This book is a nostalgic reminiscence of selected episodes from the life of Oskar Gruzenberg (1866-1940), a noted Russian-Jewish attorney whose courtroom successes in a wide range of political trials during the last two decades of the tsarist regime culminated in his brilliant defence of Mendel Beiliss in the notorious 1913 ritual murder trial in Kiev. Gruzenberg recounts scenes of his youth and of legal dramas in which he was a participant. He also describes some of the well-known writers he knew and relates several successful interventions with Russian bureaucrats during World War I in order to avert miscarriages of justice. Gruzenberg comes across in these memoirs as a skilful lawyer, eloquent advocate, humanitarian liberal, and passionate lover of the Russian language and literature. But his personal limitations are painfully evident. Thus Stalin is motivated, above all, by the desire to destroy the old world (p. 69), an observation that indicates no striking insight on Gruzenberg's part into Stalin's lust for power or Machiavellian skill. Gruzenberg does recount his feelings of loyalty to the oppressed Jewish people, noting that he refused to consider conversion to Christianity even though this would have furthered his career immeasurably. Gruzenberg's memoirs reveal the classic ambivalence of the acculturated Jew who finds himself to be far more closely attached to Jewry than he at first admits. Traditional Jews and Jewish learning were largely alien to him, but a common Jewish situational bond and certain Jewish emotional valences retain their hold.

One is somewhat mystified as to why this book, of all the still untranslated works of Russian-Jewish autobiography, was singled out for such distinction. The book may be of some use to historians of the Russian judiciary, but on the jacket its contribution to modem Jewish history has been greatly exaggerated by the publisher. Even though the Russian original was published in 1938, there is no mention of Gruzenberg's activities during the Russian Revolution or during his years of exile, when he drew closer to Zionism and played a notable role in the lively RussianJewish emigre colonies in Berlin, Riga and Paris. The translator, Don C. Rawson, devoted much care to preparing the volume: literary allusions are meticulously explained; people mentioned in passing are carefully identified; there is even a diagram of the court system of late-Imperial Russia.