Sculptures in Memory

Memoirs, ii. 26

Recalling the day she sat down to write of the memories called up, she claims, by a chance encounter with a cache of letters from her fiancé during their engagement, Pauline Wengeroff uses an evocative and unintentionally revealing image. ‘One picture after the other rises’, she says, ‘like true sculptures in my memory.’ This simile, which supposedly captures a spontaneous welling-up of memory, actually betrays the fact that Wengeroff 's ‘remembrance of things past’ was nothing like Proust's and anything but accidental, without volition or direction. Sculptures are the result of deliberate, intentional fashioning. They do not simply ‘arise’.

But Wengeroff 's image is revealing in another way that inadvertently gives entrée to understanding her as a memoirist. Sculptures are created through excision. Not because the material removed is dross; think of Michelangelo's Blockhead Slave, Unfinished Atlas, or Battle of the Centaurs, where excision lines are visible in precious marble, over whose selection the artist was known to have laboured for months. The sculptor chisels, the potter removes the same material from which the finished work is fashioned; there is no other way to produce their art. The raw material of Wengeroff 's Memoirs is memory, something she certainly presents as exceedingly, even supremely, precious. It is her only credential as an author. Why would anyone read what she has to say unless her memory, and its substance—her memories—are first rate? Memory is her—and through her, our—only link to a lost culture and time, the only way that culture will not be utterly lost. Wengeroff claims to have a memory ‘like a stamp in wax’ and there is more corroboration of the truth of this assertion than not. But she does not simply call up scenes from her life and times as they ‘arise’. She writes memoirs—cultural memoirs of the Jews of Russia in the nineteenth century, as her subtitle proclaims, seen through carefully selected excerpts from her experience and that of her family and social circle. She omits much information we would expect to find, about personal and family realities and larger, cultural ones, too. As we will see, these omissions flag crucial elements in her experience, world-view, and sense of self.