“Insignificant” Lives, Significant Writing

In the introduction to their mother’s memoir, Melekh Ravits and Herts Bergner note that the book does not “presume to have social or scholarly significance. When our dear mother was recording her memoirs exactly as they appear in this book, she could count on one hand an audience comprised entirely of her closest family” (31). Such was the case for most of the women profiled or studied in the books under review. Sure that their letters and memoirs had no “significance,” most wrote for their families. Others were rendered nearly voiceless due to the lack of documentation regarding their lives. And the ones who did write for publication discussed family, either their own or others. The books include memoirs, collected letters, and two scholarly studies of the intimate details of family life in the medieval and modern eras. Despite clear differences in form and time period, strong themes run throughout these books. Certainly all belie the contention that women’s private lives hold no significance. Instead, these works underscore just how much a study of the family realm can tell us about “public” topics, most notably the interactions between minority and majority populations, and the ways people have struggled to remain faithful to family and tradition while simultaneously interacting with the broader world.

Abigaill Levy Franks was a Jewish woman residing in New York City in the first part of the eighteenth century. As Edith B. Gelles points out in her highly informative introduction, we know little about Franks’s life other than what we can glean from the thirty–five extant letters that she wrote to her son Naphtali, then living in England. Most of these letters were first published in 1968 in Letters of the Franks Family (1733–1748), edited by Leo Hershkowitz and Isidore S. Meyer. In this new edition, Gelles provides an overview of the period and argues for the importance of Franks’s letters to colonial, Jewish, and women’s history. The footnotes to the letters, most of which were written by Hershkowitz and Meyer, offer detailed background on the numerous figures who appear in the letters. Both the introduction and the footnotes make the collection accessible to a much wider audience than specialists in colonial American history.

The letters are an invaluable resource as few sources survive from this period penned by women themselves. Franks’s letters reveal a woman who read widely and was not solely consumed by domestic affairs. Keenly observant, she commented on the small New York Jewish community, noting the tensions between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, and observed the political maneuvering of the colony’s leaders. These private letters, created for her son’s eyes alone, show the fluidity between domestic and public realms. Private missives discuss many public topics including the major political struggle between the new governor, William Cosby, and his supporters in the “town party” with opponents in the “country party.” Today her letters, considered by Franks to hold no significance, have proven to be exceedingly useful, Gelles notes, as they are among the few sources that describe this particular battle in...