Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Woman's Life: Pauline Wengeroff and Memoirs of a Grandmother

A Woman's Life: Pauline Wengeroff and Memoirs of a Grandmother

Magnus, Shulamit

Hardcover

Series: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization

Biographies GeneralReligion General General European History

ISBN10: 1906764522
ISBN13: 9781906764524
Publisher: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization
Published: Dec 10 2015
Pages: 348
Weight: 1.65
Height: 1.30 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.30
Language: English

Pauline Wengeroff was born in 1833 into a pious Jewish family in Bobruisk in the Pale of Settlement (now Belarus); she died in 1916 in Minsk. Her life, as recounted in this biography, based in part on Shulamit Magnus's award-winning critical edition of Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother, was one of upheaval and transformation during Russian Jewry's passage from tradition to modernity. Remarkably, Wengeroff's narrative refracts communal experience and larger cultural, economic, and political developments through her own family life, interweaving the personal and the historical to present readers with an extraordinary account of the cultural transformation of Russian Jewry in the nineteenth century. Wengeroff's is the first piece of writing by a Jewish woman to display such authorial audacity and historical consciousness and the first contemporaneous account of Jewish society in any era to make the sensibilities and behaviour of Jewish women--and men--a central focus, providing a gendered account of the emergence of Jewish modernity. In this, her memoirs are a full counterpart to the androcentric autobiographies of her contemporaries, the maskilim (leaders of the Jewish enlightenment movement in eastern Europe), and the basis for much new thinking about gender and modernity. Shulamit Magnus probes Wengeroff's consciousness and social positioning as a woman of her era and argues that, though Wengeroff was well aware of the women's movement in Russia, she wrote not from a feminist perspective but as a by-product of her socialization in traditional Jewish society.

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