| People with good stories inside of them often find the drive and determination to get those stories out into the world. |
On the several occasions when I’ve enrolled in creative-writing or memoir-writing workshops, usually with the aim of finishing a particular story that I’ve written, I have always been struck by the wealth of literary talent seated around the table. This has generally come as a pleasant surprise, since I’ve also observed that few people possess the discipline to become a good writer. Yet it seems that people with good stories inside of them often find the drive and determination to get those stories out into the world.
Years ago, Fannie Silver, a would-be memoirist in Brooklyn, enrolled in a creative writing workshop while working on a series of sketches about herself and her family. One day she read a story to the class about her father’s experiences in the Kishinev pogrom, and her reading gave the tale a remarkable postscript. Her story told of how, one Passover night, the Cossacks forced the Jews out of their homes and out of the town altogether. Silver’s father, a boy of ten, had been holding the hand of his six-year-old sister, but somehow lost her in the turmoil. Tragically, neither he nor anyone else in his family ever saw her again. Forever after, even long after he had come to America, he would ask everyone he met, “Do you know Deena Rosenstein from Kishinev?” “When I finished reading, the silence in the classroom was disrupted by a man’s voice calling out, ‘It’s unbelievable! It’s unbelievable!’” Silver wrote in her story collection Better Than Gold: An Immigrant Family’s First Years in Brooklyn, published posthumously in 1997.
“I thought he wanted to criticize my story, but he continued in a trembling voice, ‘I’m stunned by this story. It’s unbelievable, but it’s true. My mother was Deena Rosenstein!’” Then the man told the story of a mother torn from her family as a girl during a pogrom, and how she too, had never stopped searching for her family for the rest of her days. Incredibly, his mother had been the very same Deena Rosenstein.
Such a spine-chilling coincidence seems too extraordinary to be real and so incredible that no novelist would dare attempt to present it as fiction. The episode serves to illustrate how much the act of writing an autobiographical story or sketch of family history can be a transformative deed. Writers transform history into literature and legend just as alchemists tried to transmute base metals into gold. What follows is a discussion of some of my favorite Jewish memoirs and autobiographical works.
Writing in Yiddish from 1689 into the 1720s, the famed Gluckel of Hamelyn penned the first known autobiography by a Jewish woman, but her warm account of her family and commercial affairs over many years was never meant for publication. Like Anne Frank’s legendary diary, Gluckel’s compelling life falls into a category of literature defined as “unconscious autobiography,” written for the edification of the author and perhaps children and grandchildren. First published in 1896, it has rarely been out of print; the Jewish Publication Society issued a new edition earlier this year.
By contrast, Pauline Wengeroff, born in Bobruisk in 1833, almost certainly considered herself a professional writer when she penned her interesting memoir that the Stanford University Press published in part in 2010 as Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jewish of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, Volume One. Using her family as an example, Wengeroff describes the traditional practices that occurred within her home surrounding all of the holidays in the Jewish calendar. The result more closely resembles cultural anthropology than personal family history, but it still illuminates how we lived—always the concern of every family historian—in wonderful detail.
Dating from the auspicious year of 1848, Aus dem Ghetto (From the ghetto) is a collection of stories by Prussian writer Leopold Kompert about life behind ghetto walls. Kompert is regarded as the first author to treat the Jewish ghetto in literature. I read some of the stories in translation some years ago, and I still remember his description of the exhilarating sense of freedom and release he experienced when, as a boy, he momentarily escaped the ghetto and ran up the hill above the Judengasse (the Jewish street or area) despite the stern advice of family members to return immediately.
The narrator of the lovely memoir, The Journeys of David Toback, records a similar giddy sense of freedom when he, a shtetl dweller in the Ukraine, rode a horse at full gallop across the open plain, his first time in the saddle. That’s one of many worthy episodes in his remarkable narrative. Toback came to America and became a butcher. Late in life, he penned a Yiddish memoir that—despite his prognostication that it would be tossed into the trash after his death—was published posthumously in English.
Generations of once-famous Jewish writers are now forgotten. Consider the now-forgotten Yiddish romantic novelist Nochim Mayer Shaikevitsch (“Shomer”), who was once a household name. In 1939, his daughter, Miriam Shomer Zunser, wrote a worthy family narrative for her children, which was published in 1978 as Yesterday, A Memoir of a Russian Jewish Family. Its first sentence is unforgettable: “Your great-grandfather had 24 children, all by the same wife.” So too are the many stories of shtetl life that follow.
The most memorable shtetl memoir yet to come to my attention is Yekhezkel Kotik’s narrative, Journey to a Nineteenth Century Shtetl, originally published in Yiddish in 1913 and later in English translation. Like Zunser, Kotik had the remarkable ability, although three generations removed, of telling gripping handed-down stories about his great-grandparents, full of drama, intrigue, and human interest. Reading this book about Kotik’s tiny native village of Kamenets gives one the sense that the past is not lost, but easily revisited in literature. A good writer—in partnership with a good reader—can seemingly bring a whole world back to life.
Perhaps my favorite book of family history was written by Burton Bernstein, the brother of composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein. Burton’s Family Matters: Sam, Jennie and the Kids, appeared in two huge installments in The New Yorker in 1982 and soon afterwards was published as a book. In it, the author’s celebrated brother is featured as a late-blooming appendage on a family saga that began a century before in Russia. Burton relates family history par excellence, then he shares his experiences with us as the kid brother of a famous composer. Family Matters is an endearing and intimate portrait of a close-knit Jewish family. It remains a pleasure to read.
Bill Gladstone is a professional writer, editor, and genealogist in Toronto who gives frequent workshops and talks on genealogy and on the history of the Jews of Toronto. He is Book Review editor for AVOTAYNU. In 1994, as a freelance writer for the Jewish press, it was Gladstone’s article that exposed the Mormon practice of posthumously baptizing Holocaust victims.
