Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning

3. Two Russian Jews: Moshe Leib Lilienblum and Osip Mandelstam

3 / Two Russian Jews MOSHE LEIB LILIENBLUM AND OSIP MANDELSTAM At first glance, it would be hard to find two modern Russian Jews so different from one another than Moshe Leib Lilienblum and Osip Mandelstam . The first, one of the most famous writers of the Hebrew Enlightenment , became an early leader of the “Love of Zion” movement in late-nineteenth-century Russia and hence a hero of Zionist history. The second, one of the most renowned Russian poets of all time, was profoundly ambivalent about his Jewishness and in fact underwent a formal conversion to Protestantism at the age of twenty. (Indeed, it may be argued that it is therefore inappropriate to include Mandelstam in a volume on “Autobiographical Jews”—a problem I shall discuss at some length below.) Yet even before proposing a phenomenological parallelism between the two, it is important to point out their chronological and geographical congruity: Lilienblum was born in 1843 and died in 1910, and was thus still alive for the first nineteen years of Mandelstam’s life—the latter was born in 1891 and died (in a Stalinist gulag) in 1938. Even more intriguingly, they hailed from surprisingly close backgrounds: Lilienblum was born in Kedainiai, a small town in central Lithuania barely sixty miles from Vilna, where Mandelstam’s mother was born, and just a little farther in the other direction from Zhagory (Zagare), the northern Lithuanian town were Mandelstam’s father’s family was from (the oft-quoted misinformation about their Kurland roots notwithstanding). Lilienblum moved from Kedainiai first to nearby Vilkomir (now Ukmerge), where he was married, and then to Odessa, while Mandelstam’s parents were married in nearby Dvinsk (now Daugavpils, Latvia) and moved first to Warsaw, where Osip was born, and then to St. Petersburg, where he was raised. 54 In other words, Mandelstam’s parents were not only of the exact same background as Moshe Leib Lilienblum, but they—and especially his father —struggled at almost the same time, if with different results, with the same pushes and pulls of Orthodox Lithuanian Judaism, the Enlightenment challenges to that tradition, and the subsequent benefits and costs of Russification and embourgeoisement. Indeed, more thematically, both Lilienblum’s and Mandelstam’s lives were determined (or one might be tempted to say, “overdetermined”) by their struggles with their fathers, each of whom was a perfect representative of successive cohorts of RussianJewish patresfamilias in the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries as they moved from traditionalism to modernity. We know this, of course, from the astonishingly captivating autobiographies that each of them wrote: Lilienblum’s Hatot neurim (The sins of my youth), first published in 1876 and then revisited in the 1890s,1 and Mandelstam’s Shum vremeni (The noise of time), written in 1923, published in part in 1925 and fully in 1928.2 To be sure, dozens of memoirs and autobiographies were penned by Russian Jews, both professional writers and, to a lesser extent, ordinary folk, in these decades. I have chosen these two as paradigmatic both of the genre of the modern Jewish autobiography and of the problematics of using these works as sources for history because of their extraordinary literary power, albeit in radically different keys. Mandelstam’s Noise of Time is a series of fourteen short, exquisitely crafted, and highly self-consciously literary vignettes about his childhood, written in a brilliant Russian prose at once pointillistically delicate, fiercely combative, and mockingly ironic. Lilienblum’s Sins of My Youth is a three-volume deadly serious memoir in stolid if often gripping Hebrew prose, constructed out of citations from the author’s diary and correspondence , tied together with brief retroactive interpolations; it is clear that the reader is meant to believe that the author has barely interceded in the narrative, which is presented essentially as a documentary history of the author’s life from birth to the age of thirty-nine. Intriguingly and contrary to our usual expectations of autobiographers, both authors chose to write their life-stories when they were quite young: Lilienblum tells us that he began his autobiography on November 16, 1872—when he was just past his twenty-ninth birthday—and completed the first two vol55 two russian jews umes on November 10, 1873;3 the third volume, Derekh teshuvah (The road of repentance) was written in the early 1890s—when he was in his late forties. Mandelstam left us no such...