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Introduction Two entwined themes crisscross and bind the chapters of this book: one is the anomalous, strange, and aberrant individuals who did not keep to their predecessors’ straight and narrow path, but chose to carve out their own instead; the other is literary “memory wars,” the battles ostensibly fought over persons, events, phenomena, and processes between various, often opposing, traditions. It is also possible to define this study as an attempt to pinpoint the delicate phase at which their preservers and interpreters recast unconventional biographies or closed historical events, reshaping them at will. Many individuals—prominent and ordinary, scholarly and ignorant, impassioned and vested—stand at the crossroads of the twisted paths of human memory. To date, the always dramatic, sometimes tragic, stories of the individuals (or groups) caught in the thicket of family, community, or tradition are but dimly illumined in the broad study of Hasidism—as is the price they paid for being “other.” All of this book’s protagonists either fell on the margins of their society or found themselves between worlds, achieving neither tranquility nor fulfillment in the frameworks the hasidic and ultra-Orthodox settings offered (and mainly imposed on) their children. The disquiet their aberrance aroused among their contemporaries also reverberates in the means used to shape collective memory and internal historical writing. A combination of truth and fiction, these means are uncovered here through corroboration by, and contrasts with, many additional sources. The interpretive categories of “polemical” and “apologetic memory” are also employed ; they serve to identify reactions—defensive and offensive alike—to alternative constructions of memory. Not only are these various memory traditions (including maskilic ones and those emerging from critical and academic research) acquainted with each other, but they also converse among themselves, both overtly and covertly. Each of these chapters of crisis and discomfort stands as an independent unit. Readers of this book could justifiably inquire, what links the Seer of Lublin’s fall from the window of his house in 1814 with the conversion, six years later, of Moshe, the son of the first Habad rebbe? Or what connects the cruel persecution of the Bratslav Hasidim in the 1860s and Yitshak Nahum Twersky’s heart-rending early-twentieth-century confession? My answer is that they share not only the status of aberrant or discomfiting events, or the fate of those rejected or made other, but also the masking of these events. This book aims to reveal the hidden, both to disclose what actually happened and why, and also to demonstrate how the truth was obscured or endowed with an alternative interpretation. To some extent, this is also the tale of individuals born into prominent hasidic families who failed to find their place: Moshe, the emotionally disturbed son of Shneur Zalman of Lyady, who converted to Christianity and thereby shamed his family and Habad Hasidism; Menahem Nahum Friedman of Itscan, a scion of the Ruzhin dynasty, who devoted his life to hopeless mediation between Hasidism and Western culture; and Yitshak Nahum Twersky of Shpikov, a descendant of the Chernobyl dynasty, whose soul was rent by an existential conflict that time alone cured. The story is sometimes one of a large group, notable for its oddity—such as the Bratslav Hasidim, who took comfort in being the victims of their hasidic brethren’s scorn—and sometimes one of marginal individuals, who pushed their way or were forced into the eye of the storm—such as the brilliant scholar Akiva Shalom Chajes of Tulchin, who fought Hasidism his entire life, even after he joined its ranks. All paid a price for their aberrance. Linking them is the fascinating human tale that emerges from the historian’s joining of scattered and shattered sources. Emerging from this book’s examination of the aberrant is another feature that connects some of the chapters: a unique, defined social group that can be termed the “scions of hasidic rebbes” (referred to in hasidic circles as benehem shel kedoshim—the sons of saints). Dov Sadan first noted this phenomenon in his introduction to the collected poems of Yaakov Friedman, the son of the zaddik Shalom Yosef of Mielnica: “This poetry’s birthplace comes from within the reality and symbolism of the hasidic world and from the tension between adherence to, and the struggle with, Hasidism. This phenomenon applies to a worthy group of poets, the grandsons and great-grandsons of hasidic rebbes, who transmuted their ancestors’ dominion over souls in matters of faith...

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