentions as well, with various specifics. Yudl’s grand-nephew, Baruch Epstein (see n. 17), a rabbinic scholar and son and nephew of rabbinic scholars, refers to Yudl’s learning and works with respect and to Yudl as a friend and supporter of rabbinic scholars; see his Mekor baruch, 846–50. Ephraim Epstein, “Why,” 522, confirms what Wengeroff says about their father retiring from his business to study Talmud twelve to fourteen hours a day, not a likely pursuit unless Yudl had much prior learning. Ephraim himself converted to Christianity and was estranged from his father; he had no reason to report such things unless they were true.

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One Yudl Epstein says that Rabbi Avraham Schick solicited Kunmon bosem when Schick ­published his own commentary to Ein ya‘akov, as a further gloss to the work; it appeared in this manner (in 1847), which would not have occurred unless Epstein’s work was considered to have scholarly merit. As the subtitle on his edition of the Ein ya‘akov announces, Schick considered his work part of the “war of religion and faith,” directing it against the “sages of criticism” (hokhmei habikoret), who had begun “to critique the sages of the Talmud,” a reference to the maskilim; it is noteworthy that Epstein was invited to participate in such a venture. In his Introduction to Minkhas yehuda, Epstein reports that in 1817, he began studying for a year and a half with R. Tevvele, then a twenty-four-year-old rising star of the Volozhin yeshiva (and he, somewhat younger), an assertion Cooperman accepts. R. Tevvele was a pupil of Rabbi Hayyim, Volozhin’s founder and head, and went on to become head of the rabbinical court of Minsk, a major community. The tutelage of such a man would not have been wasted on a novice or inferior student, much less for a year and a half; products of Volozhin, in particular, did not suffer fools. Epstein’s works are mentioned among those of other rabbinic scholars in A. L. Feinstein’s hagiography of the Jewish community of Brisk, a town renowned for rabbinic scholarship, Ir tehillah (1868), 38. See also Steinman, Entsiklopedia shel galuyot, 155, in which Epstein and his works appear in a list of “the great [scholars]” of Brisk; and various particulars about Epstein and his works in Hillel Noah Maggid Steinschneider, Ir vilna (Vilna, 1900), 247–49, a book that describes the intellectual greats of Vilna. Epstein is classed there among “leaders and worthies” (not “rabbis,” he did not have rabbinic ordination), and he and his works are cited at length, with respect. A younger brother of Yudl’s, David, was a rabbi in Vilna. Cooperman states that Epstein “put a brave front” in Minkhas yehuda, for which he “could not obtain the standardized letters of rabbinic approval . . . regularly printed at the head of such religious works,” instead, simply republishing those that had appeared in his earlier work, Kunmon bosem. No author of a rabbinic work, certainly not one who wished to retain his rabbinic associations, would appropriate such approbations (haskamot) without authorization, but contrary to Cooperman’s statement, rather than trying to slip this by, the approbations appear in Minkhas yehuda with the explicit acknowledgment that they were “published in the pamphlet, Kunmon bosem.” Furthermore, while two approbations appeared in Kunmon bosem, a third appears in Minkhas yehuda—by R. Ze’ev Wolf, son of R. Mordechai Rottenburg. The dates of the first two haskamot are 1847 and 1848; Rottenburg’s is 1876, just prior to the publication of, and specific to, Minkhas ­yehuda. Cooperman states that Wengeroff asserts erroneously that her father wrote Minkhas yehuda in the 1840s, but she actually states (1:6) that he wrote Kunmon then, which is correct. She is incorrect in stating that he “published” (herausgegeben) Minkhas yehuda in the 1850s—a point when she was no longer living under his roof and seeing for herself what he was doing, though again, I accept Yudl’s testimony that he was working on it by then.

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One Cooperman asserts that Epstein was unable to sell his work, attaining a limited print run of only 250 copies because no “commercial distributor” would invest in it. I know of no “commercial” distribution of rabbinic (or other Jewish) works at this time; indeed, only two Jewish presses (in Vilna and Zhitomir, or Kiev) were then permitted to operate in all of Russia; see Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 92. Authors sold their works themselves, certainly with the help of the aforementioned haskamot, which was a good part of the reason to obtain them, the equivalent of today’s publisher’s “blurbs.” Epstein’s claim, echoed by Wengeroff, that he distributed copies of his book gratis to houses of study rather than hawking them, is consistent with his wealthy background and associated sense of noblesse oblige, as well as with Volozhin’s particular disdain for earning one’s living from Torah, on which, see Etkes, The Gaon. Rabbinic authors often donated rather than sold their works or contributed any earnings to charity (see, e.g., Steinschneider, Ir vilna, 249 n. 1). Poor and would-be scholars peddled their works in hopes of supporting themselves; examples of this abound, but one might cite the authors of tkhine collections, petitionary prayers meant primarily for women (on these works, see Chava Weissler, Voices, 5–35). Some male authors of tkhine collections so wished to capitalize on the genre’s popularity that they gave themselves female pseudonyms, the better to hawk them to women. Epstein’s circumstances were certainly straitened by 1879; having inherited a large sum upon his father, Semel’s, death, he says he was cheated out of this fortune and also suffered losses in the Polish insurrection of 1860. But he was hardly in the same class as authors peddling their works to keep starvation at bay. Indeed, while acknowledging that he was then supported by his children and sisters in Warsaw (he was also elderly by this point—he died around the time Minkhas ­yehuda was published), Yudl Epstein also says he lacked for nothing—and that he spent 1,000 rubles to bring the work to publication. Finally, Epstein’s stipulation that the books be kept in the study halls and not lent out seems to me the result of suspicion that borrowers might market them as their own (hence his statement, “I keep my reasons to myself”), rather than because of “desperation” for a memorial, as Cooperman asserts. Yudl Epstein, Wengeroff tells us, joined a khevre tehillim (Psalm-reciting society) of simple artisans around the time that the family moved from Old to New Brest (ca. 1840); he shows every indication of having been a humble, pious man, not one obsessed with self-memorialization. In his memoirs, Yehezkel Kotik relates that Semel Epstein’s children had a bitter dispute, requiring mediation, over their inheritance; this presumably, is what Yudl refers to when saying he was cheated of his share. It is noteworthy that Yudl himself does not name his siblings in this regard, an apparent act of piety, consistent with everything Wengeroff says of him; see Yehezkel Kotik, Meine zikhroynes (Warsaw, 1914), 68. Thanks to Professor David Assaf for alerting me to this passage in Kotik’s memoirs. 94.  Wengeroff, 1:128–29.

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One 95.  Ibid., 128. 96.  Ibid., 131–33. That it was the desire of boys in particular, which Wengeroff’s mother came to understand, is clear from the fact that this mother had her daughters tutored in Russian and German on her own initiative, while fiercely resisting such pursuits for her son and sons-in-law; see below. 97.  Wengeroff, 1:129. There was pervasive prejudice, even phobia, about Talmud in western and central European Christian cultures, dating to medieval times. This prejudice underwent a remarkably seamless transition to modernity and influenced variants of modern Judaism. Haskalah, west and east; the Reform movement in German lands; modernized Judaism in France—all internalized and expressed negative attitudes and even contempt for Talmud, emanating from the majority culture in which modern Jews were seeking acceptance. As John Klier states, this phobia made its way to Russia during the reign of Nicholas (“State Policies and the Conversion of Jews in Imperial Russia,” in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed. Robert Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001], 98). To cite but one, albeit extreme, example of its expression: Karaites (members of a medieval sect of Judaism that rejected the Talmud and rabbinic Judaism for their own traditions of interpretation and practice) were seen in the taxonomy of Russian philo-Semites (such existed) as superior to Jews on this account; cited in Zipperstein, Odessa, 52. The Hebrew Bible, which Christians venerated as sacred, if surpassed, Scripture, was a celebrated putative commonality between Christians and Jews, the better to serve as a bridge in an era of supposed accommodation and integration. Talmud, on the other hand, was peculiarly and essentially “Jewish.” It is important to note the existence of this hostility in tsarist Jewry policy and in maskilic programs, echoes of which appear several times in Wengeroff, who does not, however, share this bias, and indeed, explicitly counters it, surely the expression of her experience of life as Yudl Epstein’s daughter. 98.  Wengeroff, 2:16–19. In this vignette and elsewhere, Wengeroff shows herself keenly aware of the connection between ostensibly superficial behavioral adaptations and deeper cultural change, a theme to which she returns in her second volume. 99.  Wengeroff, 1:129–31. Wengeroff simply says that they were studying Don Carlos, without identifying Schiller as author: she expected her readers to be “enlightened” and recognize this on their own. On this, see further in my Introduction to Volume Two. In another passage, Wengeroff mentions Schiller and his Marquis Posa explicitly, as well as [Heinrich] Zschokke, a “dull Russian grammar,” and a “natural history text,” as the forbidden books that the “young people” studied instead of Talmud; 1:127–28. Zschokke was a German idealist novelist (and evangelical Christian thinker), author of Meditations on Life, Death, and Eternity, as well as, interestingly, a book on “the woman in the Old Testament.” He was “hugely influential in Jewish Eastern Europe” (Moseley, Being For Myself Alone, 362 and nn. 129, 131); see also Slutsky, Ha‘itonut, 292. 100.  Wengeroff, 1:139. 101.  Ibid., 1:134.

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One 102.  Ibid., 2:14–15. 103.  Cf. ibid., 1:12; 2:17. On “freethinker” Sabbath violation in Brisk, see 1:117. 104.  Ibid., 1:133. 105.  Ibid., 2:20–21. The term “fence around the Torah,” derives from the Mishnah tractate, Ethics of the Fathers (1:1) and refers to an added sphere of prohibition around explicit legal injunctions, thus, e.g., not touching candlesticks or matches— objects with no Sabbath permissible use—to protect against violation of an actual prohibition: kindling or extinguishing fire on the Sabbath. It is a common expression in halakhic usage and not surprising that Wengeroff would easily use it. 106.  Wengeroff, 1: 12–16; 1:51–53. On the cultural repercussions of improved transportation in Russian Jewish society in this time, see Zipperstein, Odessa, 16–17. 107.  Thus, for example, Mary Antin’s famous memoir, The Promised Land (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1912) was published when Antin was but thirty years old. The perceived breach in her experience of old world and new is explicit in her writing, a consciousness she says she already had while en route to the United States from Russia, when she was but a young teenager and already had begun to write her unfolding life story. The awareness of breach and loss of one’s old self is given particularly acute (and exquisite) expression in Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation (London: Penguin Books, 1990). Hoffman, too, attests that she was aware of the rupture as it was occurring when she was a young adolescent. A conscious sense of rupture and loss caused by migration that leads to memoir writing is also seen in the writing of German Jewish immigrants; see Monika Richarz, Juedisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte 1780–1871 (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1976) and Richarz, ed., Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Although a sense of rupture is a necessary element for the production of memoirs, it is not a sufficient one, of course; everyone experiences passages in life but not everyone writes about them, much less at length, or well. I touch on Wengeroff’s motivations for writing in my “Sins of Youth,” “Pauline Wengeroff,” and in more depth, in the Introduction to Volume Two. 108.  On rabbinic idealizations of female modesty and reticence, see Judith Hauptman, “Images of Women in the Talmud,” in Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 184–212; Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law; Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 8–32. For many examples of reality defying this ideal, see Grossman, 124–73, and elsewhere. 109.  Thus, I differ with Iris Parush who states that the conflicts the maskilim had with strong women—their wives, mothers-in-law—are evidence that “the patriarchal ideal in Jewish society, according to which women were to have inferior status, was coming into conflict with women’s actual position in the family” (­Parush, Women Reading, 53). While Parush and I agree that certain (not all) expressions of the patriarchal ideal conflict with the reality of traditional women’s behavior, I am saying that the Jewish patriarchal system itself, shaped by traditional

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One Jewish sources and by the Jews’ economic and political situation, generated assertive women while (for the most part) idealizing female modesty, diffidence, and deference. This pattern was well established in medieval Ashkenazic Jewish society, as Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, richly demonstrates; see esp. 102–53. 110.  Jewish women as breadwinners, even as “the” breadwinners in eastern Europe is a stereotype, with much to back up at least the former notion, since the growing poverty of the Jewish population in the nineteenth century meant that the labor of all was indispensable and that the emergence of a bourgeois ideal of women’s domestication and retreat from gainful labor was a phenomenon limited to the urbanized Jewish middle and upper classes, a minority of the population (cf. the very different circumstances in Jewish society in Germany and France; see Marion Kaplan, Jewish Middle Class and Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation, respectively). On women as breadwinners in eastern Europe, see Parush, 38–41 and Sydney Stahl Weinberg, World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Immigrant Women (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), and for a very specific variant of this phenomenon, often generalized, erroneously, to eastern European Jewish society as a whole, see Immanuel Etkes, “Marriage and Torah Study Among the ­L omdim in Lithuania in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. David Kraemer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 153–78. On female assertiveness in traditional Jewish cultures, see A. Grossman, Pious and Rebellious (the very title of whose book points to the phenomenon); Susan Starr Sered, Women as Ritual Experts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Weissler, Voices; Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). As noted in this Introduction, tyrannical and emasculating mothers-in-law and wives are staple figures in maskilic autobiography and memoir from the inception of the genre with Solomon Maimon’s memoirs. Assertive and/or dominating women are familiar tropes in Yiddish fiction, as well. See, in addition to literature previously cited, T. Cohen, Ha’ahat ahuvah; Ruth Adler, Women of the Shtetl Through the Eyes of Y. L. Peretz (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980); Chaim Grade, Rabbis and Wives (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Israel Joshua Singer, Of a World That Is No More: A Tender Memoir (New York: Vanguard Press, 1970), see, e.g., 29–37. One wonders how Wengeroff’s brothers-in-law would have depicted Wengeroff’s mother, given what Wengeroff says about her spying on them and her persecution of their secular intellectual pursuits. At the very least, she tells us they tried to hide their activities in order to avoid scenes with her. 111.  On Wengeroff’s grandmother-in-law, see 2:86–94. Her grandfather-in-law, by contrast, was a kindly man who was “completely devoted” to his wife, to whom he “bent his will . . . because he knew that she was more than a match for him in every respect.” While he, too, was active in the (inn) business, “the final word was hers. . . . In ordinary life,” Wengeroff says, the “small, stooped man” was “without initiative, without energy,” coming to life only in prayer. Despite occasional shows of severity toward the grandchildren, no one feared him, Wengeroff says.

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One 112.  Glikl’s entire work testifies to her enterprising, assertive personality—as does the fact of her writing it. As a widow, Glikl’s grandmother established a gold and silver lace-making business, and then, while living with Glikl’s parents, turned an allowance from Glikl’s father into a profitable loan business, whose proceeds she offered back to him on her deathbed; see in the Lowenthal edition, 15–21. 113.  On this, see further in this Introduction; A. Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, esp. 102–53; cf. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 3: The Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) and Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, An Abridgement in One Volume, rev. and ed. Jacob Lassner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 333–467; Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), in particular, 177–95; ­David M. Feldman, Marital Relations, Birth Control, and Abortion in Jewish Law (New York: Schocken Books, 1974). 114.  Aside from the material about Glikl Hameln and her family, who were by no means exceptional for their class, A. Grossman and before him, Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages (New York: Feldheim, 1964), provide much evidence of women’s economic activities and power in the Middle Ages, in both Ashkenaz (Franco-Germany) and Spain, precisely during times of economic well-being. With some important differences, Goitein establishes this as well for the medieval Jewries of the Mediterranean under Islamic rule. 115.  On this, see R. Biale and A. Grossman. 116.  Wengeroff, 1:42. 117.  In the (original) 1908 edition, Wengeroff says of this ritual (“taking khale”) merely that “it is probably [done] to recall the burnt offering of biblical times”; 1:43. In the next (1913) edition, however, this had been corrected to “This was to recall the part due the priest” (1913 edition, 1:44). Unfortunately, we have no information about the process by which the manuscript was revised; who corrected Wengeroff? There is much to indicate that Wengeroff’s manuscript did not undergo stylistic, editorial revision, as I will discuss in the Introduction to Volume Two. This correction, more likely, came from a (male) family member or friend. The commandment of taking khale falls on anyone who bakes, not women per se. In the home, however, it became a female-associated ritual. 118.  Wengeroff, 1:40–146. 119.  Ibid., 1:63. 120.  Ibid., 1:87–88. 121.  Ibid., 1:99–100. On this ritual, see Chava Weissler, “‘For the Human Soul in the Lamp of the Lord’: The Tkhine for ‘Laying Wicks’ by Sarah bas Tovim,” POLIN 10 (1997): 40–65, and Weissler, Voices, 126–46. 122.  Sered, Women as Ritual Experts. 123.  See Wengeroff’s references to zogerkes, reiseles, and gollerkes in 1:99, 106, 183. 124.  To be clear: the power accorded women in this ritual is the power to designate themselves as sexual objects to men, a preordained relationship they had no authority to alter. This ritual is a perfect expression of the complex ways that

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One women are implicated and made agents in their own objectification and suppression in patriarchal religion. 125.  See, e.g., the entries on marriage and women’s hair shearing and head covering—or lack thereof, in: J. D. Eisenstein, Otsar denim u’minhagim (Tel-Aviv: Shiloh, 1975); Israel Abraham, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1960); Abraham Chill, The Minhagim: The Customs and Ceremonies of Judaism, Their Origins and Rational (New York: Sefer Hermon Press, 1979), 275–90; Scott-Martin Kosofsky, The Book of Customs: A Complete Handbook for the Jewish Year (San Francisco: Harper Press, 2004); “Marriage,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 11:1025–51; Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 284–90; Diane K. Roskies and David G. Roskies, The Shtetl Book (New York: Ktav, 1975, 1979). There is a brief mention of the bride’s head shearing and covering in the memoir of Sh. Zabludovitsh in From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry, ed. Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin (New York: Schocken, 1983), 92; it is not clear if Zabludovitsh was a woman or a man. By contrast, we do see mention of the bride’s hair shearing in memoirs from and fiction about East European Jewish society of this time, a subject to which Iris Parush (Reading Women, 164–65), who cites Wengeroff at length, gives serious attention; see also Parush’s citation (p.51) of the autobiography of A. B. Gottlober, an important early maskil, who describes the preparation of the bride on the day of the wedding and her hair being shorn by other women, likening her to an “ewe . . . before the shearers.” In his memoirs, Yehezkel Kotik recalls repeatedly tormenting his child-bride (he too, was a child), over her “shaven skull” (“Feh! You look scabby. Scabby!”); Kotik, Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, 181–82. In his novel Yoshe Kalb, Isaac Bashevis Singer gives a chilling description of the shearing of the bride by women who recall “their own terror” when they had undergone this “withering,” referring to the shearing as a necessary “sacrifice”; Singer too, likens the sight to that of “a new-shorn lamb” (Singer, Yoshe Kalb [New York: Lancer Books, 1955], 35–36). On the ritual hair cutting and hair cut of boys, traditionally first done at the age of three, and the contrast with traditional rituals regarding the hair of women, see my “Ritual,” in Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1150–55. 126.  Wengeroff, 2:74–75. The memoirs of the Zionist political activist and feminist Puah Rakowski (1865–1955) mention the “big wig” she was fitted with on the morrow of her wedding as part of the degradation and depression she experienced in an arranged, teenage marriage against her will; My Life as a Radical Jewish Woman, ed. Paula E. Hyman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 36. 127.  See Rashi on Berakhot 8b, Yoma 81b, and Rosh Hashanah 9b; cf. Sukkah 28; Rabbi Moshe Taragin, “The Mitzva to Eat on Erev Yom Kippur,” The Israel Koschitzky Virtual Beit Midrash (1997). 128.  Wengeroff, 1:102. 129.  Ibid., 1:175. 130.  Thus, e.g., several times Marion Kaplan states or implies that because of

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One their superfluousness to the synagogue service and exclusion from its ritual functions, women did not attend or were “excluded”; had radically fewer commandments considered binding on them than men; and lacked a set age (unlike boys) at which the commandments became binding, rendering them adults under rabbinic law; Jewish Middle Class, 41–42, 45, 64–65, 67, 68. On women and the synagogue, see Susan Grossman and Rivka Haut, eds., Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992); A. Grossman, Pious and Rebellious, 180–88. Glikl Hameln’s memoirs are replete with matter-of-fact references to her presence and that of other women, like her daughter Esther in the synagogue, including on weekdays. The fact of women prayer leaders in the synagogue, on which, see this Introduction and n. 135, itself testifies to the presence of women there. For brief clarification of other status-obligation issues for women in rabbinic law, see Shulamit Magnus, “Ritual,” in Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, eds. Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore (NY: Routledge, 1997), II:50–54, and at length, Rachel Biale, Jewish Women and Jewish Law. 131.  Wengeroff, 1:61. 132.  Ibid., 1:97. 133.  Ibid., 2:92. 134.  Ibid., 1:106–7. The institution of women prayer leaders in the women’s section of the synagogue in Ashkenazic practice is at least medieval in provenance; see S. Grossman and Haut, Daughters of the King; A. Grossman, Pious and Rebellious; Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages; C. Weissler, Voices. 135.  On the traditional education of girls in eastern Europe and the connection between wealth and the likelihood of girls receiving tutoring and/or schooling, see Shaul Stampfer, “Gender Differentiation and Education of the Jewish Woman in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe,” in From Shtetl to Socialism: Studies from Polin, ed. Antony Polonsky (London: Littman Library, 1993): 187–211. On poor girls being taught a trade and put to work at the expense of education, see Eliyana Adler, “Educational Options for Jewish Girls in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” POLIN 15 (2002): 304–5, 307. On women’s literacy in general, see, in addition to Stampfer, Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women. On the relatively high levels of rabbinic learning among women in the Lithuanian/Volozhin traditions, see ­Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage; Yaffa Eliach, There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1998), 90–117; Feinkind, Froyen-rebbeim. Further, M. Baraisha, “Rabbanei brisk ha-aharonim,” 138, in Entsiklopedia shel galuyot, ed. Steinman (see citation below) in a section entitled, “Ha-rabbanit mibrisk,” tells of the very learned second wife of Rabbi Joshua Diskin, who issued rabbinic rulings (obviously, to Jews who received them as such). Wengeroff had one remarkable such female rabbinic scholar in her own family. Her cousin, Barukh HaLevi Epstein (see n. 17), relates a remarkable account about his “scholarly” Aunt Reyne Batyah, daughter of Rabbi Isaac, the head of the Volozhin yeshiva after Rabbi Hayyim. This aunt was not only very learned in rabbinic sources but openly and bitterly

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One disputed the low status of women in rabbinic law, particularly, the ruling that excluded them from Talmud study. See B. Epstein, Mekor baruch, 1949–50 and translated excerpts in Parush, 138–39; Stampfer, “Gender Differentiation,” 199–200; Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 173–77. One source attributes the founding of a new sort of learning institution, the kloyz, to a wealthy woman, Blumke, in Minsk, who was a known “patroness” of traditional Jewish learning and who funded this prayer room and study hall and all its students, at her own expense; see Rabbi David Moses Joseph of Krynki, “The Volozhin Yeshiva (1909),” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew, 394. Blumke would have done this to earn “merit” for vicarious Torah study at this advanced level, enabling behavior that traditional Jewish culture encouraged and valorized in pious women as far back as the Talmud; see, e.g., Berakhot 17a and the famous story of Rachel, the wife of the great talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva, in Ketubot 62b. Shmuel Niger notes that Wengeroff and Glikl Hameln received “extensive educations that included instruction in Hebrew,” the information about Wengeroff apparently being his deduction from the material in Memoirs (he does not cite an external source); Niger, “Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader,” trans. and abr. by Sheva Zucker, in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 73. We should not exaggerate this learning, however. Wengeroff clearly did not know the source and meaning of the practice of burning a piece of dough during baking until someone had corrected her; see above, n. 117. That Wengeroff would know the ritual practice but not the theory behind it is not surprising; women were to be given practical, not theoretical knowledge, though they sometimes picked up the latter, particularly in scholarly households where such matters were topics of conversation. By this standard, Wengeroff shows herself having a more-than-basic level of knowledge. 136.  Wengeroff, 1:7–8. 137.  On the education of traditional girls in eastern Europe, see Shaul Stampfer, “Gender Differentiation.” As Stampfer notes on 187, “There is a widely held misconception that, in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, Jewish women were relatively ignorant from a Jewish point of view while many received a good general education.” See too, Eliyana Adler, “Women’s Education in the Pages of the Russian Jewish Press.” See 1:67–84 for Wengeroff’s depiction of her kheder experience. 138.  Wengeroff, 1:85. For her mother’s traditional reading habits, n. 26. 139.  See n. 135 regarding female learning in the mitnagdic world. On women and religious learning and leadership in the Hasidic world, see Nathaniel Deutsch, The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Isaac Bashevis Singer’s famous novella Yentl, The Yeshiva Boy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962) of course explores the theme of a very learned woman, taught at first by her father, who then obtains yeshiva education by masquerading as a male. 140.  Wengeroff, 2:95. 141.  Adin Steinsaltz’s paraphrase (The Essential Talmud [New York: Bantam,

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One 1970], 140) of the (Jerusalem) Talmud, Peah 15c. See also A. Grossman, 12, 22, 131–33, 154–73; R. Biale, 10–43; Stampfer; Adler; Hyman; and Parush. 142.  See in the Lowenthal translation, 11–12. 143.  Thus, the classic statement of Rabbi Eliezer in the Mishnah (codified ca. 200 c.e.) that even wealthy wives should be compelled to work, “for idleness leads to immorality”; Mishnah Ketubot 5:5. 144.  On women’s economic activities and productivity in medieval Jewish societies in Europe and the Middle East, see A. Grossman and Finkelstein, 377–78. On the necessity of Jewish economic contributions and wealth for basic tolerance and security, a fundamental theme in medieval and modern Jewish history, see my Jewish Emancipation in a German City: Cologne, 1798–1871 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Misconceptions about women’s work in traditional Jewish society are very common and of several, sometimes conflicting, types. Aside from the stereotype of women working instead of men, we also see women’s work portrayed as normal, demanding, and independent of men’s activities—yet simultaneously as auxiliary (a “help”) to that of men; see, e.g., numerous such statements in Sydney Stahl Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers. 145.  Wengeroff, 1:17–18. 146.  Ibid., 2:86 and 98. 147.  Ibid., 2:163–67. 148.  On this tkhine, see Weissler, Voices, 40, 73, 179–80. Rabbinic law rules women exempt from some (though not all, as is sometimes asserted), positive, time-bound commandments (such as ritual use of the etrog on the Tabernacles holiday or daily wearing of ritual fringes), an exemption with fundamental, negative repercussions in a system in which divine obligation confers status and power, the voluntary assumption of which is valued at a lower level. On this exemption and its implications, see Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law; my “Ritual,” 1150–55. 149.  The “adornment” value of certain secular learning and attainment for girls was a reigning value of European bourgeois society that traditional Jews readily adopted—significantly, without any of the sturm und drang about “alien culture” that so rocked Jewish society regarding haskalah. On this larger cultural phenomenon in a modernizing, upwardly mobile Jewish society, see Marion Kaplan, Jewish Middle Class. 150.  See Parush, Reading Women. Previous scholars also observed that secular study caused Jewish girls to become alienated from Jewish tradition; see, e.g., ­Yehuda Slutsky, Sefer zikaron, 1:50, but Parush studies and documents this phenomenon in detail. However, since this phenomenon was not new in Jewish society, my point is that it was not exposure to European culture per se, but the nineteenth-century context that gave this exposure its disintegrative force. 151.  Wengeroff, 1:2, 7. Note that arranging the formal education of the girls is under the mother’s aegis, as such education is under the father’s for boys. 152.  Wengeroff, 2:29–30. 153.  On Yiddish literature available to women in Wengeroff’s time (and ear-

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One lier), see Shmuel Niger, “Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader,” in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. Judith Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 70–90. The tkhines of course, were composed in Yiddish; on this genre see Solomon Freehof, “Devotional Literature in the Vernacular (Judeo-German, prior to the Reform Movement),” Central Conference of American Rabbis 33 (1923): 375–424, as well as C. Weissler, Voices. On Jewish reading of Centura Ventura, Maaseh Bove, and the Yiddish-language version of The Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, see Parush, 139–40. The Bobbe meisses Wengeroff refers to is the Yiddish of a Russian version of a medieval European, versed romance, Sir Beves of Hamtoun, on which, see Gabriella Safran, Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 41–42, 213 nn. 59–60. Jewish literary figures, such as Mendel Mokher Sforim and Yisroel Aksenfeld, considered this type of pulp fiction “junk” (shund) and roundly denounced it. If Wengeroff was aware of this assessment, she neither incorporates it into her retrospective account of her reading (she does not apologize for having read such works), nor censors her recorded memory of her reading habits—effectively, giving a different assessment. 154.  Parush, Reading Women, 176, also notes Wengeroff and her female friends being the source of enlightenment about, and transmission of, Schiller to the would-be maskilim of Brisk, though she still reads Wengeroff as a traditionalist (if one with “cracks”), who disapproved of modernity; see 175–77. On such and other misreadings and regarding Wengeroff’s complicity in her family’s acculturation, see my “Sins of Youth” and Introduction to Volume Two of this edition. On Schiller’s importance in German Jewish culture in the era of emancipation and hopedfor integration, see Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism, 7, 44; Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews, A Dual Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 26–27 and the many references in M. Kaplan, Jewish Middle Class. 155.  Wengeroff, 2:97. The spelling here is as it appears in Wengeroff’s Memoirs. She lists these authors by last name only (clearly expecting her readers to identify the references) because her main point is her own reading. The references are to the iconic Friedrich Schiller, immensely popular with modernizing German and German-speaking Jews for his espousal of the notion of a universal human nature capable of moral progress; August von Kotzebue, a prolific German dramatist who wrote novels, plays, stories, and autobiographical works; and Edward Lytton Bulwer, a popular English (not German) novelist, poet, playwright, and politician; friend of Benjamin Disraeli (whom Wengeroff also cites elsewhere in her memoirs), known for his florid style. My thanks to Professors Tom Newlin and Gabriella Safran for consulting about Zhukovsky and to Professor Safran for the characterization of his verse, cited above. 156.  On the position of Russian maskilim and Jewishly identified Russian Jewish intellectuals to Jews learning Russian, see Slutsky, Ha‘itonut; Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale; Steven J. Zipperstein, Odessa; and Michael Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil. On general Jewish ignorance of Russian for much of the

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One nineteenth century, except for a small class of merchants and their clients who did business with Moscow and St. Petersburg and served as contractors for the government or as liquor concessionaires, see Slutsky, Ha‘itonut, 16–19. 157.  Wengeroff, 2:40, 97. 158.  On this, see my “Sins of Youth,” and Introduction to Volume Two. 159.  Anecdotes about expressed favoritism for the birth of boys and laments over that of girls are legion in memoirs, fiction, and oral histories from eastern Europe and in anthropological studies of Jewish life there and are expressed clearly in tkhines that women used. To cite but a few examples, see the references to such sentiments by: Sydney Stahl Weinberg’s informants in The World of Our Mothers; Isaac Bashevis Singer’s classic Yentl the Yeshiva Boy (whose story line is based on Singer’s sister Deborah’s frustrated life); and Singer’s memoir In My Father’s Court (New York: Signet, 1967); Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 309; Tracy Guren Klirs, The Merit of Our Mothers: A Bilingual Anthology of Jewish Women’s Prayers (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1992), 112; and Weissler, Voices, 66–75 and the literature cited there. Notably, Glikl Hameln, in detailing the births of her children, does not distinguish in happiness between the arrival of girls and boys, nor do her depictions of the relationships she and her husband had with their children betray favoritism on the basis of gender. On the contrary, she is openly and severely critical of one ne’er-do-well son (Nathan) and warmly praising and clearly emotionally close to a responsible, upstanding daughter (Esther). Glikl also gives a remarkable (to us) description of her husband’s distraught separation from a young daughter quarantined because of suspected plague. In her portrayal, his behavior is the natural reaction of a loving father: she depicts but does not comment on it, indicating that to her, such attachment and emotional effusion by a father to a child/daughter are entirely normal. It is surely impossible to reconstruct how common the prejudice about having daughters vs. sons actually was in Jewish society, and the ways in which it was expressed and enacted (there is no doubt that it was a normative prejudice), and we surely cannot generalize on the basis of two women’s memoirs. But neither can we dismiss the observation that such prejudice was not necessary or ubiquitous; its absence in both these cases is the more notable for being unremarked. 160.  Thus, Wengeroff recalls escaping a threatened thrashing by her father when she was a young child, exclaiming, “But I am Pessele!”—sure he had mistaken her identity because he would otherwise never lay a hand on her; he was so charmed by her protest, and its assumption, that he did relent. Wengeroff recalls her father introducing her to the matchmaker sent by the Wengeroffs to investigate her suitability with a pleased, “This is my Pessele.” Finally, her father extends allimportant absolution when Wengeroff gives up her kosher kitchen, saying, it was reported to Wengeroff, that “if my Pessele has done this, it was because she had to” (about which absolution, see my “Sins of Youth,” and Introduction to Volume Two); Wengeroff, 1:11; 2:34, 177. 161.  Wengeroff, 1:53, 54.

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One 162.  Ibid., 1:135. 163.  On Nicholas’s good looks, see the references and illustration in W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980) and Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 1–3 and n. 4. As several diplomats put it, “Nicholas I was a most imposing personage, and was considered the most perfect specimen, physically speaking, in all of Europe. Colossal in stature; with a face such as one finds on a Greek coin. . . . he bore himself like a god. . . . whenever I saw him . . . there was forced to my lips the thought: ‘You are the most majestic being ever created,’” and “He is one of the handsomest men I ever saw . . . ‘the front of Jove himself. . . .’”; cited in Riasanovsky, who notes, “Two images stand out in numerous descriptions of Nicholas I: his physical beauty and his majestic bearing, the two blending perfectly to produce one overwhelming impression. Friend and foe alike were affected by the powerful presence of the emperor, and some were smitten by it.” All this certainly corresponds with Wengeroff’s purported eyewitness memory of seeing this Tsar, though the strangeness of a Jew speaking of him in this way, as noted, cannot be overemphasized. 164.  Wengeroff, 1:185–200. Something that we should not assume Wengeroff knew is that maskilim provided the impetus behind the tsarist decree against Jewish dress; see in addition to the literature on Russian Jewry previously cited, Leder­ hendler, Modern Jewish Politics, 97–98; Raphael Mahler, Divrei yemei yisrael dorot acharonim, vol. 2 (1815–1848), Book One: Eastern Europe (Merhavia, Israel: Merhavia Publishing, 1970), 107–9, and Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment, 197–200 (on implementation of this decree in Poland); S. J. Fuenn, “The Need for Enlightenment” (1849) and “Memorandum on the organization of the Jewish people in Russia sent by a group of maskilim to district governors in the Pale of Settlement (1841),” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 382, 385 (point 8), respectively. 165.  Wengeroff, 1:151–55. We do not know how many people were affected by the order to demolish Old Brest; about a decade later, in 1847, there were 8,636 Jews in the district of Brest-Litovsk (Steinman, Entsiklopedia shel galuyot, 2:425), most of whom doubtless lived in the city, whose population was largely Jewish (Aron Taenzer, Die Geschichte der Juden in Brest-Litovsk [Berlin, 1918], 42). 166.  There has been much recent discussion and revision of Russian Jewish historiography about the intentions of tsarist Jewish policy, away from earlier typifications of this policy as unidimensionally hostile and specifically, conversionist, or even coherent; see Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas, and Stanislawski, “Russian Jewry, the Russian State”; John D. Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews, and Klier, “State Policies,” 92–114; cf. S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1920); “Nicholas,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 12:1138–39; Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition, 29; Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia. For an excerpt from Nicholas’s 1827 “Statutes Regarding the Military Service of Jews” and from the 1835 decree delineating the Pale of Settlement, see Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 377–78, 379. Whatever the recent scholarly findings,

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One the overwhelming Jewish popular perception was that the Jewish policy of the Russian government, and particularly that of Nicholas, was resolutely Jew-hating and specifically, conversionist. It is clear that Wengeroff was aware of this latter perception since she mentions it in her depiction of the popular reception of Lilienthal. Our primary interest here is this perception—and Wengeroff’s divergence from it. 167.  On Nicholas as “drill-master,” see W. Bruce Lincoln, 48 and Riasanovsky, 8–9, who says (9), “It was especially at large-scale military reviews that Nicholas I experienced rapture, almost ecstasy.” The comment about Nicholas’s Russia as in a “state of siege,” is cited in Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas, 15. The following draws heavily on Stanislawski. 168.  Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas, 15. On the role of the army in Nicholas’s reign and for a social history of life in its ranks, including the misery of peasant recruits, see Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1990). On the use of cantonist battalions for social engineering, directed at orphans and foundlings, see David. L. Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 169.  Nicholas I, quoted in Lincoln, 289; Klier, “State Policies,” 97. 170.  See Frederick Kagan, The Military Reforms of Nicholas I: The Origins of the Modern Russian Army (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); John Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Kimerling Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier; Yohanan PetrovskyShtern, “Jews in the Russian Army: Through the Military Towards Modernity (1827–1914)” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2001); Klier, “State Policies,” 99. 171.  Klier, “State Policies,” 97, 98, 99. As Klier (99) states, “There is no question that recruitment of Jewish minors into the army became the focus of a concerted effort to convert Jews to Christianity.” 172.  Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “‘The Guardians of Faith’: Jewish Traditional Societies in the Russian Army: The Case of the 35th Briansk Regiment,” in The Military and Society in Russia, 1450–1917, ed. Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 413–39; Stanislawski, Psalms for the Tsar: A Minute-Book of a Psalms Society in the Russian Army, 1864–1867 (New York: Yeshiva University, 1988); Klier, “State Policies,” 92–112. Olga Litvak, “The Literary Response to Conscription: Individuality and Authority in the Russian-Jewish Enlightenment” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1999), 19–51 and Klier, “State Policies,” show that converted Jews, once out of military service, could petition for and achieve reversion to Judaism, complaining that their baptisms had been coerced. 173.  Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 25. 174.  Dawidowicz, Golden Tradition, 30. On the conversion estimates, cf. Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 28, n. 15. Petrovsky-Shtern, “Guardians,” cites military statistics showing that “even in the years of the most aggressive missionary campaign in the army, the percentage of baptized Jewish soldiers did not exceed one percent”—but this apparently refers to the Jewish percent of the total number of converts in the entire Russian military, not the percent of Jewish draftees—much

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One less cantonists—who were converted (in any case, we would need total numbers and relative breakdowns to appreciate what the one-percent figure really signifies). As Petrovsky-Shtern (423) notes, the percentage of Jews converted was “far lower in regiments where Jews were drafted as adults, rather than as children.” 175.  Stanislawski, 26; see further, Stanislawski’s citation (27) of another eyewitness report, by the Russian reformer Alexander Herzen from 1835. 176.  Stanislawski, 25. For the brutality of treatment to cantonist recruits in general, see Kimerling Wirtschafter, From Serf to Russian Soldier, and Kimerling Wirtschafter, “Soldiers’ Children, 1719–1856: A Study of Social Engineering in Imperial Russia,” Forschungen zur osteuropaischen Geschichte 30 (1982): 61–136; David Ransel, Mothers of Misery. 177.  Kotik, Journey, 233–35. 178.  Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia, 1:74. 179.  Cited in Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas, 13. For one story of rabbinic contempt for and passive resistance to Nicholas’s decrees (in this case, ordering a rabbi to censor rabbinic works for the regime; the rabbi simply ignored it), see Slutsky, Sefer zikaron, 1:269. 180.  Wengeroff, 2:155–60. Tales of the horrors of the cantonist era were told for generations; for a study of the complex ways that nineteenth-century Russian Jewish writers in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian used the motif of the cantonists, see Olga Litvak, “Literary Response.” While Litvak shows that maskilim and their literary successors saw compulsory Jewish service in the Russian military as a necessary step in a salutary process of individuation and civic rapprochement with Russian society, a “marker of political progress” (54), not even maskilim and other Jewish intellectuals portrayed the cantonist episode as anything but horrific for draftees and their families and as an expression of egregious Jewish communal abuse (a larger maskilic theme, of course); see, e.g., 59–60; 66. For two quite different works in which we see later echoes of the cantonist trauma, see Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Hanukkah in the Poorhouse,” in his The Power of Light: Eight Stories for Hanukkah (New York: Harper and Collins, 1980), 75–87, and the memoirs of Shmaryahu Levin, Zionist leader and author, who tells of the son of a kidnapped (converted) cantonist whom Levin encountered while serving in the army. This man, an officer, Levin reports, was kind and solicitous to Jewish soldiers (among other anomalous behaviors), doing this, he finally tearfully admitted to Levin, in fulfillment of his Jewish-born father’s dying wish; cited in Slutsky, Sefer zikaron, 250–53. The sources in Ginsburg and Marek are Yiddish; for a translated source about community abuses in implementing the draft quota and a Jewish folksong on this subject, see Roskies and Roskies, The Shtetl Book, 99–103. 181.  Wengeroff, 1:19. In Evangelizing the American Jew (New York: Jonathan David, 1978), 93, David Max Einhorn says that Ephraim Epstein “came to America from Russia in 1850 to escape military service,” but this is simply not credible given everything we know of the Epsteins’ wealth and privileged connections to the government. Ephraim may have stated this reason for his emigration; it would

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One have been a common motive that male Jewish immigrants from Russia would have given and lent his emigration a righteous air, as opposed to highlighting the marital unhappiness that actually occasioned it. 182.  Wengeroff, 1:24. 183.  On Minsk as a center of Jewish socialism, see Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 171, 191–92, 200, 204, 213, 249, 254, 313; Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements (New York: Schocken, 1977), 15, 226, 227, 272, and the numerous references in Medem, Memoirs. Interestingly, while Wengeroff does not treat the existence, much less interrogate the causes for Jewish poverty, she does note the existence of classes in Jewish society, though she takes this, too, for granted and merely relates, e.g., how wealth determined which type of carriage people used for transportation; see 1:12–17. 184.  See Wengeroff, 1:38–39. 185.  Ibid., 1:147. Compare this depiction of Nicholas with that of Yisrael Kapelov’s father, as Kapelov recalls in his memoir, “A mol iz geven” (which merits citation in transliteration, as well as translation from the Hebrew and Yiddish): Be‘einai ra’isi di vildigkeit un di akhzorius fun nikolayen, yimah shmo ve zikhro! Der tzorer ha yehudim iz a mol gekumen zu uns in bobruisk oyf a groysser manovre . . . (“With my own eyes I saw the wildness and cruelty of Nicholas [note the lack of ­title—SM], may his name and memory be erased! This persecutor of the Jews came to us in Bobruisk once for a grand maneuver.”) 186.  Russian Jewish fear and hatred of Nicholas are well documented. A few examples from Wengeroff’s hometowns that could easily be multiplied from other sites: Yosef Eisenstadt, “Bniyat ha-metsudah,” in Slutsky, Sefer zikaron, 223, records that when a fortress was being built in Bobruisk, Nicholas periodically came to check on the work. Jewish children would gather to watch but were warned off by the author’s grandfather with the words: “kinder, kriecht nit in feyer” (“children, don’t enter fire”). In his memoirs of Bobruisk, Yisrael Kapelov records his father’s story of a visit Nicholas paid to the town and the Tsar’s public humiliation of a Jewish woman, which prompted the woman’s father to swear that if he had a pistol, he would have shot the Tsar as one would “a mad dog”; “A mol iz geven,” in Slutsky, Sefer zikaron, 241–42. A memoir from Brisk recounts a story of Nicholas on one of his inspection tours encountering a Jewish man still wearing traditional dress after this had been outlawed and ordering his police escort to nail the head covering to the man’s head if he were ever caught wearing it again; the memoir, by M. Kaplan, is entitled, “The Tsar’s Violence” (Aritsuto shel ha-tsar), Entsiklopedia shel galuyot, 615. 187.  It is important to note that there was a traditional Jewish genre of obsequiousness toward governmental authorities, even (indeed, especially) toward oppressive ones, including tsarist governments and that of Nicholas I. It is important, therefore, to distinguish between such traditional expression about Nicholas, on the one hand, and that of maskilim and Wengeroff, on the other. Pious obsequiousness toward tsars came in exaggerated rabbinic expressions of awe and blessing and in prayer

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One for God’s blessing, a genre known as melitsa, also used toward venerated, or feared, Jews, like great rabbis or very wealthy and powerful communal figures. Wengeroff’s words are not phrased in this language but rather, as we have noted, in a breathy effusion focusing on the tsar and tsarevich’s looks. The fact that she writes effusively, rather than with formulaic fear and awe, certainly reflects her and her family’s distance from the experience and feelings of average Jews—which of course, alone does not put her in the maskilic camp. The substance of what she says about Nicholas’s reforms, however, as I argue, below, definitively puts her in the maskilic, rather than the traditionalist, camp (at least, on this important question). On maskilic rationalization and praise of Nicholas’s policies and overall relationship to the regime (what Olga Litvak calls “the maskilic romance with the state”), see Lederhendler, Modern Jewish Politics (who cites a maskilic eulogy for Nicholas, 58–153); Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas and Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil, 146–73; Mordechai Levin, Arkhei hevrah; Litvak, “Literary Response” (here, 33); Israel Bartal, The Jews of Eastern Europe: 1772–1881 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 90–101; and the pronouncements of maskilim cited in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 381–86, 400–403. For a later period, see Stanislawski’s Psalms for the Tsar. There are some revealing statements about Nicholas from two other Brisk Jews that further set Wengeroff’s in relief. One is M. Kaplan (“Yehudei brisk ba’me’ah ha-yud tet,” in Entsiklopedia shel galuyot, 2:76–77), who speaks of the behavior of the Brest Jewish community authorities when they built a new synagogue to replace the one demolished in the old city. As the building was to begin, its architectural plan was submitted to various government authorities and ultimately, to Nicholas (any building project over 10,000 rubles required his approval; Feinstein, Ir tehilla, 209). Nicholas disliked it and noted in his own writing, “Not good looking. The synagogue should be built on the pattern of the one in Vienna.” Community leaders then dispatched an emissary to obtain the plans of that edifice, which the Tsar approved. When the synagogue was built, a black marble plaque was hung on which the following was inscribed: “The synagogue was built according to the plan and command of Tsar Nicholas I.” We can only speculate about the multiple messages—irony, contempt—of such a dedication by the leaders of Brest’s Jewish community (or even the message embodied in the blackness of the marble?). A. L. Feinstein, the other Jew we reference, whose history of Jewish Brisk we have cited, also gives an account of this affair (which does not mention the plaque). His narrative is full of traditional servile expressions in rabbinic idiom: “the Tsar, may his majesty be exalted, may his soul rest in Paradise” (Nicholas died in 1855)—the stuff of fear and censorship. He writes as if ordering a revised, “improved” synagogue was an act of imperial beneficence. The government did give the Jews an allotted sum in damages for the demolished synagogue (cf. Feinstein, 208, 209; Kaplan, 76; Taenzer, 46). But both Feinstein and Taenzer (44 and 47), state that this was far less than what was required to complete the building and that it took years to raise the remaining funds. The synagogue was demolished in 1842; permission to rebuild came from St. Petersburg only in 1851. The synagogue structure was completed in

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One 1862, but its interior was not completed until 1878; Taenzer, 47–48. Of course, ordering the synagogue modeled on that of Vienna was no act of beneficence but an expression of Nicholas’s larger desire to see “his” traditional Jews reformed along the lines of model, Europeanized Jewries to the west, as we have discussed. Feinstein was an older contemporary of Wengeroff’s, born in 1822. He wrote an autobiographical essay (“Toldotai,” in Entsiklopedia shel galuyot, 2:283–86; see also M. Kaplan, “Yehudei brisk ba’me’ah ha-yud tet,” ibid., 2:78, and there in the first note with an asterisk; Michal Pukhachevsky, “Pirkei avar, beit avotai bevrisk,” ibid., 2:173–74). As these sources make clear, Feinstein was educated traditionally; learned Russian, Polish, and German because he worked for contractors to the government; and also read Hebrew literature, which was enough for some (including Kaplan, as well as enemies in the community), to label him a maskil. His history of Brisk and autobiographical work do put him on the maskilic continuum, but it was quite possible to be fully observant and also a maskil, particularly in this generation. The photo of Feinstein, reproduced in Entsiklopedia shel galuyot, 71, shows a man of traditional Jewish look (bearded, head covered, in traditional dress). His writings, composed in rabbinic Hebrew, are suffused with traditional theology and express no criticism of traditional Jewish culture or practices or praise of European culture, such as we find in Wengeroff. Feinstein does not even mention the coming of haskalah to Brest, much less treat it as Wengeroff does in Memoirs. Feinstein authored several rabbinic-style works, whose contents, he says, sufficed to silence impugners of his orthodoxy (“Toldotai,” 284, 286). Feinstein was also an artist, but his expression was traditional: he made decorations that adorned the great synagogue of New Brest (Kaplan, Yehudei brisk, 78). Thus, while both Feinstein and Wengeroff wrote fawningly of Nicholas I, their expression is fundamentally different: Feinstein’s traditional and Wengeroff’s, strikingly modern. Though Feinstein may have imbibed some secular currents and though Wengeroff was in some respects traditional in worldview, their mentalities are fundamentally different, and comparison of their praise of Nicholas only sharpens our appreciation of Wengeroff’s modernity. On nineteenth-century synagogue architecture as an expression of Jewish accommodation and integration, see Rachel Wishnitzer, The Architecture of the Synagogue (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1964); Carol Herselle Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); Hennelore Kuenzl, “Nineteenth-Century Synagogues in the Neo-Islamic Style,” Proceedings of the Eighth World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, 1982), 71–78; Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 34 (1989): 47–66; Harold Hammer-Schenck, Synagogen in Deutschland. Geschichte einer Baugattung im neunzehnten und zwangzigsten Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Hamburg: H. Christians, 1981); and my Jewish Emancipation in a German City, 216–217, 225. We should note that there were in Brest, as in all traditional communities of any size, other synagogues and small prayer houses in addition to the main synagogue; see Feinstein, 208; Taenzer, 46–49. Either because such small spaces lacked women’s sections or

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Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One because Yudl Epstein, a gevir (important member) in the community, frequented a larger synagogue rather than these kinds of prayer spaces, Wengeroff seems not to have experienced being in them or hearing of them in any important way, so omits mention of their existence. We should note that Wengeroff does not mention a series of fires that swept the old city of Brest in 1835 and 1837, destroying hundreds of homes and obviously, lessening the scope of the government indemnification program; see Feinstein, Ir tehilla, 207–8. Neither Feinstein nor Kaplan mention the “shady lawyer” indemnification scandal that Wengeroff details in her account; 1:150–51. Indemnification, scandalous or otherwise, of course, would only have affected property owners, people of means like the Epsteins. The silence of Feinstein and Kaplan on this subject would seem to indicate that the number of such Jews was limited. 188.  Wengeroff, 1:174–75, 184; 2:37–44. 189.  Ibid., 1:119. 190.  Ibid., 1:118. Referring to traditional Jews as people lacking “culture” is a hallmark of haskalah, bequeathed to later, acculturated Russian Jewish rhetoric; e.g., an article in Voskhod from 1891 noted: “The striving for haskalah is still caught on the stubborn opposition from the side of the classes lacking culture”; cited in Slutsky, Ha‘itonut, 253, 368 n. 110. 191.  Wengeroff, 1:147–48. 192.  In his memoir, Of a World That Is No More, Israel Joshua Singer recounts several memories from ages two to three, including the local celebration of the coronation of Nicholas II and Singer’s initiation to kheder; see 11–21. But Singer’s recollections are far more general, indeed dreamlike, than the finely detailed portraits Wengeroff claims here to paint from memory. On the ambiguities regarding Wengeroff’s year of birth and my resolution of them, see above, n. 10. 193.  Similarly, Wengeroff not only evokes at length a harrowing scene of the eviction of a poor family during the time that the city was being depopulated but stresses how vividly she recalls it. The 1908 (first) edition of Wengeroff’s Memoirs (1:151), dates this as (the autumn of) 1836, which would raise the same problem of conscious memory in a three- to four-year-old as the claim of having seen the tsar at that age. The second (1913) edition dates the scene as 1839, an apparent correction (cf. n. 117, for another instance of factual correction between editions). From everything we know about the destruction of Old Brest to make way for an expanded fortress (see n. 194), 1839 would appear to be the correct date. Wengeroff’s depiction of this scene at the eviction—which she also says her mother recounted at home (meaning, of course, that Wengeroff’s memory might be influenced by her mother’s telling) goes on for four pages with many details. Of course, if she was six to seven years old rather than three to four, such an extensive memory is perhaps, remarkable, but not incredible. 194.  Wengeroff, 1:84 gives 1836 as the date for the destruction of the city. Feinstein, author of Ir tehilla (on Feinstein, see n. 187), who was parnas and gabbai (community secretary and synagogue warden) of Brisk from 1875 to 1885 and thus

Notes to Introduction to Wengeroff, Volume One a valuable informant, ascribes Nicholas’s decision to demolish the city, “which sat at the gateway of Poland,” and build a fortress there, to the Polish rebellion of 1831 (it actually began in 1830) when Brisk was besieged by Polish rebels. After the rebellion was crushed, Nicholas ordered construction of a huge fortress, with storehouses for arms and soldiers’ barracks. This information is echoed in Taenzer, Juden in Brest-Litovsk, 43–44; cf. “Brest-Litovsk,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 4:1362, which gives 1832 as the year the Jewish quarter, including the synagogue and cemetery, were destroyed. M. Kaplan, “Yehudei brisk,” 75, dates Nicholas’s decision to destroy Old Brisk and relocate its (overwhelmingly Jewish) inhabitants as 1837. 195.  The community’s 1840 appeal to Levinson is cited in Lederhendler, 104, whose characterization of Levinson I cite here. 196.  In the introductory matter to his book, Minkhas yehuda, Yudl Epstein says that he moved (from Bobruisk) to Brisk in 1833, which he would hardly have done had there been a demolition and relocation order by then, much less the Jewish quarter already destroyed. As we surmise in the Introduction, above, Yudl’s move was for business reasons connected to construction of the new fortress. As we have noted, at the beginning of her memoirs (1:20), Wengeroff says that her grand­father was in charge of building the fortress in Brisk and her father, with supplying the many millions of bricks this required; toward the end of the volume (1:149), she says that, “for my parents, [the destruction of Old Brisk] was a catastrophe because not only was our magnificent house to be demolished but also the large brick factory that stood two versts behind the city! Since my father already had assumed responsibility for the provision of many millions of bricks for the enormous barracks already under construction, his brickworks had yielded great sums every summer.” It would seem a reasonable conjecture that the scope of the original fortress project that involved both Semel and Yudl Epstein and drew Yudl to Brisk was enlarged and that destruction of the town to make way for it only came toward the late 1830s. The original project proceeded for several years, as we would expect (construction of the fortress in Bobruisk went on for decades, throughout Nicholas’s reign, with Nicholas personally inspecting the progress; see the Yosef Eisenstat memoir, in Slutsky, Sefer zikaron, 223). Wengeroff confirms the fact that work on the Brisk fortress proceeded in stages when she says, describing a point in her childhood when she was quite young, that the fortress did not “yet” have a palace and that officials, as a result, sometimes stayed with (were quartered with) her family; 1:23. At some point in or around 1835 while the project was underway, we surmise that Nicholas decided to expand its scope and surveyed the town in that context, which is what Wengeroff and her family witnessed. Taenzer, 44, gives us the name—Jacob Heilperin—of another podraczik who was given the commission to provide bricks for the new, expanded fortress in Brisk, which is consistent with what Wengeroff says about her father leaving business at this point for full-time sacred study. 197.  Other sources also mention the transfer of the cemetery remains; see Feinstein, Ir tehilla, 207–8; M. Kaplan, “Yehudei brisk,” 75–78. Though she does not cite him, it is clear to me that Wengeroff consulted Feinstein’s book, from which

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Notes to Preface by Gustav Karpeles she took her details about the inscriptions on gravestones in the new cemetery, and which is probably also the source for some historical details about the Brisk synagogue that she cites (see her 1:84 and 159–61). Wengeroff does cite Meir Yechiel Halter as the gravestone engraver for the cemetery, and Halter’s press printed Feinstein’s book (see Ir tehilla frontispiece). Feinstein’s book, written in rabbinic Hebrew, was surely beyond Wengeroff’s abilities (if she had been one of the few women who knew this kind of Hebrew, we would know this), but she would have had no trouble finding someone to translate. All this of course, is further evidence of Wengeroff’s professionalism as a cultural memoirist. Feinstein’s book was thirty years off the press at the time Wengeroff says she began to write. She either researched literature about Brisk by consulting with members of the small but energetic new class of scholars of Russian Jewish history, active by century’s end (on which, see Slutsky, 284–309; Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds., The Worlds of S. An-Sky [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006]; my Introduction to Volume Two of this edition), with whom as we will see, she had direct ties; or she learned of Feinstein’s book through her reading of the Russian Jewish press: the Russian Jewish historian, Simon Dubnov, published a review of Ir tehilla in Voskhod in 1886 (Slutsky, Ha‘itonut, n. 18, 373), a journal we know Wengeroff read. In any case, Wengeroff was bracing her account with published data, if not with full source attribution. Appropriating Feinstein without citing him, of course, also attests Wengeroff’s egoism. Why not cite Feinstein when, as we recall, she cites (however fleetingly) the Ginsburg and Marek collection of Jewish folklore? Perhaps because the latter work was recently published at the time she wrote and appeared in Russian; unlike Feinstein’s, it would have been known to a reasonable portion of her readers.

Notes to Preface by Gustav Karpeles 1.  Gregor (Grigory) Isaakovich Bogrov (1825–1885) was a Russian Jewish author whose works include a six-hundred-page autobiographical novel, Zapiski evreia (Notes of a Jew), published between 1871 and 1873. The book was composed in “the Russian Realist genre of ‘notes’ about the author’s impressions of a somewhat exotic milieu,” along the lines of Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, which gave readers sympathetic insight into the lives of serfs and prisoners, respectively; Safran, Rewriting the Jew, 28. At first glance, ­Bogrov’s work, Safran says, would seem to be “another ethnographic account of an obscure segment of the empire’s diverse population. . . . [As] Turgenev and Dostoevsky had broken new thematic ground [in the 1850s and 1860s] in their ‘notes,’ so Bogrov was the first to publish such a detailed account of [Russian] Jewish life,” doing so in Russian, rather than in a Jewish language, and in a Russian, rather than a Jewish, publication; Zapiski evreia appeared in a respected publication of St. Petersburg liberals. Bogrov, however, unlike these Russian authors, was no temporary visitor in a strange cultural landscape, writing a retrospective account from a distance. Unlike Turgenev

Notes to Preface by Gustav Karpeles or Dostoevsky, Bogrov was a member of the group he observed, and his focus is his narrator’s transformation through education—a typical maskilic device in heavily didactic haskalah autobiography. In the work, Bogrov gives a detailed description and harsh critique of traditional Jewish life and practices, from which his protagonist is radically disaffected. During his lifetime, the book achieved the status of a “kind of travelogue for the empire’s western borderlands, a handbook to the life of the Jews in the Pale of Settlement.” In his autobiography, the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem states that Bogrov’s Notes, in Safran’s words, was “required reading for young Russian Jews in the 1870s who fancied themselves enlightened.” Vladimir Medem, one of the foremost leaders of the Jewish socialist party, the Bund, reports in his memoirs that his father’s library included a signed copy of Bogrov’s work; The Memoirs of Vladimir Medem, trans. and ed. Samuel A. Portnoy (New York: Ktav, 1979), 58. Other memoirs of Russian Jews confirm Bogrov’s prominence in the Pale, where he, a self-professed “cosmopolitan” was controversial for reputed self-hate and assimilationism (a charge cemented by his conversion late in life to marry a Russian woman) and for providing fodder to anti-Semites in his negative depictions of Jewish practices; see Slutsky, Ha-‘itonut, 105 and elsewhere; Safran, Rewriting the Jew, 26–34; Litvak, “Literary Response,” ch. 4, and Conclusion. Readers of Wengeroff will immediately note the limits of comparison between her Memoirs and Bogrov’s Notes, as well as the distinction between a well-known author and member of several intelligentsias, Russian and Jewish, and a woman inventing her own place in literature. Still, there were connections between the two, aside from Gustav Karpeles’s coupling of the works in his Preface to Wengeroff. Bogrov was active in the Russian-language Jewish journal, Razsvet (Petersburg edition), where he was in close contact with two of Wengeroff’s brothers-in-law, Avraham Sack, a banker and the financial mainstay of Razsvet, and Yakov Rosenfeld, a lawyer and member of the periodical’s Board. Through Razsvet, Bogrov was also in contact with Wengeroff’s son Semyon (Vengerov), who was also associated with Razsvet (Slutsky, Ha-‘itonut, 106); Semyon, a noted Russian literary critic and compiler of an immense bibliographical work on Russian writers, wrote the entry on Bogrov in his Kritiko-bibliograficheskii slovar’ russkikh pisatelei i uchenykh (St. Peters­burg, 1897), 5:6–7. If for no other reason than these ties, Wengeroff would have known Bogrov’s work, but she also was an avid reader who would have been likely to come upon it in any case. She was also remarkably assertive, and it is quite conceivable that it was she who suggested to Karpeles its comparison to her Memoirs (Bogrov’s Notes was translated to German in 1880). However it came about, Karpeles, a Jewish literary scholar and editor of German Jewry’s major periodical (see the Introductions to this Volume and to Volume Two), situates Wengeroff’s work on a continuum with Bogrov’s—powerful association from a literary authority for a non-entity and a savvy marketing flourish for Wengeroff’s work. 2.  Karpeles is referring here to the public attention drawn by prominent Jews and Jewish organizations, the press, and high government figures in Europe, Britain, and the United States to the plight of Russian Jewry during the era of the

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Notes to Preamble pogroms (anti-Jewish riots) beginning in 1881 but particularly after the Kishinev and Gomel pogroms of 1903 and the hundreds that followed them. These attacks claimed over a thousand lives with many more injured, and caused widespread property destruction and consequent economic crisis. Jewish organizations lobbied governments to intercede with the Russian government, which rationalized the violence as the natural reaction of “the people” (in particular, peasants) to oppression and exploitation by “parasitic” Jews. Jewish communities around the world held protest rallies and fund raisers (eighty alone in the United States in 1903) for the victims; Jewish notables and organizations, such as the Alliance Israelite Universelle, intervened to fund Jewish emigration. Newspaper editorials condemned the violence, as did the U.S. Congress and British Parliament, the German Kaiser, the Austrian Emperor, and President Theodore Roosevelt. It was an unprecedented public lens on Russian Jewry, driven in large part by anxiety over their massive westward emigration, which strained the aid resources of Jewish communities in the immigrants’ destinations and set off fears of nativist antiJewish reactions. Karpeles was particularly aware of the public interest in Russian Jewry at the time that Wengeroff was first published because of his position as editor of German Jewry’s most important newspaper (see the Introduction to this Volume), and here, in another astute act of marketing (cf. n. 1, above), he links that interest to Wengeroff’s work. On the pogroms and public reactions to them, see John Klier and Shlomo Lambro, eds., Pogroms and Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Irwin Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990); Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Howard Morley Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (New York: Dell Publishing, 1977), 248–49; Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 89–91; Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free To Desist (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), 3–15; Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew Under Tsars and Soviets, 44– 58; David Vital, The Origins of Zionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 49–62; Greenberg, The Jews in Russia, 2:55–75; Jonathan Frankel, “The Crisis of 1881–82 as a Turning Point in Modern Jewish History,” in The Legacy of Jewish Migration: 1881 and Its Impact, ed. David Berger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 9–22. 3.  The kibitka was a small, simple carriage; see Wengeroff’s description below.

Notes to Preamble 4.  Wengeroff here and several other times uses the German term Sturm und Drang that means lit., “storm and stress,” and was the name of a genre of ­nineteenth-century German romantic literature depicting emotional turmoil. On her reading of European literature, see the Introduction to this Volume.

Notes to Chapter One 5.  Bobruisk, in the Minsk district (see the Map to this volume), was actually in northern Belorussia, a region Jews called Lithuania. There were 601 Jewish households in Bobruisk in 1828 and a total population of 6,829; Slutsky, Sefer zikaron, 1:29. 6.  Louise Flachs-Fockschaneanu (Luise Flachs-Fokshaneanu) was a translator of Russian works to German. On her and Wengeroff’s relationship with her, see my Introduction to Wengeroff’s Volume Two and my “How Does a Woman Write? Or Pauline Wengeroff’s Room of Her Own,” in Gender in Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Paula Hyman, ed. Marion Kaplan and Deborah Dash Moore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).

Notes to Chapter One 7.  This is a rabbinically ordained purification ritual (Yiddish: negel vasser), done upon rising in the morning, before walking four ells or cubits (a measurement from the elbow to the fingertips, commonly used in rabbinic law and traditional parlance)—that is, immediately. Since sleep is held to be a death-like state, the same ritual washing performed after contact with death (e.g., after visiting a cemetery) is done upon waking. 8.  A shtender (Yiddish) is a lectern at which men stand when praying or studying sacred texts. This position allows for the swaying that is customary during such study. See the photo in this Volume of a boys’ kheder. 9.  “Learning” (lernen) is the Yiddish term for the study of Jewish sacred texts. Such study does not consist of silent reading but of vocalization and discussion of intellectually dense texts, done in a stylized sing-song, with a study partner or to oneself. 10.  Rabbinic law ordains three daily prayer services: morning (as Wengeroff has it: shakharis), afternoon (minkhe), and evening (maarev), defined as when three stars are visible. Adult males (over the age of thirteen years and a day) are expected to pray (Yiddish: daven) in a prayer quorum (minyan) of ten adult Jewish males. Communal prayer is strongly preferred to individual prayer for men; certain prayers, as well as Torah reading, may only be said in the presence of a minyan. Thus, although Wengeroff’s father had begun the morning service (whose early portions do not require a minyan) at home, he went to the synagogue for the bulk of it. 11.  The morning service is the longest of the three daily prayers but by no means took three hours, particularly on a weekday; at most, on a day with ­Torah-reading or additional prayers (see below, Wengeroff’s description of rosh khodesh), the prayer would have lasted an hour. Clearly, Wengeroff’s father was lingering in the synagogue for study or talk, as she will confirm a few paragraphs down. That he picked up important news this way, Wengeroff makes clear in her discussion of Max Lilienthal, on which, see further in her narrative and the Introduction to this Volume. On Wengeroff’s father, Yehuda Yudl Halevi Epstein, see the Introduction to this Volume.

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Notes to Chapter One 12.  On these works and Yudl Epstein’s talmudic training, see the Introduction to this Volume and its notes 20, 21, and 94. The beis midrash (Yiddish: study hall, sing.) is an essential feature of traditional synagogues and the principal room of the yeshiva, the rabbinic academy. (For a diagram of the floor plan of a beis ­midrash, see Roskies and Roskies, The Shtetl Book, 203.) The fact that Epstein could distribute his works gratis—in his Introduction to Minkhas Yehuda, he claims to have expended 1,000 rubles on that work alone—confirms his wealth even after his retirement when his circumstances were much straitened compared to his earlier situation (as Wengeroff will explain); most authors depended on book sales for income and actively hawked them. 13.  Geonim (Hebrew; Yiddish: great rabbinic sages, luminaries). 14.  Rabbinic prayer times are set according to the position of the sun and the number of hours of daylight at different times in the year. Minkhe gedole, literally, “the great minkhe,” refers to the entire period of time during which the afternoon service may be said, including the earliest point, when the most zealous to perform this commandment—like Wengeroff’s father—would hasten to do so (as opposed to “the small minkhe,” minkhe ketana, a shorter, later period of afternoon time, closer to the time of the evening service, and the last opportunity for reciting minkhe). 15.  Melamed, a teacher or tutor of Judaism for young children, usually, but not exclusively boys, and of adolescent boys pursuing more advanced Talmud study; see Wengeroff’s description of her and her sister’s melamed, and that of her brother and brothers-in-law, below, and the photos in this volume of a boys and a girls kheder and teachers. 16.  “Reb” is an honorific term roughly equivalent to “Mr.” or “sir”; unlike “rabbi” (rav or rebbe), it does not signify rabbinic ordination. 17.  Rabbi Hayyim ben Isaac Volozhiner (1749–1821), was one of the chief disciples of Rabbi Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna, who was the leader of non-Hasidic ultraOrthodox Jewry in the eighteenth century and one of the intellectual giants of rabbinic history. In the yeshiva Rabbi Hayyim founded in Volozhin in 1802 (in which Wengeroff’s father would study as a married man), he elaborated the Gaon’s rationalist approach to Talmud study; he succeeded the Gaon as leader of the intellectual fight against Hasidism, on which, see the Introduction to this volume and below, n. 210. The fact that Wengeroff heard (approving) stories at home about Rabbi Hay­ yim’s younger brother’s devotion to sacred study is one piece of evidence among many of her father’s association with Volozhin and its traditions; see the Introduction to this Volume and its n. 94. 18.  The Shulhan arukh (the Prepared Table) by Rabbi Joseph Caro (1488–1575), is the preeminent post-talmudic code of rabbinic law and a pillar of traditional Jewish learning and practice. In citing this section of the Shulhan Arukh, the young scholar is proclaiming that its authority, rather than filial emotion (or hunger), was the reason he complied with his mother’s wishes.

Notes to Chapter One 19.  The kheder (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: lit., room) was the traditional elementary school, about whose curriculum for boys and for girls, see the Introduction to this Volume. Kheder assistants who escorted the students to school, sometimes by force, were one of its ubiquitous features; see below for Wengeroff’s experience with such an assistant and the photo in this Volume of one such “helper.” 20.  Podracziki or podryachiki (contractors). Nineteenth-century tsarist governments undertook vast building projects—roads, fortresses—frequently contracting the work to Jews. These contractors often made fortunes and were an influential class in Russian Jewish society, employing a network of Jewish subcontractors, supply agents, office employees, and laborers. 21.  Simon Semel Epstein (d. 1860), as Wengeroff asserts, was one of the more important of the contractors of his time. Aside from the project Wengeroff mentions here, he was also contracted to build a fortress in Bobruisk, work on which Tsar Alexander I ordered begun in 1810 and on which the huge sum of 70 million rubles was ultimately expended; some 5,000 soldiers were housed in this fortress in 1837. Epstein was also a purveyor of food and materials to the army. Epstein moved to progressively larger cities, first to Brest-Litovsk, then Warsaw, as his business grew; Slutsky, Sefer zikaron, 24, 26, 31. As Wengeroff says in her note here, her grandfather’s move to Warsaw was the occasion for her father’s move to Brest; it is the family home there that Wengeroff describes in these pages. As she also notes, her grandfather continued to do important government contracting in northern Belorussia. As she relates, his visits to her family there were also, even primarily, business trips. See the Map in this Volume for the location of these sites. Brest-Litovsk, a district capital on the old border between Poland and Lithuania, is situated on the confluence of the rivers Bug and Muchawiez and was a crossroad between Warsaw, Moscow, and Kiev and main commercial routes; its Jews largely practiced trade. Brest, which Jews called Brisk, had an established and culturally significant Jewish community and was a stronghold of mitnagdism (Orthodox opposition to Hasidism). Its Jewish population numbered 8,135 in 1847. 22.  In Jewish ritual food practice (kashruth), cabbage and all leafy vegetables are inspected closely to remove insects or worms, consumption of which is forbidden (aside from questions of hygiene). Wengeroff’s mother diligently oversaw this aspect of her kitchen’s function and many others, as Wengeroff details. 23.  A verst is 2/3 of a mile, or about one kilometer. The distance Wengeroff here describes would be about 15 miles, or 24 kilometers. 24.  On Wengeroff’s digression here about modes of conveyance, see my Introduction to this Volume. 25.  800 versts is about 530 miles or 850 kilometers. 26.  In traditional Jewish etiquette, men do not touch women other than their wives, even immediate relatives, and even married couples refrain from physical contact in the presence of others. 27.  “Preference” was a card game.

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Notes to Chapter One 28.  A huge furnace (called a lezhanke in local parlance), with a side space for a sleeping area, was a fixture even in the poorest homes, as a memoirist from ­Bobruisk details; Aharon Gorelick, excerpts from his “Shturmdike yohren,” in Sefer zikaron, ed. Slutsky, 1:15. Indeed, the contrast between the memoir of life in a poor family, where people took turns climbing up on the lezhanke to warm their frozen limbs in the bitter winters and that of Wengeroff, who recalls her time on the ­lezhanke as a “comfortable and cozy” treat, is notable. See the diagrams of ­lezhankes in this Volume. 29.  Hanukkah is an eight-day holiday beginning on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev, which usually falls in December. It celebrates the victory in the second century b.c.e. of Jewish forces under the Hasmoneans (Maccabees) over the Seleucid Greeks, of pious Jews over hellenized ones, and the rededication of the Temple after its defilement by pagan worship. Rabbinic sources tell of the flask of oil Wengeroff mentions. The rabbinically mandated observance of this festival, on which normal activities (business, cooking) are permitted, is blessing and lighting a nine-branched candelabrum. A candle or wick is kindled for each night of the holiday, with a light added on successive nights; the ninth candle, called shamash (servant), is used to light the others since the Hanukkah candles, sacralized “to publicize the miracle” of the holiday, may not be used for mundane purposes. No work was allowed, as Wengeroff notes, while the Hanukkah lights burned, which created time for the leisure and amusements that she describes. The candelabra of wealthy families like hers were often elaborate artistic works in silver. 30.  Wengeroff here is probably referring to the children of an aunt whom she also mentions in her description of the Purim holiday, see below. 31.  It was traditional to distribute money, “Hanukkah gelt,” to children on this holiday; this was used in the dreidl game, as Wengeroff describes. 32.  Latkes, now commonly potato pancakes, are fried in oil. 33.  Goor (Yiddish: whole, entire). The letters embossed or painted on the sides of the dreidl come from the acronym of a Hebrew phrase, “a great miracle happened there.” In the dreidl game, the letters, equivalent to n, g, h, and sh in En­ glish, stand, respectively, for the Yiddish words for “nothing” (in Wengeroff’s version of the game, if the dreidl lands on this letter, the player loses); “everything” ( goor), when the player takes all the money in the pot; “half,” when the player takes half; and “put out” (some money). Wengeroff’s original text has the Hebrew letters with no transliteration, as reproduced here: ‫ש‬, ‫ה‬, ‫ג‬, ‫נ‬. The names of the ­Hebrew/Yiddish letters are: nun, shin, heh, and gimel. 34.  Dschigetowka burduk: the dzhigitovka is an old Caucasian/Cossack art of horse stunt, the most famous of which was when the rider, at full speed, would jump out of the saddle and pick something off the ground, as this servant did here. The stunt demonstrated astonishing riding skills and was meant to impress (the Turkish word “dzhigit” means “impressive horse rider”); it is frequently mentioned in the reports of western visitors to Russia; www.dzhigitovka.info/oldage.html.

Notes to Chapter One Burduk a term used in southern Russia, means a leather wineskin that would be strapped to the top of a horse; http://dal.sci-lib.com/word002305.html. What role the wineskin played in the particular stunt Wengeroff witnessed is not clear. 35.  Brest was at the far southwest border of Grodno Province on the edge of Polish lands; as a district capital, it was the seat of regional authorities (see the Map to this Volume). Given the Epstein family’s business connections to the government and its strategic projects, it is not surprising that the provincial governor was an acquaintance or that he was received in their home. It is significant, however, that Wengeroff also depicts substantive conversation and friendship among the adults and that the children accepted gifts of pastry and candy from the other official guest who stayed with her family—goodies obtained, we must assume, from some Jewish (kosher) source. 36.  Dovor min hakhai (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: literally, flesh of a living thing). Prohibition of consuming meat from a still living animal (e.g., egregious cruelty to animals) is a cardinal principle in rabbinic law, binding even on Gentiles (otherwise considered outside the bounds of Jewish religious obligation). In the understanding of the man and group Wengeroff describes, this principle forbids even consumption of meat from properly slaughtered kosher animals. Interestingly, the man applies to Wengeroff’s strictly kosher kitchen the strictures from the rules of kashruth that forbid using the same utensils for both meat and dairy dishes (as well as actually mixing the foods), refusing to use meat utensils for vegetarian food. It is significant that Wengeroff’s mother accommodated and treated this obviously scholarly man (with whom Yudl Epstein “learned”) with such respect and consideration, despite his rejection of her dietary practice; his behavior was obviously seen as a humrah, a meritorious, voluntary stringency. Wengeroff sees her mother’s behavior as an expression of piety. 37.  Arranged marriage of adolescents was common in the middle and upper classes of traditional Jewish society. The young married couple would live with and be supported by either set of parents for a specified number of years after marriage, during which time the husband was expected to study Talmud with a tutor. The details of this institution of marital board, called kest, which of course, entailed considerable expense (hence, was an institution of the wealthier classes), were negotiated in elaborate prenuptial agreements and were contractually binding on all parties. Kest was commonly (as in this case) but not necessarily, matrilocal, that is, the expenses being borne by the bride’s family (Wengeroff’s own marriage would be patrilocal; see her Volume Two). It was very unusual, however, for there to be sufficient wealth for the younger generation and their children to have their own, separate building, as was the case here. On Wengeroff’s brothers-in-law and the degree of their fulfillment of this arrangement, see further in Wengeroff’s narrative and the Introduction to this Volume. On early, arranged marriage in traditional Jewish society, see A. Grossman, Pious and Rebellious; David Biale, “Childhood, Marriage, and the Family” in The Jewish Family, 45–61; Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce, 11–72; and the Introduction to this Volume.

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Notes to Chapter One 38.  Shtreimel, ceremonial fur hat for men; see below, n. 259. On the traditional boy’s kheder, see the Introduction to this Volume and Wengeroff’s descriptions below. Wengeroff records the rhyming folk songs and ditties that follow in transliterated Yiddish, with Hebrew and Yiddish terms translated into German in parentheses alongside the transliteration. My translation is of the Yiddish she cites, influenced by her German translation, the focus being on Wengeroff’s rendition and when possible, a sense of the rhyme of the original. I occasionally insert the Yiddish terms of the original she cites because these reference specifically Jewish forms of dress or education (shtreimel; kheder) that were paramount in the culture she is describing, in which these ditties resonated (thus, it is not school per se that is celebrated in these ditties, but specifically, the traditional boys’ kheder, excellence in which was the hoped-for route to status and upward mobility for poor boys; a sleeping child’s eyes, which in consideration of the English reader, I render as “pure,” are described in the original as “kosher”—that is, ritually fit—which has a specific, positive resonance in traditional Jewish society. Warm thanks to Katherine Hellerstein for the time she gave as we considered the best way to translate these songs and for her fine, literary renditions that influenced my own choices. For versions of some of the songs Wengeroff cites, presented in Yiddish with English transliteration, see S. M. Ginsburg and P. S. Marek, Yiddish Folksongs in Russia, esp., 59–107 (nos. 60–133). Folk songs such as these for young children abounded in a variety of renditions. A recent collection, with transliterated Yiddish, English translation, and musical notation is Yiddish Folksongs from the Ruth Rubin Archive, ed. Chana Mlotek and Mark Slobin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007); see also Jerry Silverman, The Yiddish Song Book (New York: Scarborough House, 1983). For English translations of some Yiddish folksongs, rhymes, and children’s ditties, see Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People; Roskies and Roskies, The Shtetl Book, 141–208. This well-known ditty for very young children clearly conveys traditional hopes that sons become scholars as a path to prestige and a livelihood. The next lullaby Wengeroff cites also illustrates the primacy that traditional society put on Torah study for very young boys—as Wengeroff herself observes, drawing (a triumphalist) contrast with the values of non-Jewish culture. 39.  Reference in the original is to the khupe, the marriage canopy under which Jewish weddings take place. 40.  This song has some rhyming nonsense words, hence, my own. After consultation with Yiddish experts, I have decided that krigele here means not a little jug, but little war (battle), a meaning consistent with the sense of the song, which depicts domestic violence with its cycle of violence, appeasement and despair, and relief and rejoicing. Obviously, the existence of such a folk song is evidence of such violence in traditional Jewish homes, Wengeroff’s insistent portrayal of which as oases of peace and stability notwithstanding; she will shortly present evidence of another social ill rife in traditional society, the abandoned (“anchored”) wife, similarly with no recognition of the implication of this information for her larger

Notes to Chapter One claims about traditional society. As I elaborate in the Introduction to this Volume, assertions of family stability and happiness alongside evidence to the contrary that she herself provides, are a hallmark of Wengeroff’s writing. 41.  Shlakhmones (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: gifts of food and drink exchanged on Purim), based on the Book of Esther (9:21), “make them days of feasting and joy and of sending choice portions one to another.” Rabbinic practice enjoins a minimum of two such packages (mones is plural for “portions”); in practice, many more are sent. As Wengeroff’s text shows, the exchange of these gifts was an important social occasion, used to exhibit wealth and culinary and needlepoint skills, show deference to betters and elders, and set boundaries against social inferiors. 42.  Estertaanes (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: the Fast of Esther), on Purim eve, in remembrance of the fast ordained by the biblical Esther (Esther, 4:16), when the Jews of Persia were threatened with genocide. The fast begins at sunrise and ends in the evening when the festival of Purim begins. Hamantashen (Yiddish: literally, Haman pockets). In the Book of Esther, Haman was the evil minister in the royal Persian court who plotted the genocide, which plot the Jews, thanks to Queen Esther, foiled. Poppy seeds, mon in Yiddish, recall Haman’s name (pronounced in Yiddish, homon); hence, Purim pastries filled with poppy seeds. 43.  The Book of Esther is chanted in the evening, inaugurating the holiday, and again the following morning in synagogue or at home; this service (or any other) requires only a prayer quorum and was often conducted in knowledgeable and/or wealthy homes, as is the case here. Whenever Haman’s name is pronounced, it is customary to drown it out with noise—ordinarily, unthinkable at the reading of a biblical text. The popularity of this custom is seen in Wengeroff’s father’s inability to suppress it, even in a service conducted in his own house. The atmosphere on the day is ironic, comical, and even transgressive—marked by pranks, costumes, skits, cross-dressing (see below), and liberal alcohol consumption; cf. n. 47. 44.  Purim is considered a minor holiday because, unlike the Sabbath and other major festivals (but like Hanukkah), writing, cooking, and travel are permitted; hence, the exchange of gifts Wengeroff will describe. In addition to chanting the Book of Esther in an often raucous manner, as Wengeroff describes, a special Torah reading and some additional prayers mark its liturgical observance. 45.  The Purim sude (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: festive meal), a core observance of this holiday, must begin before nightfall since in the traditional calendar, the calendar day begins at nightfall, and Purim is a one-day holiday. 46.  This is an interjection of constructed dialogue and description of a scene at which Wengeroff, by her own testimony, was not present but had only heard described (she says, below, that her family’s maid was interrogated upon her return). Wengeroff’s creative license enhances immediacy and dramatic impact, one indication, among many, of literary touches in her writing. 47.  The reason for astonishment is that biblical and rabbinic law anathematize cross-dressing. On Purim, however, much that is normally forbidden (such as drunken levity in the synagogue), is permitted and even enjoined.

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Notes to Chapter One 48.  Wengeroff here and elsewhere uses the derogatory term, “jargon” for Yiddish, though it is clear from numerous references—her reconstruction of dialogue with the maid and nanny and below, of other family members; her story of the zogerkes (see below); her noting that the Russian official who stayed with her family conversed with them in Russian—that her family, like the vast majority of East European Jews into the twentieth century, spoke a dialect of Yiddish among themselves. Wengeroff’s use of this term is one of many indications of her absorption of the values of the haskalah, which reviled Yiddish as a “bastard” tongue and championed the use of European languages, with Hebrew to be used for prayer and sacred study, or for secularized Jewish cultural expression, like maskilic writings. On the complicated and contested language question in modern East European Jewish history, see Max Weinreich, The History of the Yiddish Language, transl. ­Shlomo Noble and Joshua Fishman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996); Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); “Yiddish Literature,” Encyclopaedia Judaica 16:798–833; “Hebrew Literature,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 8:175–97; Meyer Waxman, History of Jewish Literature, vol. 4, 2nd ed.; Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 12 (New York: Ktav, 1978). On Wengeroff’s attitude toward and use of German, Russian, and Yiddish, see my Introduction to her second volume. 49.  The “Germans” in this ditty is a reference to German Jews, who here represent “modern” Jews, since Jewish modernity was understood in eastern Europe as having a German Jewish provenance; see below, when Wengeroff, following common Jewish use, substitutes a reference for Berlin and Mendelssohn for the traditional Jewish term for heretic (apikores). This entire ditty is a derogatory taunt reflective of the tensions between traditionalist, East European Jews, and their modern German coreligionists. That the term “Deutschen” refers to Jews is clear from the notation about “short pants”—as opposed to the traditional caftan for men (about which, see Wengeroff’s description at the end of this Volume of her Memoirs) and the fact that these Germans mouth words of Jewish prayer (ovinu meilakh). As Steven E. Aschheim notes, “In Eastern Europe, the term daitsh— ‘German’—was synonymous with the modern, beardless, heretical Jew”; Brothers and Strangers, 152. Such ridicule of acculturated and assimilated (and nihilistic and hedonistic) German Jews—the prayer they cite is part of solemn High Holiday liturgy—was the East European Jewish counterpart to the superciliousness of westernized Jews to East European Jews and their culture, about which, see the Introduction to this Volume; note the attributed hypocrisy of claiming not to forget God in the very act of doing so. Examples of this attitude abound; for instance, the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, in his Dos Meserl (Kiev, 1887), depicts traditional perceptions of a “daytsh” who came to a small Ukrainian town as “One of the wicked, for whom hell is too good” because he went “without a hat, without a beard, without sidelocks, and his kapote [caftan] was half-cut.”; cited in Israel Bartal, “The Image of Germany and German Jewry,” in Danzig, 1–18 (3–4). While

Notes to Chapter One such negative attitudes may well have increased over the course of the nineteenth century, replacing earlier, positive ones, as Bartal argues, this folk ditty is evidence such attitudes existed well before mid-century and not necessarily in place of formerly positive views. 50.  Note that in this society, even gift packages were constructed to reflect and reify both gender and class and as Wengeroff’s note here shows, age difference and hierarchy, as well. Note too, the costliness of Wengeroff’s family’s gifts, another indication of their wealth. 51.  Under rabbinic law, a divorce can be granted only by the husband. An agune (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: literally, a chained woman) is one who cannot obtain a divorce and remarry because her husband is either unwilling or unable to grant one (because of physical or mental incapacitation) or because he has disappeared, through abandonment or accident, without a recovered body or valid witnesses to attest death. Such a woman is in dire economic and psychological straits, as Wengeroff and her sister depict. Clearly, the agune was a well-known social type if children were using it as the plot for a Purim skit. Like the folk song about wifebeating we have seen above, Wengeroff’s memoirs are evidence of trouble in the traditional family, her assertions about its happiness and calm notwithstanding. As we note regarding Wengeroff’s depiction of the cantonist episode in Russian Jewish history (see the Introduction to this Volume), Wengeroff’s distance from the emotional reality of the desperate situation she references here, the absence of empathy (masquerading as an agune as a Purim prank), not just as a child but as an adult memoirist, bespeak an assumed immunity from such desperation, a stance of ingrained, uninterrogated privilege. 52.  In nineteenth-century German Jewish cookbooks, it was common to see Passover listed as “Easter” (Oster); see Marion Kaplan, Jewish Middle Class, 73. Since we can be certain that the holiday was not referred to in this manner in the Epstein home, Wengeroff’s usage here points to her intended audience and her own acculturation and cultural context as an adult. Memoirs often speak of a month or more of preparation for Passover; see Kaplan, Jewish Middle Class, 74–75. Shushan Purim (Hebrew; Yiddish), is the day after Purim and the day on which, according to the Book of Esther, inhabitants of walled cities celebrated the holiday. Purim falls exactly four weeks before Passover on the Hebrew calendar. Kaplan, Jewish Middle Class, 74–75, shows that even in acculturated German Jewish homes, preparations for Passover began weeks—even months—in advance. References to weeks of preparation are common in memoirs from eastern Europe. 53.  All food to be used for Passover must not only exclude ingredients forbidden on the holiday but be prepared in utensils either used exclusively for Passover cooking or “koshered” (made suitable) for Passover use through extremely thorough cleansing, as Wengeroff describes. 54.  Matses (Yiddish, plural of matse: unleavened bread); rosh khodesh Nissan, the start of the Hebrew month of Nissan, in which Passover falls (on the evening of the fourteenth day of the month). By this date, two weeks before the holiday,

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Notes to Chapter One Passover preparation, especially baking of the all-important matses, was in high gear. The sack Wengeroff mentions had to be uncontaminated by any baked goods or grains not permissible on Passover (anything fermented or leavened) for it to be suitable for holding flour that would be used for Passover baking. 55.  The children were kept at a distance so as not to contaminate the Passover flour with non-Passover crumbs; the flour had to be kept completely dry so that it would not ferment and rise; hence, forbidding the maid to speak, lest a drop of saliva fall into the flour. 56.  Kashering literally means to make fit or suitable; the concept applies to any matter that falls under rabbinic definition and criteria, e.g., valid witnesses, though its most common use is with regard to the ritual diet. Depending on the substance a utensil is made of and the manner of its use, kashering may be done, after regular cleaning, by immersion in super-boiled water; by flaming; or in case of a wood surface, by sanding, which creates a new surface (see n. 63). For a vessel or utensil to be kashered, no trace, taste, or smell of previously prepared food may remain. The rules of kashering that Wengeroff describes are also used in case of inadvertent mixing of a rabbinically defined minimum of meat and dairy during the year. 57.  Mitsve (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: lit., commandment; but colloquially, is often used in the sense that Wengeroff employs here). A few lines down, she shows her awareness of the distinction between rabbinic commandment and sacralized custom. It is not clear why hauling of the water would have been considered the most important aspect of the matse baking. 58.  Perforations are traced in the matse with a special spiked wheel so that the dough will not rise; see the photo of such a utensil in this Volume. 59.  The commandment of “taking khale” is derived from Num. 15:18–21, which enjoins donations to the Temple priests, who were not allowed to own land. This mitsve of khale is incumbent on any baker but is particularly associated with women, being one of three commandments specially enjoined on them (the others being kindling the Sabbath and festival candles and observing the laws of sexual abstention from the husband during and immediately after menstruation and childbirth). After the Temple was destroyed and the priestly portion could no longer be brought there, the rabbis ordained that a piece of dough be pinched off and burned before baking in remembrance of this commandment. Making a blessing before this or any act ordained by biblical or rabbinic law declares the sacred intent of the act in fulfillment of the commandment. 60.  A number of crucial rituals are performed on the eve of Passover (in Yiddish, the “pesakh,” Wengeroff uses) that begins at nightfall the previous day, as Wengeroff details. It is a critical day of ritualized, phased transition between the rest of the year and its rules and Passover and its special observances. 61.  Bdikas khomets (searching for leaven) is the ritual performed in fulfillment of the biblical injunction to remove all leaven from the home (Exod. 12:15, 19–20). The rabbis interpreted these verses to mean that leaven be neither seen nor found;

Notes to Chapter One hence the “search,” which is more ritual than actual since the house would have been scoured by this time, less than a day before the holiday. 62.  For use in drinking the ritual four cups of wine at the seder, about which, see below. 63.  Because it is porous, wood can be koshered only through resurfacing, which is accomplished here by ironing, or below, as Wengeroff describes, by sanding. 64.  Auto-da-fé (Portuguese: act of faith) refers to Church pronouncement of judicial sentence on Christian heretics, including Marranos—Jews forcibly converted to Christianity and their descendants—who practiced Judaism in secret, and the “reconciliation” of penitents before the Inquisition. Those found guilty were handed over to secular authorities for burning at the stake. Wengeroff here uses the term in its popular sense as accelerated burning. It is striking that she would make light use of this term, associated with a horrific chapter in Jewish history, or that she would use it to refer to a Jewish ritual. 65.  Rabbinic law forbids using or otherwise obtaining benefit from leaven during Passover (it cannot, for instance, be traded or used as security for a loan). The benefit in this instance might have been that the ashes could have served as a garden fertilizer if spread by the shoes. 66.  After kosher slaughtering, meat is soaked and salted, put on a slanted drain board, and then rinsed three times to remove the blood, consumption of which is forbidden. 67.  Matsemehl is ground matse, used for baking and cooking on Passover instead of flour. 68.  Pious adults would not consume matses for at least a month before the seder, and especially on the eve of Passover, in order to enhance the experience of eating them at the seder, when this is enjoined by biblical commandment. Children under the age of majority (12 for girls, 13 for boys), however, are not bound by these rules. 69.The kharauses of Ashkenazim usually also includes red wine. The mixture has a brick color and chunky consistency, reminiscent of mortar. 70.  As Wengeroff details, there are numerous symbolic foods and acts in the seder ritual; most are performed before the meal is consumed. One of these is dipping a vegetable into salt water (see her reference to this); it is for this ritual, called karpas, that the lettuce Wengeroff mentions is necessary (though any vegetable could be used; see below, where she mentions use of a radish as well). Hard-boiled eggs, whose shells are seared, are served just before the seder meal to recall the Festival sacrifice offered on major festivals; at Passover, this would have been in addition to the paschal sacrifice, recalled by the zeroa, as she explains; sacrificial meat was burned on the altar, hence, roasted meat and the seared eggshells. Since the cessation of sacrificial worship with the destruction of the Temple in 70 c.e., festival sacrifices are recalled through symbolic foods. The eggs also symbolize birth and spring (Passover is the festival of spring in biblical parlance and falls in early spring). The moraur (bitter herbs) Wengeroff mentions is often, as the case here, horseradish.

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Notes to Chapter One Regarding the shmure matses that Wengeroff describes: the manner of preparing shmure matses assures that they are completely free of leaven, the grain from which they are made having been guarded from contact with moisture from the moment it was cut. Matses made of such flour are considerably more expensive than regular ones; shmure matse is especially preferred at the seder, where eating matse is enjoined by biblical mandate (eating matse is required only on the first two days of the holiday; on the other days, leaven is merely prohibited). 71.  It is customary to use red, not white, wine at the seder. 72.  It is customary to recline at the seder table, literally as Wengeroff’s father does, on a bed, or symbolically, on cushions placed on chairs, for the reasons Wengeroff notes. On this custom and other Passover rituals, see the evocative account and illustrations of observance in a rural Jewish household in Toby Knobel Fluek, Passover as I Remember It (New York: Knopf, 1994) and Fluek, Memories of My Life in a Polish Village, 1930–1949 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990), 31–36. For all the differences in class, time, and locale of the Wengeroff and Fluek households, the similarities of holiday custom are striking and illustrate one of Wengeroff’s central points: the unifying and stabilizing role of tradition in traditional Jewish culture. 73.  Every Jewish festival of biblical origin is inaugurated by a ritual lighting of candles at sundown. Although men may perform this commandment, it (like “taking khale”; see n. 59) is specifically enjoined on and associated with women; in some households, including Wengeroff’s, as she notes below, girls began to light their own candles upon reaching the age of majority under halakhah, at 12 (see n. 75). As Wengeroff notes below, the manner of lighting is as follows: the candles are lit; the woman then covers her eyes while reciting the blessing that focuses intentionality. The reason for this order (in other cases, blessing is done prior to the sacralized act) is that in this case, were the blessing done first, the festival would have already begun, on which kindling of fire is forbidden. Therefore, the action is done first; the woman covers her eyes so as not to see the candles and then pronounces the blessing. 74.  This is a reference to the shehekhiyanu blessing, pronounced at each major Jewish festival (and on other remarkable occasions), giving thanks to God for allowing one to have reached that day. 75.  There are different customs regarding the point at which females begin lighting Sabbath and festival candles; either at marriage, or as Wengeroff here details, following the Lithuanian-Belarusian custom, when a girl reaches the age of twelve, at which rabbinic law deems them no longer minors but responsible for the fulfillment of religious obligations in their own right. 76.  Manishtano (Yiddish, from the Hebrew [ma nishtana]: how is this different?) are the first words of a central part of the Passover Haggadah, called “the Four Questions,” which begins “How is this night different from all other nights?” It then lists four unusual behaviors, as Wengeroff notes below. 77.  Passover is the festival of freedom, recalling liberation from slavery in

Notes to Chapter One Egypt, hence the changed status of the male servant at the seder, who sat with the family at the table on this evening. On gender and change in status at the seder, or lack thereof, see the Introduction to this Volume. 78.  These were for ritual hand washing, which occurs twice during the seder. 79.  The traditional dress of an East European Jewish man was a black caftan, as Wengeroff details toward the end of Volume One. Caftans made of fine fabric, as well as ceremonial fur caps (shtreimels) were (and among ultra-Orthodox men, still are) used on the Sabbath, festivals, and at weddings and other major life cycle celebrations. The wide sash, or gartel, worn at the hips, is a ceremonial divider between the body’s lower (baser) and upper (more spiritual) parts. 80.  Shatnez (Hebrew) is the biblical prohibition (Lev. 19:19) of using a compound of wool and linen. The twine and thread Wengeroff mentions here would have been made from linen; the sofa fabric and the lining of the fur, from wool; hence, the difficulties encountered and stringencies imposed. Note Wengeroff’s skill in using this context to introduce and explain this Jewish practice. 81.  Three matses are set apart for symbolic purposes and eaten at the seder; one explanation is that they represent the three groups into which Jews are divided: Priests, Levites, Israel. At Wengeroff’s table, each adult male (responsible for all the ritual obligations of the evening) was given his own set of symbolic foods, including costly shmure matses; on the other symbolic foods, see n. 70. The food is covered so that the kiddush (the prayer sanctifying the holiday), will be made unambiguously over wine, the preferred substance for this, and not the matses, which according to rabbinic criteria could also qualify for kiddush. See also n. 100. 82.  Ho lokhmo anyo (Aramaic: this is the bread of affliction), referring to the matse; this section begins the “telling,” the main part of the Haggadah. 83.  Mitsraim is Hebrew for Egypt. Note that Wengeroff here simply uses, rather than translates, the Hebrew, one indication among many of the lack of editing in her work, on which, see the Introduction to Volume Two. 84.  The Haggadah incorporates the Hallel (Prayer of Praise), a selection of Psalms sung in the morning festival service. The beginning of Hallel, which mentions the Exodus, is sung before the seder meal; the rest of the prayer, after it. The hand washing Wengeroff mentions here is the second of two done at the seder; this one before most of the symbolic foods and the main meal are eaten. 85.  The piece of matse eaten as the afikomen is the last food to be consumed for the night. Mautse (germanized Yiddish, from the Hebrew), is the name of the blessing over bread, or in this case, matse. 86.  Kaurakh (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: a sandwich of bitter herbs between pieces of matse). Eating bitter herbs in this manner follows the interpretation of Rabbi Hillel (late first century b.c.e.) of the Biblical injunction regarding the Passover sacrifice: “You shall eat it with matses and bitter herbs” (Num. 9:11). 87.  Mayim akharaunim (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: final waters) is the ritual hand washing before the Grace after Meals is said (“final,” because it comes at the conclusion of the meal, in contrast with that done at its start). When at least three

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Notes to Chapter One adult males are present at the table, the Grace is begun with a formal call to say it, led by a male designated for this honor. 88.  Obviously having been taught it, it is interesting that Wengeroff gives this kabbalistic explanation for the four cups of wine consumed at the seder, one of its core rituals; zuges is Yiddish for the Hebrew term zugot or pairs. The most common explanation for the four cups of wine at the seder is that each commemorates one of four terms of redemption mentioned in Exod. 6:6–7 (“I will free you . . . deliver you . . . redeem you . . . and I will take you to be my people”). There is rabbinic debate about whether there is also a fifth term (Exod. 6:8: “And I will bring you into the Land . . .”); to satisfy the possibility that there should be five cups, a fifth is poured but not consumed, left standing for the prophet Elijah, who is the herald of redemption (Mal. 3:23) and is also expected to resolve unanswered questions in Jewish law, such as this one. The fifth is Elijah’s cup. 89.  Shfaukh khamoskho (“Pour out your wrath . . .”): this section of the Haggad­ah, possibly composed in the Middle Ages, is a call for divine vengeance against the enemies of Israel for “having devoured Jacob and laid waste his dwelling place.” (Pss. 79:6–7). Khadgadyo (“One Kid”) is a playful song, meant to hold the children’s attention until the end of the seder. Each stanza repeats and a line is added; according to some commentators, it is an allegory on the history of Jewish persecution, with Israel’s persecutors devouring one another, and Israel ultimately redeemed. 90.  The biblical book Song of Songs that the rabbis understood as an allegory for the love between God and Israel, is read during the Sabbath morning service of the Intermediate Days of Passover and/or on the last two nights of the holiday. Wengeroff’s family observed a custom of reading it after the conclusion of the seder, by which time, it was quite late. 91.  The Prayer for Dew, instituted by rabbinic authorities in Palestine during the Graeco-Roman period, is recited on the first day of Passover and asks for abundant dew during the summer months, the rainy season there having passed. The fact that Jews living in exile for almost two millennia asked divine help for favorable agricultural conditions in the Land of Israel is the occasion for Wengeroff’s comment, which assumes her readers will know that the prayer is directed about the Land of Israel, not the lands of Jewish exile. 92.  Lord [First Earl of] Beaconsfield, otherwise known as Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), statesman, novelist, and Prime Minister of Britain, 1867, 1874–80. Disraeli was born a Jew and converted at his father’s direction at the age of 13. He flaunted and attempted to exploit his Jewish descent, which he claimed conferred nobility on him; proto-zionist sympathies run through his novels. The remark Wengeroff cites occurs in his novel, Tancred (Leipzig, 1847): “The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist but the eternal Law enjoins the people of Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race that persists in celebrating their vintage although they have no fruits to gather, will retain their vineyards.” See Todd Endelman and Tony Kushner, eds., Disraeli’s Jewishness (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1999) and Paul Smith, Disraeli, A Brief Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). It is

Notes to Chapter One significant that Wengeroff is aware of and cites a Disraeli novel, one of several indications that she followed events and culture in Britain and read English literature (in translation). On Wengeroff’s Zionism, see my Introduction to her second volume. It is noteworthy, too, that Wengeroff’s remarks here are broken into several very short paragraphs, in stark contrast to most of the rest of the printed text, in which long paragraphs predominate. This would clearly seem to have been done for emphasis and indicates her emotional attachment to this material. Wengeroff’s closing remark here is another indication, among many, of women’s presence in the synagogue (see below when Wengeroff explains her mother’s failure to attend synagogue prayers on the evening of the seder), indicating that such attendance was normal. On women’s weeping at prayers, see Wengeroff’s portrayal below of the sukes holiday. 93.  This remark is a clear response to the nineteenth-century criticism by both enemies and proponents of Jewish rights of Jewish concentration in trade and finance (and, in formerly Polish lands of Russia, in estate management), and their absence from agriculture, despite the fact that law and/or custom severely limited or prohibited Jewish ownership of anything but small plots of land, sufficient for personal use but not farming. All Jews who embraced modernity (that is, all but the ultra-Orthodox)—proponents of haskalah, Zionism, socialism, and obviously Wengeroff—to varying degrees accepted the validity of this criticism and were defensive about it. 94.  Even when married, women and men in traditional Jewish society strolled and otherwise undertook leisure activities separately, anything else being considered immodest, as Wengeroff illustrates, 2:19. Sfire (Yiddish: from the Hebrew counting) refers to the biblically ordained practice (Lev. 23:15–16; Deut. 16:9) of counting the fifty days from the cutting of the omer (a measure of the new wheat harvest), done according to rabbinic understanding, on the second day of Passover, to the festival of Shavuot (Pentecost; shevuaus in Wengeroff’s text). While the Temple stood, the omer was brought as an offering; since its destruction in 70 c.e., only the practice of counting the days continues, begun at the evening prayers ushering in the festival’s second day, and at the second seder. Originally a joyous time, sfire became a time of semi-mourning sometime after the second century c.e., when Rabbi Akiva lived, for the reasons Wengeroff states in her note. 95.  Wengeroff’s stated reason for the second seder starting so late is partly correct but what she says, and omits, is revealing. It is true that according to a rabbinic ruling, cooking and preparing for the second day of the festival is proscribed on the first (so that each day preserves its own sanctity). But the more compelling reason for the lateness of the second seder is that sanctification of the second day of Passover over wine (kiddush), with which the seder begins, may be said only when the second calendrical day has in fact begun, which occurs an hour after nightfall— which in early spring when Passover falls, would be quite late. Wengeroff confuses the issue of food preparation with the reason the second seder actually begins so

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Notes to Chapter One late. That reason, however, is a technicality of male practice since men made kiddush and conducted the seder. Wengeroff’s explanation situates the reason for the lateness in the female realm with which she, as a girl, was familiar. As in other instances in the memoir (cf. n. 101 regarding havdole), this inaccuracy illustrates the interconnection of gender, consciousness, and memory. 96.  No roasted meat is eaten at the seder in order not to confuse mere food with the zeroa (the roasted shank bone), which symbolizes the Passover sacrifice (which was roasted) and is one of the three central symbols of the seder (the others being the matse and the bitter herbs, whose consumption is considered to be biblically mandated). Since the destruction of the Temple and the cessation of sacrificial worship in 70 c.e., it was deemed unseemly to have roasted meat at the seder. Its exclusion is a pointed reminder of the Temple’s destruction and the deprivations of exile. 97.  The afikomen is a piece of the middle matse (of the three used symbolically at the seder, see n. 81), set aside early in the seder and eaten as the last bite consumed that night. It represents the Passover sacrifice, consumption of which had to be completed by midnight, hence this deadline for consuming the afikomen. Eating it is an essential ritual, without which the seder cannot conclude. Interestingly, Wengeroff’s household apparently practiced no version of the now popular custom of children either hiding, or searching for, the afikomen that adults have hidden, a tactic used to keep them awake till the end of the meal. This would be in line with Volozhin’s generally more sober approach to customs; cf. Wengeroff’s father’s disapproving of noise-making during the Purim megile reading and of the custom of tashlikh. On Wengeroff’s father’s association with the Volozhin yeshiva and its traditions, see the Introduction to this Volume. 98.  Khaul hamaued (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: literally, the profane of the festival) are the intermediate four days of the two eight-day-long festivals, Passover and Tabernacles. The first and last two days of these holidays are full holidays (yom tov), when no business is conducted or writing, cooking, or traveling done; on khaul hamaued, festival-specific observances obtain, e.g., eating only unleavened bread on Passover or dwelling in the suke during Tabernacles (see below), but every­day (khaul) activities are permitted. 99.  This is a reference to the biblical punishment karet, excision from the community of Israel, decreed (among other grave infractions) for violating the prohibition of leaven on Passover. It is understood to be carried out by divine action. 100.  It is not clear how Wengeroff’s mother could have discerned cooked shmure from regular matse; apparently they were made from visibly different types of grain. Apparently, the melamed mentioned here was the Talmud tutor of the young husbands in the household and of Wengeroff’s brother Ephraim; it would appear that this tutor lived, or at least ate, with the Epstein family. These three adults eating only shmure matse on separate utensils for the entire eight-day holiday is an expensive stringency, indicative of this family’s wealth and piety. 101.  Havdole (Yiddish, from the Hebrew) is the ritual performed at the end of the Sabbath or festivals of biblical origin to mark their end and distinguish holy

Notes to Chapter One from ordinary time. A prayer is recited (on Saturday night over an overflowing cup of wine or other drink; overflowing, to symbolize hoped-for abundance) and a plaited, lit candle, against which the fingers are held up and illuminated. The act of kindling fire conveys that the holiday, when this is forbidden (fire being the elemental symbol of human creative labor), has ended and week/workday time has begun. At the end of the prayer on Saturday night, the candle is extinguished in some of the wine or another liquid poured onto a plate. On Saturday night, but not at the conclusion of festivals on other days of the week, spices are also blessed and sniffed; Wengeroff here conflates practice for the end of the Sabbath with that for the end of festivals. However, this is a fine point of male-identified ritual, i.e., behavior she had observed but neither formally studied nor practiced, hence, her misreporting; cf. n. 95. 102.  According to biblical (Lev. 23:15–21) and rabbinic law, the second day of Passover is the demarcation between the old (yoshen: Yiddish, from the Hebrew) and new (khodesh: Yiddish, from the Hebrew) grain harvests. Yoshen refers to grain that grew before the counting of the omer; khodesh, to grain that grew after; see omer, n. 94). Originally, it was forbidden to partake of khodesh until one had brought one’s omer offering to the Temple; there is rabbinic debate about whether this practice is binding outside of the Land of Israel or since the destruction of the Temple, with most authorities saying it no longer applies. Wengeroff’s family, once again, observed a stringency. 103.  On sfire time, see n. 94. 104.  Given Wengeroff’s testimony that even married couples did not stroll together, it is unthinkable that Wengeroff’s parents would have gone to a concert or theater in the 1830s–40s, even had such existed in Brest. This is an anachronistic retrojection from the life Wengeroff came to live as an adult in places like St. Petersburg and Minsk, to illustrate the type of activities forbidden during sfire time. It is a doubly theoretical projection, for in her own marriage as she details in Volume Two of her memoirs, her husband discarded such (and weightier) prohibitions, and she says, forced her to do so as well; for another such instance, see n. 204. 105.  Wengeroff here refers to the sterntikhel (an embroidered headband that could be very ornate for wealthy women, her default reference), worn by married women whose hair was closely cropped or almost entirely shorn and always covered, on which, see the Introduction to this Volume. On this headpiece and the rest of traditional women’s dress, see Wengeroff’s description at the end of her first volume and the illustration in this Volume. 106.  This does not appear to have been the same extremely pious melamed who was a guest at the Epsteins’ seder and, as I note there, was probably the Talmud tutor of the young men of the family (the term melamed is also used for tutors of advanced rabbinic material). If the melamed mentioned as the Passover guest is the same man Wengeroff is about to describe, that is, the melamed in her girls’ kheder, he would have come with his wife and child, who would have been remarkable for their poverty at a table like the Epsteins’ (see her description of their impoverished

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Notes to Chapter One circumstances, below). The seder liturgy specifically invites the needy and hungry to the Passover seder, but it is more plausible that the Epsteins hosted the Talmud tutor rather than a melamed of girls, folk healer, and matchmaker (about which, see her account, below). Had he a high level of learning, he would not have practiced these low-status occupations. Wengeroff speaks of him as amiable but bumbling, not a type likely to find a spot at the Epsteins’ seder table. On girls’ education, formal and informal, see the Introduction to this Volume. 107.  The ringlets of hair in front of the ears that Wengeroff mentions are called in Yiddish (from the Hebrew) peyes, on which Wengeroff has more to say below. Peyes are one of the ways the male Jewish body is sacralized. Cutting the hair to produce peyes is based on the biblical injunction (Lev. 19:27), “You shall not round the corners of your heads.” All the hair on the male head except that which grows from the temple down would be closely cut, producing peyes, whose length varied but that were at least jaw-length. The peyes-forming haircut would be the first given a boy at around his third birthday, before which, his hair was left uncut. The rabbis exempted women from the biblical commandment on which peyes is based. 108.  “Eating days” (Yiddish: essen teg) was the traditional system by which the community supported yeshiva (talmudic) students and here, a communal functionary. A different family would host the person for meals on different, set days of the week. 109.  Bokher (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: literally, young man) of post–­ bar‑mitsvah age but single; also used for yeshiva student. 110.  As with the folk songs cited earlier, this ditty is recorded partly in Yiddish transliteration, with German translation of Hebrew terms. In rabbinic parlance, Esau connotes Christians and Christianity; the ditty refers to the biblical twin brothers and rivals, of whom Jacob (Israel) triumphs. 111.  Arba kanfos (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: lit., four corners, also called ­tsitsis), refers to a rectangular, open-sided ritual garment with an opening for the head, on whose corners wound and knotted threads, symbolizing the Torah’s 613 commandments, are attached. This garment is worn in fulfillment of the biblical injunction (Num. 15:37–41), “. . . bind them . . . make themselves fringes on the corners of their garments.” Rabbinic law made this commandment obligatory for males, and it became defining, male sacred garb in traditional society, sometimes worn on the outside of the shirt (i.e., visibly), as was the case with Wengeroff’s melamed. 112.  Shikses (Yiddish) is a derogatory term for non-Jewish women; the term implies “impudent,” or “wild.” 113.  It is noteworthy that the girls were instructed to say the evening prayer in kheder; Wengeroff does not report that morning and afternoon prayers were also part of school activities, but it stands to reason that they were. This information is an important contradiction of the common assertion that females in traditional society, exempted from the rabbinic requirement of public prayer and not counted in a minyan (prayer quorum), did not say the daily prayers and were not instructed and socialized to do so.

Notes to Chapter One 114.  It is noteworthy and unfortunate (and a stark contrast with the memoirs of maskilim) that Wengeroff does not say what she studied (initially, this would have been simply reading and writing Hebrew letters) or what text her older sister was parsing with the melamed. 115.  Rebbetsin (Yiddish: wife of a rabbi). 116.  Altinke, a female diminutive for the Yiddish word alt, meaning aged or old. A child who was sickly, or born after other children had died, or both, as in this case, was often given this name, gendered appropriately (Alta for a girl, Alter for a boy), to express the hope for longevity. It would seem the child had rickets, brought on by a vitamin deficiency that caused weak bones and irritability, or a congenital deformity. 117.  Meshuggene (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: lunatic). Clearly, as the long episode of the kheder and her depiction of the women’s synagogue show, Wengeroff enjoys telling a good, humorous tale. 118.  The shadkhen (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: matchmaker) was often an occupation for poorer members of the community. Matchmakers were an essential feature in traditional Jewish society, in which marriage was arranged. 119.  Although a (significant) form of business, it was permitted, even laudable, to arrange marriage matches on the Sabbath albeit without making financial arrangements or signing documents. 120.  The shulklopfer (Yiddish) was a low-level community functionary, always a poor man, whose job it was to knock (Yiddish: klopfen) on the doors of homes and businesses at prayer times to summon the men to the synagogue and, on Friday afternoons and the eves of festivals, as she explains, to announce the onset of the Sabbath and holidays, so that profane activity might cease. 121.  Leienen (Yiddish: literally to read) refers to chanting the Torah. 122.  Oron hakodesh (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: Holy Ark), where the Torah scrolls are kept. 123.  Magen dovid (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: shield of David). 124.  Mizrakh (Yiddish, Hebrew: east). The eastern wall of the synagogue is the most prestigious because it faced toward the Land of Israel/Jerusalem. Synagogue seats were often purchased; only the wealthy members of the community could afford seats on the mizrakh wall, where rabbis and scholars would also be seated. 125.  Matan b’sesser pushke (Yiddish: secret alms box). It was considered particularly meritorious to give alms anonymously and most meritorious to have a system in which the needy could also take without being identified; cf. below, where Wengeroff describes a system by which her mother arranged for the needy to take food from her house without being observed. 126.  Wengeroff refers to the legend of the golem: a humanoid created by mystics through the use of the ineffable Divine Name. First mentioned in the Talmud, the golem legend became popular in the Middle Ages. The best known golem tale concerns that allegedly created by the great scholar and kabbalist Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague (d. 1609). In the Prague legends, the creature, constructed for personal

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Notes to Chapter One service, got out of control and endangered people’s lives, the story Wengeroff seems to be referencing. 127.  For Wengeroff’s description of the destruction of the Old City of Brest and the effects of this on the Jewish community and her family, see below and the Introduction to this Volume, which questions the date she gives here for that destruction. 128.  Saul ben Judah Wahl (in state documents of Poland-Lithuania, called Saul Judycz) (ca. 1541–1617), was a wealthy merchant, officer of the Jewish community of Brest-Litovsk, and one of the lay leaders of Lithuanian Jewry. He held the salt lease in the grand duchy of Lithuania, as well as another such lease near Warsaw, with exclusive rights to sell by order of the Polish king; Wahl also farmed the royal revenues in the Brest-Litovsk region. Legends about him abound, including that he was chosen to perform high state functions in 1587 during an interregnum, before the election of Sigismund III to the Polish throne, and even, as Wengeroff relates, that he served as king for a day. Wahl did not have the synagogue of Brest-Litovsk built in memory of his wife, but its women’s section; it is noteworthy that Wengeroff conflates the two, expression of the centrality of women’s Judaism in her consciousness. The synagogue of Old Brest was demolished as part of the transformation of the city into a fortress, as Wengeroff describes below. On this and for the Hebrew text of the dedicatory inscription of “the women’s synagogue” to Deborah, Wahl’s wife, see Feinstein, Ir tehilla, 208–9; sections of Feinstein’s book, including the dedicatory text, are reproduced in Steinman, Entsiklopedia shel galuyot, 71–74. Wengeroff does not cite Feinstein’s book but does seem to be relying on its information for her remarks here, about which see the Introduction to this Volume. 129.  Pentecost, the Feast of Weeks or shevuaus (Yiddish, from the Hebrew), is one of three biblical pilgrimage festivals. Originally a celebration of first fruits brought to the Temple as an offering (Exod. 23:14–19, Lev. 23:9–22), the rabbis later associated the giving of the Torah with this holiday. Since the destruction of the Temple and Jewish exile, the latter meaning had been dominant. Unlike Tabernacles and Passover, which (in the Diaspora) last eight days, Pentecost lasts for two. On Tabernacles, see below in her narration. 130.  Shelausho yemei hagbole (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: the “three days of demarcation” prior to Pentecost), derived from God’s instruction to Moses before the giving of the Torah, “Go to the people and sanctify them today and tomorrow . . . and be ready for the third day [when] the Lord will come down . . . on Mount Sinai. . . .” (Exod. 19:11–12). They are days of preparation for Pentecost and are quasi-festive, when the mourning practices of the sfire period (on which, see above and n. 94) end for those, like Wengeroff’s family, who have not ended them before this (there are different traditions about the terminus for sfire mourning practices). Once again, we see Wengeroff’s family practicing a stringency where a lighter option existed. 131.  The custom of eating dairy foods on this holiday is of obscure origin; Jewish holidays are usually honored with the consumption of meat, a more expensive

Notes to Chapter One option. It is customary, also for obscure reasons, to decorate the home and the synagogue with plants, branches, and even trees on Pentecost. One reason given is that Mount Sinai was green with foliage when the Torah was given (implied in the injunction forbidding flocks to graze around the mountain; Exod. 34:3); another is that the practice is in remembrance of the first fruits brought to the Temple on Pentecost. The great rabbinic decisor, Elijah of Vilna, the Vilna Gaon (d. 1797), whose tradition Wengeroff’s father followed, denounced the custom as imitative of pagan and Christian practice, but its popularity persisted among folk and learned alike, as we see from Wengeroff’s account. 132.  Tiken shevuaus (Yiddish, from the Hebrew, tikkun): the custom, established by sixteenth-century kabbalists, of studying Torah the whole night preceding Pentecost, as a way of showing eagerness for receiving the Torah. The term tikkun also refers to a text of prepared selections from all the books of the Bible, as well as Talmud, Zohar (the central text of kabbalistic study), and prayers. This collection is divided into three parts and studied throughout the night. By reading this text, symbolically one reviews the entire Torah. Only men participated in this activity. 133.  On Rabbi Max Lilienthal of Germany, would-be propagator of “enlightenment” among Russian Jewry, see the Introduction to this Volume; further in Wengeroff’s narration and her Volume Two. 134.  Shivo osor betamuz (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: the seventeenth day of the month of Tammuz), beginning the three weeks of mourning for the destruction of the first (586 b.c.e.) and second (70 c.e.) Temples, Jerusalem’s walls having been breached in both instances in Tammuz; in the case of the second Temple, according to the rabbis (Mishnah Ta’anit 4:6), on this very day. The feeling of mourning is accentuated progressively during the three weeks through ritual observances and deprivations, as Wengeroff lists, culminating in a total fast and the mourning practices on the Ninth of Av, the day of the destruction of both Temples and other disasters in Jewish history, on which, see n. 139. The second Temple was destroyed by Roman forces under the command of Titus. 135.  On the Sabbaths of the three weeks before the Ninth of Av, special readings from the Prophets (haftorah) follow the Torah reading. The theme of these readings is rebuke to Israel for its sins, which are held responsible for the Temple’s destruction and Israel’s exile. The third of these Sabbaths is called shabbes khazon, “the Sabbath of vision,” after its haftorah, Isa. 1:1–27, that begins, “The vision of Isaiah. . . .” 136.  Zeikher l’khurben (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: in commemoration of the destruction). It was traditional to leave a mark in the home—an unfinished piece of plaster, an unpainted spot of wall—as a reminder of the destruction of Jerusalem, in fulfillment of the oath, repeated before the Grace after Meals on weekdays, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither” (Ps. 137:5). Golus (Yiddish: lit. “exile,” but Wengeroff is correct in translating it as “subjugation”) since lack of sovereignty and vulnerability to persecution, as much as physical exile, were the lived meaning of golus, which was the preeminent existential self-definition of pre-modern

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Notes to Chapter One Jews. Given this significance, it is particularly noteworthy that the female head of the Wengeroff household marks the house with the sign of mourning. 137.  Traditionally, low stools are used in any mourning situation. Hard-boiled eggs are the traditional fare of mourners because their shape symbolizes the cyclicality of life. It is customary to dip them in ashes, symbolic of fiery destruction, for the final meal before the fast of the Ninth of Av, which (unlike that before Yom Kippur, see below), is to be modest and consumed in sorrow; hence hard, rather than fresh, bread. 138.  Going shoeless, and other acts of self-abnegation (abstaining from bathing, grooming, and sex), is traditional mourning practice. 139.  The biblical Book of Lamentations gives a graphic description of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 b.c.e., particularly of starvation inside the city, and lays out the theological reading of the national catastrophe that becomes the trope of pre-modern Judaism; in the words of the liturgy for the major festivals: “Because of our sins we were exiled from our land.” The power of this yearly, performed remembrance and its linkage to the Jews’ current political situation cannot be overstated. It made for a living sense of connection to the past, indeed, for effacement of the boundaries of past and present. On the power of memory (as opposed to history) in traditional Jewish religious consciousness and the centrality of Ninth of Av rites, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor. 140.  Kinos (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: lamentations, dirges), liturgical mourning poetry about the Ninth of Av and later catastrophes in Jewish history, recited on the Ninth of Av. 141.  Wengeroff’s dismissive, bland line about “the boys’” activities on this day is the more remarkable following upon the dramatic scene that precedes it. On this, see the Introduction to this Volume. 142.  Girls under the age of 12 and boys under the age of 13 are minors in rabbinic law and not obligated to observe the fast (or any other commandment). They are taught the commandments and observe them, in this case, partially, as education for obligations they will assume when they come of age. Aside from health considerations that cut short a minor’s fast, the most severe of the mourning rituals of the Ninth of Av obtain in the morning; by afternoon, as Wengeroff attests (her quote of the rabbinic “half the day”), rituals of “consolation” and a partial return to normal routine (though not eating and drinking) begin. 143.  Shabbes nakhmu (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: the Sabbath of Consolation, following the Ninth of Av), named for the opening words of its haftorah (weekly synagogue chanting from the Prophets), “Comfort ye [nahamu], oh comfort ye, my people” (Isa. 40:1). 144.  Unlike the rhymes and ditties we have seen thus far, this poem is entirely in German. Saul Ginsburg (1866–1940), was a historian of Russian Jewry (see the Introduction to this Volume). In 1901, Ginsburg, together with Pesakh Marek, published Jewish Folk Songs in Russia (Di yiddishe folkslider in rusland [St. Petersburg, 1901]; Photo Reproduction [Bar Ilan, Israel, 1991]), a work that helped

Notes to Chapter One establish the scholarly study of Yiddish folklore. The publication occurred while Wengeroff was working on her memoirs; she not only knew the work, evidenced by her citation here, but it is safe to say, was influenced by it. Encouraged that there was a market for Jewish folklore, she recorded her own memories of songs sung in her childhood several times in this volume of her memoirs. On this, see the Introduction to Volume Two of this edition. 145.  Shemone esre prayer (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: the eighteen benedictions), also called the silent standing prayer, is a core part of Jewish liturgy; some variant of it is part of each of the three daily prayer services and those of festivals. It is recited silently, at attention (feet together, motionless). In communal prayer, except in the evening service, it is repeated aloud after worshippers have recited it individually. 146.  Mezuzaus (Yiddish, from the Hebrew): small, oblong boxes containing a scrolled parchment on which verses of the Bible are hand-written; a mezuzah (singular) is attached about two-thirds of the way up on all doorposts of the home in fulfillment of the commandment (Deut. 6:9 and 11:20) to write “these words” and affix them to doorposts. The mezuzah would be kissed upon entering or exiting; thus, placement of the erets yisroel pushke (Yiddish: Land of Israel alms box) near the mezuzah would insure it received regular attention. 147.  Erets yisroel meshulakh (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: an emissary from the Land of Israel). This was a fund-raiser sent to collect money from Diaspora Jews to support the (pre-Zionist) Jews of Palestine (whom Wengeroff describes, accurately, as predominantly pious scholars and their families and elderly Jews who wished to buried in the Holy Land, all of whom eked out a living as artisans or petty merchants and depended on charity from abroad). Supporting these Jews was considered a particular religious duty by Diaspora Jews. Emissaries from the Land of Israel were a fixture of Diaspora Jewish life from the early Middle Ages; they appeared in synagogues, where they would be invited to preach and bring news from the Holy Land. 148.  The identity of Rabbi Meir Ba‘al Ha’ness (for whom Wengeroff here uses the honorific “reb”) is uncertain. According to popular folklore, he was a miracleworking (ba‘al ha’ness) saint; his renown was publicized in the Diaspora by emissaries from the Land of Israel (see n. 147). His tomb is located near Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Beginning in the eighteenth century, a pushke (Yiddish: charity collection box) in his name became a fixture in Jewish homes. Housewives would make contributions to it before lighting Sabbath candles to ward off danger or evil spirits, attain health, fertility, or other blessings. 149.  The month of Elul precedes that of Tishrei, in which fall the Days of Awe (High Holy Days), whose themes are sin, repentance, and mortality. The penitential season begins with the New Moon of Elul, with acts that Wengeroff has already mentioned: daily blowing of the ram’s horn and a particular focus on charity. In Ashkenazic custom, recitation of slikhaus, special penitential prayers, begins on the Saturday night preceding Rosh Hashanah or four days before the holiday.

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Notes to Chapter One 150.  Zekhor bris (Yiddish, from the Hebrew): the Covenant to be remembered is that between God and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This prayer is considered especially efficacious because it pleads for forgiveness not on the merit of the petitioners but that of the biblical patriarchs, a major theme in the High Holiday liturgy. 151.  White symbolizes purity from sin; it is also reminiscent of death shrouds, hence, mortality. 152.  It is customary to bless children before making kiddush (sanctification of the Sabbath and festivals through a prayer recited over wine). The hands are placed on or above the child’s head and the priestly blessing (Num. 6:23–27) is said, preceded by “May God make you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah” for girls and “May God make you like Ephraim and Menasheh” for boys. 153.  Traditionally, any food eaten with bread (considered a basic constituent of a meal, as opposed to a snack) is preceded by ritual hand washing, done by pouring water over clean hands with a cup or pitcher and reciting the appropriate blessing while drying them. This washing and the blessing and eating of bread are considered parts of one act that sanctifies the meal; in order not to interrupt the intentionality of the act, it is forbidden to speak from the time of the hand washing blessing until after the first bite of bread is consumed—hence, Wengeroff’s reference to sitting down “without a sound.” On the Sabbath and festivals, two uncut loaves of braided bread (Wengeroff uses the Western Yiddish term barkhes for this bread, more commonly known as challah) are blessed and ceremoniously cut; two loaves are used to recall the double portion of manna given to the Israelites in the desert on Friday. Normally, the bread is eaten with salt; during the New Year season, from Rosh Hashanah through the seventh day of Tabernacles, it is dipped in honey to symbolize the wish for a sweet year. In addition to the blessing over bread, a prayer that God “renew for us a good and sweet year” is recited, the second blessing Wengeroff says her father recited at the table. After these rituals (all of which had been preceded by kiddush), the meal begins. 154.  The text Wengeroff cites is the makhzor (prayer book) for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. 155.  Although napping on the afternoon of the Sabbath and other major biblical holidays is standard and even lauded practice, it is considered inappropriate and poor symbolism on Rosh Hashanah, when one should be alert to repentance and not (morally) “asleep.” 156.  Tashlikh (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: literally, cast; throw): a prayer recited on the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah (or the next day, if Rosh Hashanah falls on the Sabbath) near a body of living water. It is named after the verses in Micah (7:18–20): “Who is a God like You, who pardons iniquity . . . and will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.” The person saying it shakes out clothes and pockets while pronouncing the phrase, “cast all their sins” to symbolize the ridding of sin. Tashlikh is of relatively late (fourteenth century) provenance and was disparaged and opposed as superstition by some rabbis, especially in the

Notes to Chapter One Lithuanian tradition, Wengeroff’s father’s custom. Resiliently popular, it persisted. Her father, she implies, overcame his resistance to it. 157.  Shekheyone (Yiddish, from the Hebrew): blessing recited on momentous occasions, including the holidays that occur only once a year or upon eating a food not eaten in some time. Since the rabbis considered the two days of Rosh Hashanah one “long day,” there was dispute about whether this blessing should be pronounced after kiddush on the first night only or on both nights. The practice is to recite the blessing on both nights. To ensure that the second blessing is not said in vain (which violates the commandment against desecrating God’s name), a new fruit is eaten or new clothes worn, acts which themselves require the blessing. On the blessing of children, see n. 152. 158.  Tsom gedalya (the Fast of Gedalya), in commemoration of the assassination of Gedalya ben Ahikam by Jews rebelling against Babylonian rule. Gedalya was the Babylonian-appointed governor for the Jewish remnant in Judah after the exile of most of the population (Jer. 40–41) in 586 b.c.e.. According to the rabbis of the Talmud, this act, committed on the third of Tishrei (the day after Rosh Hashanah) led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the first Temple; hence, the fast. 159.  The Ten Days of Repentance: Rosh Hashanah occurs on the first day of the month of Tishrei; Yom Kippur, on the tenth. These ten days of repentance are marked by acts of soul searching, confession, and atonement; by special prayers and pious deeds; especially charity, all of which have the power, according to the traditional liturgy, to “avert the evil of the decree” of harsh divine judgment for sins. 160.  Kapores (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: expiations): is a ceremony during which poultry (hens for females, roosters for males) is offered in a form of vicarious sacrifice. Officiants swing the animals about their heads while reciting a prayer, the central portion of which is: “This is my atonement . . . my ransom . . . my substitute. . . .” The ritual is based on the Talmudic injunction (Berakhot 54b), based on biblical texts, that anyone delivered from danger must offer a thanksgiving sacrifice (kapores being performed in anticipation of deliverance from divine judgment on Yom Kippur). It is also based on the practice of the high priest confessing the sins of Israel over the head of a sacrificial goat, to whom they were transferred, the goat then sent off to the wilderness (Lev. 16:7–10, 21:22). Several eminent rabbinic decisors denounced this custom; others upheld it. Like tashlikh (see n. 156), it found wide popular acceptance and prevailed. Wengeroff’s references here to eating poultry and Yom Kippur bread are to the festive meal before the 25hour total fast begins. 161.  Yom Kippur candle; this is a yizkor or twenty-four-hour memorial candle, lit in the home for Yom Kippur, a day when yizkor, the memorial prayer for deceased family members, is recited in the synagogue. It is also customary to light such a candle in the synagogue itself. On this act and other women’s ritual acts, religious functionaries, and liturgy (the tkhines Wengeroff mentions) in traditional culture, see the Introduction to this Volume and see the photo in this volume of Yom Kippur candles in the synagogue.

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Notes to Chapter One 162.  On this custom, see the Introduction to this Volume. 163.  Although a fast day, Yom Kippur is a festival, on which eating fine meals would normally be enjoined. It is therefore, considered particularly meritorious to eat on the eve of Yom Kippur, considered a semi-holiday; according to talmudic prescription (Berakhot 8b), subsequently popularized, eating and drinking on this day is equivalent to fasting on Yom Kippur (on Wengeroff’s mother’s transgressive fasting on this day, see the Introduction to this Volume). It is not clear why fruit would have been preferred in the Epstein household; perhaps this would have enabled recitation of many individual blessings, a meritorious act. There is a general rabbinic exhortation to make one hundred blessings a day, which would be particularly appropriate on the eve of Yom Kippur. 164.  Malkes: stripes, administered with a strap. This was one of the corporal punishments that Jewish courts traditionally meted out for documented crimes; symbolic malkes were administered on the eve of Yom Kippur to arouse remorse and symbolically, to inflict corporal punishment in place of the capital punishment for which sinners might theoretically be liable (and that Jewish courts were not empowered to inflict since the demise of the Sanhedrin, the high court, in Jerusalem. The se‘udah mafseket or final meal before the fast must end punctually, in this case, additionally, so that all can attend the first of the Yom Kippur prayers, chanted as the sun sets. On this service, see Wengeroff, below. 165.  As we have noted, walking shoeless is a traditional practice of self­abnegation on a fast day. The kittel is a white, belted caftan worn over clothing that symbolizes purity. It is worn by the groom at weddings and by men at the Passover seder and on Yom Kippur; it is also reminiscent of the burial shroud. 166.  On the use of a waistband in traditional male Jewish dress and the other elements of this garb see nn. 79, 111, 259, and further, as Wengeroff explains. Festive garb is ordained for this holiday, which is a solemn but not a mournful day; the silver brocade cap apparently was a family custom. Note that Wengeroff says “we” went to the synagogue for a third time that day. As we have seen from other references in Wengeroff, women regularly frequented the synagogue; age here, not gender, determines who remains at home. On this, see the Introduction to this Volume. 167.  Maukhel sein (Yiddish: to forgive): during the Ten Days of Repentance, Jews are enjoined to ask forgiveness formally of those they have wronged. Traditionally, only those harmed by acts committed against them can grant forgiveness (e.g., for insult, theft), for which the offender must petition directly; God grants atonement only for repented infractions of religious duties that are between the individual and God (e.g., Sabbath, dietary law). The tension surrounding the request for and receipt of forgiveness reaches its peak as Yom Kippur begins, hence, the dramatic scene at the door as family members depart for the synagogue for the first of the Yom Kippur services (Kol Nidre, see n. 168). Note that Wengeroff says that her mother, in particular, begged forgiveness of her household staff for harshness.

Notes to Chapter One 168.  Kol Nidre (all vows) is the first of five services (instead of the usual daily three, four on the Sabbath and other festivals), conducted over Yom Kippur. Kol Nidre is recited with the Holy Ark open and all the Torah scrolls removed and held by men honored with this act, who face the congregation; anytime the Ark is opened or the Torah lifted, all stand. The synagogue becomes a rabbinic court for Kol Nidre, with three Torah holders constituting the judicial panel required for release from vows that are otherwise binding. Kol Nidre begins in the late afternoon and must be completed while still day, since rabbinic law does not permit court verdicts to be issued at night. The cantor, surrounded on each side by a Torah holder, uses a haunting, ancient melody to chant a formula renouncing all oaths made rashly or frivolously to oneself in the coming year (e.g., to fast twice a week; never to slander anyone). This is repeated three times following rabbinic judicial practice, in which the court pronounces its verdict three times. Agreements between parties, much less formal contracts, are not covered by this formula. Kol Nidre is an awesome opening scene to the Day of Atonement, reminding all of their fallibility and, paradoxically, of the binding nature of spoken commitments since it otherwise requires a ceremony such as this to release the obligation. Kol Nidre is said on Yom Kippur because anxiety about rash acts would be particularly high in this season. Wengeroff’s account here reflects both her experience as a young child, when she did not go to synagogue but prayed at home with other young siblings and her older sister (as she describes), and her experience later, when she did go to synagogue. 169.  A maarev (evening) service follows Kol Nidre and includes slikhaus (penitence prayers), whose liturgy Wengeroff cites and paraphrases. 170.  Wengeroff does not translate literally here but paraphrases the Hebrew of a central piece of liturgy on both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in her parlance, the unessane taukeff prayer, which imagines all creatures coming before God for judgment according to their deeds. One significant divergence between the liturgy and Wengeroff’s version of it is her rendering of a central pronouncement: “But repentance, prayer . . . release one from the evil [of the] gezerah.” Gezerah (Hebrew, decree), as the prayer itself states, may be averted, but Wengeroff translates the word as (unalterable) destiny or fate ( geschick), a choice in keeping with her fatalism. It is quite possible that Wengeroff used a Yiddish (or German) translation of the liturgy instead or alongside the Hebrew, which may also account for disparities between the original Hebrew and her rendering. 171.  This is the meat of the chicken used for the expiation ritual of the eve of Yom Kippur (see n. 160). 172.  According to rabbinic law, the appearance of three stars in the night sky signals the beginning of a new calendar day. Thus, even before the ceremonial ending of the holiday with havdole (on which, nn. 95, 101), lighting candles and heating water were permitted. 173. Yomim nauroim (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: Days of Awe). 174.  This is one of several instances where Wengeroff criticizes or at least notes

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Notes to Chapter One a negative aspect of traditional Jewish observance, despite her many idealized pronouncements about it. Her characterization of herself as wholly serious also contradicts her own reports of her quite “frivolous” childhood behavior: wanderings in the hills and kitten pranks in the hayloft that—she tells us—prompted her mother to send her to kheder, as well as her pranks at kheder itself. 175.  Promptness in fulfilling a religious obligation for the coming holiday (Tabernacles begins four days after Yom Kippur) is considered particularly appropriate at the conclusion of Yom Kippur. One of the major ritual objects of Tabernacles, originally a harvest celebration, is the lulav (palm bough), which is placed with three myrtle branches and two willow branches on either side in a woven holder constructed from a palm branch. Together with the etrog (citron), they are blessed and waved during holiday prayers. The use of these “four species” derives from biblical commandment (Lev. 23:39–41), as expounded in rabbinic tradition. Each of the species has elaborate symbolic significance but of the four, the etrog (a fruit that grows only in warm, sunny climates and must be imported to ­Belorussia/ Lithuania) is the most important; hence, the desire to have a flawless one—symmetrical, with no discolorations—and the extraordinary stringency, affordable by only the wealthiest Jews, such as the Epsteins, of providing each adult male member of the household with his own. When not in use, the etrog is carefully wrapped in folds of palm fiber and kept in a container because it is only fit for ritual use if the remnant of its flowering bud, the pittam, is intact; if the pittam is broken off, the etrog is ritually useless. The other three species are kept in water when not in use so that they will not dry out during the eight-day festival, which could also render them ritually unfit. Wealthy Jews, like Wengeroff’s family, could afford to have fine etrog boxes, often of engraved wood or silver. Poor Jews often could not afford to have their own set of “four species” and used that belonging to the synagogue. 176.  Men and women are separated in traditional synagogues because rabbinic law is androcentric, and the presence of women is deemed sexually distracting to men, for whom communal prayer is an obligation; in contrast, women are legally obligated only to private prayer and attend synagogue voluntarily. However, as Wengeroff’s and many other memoirs by men and women, including Glikl Hameln, attest, women attended synagogue regularly and with a fervent sense of duty and piety (see the Introduction to this Volume). Hence, the separation. In some synagogues, Wengeroff’s obviously among them, women sat in a room completely separate from the men’s prayer hall where the service was conducted and could neither see nor hear it; a small opening in a common wall may have been the only connection between the spheres; and even this may not have existed. For this reason, women attending synagogues with such architecture (as opposed to ones with a women’s balcony section), needed their own prayer leaders, a practice well attested already in medieval Ashkenazic communities (on which, see A. Grossman). 177.  The terms zoger and zogerke come from the Yiddish zogen (to say or recite).

Notes to Chapter One 178.  Wengeroff records this episode partially in Yiddish. 179.  The tabernacle (suke) is a temporary dwelling, in rabbinic parlance: a booth having at least three walls and a roof consisting of cut foliage that must cover the interior yet through which the sky must yet be visible. The biblical commandment (Lev. 23:34, 42–43), is “to dwell” in the tabernacle, in remembrance of the booths in which the Israelites dwelled for forty years while wandering in the desert. Rabbinic interpretation also stressed this as a reminder of the fragility of physical structures and of ultimate reliance on divine protection and Providence. The rabbis interpreted the commandment of dwelling in the suke as eating, drinking, and sleeping there. In cold, eastern European climates, this (or as Wengeroff notes, even having leisurely chats) was often untenable, but except in case of rain or snow, pious males took all meals there (as with the other rituals of this festival, the rabbis exempted women from the commandment of dwelling in the suke, though not of course, from the preparation of meals for the men). Wengeroff’s memoir, in contrast to that of Bella Chagall (Burning Lights), indicates that the females of her household also ate in the suke, a function perhaps of the family’s wealth and consequent size of their sukkah, as opposed to that of Chagall’s much more modest family, as much as any position on the inclusion of women in what was considered for them a merely voluntary fulfillment of this commandment. It was considered meritorious to bring one’s finest furnishings into the suke, which the Wengeroff’s family did, as she details. While most Jews would build a suke each year, Wengeroff’s account makes clear that the Epsteins had a suke that remained standing from one year to the next, which the ample dimensions of their property and their wealth allowed (the suke would have had to have been substantial to withstand the climate). As she notes, it had a movable roof that would be replaced with the mandatory greens for the holiday. Tabernacles, like Passover, lasts eight days in the Diaspora. 180.  On the blessing for children, see nn. 152, 157; on ritual hand washing before meals, see n. 153; on the handling of the barkhes (also known as challah), see n. 73. 181.  The Hallel prayer is sung during the morning service on every New Moon, on Hanukkah, Purim, and the three Pilgrimage Festivals (Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles), and during the seder. At certain points during Hallel on Tabernacles, the lulav and etrog are waved in circular, horizontal, and vertical motions around the worshipper, making its chanting on this holiday particularly memorable. The etrog is a fragrant fruit, and a synagogue full of them would have a distinct citrus scent. It is this scene that Wengeroff evokes. Since only men are obligated to bless and wave the lulav, this is whom she sees performing this ritual, as well as the hakofes (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: circular processions) of male worshippers carrying the lulav and etrog around the bimah (the platform located in the center-front of traditional synagogues, on which the Torah is read) while chanting special prayers for salvation. Since Wengeroff has said the women’s section in her synagogue was so separate from the main (male) section that it needed its own prayer leaders, this recollection would be based on her having been present in the men’s section. Traditionally,

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Notes to Chapter One girls under the age of twelve (which is what she was during the years she recalls here) were permitted in the men’s section. 182.  On biblically ordained, weeklong festivals (Passover and Tabernacles), festival-specific observances—in this case, dwelling in the sukkah and blessing the lulav—are observed throughout the week. During hol hamo‘ed (the intermediate days of the festival), “profane” activities—like cooking, travel, and doing business, forbidden on the first and last two days of the holiday—are permitted, but as Wengeroff notes, can be dispensed with voluntarily. Cooking was done on hol hamo‘ed, but business, conducted in Wengeroff’s family by men—and in most of Jewish society, by men and women—was suspended. This meant, of course, that women did not have the same degree of “pleasure and peacefulness” as men, whose “tasty morsels” women prepared. However, as we have noted in the Introduction to this Volume, Wengeroff is oblivious to the privileging of men in traditional Jewish culture, in stark contrast to her awareness of such privileging in modern Jewish culture. She does not even include the heavy female-centered labors of the kitchen and dining room in her list of “work.” 183.  Haushano rabbo (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: the great salvation) is the last day of hol hamo‘ed of Tabernacles. It is called the great haushano because on this day, (male) worshippers circle the synagogue sanctuary seven times (as opposed to one circuit on the other days of the festival). After morning prayers, all the Torah scrolls are removed from the Holy Ark, and the platform from which the Torah is read (bimah) is circled seven times while the men hold the lulav and etrog and chant fervent prayers for salvation. It is traditional for males to stay awake the night before this holiday, studying Torah and praying, as on the night before Pentecost. This is done to stimulate repentance and engage in meritorious deeds. The book of Deuteronomy, called mishneh torah (review of the Torah), is studied because the numerical value ( gematriyah) of the Hebrew letters of the word mishneh are equivalent to those of the word, shekhinah, the name of the indwelling, most merciful, aspect of God. Wengeroff here says that the text studied was “the mishnah,” the earliest rabbinic law code and foundation stone of all rabbinic legal commentary; this either was her local custom or an error on her part. Again, this is not a custom she, as a female, would herself have practiced or been formally taught, as we have noted in other instances. 184.  Haushano rabbo is the last day of the penitential season that began in Elul, over a month before. As Wengeroff notes, it is believed that on this day final judgment of each Jew is sealed; it is a day of appeal, as it were, from judgment rendered on Yom Kippur and, in part, a recapitulation of Yom Kippur, hence the devotion and tears Wengeroff notes. A popular folk belief that those who did not see the shadows of their heads on this night were destined to die in the coming year is the basis for Wengeroff’s comment about “headless spirits.” The belief that the heavens would part and that pious Jews could have their wishes granted is probably connected to the understanding of haushano rabbo as the time when judgment is sealed for the coming year. At the conclusion of the seven circuits made in the synagogue

Notes to Chapter One on haushano rabbo, worshippers take three willow branches (willow was one of the “four species” of the lulav; see above) and beat them on the ground. The reasons for this ancient custom are obscure but may be related to the belief, stated in the Mishnah (Rosh Hashanah, 1:2) that “during [Tabernacles] the world is judged for the water that would be received,” i.e., whether there would be sufficient rains. (Tabernacles comes at the end of the autumn harvest, just before the rainy season begins in the Land of Israel.) The motif of many of the salvation prayers on this day is water; willows grow near streams and are water intensive. The beating ritual may be part of the supplication for water that culminates with a formal prayer for rain on shemini atseres (see n. 185). 185.  Shemini atseres is a holiday of biblical origin that comes at the end of Tabernacles. While technically, a separate holiday (see Lev. 23:36 and Num. 29:35), effectively, it concludes Tabernacles. On this day, it is believed, Divine judgment is made regarding rainfall; God is beseeched for a good rainy season for the Holy Land in a special geshem (rain) prayer that contains allusions to the merit of the biblical patriarchs. The prayer is chanted in the solemn tones of Yom Kippur prayers, with the cantor wearing the kittel (white caftan, see n. 165) worn on Yom Kippur. 186.  Although technically, the Tabernacles festival ends as shemini atseres ­begins, pious Jews, Wengeroff’s family obviously among them, would continue to eat in the suke (without making the suke blessings) even though the weather, as she tells us, was already harsh. This is another example of the family’s piety. A special prayer of yearning for the messiah is said after taking the last meal of the holiday in the suke. 187.  It is impossible that the furniture and the suke decorations were removed from the Epsteins’ suke on shemini atseres since such labors are forbidden on this holiday, including by servants. The dismantling could not have taken place that evening, either, since another holiday (simkhas torah, see n. 188) commenced then, on which the same restrictions applied. This is one of several instances of Wengeroff’s faulty recall or explanation of ritual observance. 188.  Simkhas torah (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: the rejoicing of the Torah) is a joyous festival marking the end of an annual cycle of weekly Torah readings and the simultaneous beginning of a new one. The final verses of Deuteronomy and then immediately, the first section of Genesis are read in the synagogue in an elaborate ceremony. All the Torah scrolls are removed from the Holy Ark and male worshippers, including boys carrying flags, make seven circuits around the synagogue, each followed by joyous, even raucous, singing and dancing. The proceedings are enlivened by alcohol consumption and pranks by both children and adults. It is interesting that Wengeroff recounts home, but not synagogue, observances of this holiday. Although as a child Wengeroff clearly spent time in the men’s section of the synagogue, as we noted above, the proceedings there on simkhas torah may have been deemed too raucous for her. 189.  Rabbinic law forbids playing a musical instrument on the Sabbath and festivals, not because playing per se is a violation but to prevent tuning or repairing instruments, which would be. To prevent violation, observant Jews do not even

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Notes to Chapter One touch an object (e.g., a pen or candlestick) whose normal use is forbidden on the holiday. Such objects are called muktse, meaning, “fenced off.” 190.  Al hatauro ve‘al ho‘avaudo (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: upon Torah and worship) is a rabbinic expression for two of three pillars on which the world stands (the third being “acts of kindness”); the reference is from Mishnah Avot 1:2. 191.  A siyyum (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: conclusion) is a ceremony marking the end of study of a significant body of sacred Jewish text. Food and alcoholic drink would be served, and the scholar (or group of men who had studied together) would give a learned discourse based on their study. Shas is the Hebrew acronym for the six orders of the Mishnah, a rabbinic term used to denote the entire Talmud, with commentaries. This is a huge corpus whose study would take years to complete and would be accomplished by only the most diligent students of Talmud. Although the siyyum can be held at any time, simkhas torah was a particularly appropriate time (it was traditional for the man honored with the blessing on reading the final portion of Deuteronomy on simkhas torah to make a siyyum). Hence, Wengeroff’s father’s preference for this date. From Wengeroff’s language here, her father may have done a yearly siyyum or, at least, had done this more than once, supporting her assertion elsewhere that sacred study was central in his life. 192.  Shabbes bereishis (the Sabbath of Genesis) is the first Sabbath after the end of the autumn holidays, on which the regular cycle of weekly Torah readings begins anew with the first portion of Genesis. 193.  Issru khag (Yiddish, from the Hebrew) is the day following the conclusion of the three pilgrimage festivals (Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles), not just simkhas torah. It is considered a semi-holiday, on which better-than-usual food (holiday leftovers) was appropriate, but on which profane activities forbidden on full holidays (writing, conducting business, cooking, travel) were permitted. 194.  Wengeroff here refers to the ritual of kiddush levanah (sanctifying the moon). The ritual is done in the first half of the lunar month and is performed outdoors at night, preferably on Saturday night, just after the Sabbath ends, so that those doing the blessing are still attired in fine clothes and have the scent of spices from the havdole ritual on them (see nn. 95, 101). The moon must be visible; the ritual is not done on a cloudy or rainy night. It is a joyous, whimsical ceremony, including dancing on tiptoe; with thanks expressed to God for creating and renewing the moon, which herself (sic) is addressed; and with greetings, blessings, and song. Note that this, too, is male-identified ritual, with Wengeroff recording her observation of men performing it. 195.  The Jewish calendar is lunar; all festivals are reckoned by the New Moon (rosh khodesh), on which see nn. 198–199. As Wengeroff states, many pious Jews would fast on the eve of rosh khodesh, which was called a “minor Yom Kippur” (yom kippur katan) by the sixteenth-century kabbalist, Moses Cordovero, a designation subsequently popularized. There is a kabbalistic teaching that the moon became defective (smaller than the sun and subject to monthly waning) after Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden; hence, the acts of repentance, including the charity and

Notes to Chapter One fasting that Wengeroff mentions on the eve of the new lunar month. The “special prayers” to which she refers are penitential prayers recited at the afternoon service on this day. As she notes, there was also a practice of fasting and giving charity on Mondays and Thursdays every week, which the zealous did. It is noteworthy that Wengeroff records the behaviors customary on this day but unlike many other such instances, does so here without explanation, of which perhaps, she was ignorant. 196.  Prute (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: penny). 197.  There was precedent in the formerly Polish lands of the Russian Empire for Jews to mint coins and print paper money for Jewish use. As Wengeroff notes, this currency was not accepted in the market, but the Jewish poor could redeem it for food, firewood, etc., in community charity institutions—that is, in the internal Jewish economy. Of course, Jewish currency, stamped with Hebrew writing, is a vivid expression of Jewish self-government and pre-modern Jewish self-­referentiality—precisely what is lost in Jewish modernity. This section is a demonstration of Wengeroff’s memory-virtuosity. 198.  It is strange that Wengeroff would say this since she has just detailed other typical activities of erev rosh khodesh—fasting, special synagogue prayers. Of all of them, however, charity was the most female-identified, associated with the colorful gabete she has described. This would seem to account for the prominence she gives it, illustration of the role of gender in memory and the reconstruction of what is “normative.” 199.  Rosh khodesh, indeed, is considered a minor holiday. It is of biblical origin (Num. 28:14; 1 Sam. 20:18, Isa. 1:13, 66:23; Hosea 2:13, Amos 8:5). An abridged form of the Hallel prayer (see nn. 84, 181) is chanted in the morning service; there is also a special Torah reading and supplementary (musaf ) service, which Wengeroff does not mention. Significantly, rosh khodesh was considered a women’s holiday not only in traditional women’s culture but in rabbinic culture. Its chief observance was a cessation of female work—note that Wengeroff mentions “handwork”—a significant dispensation (cf. above, regarding the seder, where we saw that men but not women were relieved of certain obligations). According to an early rabbinic legend (Pirkei derabbi eliezer, 45), women were given rosh khodesh as a holiday for refusing to contribute their jewelry for construction of the Golden Calf but later willingly donating it for building the portable sanctuary, set up for the first time on the rosh khodesh of the month of Nissan. Special foods, as Wengeroff notes, are a feature of the day, dating back to biblical times. Clearly, as she goes on to indicate, the day was viewed as auspicious. 200.  Given what Wengeroff has just said about women and work on rosh khodesh, gathering the geese for fattening on rosh khodesh of Kislev (roughly, December), would have been done by men. See the painting, Making Goose Fat, by Toby Knoebl Fluek in Fluek, Passover and Fluek, Memories of My Life, 15 and 34. As Wengeroff notes, twenty-one days of fattening, beginning on the New Moon, meant that plenty of goose fat became available in time for the Hanukkah holiday, which began on the 25th of that month, with its customary latkes (fried pancakes).

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Notes to Chapter One In Fluek’s Passover, the fattening began in late December, in preparation for the demands of Passover cooking. 201.  On the kashering of ritually slaughtered meat, see n. 66. Kosher slaughtering is done with an exceedingly sharp, dedicated knife that severs the carotid artery in a single stroke but does not cut the spinal column. 202.  This tale seems to be a take-off on the biblical story (2 Kings: 4) of the prophet Elisha’s miracle for the poor woman, who paid off her debts with oil that increased miraculously, in similar fashion. Wengeroff does not show any awareness of this allusion, meaning she knew of it from popularization. 203.  Akhenu bnei yisroel (Yiddish; Hebrew: our brethren, the Children of Israel). 204.  This is a very odd illustration of possible ways of showing (or not needing to show) formal deference since uncovering the head is the last thing a pious Jewish man would do, or expect of any other good Jew. This is another case of anachronistic retrojection of social customs that Wengeroff came to know as an assimilated adult into memories of her childhood; cf. n. 104. 205.  Carrying anything on the Sabbath from a private to a public domain, or vice versa, or more than about seven feet within a public domain, is forbidden under rabbinic law, based on rabbinic interpretation of Exod. 16:29 and Jer. 17:21–22; carrying within a private domain, such as a house, is permitted. The prohibition is not related to the weight or bulk of the item carried—as Wengeroff notes, carrying even a handkerchief is forbidden—but to rabbinic definitions of a property’s status. To get around the restriction against carrying on the Sabbath, the Talmud devised a legal fiction whereby the boundaries of domains were mixed and became jointly owned, through the agency of an eruv (mixing or pooling rights); this was accomplished by a string or wire being hung around contiguous properties, enveloping neighborhoods, or even a town. Carrying was then permissible on the Sabbath within the limits of the eruv. There is also a prohibition, based on the same verse in Exodus, on walking long distances from one’s residence on the Sabbath, unless it is within city limits (travel, by any means except ship that departed before the Sabbath, is forbidden). A specified limit (“the Sabbath boundary”) on walking beyond city limits is set; going beyond it is a violation of the Sabbath. Rabbinic law distinguishes clearly between public and private and intentional and accidental violation. Wengeroff’s examples are of Jews who violate both intentionally and publicly, the most provocative behavior, which the violators she depicts would, of course, have known. Her remark here testifies to the existence of such “freethinkers” in Brest by around 1840: people who flouted rabbinic authority intentionally and with impunity, disapproval from the pious notwithstanding. This kind of behavior became more common during the era of the haskalah, as the writings of the maskilim, their opponents, and others attest. In his memoirs, the great Jewish socialist leader, Vladimir Medem, an age contemporary of Wengeroff’s children, relates a similar incident, in which he went out in Minsk on the Sabbath carrying a walking stick and encountered traditionalist condemnation; Medem, Memoirs, 160. On

Notes to Chapter Two the larger significance of Wengeroff ’s pronouncement about collective Jewish responsibility, with which she concludes the first section and major portion of Volume One, see my Introduction to her second volume.

Notes to Chapter Two 206.  On the significance of this statement, see the Introduction to this Volume. Wengeroff does not explain why she sets 1838 in particular as the beginning of the period of the progress she so applauds. 207.  On Max Lilienthal and his mission to Russian Jewry and Russian Jewish responses to it, see the Introduction to this Volume. 208.  A central part of Nicholas I’s program to reform Russian Jewry was the creation in 1847 of two state-sponsored rabbinical schools; one in Vilna, eminent seat of traditional rabbinical scholarship; the other in Zhitomir, in Ukraine. The goal of establishing Crown seminaries was to undermine traditional religious authority and create a Russified, alternative leadership; the State even mandated that these schools be called seminaries, to distinguish them from yeshivas, traditional rabbinical academies. Within a decade of their founding, each school had enrolled over 250 students, a significant number (Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 107), but their influence ultimately was limited and the government’s hoped-for results with them, unrealized. The Crown seminaries graduated Russian-literate, “government rabbis” (as opposed to the traditional kind, whose education was purely talmudic and who could rarely speak, let alone read or write, Russian). The State authorized only government rabbis to perform and register marriages and divorces, but these rabbis most often were qualified for and did little else and were treated with disdain and contempt by traditional Jews, who maintained a parallel, unofficial system of rabbis of the old type; see Azriel Shohat, “Yahas ha-tsibbur el ha-rabbanim hanikhei batei-ha-midrash le-rabbanim,” in Ha-Dat ve’ha-hayyim, 240–68. The state rabbinical schools became hotbeds of haskalah and violation of Jewish law and, later, of various revolutionary currents. On this and their overall cultural impact on Russian Jewry, see Yehuda Slutsky, “Beit ha-midrash le-rabbanim be-vilna,” in Etkes, Ha-dat ve’ha-hayyim, 217–39; Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 103–13; Lederhendler, Modern Jewish Politics, 91–99; and Verena Dohrn, “Das Rabbinerseminar in Wilna (1847–1873): Zur Geschichte der ersten staatlichen hoeheren Schule fuer Juden im Russischen Reich,” Jahrbuecher fuer Geschichte Osteuropas 45 (1997): 379–99. For the respective functions of state and “spiritual” rabbis, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce; and on the traditional rabbinate in Lithuanian Jewry, see Etkes, “Talmudic Scholarship,” 107–32. As Wengeroff notes, below, traditional parents resisted the desire of sons to attend these rabbinical schools, precisely because they served as intellectual entrée to European culture and loss of traditional observance. 209.  Wengeroff is obviously impressed with the fact that Lilienthal had a doctorate in philology; she states it twice in the space of a few lines. It speaks volumes

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Notes to Chapter Two that she presents his credentials first as his “European education” and only then, his knowledge of Hebrew and “some Talmud” (Lilienthal was, after all, an ordained rabbi). That such a (twenty-three-year-old) man would be entrusted with reforming Jewish education in Russia was for traditionalists, precisely the cause of alarm, on which see the Introduction to this Volume. 210.  Wengeroff is mistaken in stating that Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin (b. 1749), was summoned to St. Petersburg to participate in the government’s commission to reform Jewish education, led by the Minister of National Enlightenment, Uvarov, in 1843; Rabbi Hayyim died in 1821. Rather, it was his son, Rabbi Isaac ben Hayyim, who had succeeded him as head of the Volozhin yeshiva, who was summoned. Also contrary to her depiction, Rabbi Isaac agreed to go and participated actively, while also delegating some responsibilities to two sons-in-law. Wengeroff is further mistaken in her depiction of the behavior of the leader of Lubavitch Hasidism, Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneerson, who also participated in the commission. The two men did differ significantly in their stances toward the commission; Rabbi Isaac came to the reluctant conclusion—convinced by a conversation with Max Lilienthal—that collaboration with the government plan was necessary to prevent Nicholas I from sentencing the entire Jewish population to penal servitude. He also hoped that engagement would allow him to control the reforms from within. Rabbi Schneerson agreed to participate with the intention of subverting the government’s plan; according to internal, hagiographical sources, he attempted to do this in a forthright manner, leading to multiple arrests. For a hagiographical account of Rabbi Isaac’s involvement with the commission, see Shulamith Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, 34–40; which, interestingly, has Rabbi Isaac asking Lilienthal why the Tsar is so interested in the education of the Jews when he shows no similar interest in the education of his peasants. Both rabbis served on Uvarov’s commission for several months in 1843. On this, see Stanislawski, 75–82. For Wengeroff’s remarks about the Crown rabbinical seminaries, see below. Wengeroff’s sources for her presentation of this chapter in Russian Jewish cultural history are not clear; it would appear to be hearsay. If so, her account gives important insight into popular Jewish perception of these events. 211.  On the journal Voskhod and Wengeroff’s association with it, see the Introduction to this Volume. 212.  For the communities on Lilienthal’s itinerary and his version of his experiences there, see his memoirs (cited in the Introduction); for scholarly treatment, see Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I. On Lilienthal’s time in Brest, see Wengeroff and the Introduction to this Volume. 213.  On colonialist attitudes expressed in this and associated characterizations, see the Introduction to this Volume. One wonders how Wengeroff knew what she says here about Lilienthal’s impressions of kheder boys. His memoirs cite such physical impressions; either she was familiar with them or knew of his impressions from reports of his remarks, perhaps made to members of her own family who met

Notes to Chapter Two him. On this type of observation in Lilienthal’s memoirs, see the Introduction to this Volume. 214.  Talis (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: prayer shawl); the ritual, knotted fringes on this body-covering shawl, another term for arba kanfos; see n. 111. Rabbinic law obligated men and exempted (effectively, banned) women from donning this ritual garment, which is simultaneously one of the foremost identifiers of Jewish religious practice and completely male-identified. Accordingly, Wengeroff here, and elsewhere when describing male-identified practices, identifies males and “Jews.” 215.  The kheder ceremony that Wengeroff describes is well attested in the literature from and about eastern Europe. See, e.g., I. J. Singer, World That Is No More, 21–28; Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 88; Roskies and Roskies, The Shtetl Book, 151–57. On the origins of this ceremony, see Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 216.  Minsk (see the Map in this Volume) was the most important commercial center in Belorussia, its Jewish settlement dating from the fifteenth century. In the nineteenth century, its Jewish community was among the largest and most important in Russia, numbering nearly 13,000 in 1847; some 88,000 Jews lived in the province of Minsk in that year. The city was a stronghold of mitnagdic (anti-Hasidic) Judaism. As an adult, Wengeroff would spend many years there; see her Volume Two. 217.  Wengeroff is correct in saying that in the 1840s, the large yeshivas of Russia were in Volozhin, Minsk, and Mir. Other important yeshivas of the “Lithuanian” (anti- or at least, non-Hasidic) variety were established during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Slobodka, Telz, Lomza, Radzyn, Novogrudok, and Slutsk. There were also Hasidic yeshivas, often in small towns, the largest of which was that of Lubavitch, which had branches in other places. In addition, there were local yeshivas, supported by the community and local householders, as Wengeroff details about Brest, below. There were also kollelim, academies for married men, about which Wengeroff writes, in Volozhin, Minsk, Vilna, Eyshishok, Kovno (see her description, below), and elsewhere; for locations, see the Map in this Volume. On Volozhin and the Lithuanian yeshivas, see the Introduction to this Volume and the literature cited there and the photo of the yeshiva in this Volume. Rabbi Hayyim broke from the pattern of yeshiva students boarding with members of the community (the pattern Wengeroff describes; see below, “Yeshiva Bokhurim”) in order to maximize the yeshiva’s ideological control. He envisaged the yeshiva as an ideological, not a local, institution and called on communities near and distant to support it. Because of its reputation for elite scholarship and the prestige of Talmud learning in traditional society, Volozhin did draw students from afar, as well as locally; it became the model for the characteristic “Lithuanian” (non-Hasidic) yeshiva. The Russian government ordered Volozhin, the antithesis of the Russified Crown rabbinical seminary, closed in 1824, but it continued to function and even grew. ­Volozhin exercised enormous, even mythic, influence; its heads—Rabbi Hayyim and his son and successor, Rabbi Isaac—were

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Notes to Chapter Two acknowledged leaders of Russian Jewry, as seen in the government’s summons to Rabbi Isaac to participate in its commission on Jewish education. From 1854 until 1892, the yeshiva was headed by Naphtali Tsvi Yehuda Berlin (known by the acronym, “the ­Netsiv”), Rabbi Isaac’s son-in-law, during whose tenure the yeshiva’s stature reached its peak, with over 400 students and emissaries dispatched over Russia and even to the United States to solicit funds. Volozhin produced most of the rabbis of Russia in the nineteenth century. As Wengeroff relates in this chapter, her father studied in Volozhin’s kollel (see n. 218), and much that she says about him fits its traditions, about which, see the Introduction to this Volume. On Rabbi Hayyim and Volozhin, see also Immanuel Etkes, “The Methods and Achievements of R. Hayyim of Volozhin as a Mitnagedic Response to Hasidism,” in Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 38–39 (1972): 1–45; Etkes, Rabbi Israel Salanter and the Mussar Movement, 30–56; Norman Lamm, Torah Lishmah: Torah for Torah’s Sake in the Works of R. Hayyim of Volozhin and His Contemporaries (New York: 1989); Soloveitchik Meiselman, The Soloveitchik Heritage, 26–40. On the relationship of the yeshiva and the town Volozhin, see Immanuel Etkes, “A Shtetl with a Yeshiva: The Case of ­Volozhin,” in The Shtetl: New Evaluations, ed. Steven T. Katz (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 39–52. Mir was a town in Grodno province, Belarussia, with a population of 2,273 Jews in 1847. The yeshiva there was founded in 1815 by Rabbi Samuel ben Hayyim Tiktinsky, a wealthy merchant, who gathered students and began giving talmudic lectures, paying for their maintenance himself. His son Abraham took over the yeshiva in 1823 and set an example of contemplative prayer; here too, students boarded at the yeshiva rather than with householders, sparing them the indignities that often came with such lodging (on which, see Wengeroff’s account, below, and n. 218). As the yeshiva’s fame spread and enrollments grew, Tiktinsky began soliciting support from other Jewish communities, causing conflict with the authorities at Volozhin, who accused Mir of encroaching on their donors; Tiktinsky and the yeshiva persevered. Subsequent heads of Mir were renowned Talmud scholars; some were also charismatic. Mir was one of the great yeshivas of Lithuanian Jewry. On Minsk, see n. 216. There were several yeshivas there, the largest of which was Blumke’s kloyz—a study hall funded by a woman. On women’s vicarious route to the merit of sacred study in traditional culture, see the Introduction to this Volume. 218.  Wengeroff is here describing a kollel, a talmudic academy for married men. The yeshiva was for youth of post–bar mitsvah age until marriage; married youth were not accepted. The law codes, moreover (practical, as opposed to theoretical Talmud), were studied not in yeshivas but in kollelim (plural). Therefore, men wishing rabbinic ordination (as well as others, like Wengeroff’s father, who though married, wished to “learn” for its own sake), joined kollelim. In Volozhin, the kollel was a branch of the yeshiva. Kollel study was usually for 3–4 years, with students receiving a subsidy for their families. During this time, as in Wengeroff’s family’s experience, wives and children were without husband and father for most of the year, which caused financial hardship to most families (if not to ­Wengeroff’s), as

Notes to Chapter Two well as emotional stress; the Vilna Gaon, a staunch advocate of married men going off to learn despite such family pressures, himself recorded the putative plaint of families: “Bring us something to support and sustain us, some livelihood!”; cited in Etkes, “Marriage and Torah Study Among Lomdim” in The Jewish Family, 154. Despite this, as Wengeroff states below, Talmud study for young married men with families was highly regarded in traditional society, at least officially. Implementing this innovation, with its negative impact on family life, was one of the triumphs of Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner and his successors (obviously, as the Gaon’s remark indicates—he had gone as far as calling men who ignored family pleas “true heroes”—there was also criticism and opposition). Wengeroff’s father’s relatively short tenure in the kollel may have been caused by business pressures, his departure linked to his own father’s move from Brest to Warsaw in the late 1830s (by which time, Yudl Epstein had several children, including Pauline), and his assumption of a branch of the family business in Brest (about which, see the Introduction to this Volume). In his case then, it would have been not the demands of a stressed family but those of a robust business that caused his early departure from kollel, not a typical situation. On the conflicts of family life, Torah study, and making a living in nineteenth-century Lithuanian Jewish society, see Etkes, “Marriage and Torah Study,” and Etkes, “Mishpaha velimud,” Zion 51:1 (1986): 87–106. ­Kollelim were a significant variation on and departure from the system of kest, in which married men studied Talmud on their own or with tutors while they boarded with their in-laws. Of course, ideological control in an age of heterodoxy was far greater in a kollel or yeshiva than in individual households, which is part of the reason the rabbinic leaders of Lithuania in the nineteenth century backed them, and the reason they stressed the role of the mashgiah ruhani (the spiritual supervisor), who lectured, exhorted, and threatened students about ideological purity. Control of course, was far from hermetic and yeshivas could be hotbeds of unsanctioned ideological ferment, as we have noted. About yeshiva students and their lives in this culture, see Wengeroff’s section, “Yeshiva Bokhurim.” 219.  Putting it mildly; on Wengeroff’s mother’s fears of haskalah, see Wengeroff’s second volume and the Introduction to this Volume. 220.  Wengeroff implies here that her brothers-in-law had this knowledge of European languages, literature, and “some science,” before the advent of Lilienthal and the reforms, but this is very unlikely given the date here (ca. 1841) and what she herself tells us, below, about these young men and their struggles, against Wengeroff’s mother, especially, to attain precisely such knowledge, specifically on Lilienthal’s recommendation. For my reconstruction of this struggle in this household, see the Introduction to this Volume. 221.  The languages Wengeroff is reporting about here are those that these Jews used for dealings with non-Jews. Among themselves, Jews, including her family, spoke various dialects of Yiddish. Her comment here is about the degree of fluency and “purity” Jews had in Russian, Polish, German, and Lithuanian, used purely for utilitarian purposes.

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Notes to Chapter Two Since the Pale of Settlement, to which Jewish residence was restricted, was to the west of Russia proper (see Map in this Volume), most Jews did not need to know and did not know Russian; they used the Polish, Ukrainian, and German of the non-Jewish populations of the Pale and their business partners in Germany. See Wengeroff herself on this (Chap. 3, p. 5). Wengeroff’s statement about Jewish use of Russian, even as an admixture of Yiddish, would appear to be a generalization from the exceptional situation of her family, who knew Russian because of its business association with the government. On this, see the Introduction to this Volume. 222.  Rossien, which lay about 30 miles from Prussia’s eastern border, in Kurland (see the Map in this Volume), had a large Jewish community (about 8,000 in 1842), with extensive business ties to Germany. It was an early (pre-Lilienthal) center of (moderate) haskalah in the east, a place where Jews began using Russian schools relatively early. The maskil and Hebrew novelist Avraham Mapu was a private teacher there from 1837 to 1844 (Slutsky, Ha‘itonut, 70–71); Mapu would later tutor Wengeroff’s son Semyon and was often in her home, where he lingered, she says, for conversation (see her Volume Two). Kurland, situated between the Baltic Sea and the Western Dvina River (now Latvia), passed to Russia in 1795 after the third partition of Poland, though it was not included in the Pale of Settlement. 223.  This strange reference is to Daniel Khwolson (1819–1911), who grew up in Vilna in the home of pious parents, received a traditional education, and became an eminent and prolific scholar of Semitic languages. An autodidact who taught himself the Latin alphabet, then German, Russian, and French, ­K hwolson was desperate for secular education and went on foot to Riga to see Max Lilienthal, who gave him a letter of introduction to Abraham Geiger, one of the leaders of the German Jewish Reform movement; Geiger helped him prepare for Russian university matriculation exams. Khwolson returned to Russia in 1851, settling in St. Petersburg, and converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1855 in order to accept appointment as professor of Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldaic philology at the University of St. Petersburg. He was subsequently appointed to the Greek Orthodox Theological Seminary and the Roman Catholic Academy of the city, as well, holding the three posts simultaneously. Over the course of his career, ­K hwolson trained virtually every important orientalist in Russia. Khwolson actively remained tied to the Jewish community, writing scholarly works that refuted antiJewish calumnies like the blood libel and wholesale attacks on the Talmud; giving a vehement, emotional denunciation of the blood libel during the trial of a Jew accused of this in Kutais (1878); writing in defense of the Pharisees against accusations in the New Testament, including their alleged role in the trial of Jesus, by implication, lifting the charge of deicide from contemporary Jews. Khwolson served on the Board of the Society for the Spread of Enlightenment Among the Jews of Russia, a Jewish organization, and published in Russian Jewish periodicals, such as ­Voskhod. The best-known tale about Khwolson is his alleged response to being asked if he had converted from conviction, to which Khwolson is said to have replied, “Yes, I was convinced that it was better to be a professor

Notes to Chapter Two in St. Petersburg than a melamed in Eyshishok” (cited in Lucy Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition, 335; cf. the slightly different version in Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia, 1:180); on Eyshishok, see n. 250. As Sophie Guenzburg, daughter of the financier, philanthropist, communal leader, orientalist scholar, and friend of Khwolson, Baron David Guenzburg, said, “as a Jew, my father could not be a professor at the University of St. Petersburg, though he was the leading expert in Near Eastern History, Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Assyrian, Aramaic . . .”; cited in Dawidowicz, The Golden Tradition, 255. (On Jewish responses to Khwolson and a very different account of his conversion, see my “Good Bad Jews.”) This is the background to Wengeroff’s parenthetical remark that the nameless, accomplished figure she mentions had “of course” converted. This was a situation with which Wengeroff, of course, was very familiar, since two of her sons, she tells us in Volume Two, converted in order to gain admission to university (one of whom, ­Semyon, became a renowned Russian literary scholar, a career that would have been barred to him as a Jew). The point of the (apologetic) passage in which Wengeroff’s allusion to Khwol­ son appears is that Talmud learning has intellectual benefits for those who go on to secular study: it is a defense of Talmud study, which was the target of much maskilic criticism and outright government antipathy and was increasingly abandoned by modern Jewish men (including, Wengeroff will tell us, her own husband), who associated it with the old, outdated (and overly Jewish) culture—as opposed to Bible study, which Christians as well as Jews revered as sacred. What is fascinating is that Wengeroff chooses to introduce Khwolson into this defense, using his life as a proof text for her argument—but without identifying him, an artifice that would have been wasted on no one with even a passing familiarity with modern Russian Jewish society. It is a revealing maneuver, to whose significance, and the whole subject of Wengeroff’s sensibilities about opportunistic conversion, we will turn in the Introduction to Volume Two of this edition. 224.  Hayyim Selig Slonimsky (1810–1904), was a moderate maskil, editor, and inventor who used Hebrew for his scientific writings. He published on math, astronomy, and the Hebrew calendar and won a prize from the Russian Academy of Sciences for inventing a calculating machine. There are also claims that he invented the telegraph in 1854; see Nicholas Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 23. In 1862, Slonimsky founded and edited the Hebrew periodical, Ha-tsefirah, devoted mainly to popular articles on science, many of which he wrote; he ceased its publication after a few months to become inspector of the government’s rabbinical school in Zhitomir and Hebrew censor for southern Russia but renewed its publication in 1874 when the school closed. More significant for our purposes, Slonimsky was Wengeroff’s in-law: Wengeroff’s daughter Faina married Slonimsky’s son Leonid Zinoyevitch (1850–1918), a lawyer and legal scholar in Russia. Both of them converted to Greek Orthodoxy—about which and about Faina’s very existence—Wengeroff tells us absolutely nothing in her ­Memoirs, a subject to which we will turn in the Introduction to Volume Two.

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Notes to Chapter Two For now, suffice it to note that Wengeroff does not identify or claim Slonimsky as a relative, though she could easily have boasted having such an association by marriage (and others, as we will explore). 225.  This seemingly simple statement is a stunning commentary on the transformations of this age and the creation of Crown rabbinical schools: seminary students who prior to their rabbinical training had been serious students of Talmud but who now—in rabbinical school—no longer were, their Talmudic training serving to facilitate acquisition of secular knowledge precisely, while and because, they were in rabbinical school. Such a situation would have been literally inconceivable before this period. 226.  The references here are to the great German poet and dramatist Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) and Heinrich Zschokke, a German idealist novelist “hugely popular in Jewish Eastern Europe”; Marcus Moseley, ­Being For Myself Alone, 362 and nn. 129 and 131; see also Slutsky, Ha‘itonut, 92. Schiller’s works were immensely popular among acculturating German Jews (see the many references, for instance, in Monika Richarz’s collection of German Jewish memoirs, Jewish Life in Germany). On Schiller’s standing among German Jews, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity; Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, and George Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism. This popularity was because, in the words of Peter Gay, of “the striving for humanity that animated Schiller,” a longing with which German Jews strongly identified in the age of their struggle for civic rights and acceptance, which was predicated on the notion of a universal humanity that Jews shared (cited in Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978], 186). For these same reasons, Schiller, “perceived as an advocate for cosmopolitanism and equality, a spokesman for humanitarian ideals,” was also popular among Russian Jews attuned to German culture—like members of Wengeroff’s childhood family; cited in Gay, Freud, 44. Wengeroff’s listing of the reading choices of her brothers-in-law illustrates the mechanisms through which cultural change took place in the first generation of acculturating, eastern European Jews: her list is a curriculum for maskilic auto­ didacts. Note however, that while focusing on the young men in her house, she also mentions the appeal of this literature to “Jewish women,” whom she also mentions, below, as involved in maskilic activities in Brest. On this, see her second volume, and my Introduction to this Volume. 227.  On Yudl Epstein’s complicated stance toward haskalah, see the Introduction to this Volume. 228.  A reference to this work by Schiller. The melamed here is to be distinguished from that for young children; he was a Talmud tutor, hired by parents or in-laws to supervise the “learning” of adolescent sons and sons-in-law. 229.  Omar Abbaye (Rabbi Abbaye said.) Abbaye was one of the greatest sages of the Babylonian Talmud, quoted there hundreds of times. In Talmud study, the meaning, logic, and textual bases for the cited opinions of various rabbis would be interrogated.

Notes to Chapter Two 230.  This is another instance of Wengeroff’s literary technique in constructing her tale: how could she know her mother’s thoughts as she stood on the threshold of the young men’s study room? 231.  Pious men wore a ritual head covering at night, as well as during the day. Clearly, David had just risen from sleep and without even dressing hastened to his scientific investigations before the rest of the household was up and about the grounds of the multi-structure Epstein property (obviously, whenever this was, it was not early enough to evade his mother-in-law). Since Wengeroff has told us that her father customarily rose at 4:00 a.m., which of course, had to have been household knowledge, the whole exercise must have been fraught with anxiety for him. 232.  Presumably, this meant she was headed to the main house—to report her son-in-law to her husband. 233.  Elsewhere (2:47), Wengeroff tells us the titles of two works her mother would read: Menoyres hamo’er and Nakhlas tsvi, on which, see the Introduction to this Volume. 234.  On her parents’ different reactions to this episode and feelings about haskalah, see the Introduction to this Volume. 235.  Haskalah flourished in towns and cities, particularly those like Brest (or Brody in Galicia; or Vilna, Berdichev, Pinsk, Odessa, or Shklov in Russia), with extensive trade and associated cultural connections to Germany, in particular, Prussia, and its capital, Berlin. More isolated small towns and villages were relatively “safe.” See Louis Greenberg, The Jews in Russia, 1:23, 25–28; Zipperstein, Odessa, esp. 41, 70; David E. Fishman, Russia’s First Modern Jews, esp. 46–67, 122, 134. Many budding maskilim abandoned their traditional wives to seek enlightenment and escape intellectual stagnation and traditionalist persecution; doing so seems almost a rite of passage in their memoirs. Divorces often ensued, which, however ready an option in traditional society, were still a source of scandal, especially if heresy was the cause and the family was prominent, as the Epsteins were (on both frequency and stigma in divorces in traditional Jewish society, see n. 294). Sometimes it took years for an abandoned wife to secure a divorce, during which time she was an agune (a chained wife), neither married nor free to marry someone else (on which, see n. 51); such was the case with the wives of the famous maskilim Solomon Maimon and Moshe Leib Lilienblum; on the latter, see my “Sins of Youth.” Sometimes, divorces were never given, and the wives remained agunes, an economic and emotional calamity. Even if Wengeroff’s parents welcomed a brief sojourn home for David, an extended absence would cause alarm. A daughter left an agune would be a catastrophe that Wengeroff’s parents would seek actively to avert. Indeed, one wonders if they struck a deal with David about permitted maskilic pursuits to secure his return; Wengeroff does tell us that her mother eventually came to understand the desire to study European languages, a softening in her position (on this, see my Introduction to this Volume). On marital instability and divorce, rife in modern Russian Jewish society, see Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce. The motif of domineering, intrusive, even

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Notes to Chapter Two violent, mothers-in-law making young maskilim miserable is prominent in maskilic autobiography and memoirs. Such intrusiveness was guaranteed by the combination of early marriage, largely matrilocal kest, and women’s power in traditional homes (about which, see the Introduction to this Volume). We should also note that kest was an expensive arrangement, and a son-in-law who violated its expectations would, if nothing else, be considered a costly failed investment. We should note that this exchange between mother and son-in-law is recorded in transliterated Yiddish, further evidence that this was the spoken language in the Epstein home, for all Wengeroff’s comments about (lower-class) others speaking “jargon.” 236.  This is Wengeroff’s sole, explicit observation on the workings of gender in traditional society. While her writing is a major source of information about this topic, it is not one she recognizes as such herself, about which, see the Introduction to this Volume and my “Kol Ishah.” 237.  Wengeroff makes oblique reference here to the history of Jewish expulsions—a significant feature of Jewish life in late medieval central and western Europe that also afflicted Jews in rural and border settlements in the Pale during the nineteenth century and in Moscow in 1891 under the rule of various Tsars. This passage is a beautiful elegy on traditional Jewish society; Wengeroff later offers one for traditional marriage, in particular. Wengeroff, I argue, was hopelessly conflicted about tradition and modernity, but her love for tradition and its lived tropes was profound. It is worth noting in connection with Wengeroff’s metaphor of an island on which Jews lived, albeit as “civilized” inhabitants, that Robinson Crusoe was one of her favorite reading choices; see the Introduction to this Volume. 238.  Bas tovim (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: daughter of fine people). Traditional Jewish society is very status conscious and hierarchical. Status was endowed through elite lineage or (for males) acquired through scholarship, through distinguished marriage, through wealth, or some combination of these factors. On Wengeroff’s use of this term, see the Introduction to this Volume. 239.  The term, “learned proletariat” is not an oxymoron in traditional Jewish society. 240.  On the characteristic sickly appearance of yeshiva boys and the value that traditional, rabbinic culture put precisely on such appearance, see Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct. 241.  Wengeroff is here describing the system of “eating days” (Yiddish: ­essen teg), in which yeshiva boys ate a meal a day (sometimes, their only meal of the day) at the table of a householder who volunteered to support the mitsvah of “learning” in this manner. It was, as she indicates, a hit-or-miss system, not only because not all days would necessarily be subscribed (in any case, it was only one meal a day), but because what was served depended on the standard of living and generosity of the household. Poor families also volunteered for the status-laden teg rotation but often had little to offer; women, in particular, often used this as a vicarious route to holiness and wished to subscribe even when poor; on this, see the Introduction to this Volume. Even in well-to-do families like Wengeroff’s, food

Notes to Chapter Two would be withheld from students who offended religious norms, e.g., by spiriting haskalah tracts into the house, as Wengeroff notes below. It was in part because of the vagaries and frequent indignities of this system that the founders of the nineteenth-century Lithuanian-type yeshiva instituted yeshiva boarding, though desire for ideological control played a larger role in this innovation; see n. 217. On the poverty, student deprivation, and devotion of women in this system, see the evocative memoir of Z. Sher, a former yeshiva boy, “My ‘Days’ in Slonim,” in From A Ruined Garden, 107–9, and I. B. Singer’s novella, Yentl, in particular, the depiction of Hadas. 242.  In traditional Jewish society, scholarship often married wealth: a poor but brilliant youth would be considered an excellent match for the daughter of a wealthy householder. Intellectual aptitude, manifested in Talmud study, therefore, was a route of upward mobility for impoverished males. No such option existed for females. 243.  Orem (Yiddish: poor); botemidrashim (Yiddish; Hebrew: houses of sacred study). 244.  Fishele (Yiddish: little fish). 245.  Apikorsishe (Yiddish: heretical). Note that Wengeroff here translates “enlightened” as “heretical,” which is how traditional Jewish society saw it at this time. On yeshivas functioning as hotbeds of heretical currents, with students initiating other students in contraband literature, see my Introduction to this Volume. Wengeroff’s statement that boys from small towns and villages were “particularly suited” to convey heretical books to the boys in Brest is not necessarily to be understood as saying that greater heterodoxy obtained in smaller settlements than in Brest, but as a comment on the boarders’ desire to please that apparently extended to obtaining contraband literature in the first place. This may have been easier for out-of-town boarders than natives, who were under their parents’ watchful eyes. That doing this was a way for outsiders to earn favor and gain entry into the circles of native yeshiva boys in Brest says much about the status of haskalah literature among Jewish male adolescents—the elite of them—at this time, as Wengeroff’s next recollection confirms. 246.  This is an extremely perceptive observation on the creation of a new, modern Jewish elite of learning, based on secular knowledge and professional ­attainment. 247.  Trefe (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: ritually unfit) characterizes food but also any ritual item or behavior. Batlonim (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: lit., an impractical or idle person); obviously, a derogatory term, used in this context because the activities described are rote, though considered obligatory and sacred. ­Mishnayos (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: sections of the Mishnah, the earliest rabbinic law code), redacted in Israel ca. 200 c.e. Mishnayos in particular, were recited at a death because the transposed letters of the word mishnah (singular) are the same as the Hebrew word for soul (neshamah). All the “types” Wengeroff enumerates here were paid, communal functionaries in the traditional Jewish community,

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Notes to Chapter Two which assessed its members taxes in a variety of ways to support their services; on such functionaries, see Isaac Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 1772–1844 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); Eliach, Once There Was a World, 119–46. Batlonim were semi-official functionaries, paid by the family for whom they performed their services yet operating in the working space of official functionaries: rabbis performing weddings, ritual circumcisers (mohelim), or members of burial societies conducting burials, and thus under the communal “umbrella.” Consciously or not, Wengeroff lists these functionaries in order of their status in the community, a reflection of her own status-consciousness. 248.  Recall Wengeroff’s portrait of the hapless behelfer who was the assistant in her kheder. 249.  Prushim (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: separated), “someone who secedes,” with the connotation of “saintly” and “pure.” This was a social phenomenon in the mitnagdic world. They became near (not complete) ascetics—as Wengeroff herself notes, they had wives and children, marriage and procreation considered a biblically ordained commandment incumbent on males—yet they did set an ideal of maximum distance from the demands of quotidian life and were enabled to live this ideal through subsidies provided in the manner she describes. Since women were exempt and in practice, barred from sacred study (with a few exceptions), they would earn “merit” for this pivotal mitsvah by enabling the learning of men, either by earning the family living to free scholar-husbands, sons, and sons-in-law for study or by supporting yeshivas, kollelim, and prushim. Women sometimes supported an entire institution; one of the larger and better known, called Blumke’s kloyz for its female benefactor (kloyz, Yiddish for cloister, a small study hall), was located in Minsk. On Blumke’s kloyz, see Leichter, Minsk, Ir va’em, 504, 507. ­Magidim (preachers, on which, see n. 252, and Wengeroff) often made a point of stressing “the Jewish mother’s dedication to her children’s education” (see Eliach, Once There Was a World, 122), praising women’s sacrifice to raise their sons for Torah; praise that, of course, elicited such sacrifice. On women’s role in supporting “learning” in Lithuanian Jewry by undertaking support of their families, see Etkes, “Marriage.” On the kollel of the prushim in Kovno, see Wengeroff’s description in Volume Two of her memoirs; Etkes, Rabbi Israel Salanter and the Mussar Movement: Seeking the Torah of Truth (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 268–75. 250.  On the town Eyshishok and its ascetics, Torah scholars, and their female and male supporters, see Eliach, Once There Was A World; Moshe Tsinovits, “­Eyshishok, ayeret ha-prushim,” in Yahadut lita, 2:218–21. Wengeroff’s overall characterization of the centrality of Torah study and her summary statement here should not be dismissed as retrospective idealization or hyperbole; its context was nineteenth-century Lithuanian Jewry, whose commitment to Torah study, not only hagiographical, but scholarly accounts attest. Thus, Immanuel Etkes writes, “In nineteenth-century Lithuania, Torah study flourished to an unprecedented extent . . . respect [for Torah study] was expressed in the willingness to provide gen-

Notes to Chapter Two erous support for Torah scholars, the proliferation of ‘societies’ that set aside fixed times for Torah study, and the relatively large number of talented young people who sought to become (talmudic scholars) . . . it is likely that the relative number of such [scholars] in Lithuania was unrivaled by other areas of Eastern Europe”; Etkes, “Marriage,” 154–55. 251.  The reference here is to Faust’s assistant at the university, Wagner, the metaphor meant to invoke persistent intellectual curiosity. This exceedingly odd association—a pious yeshiva bokhur reminding her of a character in Faust—reflects Wengeroff’s unusual grounding in both traditional Jewish and German culture. This unexplained reference also tells us that she assumed her audience would recognize it without help. 252.  Magid (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: preacher). Rabbis who served in communal capacities or were great scholars rarely, if ever, preached publicly; typically, they would do so twice a year, on the Sabbath between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and on the Sabbath preceding Passover. Homiletical tasks fell to magidim (plural), who often also held rabbinical ordination but whose strength was dramatic, even melodramatic, oratory, delivered in a distinctive, mournful melody. ­Magidim exhorted piety and rigorous honesty, especially in business and interpersonal dealings, including with Gentiles, and excoriated religious hypocrisy and abuses of power. They praised self-sacrifice and self-effacement and reproached failings directly to those exhibiting them, e.g., to a congregation that failed to extend proper hospitality to strangers; Wengeroff illustrates the latter circumstance in describing the visit of a magid to Brest and gives a general presentation of a magid below. ­Magidim often evoked sobs, especially from women, who “made up a significant portion of the audience for these sermons”; Eliach, Once There Was A World, 122. See the description and reconstructed sermons of magidim in Eliach, 119–28 (cf. “Maggid,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 11:698–701); and descriptions of a magid preaching in Yehezkel Kotik’s memoirs, Journey, 154–55, and Chaim Grade, My Mother’s Sabbath Days: A Memoir (New York: Schocken, 1987), 156; see also n. 249. The term talmud torah (lit., study of the Torah) here refers to a school for impoverished elementary-school-age children, funded and run by the community. This was a different institution than the kheder, which was funded by paying parents. 253.  Arendar (Polish: leaseholder). It was common for Jews in the Polish and Lithuanian lands annexed by Russia in the eighteenth century to hold leases from absentee nobles to manage their estates’ lands, lumber mills, inns, breweries, distilleries, salt mines, and fish ponds, forwarding the produce, income, or rents to the owner, keeping an agreed portion for themselves. Thus, Jews were found in the countryside, and Jewish travelers could lodge in Jewish inns and obtain kosher food. Wengeroff here writes of the itinerant magid, called a pechotni (Polish: infantry) magid. Larger communities, such as Vilna or Minsk (and in better times, small towns like Eyshishok), had resident magidim, appointed and paid by the community and called the magid mesharim (The Preacher of Righteousness) or the shtot magid (Yiddish: town preacher; on the shtot magid/Stadt Magid of

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Notes to Chapter Three Vilna, see the Introduction to this Volume); Wengeroff mentions this type  of magid, just below. These were often very learned men, who sometimes also functioned as community judges. The itinerant magidim had unusual latitude of expression because they drew no local salary so were not beholden to community elites, lay or rabbinic, whom they often included in their criticisms. This of course, often made them unpopular with those holding power in the community, which only fed their sense of righteousness and their popularity. On this, see “Maggid,” Encyclopaedia Judaica; Zev Gries, “Preachers and Preaching,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, vol. 2: 1450–1453 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Eliach, Once There Was a World, 119–20, and the works cited there. Itinerant magidim earned their livings from donations of listeners. There were magidim in both the Hasidic and mitnagdic traditions. 254.  The Kelmer Magid was Moses Isaac Darshan (1828–1899), one of the great itinerant magidim and the foremost magid of the musar movement (on which, see below). It is not clear why Wengeroff did not simply furnish the full names of these men (the R in both cases stands for rav, rabbi). 255.  Plaet (Yiddish: raffle or invitation) In larger Jewish communities, hospitality to visiting strangers was often organized in a system in which householders signed up to host guests for meals, their names engraved on small pieces of wood. Unattached guests, that is, those not visiting friends or family, would be given invitations to meals of these householders by means of a lottery. 256.  Kiddush, sanctification of the Sabbath (and other biblically ordained festivals) over wine is a fundamental requirement of Sabbath observance; so is eating three meals (for which one does the ritual hand washing before and Grace after Meals, see n. 285). The issue here is not only hunger but discharging this religious obligation. That those assembled for Sabbath eve prayers could have failed to notice a stranger and arrange for his Sabbath needs is a serious failing, as the magid castigates them.

Notes to Chapter Three 257.  On this section and its significance in understanding Wengeroff, see the Introduction to this Volume. 258.  Wengeroff says 100 fathoms; there are 6 feet to a fathom. 259.  On traditional male Jewish garb, see n. 79, and in greater detail in Wengeroff’s account, below. Note that the poor householder described here and Wengeroff’s wealthy father shared basic fashion and that, for all else he lacked, the poor man had made it a priority to obtain a ceremonial fur hat (shtreimel) (of far lesser quality, of course, than that of Yudl Epstein). As Wengeroff has remarked astutely above, this man, while marginal, was not the poorest of the poor. However modest it was, he, unlike the utterly destitute, owned a property that was also a workplace (see his wife’s exclamation, below). He was clearly an artisan of some kind. 260.  It was traditional to mark the eastern wall of homes, as well as the syna-

Notes to Chapter Three gogue, with some sort of sign or plaque, for the reason Wengeroff mentions, east symbolizing the direction of the Land of Israel and Jerusalem. As is evident from this reference, Jews of both genders (and not only women, as is commonly stated), prayed at home, as well as in the synagogue. 261.  Although Wengeroff’s and her mother’s sympathy for the evicted family is undoubtedly sincere, this comment and the passage that follows speak volumes about her class-based assumptions. That Wengeroff could compare the situation of her family, with its standing with the government and means, with that of the family she has just described, or even imply that her married sisters no longer being able to live with her parents but needing to find their own homes, was a “like fortune” to the eviction and ruination of the artisan family, shows that the experience of poverty was as distant from Wengeroff’s comprehension at the end of her life as a memoirist, as it had been in her childhood. As she herself notes, her father received far more considerate treatment from the (“benevolent”) authorities than did “the other citizens” of Brest, merely being asked from time to time when he would be ready to move, a stark contrast to the ruthless eviction of the poor family that Wengeroff has just described. And what a contrast—unconscious, to be sure—between the hopelessness of the poor and now homeless Jewish family and Wengeroff’s “joyful” anticipation of her family’s move to “only one residence” in New Brest, while her parents dreaded its “toil and inconvenience.” On Wengeroff’s class assumptions and perspective, see the Introduction to this Volume. 262.  Readers should not confuse Wengeroff’s use of the words “patriarchy” and “patriarchal” with the contemporary meanings of these terms to signify systematic subordination of women to men as a fundamental form of human oppression. Wengeroff, as we have seen, accepted the gendering of roles in traditional society (on which, see the Introduction to this Volume; my “Pauline Wengeroff and the Voice of Jewish Modernity,” in Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition, ed. Tamar Rudavsky (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 181–90; and my “Kol Isha.” What Wengeroff means by “patriarchal” becomes clear from her next sentence: an extended family, living an ordered life under the roof of the patriarch—and matriarch (she writes of her “parents’ home”)—under the father’s ultimate authority. As long as the father was a pious Jew like her father, to Wengeroff, this was not oppression but familial perfection, as will become clear in Volume Two of her memoirs. For a useful summary of feminist scholarly use of the term “patriarchy,” see Carol Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 24–46. 263.  Rabbi Aryeh Leib Katzenellenbogen served as rabbi of Brest for 40 years; he died in 1837 during this period of crisis for the community, though he lived to consecrate one of two new cemeteries the community established in New Brest; Feinstein, Ir tehilla, 212, 220; M. S. Geshuri, “Pulmus u’neginah,” in Entsiklopedia shel galuyot, 2:101–2; cf. note 244. The Katzenellenbogen family was an old and eminent one, dating to the fifteenth century, akin to aristocracy, with arranged marriages with other prominent

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Notes to Chapter Three families and men who married Katzenellenbogen women taking their wives’ family name. Widely dispersed in central and eastern Europe, the family had deep ties to the city of Brest. Saul Wahl was the grandson of the family’s progenitor; several members of this family served as rabbis of Brest; Encyclopaedia Judaica, “Katzenellenbogen”; ibid., “Wahl, Saul ben Judah”; Feinstein, Ir tehilla, 220, 223; M. S. ­Geshuri, “Pulmus u’neginah,” 97–104. A traditional Jewish response to threatened catastrophe is to declare a communal fast (tsom tsibbur), as a means of atonement (since wrongdoing and misfortune are assumed to be linked) and to “avert the evil decree.” Often, of course, as in this case, the decree was not averted, and it was understood that sins were too weighty to be overcome or that God, for unknowable reasons, willed the catastrophe. 264.  This is a reference to a petition by the town’s rabbi and community to the government to spare the cemetery, mediated though the agency of Russia’s foremost maskil, Isaac Ber Levinson. About this, see the Introduction to this Volume and n. 191, there. 265.  Special prayers and fasting—penitential acts—are traditional responses and attempts to prevent threatened catastrophe. 266.  A Torah portion is read in the morning service on Mondays and Thursdays, as well as on Saturdays, so that no more than three days pass without a public Torah reading. It is traditional practice at funerals to confess one’s wrongdoings to the deceased and beg forgiveness. 267.  Self-affliction in this manner is also a practice of penance. The very fact of this harrowing calamity—as Wengeroff notes, of a curse being enacted—was taken as a sign of great communal sin and the need to repent. 268.  With the demolition of the old cemetery, two new ones were prepared: one (consecrated by Rabbi A. L. Katzenellenbogen; see n. 263) located within New Brest to accommodate current needs; a second, in an outlying village, as Wengeroff states, prepared in 1835 for the reburial she describes; cf. Feinstein, Ir tehilla, 212–13. Six versts is approximately four miles, so this journey, barefoot or not, would have taken a communal procession several hours. 269.  Abraham ben David Katzenellenbogen was the rabbi of Brest from 1760 to 1806. Known as a great sage and zealot, he was among the earliest opponents of Hasidism, under the leadership of the Gaon of Vilna and his circle, and carried on a public polemic against one of the founders of the Hasidic movement, Levi Yitshak of Berdichev. He had eight sons, one of whom, Joseph, succeeded him as rabbi of Brest, and who was himself succeeded by a son—Aryeh Leib, rabbi in Wengeroff’s time (see n. 263). Wengeroff is mistaken in the date (1742) she gives for his death. Katzenellenbogen’s anti-Hasidic polemics began in the 1770s and continued in the 1780s (see Gershuni, 98–100). Nor could the year of his death be read on his gravestone since, according to Feinstein (Ir tehilla, 223; cf. Geshuri, “Pulmus u’neginah,” 101), this information was effaced from the stone after the destruction of the Old Brest Jewish cemetery—and Feinstein was fastidious about cemeteries. He records at length (Ir tehilla, 223–34) the inscriptions on gravestones

Notes to Chapter Three from the old cemetery of Brest out of pious concern that stones had been lost, had had their inscriptions erased or partially erased, or could not be properly relocated, leaving re-buried graves in the new cemetery unmarked (as Wengeroff states) or unknown; he also records dates of death (so that memorial prayers could be recited). Finally, the date of death of a rabbinic sage (or even a simple traditional Jew) would never have been recorded in Arabic numbers using the Christian date, as she lists it, but would be in Hebrew letters, according to the rabbinic reckoning of the age of the world. Wengeroff’s source for her citation of gravestone inscriptions is not clear. Although it resembles some of Feinstein’s listings (his are more extensive, but her citation follows the same order as his), it is not simply a translation of Feinstein. Meyer Yekhiel Halter, whom Wengeroff credits with these inscriptions in her footnote, was the printer of Feinstein’s Ir tehilla, and it is plausible that he was a stone cutter as well (see Ir tehilla, title page, and Geshuri, 101). Wengeroff writes (“There, today, one can still read . . .”) as if she might have visited the cemetery herself or consulted with someone who had. In any case, this section of the Memoirs veers sharply out of personal experience of events to “cultural history” in its more common, even quasi-scholarly, sense. 270.  Kive is short for Akiva. The date is given according to traditional rabbinic reckoning of the age of the world and corresponds to 1831. 271.  Presumably, these orders would have been given to Wengeroff’s father as a contractor rather than a producer. In any case, it meant that Yudl Epstein’s business could have survived the move to new Brest had he been inclined to reinvent it, but as she emphasizes several times in this Volume, he used the financial setback to break with his active business life, devoting himself full-time to the sacred study that had always been his preference. 272.  On this ritual, see nn. 59, 73, and 180. Note that this is the second time that Wengeroff devotes a section to describing Friday night and Sabbath day, this time, from her vantage point as an adolescent. The recapitulation shows the centrality of the Sabbath in her consciousness and her conviction that traditional Sabbath observance was an anchor in the midst of chaos and even, as here, in literal upheaval. Whatever the family had just been through, however lessened their material circumstances, the Sabbath was a constant, a sharp contrast to the vagaries of life that Wengeroff has just detailed. This section is a beautiful literary device, circling and bringing the reader back after Wengeroff’s historical account to one of the central themes in this volume of her memoirs—traditional Jewish life and its rhythms—and one of her main editorial points: the stabilizing force of tradition. 273.  This is surely a reference to the tsenerene, a Yiddish translation and commentary to the Pentateuch used heavily by women. Note that it is Wengeroff, aged 14 who is doing the marketing, freeing her mother for religious reading—spiritual and intellectual preparation for the Sabbath. Traditional culture—elite and folk, including women’s tkhine culture—may have expressed the view that male children were the ultimate value but in reality, daughters were the household’s—certainly the matriarch’s—greatest asset, for it was the daughters, when they came of age,

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Notes to Chapter Three who were given household work and responsibility, freeing mothers for leisure, including intellectual or communal activities, such as those of the gabetes we have encountered, or those of Wengeroff’s mother, seen here. Such duties were an apprenticeship for the role of matriarch, since a girl of 14 was approaching marriageability. Although Wengeroff has certainly shown us that her mother, as well as other family members, did many domestic chores, the type and extent of work Wengeroff here describes herself doing may testify to the family’s straitened circumstances, as well, possibly, to their smaller quarters in New Brest: they would have had neither means nor space for the number of domestic servants they previously had in Old Brest (though she speaks of at least one servant in residence in the new quarters). Indeed, these smaller quarters were hardly “paltry” (to cite Wengeroff’s description), given Wengeroff’s description of her elder sister Eva’s wedding, celebrated there. With her married sisters now having moved out, she and Eva were the oldest siblings in the house, which had several younger children. Age—but even more than this, gender—(a male her age and birth order would not have been doing laundry and ironing) meant a greater burden of household chores on her shoulders, something Wengeroff shows herself enjoying as recognition of her maturity. 274.  See Wengeroff’s description of women’s candle lighting in her previous sections on Sabbath observance; the other two commandments specifically incumbent on women were “taking khale” (see nn. 59, 73, and 180) and wives’ sexual separation from husbands during menstruation (about which Wengeroff says nothing in her work). The prayer Wengeroff mentions (“in this prayer”) is not the rabbinically prescribed blessing for candle lighting, but rather a women’s tkhine that beseeches God for healthy, Torah-learning sons, long life, and so on, and mentions these three commandments. There are numerous versions of such tkhines, though the basic content is the same. See, e.g., the “seder fun likht ­tsinden,” and “a naye tkhine nokh likht tsinden,” Tkhinas bnos yerusholoyim (Budapest: Schlesinger, 1915), 42–45 (no date appears on the title page of this book, but a date in Hebrew letters, corresponding to 1915, is printed at the bottom of pp. 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, and 66 in a section on prayers for the new months of that year); “Beim ­Eingange des Sabbath nach dem Lichzinden,” in Fanny Neuda, Stunden der Andacht (Prague: J. Brandeis, 1895), 17–18; Norman Tarnor, trans., A Book of Jewish Women’s Prayers (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995), 44–50; and “tkhine likht bentshen” (Tkhine for Lighting Candles) in The Merit of Our Mothers, 88–89. Note that both parents go to the synagogue for Friday night prayers and that Wengeroff states this as an unremarkable fact. 275.  A minimum of two lights are kindled for the Sabbath (and other festivals of biblical origin) in fulfillment of the injunction to “remember” and “observe” the Sabbath stated, respectively, in the two versions of the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20:8; Deut. 5:12). However, it was considered meritorious to increase the festive atmosphere of the day by multiplying the number of lights (additional ones for each child of the family), and it was common practice, in households where

Notes to Chapter Three means permitted it, for unmarried girls, in addition to the matriarch of the household, to light Friday night candles. 276.  The notion of an “additional soul” that the Jew acquires on the Sabbath is much older than Hasidism (it is elaborated in kabbalistic literature), though Wengeroff may have learned of it in a Hasidic setting after her marriage. 277.  There is a rabbinic prohibition (Berakhot 24a) of men hearing women’s voices in song, this being considered seductive even among family members; see Wengeroff’s further comment about this, below, and n. 283. Women, however, may sing freely among themselves and, as was the case here, may well have welcomed the opportunity for all-female company (the men of the household being in synagogue) for song that would otherwise have been “disturbed,” as Wengeroff says, by calls for women’s silence. Note the many languages, only one of them Jewish, in which she says the girls sang. 278.  The large goblet and decanter are for her father’s recitation of kiddush, on which, see n. 256. 279.  Proverbs 31:10–31, from which Wengeroff cites, is traditionally sung by the male head of the house at the Friday night table before kiddush, as Wengeroff says, in recognition of the wife’s labors in preparing the Sabbath. 280.  This is an extremely important and revealing remark. Everything Wengeroff says in this section shows that as an adolescent, she was being primed for the role of female head of household and that she was proud of her abilities, responsibilities, and burgeoning maturity. The next logical step—as she shows us with the progression of her tale to the story of her sister’s engagement—is marriage and assumption of this role. Note, significantly, that it is her father she records as watching her cook the Sabbath fish he so loved: clearly, she was rehearsing pleasing a man with her cooking and other domestic skills and, he, consciously or not, was rehearsing her for this role. As she describes in her second volume, Wengeroff did not come into her desired inheritance as pious wife and matriarch of a traditional household. This account shows us her expectation and is crucial to understanding her later rage at modernity and her husband. Also noteworthy is her remark that she “half understood” the Hebrew of this biblical poem. This indicates an unusual degree of Hebraic knowledge for a female in the 1840s and is evidence of the importance her family placed on the Judaic education even of girls. Linguistic literacy aside, however, in this remark Wengeroff is saying that she understood the social, cultural, and gendered message of reciting eyshes khayil and had internalized the norms that underlie it: distinct gender roles, with praise and recognition for the traditional, virtuous wife, whose labors undergird the functioning of the entire household and enable the sacred “learning” of its males. 281.  According to rabbinic law, a certain volume of wine must be drunk to fulfill the mitsvah of kiddush; the goblet, therefore, would have been a certain size and Wengeroff’s father would drink at least half its contents. Others at the table partake of the wine and thus fulfill their obligation of kiddush (if necessary, additional wine can be added to the cup as long as some of the wine blessed in

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Notes to Chapter Three the kiddush remains); the cup is first passed to the wife in deference to her rank in the family. 282.  On these acts (ritual hand washing, the blessing over bread, and not speaking in between), see n. 153. The meal on Friday night and Saturday lunch (as well as dinner and lunch at all festivals of biblical origin) begins with two whole loaves of (special, braided) bread. Lekhem mishneh (Hebrew; Yiddish: double loaf), recalling the double portion of manna that fell in the desert on Fridays so that the Israelites might desist from collecting manna on the Sabbath (Exod. 16:22–26); lekhem mishneh symbolizes divine Providence and plenty. The blessing over bread is pronounced by a male designated with this honor, usually the head of household, who cuts it ceremoniously, eats a piece of minimum size first (to fulfill his obligation of this mitsvah; eating first to minimize the time between reciting the blessing and actually eating the bread) and then gives slices to the others at the table. Only after this slice is consumed does conversation, halted since the ritual hand washing, resume. 283.  It is traditional to sing Sabbath table songs at all three Sabbath meals (Friday night dinner; Sabbath lunch; and the late afternoon meal). The songs are liturgical poems with allusions to the Sabbath, creation, and other biblical and traditional themes; sections of mystical teachings; or biblical verses. 284.  It should not be imagined that the men were bare headed before this. Rather, they now donned caps over their regular head covering, behavior appropriate for prayer. On the ritual “final waters” (as opposed to the “first” waters of ritual hand washing at the beginning of the meal before eating bread), see n. 87. Only males perform this, a custom, whereas the ritual hand washing before the meal is required by rabbinic law and done by all. 285.  Rabbinic law requires recitation of the Grace after Meals anytime bread is consumed and certainly at festive meals. This prayer is considered fulfillment of the biblical injunction, “and thou shalt eat and be satiated and bless the Lord thy God” (Deut. 8:10). Individuals are required to say the Grace after Meals but here as in other aspects of Jewish liturgy, the preference is for group prayer (for males); in this case, Grace is led by a man honored, as Wengeroff notes, with this role, who begins with a formulaic invitation to the assembled to recite the Grace together, to which they respond with expressions of praise of God. The Grace has four parts, demarcated by blessings the leader pronounces aloud and to which the assembled respond “amen,” as Wengeroff notes. The Talmud (Pesahim 105b) rules that Grace after Meals be recited over a full cup of wine (later rabbis restricted this to Grace said in the presence of at least three adult males, which of course, was the case at Wengeroff’s table); the wine is drunk at the conclusion of Grace, after which a further, final blessing is recited. What Wengeroff here describes, like her portrayal of the Passover seder, is an excellent illustration of the centrality of home ritual in traditional Judaism. Judging by some of the food Wengeroff says was served (fresh as opposed to preserved fruit and vegetables) and the hour of the dinner’s conclusion, the memory she records here is of a summer Sabbath.

Notes to Chapter Three 286.  This passage refers to a trusted non-Jew, the so-called shabbes goy (Sabbath Gentile), employed to kindle fire on the Sabbath in the synagogue, study hall, and in private homes, to provide heat and light in winter and to warm already cooked food. Although non-Jews are not considered bound by the laws of the Sabbath (or any other Jewish observances), biblical and rabbinic law forbids Jews from having non-Jews perform labor for them on the Sabbath. However, the exigencies of life led to the creation of a legal fiction to get around this prohibition (without which Jewish homes would have been unheated and dark on Sabbaths and festivals), and the shabbes goy became a fixture in traditional Jewish life; see Jacob Katz, The “Shabbes Goy”: A Study in Halakhic Flexibility (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989). Relations with this person, who had access to homes and communal institutions, were often close, as was clearly the case here. The scene Wengeroff describes was obviously winter. 287.  This passage contains an error of recall. Heating any liquid or cooking any food from scratch is forbidden on the Sabbath, as Wengeroff says, and of course, would not have been done in her parents’ home. But it cannot be that no pre-cooked food was warmed on the Sabbath—such warming is permitted by rabbinic law, while eating only cold food on the Sabbath would have been untenable in Russia’s winters and inconsistent with the rabbinic injunction to have pleasure on the Sabbath, specifically, through food. Indeed, she will shortly tell us that the traditional Sabbath foods, shalet and kugel (on which, see n. 290) were served from the oven, and she says here that her father’s tea (prepared before the Sabbath from cooked leaves) had stayed hot in hot sand—which itself had to have been warmed (the reason for warming it in this ingenious, indirect manner is so that its temperature will not exceed a rabbinically set maximum on the Sabbath). Some heating source had to have been kept burning—or been lit by a shabbes goy (see n. 286)—to have warmed the sand, and in any case, the tea was consumed warm. 288.  It is very interesting that Yudl Epstein, the scholar, would have joined a khevra tehillim—a society known for piety, not learning—in the very years that he produced his published scholarly works (about which, see the Introduction to this Volume), much less a society dominated by artisans. However straitened his circumstances in New Brest, Epstein was still a wealthy householder, as Wengeroff ’s depiction of the furnishings and ample food of the new home show. It is a fascinating, if unfortunately, unexplained, glimpse into Yudl Epstein’s personality. Perhaps, we speculate, Epstein took the humbling of his material circumstances as an opportunity for other expressions of humility, taking spiritual nourishment in the company of simple but pious artisans. Wengeroff has also told us that the experience of the cemetery exhumation when Old Brest was destroyed deeply affected him, and he may have taken that experience as a call to penitential acts such as this. 289.  This too, would have been the work of the shabbes goy; see n. 286. 290.  Wengeroff here cites Heine’s poem, “Prinzessin Sabbath”; see Heinrich Heine Werke, vol. 1, Gedichte (Romanzero: Hebraischen Melodien), ed. Christoph

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Notes to Chapter Three Siegrist (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1968), 197, or in English, Nathan and Marynn Ausubel, eds., A Treasury of Jewish Poetry (New York: Crown Publishers, 1957), 334–36. See also Marion Kaplan, Jewish Middle Class, 72–73. Shalet (Yiddish: chulent) and kugel, are traditional, eastern European, winter dishes for the Sabbath. Shalet consists of some variety of meat, bones, potatoes, beans, barley, onions, garlic, and carrots, cooked before the Sabbath and then left to bake in the oven overnight, as Wengeroff relates. Very hearty fare, it is often the meal’s main dish, as was the case here. Kugel is also a baked dish, either of noodles or more likely here, ground potatoes, baked with goose or chicken fat, onions, and garlic, and is also rich and hearty. The heaviness of the food itself induced the sleep she mentions in the next paragraph. Of course, no “angel,” but rather laboring women, had cooked these dishes. It is striking that she here adopts the male (or the young child’s) experience of food materializing on the table, effacing the labor that Wengeroff, the adult, female memoirist, herself tells us went into its preparation. 291.  The “everyone” Wengeroff mentions here who went to the synagogue for evening prayers were actually men as the rest of the sentence makes clear. Wengeroff here writes in a male voice; cf. n. 290. 292.  Melave malke (Yiddish: accompanying the Queen), that is, escorting the Sabbath out, just as “the Queen” had been welcomed in the night before. Wengeroff is describing the custom, of kabbalistic origin, of a fourth “Sabbath” meal (the Sabbath, of course, having ended with nightfall, this practice prolongs its spirit). The first three meals are said to symbolize the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, respectively; the fourth is referenced to David, the progenitor of the Messiah, so is approached with particular reverence and yearning (the rabbis teach that the messiah will not come on the Sabbath; the end of Sabbath, therefore, brings heightened messianic yearning). Although the melave malke is custom, not law, custom often had the force of law in traditional society, and Wengeroff certainly writes of this as normative practice. 293.  Wengeroff shortly identifies the town the groom came from: Sasslav. Rabbinic law requires a girl’s consent to a marriage but in practice, as seen here, this was often not even asked, much less obtained. On the legal requirement and actual practice in Jewish society, see A. Grossman, Pious and Rebellious. Wengeroff’s statement here and her commentary on it that follows are very telling for asserting that parental will simply and self-evidently prevailed in traditional Jewish society—a point Wengeroff makes repeatedly in the Memoirs. Absolute authority of parents over children is a major component of what Wengeroff approvingly calls “patriarchal” life. As we will see, this would become a tremendous sore point for her in her own parenting. As we note in the Introduction to this Volume, Wengeroff herself gives the lie to this assertion in vignettes of disobedience and in the whole story of the progress of “enlightenment” among the young people of Brisk that she narrates. 294.  This statement, too, that traditional marriages, unlike those of “today,” were considered irrevocable is very significant; we will return to it in the Introduc-

Notes to Chapter Three tion to Volume Two. Suffice it here to note that it simply contravenes fact. Divorce was a live option in rabbinic law and is a relatively simple and straightforward affair if both parties agreed. More important, it was a very frequent feature in traditional society—as Wengeroff herself has just offhandedly testified, when she says that her new brother-in-law himself had been divorced once—as if having been divorced more than once were not inconceivable. On the frequency of divorce in medieval European Jewish society and its even greater frequency in nineteenthcentury Russia, see A. Grossman and Freeze, respectively. Wengeroff missing so blatant a contradiction in her own narrative—stating a supposed norm within a few lines of recording evidence to the contrary—shows a powerful need to deny a social reality she knew personally in favor of an idealized picture. For all the availability of traditional divorce (again, so long as the husband is willing—if he refuses to grant a divorce, the woman is an agune; see nn. 51 and 235),it is important to note that it is socially far easier for a man in traditional society, much less an independent businessman, like her new brother-in-law—to divorce than for a woman. Gender bias, with shame and other status consequences devolving on the woman but not the man, were significant. Wengeroff writes of her brother-inlaw’s divorce as evidence of maturity and independence—an asset: he was “already an independent businessman, indeed, he had already been divorced once.” Obviously, Wengeroff’s parents did not reject this divorced man as a marriage prospect, but it is inconceivable that a wealthy, status-laden Jewish family like hers would have married a virgin son to a divorced woman, much less seen a divorcee’s prior marriage as evidence of experience and maturity—as credentials for a second marriage—rather than as a stain. This is a deeply embedded, de jure, as well as de facto, double standard in traditional society: according to biblical and rabbinic law, a priest may not marry a divorced woman, but a divorced priest is not disqualified from the priesthood. Even in traditional society, in which divorce was accepted and in some cases (such as prolonged childlessness) enjoined, there was stigma for the woman, the more so with elevated class status. 295.  We see here evidence of pre-modern “romance.” The partners have not even met; yet, through letters, have begun to feel the approved (if controlled) emotions that should accompany a good marriage match (vindicating, of course, their parents’ choices). Since the outcome—this marriage—was already a foregone conclusion, it made sense, was good adaptive behavior—to feel attraction for one’s intended (maskilic accounts of their arranged marriages report no such attraction—before or after their marriages—but they are the least likely to have behaved adaptively; their testimony of marital misery because of arranged, childhood marriage cannot be taken at face value—any more than can Wengeroff’s assertion of arranged marital constancy and bliss). Wengeroff will report such affection and more, with regard to her own engagement and fiancé, in Volume Two. Both accounts she brings are important testimony to girls’ experience of arranged marriage in traditional society, a perspective wholly lacking in the famous accounts of the maskilim.

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Notes to Chapter Three 296.  The marriage day would be the New Moon of Heshvan, that is, two weeks after the end of the spate of autumn festivals (it could not have been the previous New Moon, which is Rosh Hashanah, on which marriage ceremonies may not be held). The date would have been late September, or early October, with the days, as Wengeroff says, already short. This was probably around the last date on which people would want to hold a wedding before the onset of deep winter made travel difficult. Note that although the groom was economically independent and previously married, it was still his parents who negotiated the particulars of the wedding. 297.  Zmires (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: songs); it is the same term used for the table songs sung on the Sabbath. 298.  This description of the various non-Jewish dances the girls do (the exception is the khosidl, the little Hasid) is precious testimony to the cultural borrowing that was permitted girls and women in traditional society, borrowing so accepted, it is unconscious and unremarked: Wengeroff, so alert to signs of encroaching cultural change in such things as dress and reading, records this without comment, as another piece of traditional behavior; compare this to her descriptions of the attempts of her brothers-in-law at cultural borrowing. Her father, too, watches, amused, without objection, though we have seen (see the Introduction to this Volume) that he reacted vehemently against one daughter’s attempt to wear non-Jewish style dress and to another’s attempt to take a Sabbath stroll in the company of her own husband. Clearly, there were sharp lines of what was tolerated as harmless, indeed, not even seen as cultural borrowing, and what was perceived as cultural abdication. 299.  These terms are Russian. 300.  Here again, as with her mother’s thoughts and feelings on discovering the heretical pursuits of her sons-in-law, Wengeroff is voicing the imagined thoughts of another person; perhaps these words are reflective of her thoughts on her own wedding day. Would that Wengeroff had spelled out just what she meant by the phrase, “Ah! A woman’s life!” though the reference to marital permanence may be at least a partial clue. 301.  As we have seen, traditional etiquette forbids physical contact between the sexes, except for husband and wife and even then, only in private. Even a handshake between relatives, or those, as here, about to become closely related, is forbidden. 302.  This is an allusion to the Song of Songs (3:1–2) and indication of Wengeroff’s familiarity with this biblical book, whose recitation at the Passover seder she says she particularly loved to hear. 303.  Wengeroff here admits to imagining something she has not witnessed but nonetheless describes. 304.  The Talmud (Eruvin 18) records a legend that God loosened Eve’s hair (and gave her numerous adornments), before bringing her to Adam. It is therefore traditional for the bride to come to her wedding with braided hair that is ceremoniously loosened before the ceremony; a rite performed by women, as Wengeroff records. In the traditional marriage rites, the bride sits on a throne-like chair before the ceremony, greeting her guests and receiving their flattery and good

Notes to Chapter Three wishes. The Talmud likens her to a queen; the groom, to a king, both of whom the guests are to serve and entertain. 305.  There are some pronounced shifts in mood in the traditional wedding, from utter gaiety and celebration to extreme, even mournful somberness, and back. The wedding ceremony itself, the beginnings of which Wengeroff describes here, is very serious in mood, as the badkhen conveys. The badkhen (Yiddish: jester), also called a marshalik, functioned like a master of ceremonies at everything but the marriage rites, which are legal proceedings, discharged as Wengeroff describes. The badkhen was a dramatist, who announced important guests and especially, entertained by reciting humorous and satirical poems, making puns on biblical and rabbinic texts (evidencing some level of learning) through sentimental, semiimprovised rhymes. The badkhen sang folksongs, juggled, but also, as Wengeroff says here, offered solemn, rhymed moralizing that often brought those present, particularly the bride and groom, to tears. The rhymed exhortation to penitence, called the forshpil, was particularly directed to the bride just before the bedeken, heightening what was already an emotional moment. The wedding jester is already mentioned in the Talmud (Ketubot 17a, Berakhot 30b–31a) but became a highly developed art form and means of livelihood in eastern Europe. The wedding day is likened to Yom Kippur for the bridal couple in that one begins a new chapter in life, hence, the focus on confession of sins and purification; sins are considered forgiven as on Yom Kippur. The Talmud (Yevamot 66a) enjoins fasting for bride and groom from daybreak until the ceremony, but this wedding, as Wengeroff has noted, took place on the New Moon on which fasting is prohibited. Marriages were often planned for the New Moon precisely to spare the bridal couple this fast. 306.  Here Wengeroff describes the bedeken, or veiling of the bride, an Ashkenazic custom that precedes the marriage rituals. It is to be reminiscent of Rebecca, who veiled herself before her union with Isaac (Gen. 24:64); the custom is for the groom (or sometimes the male who conducts the ceremony) to veil the bride, reciting the verse: “O sister! May you grow into thousands of myriads,” recited to Rebecca (Gen. 24:60) as she parted from her family to join with a husband—which is what is enacted at this part of the ceremony. The bedeken is an emotional highpoint of the proceedings, for it is the first act whereby the groom physically designates the bride as his intended wife. It is a custom from talmudic times to throw or strew grains or, as here, hops, at this point as a sign of hoped-for fertility. 307.  On the Sabbath prior to the wedding (or earlier than this), the groom is given a special aliyah (he is called up during the chanting of that week’s Torah portion by his full Jewish name) to recite the blessings for a section of the reading and is announced as a groom (this is called an ofruf: Yiddish). This is accompanied by shouts of “mazel tov” and showers of nuts, raisins, or candy from the assembled. The ofruf serves as public notice of the imminent marriage, affording anyone with knowledge of his ineligibility (i.e., because he is already married) an opportunity to object; this is the basis for Wengeroff’s explanation as well. Traditionally, Ashkenazic weddings are conducted outdoors, “under the

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Notes to Chapter Three dome of the sky,” recalling God’s promise to Abraham to “make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the heaven” (Gen. 22:17). Although Wengeroff goes on to say that the couple was led to the synagogue, this does not mean that the ceremony was conducted indoors; weddings were often conducted in the courtyard of the synagogue, which seems to be what she is indicating here. That Wengeroff omits mention of the ofruf is not surprising since she writes from the female perspective and would not have been present at the ofruf of her future brother-in-law, not only because he came from a distant community—none of her family, even her parents, appear to have met the groom in person before the wedding—but because the ofruf was not women’s cultural “place.” This perspective also leads her to omit other details, central in rabbinic law, that take place among the men prior to the bedeken: checking of the ketubah (Aramaic; Yiddish: ksube, the marriage contract) to make sure it is executed correctly and making sure that the document is signed by kosher witnesses. Further, the groom performs the act of kinyan (acquisition), by which he accepts the obligations specified in the ksube (and the woman is transferred from her father’s jurisdiction to that of her husband); kinyan is transacted symbolically by the groom taking hold of the end of a cloth that the mesader kiddushin (the man overseeing the marriage ceremony) holds out. The obligations of a husband are to provide his wife with food, clothing, and sexual satisfaction; the ksube states a settlement amount for the wife in case of divorce or widowhood. See Wengeroff’s very abbreviated summary of its contents. All this takes place in a separate room where the groom and other men gather, are served cake and liquor, sing, dance, give and listen to Torah discourses, and give praise and good wishes to the wedding families and couple. In the wedding being described here, all this would have taken place when Wengeroff’s mother “admonished the groom that it was time” to leave the women’s hall (where the ceremonial loosening of the bride’s hair was about to take place). Only when the signing of the ksube was completed would the bedeken proceed. All of this—the manifold legal transactions that constitute the bases of rabbinic marriage—is not on Wengeroff’s “map” as she describes, not simply her sister’s wedding but supposedly, traditional Jewish marriage—as she says, “a young couple [living] the old life.” Her omission of what is crucial in “normative”—rabbinic, male—Jewish practice, is another illustration of the effects of gender on the writing of Jewish memoirs and cultural history. 308.  The khupe (Hebrew, Yiddish: marriage canopy), symbolically representing the groom’s home that the bride now enters, having left her father’s jurisdiction, can be a talis (prayer shawl) or other cloth, sometimes ornate and embroidered, attached to four poles that are either stationary or held up by four men honored with this role. The groom enters under the khupe first, after which the bride is led under, to symbolize her entering his home. The bride is placed to the right of the groom; Wengeroff here is either recording local custom, is mistaken, or is speaking from the perspective of the audience, with the bridal pair facing the audience. 309.  In rabbinic law, the marriage ceremony consists of two parts: betrothal

Notes to Chapter Three (erusin), which binds the parties to one another in marriage but in which state they do not cohabit, and marriage (kiddushin), after which they are fully married and permitted to one another sexually. The betrothal that Wengeroff mentioned earlier was different—a contractual agreement to the match between the two families, with specifics such as the dowry and other gifts, the wedding date and location, and support of the couple after their marriage, agreed upon. In talmudic times, erusin and kiddushin were separate stages, conducted about a year apart. Since the twelfth century, both were conducted under the marriage canopy, separated only by the reading of the ksube and sometimes, a speech to the couple by the mesader kiddushin, the man who actually conducts the marriage rites, or someone else the families wished to honor. At each stage, wine is drunk by both bride and groom, its blessing recited by the mesader kiddushin. In addition, there is a blessing for the erusin, whose text is recorded in the Talmud (Ketubot 7b). The groom then places the ring on the bride’s right index finger (for ease of visibility since this act must be witnessed by designated witnesses; the right hand is almost always favored in traditional culture). With this act, the groom legally “acquires” the bride in marriage; her acceptance of the ring connotes her consent. The ring must be of minimal value and is of simple gold so that its value is readily apparent and the possibility of deception with ostentatious but ersatz rings avoided. After the ceremony, the bride transfers the ring to her fourth finger. The marriage formula that Wengeroff cites means: “Behold, you are consecrated to me with this ring according to the laws of Moses and Israel.” At this point, the text of the ksube (written in Aramaic) is read out by the mesader kiddushin or another man honored with this act (Wengeroff mistakenly places it later; the ksube reading is placed at this point to separate between the betrothal and marriage segments of the ceremony). The document is handed to the groom, who hands it to the bride (it must come from him to her) to remain in her possession: the ksube was intended as a powerful instrument of protection against abuse in the marriage, arbitrary divorce, or destitution in case of widowhood. To obtain any of its protections or establish her marital status, e.g., should the couple move, the wife must be able to produce it. The bride’s acceptance of the ksube, too, must be witnessed by kosher witnesses. The actual efficacy of the ksube depended on the intactness of rabbinical authority, which began to unravel in this period. The second cup of wine is then poured, and the seven blessings Wengeroff mentions are recited. 310.  The final act of the ceremony under the canopy is the groom shattering a glass underfoot, fulfilling the oath (Ps. 137) to place remembrance of (destroyed) Jerusalem over even the highest joy. At the sound of that thump, the assembled erupt in shouts of “mazel tov!” as Wengeroff records, and the tension that has been building in the solemn ceremony bursts in celebration. 311.  Note that Wengeroff does not tell us who won the competition in this case! The custom Wengeroff here describes was common in some Jewish communities of eastern Europe, as well as in the Middle East.

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Notes to Chapter Three 312.  Wengeroff here speaks of the general practice of fasting on the wedding day, suspended if held on the New Moon, in deference to this day’s status as a semi-holiday. 313.  Called “golden soup” because it is chicken broth with globules of fat; see Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 284. 314.  Wengeroff is referring to yikhud, the ceremonial seclusion of the bride and groom after the wedding ceremony, the first time the pair would have been alone together. It is indicative of their new status as sexual partners and originally was a time when the marriage would be consummated. Their entrance into the room and seclusion behind closed doors must be witnessed; this is the final legal element of the wedding ceremony. Food is served to the couple, as Wengeroff states, because normally they would have been fasting; a private first meal together of course, also expresses marital intimacy. Her sister and brother-in-law would still have been served this food in yikhud, though in their case, not to break a fast. 315.  The droshe gifts—wedding presents—could be money or objects, often displayed on a table; with the donor and the amount, if the gift was money, announced by the badkhen to music and sounds of appreciation from the guests. See Wengeroff’s description of this at her own wedding in Volume Two. 316.  Considerable skill and knowledge of traditional lore were required for the badkhen, who improvised satires and spoofs of religious texts and observances— and of wedding guests—and who also used an established repertoire of songs and poems. Eliakum Zunser (1836–1913), the badkhen of Vilna (and later, Minsk), whom Wengeroff mentions, was a prolific Yiddish bard and dramatist who composed over 600 folk-poetry songs; a scholarly, two-volume edition of his collected works (Eliakum Zunser, Verk), was edited by Mordkhe Schaechter (New York: YIVO, 1964). See the evocative description of one badkhen from Minsk in the 1840s in Roskies and Roskies, The Shtetl Book, 232. 317.  Khokhmes (Yiddish: witticisms). 318.  This is a reference to the Grace after Meals (see n. 285), which has a special, poetic introduction said at wedding banquets. The same “seven blessings” said under the khupe are said at the conclusion of this Grace, with different men honored with singing them, the only difference being that the blessing over wine is said here last. Grace is recited over a full goblet of wine; another goblet of wine is poured for the recitation of the seven nuptial blessings, and each person making a blessing holds it while doing so. After the blessing for wine is made, some of the contents of the two goblets are mixed in a third, empty goblet; this “combined” wine, of obvious symbolism, is then sipped by the bride and groom (the person who has made the blessing sipping from the original goblet). It is traditional to hold a festive dinner for the six nights following the wedding, each one concluding with the recitation of the seven nuptial blessings and the wine-mixing ritual; thus, the couple would have a solid week of being feted at dinners, called sheva berakhot (after the blessings), and hearing these blessings recited. A description of the various stages and rituals of traditional Jewish marriage in Vengerov (Wengrow), outside

Notes to Chapter Three Warsaw, in the early decades of the twentieth century, is found in Kugelmass and Boyarin, From A Ruined Garden, 91–92. 319.  As we have seen, in traditional society, there is no approved physical contact between men and women outside of marriage. Mixed-sex dancing, of course, is forbidden; at celebrations, dancing is sex-segregated. The kosher dance Wengeroff describes (so-called because the handkerchief prevents direct physical contact), done only at weddings, and with the bride the only woman that men dance with, is the only exception to this rule. For a description of Jewish wedding dances, see Roskies and Roskies, The Shtetl Book, 231–32, and Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People, 284. 320.  The gollerke is one of the semi-official women who performed ritual functions in traditional society; see the Introduction to this Volume. Under rabbinic law (Ketubot 2:1, Berakhot 24), married women must not show their hair to any man but a husband, a woman’s hair—like her voice—being deemed seductive in a culture that defined and circumscribed women with reference to men’s (presumably heterosexual) sensibilities. Pious wives did not uncover their hair even at home. Ashkenazic girls and unmarried women did not have to cover their hair since as penuyot (available), that is, unmarried females, they were supposed to be attractive to eligible men. It became the practice in eastern Europe to crop and even shave the head of the bride just after the wedding, as occurs here, with the type of hair-colored headband and over-bonnet Wengeroff describes then donned. For the wealthy, as here, the headdress could be made of silk and be quite elaborate, adorned with fake or real pearls, at least for the Sabbath, festivals, weddings, and circumcisions; with simpler bonnets worn otherwise. See the illustration of a young married woman in this volume. Effectively, the headdress, far more than the wedding ring, was a married woman’s “uniform,” proclaiming her status as sexually unavailable to any man but her husband. For the bride, it was a powerful, abrupt change in appearance, conspicuous to others, but also a palpable, everpresent signal to herself of her passage from maiden to matron—the feeling of her head bound, with the weight of the covering; the feel of a cropped scalp against the fabric of the headdress. It clearly was a traumatic passage in a young woman’s life, as Wengeroff’s account here, as well as her account of her own “shearing” as a young bride show; on which, see the Introduction to this Volume. Here, too, the perspective of the bride makes Wengeroff’s Memoirs strikingly different from those of the maskilim, with their descriptions of arranged marriage from the male’s experience. Wengeroff has evident sympathy for the “shorn lamb,” who comes under “murderous shears” and looks “considerably older” with her bonnet—another instance when Wengeroff criticizes traditional society. Notably, Wengeroff does not mention sexual activity as a transition from girlhood to womanhood (though, see her allusions in her own case in vol. 2:65–66). It is interesting that she also omits all mention of the mikvah (the ritual bath) from her account here, though this was a major part of the bride’s pre-nuptial process (she does mention her own mikvah visit and her feelings about this ritual prior to her own marriage).

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Notes to Chapter Four 321.  It was actually two maskilim, Mordekhai Aaron Ginszburg and Mattias Strashun, who pushed for this decree, petitioning the Tsarist government in 1845 to outlaw traditional Jewish dress on the grounds that it was not intrinsic to Jewish practice or ordained by rabbinic law and was needlessly separatist; Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas I, 111. Wengeroff appears ignorant of this origin. 322.  Golus (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: exile). It is significant that Wengeroff does not define this word here though she does so earlier in her narrative when describing her mother’s marking of the house for mourning on the Ninth of Av. That catastrophe was historical; this one, part of her lived experience. In this context, she lacks emotional distance and so uses the term as she would in speech, rather than in the more distant voice of quasi-scholarly narration. Yet Wengeroff also goes utterly beyond traditional expressions when she states that there was rage about this state of affairs, contained only by the knowledge that Jewish powerlessness rendered such anger lacking a safe outlet for expression. Her assertion, that had the Jews “then” (in the 1840s) been “organized and powerful,” they would have revolted against oppression, is both anachronistic and violates traditional Jewish political attitudes that since the Middle Ages had upheld passive awaiting of divine deliverance from golus. (On this, see Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis.) Wengeroff’s statement is clearly informed by the emergence of political Zionism in the late nineteenth century and of organized Jewish self-defense bands in Russia, organized by Jewish socialist (Bundist) and Zionist groups in the aftermath of the 1903 pogrom in Gomel—and reflects her support for these developments. Wengeroff may here be writing of the 1840s, but she took quill to hand in the 1890s and early twentieth century, the era of pogroms. Even as she describes the traumatic and lamented wrenching of traditionalism from its moorings in the forced change of traditional garb in the 1840s, her time, place, and political position are betrayed by this statement. 323.  Gezere (Yiddish, from the Hebrew: lit., decree); when Jews used this term to describe a government decree, it meant an evil one. 324.  Yehoreg ve’al ya‘avor (Hebrew); the talmudic ruling (Yoma 84) “let oneself be killed but not trespass.” In all but three instances, a Jew is enjoined by rabbinic law to violate any of the Torah’s commandments if threatened with death for not doing so, the exceptions being idol worship, sexual transgression, and murder. The ruling received much elaboration in the Middle Ages and early modernity and, as Wengeroff shows, was a category of response that readily came to mind for traditional Jews of the 1840s. 325.  Goyish (Yiddish: “like the Gentiles”); a disparaging term. For rich illustrations of traditional Jewish dress in eastern Europe, see Alfred Rubens, A History of Jewish Costume (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1967); Giza Frankel, “Notes on the Costume of the Jewish Woman in Eastern Europe,” Journal of Jewish Art 7 (1980): 50–57; Mariella Beukers and Renee Waale, Tracing An-Sky: Jewish Collections from the State Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg (Amsterdam: Joods Historisch Museum, 1992).

Notes to Chapter Four 326.  Khalat, also called a kapota or bekeshe: the long coat of traditional male dress. 327.  Wengeroff here describes the gartel (Yiddish: ritual belt worn by pious men); see n. 79. 328.  Bekalus rosh (Hebrew, literally, with a light [i.e., uncovered] head). Wengeroff ’s remark that this head covering would not be removed in a social setting illustrates the dress etiquette of traditional Judaism but also shows that by the time she wrote her Memoirs, her reference was the mentality of her intended, assimilated audience and her own experience, in which doffing head covering in social settings was the norm. Cf. her anachronistic observation in notes 104 and 204. 329.  Shtreimel; peyes (ceremonial fur hat and earlocks of traditional males); see nn. 38, 79, 107, 259. 330.  Iluy (Yiddish; Hebrew: genius); prodigy. 331.  Tefillin shel rosh (Hebrew; Yiddish): tefillin (phylacteries) are a ritual object used during morning prayer and by very pious scholars during sacred study, as well. They consist of black boxes made of hardened leather, containing compartments in which small scrolls with words of the Torah are inserted. There is one set for the arm (shel yad) and one for the head (shel rosh); they are fastened by means of black leather straps and are a means of binding oneself, literally, to Torah. Wengeroff transcribes these lines in (transliterated) Yiddish. 332.  Tselem elohim (Hebrew; Yiddish: divine image); see Gen. 1:27. 333.  This division of appearance and identity between home (Jewish) and street (Russian) and between private and public, is extremely important not only for the case at hand but because this became one way that modernizing Jews, Wengeroff included, attempted to deal with the tensions of their new situation. In 1866, one of the foremost Russian maskilim, Yehuda Leib Gordon, expressed this stance in a poem that became a watchword for the movement, declaring “Be a man abroad [lit., ‘in the street’] and a Jew in your tent.” Gordon, “Hakitsa ami,” Hakarmel 7 no. 1 (1866); “Awake My People,” in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, The Jew, 384. On this poem and its importance in haskalah ideology, see Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil, 49–54. 334.  The ability to buy a two-year exemption from the dress decree illustrates the corruption of the Tsarist regime and the uncertainty and ambiguities of law in this system in which a panic-inducing regulation would be introduced almost simultaneously with a legal means to evade it. On the absence of consistency in Tsarist Jewry policy, see Stanislawski, “Russian Jewry,” and Nathans, Beyond the Pale, 311–15. 335.  It is interesting that Wengeroff refers to women’s dress, but not men’s, as “oriental” in appearance; for her, at least in this reference, this is a positive attribute. Clearly, Wengeroff is very clothes conscious; the amount of space she devotes to descriptions, here and elsewhere in the memoirs—describing her sister’s crinoline, her parents’ dress, her brother-in-law the scientist’s attire, her sister’s wedding

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Notes to Chapter Four dress, her own trousseau—shows that she had a voracious eye and a prodigious memory for such details. Note that the description that follows is not, as Wengeroff herself notes as an aside, “the dress” of traditional Jewish women per se but of the wealthy: she speaks of “costly fabric,” “silk,” “lace,” “velvet,” “satin,” “silver and gold embroidered material,” gold woven fabric; sable furs; “gold jewelry,” “silver hooks,” “diamonds,” and “necklaces of large pearls.” Notably, Wengeroff never describes the garb of the poor, stating only that “poor women” were particularly adamant about traditional dress. This bias is in line with what we have noted about Wengeroff’s stance toward Jewish poverty and is another instance of Wengeroff’s class affecting her memory and writing, on which, see the Introduction to this Volume. 336.  On sfire and shevuaus, see nn. 94, 104. Lag ba‘omer is the thirty-third day of the omer (the seven-week period between Passover and Pentecost); it is a day of celebration that interrupts the semi-mourning of these weeks because the plague that had decimated the (second century c.e.) academy of Rabbi Akiva, for which the mourning was instituted, ceased on this day. 337.  Panotzik (from the Polish term pan for sir); here, a particularly pleading, ingratiating form.

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Index

This index references terms in several languages and variant spellings terms in the same language (especially Yiddish) as they appear in Wengeroff ’s text (see the Note to this Edition, to Translation, Transliteration, and Illustrations) or in other writing cited. It also references different grammatical forms of terms. A slash ( / ) is used to separate variants of spelling of same term in the same language, especially Yiddish (akdomus/akdames); plural from singular (agune/s); noun and/or adjectival forms (goy/ish; halakhah/halakhic/halakhist). A semicolon ( ; ) is used to indicate a different term for same or related object (arba kanfos; tsitis) and to separate Yiddish and Hebrew (German or Russian) terms or spelling for the same object and for related terms. Adar, 170 Afikomen, 131, 134, 135, 289, 292 Agune/s, 68, 117, 285, 319, 333 Akdomus/akdames, 150 Al hatauro ve‘al ho‘avaudo, 167, 203, 308 Alef-beis, 176 Aliyah, 335 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, 17, 18, 249 Apikores/apikorsim/apikorsishe 39, 181, 284, 321 Arba kanfos; tsitsis, 141, 176, 294, 313 Arendar, 190, 323 Arukh ha-shulhan, 99 Aseres yemei teshuvo, 159 Ashkenaz/i, xi, 36, 47–50, 54, 238, 247, 258, 259, 261, 287, 299, 304, 335, 339 Assife, 177 Ayin hora, 146 Badkhen; marshalik, 214, 216, 217, 335, 338 Badkhonim, 216 Balbatim, 191 Balhabayis, 190

Bar mitsvah, 10, 294, 314 Barkhes 165, 300, 305 Bas tovim 7, 185, 259, 320, 357 Batei; botemidrash/im; beis; beit (ha) midrash, 98,186, 187, 207, 260 278, 311, 321, 355 Batlon/im, 188, 321, 322 Bdikas khomets, 122, 286 Bedeken, 214, 335, 336 Behelfer, 82, 322 Bekalus rosh, 221, 341 Bekeshe, 341 Bekiut, 6 Bildung, 250 Bimah; bime, 191, 305, 306 Blintshikes, 150 Bobruisk, 4, 5, 80, 93, 100, 102, 236, 269, 273, 277, 279, 280, 346, 355 Bogrov, Gregor Isaakovich, 89, 274–275, 354 Bokher/bokhur/im, 124, 139, 142, 186–190, 294, 313, 315, 323 Borkhu, 136 Borscht, 118, 134, 168, 209

359

360

Index Brest Litovsk; Brisk de lita, 5, 12, 34–39, 51, 58, 62, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 84, 100, 102, 104, 107, 109, 148, 149, 156, 169, 174– 178, 183–187, 194–196, 200– 204, 228, 234–237, 240, 254, 255, 257, 264, 266, 269, 270– 274, 279, 281, 293, 296, 310– 315, 318– 321, 323–332, 344, 348, 350, 356 Brokhaus/brokhe(s), 160, 215, 217 Cantonists; cantonist policy, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 267, 268, 285. See also Nicholas I Conversion; converts, 11, 31, 64, 65, 71, 228, 235, 240, 241, 251, 253, 256, 266–268, 275, 290, 316, 317, 350, 351 Daitsh/daytsh/en, 33, 284 Darshen, 191 Daven/davenen, 97, 277 Dawidowicz, Lucy, xiii, 233, 235, 246, 266, 267, 317, 346 Dayan/im, 88 Deiteholz, 141 Dobri dien; dobri vetsher, 211 Dovor min hakhai, 109, 281 Dreidl, 108, 280 Droshe, 216, 338 Droshke, 104, 106 Dschigetowka burduk; dzhigitovka, 109, 280 Ein ya’akov, 98, 253, 254, Eishishok/Eyshishok, 189, 313, 317, 322, 323, 356 Elul, 155, 157, 299, 306 Enlightenment, 10–13, 16, 20, 22, 27, 31–34, 38, 41, 67, 89, 90, 128, 173–192, 238, 241, 243, 245, 246, 249, 250, 252, 266, 267, 275, 297, 312, 316, 319, 332, 345, 347, 348, 349, 351–355. See also Haskalah Epstein, Baruch ha-Levi, 6, 236, 237, 253, 261, 262, 346 Epstein, Ephraim, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 39, 60, 67, 237–239, 240, 241, 253, 268, 292, 300, 343, 346 Epstein, Semel Simon, 4, 5, 11, 55, 100, 102, 236, 241, 255, 273, 279

Epstein, Yudl, 4–7, 34–38, 40, 50, 52, 59, 62, 87, 236, 237, 239, 252– 256, 272, 273, 277, 278, 281, 315, 318, 324, 327, 331, 346 Erets-yisroel meshulakh; pushke, 156, 299 Erev rosh hashono, 157 Erev yom tov, 135, 150, 165, Erusin, 337 Eruv, 171, 310 Essen teg, 294, 320 Estertaanes, 112, 283 Esrog; etrog, 56, 74, 163, 165, 263, 304–306 Eyshes khayil, 53, 55, 206, 329 Flachs-Fockschaneanu, Louise 95, 277 Foches, 227 Forshpil, 335 Fürgon, 103 Gabbai, 272 Gabetes, 47, 48, 78, 79, 159, 168, 169, 225, 309, 328 Gaon, Rabbi Elijah of Vilna 35, 36, 87, 237, 248, 252, 255, 278, 297, 315, 326, 347 Gartel, 289, 341 Gebildeten, 57 Gehenom, 148 Geiger, Abraham 316 Geld; gelt, 108, 168, 280 Gematriyah, 306 Geonim, 98, 278 Germany, 10, 14, 15, 17–20, 30–33, 37, 39, 54, 57–59, 94, 159, 175, 178, 179, 183, 197, 205, 234, 239, 240–250, 256–259, 263, 264, 271, 275–277, 282–285, 289, 294, 297, 298, 303, 315–318, 319, 323, 344, 348–350, 352–354, 357 Gezere/gezeraus; gezerah, 220, 303, 340 Gimel, 108, 176, 280 Ginsburg, Saul 2, 4, 18, 67, 233, 234, 241, 268, 274, 282, 298, 348, 349 Gmiles khesed, 79 Goilem/golem, 148, 149, 295 Gollerkes, 49, 217, 259, 339 Golus, 46, 151, 220, 297, 340 Goy/ish, 221, 331, 340, 350 Grace after meals, 131, 207, 208, 216, 289, 290, 297, 322, 324, 330, 338

Index Grager/s, 113 Groshen, 156, 169 Gut yom tov, 129 Gevir, 272, Haftorah, 297, 298 Haggadah/s, 130, 131, 134, 288, 289, 290 Hakofes, 165, 305 Halakhah/halakhic/halakhist, 29, 46, 50, 53, 236, 257, 288, 331, 350 Hamantashen, 112, 283 Hanukkah, 97, 107, 108, 170, 197, 268, 280, 283, 305, 309, 355 Haskalah: German, Russian, 12–18, 26, 27–41, 61, 70, 72, 74, 235, 236, 243–248, 250, 252, 256, 263, 271, 272, 275, 284, 291, 310, 311, 315–321, 341, 344, 345, 347, 348, 351, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357. See also Enlightenment; Maskilim Haushanes/haushano; haushano rabbo, 166, 306, 307 Havdole, xi, 52, 136, 162, 167, 209, 292, 303, 308 Heder; kheder/khodorim/khedorim/khedurim; khedarim, 22, 32, 35, 36, 53, 66, 68, 71, 81, 82, 99, 111, 112, 138–143, 146–149, 152, 157, 164, 173–176, 188, 196, 245, 246, 262, 272, 277–279, 282, 293–295, 304, 312, 313, 322, 323, 358 Heine, Heinrich, 20, 208, 331, 355 Herzl, Theodor, 4, 234, 240, 244, 343, 350 Heshvan, 164, 334 Hodesh/khodesh, 118, 120, 137, 149, 155, 168, 169, 170, 211, 277, 285, 293, 308, 309 Ho lokhmo anyo, 130, 289 Homets/khomets, 45, 121, 122, 123, 135, 136, 286 Humrah, 281 Iluy, 222, 341 Issru khag, 168, 308 Kaddish, 9, 10, 11, 60, 201, 239, 240 Kahal; kehile; kehila/kehilla, 63, 139, 180, 181, 236, 346, 355 Kapores, 47, 48, 159, 162, 301 Kapote, 284, 341

Karet, 292 Karpas, 287 Karpeles, Gustav, 17, 18, 19, 21, 89, 90, 244, 274, 275, 276, 343, 350 Kashe/s, 111, 134, 137 Kashruth; kasher/ed, 2, 45, 46, 120, 123, 124, 279, 281, 286, 310 Kest, 7, 22, 36, 40, 281, 315, 320 Ketubah/ot; ksube, 215, 262, 263, 335, 336, 337, 339 Khalat, 182, 221, 341, Khale (challah), 45, 121, 259, 286, 288, 328 Khappers, 66 Kharauses, 125, 130, 131, 287, Khaul/khol hamaued; hol hamoed, 135, 166, 292, 306, Khazon/im, 151, 188, 297 Kheshvan/Heshvan, 164, 334, Khevra-tehillim bet hamidrash, 207, 255, 331 Khokhmes, 216, 338, Khomets, 45, 121–123, 135, 136, 286 Khupe, 176, 215, 216, 282, 336, 338 Khurben, 46, 151, 198, 297 Khvolson/Khwolson/Chvolson, Daniel, 316, 317 Kibitka, 89, 103, 276 Kiddush, 49, 52, 130, 157, 158, 191, 206, 208, 289, 291, 300, 301, 308, 324, 329, 330 Kiddushin, 336, 337 Kinos, 151, 298 Kinyan, 336 Kislev, 170, 280, 309 Kittel(s), 160, 302, 307 Klier, John 64, 251, 252, 256, 266, 267, 276, 350 Kloyz, 262, 314, 322 Knoedel, 133 Koishel, 227 Kol nidre, 160, 161, 302, 303 Kol yisroel khaverim, 171 Kollel/im, 40, 313, 314, 315, 322 Korban, 126 Kosher dance, 217, 339 Kreplakh, 152 Kugel, 138, 208, 331, 332 Kunmon bosem, 98, 237, 253, 254, 346 Lag ba‘omer, 226, 342

361

362

Index Latke/s, 108, 280, 309 Lehmener goilem, 148, 149 Leibzoll, 28 Leienen, 148, 295 Lekhem mishne, 206, 330 Lernen, 277 Lezhanke, 280 Lilienblum, Moshe Leib 22, 23, 237, 241, 246, 319, 352, 353 Lilienthal, Max 2, 31- 42, 44, 67, 70–73, 150, 173-188, 244, 249, 252, 267, 277, 297, 311–316, 354 Lomdim, 236–238, 253, 258, 315, 347 Lulov/lulev; lulav, 52, 163, 304, 305, 306, 307 Maarev, 97, 98, 147, 277, 303 Magen dovid, 148, 295 Magid/im, 188–192, 322, 323, 324 Magid mesharim, 323 Maimon, Solomon, 23, 27, 239, 245, 246, 248, 258, 319, 351, 352, 355 Makhzor, 300 Malkes, 160, 302 Manishtane/o, xi, 127, 288 Manna, 300, 330 Mapu, Avraham, 15, 316 Marshalik, 214, 335. See also Badkhen Mashgiah ruhani, 315 Maskil/im; maskilic; maskilot, 13, 15, 16, 20-29, 31–40, 44, 53, 54, 58, 70, 72, 236, 241–243, 245–250, 252, 254–258, 260, 264, 266–269, 270, 271, 275, 284, 295, 310, 316–320, 326, 333, 339, 340, 341, 345, 349, 352, 358 Matse/s, matza/h, 45, 46, 85, 118–121, 124– 126, 130–136, 285–289, 292 Matsemehl, 124, 131, 287 Maukhel sein, 160, 302 Mautse/s; motsi, xi, 131, 158, 289 Mayim akharaunim 131, 207, 289 Medem, Vladimir, 20, 245, 269, 275, 310, 354 Megilas ekho, 151 Megile; megilas esther; megilas echo, 113, 114, 151, 292 Mehuder, 163 Mekor Baruch, 236, 237, 253, 262, 346. See also Epstein, Mordechai ha-Levi

Melamed; melamdim, 22, 35, 39, 53, 57, 68, 81, 82, 98, 136, 138, 141, 146, 150, 173–178, 180, 184, 187, 188, 245, 246, 278, 292, 293, 294, 295, 317, 318 Melave malke, 209, 332 Melitsa, 270 Mendelssohn, Moses, 39, 248, 284, 351 Mesader kid(d)ushin, 336, 337 Meshchane, 63 Meshores, 60, 124, 128, 130 Meshuggene, 145, 295 Messamea’akh khosen vekalo, 215 Mezuzah; mezuze/mezuzaus, xi, 144, 156, 299 Mikvah, 339 Milkhig, 142 Minkhas yehuda, 98, 237, 239, 253, 254, 255, 273, 278, 346 Minkhe; minkhe gedole; minkhe ketana, 97, 98, 147, 160, 277, 278 Minsk, 1–4, 20, 34, 68, 71, 83, 177, 190, 191, 216, 222, 235, 251, 254, 262, 269, 277, 293, 310, 313, 314, 322, 323, 338, 351 Minyan, 45, 277, 294 Mishnayos, 188, 321 Mishneh torah, 306 Mit(h)nagdic/mitnagdim; mit(h)nagdism, 5, 34, 69, 236, 252, 262, 279, 313, 314, 322, 324, 347, 353 Mitsraim ,130, 289 Mitsve; mitsvah, 40, 41, 120, 167, 208, 215, 260, 286, 320, 322, 329, 330 Mizrakh, 148, 197, 295 Mon, 283 Montefiore, Moses, 69, 73, 244 Moraur; moror, 125, 131, 287 Moseley, Marcus, 23–26, 234, 236, 241–247, 256, 318, 353 Muktse, 308 Musaf, 208, 309 Musar, 53, 69, 252, 253, 324 Negel vasser, 277 Neshomo yesseire, 205 Nicholas I, 4, 31, 61–75, 173, 193, 194, 218, 235, 244, 250–252, 256, 266–273, 311, 312, 340, 349, 351, 353, 354, 356 Niddah, 56

Index Nissan, 118, 120, 285, 309 Omar abbaye, 181, 318 Orem bokhur/im, 187, 188, 189, 321 Orev, 171 Oron hakodesh, 148, 161, 295 Ovinu meilakh, 284 Pale of Settlement, xviii, 2, 30–32, 58, 59, 63, 66, 235, 244, 251, 252, 264, 266, 267, 275, 316, 320, 341, 352, 353 Parnas, 272 Passover; pesakh/pesach, 41, 45, 46, 51, 52, 60, 68, 85, 118, 121–126, 133–137, 149, 226, 233, 285–288, 290, 290–294, 296, 298, 302, 305, 306, 308, 309, 310, 323, 330, 334, 342, 348, 349 Peyes, 141, 222, 228, 294, 341 Pilpul, 35 Pittam, 304 Podraczik/podracziki/podryachiki, 4, 100, 104, 273, 279 Purim; purim spiel, 68, 97, 112–114, 116–118, 280, 283, 285, 292, 305 Pushke, 148, 156, 295, 299 Prushim, 322, 356 Razsvet, 275 Rebbe, 53, 99, 141–143, 174, 261, 278 Rebbetsin, 80, 144, 145, 295 Regeneration, 72, 173 Reiseles, 48, 259 Riga, 32, 174, 316 Ritual; women’s, xi, 4, 12, 45–50, 56, 60, 78, 79, 86, 122, 258, 259, 260, 261, 263, 279, 288, 301, 305, 335, 338, 339, 352, 355 Rosh Hashanah; Rosh hashono; New Year, 51, 77, 147, 157–159, 164, 260, 299, 300, 301, 303, 307, 323, 334 Rosh khodesh, 118, 120, 149, 155, 168, 169, 170, 211, 285, 308, 309 Rossien, 179, 316 Sack (Zak), Abraham (Avraham), 38, 39, 241, 275 Schiller, Friedrich, 20, 38, 57, 58, 180, 256, 264, 318

Seder (Passover), 6, 46, 51, 60, 125–135, 287–294, 302, 305, 309, 328, 330, 334 Sefer torah, 177 Sfire, 134, 137, 149, 226, 291, 293, 296, 342 Sabbath; shabbes, 38–40, 48, 49, 52, 55, 56, 67, 70, 86, 109, 127, 138, 147, 151, 154, 155, 168, 190–192, 197, 203-209, 221, 228, 238, 257, 283, 286, 288–293, 295, 297–310, 323, 324, 327–332, 334, 335, 339, 349, 350 Shabbes bereishis, 168, 308 Shabbes goy, 331, 350 Shabbes khazon, 151, 297 Shabbes nakhmu, 154, 155, 298 Shadkhen, 146, 209, 295 Shakharis, 208, 277 Shalet, 208, 331, 332 Shames, 78, 166, 190, 215 Shas, 167, 308 Shavuot; shevuaus; Pentecost, 134, 149, 150, 226, 291, 296, 297, 305, 306, 308, 342 Shatnez, 129, 289 Shehekhiyanu, 288 Sheitel, 80 Shekheyone, 158, 301 Shekhinah, 306 Shelausho yemei hagbole, 149, 296 Shemone esre, 6, 155, 299 Shemini Atseres, 166, 307 Sheva berakhot; sheva brokhaus, 215, 217, 338 Shfaukh khamoskho, 132, 290 Shikses, 142, 294 Shir hashirim, 132 Shivo oser/osor betamuz, 150, 297 Shlakhmones, 112–114, 116, 283 Shokht/im, 188 Sholem aleikhem, 176, 206, 245, 275, 284, 343 Sholosh-suda, 208 Shtender, 81, 97, 277 Shtetl, 239, 246, 258, 260, 261, 268, 278, 282, 313, 314, 338, 339, 343–347, 354–357 Shtot magid; Stadt Maggid, 33, 323-324 Shtreimel, 111, 129, 197, 222, 282, 289, 324, 341 Shulkhan; shulhan arukh 99, 236, 278 Shulklopfer, 295

363

364

Index Shushan purim, 118, 285 Sifrei torah, 148 Simkhas-torah, 167, 168, 307, 308 Sivan, 149 Siyyum, 167, 253, 308 Slikhes/slikhaus, 147, 157, 299, 303 Slonimsky, Hayyim Selig, 317, 318 Stanislawski, Michael, xvi, 31, 63, 65, 66, 234, 240, 243, 251, 252, 264, 266–268, 270, 311, 312, 340, 341, 356 Sterntikhel, 293 Sude, 113, 117, 283 Skkah; Suke/sukkes; Tabernacles, xi, 51, 52, 56, 74, 149, 163–167, 260, 263, 291, 292, 296, 300, 304–308 Synagogue, women; women’s section, 48, 49, 51, 52, 164, 240, 261, 271, 295, 296, 302–305, 306, 325. See also Ritual Talis, 84, 176, 313, 336 Talmud, 5, 9, 10, 22, 29, 30, 34–41, 53–59, 64, 67, 97–100, 105, 108, 111, 127, 156, 167, 174–190, 197, 202, 203, 207, 216, 222, 228, 236–239, 252–257, 262, 263, 278, 281, 292–297, 301, 302, 308–323, 330, 334–337, 340, 347, 349 Tashlikh, 77, 158, 292, 300, 301 Tefillin shel rosh/yad, 56, 84, 222, 341, Tiken shvuaus, 150, 297 Tisheb’av; Tisho B’ov; Ninth of Av, 151, 152, 154, 162 Tishrei, 299, 301 Tkhina; tkhine/s, 47, 48, 56, 78, 159, 239, 255, 259, 263–265, 301, 327, 328, 356, 357 Trefe, 188, 321 Tselem elohim, 222, 341 Tsenerene, 53, 238, 327 Tsitsis, 141, 176, 294, 313. See also Arba kanfos Tsom gedalya, 159, 301 Tsom tsibbur, 326 Ukase, 194, 220 Unessane taukeff, 161, 303 Uvarov, Count, 31, 32, 71, 174, 249, 312

Vengerov, Semyon, 15, 234, 275, 316, 317, 338, 356 Vengerova, Faina, 15, 242, 317 Vilna, 33–35, 71, 79, 87, 174, 177, 179, 189, 216, 227, 233, 236, 237, 241, 248, 250, 251, 254, 255, 278, 297, 311, 313, 315, 316, 319, 323, 326, 338, 346, 347, 355, 356 Volozhin, yeshiva, 5, 35, 36, 52, 87, 174, 177, 178, 236, 252–254, 261, 262, 278, 292, 312, 313, 314, 347, 351 Volozhin/er, Hayyim, Rabbi, 35, 36, 87, 99, 174, 175, 236, 252, 253, 254, 255, 261, 278, 292, 312–315, 317, 347, 351 Voskhod, 2, 18, 174, 233, 244, 272, 274, 312, 316 Warsaw, 4, 5, 78, 100, 104, 105, 109, 235–237, 241, 255, 279, 296, 315, 339, 346, 348, 351, 356 Yehoreg ve’al ya’avor, 220, 340 Yeshiva, 5, 35, 40, 50, 87, 174, 177, 178, 186–189, 236, 237, 252, 254, 261–263, 267, 278, 292, 294, 311–315, 320–323, 343, 347, 351, 355, 356 Yikhud, 338 Yikhus, 7 Yizkor, 78, 235, 301 Yom Kippur, candles, 47–51, 78, 159, 160– 163, 202, 260, 300–304, 306–308, 335 Yom kippur, katan, 308 Yom tov, 129, 133, 135, 150, 165, 292 Yomim nauroim, 162, 303 Yorzeit, 47 Yoshen, 137, 293 Zeikher l’khurben, 151, 297 Zeroa, 126, 130, 134, 287, 292 Zogerke/s; zoger, 48, 52, 83, 163, 164, 259, 284, 304 Zohar, 239, 297 Zmiraus/zemires/zmires, 168, 209, 211, 334 Zschokke, Heinrich, 39, 57, 58, 180, 256, 318 Zuge/s; zugot, 131, 290