Lucy Dawidowicz writes in the introduction to this recently republished book: ‘This is a book about East European Jews in crisis, challenge and creativity from the end of the eighteenth century until their cataclysmic destruction in the Second World War.’ She has prepared a collection of extracts from the autobiographies of eminent Jews or memoirs which show the deep changes which have occurred in the last two centuries in Jewish life in East Europe. She argues that'… the most direct form of history, the autobiography, is history's most intimate disclosure, a man's assessment of his life, his acts and ideas, successes and failures … ’. I feel that there is some exaggeration in these words. Autobiographical documents and memoirs differ greatly in their value and even the best of them should not be considered uncritically as historical sources. Some are indeed really of great importance. Others, however, have served as self-justification for authors trying to hide some dark side of their past and who therefore present only what they consider noble. Sometimes the authors omit important facts. One of the representatives of the Haskala, Moses Leib Lilienblum, quoted in this book, has written: ‘Luzzato's autobiography is as hollow as the parched ears of corn in Pharoah's dream.’ Every historian should bear this statement in mind in using documents of this kind. Dawidowicz is, however, aware of this problem and has chosen truly important memoirs, works that reveal many different sides of Jewish life and thought.

The book does not present Jewish life in all its real variety. The life of Jewish shopkeepers, artisans, farmers, workers and luftmenshen is far less represented than that of scholars, rabbis, rebbes, teachers and artists. The autobiographies and memoirs contained in this book concern mainly the Jewish intellectual elite and the life of common people appears only on the margin. Even in this sphere there are lacunae. The most important gap is the paucity of material on the twentieth century. Most of the memoirs are connected with the evolution of the Jewish intellectual and political life before the First World War. Only in a few cases do we find anything about the period 1918-1939 (and almost exclusively about PolishJewry), nothing about the First World War. The importance of these years in Jewish life does not need to be stressed.