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T HE J EWISH Q UARTERLY R EVIEW , Vol. 95, No. 1 (Winter 2005) 16–59

Jewish Autobiography:

The Elusive Subject

MARCUS MOSELEY

T HE STUDY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY, a relatively recent field, has been

bedeviled from the outset by the definitional problem. 1 While the last

thirty years or so have seen a remarkable upsurge in the study of the

genre, the question of what exactly constitutes autobiography has not

only not been resolved but, if anything, has become exacerbated. 2 On the

one hand, such unlikely works as Eliot’s ‘‘Four Quartets’’ 3 and Haw-

thorne’s The Scarlet Letter 4 are now discussed as ‘‘autobiographies.’’ On

the other, critics seem to take a perverse delight in revealing the inelucta-

ble ‘‘fictionality’’ of such ostensibly straightforward self-referential texts

as Newman’s Apologia 5

hood . 6

The confusion has, in the post–World War II period, become com-

pounded by representative autobiographers of the twentieth century,

This essay is an adaptation of the first chapter of my book , Being for Myself

Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, Calif., forthcoming, 2005).

1. ‘‘Hardly any form is alien to it. Historical record of achievement, imaginary

forensic addresses or rhetorical declamations, systematic or epigrammatic de-

scription of character, lyrical poetry, prayer, soliloquy, confessions, letters, liter-

ary portraiture, family chronicles, and court memoirs, narrative whether purely

factual or with a purpose, explanatory or fictional, novel and biography in their

various styles, epic, and even drama.’’ See Georg Misch, A History of Autobiography

in Antiquity , trans. E. W. Dickes (Westport, Conn., 1973), 1:4.

2. See William Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography (New Haven, Conn.,

1980), xiff.

3. See James Olney, Metaphors of Self (Princeton, N.J., 1972), 260–99.

4. Spengemann, Forms of Autobiography , 132–65.

5. See Susanna Egan, Patterns of Experience in Autobiography (Chapel Hill, N.C.,

1984), 40–67.

6. See Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography (Princeton, N.J., 1985),

3–56; Darrel Mansell, ‘‘Unsettling the Colonel’s Hash: Fact in Autobiography,’’

The American Autobiography , ed. A. Stone (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1981), 61–80.

The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2005)

and Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girl-

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

17

such as Sartre, Nabokov, Roland Barthes, and Michel Leiris, who, play-

ing elaborate literary games of hide-and-seek, call attention to the prob-

lematic generic status of their own works. 7 Autobiography, as a literary

category, was further destabilized, interrogated, and complicated by

being sucked into the vortex of structuralist and later deconstructionist

discourse. The latter discourse, whose most important literary progenitor

is probably Mallarm ´ , has, in fact, evinced a certain grim fascination with

‘‘decentering,’’ ‘‘displacing,’’ ‘‘de-facing’’ the sovereign bourgeois ‘‘sub-

ject.’’ 8 Postmodernist discourse on this topic actually provides a sort of

photographic negative to the more traditional Whiggish narrative, as pur-

sued by Dilthey, Georg Misch, Georges Gusdorf, and Karl Weintraub,

according to which the emergence of autobiography is coextensive with

the emergence of historical consciousness, discovery of self, validation of

the individual, and so on. The rhetoric adopted in this debate can be

shrill; canonical autobiography is often viewed with barely disguised hos-

tility, even paranoia, as ‘‘the locus of monumental Western selfhood,’’ an

‘‘imperialist,’’ ‘‘privileged, phallocentric discourse,’’ a ‘‘First World genre

of the dominant culture,’’ a genre that ‘‘has been ‘policed’ ’’ to exclude

non-normative works and so forth. 9 The autobiographical self with his/

her attendant epistemological paradigms, has, however, proven rather re-

silient. 10 Laura Marcus, in a recent survey of critical responses to autobi-

ography, notes a contemporary tendency for the critics of autobiography

themselves to yield to the autobiographical impulse in their discussions of

the texts at hand. She relates this to a wider phenomenon of the ‘‘return

of the subject.’’ 11 A parallel phenomenon in other disciplines of the hu-

manities—anthropology in particular—certainly substantiates her thesis,

as does, beyond academe, the sheer quantity of autobiographical/confes-

sional literature produced in the last decade. Within the narrower con-

7. See Spengemann, Forms of Autobiography , 189.

8. See Laura Marcus’s chapter ‘‘Saving the Subject’’ in her Auto/biographical

Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester and New York, 1994), 179–228;

and on Jacques Derrida’s obsession with autobiography, both as practitioner

and theoretician, see Joseph G. Kronick, ‘‘Philosophy as Autobiography: The

Confessions of Jacques Derrida,’’ Modern Language Notes 115 (2000): 997–1018.

9. See Julia Watson, ‘‘Towards an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography,’’ The

Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation , ed. R. Folkenflik (Stan-

ford, Calif., 1993), 60, 61, 66, 71.

10. That the prime target of Watson’s essay is Georges Gusdorf’s ‘‘Conditions

and Limits of Autobiography,’’ an essay written some quarter century prior, is in

itself testimony to this resilience (in J. Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical

and Critical [Princeton, N.J., 1980]).

11. Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses , 211.

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fines of literary criticism, as Marcus points out, the revelation concerning

Paul de Man’s pro-fascist articles written from 1940 to 1942 had wide-

ranging implications. These biographical data raised the issue of the auto-

biographical aspect of, as Marcus puts it, de Man’s ‘‘very substantial

reflections on the modes of autobiography, confession and apologia—

reflections which assert their generic ‘impossibility’ or the bad faith they

manifest.’’ 12 Alain Robbe-Grillet’s (forever the enfant terrible) comments

apropos of the disappearance and reappearance of the self in twentieth-

century intellectual discourse are pertinently impertinent in the present

context. ‘‘Ideology,’’ he writes:

Always masked, changes its face with ease. It is a hydra-mirror whose

severed head quickly reappears, presenting the adversary who thought

himself victorious the image of his own face. 13

In surveying the criticism of autobiography of the last several decades,

it is hard to escape the conclusion that this branch of literary discourse

has reached something of an impasse. Analogically to the impossible quest

for self-knowledge, which is autobiography itself, the criticism of the

genre appears to be chasing its own tail. This is in no small part due to

the sheer weightiness and intractability of the literary, existential, psycho-

logical, and metaphysical issues that the criticism of autobiography

addresses: the ontology of the self; the dialectics of truth and fiction—

Dichtung und Wahrheit ; the problem of memory, considered philosophi-

cally, psychologically, and neurologically; the absence of presence/

presence of absence in scriptural representations. More recently, autobi-

ography has also become a significant site for feminist, ethnic, class, and

postcolonial debates. 14 From being a relatively neglected branch of litera-

ture, then, autobiography has, if anything, become overdetermined, over-

interpreted, and overpoliticized.

12. Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses , 211–12.

13. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ghosts in the Mirror , trans. J. Levy (London, 1988), 6.

14. See Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, passim, and esp. chap. 7, ‘‘Auto/

biographical Spaces,’’ 273–96. This drift is evident from James Olney’s anthol-

ogy Studies in Autobiography (New York/Oxford, 1988), in which two four-essay

sections are devoted to ‘‘Ethnic and Minority Autobiography’’ and ‘‘Women’s

Autobiography.’’ For a combination of ethnic and feminist approaches, see Ken-

neth Mostern, Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-

Century America (Cambridge, 1999); for the integration of neuroscientific research

within the study of autobiography, see Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of

Life-Writing (Chicago, 1998), 339–404, passim.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

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One consequence of the oceanic nature of the discourse surrounding

autobiography has been that this discourse has slowly but surely lost its

moorings in any generically recognizable category of writing. There has

been a noticeable tendency to include within the rubric ‘‘autobiography’’

any text that reflects upon, and reflects upon itself reflecting upon, the

vicissitudes of the self in relation to time, memory, narration, and/or gen-

der, race, class. The intellectual trajectory of James Olney, the founding

father of autobiographical studies in America, is representative in this

respect. In a recent book , Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writ-

ing —the title itself is telling—Olney writes as follows:

Although I have in the past written frequently about autobiography as

a literary genre, I have never been very comfortable doing it . . . and I

have never met a definition of autobiography that I could really like

. . . In the course of Memory and Narrative I call the kind of writing I

am looking at by various names—confessions, autobiography, mem-

oirs, periautography . . . autography . . . and—the most frequently

employed term—life-writing . . . What I like about the term ‘‘periautog-

raphy,’’ which would mean ‘‘writing about or around the self,’’ is pre-

cisely its indefinition and lack of generic rigor, its comfortably loose fit

and generous adaptability, and the same for ‘‘life-writing.’’ 15

In this tinkering with the very term ‘‘autobiography’’ in order to broaden

the horizon of the word’s possible applications, Olney is by no means

alone. The terrifying-sounding ‘‘autobiothanatography,’’ ‘‘autogynogra-

phy’’—the clinical overtones of these latter terms, bearing Foucault in

mind, are ominous and odd—and, less frightening, ‘‘auto/biography’’ (the

forward slash marking the innovation), ‘‘otobiography,’’ are among the

neologisms that have been coined for this species of writing. 16 The prob-

lem with all this, however, is that it becomes increasingly unclear what

exactly is being talked about. Take, for example, Olney’s preferred terms:

true, they are ‘‘indefinite,’’ indefinite to such an extent, however, that it is

difficult to determine what types of literary discourse these terms for

‘‘writing about or around the self’’ would actually exclude. 17

It is also

15. Olney, Memory , xv.

16. See Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses , index under ‘‘Autobiography—

Terminology.’’

17. This indefiniteness actually licenses Olney to go beyond ‘‘graphe’’ alto-

gether, in his wonderful discussion of self-reflective aspects of the sculptures,

paintings/drawings, and installations of Giacometti, one of which is reproduced

(on p. 269). See Olney, Memory , index under ‘‘Giacometti.’’

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worthy of note that both critics of autobiography on the more radical

deconstructionist wing, and critics closer to Olney in their firm commit-

ment to the existence of the self, are at one in eroding the generic bound-

aries of autobiography. To put it in broad strokes: one school of thought

sees autobiography along a continuum of a multitude of forms of literary

discourse that reveal the specularity/defacement/displacement of the self

in writing; the other school of thought views autobiography along a con-

tinuum of literary modes that depict, reflect upon, and substantiate a self

in writing. Given all of this, there is some sort of perverse logic to the

phenomenon of some critics of autobiography effectively jettisoning auto-

biography, with or without quotation marks, altogether. Thus Laura

Marcus:

Attempting to open up the modes of autobiographical representation,

recent critics have coined neologisms intended to redefine, extension-

ally and intensionally, ‘‘autobiography’’ away from the limits of its com-

ponent parts, self-life-writing . . . Other critics have bypassed

‘‘autobiography’’ altogether, overtaking it on the left, and focus instead

on related ‘‘outlaw genres’’—including testimonial literature, oral nar-

ratives and ethnographies. It could be argued that ‘‘autobiography’’ . . .

is kept in play through this shift to its transgressive homologues. 18

We are thus left in very much the same situation, though considerably

exacerbated, as that described by William Spengemann, writing in 1980:

‘‘The only arguable definition of autobiography would be a full account

of all the ways in which the word has been used.’’ 19 Sarah Pratt, writing

in 1996, essentially reiterates Spengemann’s observation:

In addressing the basic problem of definition, the easiest argument

would be that almost anything counts as autobiography these days, for

we live in the midst of a critical free-for-all about the nature of the self,

the nature of reality, and hence the nature of autobiography. 20

Pratt goes on to provide a lucid and concise thumbnail sketch of the

contemporary critical state of affairs:

18. Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses , 294, 296, n. 59.

19. Spengemann, Forms of Autobiography , 185.

20. Sarah Pratt, ‘‘Angels in the Stalinist House: Nadezhda Mandelstamm,

Lidia Chukovskaia, Lidiia Ginzburg, and Russian Women’s Autobiography,’’

Auto/biography Studies : 11.2 (1996): 69.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

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Yet there are still scholars who are most aptly termed traditionalists,

those who define autobiography as an individual’s presumably truthful,

rational exposition of her or his own life story written by her or himself

. . . And there are those who might be called ‘‘literary liberals,’’ who

see autobiography as a more flexible, capacious genre ranging from

works of fiction, through traditional autobiography, to various forms

of diaries, journals and even scholarly writing . . . And there are ‘‘radi-

cals.’’ These are primarily more extreme feminists, deconstructionists,

and materialists of various ideological persuasions. Radical feminists

typically perceive the genre of traditional autobiography as an embodi-

ment of patriarchal values and hence invalid in relation to women. De-

constructionists deny the very concept of the self. 21

ROUSSEAU’S CONFESSIONS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PARADIGM

My own work on Jewish autobiography falls, for the most part, within

the ‘‘traditionalist’’ spectrum, as understood by Pratt. My approach is

‘‘traditionalist’’ also in that generic considerations are given a central posi-

tion in the present analysis; nor do I attempt, to refer back to Marcus, to

‘‘redefine’’ autobiography ‘‘away from the limits of its component parts’’:

‘‘Self-life-writing,’’ taken separately or as a composite entity, hardly, in

my view, constitutes an overcircumscribed topic. My decision to steer

away from the wilder shores of autobiographical discourse was also prag-

matic; since there existed, to my knowledge, no synthetic study of Jewish

autobiography on the scale I attempted, my intention was to provide a

preliminary study—a first word, rather than dernier cri . I found myself

most indebted to the voluminous work devoted to this topic by Philippe

Lejeune over the past thirty-five years. In his ongoing project Lejeune

effects the most extraordinary combination of restless, adventurous intel-

lectual enquiry, often laced with a strong measure of autocriticism, with

an unwavering commitment to a generic approach to autobiography, un-

paralleled in the field. 22 It is Lejeune’s early and pioneering work, L’autob-

iographie en France , that provided the model for my study. In this

constitutive, introductory book, Lejeune poses ‘‘elementary, but funda-

mental questions: what is an autobiography, in what does it differ from

the novel, from the personal diary, from memoirs? How long has it ex-

isted?’’ 23

21. Pratt, ‘‘Angels,’’ 69.

22. See Paul John Eakin, ‘‘Foreword’’ to Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography ,

ed. and with a foreword, P. J. Eakin, trans. K. Leary (Minneapolis, Minn., 1989),

viii–xxviii.

23. Lejeune in his 1998 foreword to the second edition of L’Autobiographie en

France (Paris, 1998), 5.

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Lejeune here posits that ‘‘autobiography,’’ both as a mode of reading

and of writing, is a strictly post-Rousseauian phenomenon. Rousseau’s

Confessions , Lejeune argues in this work, not only gave rise to the concep-

tion and the term ‘‘autobiography,’’ 24 but also presages every major devel-

opment of the genre, including works that seem, at first blush, to deviate

most markedly from the Rousseauian model. 25 The paradigm of Rous-

seau’s Confessions , Lejeune further argues, also gave rise to a mode of

reading , and it is this mode of reading which informs all histories of auto-

biography that seek to establish a pre-Rousseauian autobiographical

tradition. 26 Elsewhere, Lejeune terms such reading as ‘‘an illusion of per-

spective’’: ‘‘This illusion is very natural: it corresponds to the most sponta-

neous historical operation, which makes us constantly redistribute the

elements of the past dependent upon our present categories.’’ 27

It is this ‘‘retrospective illusion,’’ in its back-projection of Rousseauian

categories of confession to texts of classical and mediaeval provenance,

that enables the contemporary critic to read works like the Confessions of

Augustine and Abelard’s Histoire de mes malheurs as ‘‘autobiography.’’

Such reading, Lejeune argues, runs quite contrary to the hermeneutic

codes prevailing at the time of the initial production and consumption of

these texts. 28

The claim that Rousseau is the founding father of modern autobiogra-

phy has, of course, been made repeatedly. 29 It is Lejeune, however, to my

mind, who makes, in L’autobiographie en France , the most compelling and

24. The term was first coined, it appears, in 1797, by a reviewer of Isaac

d’Israeli’s Miscellanies , but rejected by the same writer as ‘‘pedantic.’’ See Marcus,

Auto/biographical Discourses, 12. It was first positively employed as a generic indica-

tor in 1809 by Robert Southey. See Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Turning Key

(Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 18–19. Herder and Goethe had a clear conception

of autobiography as a discrete literary form before Southey’s neologism became

current; Herder referring to Selbstbiographien and Goethe to the ‘‘so called Confes-

sions of all ages.’’ See Misch, History of Autobiography, 1:2, 5.

25. See Philippe Lejeune, L’Autobiographie en France (Paris, 1971), 65–66.

26. Lejeune, L’Autobiographie , 42ff.

27. Lejeune, ‘‘Autobiography and Literary History’’ in his On Autobiography ,

144.

28. Nor are Augustine scholars, after Rousseau, unanimous in reading the

work as an autobiography. Edward B. Pusey, for example, in the preface to his

translation of the Confessions , argues in some detail against categorizing the work

as an autobiography. See Augustine of Hippo, Confessions , trans., E. B. Pusey

(London, 1907), xvii-xxi. For a survey of the debate, see Spengemann, Forms of

Autobiography, 213–18.

29. See, for example, Irving Howe, ‘‘The Self in Literature,’’ in his A Critic’s

Notebook (New York, 1994), 264–94; Olney, Memory , 203–09, 405–22.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

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systematic argument for the primacy of Rousseau in the history of the

genre. 30 He thus corroborates Rousseau’s own claim, as trumpeted in the

opening lines of the Confessions , to have ‘‘resolved on an enterprise which

has no precedent.’’ 31 Following Lejeune and drawing upon the works of

other scholars in order to corroborate and illustrate his thesis, I present

a summary of the principal innovations of the Confessions that exercised a

formative influence upon subsequent autobiographical writing. Each of

these elements may assume a greater or lesser degree of prominence

within a given work. The manner in which these elements express them-

selves is not uniform, the modalities that they assume being dependent

upon the system of literary discourse within which they occur.

Of primary significance, as has frequently been noted, is Rousseau’s

desacralization of the religious confessional. While availing himself of the

model—he cannot have been unaware of the coincidence of the title of his

work with that of Augustine’s—he effects a fundamental and far-reaching

alteration in the discourse of the religious confessional. Augustine, for

whom ‘‘confession’’ means primarily confessio laudis and not confessio pec-

cati 32 addresses himself throughout his Confessions to God. Man is not the

interlocutor in the Confessions but rather the indirect beneficiary of the

laudatory effusion that issues from Augustine and is directed toward the

Divine. Rousseau, it is true, evokes the ‘‘Sovereign Judge’’ in the opening

paragraph of his Confessions , but this is little more than rhetoric. Rous-

seau’s apostrophes and invocations are directed throughout the Confes-

sions not to God, but to his fellow man. The veracity of Augustine’s

narrative is guaranteed by the omniscience of his addressee. Here, as

Jean Starobinski notes, ‘‘is a content guaranteed by the highest bail.’’ 33

For Rousseau, the ultimate criterion of sincerity is not that he be true to

the ‘‘Eternal Being,’’ but rather to ‘‘the succession of feelings which have

30. Thus the title of the periodical published by ‘‘L’Association pour l’autobio-

graphie,’’ founded by Lejeune in 1991—‘‘La Faute ` Rousseau.’’ See the preface

to the collection of Lejeune’s articles published in this journal, in idem, Pour

l’autobiographie: Chroniques (Paris, 1998), 7–8.

31. J. J. Rousseau, The Confessions , trans. J. J. Cohen (Harmondsworth,

1953), 3. See also the earlier ‘‘Neuchatel’’ preamble in which Rousseau cites two

possible precedents for his enterprise: Cardano’s Vita and Montaigne’s Essays .He

gives short shrift to both; Cardano is too crazy, Montaigne the epitome of the

‘‘pseudo-sincere.’’ See Lejeune, L’Autobiographie , 153.

32. See the psalmodic opening paragraphs of Augustine, Confessions , 1–4; Karl

J. Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography

(Chicago, 1978), 22–23.

33. Jean Starobinski, ‘‘The Style of Autobiography,’’ Autobiography , ed.

Olney, 8.

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marked the development of my being,’’ this being the one ‘‘faithful guide

upon which I can count.’’ 34 For Rousseau and for autobiographers who

follow him, even Christian, 35 it is the ‘‘self’’ that assumes many of the

functions traditionally assigned to God in Christian confessional litera-

ture.

Rousseau was the first to incorporate techniques of verisimilitude and

psychological penetration deriving from the eighteenth-century novel

within the nonfictional, extrareferential context of autobiography. In par-

ticular, he was indebted to what Lejeune refers to as a ‘‘new biographical

model’’ of eighteenth-century provenance—the novel that purports to be

an authentic first-person account of the life of the protagonist. 36 The ac-

knowledged pioneer of this genre is Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe

(1719), a book of which he was particularly fond, 37 and Moll Flanders

(1721) each purports to be the genuine autobiography of the respective

hero and heroine. 38 ‘‘Autobiography,’’ Lejeune writes,

could not come into its own without imitating people imitating people

who were imagining what it was like to be an autobiographer. A singu-

lar game of mirrors that demonstrates that sincerity is learned, original-

ity imitative. 39

Rousseau himself was, both as reader and as writer, well versed in the

discourse of the burgeoning novel. His La Nouvelle H´lo¨se (1761), an epis-

tolary novel modeled on Richardson’s Clarissa 40

(1741), contains strong

34. J. J. Rousseau, Confessions , 262.

35. Cardinal Newman being a case in point. See Buckley, The Turning Key, 13.

36. Lejeune, L’Autobiographie , 45–46.

37. See Rousseau, Rousseau Judge of Jean Jacques: Dialogues , ed. R. D. Masters

and C. Kelly, trans. J. R. Bush, C. Kelly, and R. D. Masters (Hanover and

London, 1990), 117–18, 264–65, n. 49. So taken was Rousseau with the book

that in his treatise on education, ´ mile , he selects Robinson Crusoe as the ‘‘first

book that ´ mile will read,’’ forming ‘‘for a long time . . . his whole library. . . . It

will be the text to which all our talks about natural science are but the commen-

tary.’’ See Rousseau, ´ mile , trans. B. Foxley (London, 1974), 147.

38. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley, Calif., 1967), 90–91, 115–16.

39. Lejeune, L’Autobiographie , 47. See also Brian Finney, The Inner I: British

Literary Autobiography of the Twentieth Century (London, 1985), 66–67.

40. For a detailed comparison of Clarissa and La Nouvelle H´loise , see Joseph

Texte, Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit in Literature (New York,

1929), 227–54; for Rousseau’s own comparison of his La Nouvelle H´loise with

Richardson’s novels, see The Confessions , 502–6.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

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autobiographical elements, as does his seminovelistic ‘‘educational trea-

tise’’ ´ mile 41 (1762).

Autobiography, in distinction from biography and the memoir, func-

tions primarily as an introspective, self-reflective mode of literary dis-

course. Perceptions and emotional responses of the self assume, in

autobiography, the roles assigned for deeds and events in the life of the

other in the biography and the memoir. For these latter genres, the sig-

nificance of this other is independent of personal consideration, arising

rather from social consensus. Autobiography operates upon an entirely

different set of criteria. For the autobiographer, the significance of the

other is determined solely by the role that he or she plays in the formation

of the self, regardless of social standing. Thus Rousseau, in the ‘‘Neucha-

tel’’ variant of the preamble to the Confessions :

The relationships I have had with several people compel me to speak

as freely of them as of myself. I can only succeed in making myself

known by making them known also. 42

Many of the more decisive encounters with the other in the shaping of

the autobiographer’s self occur in the years of childhood and adolescence.

Parents, teachers, schoolmates, and domestic staff may thus achieve a

prominence in the autobiography that would, in the memoir, be reserved

for generals and prime ministers, renowned men of letters, and so on.

This is not to say that the formative encounters with the other in an

autobiography are restricted to the historically obscure. But when the

great do drift in and out of the pages of an autobiography, it is often not

on account of the qualities that granted them this status that they are

recalled. Thus the most powerful and lasting impression left upon Amos

Oz of the Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernikhovsky, the memory of which

eclipses Oz’s subsequent acquaintance with his poems, derives from an

infantile memory of the man’s mane of hair, his ‘‘felt [as in the material]

cheek,’’ the feel of his moustache on Oz’s cheek, his laughing eyes, furry

hands, but above all the man’s smell , and the mysteries this smell evoked:

‘‘I summon this smell and the smell returns to me, a somewhat coarse

smell, a dusty smell, but strong and pleasant, a smell that reminds me of

41. See Peter D. Jimack in his introduction to Rousseau, ´ mile , x–xiii; Olney,

Memory , 414ff.; for Rousseau’s account of the experiences that gave rise to ´ mile ,

see The Confessions , 400–1, 406ff.

42. As cited by Lejeune, L’autobiographie , 155

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thick sack-cloth . . . his compassionate, comforting smell.’’ 43 The great

poet—all but deified in the Revisionist Zionist family circle in which Oz

grew up—is thus leveled in the eyes of the child to a bundle of visual,

tactile, and, above all olfactory sensations, experienced, Oz writes, ‘‘two

to three years before I succeeded in pronouncing the name ‘Tchernik-

hovsky’.’’ 44

Autobiography is contingent upon a degree of historical awareness.

The autobiographer does not portray a predetermined self or being, but

rather tracks an open-ended process of becoming. It is under the sign of

historicism that the crucial distinction between autobiography and the

self-portrait—in particular the Renaissance self-portrait, on the model of

Montaigne’s Essays or Cardano’s Vita —manifests itself: 45 Autobiography,

in distinction to the self-portrait whose focus is upon the adult self in

stasis, albeit from a variety of angles and in a variety of postures, directs

attention to the dynamic process of the crystallization of self through all

the stages of life, and most particularly to the period of origins, childhood,

as recalled and reflected upon from the retrospective vantage point of the

adult. ‘‘There is a certain sequence of impressions,’’ writes Rousseau,

which modify those that follow them and it is necessary to know the

original set before passing any judgments. I endeavor in all cases to

explain the prime causes, in order to convey the interrelation of re-

sults. 46

There is thus an implicit assignation of meaning to temporal passage and

a hermeneutic investment in chronological narrative. Wilhelm Dilthey

indeed, turning the tables, views autobiography as the paradigm par ex-

cellence for historical enquiry.

43. Amos Oz, Sippur ‘al ahavah ve- . oshekh (Jerusalem, 2002), 44ff.

44. Oz, Sippur ‘al ahavah , 45–46.

45. See Weintraub, Value of the Individual , xi–xii, 162–65, 191–95, 261–63. Cel-

lini’s Vita is atypical of Renaissance depictions of the self in this respect, present-

ing his life history in some sort of chronological sequence. But he gives only the

most desultory account of the years of childhood and adolescence that precede

his first apprenticeship as a goldsmith at the age of fifteen. Michel Beaujour in

his Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait , trans. Y. Milos (New York, 1977), privileges

the self-portraitist’s liberation from the arbitrary shackles of chronological narra-

tive. See Moseley, ‘‘Between Memory and Forgetfulness: The Janus Face of Mi-

chah Yosef Berdichevsky,’’ Studies in Contemporary Jewry 12, ed. E. Mendelson,

(New York, 1996), in which I apply Beaujour’s insights.

46. Rousseau, Confessions , 169.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

27

The power and breadth of our own life, and the energy and reflection

upon it is the foundation of historical vision. It alone enables us to give

a second life to the bloodless shades of the past. 47

And it is in particular to the resurrection and reliving of childhood that

autobiography devotes especial ‘‘energy and reflection.’’ Of all the ‘‘ages

of man,’’ childhood holds the privileged place in the autobiography; the

implicit ideology of the genre even bestows upon the childhood an onto-

logically privileged status in the lifecycle; the childhood/Garden of Eden

analogy, so common as to constitute a trope of subsequent autobiographi-

cal writing, has its origins in the first book of the Confessions . In quantita-

tive terms alone, no writer prior to Rousseau would have dreamt of

devoting so many pages to the depiction of his childhood as does Rous-

seau in the early books of the Confessions ; that Rousseau himself was

aware of this lack of precedence, and somewhat anxiously so, is attested

to by the numerous asides that punctuate this account, apologizing to the

reader and justifying his close scrutiny of these years. In the subsequent

development of the genre, it is, indeed, not at all rare for an autobiogra-

pher to devote him/herself predominantly, or even exclusively, to an ex-

ploration of the childhood years; while an autobiographer may well

exclude from his/her narrative an account of the years of maturity, it is

hard to imagine an autobiography that would exclude the years of child-

hood. Rousseau, as autobiographer, writes ‘‘less the history of . . . events

in themselves than of the effect of their occurrence upon the state of my

soul.’’ 48 By virtue of this, he is given a free hand in the depiction of the

trivial and paltry episodes that have so disproportionate an impact upon

the mind of the child. In fact, in giving an account of the history of feel-

ings, childhood experience may, and frequently does, assume greater sig-

nificance for the autobiographer than do the deeds and events of the adult

years: the system of relations that obtains in biography, not to say the

memoir, is thus reversed. Edwin Muir, who as an autobiographer stands

firmly in the Rousseauian line of tradition, contrasts the unsullied, ‘‘origi-

nal vision’’ of the child, ‘‘in which there is a more complete harmony of

all things with each other than he will ever know again,’’ 49 with the ‘‘adult

world’’ which ‘‘is a dry legend consisting of names and figures,’’ made up

47. As cited by Herbert A. Hodges, The Philosophy of Willhelm Dilthey (London,

1952), 275. See also John Paul Eakin, ‘‘Narrative and Chronology as Structures

of Reference and the New Model Autobiographer,’’ in Olney, Studies .

48. Rousseau, ‘‘Neuchatel’’ preamble, as cited by Lejeune, L’Autobiographie ,

153.

49. Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (New York, 1954), 33.

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in collusion with mankind and known only ‘‘in an external and deceptive

way.’’ 50 Anthony Cockshut writes of the ‘‘commonplace that the early

chapters of autobiography which describe childhood are the best.’’ 51 Roy

Pascal goes so far as to define those autobiographies which confine them-

selves to the years of childhood as the ‘‘purest form’’ of the genre. 52

For Rousseau, and autobiographers after him (and psychiatrists),

childhood is viewed along an ontological continuum with adult identity,

and not, as in Rousseau’s own ´ mile , a self-contained and autonomous

period of life. Thus Rousseau, in the lengthy ‘‘apology’’ he supplies to the

reader for the account of his youthful experiences which he is in the

course of narrating in Book IV of the Confessions:

These long details of my early youth may well seem extremely childish,

and I am sorry for it. Although in certain respects I have been a man

since birth, I was for a long time and still am, a child in many others. I

never promised to present the public with a great personage. I prom-

ised to depict myself as I am; and to know me in my later years it is

necessary to have known me well in my youth. As objects generally

make less impression on me than does the memory of them, and as all

my ideas take pictorial form, the first features to engrave themselves

on my mind have remained there, and such as have subsequently im-

printed themselves have combined with these rather than obliterated

them . . . I endeavor in all cases to explain the prime causes, in order

to convey the interrelation of results. I should like in some way to make

my soul transparent to the reader’s eye. 53

This aside may fairly be called a manifesto for all future autobiographers.

The coexistence of the child self with adult, adult self with child, gives

rise to a Janus-faced view of personality; the autobiographer, as he gives

an account of his childhood years, both is and is not the subject of his

enunciation. 54 This paradoxical situation of, in Lejeune’s phrase, ‘‘dis-

tance and relation’’ 55 between the two planes of temporal existence elicits

an autobiographical fascination with memory as the locus of the encoun-

50. Muir, An Autobiography, 67, 49. See also Brian Finney, The Inner I , 201ff.

51. Anthony. O. J. Cockshut, The Art of Autobiography in Nineteenth and Early

Twentieth Century England (London, 1984), 36.

52. Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London, 1960), 85.

53. Rousseau, Confessions , 169.

54. See Richard N. Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the Expe-

rience of Childhood (New Haven, Conn., 1984), 27–30.

55. See Lejeune, L’Autobiographie , 74ff.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

29

ter between child and adult self. Since memory reaches back toward the

self as child, but the act of memory occurs within the self as adult, an

irresoluble temporal dilemma lies at the heart of the autobiographical en-

terprise. In face of this dilemma, autobiographical discourse evinces a

marked tendency to collapse into the present. This collapse into the pres-

ent moment of recall and narration, as is well illustrated in the above

citation from the Confessions , lends a metadiscursive aspect to autobiogra-

phy, which becomes a hallmark of the genre. 56 Thus Rousseau’s formula-

tion of the problem, as found in the ‘‘Neuchatel’’ variant of the preamble

to the Confessions , is astonishing in its prescience and sophistication; espe-

cially in view of the fact that neither autobiography as a genre nor the

criticism of the same had, at the time these lines were written (1764),

become established:

In giving myself over both to my remembrance of the past impression

and to my present feeling, I will depict doubly ( je peindrai doublement )

the state of my mind, that is both at the moment the event happened

to me and at the moment I describe it; my style, which is uneven yet

natural—now energetic and now leisurely, now subdued and now ex-

travagant, now grave and now gay—will itself form a part of the

story. 57

In high modernist autobiographical experimentation, this aspect of Rous-

seau’s project is subject to hypertrophy to the extent of varying degrees

of dissolution of autobiographical narrative. Thus Nabokov’s autobiogra-

phy is, as the title Speak Memory suggests, a book about remembering,

and Roland Barthes, writing Roland Barthes , writes about writing about

Roland Barthes etc. as a continuous process of self-creation. 58 It is Sam-

uel Beckett, as James Olney has so richly demonstrated, who takes this

56. There is, of course, precedent for this metadiscursive collapse into the

moment of recall and narration in Augustine’s meditations on memory and time

in the tenth and eleventh books of the Confessions . James Olney has made a bril-

liant and persuasive comparison between Augustine, in this respect, and Samuel

Beckett. He makes an important caveat to this comparison, however: ‘‘Rousseau

is the true centre of it all: without his achievement as the middle, Augustine’s

would not be the beginning, Beckett’s would not be the end.’’ Olney, Memory , xii.

57. Rousseau, ‘‘Neuchatel preamble,’’ as translated by Olney, Memory, 168.

For the original of this passage see Lejeune, L’Autobiographie , 154–55.

58. See especially the foreword and first chapter of Nabokov’s Speak Memory

(New York, 1966); Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes , trans. R. Howard (London,

1977); Finney, The Inner I , 118.

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autobiographical metavertiginousness as far as, or perhaps even further

than, it can be taken. 59

Over and above all this, Rousseau’s significance lies no less in his expo-

sure of the sheer hubris and ultimate impossibility of the autobiographical

quest (‘‘to make myself transparent to the reader’s eye’’) than in his con-

stitution of autobiography as a historical genre. Rousseau, Lejeune

writes, ‘‘elaborated a problematic of autobiography at the same time as

he was establishing its practice . . . He scarcely left a stone unturned

for his successors.’’ 60 In a more recent profound study of the totality of

Rousseau’s autobiographical writings—the Confessions , Rousseau juge de

Jean Jacques: Dialogues , and Les r ´ veries du promeneur solitaire —James Olney

argues that Rousseau actually prefigured the modernist and postmodern-

ist fragmentation of self. Olney’s observation is corroborated by the para-

digmatic postmodern autobiographer Michel Leiris, who saw Rousseau’s

Confessions ‘‘as exemplary of the heterogeneous writing needed to ‘grasp

the human,’ which he himself espoused in his ethnopoetic combination of

anthropology and autobiography.’’ 61 Rousseau then, the harbinger of the

romantic self, modern individualism, was also he who sowed the seeds of

dissolution into these constructs. ‘‘In how many ways,’’ asks Olney,

was Jean-Jacques not the crucial, pivotal, transitional figure between

the antiquity of St. Augustine and what we have come to call the mod-

ernism and postmodernism of Samuel Beckett? . . . Rousseau it was

. . . who fragmented the I and dispersed it among various hes . . . He

cut the self loose, leaving it without ties, anchor, or direction, and to

modern descendants he left as starting-point what for him was the end-

point: a free-floating self, uncentered except in itself, and quite un-

real. 62

Olney’s thesis, admirably documented with a wealth of examples from

Rousseau’s entire oeuvre, demonstrates, I believe, that to adopt a para-

digm based upon Rousseau for a literary/historical study of a particular

autobiographical tradition is not to adopt an overly rigid, prescriptive and

restrictive heuristic model.

To speak of ‘‘autobiography’’ before Rousseau, without conceding that

59. See Olney, Memory, index under Beckett.

60. Lejeune, L’Autobiographie ,66

61. See Felicity Baker, ‘‘The Object of Love in Rousseau’s Confessions ,’’ Repre-

sentations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism , ed. P. Coleman, J. Lewis,

J. Kowalik (Cambridge, 2000), 174.

62. Olney, Memory, 207–8.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

31

this term is used as a heuristic device, is to fall prey to what Lejeune

terms the ‘‘retrospective illusion,’’ or ‘‘the illusion of eternity,’’ an illusion,

writes Lejeune, that ‘‘corresponds to the most spontaneous historical op-

eration, which makes us constantly redistribute the elements of the past

depending upon our present categories.’’ 63 By equivalence, to speak of

autobiography after Rousseau without acknowledging his fundamental

role in shaping the genre—change as the modes of autobiographical dis-

course may—is to run the risk of losing sight of the subject altogether;

and I believe that there is indeed a ‘‘subject,’’ in both senses of the term,

to be lost sight of.

THE ‘‘CHILDREN OF JEAN JACQUES’’

IN JEWISH EASTERN EUROPE

We, who were related by spiritual consanguinity with Brenner-Berdi-

chevsky, recognized almost exclusively only one type of sincerity, that

extending in world literature from Rousseau and the Young Werther:

that of revelation of the self and confession of the self. 64

In modern Jewish literary history, Eastern Europe provided the soil from

which an autonomous modern Jewish autobiographical discourse written

in Jewish languages arose. Eastern European Jews, writing autobio-

graphically in Hebrew and Yiddish, would, at first blush, appear way-

ward and exotic ‘‘children of Jean Jacques’’ indeed. Yet one cardinal

aspect of Rousseau’s intellectual and autobiographical legacy is its omni-

presence. 65 Rousseauian thought, however variously mediated, exercised

a pervasive influence upon the Hebrew Enlightenment (Haskalah) in

Eastern Europe, 66 the intellectual matrix of modern Hebrew and Yiddish

literature: an influence evinced in Hebrew literature in particular by the

radical conjoining of the validation of the individual and an acutely

heightened sensitivity to the wonders of nature, notwithstanding the fact

that such neopantheism is often expressed with the hyperbole and artifi-

ciality of Schiller’s ‘‘sentimental’’ poet. 67

63. Lejeune, On Autobiography , 143; and see idem, L’Autobiographie , 42ff.

64. Rabbi Binyamin (Yehoshua Radler-Feldman) in Kitve R’ Binyamin: Mishpa-

hat sofrim (Jerusalem, 1960), 147.

65. See Olney, Memory , 207–8.

66. See Abraham Sha’anan, ‘ Iyyunim be-sifrut ha-haskalah (Mer . avia, 1952),

especially 7–13, 57–102; Israel Zinberg, Di geshikhte fun der literature bay Yidn ,10

vols. (Vilna, 1929–66), 7:150–51, 155ff.

67. These twin ‘‘id ´ es maitresses’’—individualism/nature worship—provide

much of the intellectual backbone of Simon Halkin’s study of the emergence of

Moreover, one of the earliest

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autobiographies in any language clearly fashioned after the example of

Rousseau’s Confessions , Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte (2 vols., Ber-

lin, 1792–93), was written by a Polish Jew. Maimon’s autobiography

provided the cornerstone for the Hebrew and Yiddish development of

the genre. Eastern European Jewish autobiography, I would argue, fol-

lowing Lejeune, is a specifically modern, specifically post-Rousseauian

phenomenon, essentially analogous to the history of the genre in eigh-

teenth- and nineteenth-century Western Europe. Rousseauian autobiog-

raphy left its mark on Jewish literary and intellectual history not only as

a mode of writing but also, again pace Lejeune, as one of reading. As

with wider European autobiography, so with Jewish, the notion of a pre-

Rousseauian, indigenous autobiographical tradition is itself a post facto ,

post-Rousseauian intellectual construct arising from a modern mode of

reading which projects autobiographical categories onto premodern texts.

The origins and history of this mode of reading the textual deposits of the

past through autobiographical lens thus constitute an essential aspect of

the history of the origins and emergence of Jewish autobiographical con-

sciousness. Lejeune puts this in a nutshell: ‘‘This transformation of read-

ing must become the object of a historical study, but it could not be its

foundation.’’ 68

The transformation of thinking, reading, and writing in Jewish Eastern

Europe, of which autobiography is both cause and symptom, was not

effected smoothly; the phenomenon, with its attendant aesthetic, sociolog-

ical, and intellectual ramifications, is of central import to the seculariza-

tion of Jewish life and letters in Eastern Europe, and its reverberations

are to be felt to this day. This history is part and parcel of the painful

transition, spearheaded by a numerically meager modernizing avant-

garde of Eastern European Jews, to employ the keen antithesis of Ahad

Ha‘am (Asher Ginzberg), from ‘‘people of the book’’ ( ‘am ha-sefer ) to ‘‘lit-

erary nation’’ ( ‘am sifruti ). 69 The problematic nature of the reception/ab-

sorption of the autobiographical into Eastern European Jewish literary

and intellectual discourse is attested to by the literary-historical data. On

the one hand, Jewish autobiography takes its cue, as does every other

major European branch of the genre, from Rousseau, and that, as noted,

hot on the heels of the publication of Rousseau’s Confessions . On the other,

modern Hebrew literature, a masterpiece of synthetic analysis that bears reading

and rereading to this day, Modern Hebrew Literature from the Enlightenment to the

Birth of the State of Israel: Trends and Values (New York, 1970).

68. Lejeune, On Autobiography , 143

69. Ahad Ha‘am (Asher Ginzberg), Torah sheba-lev (1894), in Kol kitve Ahad

Ha‘am (Tel Aviv, 1953), 51.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

33

at least one hundred years were to elapse before autobiography, under-

stood both as a mode of reading and as one of writing, showed any signs

of becoming established within a Jewish sphere of literary discourse in

Eastern Europe. Why should Jewish autobiography have entered into so

lengthy a period of latency at precisely the time in which the ‘‘classic’’

autobiographies of France, Germany, England, and Russia were writ-

ten? 70 This belatedness, characteristic of the Eastern European Jewish

Enlightenment movement in general, presents less of an anomaly when

viewed within the context of the almost total absence of the most basic

conditions for any form of secular literary discourse in Hebrew or Yid-

dish in Jewish Eastern Europe before the last decades of the nineteenth

century. 71 In Western Europe, the ground had been laid for the appear-

ance of autobiography by the prior existence of a system of literary rela-

tions centering upon the eighteenth-century novel. 72 In England, for

example, the eighteenth century saw the appearance of the first literary

periodicals— The Tatler in 1709 and The Spectator in 1811—the establish-

ment of the first nonproprietary libraries, and the emergence of the pro-

fessional bookseller as the vital middleman between author and printer. 73

These innovations in England were catalytic of analogous developments

in eighteenth-century France and Germany. 74 Only a handful of Hebrew

novels had, by contrast, appeared in Eastern Europe by 1880, and the

circulation of the Hebrew periodicals that did exist at the time was piti-

fully low. 75 Thus, and this is a quite anomalous phenomenon in the history

of post-Rousseauian autobiography, the first Hebrew autobiography,

70. France (other than the Confessions ): Chateaubriand, M´moires d’outre tombe ,

first published in toto in 1849–1859; Renan, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (first

ed., Paris, 1883). Germany: Moritz, Anton Reiser (1785–90); Goethe, Dichtung und

Wahrheit , books 1–20 (1811–32). England: Wordsworth, ‘‘The Prelude,’’ fourteen

books, (1798–1805); Ruskin, Praeterita (1885–89). Russia: Tolstoy, Childhood

(1852), Aksakov, Years of Childhood (1858).

71. See M. Viner, Tsu der geshikhte fun der Yidisher literatur in 19tn yorhundert

(New York, 1945), 1:9–22.

72. See Michael Masuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-

Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Stanford, Calif., 1996), passim.

73. See Watt, Rise of the Novel , 35–39.

74. See Joseph Texte, Rousseau and the Cosmopolitan Spirit, 118–24. For the

impact of Addison’s Spectator upon the young Rousseau, see the Confessions , 110.

75. See Dan Miron, ‘‘Le fesher ha-mevukhah ba-sifrut ha-‘Ivrit bi-tekufat ha-

‘te . iyyah shelah,’ ’’ in his Bodedim be-mo‘adam: li-deyoknah shel ha-republikah ha-si-

frutit ha-‘Ivrit bi-te . ilat ha-me’ah ha-’esrim (Tel Aviv, 1987), 23–111. For a survey

of the Hebrew novels that had appeared from c. 1867 to 1887, see David Patter-

son, The Hebrew Novel in Czarist Russia (Edinburgh, 1964), 1–34.

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M. A. Guenzberg’s Avi‘ezer (Vilna, 1863), was completed, 76 although not

published, some ten years before the appearance of what is generally

considered the first Hebrew novel, Abraham Mapu’s Ahavat Tsion

(1853). 77 Nor, in the nineteenth century, was the outlook any more auspi-

cious for the emergence of Jewish autobiography in Yiddish. The attitude

toward Yiddish was at this stage, and later, extremely ambivalent, the

consensus being that this was a language only fit for patently didactic

works, or the type of shund (‘‘trash’’) served up in abundance by writers

such as N. M. Shaykevitsch (‘‘Shoymer’’) and Y. Dinesohn. 78

Notwithstanding the centrality here accorded Rousseau, in the course

of writing my study I became increasingly aware that the Yiddish auto-

biographical voice, as it emerged from a synthetic appraisal of a number

of representative texts (inevitable exceptions notwithstanding), differed

markedly from that of Hebrew. It became clear to me that treatment of

the topic thus necessitated a conceptual and literary-historical framework

other than the one employed in tracing the origins of Hebrew autobio-

graphical writing and thinking—a much less Rousseau-centric frame-

work. Chronologically speaking, Yiddish autobiographical writing

considerably postdates that in Hebrew, the origins of the latter traceable

to the mid-nineteenth century. This is absolutely consistent with the more

general Yiddish literary belatedness, by comparison with Hebrew, in the

assimilation of modern European literary genres: most notably the novel.

Thus the great majority of nineteenth-century Yiddish writers—including

the three Klassikers, Abramovitsh (Mendele), Peretz, and Sholem

Aleichem—made their literary debuts in Hebrew. Abramovitsh had writ-

ten an autobiographical sketch in Hebrew ten years before embarking

on his major autobiographical work, Shloyme reb khayims , in Yiddish. 79

Moreover, the two most prolific Yiddish writers of the nineteenth cen-

tury, Ayzik Meir Dik and Shaykevitsh, elected Hebrew as their language

76. See below for a discussion of the precise dating of the writing of Guenz-

berg’s autobiography.

77. See David Patterson, Abraham Mapu (London, 1964), esp. 96–107.

78. See Miron, A Traveler Disguised : A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction

in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1973), 34–66. Aizik Meir Dik (Isaac Meir

Dick) summed up his own career as a prolific Yiddish novelist in the preface to

his autobiography, written in Hebrew: ‘‘I debased the honour of my pen by writ-

ing various tales in the language currently spoken, to our shame and disgrace, by

the Jews of Lithuania, Poland and Russia.’’ Dik, Ma . azeh mul ma . azeh (Warsaw,

1861), 2.

79. Abramovitsh, Reshimot le-toldotay ,in Sefer zikkaron , ed. N. Sokolov (War-

saw, 1889), 117–26.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

35

of autobiographical expression. 80 Some members of the Russian-Jewish

intelligentsia, notably Shimon Frug, had reverted to Yiddish after the

1881 pogroms, 81 but Yiddish did not become an accepted linguistic me-

dium for serious modern literary discourse—‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘literary dis-

course’’ being pretty much interchangeable terms—until the first decade

of the twentieth century. 82 ‘‘We have no tradition,’’ we read in the dissi-

dent modernist Yiddish New York journal In zikh (of March 1923): ‘‘We

have found very little that could serve as tradition for us. The tradition

begins precisely with us, strange as it may sound.’’ 83

This relative chronological belatedness of Yiddish autobiography also

entails, though it does not fully account for, some marked phenomenolog-

ical and stylistic distinctions between Hebrew and Yiddish autobiograph-

ical writing. The emergence of an autonomous literature in Yiddish was

coterminous with a change in the intellectual guard in Eastern European

Jewish intellectual and literary history, by which indigenous, specifically

Russian, paradigms of discourse steadily usurped the Western and Cen-

tral European paradigms. Yet Western and Central European models, in

and through the mediation of the German language, were predominant

in shaping Hebrew literary and intellectual discourse. 84

The effects of this paradigm-shift are clearly discernable in Yiddish

autobiographical discourse. Many Yiddish autobiographical works thus

make much more sense when viewed within the specifically Russian vari-

ant of Rousseauian autobiography. Russian autobiography is, in general,

markedly less introspective than its Western European counterpart. Less

solipsistic and solitary in orientation, the natural, familial, and wider soci-

ohistorical environment is accorded a far greater role in accounts of the

becoming and being of the self; compare, for example, Tolstoy’s account

80. Dik, Ma . azeh mul ma . azeh ; Nokhem Meir Shaykevitsh, Shire shomer ve-

zikhronotav (Jerusalem, 1952).

81. See Dan Miron, Bodedim , 75–76.

82. Miron, A Traveler Disguised , 1–34; Viner, Tsu der geshikhte , 1:9–22, passim.

83. As cited by Benjamin Harshav, in his The Meaning of Yiddish: (Berkeley,

Calif., 1990), 148.

84. For the impact of this shift of literary allegiances on the development of

the Haskalah in Russia, see Shmuel Finer, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a

Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness , trans. Ch. Naor and S. Silverston (Oxford/

Portland, Ore., 2002), 274–95; Khone Shmeruk, Sifrut Yidish: Perakim le-toldoteha

(Tel Aviv, 1978), 261–93. For memoiristic accounts of the same process, see Pau-

line Wengeroff, Rememberings: The World of a Russian Jewish Woman in the Nineteenth

Century , trans. H. Wenkart, ed. B. D. Cooperman (Potomac, Md., 2000), 217–26;

Avrom Kotik, Dos lebn fun a Idishn inteligent (New York, 1925)

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of his childhood—pointedly entitled Childhood , not My Childhood —with

that of his spiritual mentor, Rousseau. 85 Like the Russian novel, Russian

autobiographical writings are characterized by their exceptional generic

fluidity and amorphousness, and by their frequently composite status as

memoir, novel, and autobiography. 86 There is an essential correspondence

between this very general differentiation between Russian autobiography

and Western European, and that between Yiddish autobiographical writ-

ing and Hebrew. This allocentric, other-directed tendency, here contextu-

alized within the Russian literary environment, dovetails with specifically

Yiddish literary dynamics according to which this language was con-

strued as the archetypal language of the other, the non-self, or even anti-

self. Two of the chapter headings of Dan Miron’s classic study of the rise

of Yiddish literature in the nineteenth century speak for themselves in

this respect: ‘‘A Language as Caliban’’; ‘‘The Mimic Writer and his ‘little

Jew’.’’ 87

The Yiddish autobiographical self is, by contrast with that of the He-

brew, markedly more contextualized in specific place, sociohistorical set-

ting, family (I speak here of prose texts whose dominant tone is

recognizably autobiographical rather than memoiristic or ethnographic

though they may include aspects of each or both of these latter modal-

ities). Thus the autobiographies of two of the ‘‘classic’’ writers of Yiddish

literature, S. Y. Abramovitsh and Sholem Aleichem, are written in the

third person. That the familial environment is to a significant extent con-

stitutive of the self is accentuated by the naming of the protagonists of

these autobiographies, respectively, Shloyme the son of Khaim, and Sho-

lem the son of Nokhem the son of Vevik. In what is probably the most

widely acclaimed Yiddish autobiography, Daniel Charney’s Barg aruf , 88

Charney entitles the first section ‘‘Family Chronicle’’ (previously pub-

lished as a separate book). The contrast here with the solitary, foundling-

like child of Bialik’s autobiographical Safia . , a text that achieved canoni-

cal status in the annals of Hebrew autobiography and left long shadows

indeed, is telling. Again, there are clear Russian literary parallels here.

Thus Andrew Baruch Wachtel:

85. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth

(Stanford, Calif., 1990), 7–58, esp. 7–15, 36–44.

86. See Lydia Ginzberg, ‘‘Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts and Historical Iden-

tity,’’ in her On Psychological Prose , trans. and ed. J. Rosengrant (Princeton, N.J.,

1991); Jane Gary Harris, Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian

Literature (Princeton, N.J., 1990).

87. See Miron, A Traveler Disguised , contents page.

88. Daniel Charney, Barg aruf: Bleter fun a lebn (Warsaw, 1935).

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

37

Rather than beginning their autobiographies with their own memories

. . . Russian autobiographers usually started with a discussion of their

entire family history. In the course of the nineteenth century, there

were at least five autobiographies that bore the subtitle ‘‘A Family

Chronicle’’ and many more in which the phrase was used in the text. 89

This ‘‘being for/with the other’’ rather than ‘‘for myself alone,’’ a self-

conception further fostered by the strong socialist dimension of a signifi-

cant number of Yiddish autobiographies, clearly swerves from the care-

fully constructed paradigm based upon Rousseau’s Confessions that

informed my own study of the origins of Jewish autobiography. If, in-

deed, some of representative Yiddish autobiographers are ‘‘children of

Rousseau,’’ which I would argue they are, it would be more of the frag-

mented, doubled-up ‘‘Rousseau’’ of the Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques: Dia-

logues than of the Rousseau of the Confessions. In grappling with this shift

in perspective, I have been much informed by recent studies of Russian

autobiography, which until very recently, perhaps precisely because of

its departure from the classic models, has been the least studied of the

European national autobiographical traditions. 90

INANDAROUNDTHESELF:THECRITICALDISCOURSE

Just as autobiography itself made a belated appearance in Jewish East-

ern Europe, so the critical discourse surrounding autobiography. This is

not to say, though, that there does not exist a sizeable amount of material

tangentially related to the topic. There is, first of all, the material that

may be termed incidental: that is, critical responses to discrete autobio-

graphical writings from the time of their appearance to the present day.

The agglomerate of such critical responses, for example, to M. L. Lilien-

blum’s . att’ot ne‘urim , Mendele/Abramovitsh’s Shloyme reb . ayims , and

other noted examples of the genre would constitute a sizeable bibliogra-

phy. This ‘‘incidental’’ material is not confined to responses to self-

declared autobiographical works but extends to critical discussions of

89. Wachtel, Battle for Childhood , 63.

90. Lejeune, providing a selective bibliographic summary in 1971 of synthetic

treatments of British, American, German, French, and Italian autobiography,

notes that there appears to be no such treatment of Russian autobiography. See

L’Autobiographie , 146. My impression is that the critical discourse surrounding

Russian autobiography remains, by and large, the province of Slavicists and is

yet to be integrated into the general study of the genre. Critical works that seek

to provide pan-European synthetic surveys of autobiographical writing rarely

engage Russian examples, even Tolstoy.

38

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works clearly infused with autobiographical elements without declaring

themselves as autobiography. This is especially true of Hebrew literature

of the ‘‘Renaissance’’ period, a period unprecedented and without parallel

in autobiographical self-scrutiny in all branches of literature. 91 Such was

the heightened autobiographical sensibility of Hebrew literature of this

period, and later, that much of the contemporaneous critical discourse

devoted to discrete works amounts, in effect, to a theoretical discourse of

autobiography. In the poetic sphere, this is nowhere more manifest than

in expositions upon and explications of Bialik’s writings. Bialik himself

invited speculation concerning the autobiographical elements in the work,

by the constant and on occasion coquettish games of autobiographical

hide-and-seek he played with his readers, both in his prose and his

poetry. That he did play these games is sure indication in and of itself

that some confusion of codes was endemic to the rules of the literary

master-game in which these discrete works find their provenance. 92 Thus

Ya‘akov Fichman, one of the most prolific and significant literary critics

of the ‘‘Renaissance’’ period, writes that the key to Bialik’s poetry lies in

the commingling of autobiography and ‘‘hints of ancient Jewish legend,’’

themselves transformed through the prism of autobiography. 93 In a sepa-

rate piece Fichman mused upon the topic of autobiography in general. 94

Fichman’s formulations, born of profound and engaged reflection on

what is arguably the most ideationally hermetic and aesthetically chaotic

of Bialik’s works, Megillat ha-’esh , and the intuitive intelligence with which

he applies them, are clearly of wider application to the autobiographical

genre. The same is true of the work of subsequent Hebrew literary critics

who address themselves to the autobiographical problematic in Bialik’s

work, foremost among them Dov Sadan, Gershon Shaked, and Dan

Miron. The latter in particular, taking his cue from Sadan, has devoted a

91. See Miron, Bodedim be-mo‘adam , 283–84; Dov Sadan, Ben din le- . eshbon:

Massot ‘al sofrim u-sefarim (Tel Aviv, 1963), 215.

92. See in particular his poem ‘‘ Gam be-hit‘oruto le-‘enekhem ’’ in which Bialik

claims—in a manner that is to my mind unintentionally comical—that even

though he may ‘‘flash,’’ so to speak, and stand naked before his readers, this is a

deliberate strategy of deception, a seeming self-exposure the better to conceal the

true nature of his self. The game is developed when Bialik configures himself in

this poem as a ‘‘lion in hiding’’ behind the lines of his verse: the word used for

‘‘lion’’ comprises the first four letters of his last name. See H. N. Bialik, Kol kitve

(Tel Aviv, 1938), 54–55.

93. Ya‘akov Fichman, Shirat Bialik (Jerusalem, 1946), 209.

94. Ya‘akov Fichman, ‘‘Mashehu’ ‘al ha-’otobiografiah,’’ in his Mussag ha-shi-

rah ha-modernit (Tel Aviv, 1982).

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

39

book-length survey to Bialik’s poetry whose central theme is the poet’s

overcoming of psychological and cultural resistances to the autobiograph-

ical compulsion that was the fons et origo of his creativity. 95

Likewise, with respect to the criticism of Hebrew prose, there is the

vast critical discourse devoted to the overridingly autobiographical ele-

ment in the writings of Yosef Hayyim Brenner, which, however com-

plexly refracted, is rarely absent. Brenner’s work has proved fertile

ground for the exploration of autobiographical theory, and continues to

be so to this day. 96 Brenner was a fine literary critic himself, and his

own explorations of the autobiographical lode in the works of Gnessin,

Berdichevsky, Nomberg, inter alios were extraordinarily prescient in their

anticipation of later theoretical developments in the study of the genre. 97

The high degree of attunement of Hebrew literary criticism to the auto-

biographical as manifested in works not declaredly or unequivocally auto-

biographical may in no small part be accredited to the extraordinary level

of intimacy by which the practitioners and consumers—a disproportion-

ate number of whom were also practitioners—of this literature were

bound together in the early decades of the twentieth century. A good

illustration of this intimacy is the widespread usage of the first-person

plural in Hebrew literary criticism: the term ‘‘our literature’’ ( sifrutenu )

becomes a standard substitution for ‘‘Hebrew literature’’ in this discourse;

‘‘our poet’’ ( meshorerenu ) Bialik, that is, who himself referred to his mentor

Ahad Ha‘am as ‘‘Daddy’’; ‘‘our poetry’’ ( shiratenu ), et cetera. 98 It is this

intimacy in the midst of dispersion that forms the leitmotif of Dan Mir-

on’s collective biography of Hebrew literature in the early twentieth cen-

tury; hence the title, Bodedim be-mo‘adam ( When Loners Come Together ;a

play on Is 14.31). A literary environment of what Miron calls ‘‘intimate

loneliness’’ was most conducive to the writing and mutual exchange of

autobiographical texts within the coterie. Thus Gershom Shofman, writ-

ing apropos of his first encounter with Uri Nisan Gnessin, as cited by

95. D. Miron, Ha-peridah min ha-’ani he-‘oni: Mahalakh be-hitpathut shirato ha-

mukdemet shel Hayyim Nahman Bialik 1891–1901 (Tel Aviv, 1986).

96. See Dov Sadan, Midrash psikho’analiti: Perakim ba-psikhologyah shel Y. H.

Brener (Jerusalem, 1996); Ada Zemach, Tenu‘ah ba-nekudah: Brener ve-sipurav (Tel

Aviv, 1984); Menahem Brinker, ‘ Ad hasimtah ha-Teveryanit: Ma’amar ‘al-sippur u-

mahashavah bi-yetsirat Brener (Tel Aviv, 1990).

97. See Sadan, Midrash , 25–71.

98. See Avner Holtzman’s essay ‘‘ Be-yom kayits, yom . om’’ in his Temunah le-

neged enay (Tel Aviv, 2002), esp. 75, where Holtzman notes that Brenner refers in

his correspondence to the Hebrew essayist Ahad Ha‘am as ‘‘our father.’’ For

Ahad Ha‘am as ‘‘Daddy’’ to Bialik, see Bialik, Iggerot .

ayyim Na . man Bialik , ed.

Fishel Lahover, 5 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1937–1939), 1:120.

40

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Miron in this context: ‘‘This whole business of writing in general is when

it really comes down to it no more than a kind of exchange of letters

between a few fellow-brethren, dispersed and scattered over the surface

of the globe, most of whom do not know each other.’’ 99 In a striking

analogue to the above passage, Shlomoh Grodzensky writes, in an essay

included in his book Otobiografiah shel kore’ ( Autobiography of a Reader ;a

title highly germane in the present context), of awaiting each new story

of Devorah Baron as if it were ‘‘a letter from a distant friend, for further

knowledge of his changing life in faraway lands, with curiosity, good

wishes and pride.’’ 100 Y. H. Brenner, while declaring that he was ‘‘not a

’‘‘genreist,’’ viewed the totality of his writings in various fields as above

all letters :

In all that I write from time to time, be it newspaper articles or in

story-form . . . I do not intend . . . to describe life as it is, as it appears

to an objective and lucid observer. What then? I shall make no bones

about it: letters , that’s all, I write to my close friends about the life of a

man such as myself at that time and about his emotions . . . I only

write letters, in which I relate essentially to whoever is interested, the

impressions that I receive and how I spend my hours and days. 101

Dov Sadan’s evocation of his first encounter with the writings of Brenner

is equally illustrative of Shofman’s above observation: ‘‘I was a young

man when I first discovered Brenner, and I did not so much swallow his

stories, as I was swallowed up by them, to the extent that I imagined, that

they were crying aloud before me: ‘it is of you that the text speaks.’ ’’ 102

The reception of a self-revelatory, autobiographical text may constitute

a self-revelatory moment to the reader/critic, whose written response to

the text may assume a highly autobiographical hue, thus bearing witness

to a transmission of the autobiographical impulse from writer to reader/

critic. Thus the centrality of the autobiographical impulse in the range of

Sadan’s critical writings, to the extent that the literary-critical discourse

often appears subsidiary to the autobiographical. 103

And thus Shlomoh

99. Miron, Bodedim , 106ff.

100. See Shlomo Grodzensky, Otobiografiyah shel kore’ (Tel Aviv, 1975), 94.

101. Yosef Hayyim Brenner, Ketavim , 4 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1978–85), 3:573ff.

102. Sadan, Ben din , 144.

103. The autobiographical element is predominant in many of the essays in-

cluded in Sadan, Ora . ot u-shevilim: Massah, ‘iyyun, . eker (Tel Aviv, 1977). This

book is actually more autobiographical than Shlomoh Grodzensky’s Autobiography

of a Reader .

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

41

Grodzensky on the impact made upon him by Sadan’s own autobiograph-

ical volumes devoted to his childhood and youth: 104

The relationship between the reader and the writer is posited within a

context of connections not of our own choosing—the historical period

that fell to our lot, the shared mental horizon of a given generation.

Therefore, a Hebrew reader whose childhood fell in the shadow of

World War I, in characterizing his relationship with Dov Sadan, will

declare—he is my writer, in this intimate sense. For those years, 1914–

1918, were seen by those who were born at the end of the nineteenth

century as sunrise, or as sunset, but for those who were born at the

beginning of the century, this was morning, morning of terror, that

stood under the sign of the impending destruction of the Jews in East-

ern Europe. For whomever this memory is buried in the hidden most

regions of his consciousness, it is inevitable that a special relationship

of fraternity will bind him to those who share this memory. Hebrew

writers whose childhood fell within the arena of World War I consti-

tute a unique body in our literature. It is odd that its literary historians

and critics have still not acknowledged this aspect that unites them. In

several respects they were the last of their kind: the last witnesses of

Jewish life to which World War I dealt the first fatal blow; the last

generation of Hebrew writers to graduate from the traditional Beys-

medresh , when it still stood on a firm basis; and above all, the last gener-

ation of Hebrew literature on European soil ...Inhistwofirst won-

derful volumes of memoirs, the memoirs of his childhood and youth,

Sadan seeks traces of the world as it was in his birthplace, the world

before 1914, and of the shattered, tormented world after that. 105

Such transference of the autobiographical impulse is well illustrated in

Brenner’s depiction, in the novella Mehathalah , of his female protagonist’s

reception of the writings of Feierberg and Berdichevsky:

She searches around for books to read on her desk: the writings of

Feierberg, Mibayit umihuts , Mehe‘avar haqerov 106 —she had already read

all these several times, and had even copied down in her notebook all

of the poetic sections that especially touched her, sometimes also with

104. Dov Sadan, Mi-ma‘agal ha-ne‘urim (Tel Aviv, 1981); idem, Mi-me . oz ha-

yaldut (Tel Aviv, 1981).

105. Grodzensky, Autobiography of a Reader , 181.

106. These two latter titles are of Michah Yosef Berdichevsky’s collections of

strongly autobiographically tinged writings.

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some alteration from masculine to female voice, in order to make the

words her own. 107

Shofman’s epistolary metaphor is also borne out by the intensely self-

revelatory character of much of the vast correspondence generated by

the Hebrew writers of this period, suggestive of a secular substitution for

the rabbinic responsa literature ( she’elot u-tshuvot ). Sometimes, as with

Bialik, Brenner, and Berdichevsky, personal letters effectively consti-

tuted the first draft of published autobiographical texts. 108 Thus the first

letter to be included in Fishel Lachover’s edition of Bialik’s letters consti-

tutes, in effect, an extraordinarily revealing and self-lacerating autobiog-

raphy, in which the influence of the autobiographical texts of Guenzberg

and Lilienblum is clearly discernable. This gigantic epistle—it runs to

twenty-two printed pages—was penned in 1890 when Bialik was at the

Volozhin yeshivah, and it is addressed to a collective audience of the

friends he has left behind in Zhitomir. The letter, one section of which is

entitled with a chapter-heading, ‘‘Retrospective,’’ disrupting the informal

epistolary flow, actually bases itself on a ‘‘book of memoirs’’ that Bialik

has before him at the time of writing and is in the process of editing:

Now I am running my hand over several pages and I have skipped

over many remembrances, whose letters are blurred and many of them

even erased entirely, now my hand is holding one page at the end of

the second chapter, that is the end of ‘‘The Chapter of the Days of

Boyhood’’ and I read: ‘‘The days of youth are close at hand and how

have I prepared myself spiritually for these days?’’ 109

In fact, Shofman’s dictum could be altered to read: ‘‘This whole business

of writing letters is . . . no more than a kind of exchange of autobiographi-

cal literature.’’ Within this literary environment, I would argue, the original

107. Brenner, Ketavim , 2:1782–83.

108. See Bialik, Pirke . ayyim be-’arba‘ girsa’ot , ed. F. Lachover (Jerusalem,

1944); Zivah Shamir, ‘‘ Safi . , shorshav u-sef . av ,’’ in ‘Al ‘‘Safi . ’’ li-Vialik: ha-sippur

‘‘Safi . ’’ u-massot ‘iyyun , ed. Z. Luz and Z. Shamir (Tel Aviv, 2001), 138–43; A.

Zemach, Tenu‘ah ba-nekudah, 96ff.; A. Holtzman, El ha-kera‘ sheba-lev: Mikhah Yosef

Berdichevksky; shenot ha-tsemi . ah (1887–1902) (Jerusalem, 1995), 215–30. And see

Shmuel Werses’s comments on the letter as a means of autobiographical expres-

sion for Sh. D. Luzzato (Shadal), in his essay ‘‘ Shmuel David Lutsato be-‘eyne ‘atsmo:

‘Iyyun be-’iggrotav ha-‘ivriyot,’’ in Werses, Megamot ve-tsurot be-sifrut ha-haskalah

(Jerusalem, 1990), 267–68.

109. Bialik, Iggerot , 1:18–19.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

43

literary texts, the critical response to them, and the actual correspondence

surrounding each may be placed upon a continuum whose dominant fea-

ture is the autobiographical.

This preoccupation with the autobiographical is evinced in twentieth-

century Hebrew and Yiddish literary criticism by the predominance of

biographical considerations in the explication of literary texts. The cen-

trality of the biographical in this literary-critical discourse is attested to

by the central place it held, and holds, in the works of critics of very

different ideological and aesthetic persuasion. For Joseph Klausner, for

example, who himself wrote a two-volume autobiography, 110 biography

serves as the essential structuring principle of his six-volume History of

Modern Hebrew Literature , a work constructed on solidly positivistic foun-

dations ` la Taine and Sainte Beuve. 111 For Klausner’s counterpart in

Yiddish literary criticism, Bal Makhshoves (Eliashev), basing himself on

similarly positivistic foundations, biography constitutes an essential com-

ponent of critical discourse. Biography, likewise, is of equal centrality in

the critical works of Dov Sadan, one of the most outspoken opponents of

Klausner’s literary schema; whereas for Klausner biography provides ac-

cess to facts, for the wildly speculative Sadan biography provides a key

to the cellar of the Freudian subconscious and the Jungian Collective

Unconscious. 112 Shmuel Niger, whose Yiddishist, secularist, and Dias-

pora-centered schema of Yiddish literature provides the ideological coun-

terpoint to that of Sadan, immerses himself in the biography of his

subjects as much as does Sadan and, like Sadan, his explorations are

strongly informed by psychoanalytic technique. Indeed, his most endur-

ing book-length work is his biography of Y. L. Peretz, throughout which

literary-critical and biographical considerations go hand in hand. The

auto/biographical fascination is shared—especially as concerns Bia-

lik—by two of the leading critics of the early decades of the twentieth

century, Ya‘akov Fichman and Fishl Lachover, critics of a very different

stripe: Fichman is one of the foremost representatives of ‘‘impressionist’’

criticism, Lachover of the more analytic, empiricist school. 113 No small

part of the appeal of the exclusively text-centered ‘‘New Criticism’’ in the

Israeli literary-critical field from the 1950s onwards lay in its rejection of

110. Yosef Klausner, Darki li-kerat ha-te . iyyah veha-ge‘ulah , 2 vols. (Tel Aviv,

1955).

111. See Klausner, Historiyah shel ha-sifrut ha-‘ivrit . a- . adashah , 6 vols. (Jeru-

salem 1930–1949), 1:v–vii.

112. See especially the essays on Bialik and Tchernikhovsky in Sadan, Ben din .

113. See Miron, Bodedim , 280.

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the institutionalized biographical paradigm. 114 But, as demonstrated by

Dan Miron, a critic of the New Critical generation, the biographical im-

perative of the literary-critical founding fathers continued to resonate.

Indeed, more than any other single Hebrew and Yiddish literary critic, it

is Miron who has relegitimized the simultaneous reading of literary texts

as aesthetic/linguistic entities in their own right and as autobiographical/

biographical documents; his project thus forms a dialectical continuum

with that of Sadan. 115 Then there are the massive biographical excursions

of Nurit Govrin, and Yitshak Bakon’s biography of the young Brenner,

both of whom draw extensively from the ‘‘fictional’’ constructions/repre-

sentations of their biographees’ writings for the reconstruction of the

life. 116 Of the younger generation of Hebrew literary critics, Avner Holtz-

man’s biographically grounded studies of M. Y. Berdichevsky are of spe-

cial relevance in the present context. 117 Then there is Amia Lieblich’s

feminist, somewhat New Age, ‘‘experimental biography’’ of Deborah

Baron, cast in the form of imaginary conversations between the biogra-

pher and her subject. 118 It is my impression that contemporary Israeli

criticism of Hebrew and Yiddish literature is more biographically ori-

ented than that stemming from America, where Jewish biography has of

late been largely the preserve of historians. 119 This contemporary reorien-

tation to the auto/biographical is further attested by the translation and

republication of Jewish autobiographical/memoiristic documents: David

114. See Miron, Bodedim , 12–13.

115. See Miron’s memoir/literary-critical manifesto, ‘‘ Perek zikhronot min ha-

reublikah ha-sifrutit ,’’ in Bodedim , 9–19.

116. See Nurith Govrin, Me-’ofek el ofek: G. Shofman, . ayyav vi-yetsirato , 2 vols.

(Tel Aviv, 1982); Govrin, Ha-ma . atsit ha-rishonah: Devorah Baron— . ayeha vi-yetsir-

atah (Jerusalem, 1988); Y. Bakon, Brener ha-tsa‘ir , 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1975); Hay-

yim Be’er, Gam ahavatam, gam sin’atam: Bialik, Brener, Agnon: ma‘arakhot-ya . asim

(Tel Aviv, 1992).

117. On this literary critic’s fascination with the biographical, see the intro-

duction to his wonderful series of essentially biographical vignettes, Temunah .

Two lengthy essays in this book—they constitute about a half of the entire vol-

ume—are, since they treat of the experiences of the author’s parents, intimately

autobiographical documents.

118. Amia Lieblich, Conversations with Dvora: An Experimental Biography of the

First Modern Hebrew Woman Writer , trans. N. Seidman, ed. Ch. Kronfeld and N.

Seidman (Berkeley, Calif., 1977).

119. Instructive in this respect is that the biographies of both Yehudah Leib

Gordon and Ahad Ha‘am should have been written by historians. See Michael

Stanislawski, For Whom Do I Toil? Judah Leib Gordon and the Crisis of Russian Jewry

(New York, 1968); Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha‘am and the

Origins of Zionism (Berkeley, Calif., 1993).

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

45

Assaf’s superbly annotated editions, with extensive introductions, of part

of Yehezkel Kotik’s Mayne zikhroynes 120 and Reb Mordkele’s (Tshemerin-

sky) ‘Ayarati motele ; 121 a projected reissue of Mordechai Aaron Guenz-

berg’s Avi‘ezer based upon manuscript variants of the work by Shmuel

Werses; 122 the publication for the first time of the draft of an autobiogra-

phy of the childhood years by Tchernikhovsky, 123 to list just a few.

Notwithstanding this considerable body of work in and around the

autobiographical and the evident literary/critical fascination with the

topic, very few works have appeared to date that attempt a synthetic

overview of Jewish autobiography, in particular within the context of

Jewish Eastern Europe in whose literary ambience the autobiographical

voice in Hebrew and Yiddish came to the fore. Prolegomena to such a

study appeared at a relatively early stage. The first essay to treat of Jew-

ish autobiography in a comparative context, albeit in a primitive manner

and largely derived from Heinrich Heine’s musing on this topic, was writ-

ten by Meir Halevi Letteris and appeared in 1869. 124 Since then, a num-

ber of essays which move beyond the monographic toward a synthetic

overview of the genre have appeared with some regularity: Berdichev-

sky’s Devarim ‘a . adim ‘al devar ha-toladah veha-’outobiografiah (1889), 125 Bal-

Makhshoves’s Undzer memuarn literatur (1910), 126 Y. Shatzky’s Yidishe

Memuarn Literatur (1925), 127 Sh. Werses’ Darkhe ha-’otobiografiah bi-tekufat

ha-Haskalah (1945). 128 As a complement to this essay, and at a remove of

over a half-century, Werses arrived at a different type of synthesis. In a

120. The English version is reviewed in this issue: Journey to a Nineteenth-Cen-

tury Shtetl: The Memoirs of Yekhezkel Kotik , ed. D. Assaf; trans. M. Birstein, and ed.

S. Makover-Assaf (Detroit, Mich./Tel Aviv, 2002). And see note 121 below.

121. Mah she-ra’iti: Zikhronotav shel Ye . ezkel Kotik , ed., annotated, trans. and

with an introduction by David Assaf (Tel Aviv, 1998); Hayyim Chemerinsky,

‘Ayarati motele , ed., annotated, and with an introduction by Assaf (Jerusalem,

2002).

122. See Werses, Hakitsah ‘ami: Sifrut ha-Haskalah be-‘idan ha-modernizatsyah

(Jerusaem, 2000), 430.

123. Shaul Tchernikhovsky, Me’en otobiografiah ,in Sha’ul Tcherni . ovsky: Me . k-

arim u-te‘udot , ed. Boaz Arpaly (Jerusalem, 1994).

124. M. L. Letteris, Zikkaron ba-sefer (Vienna, 1869), 1–8.

125. M. Y. Berdichevsky, ‘‘Devarim a . adim ‘al devar ha-toladah veha-’otobio-

graphiah,’’ Ha‘Ivri 13.27 (December 1889).

126. See Baal-Makhshoves (Isidore Eliashev), Geklibene shriften , 5 vols. (War-

saw, 1929), 3:58–70.

127. Yankev Shatsky, ‘‘ Yidishe memuarn literatur ,’’ Di tsukunft 30 (August

1925).

128. Sh. Werses, ‘‘ Darkhe ha-’otobiografiah bi-tekufat ha-Haskalah ,’’ Gilyonot 4

(1945).

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JQR 95:1 (2005)

monograph-length essay entitled ‘‘The Jewish Maskil as a Young Man,’’

he draws a magnificent composite portrait of this ‘‘young man,’’ extrapo-

lated from an array of autobiographical material from the period so vast

that he alone could muster and master it. 129 It should be noted that Werses

himself, when in his late teens, submitted his autobiography to the 1934

competition for youth autobiographies hosted by the YIVO institute in

Vilna. 130 To these I would add David Assaf’s superb introductions to his

translation to Hebrew from the Yiddish of Kotik and to his edition of

Reb Mordkhele, as cited above. Each of these introductions, especially

that to the Kotik volume, place these works within the wider literary/

historical context of Eastern European Jewish autobiography.

To the best of my knowledge, only one book-length literary-critical

study of Jewish autobiography exists to date: Alan Mintz’s ‘‘Banished from

Their Father’s Table’’: Loss of Faith and Hebrew Autobiography . 131 The body of

Mintz’s book is devoted to highly intelligent, close, and provocative read-

ings of five texts: Geunzberg’s Avi‘ezer ; Lilienblum’s . att’ot ne‘urim ;M.Z.

Feierberg’s Le’an ; Berdichevsky’s ‘Orva’ para . ; Y. H. Brenner’s Ba- . oref

(In Winter). It is not these individual readings I shall address in the

present context, but the methodological and literary/historical framework

of Mintz’s treatment. Since Mintz’s is the most recent and the most com-

prehensive attempt at a synthetic overview of the phenomenon of Jewish

autobiography in Eastern Europe, I shall dwell on it in some detail.

As is apparent from the title, Mintz is concerned with Hebrew autobi-

ography insofar as this reflects, and reflects upon, the paradigmatic expe-

rience of post-Haskalah Hebrew writers: the loss of religious faith, a loss

rendered all the more devastating by a corresponding disaffection with

the ideological tenets of the Haskalah itself. Not only do the texts that

Mintz studies give account of this crisis of faith, but their very creation

is contingent upon this crisis, the loss of faith being the matrix, according

to Mintz, from which Hebrew autobiography derives:

The attempt in Hebrew literature to represent and explore the shape

of experience in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of faith is the

129. Sh. Werses, ‘‘Ha-maskil ha-yehudi ke-’ish tsa‘ir,’’ in idem, Hakitsah ‘ami ,

67–116.

130. On these autobiography competitions, see the anthology, with an intro-

duction, Jeffrey Shandler, ed., Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in

Poland before the Holocaust (New Haven, Conn., 2002); Marcus Moseley, ‘‘Life,

Literature: Autobiographies of Jewish Youths in Interwar Poland,’’ Jewish Social

Studies 7.3 (2001).

131. Alan Mintz, ‘‘Banished from Their Father’s Table’’: Loss of Faith and Hebrew

Autobiography (Bloomington, Ind., 1989).

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

47

subject of the present study. I shall argue that the need to tell this story

resulted in the creation of a new mode of writing in Hebrew prose

narrative—the autobiography, both inside and outside of fiction. 132

Mintz views the turn to the autobiography as expressive of a perceived

dissonance between the sentimental and melodramatic conventions of the

novelistic genre in Hebrew, as these had developed into the final decades

of the nineteenth century, and the urgent compulsion to render accounts

with the existential dead-end in which this post-Haskalah generation of

writers found themselves. Thus the belated incorporation of the Rous-

seauian confessional into Hebrew literary discourse, as mediated through

the example of Solomon Maimon, responds to the need for ‘‘an alternative

tradition of narrative prose writing which could take on life closer to

the bone.’’ 133 Mintz argues, very much as I have done above, that the

Rousseauian turn is as unprecedented in Hebrew literary history as it is

in that of major European literatures; hence the cardinal significance of

Solomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte as a precursor for the recasting of

Eastern European Jewish life through the eyes of the modern autobiog-

rapher. The majority of Haskalah autobiographies, as surveyed in

Werses’s programmatic essay, Mintz excludes from consideration as

being overly dry, and more of interest for the biographical information

these shed upon their authors than as literary autobiography. Mintz’s

dismissal of these texts is somewhat breezy: Sh. D. Luzzatto, after all, did

introduce that ‘‘dangerous supplement,’’ masturbation/nocturnal emis-

sion—the distinction is subtle—to Hebrew autobiographical discourse, 134

and the autobiographies of S. J. Fuenn and A. Gottlober are not, I think,

devoid of interest even to those uninterested in their authors. But he is

surely correct in singling out Guenzberg’s Avi‘ezer and Lilienblum’s . att’ot

ne‘urim as marking the high points of Haskalah autobiography and indeed

the ones that most closely approximate the Rousseauian paradigm. 135 And

these two texts were of immeasurably greater influence in shaping He-

brew autobiographical discourse than were any others of the period. Li-

lienblum, Guenzberg, and other Haskalah figures wrote what Mintz

defines as ‘‘ ‘straight’ autobiographies.’’ 136 That is:

132. Mintz, Banished, 5.

133. Mintz, Banished ,6

134. See Yehudah Ha’ezrahi, ‘‘ Toldot shadal ,’’ Melilah 5 (Manchester, 1955),

236.

135. Mintz, Banished , 14–15.

136. Mintz, Banished, 130–31.

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In the Haskalah autobiography, the author of the work and the retro-

spective narrator of the story are presumably the same person. The

Lilienblum who tells the story of his life in Sins of Youth presents himself

as the same Lilienblum who lived the life and now exists as a real

public person. 137

In Mintz’s scheme of things, the ‘‘Renaissance’’ ( Te . iyyah ) period of

Hebrew literature was accompanied by a crucial transformation in He-

brew autobiographical discourse: autobiography now ‘‘crossed over into

fiction.’’ 138 He appears to view this chiasma as a positive development in

the history of the genre. Now that the writer—I hesitate to say ‘‘autobiog-

rapher’’—is not to be identified with the retrospective narrator of his life-

story, he is given

the opportunity to ironize the distance between himself and the narra-

tor, who can then be tinged by various degrees of unreliability. This is

a freedom, we shall see, of which both Berdichevsky and Brenner take

full advantage . . . Fiction writers such as Brenner . . . violated the

autobiographical compact for the sake of higher autobiographical

truth. 139

Thus the majority of Mintz’s study is devoted to what he himself terms

‘‘fictional texts,’’ ‘‘novels and novellas.’’ In order to build a bridge between

these ‘‘fictions’’ and ‘‘ ‘straight’ autobiography,’’ and thus justify their

treatment under one rubric—‘‘the Hebrew autobiographical tradition’’—

Mintz points to literary/historical, formal, and thematic commonalities

that bind the texts under consideration together. First he points to an

implicit or explicit intertextual ‘‘interdependence’’ between the Hebrew

texts he focuses upon, with the weight of his evidence inhering in the last

of the series of texts he analyzes, Brenner’s Ba- . oref : ‘‘The true sign that

these works comprise an identifiable and self-consciously organized tradi-

tion is indicated by the intertextual nature of Brenner’s autobiographical

first novel In Winter .’’ 140

Second, there is a shared ‘‘formal axis’’ to the works he examines: ‘‘the

autobiographical premise of self-portraiture and retrospective narrative.’’

This ‘‘formal axis,’’ it should be noted, does not preclude a third-person

137. Mintz, Banished, 16.

138. Mintz, Banished, 16.

139. Mintz, Banished, 16, 22.

140. Mintz, Banished, 17.

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narrative, such as that of Feierberg’s Le’an . Last, there is a ‘‘thematic axis’’

that unites these disparate texts into a discernible Hebrew ‘‘confessional

tradition’’: ‘‘What we have called in a kind of shorthand the apostasy

narrative . . ., which describes a young man’s break with religion, family,

and community, and his attempts to live in a world empty of those beliefs

and institutions.’’ 141 A further thematic axis in Mintz’s treatment is consti-

tuted by the account of the adolescent/young man’s psychological and

existential crises engendered by sexual/erotic complexes. Whether this

‘‘axis’’ or ‘‘code’’ falls squarely within the ‘‘apostasy narrative’’ or is an

additional axis/narrative, related but independent in its own right, is not

entirely clear. 142

Thus defined, or better perhaps, qualified, Hebrew autobiography is of

an essentially transient character: ‘‘a brief but significant moment in

which the crisis of Judaism in the modern age was given a very specific

literary expression.’’ 143 According to this model, the crisis of faith ceases

to constitute the catalyst in the individual life of Jewish writers/autobiog-

raphers of later generations; autobiography is no longer quickened by the

‘‘narrative of apostasy’’ with its attendant erotic correlates. The genre

thus becomes impoverished, evincing ‘‘a clear withdrawal from a commit-

ment to individualized introspection and introspectiveness.’’ Now, autobi-

ographies that seek to recreate the Eastern European Jewish childhood,

sans crisis of faith, tend to retreat from the ‘‘existential’’ to the ‘‘ethno-

graphic.’’ 144 Jewish autobiographers who recount their coming-of-age in

the midst of cataclysmic historical events—World War I and all that fol-

lowed it—tend to become reduced as individuals by the sheer magnitude

of the events to which they bear witness. Those who emerged from this

historical maelstrom to positions of leadership tend to dwell on the public

persona rather than the individual self. 145 In sum, with one or two excep-

tions that prove the rule, the stream of modern Jewish autobiography

effectively flows into the memoir.

Mintz provides a bold and far-reaching explanatory model for the phe-

nomenon of Eastern European Jewish autobiography, especially in its

Hebrew manifestation. My major equivocations arise from the texts

Mintz chooses to include, and exclude, from the highroad of Hebrew

autobiographical expression as he defines it. Of the five texts he selects

141. Mintz, Banished, 18.

142. Mintz, Banished, 117–18.

143. Mintz, Banished, 203.

144. Mintz, Banished, 203.

145. Mintz, Banished, 204.

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for close scrutiny, only two—those of Lilienblum and Guenzberg—are

actual autobiographies, and these are dealt with in a single chapter that

constitutes, approximately, but a quarter of the book. Mintz himself

draws attention to this distinction pointedly by entitling the section of his

work that discusses Feierberg and Berdichevsky ‘‘Into Fiction.’’ And in

discussing the relationship between Lilienblum’s . att’ot ne‘urim and Bren-

ner’s Ba- . oref , he writes:

At bottom the two works are separated by a fundamental fact of genre:

one is an autobiography and the other is a novel. One purports to be a

true story, no matter how artfully crafted, told by the person about

himself in his own words; the other, though written in the first person

and based on personal history, is a fiction about a protagonist who is

not identical with the author. 146

To be sure, the precise lines of demarcation between autobiography and

‘‘fiction’’ are highly unstable and blurred—employment of novelistic tech-

nique in the recounting of the life-history, is, as argued above, endemic

to the genre 147 —all the more so at this particular juncture of Hebrew and

Yiddish literary discourse; it is a far less complicated matter, for example,

to establish the essentially fictional status of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe ,

Dickens’s David Copperfield , Bronte’s Jane Eyre , and later Thomas Mann’s

Felix Krull (even though these all declare themselves as autobiographies

and are written in this format) than it is to establish where autobiography

ends and fiction begins, and vice versa, in the first-person narratives of

Berdichevsky, Brenner, and others. In fact, the autobiographical element

in Brenner’s writing, for one, is so all-engulfing that it could be argued,

and has been, that the fictional status of his fiction is a fiction: the name

of the protagonist and narrator of Ba- . oref , Fayerman (‘‘Fireman’’), is,

after all, a transparent allusion to Brenner (‘‘incendiary’’). 148 More

broadly, it could be argued that Brenner here is paradigmatic of a larger

generic shift in the Hebrew literature of his day marked by the subsump-

tion of the fictional to the autobiographical, rather than vice versa. Thus

146. Mintz, Banished, 130.

147. Mintz himself actually pioneered in his analysis of the literary rhetorics

of so seemingly an objective, heavily documented reconstruction of the life as

Lilienblum’s . att’ot ne‘urim . See Mintz, Banished, 29–54. Ben Ami Feingold, fol-

lowing Mintz’s lead, further reveals the novelistic undergirdings of this text. See

his Ha-’otobiografiah ke-sifrut in Me . kere yerushalayim be-sifrut ‘ivrit (Jerusalem,

1983), 4:86–111.

148. See Sadan, Midrash , 25–31.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

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Dov Sadan on this generation of writers for whom Michah Yosef Berdi-

chevsky was the founding father and Brenner the paradigmatic represen-

tative (in contradistinction to Mendele before them, and Agnon and

Hazaz after them), a generation lacking the art that these latter writers

were endowed with and enjoyed/employed: ‘‘creative transformations’’

( gilgule yetsirah ):

A generation of writers that did not see and did not show anything

other than themselves, the Jewish individual in his orphanhood and

tribulations . . . A generation that is capable of metamorphosing the

self and the experiences of the self by artistic transformations and

transpositions of character by means of the liberation of autobiographi-

cal materials is not the same as a generations that is incapable of this,

even though both draw the source of their creation from within. 149

This line of approach is not, however, adopted by Mintz, so it is strange

that over a third of a book whose subject is autobiography should be

devoted to a text separated from autobiography ‘‘by a fundamental fact

of genre.’’ This generic/definitional confusion is compounded by the fact

that Mintz understands autobiography by and large as formally deter-

mined: a first-person retrospective text that tells of the life of the narrator,

regardless of historical/biographical identity or nonidentity between the

narrator and author. (Thus Sholem Aleichem’s first-person monologue

Motel peyse dem khazans yingl may be construed as autobiography). 150 But

Feierberg’s Le’an , ‘‘whose place in the autobiographical enterprise is as-

sured by the fact that in his work the central moment of apostasy receives

its fullest articulation,’’ 151 is actually a third-person narrative relating the

crisis of faith of a protagonist, ‘‘Nahman the madman,’’ who dies at the

end of the tale, which means that if this is an autobiography it constitutes

literally ‘‘ m´moires d’outre-tombe ,’’ as Chateaubriand, deliberately employ-

ing a fictional conceit, entitled his autobiography. As with Brenner, it

is clear that Feierberg’s autobiographical investment in this account is

immense. But Nahman the madman’s life differs in some key respects

with what we know of that of Feierberg—most notably in the relatively

positive, or at least nuanced, depiction of the father-figure in the tale by

contrast to the fanatical sadist of a father that emerges from the memoirs

149. See Sadan, Ora . ot u-shevilim (Tel Aviv, 1978), 130

150. Mintz, Banished , 203

151. Mintz, Banished, 59

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of Feierberg’s contemporaries. 152 If one were to insist upon the primarily

autobiographical kernel of Le’an , one might take recourse to Freudian

psychology and explain this discrepancy as overcompensation for Oedi-

pal rage or some such. This is actually what Dov Sadan does in account-

ing for the polarized coexistence in Brenner’s writings, whose primarily

autobiographical nature he insists upon, of the excoriated and idealized

father-figure. 153 Mintz, however, does not seem concerned with mooring

Feierberg’s narrative to autobiographical reality; concerning the discrep-

ancy between the represented and real-life father in Le’an , Mintz writes:

Is not the sort of confessional act distinguished by its psychological

realism; and Nahman is not the kind of autobiographical hero who is

driven to understand how his identity emerged out of conflict with his

parents and to settle scores for the price he was made to pay. The

figure of the father lies much closer to myth than gritty reality. 154

This is confusing: a ‘‘confessional act’’ lacking of ‘‘psychological real-

ism’’ and without biographical grounding is surely compromised one way

or the other. All the more so, an autobiographical confessional act that in

the account of the formative years of childhood eschews the ‘‘gritty real-

ity’’ of bios in favor of ‘‘myth.’’ Are, for example, Tolstoy’s A Confession

and his Kreutzer Sonata , both of whose forms are confessional, to be read

at the same autobiographical frequency? Here, as elsewhere in his study,

Mintz actually seems to operate according to essentially New Critical

criteria according to which the novel is somehow on a higher plane than

the autobiography. 155 The teleological trajectory of his study traces the

quasi-Hegelian ‘‘sublation’’ of autobiography by the novel, of the docu-

mentary and nonfictional by the fictional. He thus appears to be in essen-

tial agreement with the hypostasized ‘‘novelist,’’ who, he writes (apropos

of Brenner’s achievement),

may well argue that the truth he reaches for is deeper and even more

autobiographically authentic than the literal-minded adherences of bio-

graphical writing, and indeed the canons of the novel genre leave him

152. See Sh. Werses, ‘‘ . averim mesapperim ‘al Feierberg,’’ in idem, Mi-Men-

dele ‘ad Hazaz: sugiyot be-hitpat . ut ha-sipporet ha-‘ivrit (Jerusalem 1987), 119–36.

153. Sadan, Perakim , 80–99.

154. Mintz, Banished, 83–84.

155. For general discussions of the dilemmas posed by autobiography to New

Criticism and vice versa, see Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, index under

‘‘New Criticism’’; Lejeune, Pour l’autobiographie , 11–40.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

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free to work unencumbered in the space between biographical facts

and fictional representations. 156

It is the ‘‘study of how life is transformed into art, the quality of the

alteration, not the quantity’’ 157 that impels Mintz’s study—and note that

this is the polar opposite of Sadan’s assessment of Brenner and his con-

freres. Consistent with this, Mintz finds fault with Brenner’s Ba- . oref

when the existential howls of anguish of the narrator shatter the aesthetic

harmony of the artistic construct:

Sentences either end abruptly with exclamation marks or trail off un-

finished . . . This is writing as existential howl. Ejaculations abound;

‘‘oh’s’’ and ‘‘woe’s’’ stud the page . . . In sum, the canons of craft and

discipline set up by Brenner throughout the novel would urge us to

judge chapter 33 not as an excrescence of insight but simply as bad

writing. Its badness derives from its giving way to feeling. It is not as

if the wretchedness of spirit is not real—it is. 158

From the point of view of the novel, the well-wrought literary artifact,

Mintz may well be right; Montaigne entertained similar reservations con-

cerning the laying of the self bare in writing: ‘‘Is it . . . reasonable?,’’ he

asks:

That I should expose to a world in which grooming has such credit

and artifice such authority the crude and simple effects of Nature—and

of such a weakling nature too? Is writing a book without knowledge

or art not like building a wall without stones and so on? 159

From the point of view of autobiography, the shattering of aesthetic

norms upon impact with the expressive/confessional imperative may con-

stitute a high point of Ba- . oref. Indeed, it is a marker of many of Brenner’s

other writings whose singularity lies precisely in this recurring, and often

rude, intrusion of the ‘‘gritty reality’’ of the ‘‘I’’ of the author at the time

of writing. Chapter 33 (chapter 34, in my edition) may or may not be bad

writing. Yet to my mind one of the most unforgettable and disturbing

156. Lejeune, Pour l’autobiographie , 130.

157. Lejeune, Pour l’autobiographie , 130.

158. Lejeune, Pour l’autobiographie , 201.

159. Michel de Montaigne, ‘‘On Repenting,’’ in idem, The Complete Essays ,

trans., ed., and with an introduction by M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth, 1991),

908.

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images in the book occurs in this chapter: the sack and its insect-filled

interior, partially smeared with honey, that the narrator imagines tied

over his head. 160 Either way, bad writing may make good autobiography,

and vice versa. Hence Bialik, whose standards for aesthetic harmony and

Hebrew linguistic integrity were highly exacting, made allowances for

Brenner’s excesses. While critical of the ‘‘stylistic sloppiness’’ and ‘‘archi-

tectural flaws’’ of Brenner’s Misaviv ha-nekudah, Bialik writes, 161 ‘‘But

what do I care about ‘literary theory,’ if I see before me a living soul,

ardent emotion and fiery intellect penetrating each line and writhing in

each and every letter.’’ 162

Indeed, it could be argued that overattention to autobiography as aes-

thetic artifice, while making for ‘‘good’’ literature, may even detract from

the autobiographical value of a work that lies in presence/immediacy of

the self of the writer to the self of the reader. Thus, for example, I find

Bialik’s autobiographical letter to Joseph Klausner, and his earlier auto-

biographical letters from Volozhin, which formed the blueprint for his

Safi . , more compelling than the latter work as autobiography, even

though Safi . , in terms of style, tropology, symbolic motifs, and so forth,

is infinitely richer. As autobiography, Safi . is, to my mind, overblown,

on occasion rhetorically, emotionally, and referentially excessive to the

point of inducing vertigo or even nausea; its very literariness ‘‘conceals’’

where the letters ‘‘reveal,’’ to adopt Bialik’s terminology in his Gilui ve-

khissui be-lashon , whose central problematic is the function of language as

‘‘defence’’ or barrier to transparency of the self to self/self to other. 163

That literary sophistication may lie, though does not do so of necessity,

in inverse proportion to autobiographical expression is also demonstrated

by the YIVO youth autobiographies, many of whose authors are quite

candid in drawing attention to their lack of literary finesse, even of full

command of the language in which they write:

I am sure that you will find my work very useful, although the language

is perhaps not very good. But this isn’t my fault, as I never attended a

160. See Brenner, Ba- . oref , in his Ketavim , 4:262–63.

161. Brenner had submitted the piece to Ha-shiloa . , where Bialik was then

literary editor.

162. As cited by Werses in his Bikoret ha-bikoret: ha-‘arakhot ve-gilgulehem (Tel

Aviv, 1982), 126. And compare A. D. Friedman: ‘‘Surely one cannot demand of

the man standing up and confessing before you, that he pay heed to the external

form of his confession!’’ as cited by Sadan, Midrash , 31.

163. See Zamir, ‘‘Safi . ,’’ as cited above. And on Gilui ve-khissui , see Nathan

Rotenstreich, ‘‘ ‘Al Gilui ve-khissui be-lashon’’ in his Sugiyot be-filosofiyah (Tel Aviv,

1961), 398–408.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

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Yiddish school, and therefore my writing is full of mistakes—please

take this into account. If you can, please send me some material that

will teach me how to write Yiddish well. 164

That autobiographical imperative and literary/aesthetic considerations

may clash may also be evinced in autobiographical texts of highly sophis-

ticated litterateurs ; thus the paranoid Rousseau of the later books of the

Confessions , who confesses, ‘‘Now, the disturbances of my later life have

become too unpleasant to be capable of straightforward narration . . . my

story can only proceed at haphazard, according as the ideas come back

into my mind.’’ 165 And in his introduction to Rousseau Judge of Jean Jacques:

Dialogues , ‘‘On the Subject and Form of this Writing’’:

What I had to say was so clear and I felt it so deeply that I am amazed

by the tediousness, repetitiousness, verbiage and disorder of this writ-

ing . . . Seeing the excessive length of these dialogues, I tried several

times to prune them, eliminate the frequent repetitions and introduce

some order and continuity . . . It is impossible for me to retain anything,

collate two sentences, and compare two ideas . . . I am even forced to

abandon multitudes of ideas that are better or better expressed than

those which are here, ideas I had scribbled on scraps of paper hoping

I could easily incorporate them . . . After all I have said just about

everything I had to say. It is drowned in a chaos of disorder and repeti-

tions, but it is there. 166

Within the context of Jewish autobiography, a similar phenomenon may

be observed in what, to my mind, is one of the most significant and pow-

erfully affecting contemporary Jewish autobiographies: Amos Oz’s Sippur

‘al ahavah ve- . oshekh (Tale of love and darkness), a work that in terms of

literary structure is diffuse, rambling, frequently repetitive, on occasion

even jejune. Oz himself, in a metareflective passage quite similar to that

of Rousseau, notes this:

An uncompleted chapter of this book awaits me on my table in a heap

of scribbled drafts, crumpled slips and half pages full of erasures: this

is the chapter on Teacher Isabella Nahalieli from the ‘‘Homeland of the

Child’’ school and about her whole army of cats. I will have to make a

164. See Jeffrey Shandler, ed., Awakening Lives , 296, and compare ‘‘Forget Me

Not’’ in Awakening Lives, 123.

165. Rousseau, Confessions , 574.

166. Rousseau Judge of Jean Jacques: Dialogues: Dialogues ,5–6.

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few omissions and to erase from the chapter several cat-incidents and

several episodes about Getsel Nahalieli, the clerk; to be sure, these

were entertaining incidents, but they contribute nothing to the progres-

sion of the narrative. Contribute? Progression? As if I even knew at

this point what would contribute to the progression of the story, as if I

had the faintest idea whither this story wants to go, and why, in fact,

there is any need for contributions? Or progression? 167

I think that Mintz’s implicit preference for literary over autobiographi-

cal achievement leads him to considerably underestimate the scale and

significance of the autobiographical phenomenon in Hebrew and Yiddish

literary discourse. He treads the highways of Hebrew literature; but a

short detour in the byways reveals a very considerable group of Hebrew

and Yiddish autobiographers who barely figure, if at all, on today’s ca-

nonical literary map: Kotik, as mentioned above, A. A. Friedman, Buki

Ben Yogli (Katznelson), R. Brainin, Rabbi Binyamin (Radler-Feldman),

P. Hirshbein, M. Ravich (Bergner), A. Almi (Sheps), and the list could

well continue. Some of these, moreover, do in fact reflect upon the crisis

of faith, as do many of the YIVO autobiographers, writing well after

Brenner in the 1930s. Of course, it would be virtually impossible to in-

clude discussions of every single one of these autobiographies in a syn-

thetic analysis of the topic; were such a study to be undertaken, it would

result in a multivolume work on the scale of that of Misch. And the gener-

alization certainly does hold, both in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, that

the drift in the first half of the twentieth century is from the autobio-

graphical to the memoiristic end of the life-writing spectrum. Yet to claim

that, with several exceptions that prove the rule, the history of Hebrew

and Yiddish autobiography is essentially exhausted by the five autobio-

graphical texts that Mintz discusses at length, after which the individual

autobiographical voice is reabsorbed by and into the ‘‘normative,’’ ‘‘unre-

mittingly collective’’ ‘‘mode of Jewish literature,’’ 168

is surely a misread-

ing, albeit, pace Harold Bloom, a strong one.

This restriction of purview is further restricted by Mintz’s thematic

insistence upon the crisis of faith/erotic complex as necessary components

of Jewish autobiography. First of all, it is extremely problematic to define

autobiography, or the novel come to that, by its content. While it is true

that with the protracted waning of the nineteenth century, the crisis of

faith recedes from a central position in the lives, experienced and written,

167. See Amos Oz, Sippur ‘al ahavah ve- . oshekh , 351.

168. See Mintz, Banished , 206.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

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of many Hebrew/Yiddish autobiographers 169 —and, more generally in

those of Jews and non-Jews writing in other languages—this does not

mean that Hebrew/Yiddish autobiography effectively ceased to exist after

Brenner’s Ba- . oref , a work, Mintz writes, ‘‘whose authority seems to ex-

haust the possibilities of a genre and discourage further attempts at devel-

opment.’’ 170 Within the wider context of literary/historical dynamics, it

would be strange indeed if such were the case: surely the pinnacles of

literary achievement provide fecund models for emulation that do not

stultify. Otherwise, the English sonnet, not to mention the historical

drama, may well have disappeared from the literary landscape after

Shakespeare; the Russian novel, after Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyev-

sky. In Hebrew literature, for example, Bialik’s autobiographical account

of his childhood in a Ukrainian village, Safi . , provided the ‘‘model par

excellence,’’ not only for the childhood accounts of those of his own gen-

eration, who preserved memories of similar Eastern European childhood

landscapes, but also ‘‘anomalously,’’ as Ziva Shamir and Tsvi Luz point

out:

For the childhood narratives of the members of the generation of the

struggle for independence (Hanokh Bartov, Binyamin Tammuz, and

latterly even S. Yizhar), for those of the generation of statehood (Am-

alia Kahana Karmon, Yitshaq Orpaz, Yehoshua Kenaz, Ruth Almog

and others) and up to the childhood narratives of Hayim Be’er and

those younger than him. 171

Amos Oz, whose above-mentioned autobiography is especially redolent

of the Bialik childhood of Safi . , may now be added to their number.

And yet, notwithstanding the extraordinarily long duration of Safi . in

Hebrew autobiographical discourse, Bialik is banished from the table of

Mintz’s autobiographers:

169. In the post–World War II center for Hebrew literature, Israel, the con-

version from Orthodox Judaism to secular belles-lettres as characterized by the

Eastern European period has until today been rare, thus altering the entire com-

plexion of all forms of Hebrew prose and poetry. The ‘‘secularizing of the sacral

and sacralizing of the secular,’’ in Bialik’s formulation, was a defining characteris-

tic of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the Eastern European period. See Bialik,

in ‘‘ Gillui ve-khissui be-lashon,’’ in Kitve H. N. Byalik (Tel Aviv, 1935), 2:229. And

see Sadan, ‘‘ Ben kodesh le- . ol,’’ in Ora . ot , 132–40.

170. Mintz, Banished , 205

171. Luz and Shamir, eds., ‘Al ‘‘Safi . ,’’ 9.

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Even the one gem of Bialik’s prose that is genuinely autobiographical,

‘‘Aftergrowth’’ ( Safi . ) falls outside the bounds of the present study

because it is attached to a wholly different tradition which is concerned

with the birth of the imagination in the child rather than the loss of

faith and its consequences in later life. 172

This exclusion from within the canon on thematic grounds of so central a

work surely undercuts Mintz’s more global claims for the indispensability

of the ‘‘apostasy narrative’’ in his epistemological framework for the un-

derstanding of the Jewish autobiographical phenomenon. Furthermore,

one cannot help but wonder at the lack of mention of another writer of

canonical status whose works would seem to fall very squarely within the

autobiography/apostasy/eros rubric—Isaac Bashevis Singer, the son of a

rabbi, and his obsessively autobiographical quest to ravel and unravel the

weave of loss of faith/erotic cravings/mortality sans afterlife. 173

All of the above leads me to question to what extent Mintz’s book really

is about autobiography. That is, of the threefold cord—autobiography/

apostasy/eros—it seems to me that autobiography is of subsidiary interest

and significance here. Mintz’s book finds an interesting analogue in the

essays of Barukh Kurzweil, for whom the defining and definitive crisis of

modern Hebrew literature is the loss of faith, both in God and in any

secular/humanist ideological substitutions for this loss. In tracing this the-

matic trajectory Kurzweil actually highlights the same texts as does

Mintz: Lilienblum’s despair with both religion and Haskalah as docu-

mented in . att’ot ne‘urim paved the way for Feierberg’s quintessential

encapsulation of the personal/national dimensions of this ‘‘double trag-

edy’’ in Le’an ; Berdichevsky in ‘Orva’ para . and Brenner in Ba- . oref , ad-

vancing further along the path to nihilism with Nietzsche as guide or will-

o’-the-wisp, probe the erotic complications arising in the wake of apos-

tasy. Kurzweil claims that the religious/existential ‘‘double tragedy’’ as

experienced by these writers—Brenner is a particular favorite and adver-

sary of his—served as the matrix for the high points of modern Hebrew

literary creativity, and that subsequently, with the loss of the loss of faith

element, this literature became much impoverished. This is essentially

what Mintz writes with respect to Hebrew autobiography. And finally,

Kurzweil, while noting on frequent occasions the confessional nature of

the texts he elucidates, is less concerned with their generic status as indi-

172. Mintz, Banished , 18.

173. See Khone Shmeruk, ‘‘Yitshok Bashevis: Af di shpurn fun zayn oytobio-

grafie,’’ Di goldene keyt 115 (Tel Aviv, 1985), 14–27.

JEWISH AUTOBIOGRAPHY—MOSELEY

59

vidual documents vecus than with the perspective these writings afford

on collective, generational, and national crisis. 174

The above critical engagement with Alan Mintz’s book has provided

me with an occasion for dialogue with myself, as much as anything else. I

have no doubt that subjection of my own work to such systematic analysis

would, and will, reveal no fewer self-contradictions in my own choice of

texts, modes of explication, criteria. But that is perhaps proper to the

ultimate aporia of the subject, ‘‘subject’’ in the sense both of ‘‘self’’ and

‘‘topic’’: the unknowability that is both the catalyst for the autobiographi-

cal project and the defining outer limit of its attainability. An ‘‘aporia’’ no

better put, nor unput, than by Beckett:

Where now? Who now? When now? Unbelieving. Questions. Hypothe-

ses, call them that . . . I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not

about me. These general remarks to begin with. What am I to do, what

shall I do, what should I do in my situation, how proceed? By aporia

pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as ut-

tered, or sooner, or later? Generally speaking. There must be other

shifts. Otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless. I

should mention before going any further, any further on, that I say

aporia without knowing what it means. 175

Georges Gusdorf has written that the ‘‘original sin of autobiography is

first one of logical coherence and rationalization.’’ 176 Looking back at it, I

believe that this is precisely the ‘‘original sin’’ of my own work, and per-

haps of all studies that seek to scrutinize, define, or, in Bob Dylan’s

words, ‘‘analyze,’’ ‘‘categorize,’’ or ‘‘finalize’’ 177 this protean form of litera-

ture that, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, continues to as-

sume so increasing a predominance in Jewish literature in all languages.

174. See Baruch Kurzweil, ‘‘Be’ayot yesod shel sifrutenu ha- . adashah’’ and

‘‘Ha-hashpa’ah shel filosifiyat ha- . ayyim ‘al ha-sifrut ha-‘ivrit bit . ilat ha-me’ah

ha-20,’’ in his Sifrutenu ha- . adashah: hemshekh o mahpekhah? (Tel Aviv, 1959),

passim.

175. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (New York, 1958), 3–4.

176. See Georges Gusdorf, ‘‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography’’ in

Olney, ed., Autobiography , 41.

177. Taken from the song ‘‘All I Really Want to Do.’’ The pertinent verse

runs: ‘‘I ain’t looking to block you up, / Shock or knock or lock you up, / Analyze

you, categorize you, / Finalize you or advertise you.’’ See Bob Dylan, Lyrics 1962–

1985 (New York, 1985), 129.