Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning

Introduction: Autobiography, the Jews, and Episodic Memory

Introduction AUTOBIOGRAPHY, THE JEWS, AND EPISODIC MEMORY The problem I discuss in these essays is the nature of autobiographical writing by Jews over the centuries, and specifically the ways in which such writings can legitimately be used as sources for Jewish history. My interest in this problem emerged while I was working on my last book, on Zionism and the fin de siècle, and discovered that one of my most important sources, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s wonderful and indeed stirring autobiography , entitled in its original Hebrew Sipur yamai (The story of my life), was all but invented out of whole cloth—i.e., it contradicted the massive data, in black and white, in Russian, Hebrew, German, Yiddish, and Italian, that I had gathered on three continents by and about Jabotinsky, on matters both small and grand. At first, I must confess, it was great fun identifying and correcting Jabotinsky’s many errors of fact and interpretation, but very soon I began to ponder the meaning and logic of these so-called “errors .” In due course I realized that far more interesting than debunking Jabotinsky’s own retelling of events in his life was deciphering the ways in which he had retroactively created his own mythologized, and to a large extent, mythological, life-story, constructing a supremely controlled and controlling narrative in which truth-telling necessarily gave way to the overarching purposes and goals of the work: a brilliant, but highly fictionalized , self-fashioning. To sort out this matter, I began to read literary theory on autobiography, and discovered that I had but hit upon something entirely well known: that in the last fifty years an immense body of academic analysis of autobiography has appeared, written largely by literary scholars and critics, questioning the very nature of autobiographical writing , its definition, boundaries, and relationship to what we normally desig3 nate as the truth. These studies have queried not only how an autobiography is to be distinguished from allied genres—memoirs, autobiographical fiction, and the like—but to what extent every autobiographer plays fast and loose with the truth: not simply that all autobiographies contain errors of fact; these one important critic felicitously called “mere friendly difficulties compared with those that belong to the very nature of autobiography ,”1 i.e., both the conscious and the far more elusive unconscious distortions of memory and narrative selection that in many ways define the very act of choosing to write one’s own life story. Thus, already in 1960, that most important early theorist of autobiography, Roy Pascal, had conceded , on the basis of his contemplation of the genre of autobiography, that “the distortion of truth imposed by the act of contemplation is so over-riding a qualification of autobiography that it is indeed a necessary condition of it. . . . In the abstract, the argument remains undecided, autobiography may be a means of revealing the truth, [or] it may be a means of hiding it.”2 In the forty years since these words were written, I proceeded to learn, autobiographical theory has become an enormous growth industry, to the extent that it is virtually impossible these days to keep up with the books, articles, conferences, symposia, scholarly associations, and entire journals devoted to the subject. Countless positions have been taken on the first of Pascal’s ambitions, a definition of autobiography as a genre, and its relation to other forms of narrative, the latter itself having become an increasingly vexed and complex subject of theoretical musing. James Olney, perhaps the most engaging and productive American theorist of autobiography, confessed in his most recent tome on the subject, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing, that he has “never met a de- finition of autobiography that [he] could really like,” and that as a result, he tends to use many terms to describe the type of writing he studies— “confessions, autobiography, memoirs, periautography (writing about or around the self), or life-writing”—without worrying about their precise generic boundaries.3 More central to his concerns than a tight definition of autobiography has been the relationship between narrative and memory , or what he calls the narrative “imperative.” Other scholars have focused more on the memory side of the equation, i.e., the mechanisms, 4 introduction both psychic and physiological, by which we remember things and forget them, both individually and collectively. Indeed, although literary theory and hard...