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Appendix 1 Szeftel's "Intellectual Autobiography" Szeftel's "intellectual autobiography," which he wrote in the 1970S and 1980s, is not in the archive but was given to me by his son, Marc Watson Szeftel, who had partially edited it. Szeftel's own original ofthe autobiography has been, apparently, lost. The document we now have breaks abruptly around 1916. The original autobiography was probably much longer, for Szeftel noted in his diary on October 22, 1977, that he had "completed the story of my intellectual development up to 1945, when I started teaching at Cornell." Since the autobiography as I received it had already been "tampered" with, I had no choice but to edit it further, mostly eliminating obvious inaccuracies ofthe kind that are impossible to imagine as having existed in the lost original. It is also published here in an abridged version. In his diary entry ofSeptember 9, 1976, Szeftel explains why he chose to write an "intellectual autobiography" rather than a more personal one: "I should, finally, start writing my autobiography, but only an intellectual one. The rest I don't want to recall, even a few pleasant events. The unpleasant is too painful to recall, and I had much of iliat, as I also had much of what retroactively I would want to change." In another diary entry, the same year, he wrote: "I have time left ... to record the most essential of what I have experienced on an intellectual plane. I am reluctant to revisit what I have lived ilirough nonintellectually . Why dig out things from ilie past? If I had talent (like Nabokov, for example) ilian it would have been different. As it is, I am afraid I would tell my story awkwardly.", INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY There is no pedigree in my case. My father was a photographer, first in a small Ukrainian town, Starokonstantinov (where I was born), then in Lublin, Poland, and finally in Antwerp, Belgium. The name Sheftell (not 92 APPENDIX 1. SZEFTEL'S "INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY" 93 so rare among the Lithuanian Jews) seems to be a diminutive of Sabbatai (Shabsai in Hebrew). There were other lines of the same name (not consanguinal, as it seems): the Sheftells of Shklov and those ofSlutsk. Those of Shklov descended from the famous XVIth century cabalist Shelo (from the initials of his book Shnei Lukhoth Habrith, i.e., the Two Tables of Covenant, revered among the Hassidim). No kinship is possible in this case, however desirable: we belonged to the Israelis, i.e., the lay descendants of Israel; while Shelo was a Levite; his progeny carried the name of Horwitz. Also the Slutsk Sheftells had distinction, but a modern one: Mikhail Isakovich Sheftell, a prominent civil lawyer in St. Petersburg and a deputy to the First Duma was one of them. My father did not have the benefit of formal schooling, but his Russian was flawless in speech and writing. He must have been self-taught, for they spoke Yiddish at home, and obviously he put considerable effort into it. He spoke Russian without any Jewish accent, and as he had not typically Jewish looks he was taken for a Russian intellectual most of the time. There were books at home and cultured conversation. My mother had to leave school at 16, but her Russian was also fluent and literary, although she had a very slight Jewish accent. Her features were regular and rather Jewish. Her correspondents praised her letters for their literary polish, but on the whole, my sense is that my father was more cultured and erudite than my mother. She did not know Hebrew, which my father wrote and even spoke well. I do not know very much about my paternal lineage. My father was born in Kiev in 1874, where my grandfather was an accountant in a sugar mill, and at some time the keeper of a small inn. My paternal grandfather visited Starokonstantinov when I was a child, and I vaguely remember his going away. I must have been very young at that time, a small child, for nothing else stuck in my mind. But his portrait hung in our living room and I looked at it many times: everyone noticed my very close resemblance to him (also to my father, who, however, was much better looking than either of us: he greatly resembled Leonid Andreev). I heard, however, certain things about my grandfather which impressed me. He was a very religious man, and, as my father was saying, faith gave him...

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