Pauline Wengeroff was born
in 1833 into a pious Jewish family in Bobruisk in the Pale of Settlement (now
Belarus); she died in 1916 in Minsk. Her life, as recounted in this biography,
based in part on Shulamit Magnus’s award-winning critical edition of
Wengeroff’s Memoirs of a Grandmother, was one of upheaval and
transformation 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, interweaving
the personal and the historical to present readers with an extraordinary
account of the cultural transformation of Russian Jewry in the nineteenth
century. Wengeroff's is the first piece of writing by a Jewish woman to display
such authorial audacity and historical consciousness and the first
contemporaneous account of Jewish society in any era to make the sensibilities
and behaviour of Jewish women—and men—a central focus, providing a gendered
account of the emergence of Jewish modernity. In this, her memoirs are a full
counterpart to the androcentric autobiographies of her contemporaries, the
maskilim (leaders of the Jewish enlightenment movement in eastern Europe), and
the basis for much new thinking about gender and modernity. Shulamit Magnus
probes Wengeroff’s consciousness and social positioning as a woman of her era
and argues that, though Wengeroff was well aware of the women’s movement in
Russia, she wrote not from a feminist perspective but as a by-product of her
socialization in traditional Jewish society.
A brilliant woman who
'loved books', Wengeroff produced a carefully crafted, beautifully written, and
compelling account of tradition and its demise; of intergenerational and
marital strife over Jewishness; and of betrayal, loss, and hope. Despite a
dramatic and readily accessible narrative line—what Magnus calls ‘Wengeroff’s
myth of her life story'—Wengeroff embeds much counter-evidence in her memoirs
that 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 and
secondary sources, Magnus goes beyond constructing a portrait of Pauline
Wengeroff, her family, and her social circles to consider how Memoirs of a
Grandmother came to be in the form in which we have it: she writes a
biography of a literary work as well as of a woman. She documents its
astonishing success: published for the first time (largely in German, in
Berlin) in 1908, it was republished in 1910, 1913, 1919, and 1922 to rave
reviews, in the Jewish but also the non-Jewish press, in Germany, Austria,
Russia, and even the Netherlands. Organized topically rather than
chronologically, Magnus’s study gives readers entrée to Wengeroff’s life,
aspirations, and her disappointments—above all, with her husband, who ridiculed
her attachment to traditional observance and forced her to relinquish it and
with her seven children (three of whom converted to Christianity; none of the
others were committed Jews in any fashion)—raises the question of Wengeroff's
actual, intended audience for Memoirs of a Grandmother. Magnus argues
that, Wengeroff's title notwithstanding, it was not her biological offspring
but other ‘grandchildren’ from among the Jewish youth of the fin de siècle, who
shared 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 being
read both as an apologia for tradition and for assimilation and even
conversion—both fundamental, if revealing, misreadings, she argues.
When Wengeroff died in 1916, the world was very different
from the one in which she had grown up. Her story makes a significant
contribution to Jewish women's history; to east European Jewish history; to the
history of gender, acculturation, and assimilation in Jewish modernity; and to
the history of Jewish writing and Jewish women’s writing.
Author Biography:
Shulamit S. Magnus is Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Oberlin College. She has previously taught in the history departments of Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania and has been a Lady Davis Fellow in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Yad Hanadiv-Barecha Fellowship for her work on Pauline Wengeroff’s Memoirs of a Grandmother; Volume I of this critical edition of Wengeroff’s memoirs won the National Jewish Book Award (2010), Volume II the Hadassah-Brandeis Translation Award (2013). Her other books include Jewish Emancipation in a German City: Cologne, 1798-1871 (1997). Her scholarly and teaching interests lie in Jewish social and cultural history, Jewish women’s history, the workings of gender in Jewish society, and questions of identity, boundary formations, and shifts.