A Woman's Life

Pauline Wengeroff was bornin 1833 into a pious Jewish family in Bobruisk in the Pale of Settlement (nowBelarus); she died in 1916 in Minsk. Her life, as recounted in this biography,based in part on Shulamit Magnus's award-winning critical edition ofWengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother, was one of upheaval andtransformation during Russian Jewry's passage from tradition to modernity. Remarkably,Wengeroff's narrative refracts communal experience and larger cultural,economic, and political developments through her own family life, interweavingthe personal and the historical to present readers with an extraordinaryaccount of the cultural transformation of Russian Jewry in the nineteenthcentury. Wengeroff's is the first piece of writing by a Jewish woman to displaysuch authorial audacity and historical consciousness and the firstcontemporaneous account of Jewish society in any era to make the sensibilitiesand behaviour of Jewish women-and men-a central focus, providing a genderedaccount of the emergence of Jewish modernity. In this, her memoirs are a fullcounterpart to the androcentric autobiographies of her contemporaries, themaskilim (leaders of the Jewish enlightenment movement in eastern Europe), andthe basis for much new thinking about gender and modernity. Shulamit Magnusprobes Wengeroff's consciousness and social positioning as a woman of her eraand argues that, though Wengeroff was well aware of the women's movement inRussia, she wrote not from a feminist perspective but as a by-product of hersocialization in traditional Jewish society. A brilliant woman who'loved books', Wengeroff produced a carefully crafted, beautifully written, andcompelling account of tradition and its demise; of intergenerational andmarital strife over Jewishness; and of betrayal, loss, and hope. Despite adramatic and readily accessible narrative line-what Magnus calls 'Wengeroff'smyth of her life story'-Wengeroff embeds much counter-evidence in her memoirsthat subverts this same myth. Why she constructs the particular myth she does,and also, if unconsciously, subverts it, is a major focus of this study.Using archival andsecondary sources, Magnus goes beyond constructing a portrait of PaulineWengeroff, her family, and her social circles to consider how Memoirs of aGrandmother came to be in the form in which we have it: she writes abiography of a literary work as well as of a woman. She documents itsastonishing success: published for the first time (largely in German, inBerlin) in 1908, it was republished in 1910, 1913, 1919, and 1922 to ravereviews, in the Jewish but also the non-Jewish press, in Germany, Austria,Russia, and even the Netherlands. Organized topically rather thanchronologically, Magnus's study gives readers entree to Wengeroff's life,aspirations, and her disappointments-above all, with her husband, who ridiculedher attachment to traditional observance and forced her to relinquish it andwith her seven children (three of whom converted to Christianity; none of theothers were committed Jews in any fashion)-raises the question of Wengeroff'sactual, intended audience for Memoirs of a Grandmother. Magnus arguesthat, Wengeroff's title notwithstanding, it was not her biological offspringbut other 'grandchildren' from among the Jewish youth of the fin de siecle, whoshared her Jewish cultural nationalism-and her affinity for Herzlian Zionism.Finally, Magnus probes the reception of Memoirs on two continents,Europe and North America, to reveal a surprising story of the same work beingread both as an apologia for tradition and for assimilation and evenconversion-both fundamental, if revealing, misreadings, she argues.When Wengeroff died in 1916, the world was very differentfrom the one in which she had grown up. Her story makes a significantcontribution to Jewish women's history; to east European Jewish history; to thehistory of gender, acculturation, and assimilation in Jewish modernity; and tothe history of Jewish writing and Jewish women's writing.