Rememberings: The World of a Russian-Jewish Woman in the Nineteenth Century

By Wengeroff, Pauline, Bernard D. Cooperman (Ed.), Henny Wenkart (Trans.)
University Press of Maryland, 2000, Paperback, 306 pp., ISBN: 1883053617, $18.00

Pauline Wengeroff’s memoir tells what it was like to be a Jewish girl and a Jewish woman in 19th-century Russia, as foundations of faith and tradition eroded around her with the onset of the Jewish Enlightenment in Russia.

No other work like this survives. The book has been translated into English from her original German memoir. Wengeroff’s book is excellent at showing how modernity and secularism developed among the Jewish upper classes in Eastern Europe. She traces three generations of Eastern European Jews and the reader watches her home and life become secular.