Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Fifteen years ago, with the publication of her first article on the subject, Shulamit Magnus opened up the scholarly conversation on Pauline Wengeroff. Experts in the field of modern Jewish history had access to Wengeroff 's German-language memoirs, and thanks to an excerpt published in Lucy Dawidowicz's anthology The Golden Tradition, even students knew of her existence, but until Magnus, no one had really written about Wengeroff and her life and writings. Now Magnus has taken the conversation to a new level, with the publication of the first volume of Wengeroff 's memoirs in a new English translation, with annotation and a lengthy introduction.

In the introduction, Magnus jumps right into the ongoing conversation that she initiated. There is some biographical information about Wengeroff, but mainly the introduction thoroughly and skillfully problematizes Wengeroff 's writings. Despite the implied sentimentality in the title of her memoirs, she was ". . . [n]o grandmother spinning tales, Wengeroff bears the weight of her life and an age in Jewish history in her narrative. It is only with an appreciation of these complexities, especially the existence of both story line and counter-narrative in her writing, that we can begin to understand her . . ." (p. 4).

To reach this understanding, Magnus both engages with other scholars and provides new interpretive conclusions of her own. She suggests, for example, that the schema for understanding Jewish autobiography recently laid out by Marcus Moseley is insufficient to contain a woman like Wengeroff. According to Magnus, "Moseley's definitional criteria derive from certain types of male writing, yet categorize Jewish self-referential writing as a whole" (p. 25).

Magnus then goes on to offer a broader critique of trends in modern Jewish history:

Wengeroff 's work goes beyond adding a female voice to the male-authored canon of self-reflective writing about this, acting as a compensatory addition to androcentric literature. It highlights the reality of gender as a variable affecting the consciousness, experience, and expression of all who write about this passage, which can no longer be represented as oedipal rebellion (most sons did not rebel against their fathers in the first half of the nineteenth century; many did not do so even later).

(p. 26)

Magnus contextualizes Wengeroff within the Haskalah, but also shows how her experience differed from that of her male peers. Indeed Magnus' insights on gender are particularly significant. Magnus describes Wengeroff 's writing as neither feminist nor feminine, but "female" (p. 13). This is demonstrated most strongly in her depictions of Judaism. As Magnus shows, Wengeroff was not even herself aware of the female focus of much of her text. "The fact that Wengeroff does not notice that the candle ritual is purely female testifies to the naivite of her female identity and the degree to which female ritual was intrinsic Judaism to her—not, as we would see it, "women's ritual," but simply—Judaism" (p. 48).

The introduction is followed by a series of illustrations, and then the complete text of the first volume of Wengeroff 's memoirs. In her notes to the edition, Magnus scrupulously explains all of her editing, transliteration, and translation decisions. She felt strongly about the integrity of the original text, going so far as to call abridging or reordering it "violence to the whole and to her intentions" (p. ix). Given this stance, Magnus' own decision to include photographs is somewhat surprising. "I felt," she explains, "that it was crucial to include illustrations that would bring life to description that would otherwise remain obscure and inaccessible to contemporary readers and non-specialists" (p. xi). Magnus goes on to state that the photographs are not all from Wengeroff 's lifetime or region and that she elected to keep them in a separate section to show their external nature...