Pauline Wengeroff’s extraordinary, two-volume work, Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century [Memoiren einer Grossmutter: Bilder aus der Kulturgeschichte der Juden Russlands im 19. Jahrhundert] richly depicts traditional Jewish society in Russia, its unraveling during the nineteenth century, and the devastating impact this dissolution had on families and especially on women.

Wengeroff treats her life as a microcosm, weaving together personal narrative, anthropological description, and the tale of an era of tumultuous change. It is the first work in the annals of Jewish literature in which a woman uses her life as a lens to refract an era in Jewish history. In this, Wengeroff’s memoirs differ fundamentally from those of the pre-modern Glikl Hamel (Glueckel of Hameln, 1646-1724). Glikl wrote, as did Wengeroff, because she was a writer and out of loneliness in her later years, but unlike Wengeroff, she wrote as a form of ethical will directed solely to her children and their descendants, with no thought of wider readership. Glikl was not an historian, nor a social, cultural, religious, or political observer, however much information her account gives about these matters. Wengeroff was all these things, as well as an advocate of particular religious, cultural, and political expression.

Wengeroff’s memoirs also differ sharply from those of her contemporaries, the female/sing.: Member of the Haskalah movement.maskilim (leaders of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement in Russia), in making women’s experience central to the emergence of Jewish modernity and to grasping what Wengeroff sees as the fundamental tragedy of modern Jewish history: the loss of traditional Jewish culture. This catastrophe, she asserts, and illustrates through the tragedies of her life, was a consequence of women’s loss of power in the modern Jewish family and the arrogance and short-sightedness of modernizing Jewish men. Her narrative is thus markedly gendered in its consciousness, not only in focusing on women but also in assigning global value to female experience.

An astute social observer and gifted writer, Wengeroff also produced a first-rate piece of literature whose importance was recognized by such cultural leaders as Gustav Karpeles (1848–1909), a Jewish literary historian and editor of German-speaking Jewry’s leading journal the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums; Theodor Zlocisti (1874–1943), a pioneer of Zionism, in Germany; and Solomon Schechter (1847–1915), an eminent scholar of rabbinics and president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Unlike Glikl, Wengeroff sought publication of her work both in Germany, where she succeeded, and also in English translation in the United States and England.

Born Pessele Epstein in Bobrujsk, northern Belorussia, Wengeroff grew up in Brest-Litovsk (which Jews called Brisk), in the Minsk district. Hers was a wealthy and very pious household, though also, for its time, a culturally forward-looking one. Her father, Yehuda Yudl Halevi Epstein (d. Warsaw, 1879), like his father, Simon Semel Epstein (d. Warsaw, 1854), manufactured bricks and was a contractor to the Tsar in road and fortress-building projects. He was also a Lit. "teaching," "study," or "learning." A compilation of the commentary and discussions of the amora'im on the Mishnah. When not specified, "Talmud" refers to the Babylonian Talmud.Talmud scholar, which Wengeroff claims was his main occupation, made possible by his business success. His record of publishing several extensive rabbinic works bears out this claim.

Wengeroff gives no family background about her mother (d. ca. 1860), whose name, notably, she does not record. However, she writes a great deal about her and makes clear that she was a formidable force in the household, both as a strict enforcer of traditional norms and parental authority and as a foe of the emerging Haskalah movement. Wengeroff’s detailed evocation of the world of traditional women’s piety and ritual, which she witnessed and experienced in the company of her mother, sisters, and other women, is one of the most salient and valuable features of Volume One.

In sharp contrast to the memoirs of the maskilim, Wengeroff depicts traditional Jewish society nostalgically and defensively, though not uncritically. Of particular note in this regard is her sympathetic portrait of her kindly melammed (teacher of young children), as opposed to the depraved, sadistic melammed who is a fixture in maskilic memoirs. This portrait is also a rare glimpse into the formal Jewish education of traditional girls in the first half of the nineteenth century. Wengeroff also had tutors, in particular for German. She received pivotal education informally, at home, from both her parents, from her mother in particular about areas for which women are responsible in traditional homes, notably the Term used for ritually untainted food according to the laws of Kashrut (Jewish dietary laws).kosher kitchen and  the wife’s role in running the traditional domestic realm.

Wengeroff’s first volume traces her girlhood in the 1830s and 1840s through descriptions of a year’s cycle of festivals and fasts and the routines of daily piety of men and especially of women, in whose image Wengeroff was being groomed for her own anticipated role as a traditional matriarch. This socialization is pivotal to her later disappointment with and rage against Jewish modernity.

Alongside her depiction of patterns she depicts as timeless comes testimony about the transformative events of her time and place, moving at a dizzying pace. The decades of Wengeroff’s childhood and adolescence coincided with those in which the Haskalah was transformed from a marginal intellectual current of beleaguered mavericks, persecuted and often silenced by traditional authorities and families, to a movement with institutions, publications, and especially schools. This transformation was the result of tsarist policy that gave the Haskalah funding and power in the Jewish community. In telling vignettes, Wengeroff depicts the inroads the Haskalah made in her own family in the 1840s and the generational and marital conflicts this engendered.

Wengeroff depicts her father as open and even welcoming to the pedagogical reforms the Haskalah propounded, if not to other aspects of its program. He even took his sons-in-law (whom he supported so that they could study Talmud) to meet Max Lilienthal (1815–1882), the German rabbi sent by the tsarist government in 1840 to tour the Pale of Settlement and advocate “enlightenment” to Russian Jewry, when Lilienthal visited Brest. Wengeroff’s mother opposed this meeting and several times confronted her sons-in-law about their maskilic activities (reading novels, conducting scientific observations) to the point that one of them fled for a time, abandoning his wife and family.

Wengeroff gives other evidence of the growing impact of modern culture on her generation. She describes sisters, who attempted to don European fashion; to promenade outside alongside a husband on the Sabbath; to meet a bridegroom in an arranged marriage before the wedding ceremony—all efforts quashed by both parents. In Wengeroff’s second volume, she writes of a brother, Ephraim, who was a budding female/sing.: Member of the Haskalah movement.maskil who, because of an unhappy arranged marriage, emigrated to America, where he converted to Christianity. Wengeroff’s depiction of the “Lilienthal era” and its disruptive effects on traditional Jewish society is extremely valuable testimony from a participant-observer.

For all her defense of Jewish traditionalism, it would be a serious misreading to say that Wengeroff was an enemy of the Haskalah or that her memoirs are an anti-modern polemic. Wengeroff herself was an utter product of modernity. She published in German, the language in which European “enlightenment” reached Russian Jews; she also cites great European writers, such as Friedrich Schiller, who was particularly important to maskilim, as well as Jewish sources, traditional and maskilic. She implicitly criticizes some of her parents’ traditionalism, as in the instances cited above regarding social mores. Like the maskilim, Wengeroff writes rhapsodically of the coming of “enlightenment,” which she depicts as inevitable and salutary. Like them, she wrote to justify her life, and sought publication and influence.

Wengeroff rejected not the Haskalah per se, but rather the manner of its implementation by men who, she claims, were incapable of the moderation of embracing European culture while also maintaining Jewish traditions, a synthesis she insisted was both beneficial and possible. In proclaiming the need for modernized tradition and embracing the best that European culture had to offer—“high” not “low”  culture, like ephemeral fashions and relaxed sexual mores, for which she has only contempt— Wengeroff is indistinguishable from moderate maskilim.

Wengeroff is distinct from them, however, in articulating a gendered indictment about modernizing Jewish men. These, she claims, were seduced by the blandishments of modernity to abandon the treasures of Judaism and usurped power within the household, displacing women, who according to her did know how to embrace both the Haskalah and Judaism; in doing so, they robbed them of the ability to shape or transmit culture. The result was a generation, that of Wengeroff’s children, bereft of their past and of any transcendent values. This is where women’s narrative converges with a larger Jewish narrative in Wengeroff’s telling: women’s loss of power in modernity led to the loss of Jewish culture as a whole. Modernity for Jewish men may have spelled unprecedented educational and occupational opportunity and personal, material gain from which women did benefit, derivatively. For women—and for Jewish tradition—it spelled catastrophic loss.

Volume Two of Wengeroff’s memoirs describes the unfolding of the Haskalah (a term she uses for both the intellectual movement and the societal changes of this era) between the 1850s and the1880s, and the shattering of tradition under her own roof. Her husband, Chonon (Afanasi) Wengeroff, son of adherents of Habad Hasidism, lost his faith while on pilgrimage to his rebbe (dates indicate this would have been Menahem Mendel Schneerson, the Zemah Zedek, 1789–1866, third rebbe of the Lubavich dynasty), details of which she says Chonon never shared. Conflict with his parents and with her ensued as Chonon trimmed his beard and donned Western-style clothing, announcing his break with traditional Judaism, though he maintained its strictures outwardly for a time, if without his previous fervor. He refused her entreaties to return to the old ways, demanding wifely obedience and citing his “rights as a husband” to silence her. Wengeroff had depicted fluttered, teenage readiness to experience romantic love, a key maskilic value—after a match was proposed but before she ever laid eyes on Chonon—and a mutual romantic attraction once they did meet. She experienced Chonon’s subsequent behavior toward her as a profound betrayal of their relationship. This betrayal included his demand that Wengeroff cease involvement in any gainful work, leaving employment solely to him; this practice was in line with new maskilic and European middle-class norms of the “domesticated wife” but was utterly foreign to anything Wengeroff knew and contrary to her inclinations—and, she says, to her superior business abilities. Wengeroff’s account of women’s forced domestication in the context of acculturated, Jewish middle-class striving is unprecedented in its detail and in her expressed resentment of it.

Wengeroff and Chonon’s marriage was patrilocal (the more typical Jewish practice was matrilocal), the couple living with and supported for several years by Chonon’s parents in Konotop, Ukraine, in an arrangement called kest, during which the husband was to study Talmud. Kest over, the couple was sent off to earn their own livelihood. Wengeroff describes their frequent moves over many years as Chonon sought business success. In 1871 they finally settled in Minsk, where Chonon became director of the Commercial Bank and served on the City Council from 1880 to 1892. Volume Two ends abruptly with Wengeroff’s distraught account of Chonon’s death in 1892, after he had delivered a fervent defense of the city’s Jews in the Council against Jew-hating accusations.

For each place they resided, Wengeroff depicts the growing impact of the Haskalah and modernization alongside and in conflict with traditional culture. Some of these places—Kovno, Vilna, Minsk—were among the Pale of Settlement’s most important communities, while others—St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Finland—outside the Pale—were places where Jewish assimilation was rampant. These portraits provide invaluable insight into the process of cultural transformation in Jewish society as it was occurring. Wengeroff also provides a gripping account of a feared impending pogrom in Minsk, which did not eventuate.

Wengeroff’s marriage was the scene of severe conflict over Jewish observance, a microcosm of the larger cultural process taking place; this explicit claim is one of the key motifs of Volume Two. Chonon’s religious lapse progressed once he was out of his parents’ home, and he also pressured Wengeroff, who had undergone no similar crisis of faith, to diminish her own observance. Chonon’s ridicule of her traditionalism reached a peak in St. Petersburg, where Russia’s wealthiest and most assimilated Jews lived. Wengeroff describes her failed efforts to give their children a Jewish education, despite Chonon’s insistence—in concert, she insists, with other modernizing Jewish men—that “the children need no religion!” (Vol. II:111). Similarly, she relates her attempts over many years to resist his pressure to relinquish her traditional marriage wig and then, her Term used for ritually untainted food according to the laws of Kashrut (Jewish dietary laws).kosher kitchen. The latter was a particularly traumatic loss, to which she devotes an entire chapter, based on diary entries she made at the time. Wengeroff not only kept a diary but preserved it and took it with her in her family’s many moves.

Finally, Wengeroff says, to end fifteen years of debilitating conflict in which her attachment to tradition was labeled “obstinacy,” and her children sided with their father, in St. Petersburg, she yielded on all points but one, insisting on keeping kosher one week of the year: A seven-day festival to commemorate the Exodus from Egypt (eight days outside Israel) beginning on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Nissan. Also called the "Festival of Mazzot"; the "Festival of Spring"; Pesah.Passover. Her larger acquiescence she says she did in fulfillment of the traditional wife’s obligation to preserve shalom bayit, domestic peace, writing that in this tumultuous era, one needed to “be a Hillel, not a Shamai,” referencing ancient rabbis known for their flexibility and rigidity, respectively (Vol. II:138). Wengeroff angrily cites Chonon’s (and she claims, other Jewish men’s) hypocrisy in propounding liberal values in society (citing the motto of the French Revolution, “liberty, equality, fraternity,” was surely not accidental), while at home acting like “despots” to their (traditional) wives (Vol. II:111).

Two of Wengeroff’s brilliant sons eventually converted when faced with anti-Jewish discrimination that would have stymied their educations and careers. It was, she says, the greatest tragedy of her life. Yet in one of the Memoirs’ most significant features, Wengeroff resolutely puts this personal tragedy in larger historical context. Parental authority in general, she insists, not only hers, was unraveling in this era. Jewish women as a class, not just she, lost control of their homes and children to rashly modernizing Jewish men and the larger culture, unmitigated by a compelling Jewish version conveyed at home or in schools. Her sons converted, she says, as did many others when faced with similar pressures, because they had been kept ignorant of the riches of their religion while being seduced by the promise of an outside world that rejected them as Jews.

In Minsk, she and Chonon practiced a philanthropic Judaism, founding two vocational schools for impoverished Jewish boys and girls. At her insistence, she says, the schools also gave instruction in Judaism and observed Jewish holidays and dietary laws, implementing the “moderate” Haskalah that Wengeroff would have wanted to see in Jewish society and in her own home. They were an enormous source of pride and comfort to her and to Chonon, who, she says, in his final years increasingly rued his lapse from Judaism and in particular its radical consequences and began a return to its traditions—ultimate vindication of Wengeroff’s position.

In keeping with the peculiar nature of the personal in Wengeroff’s memoirs—as a lens through which to tell a larger tale and its moral—she is not precise about such basic family information as the number or birth order of her siblings. She seems to have had seven siblings. More notable and significant is the absence of a full accounting of her own children. The memoirs speak of four children who survived infancy: Lise, Simon, Volodya, and Sina—with scant details given only about the sons. However, we know from other sources of three more daughters: Isabella, Maria, and Faina, the latter of whom converted in what was clearly not an opportunistic conversion, as Wengeroff says was the case with her sons.

Faina (b. Konotop, 1857, d. New York, 1944) and her husband, Leonid Slonimski (1850–1918), a political writer, converted to Russian Orthodoxy, had their children baptized, and vehemently denied even having Jewish origins, keeping her background from their children until a family member betrayed the secret. In his own memoirs, Faina’s son, the pianist Nicholas Slonimsky, describes his mother as a religious (Christian) fanatic; her grave bears a Russian Orthodox cross. Faina studied medicine, one of the first women in Russia to do so, but never practiced.

Several of Wengeroff’s children were highly accomplished, a fact she also omits. Wengeroff’s son Simon (Semyon, b. Lubny [Luben], 1855, d. Petrograd, 1920) was an eminent Russian literary historian and critic, a founder of Russian literary criticism, and professor at the University of St. Petersburg, his career made possible by his conversion to Russian Orthodoxy. Volodya (Vladimir) was a gifted cellist who died young. Sina (Zinaïda, b. 1867, d. New York, 1941) was a noted literary critic and translator of European and Russian literature. Isabelle (b. Minsk, 1877, d. New York, 1956) was a pianist who taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music and at several schools of music in the United States; among her students was Leonard Bernstein.

Probing Wengeroff’s omissions gives important entrée to understanding what she chose to include in her memoirs. Evidence from a large collection of letters preserved in the Pushkin Archives in St. Petersburg shows that Wengeroff had a testy relationship with daughter Isabelle, who ridiculed her mother’s writing, for which she seems to have been punished by omission from her mother’s account. Faina’s omission seems to be because her conversion could not be attributed simply to the pressures of Jew-hatred (though no conversion in the context of conditions in Tsarist Russia can be seen as entirely unrelated to that phenomenon). It was clearly crucial to Wengeroff to depict her sons’ conversions as driven by the pressures of the time, coupled with the lack of compelling Jewish education at home or in schools. Faina’s fervent conversion does not fit that motif. Wengeroff’s myth of Jewish modernity may have functioned as powerful absolution of her guilt for her failings as a Jewish parent. About the omission of daughter Maria there is insufficient information for informed speculation.

For Wengeroff, writing was clearly an outlet for prodigious talent as well as a critical psychological outlet in many trying circumstances in her life. In 1902, she published reminiscences of her life (in Russian) in Voshkhod, the most important Russian-language Jewish periodical, making her one of a handful of Russian Jewish women then published. (Another was her daughter Zinaïda, who also wrote for Voshkhod.) Wengeroff says she wrote to soothe loneliness in her old age and to leave her children a record of her life, but she obviously had other purposes. She is clearly angry at her loss of control over her household and what she feels was the theft of her proper matriarchal role in it. Her writing seems to be a powerful revenge against Chonon, as well as an attempted vindication of herself for her failure to prevent the ultimate of Jewish tragedies: her children’s conversions. The conversion of three out of seven children was much to account for in a woman of Wengeroff’s background and inclinations.

Despite her assumed authorial stance as a grandmother and saying that she wrote so that her children might know her story (Vol. II:42), Wengeroff’s intended audience was clearly not her biological offspring. She does not even mention her numerous grandchildren, while her narrative several times excoriates her children and their generation precisely for lack of interest in or respect for their parents’ experience and wisdom. Rather, Wengeroff’s intended audience was young Jews in Russia and central Europe, who at the turn of the twentieth century were rediscovering Jewish culture and reclaiming Jewish identity. Wengeroff mentions the Members of Hibbat ZionHovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement warmly and makes other references that make clear that she was a Zionist. She corresponded with Herzl, whom she supported fervently against his critics, something she does not mention in Memoirs. She seems to have viewed her memoirs, with their detailed recording of customs, liturgy, even recipes, as source material for those on the search for identity and needing a precise guide in a European language, to traditional Jewish culture. Finally, she clearly wished to give a beloved culture a respectful memorial, as well as to assure remembrance of herself.

Wengeroff’s Memoirs of a Grandmother was first published in 1908, in German, by the Berlin Jewish publishing house Poppelauer. This, in itself, was a major accomplishment. It received rave reviews in the Jewish and European press and was subsequently republished several times before 1922. Wengeroff attempted to get an English translation, produced by her brother Ephraim Epstein, published by the Jewish Publication Society of America. The project had the strong backing of Solomon Schechter, who served on the Society’s Publication Committee and of several other Committee members who were leaders of American Jewry. But the project was rejected after it became known that Ephraim had not, as Wengeroff asserted in Memoirs, reverted back to Judaism after a conversion to Christianity. Instead, he was an active Christian missionary to the Jews. Close examination of the letters between Wengeroff, Solomon Schechter, and Henrietta Szold, the reporting secretary of JPS, and of the Publication Committee’s minutes, leads to the conclusion that Wengeroff did not knowingly misrepresent Ephraim, but rather had been misled by him. She was bitterly disappointed at the failure of the project and by her brother’s betrayal. Her remarkable writing and publishing success, as well as her years of pursuing JPS, testify to extraordinary self-confidence and ambition.

Wengeroff was an Eastern European Jew. But she was profoundly oriented to the West and chose German as the language of presentation for her memoirs and herself. Just how important this choice of language was to her becomes clear from examining the original, handwritten manuscript of the work, which was actually largely composed in Russian, with some German, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish. A professional translator helped to polish the text into the fluent, grammatically correct, idiomatic German in which it was published. Though Yiddish was Wengeroff’s mother tongue, not only did she not write her memoirs in that language, but she expresses contempt for it as a “jargon,” a typical stance of Jewish Enlighteners. She certainly did not wish to confine the audience for her writing to Yiddish readers, whether in the Old World or the New.

Wengeroff’s Memoirs were tremendously popular among the modernizing Jews she wished to reach, but also with non-Jewish reviewers. The nineteenth century was a time of tremendous upheaval not only in Jewish but also in non-Jewish societies, with traditional worlds overwhelmed by industrialization, urbanization, and the creation of modern cultures. Such rapid change and loss generated nostalg, iaand Wengeroff’s Memoirs were seen by non-Jewish reviewers as the perfect representation of the charm of a lost world. This most Jewish of accounts, of the experience of Ostjuden (East European Jews), was read as a universal tale of modernity, of cultural loss that all moderns underwent due to their modernity.

In the Jewish world, both in Europe and—at least until Ephraim Epstein’s true identity was revealed—in the United States, cultural leaders and Zionists saw in her work an invaluable resource that could speak to a young generation about the value of Jewish tradition, identity, and continuing affirmation.

Having failed to get an English-language edition of her Memoirs published in the United States and, it appears, in an associated desire to emigrate there, Wengeroff’s last years appear to have been “lonely and miserable,” in the words of one scholar who interviewed her [Saul Ginsburg, “The Tragedy of a Jewish Woman,” (Yid)., in  Historical Works (1937), ii, 82-90, p.82]. Terrified of anti-Jewish violence, Wengeroff died in Minsk in 1916, at the age of 83, in the midst of the First World War and a disintegrating Tsarist empire.

All translated citations and page references are from the Magnus edition of Memoirs of a Grandmother.