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Guenzburg, Lilienblum, and the Shape of Haskalah Autobiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2009

Alan Mintz
Alan Mintz
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

Haskalah autobiography, as S. Werses has surveyed it, is a wide field which includes such well known figures as I. S. Reggio, S. D. Luzzatto, M. H. Letteris, A. Gottlober, S. Y. Fuenn, J. L. Gordon, M. A.Guenzburg, and M. L. Lilienblum. The fact that these names are well known—and known to us from works other than their autobiographies—is significant. Most of these works are accounts of the author's literary and cultural activity, and they interest us now, if they do at all, as portals to a more complete comprehension of that activity. Reggio, for example, describes his call to Jewish learning and the progress of his career as a scholar; in provoking detail in the pages of Ha-maggid, Luzzatto gives an authorized version of the canon of his works; Letteris and Fuenn offer not so much portraits of themselves as reminiscences of such famous figures from the milieu in which they worked as Rappaport and Krochmal; and Gottlober deflects attention from himself in another way by confining himself to an ethnographic account of the Volhynia and Podolia of his youth.

Type
Research Article
Information
AJS Review , Volume 4 , April 1979 , pp. 71 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 1979

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References

1. Werses, Samuel, “Darkhei ha-'avtobiogerafyah bi-tequfat ha-Haskalah, ” Gilyonot 17 (1945): 175–83.Google Scholar

2. Aaron Guenzberg, Mordecai, 'Avi'ezer (Tel Aviv, 1967, photoreproduction of 1st ed., Vilna, 1864), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar Page references are to this edition.

3. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore, 1975), p. 17.Google Scholar

4. Digressions, such as those on Christians and heretics (p. 44), class differences (p. 50), and marriage (p. 52), would seem to be modeled on Maimon's practice in the Autobiography.

5. Lilienblum, Moses Leib, Ketavim 'otobiogerafiyim, ed. Shlomo Breiman (Jerusalem, 1970), 2: 109. All references are to this edition according to volume and page (e.g., 2: 109) and are translated by the present writer.Google Scholar

6. In Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), Lionel Trilling describes the French conception of sincerity as “telling the truth about oneself to oneself and to others; by truth is meant a recognition of such of one's own traits or actions as are morally or socially discreditable and, in conventional course, concealed” (p. 58). See also, Henri Peyre, Literature and Sincerity (New Haven, 1963). I use “authenticity” here in the Sartrian sense of acceptance of responsibility for one's liberty through avoidance of bad faith.Google Scholar

7. See Zenkovsky, V. V., A History of Russian Philosophy, trans. George I. Kline (New York 1953), p. 322. Lilienblum mentions Chernychevski's influence on 2: 72.Google Scholar

8. Masaryk, Thomas G., The Spirit of Russia, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, 2d ed. (New York 1955), p. 398.Google Scholar

9. Zenkovsky, p. 338.

10. Lilienblum compares his lot to that of Pisarev on 2: 96 (see Breiman's quotation of the manuscript diary in n. 96). Also see Lilienblum's retrospective remarks on Pisarev on 3: 195. In reference to Turgenev, see n. 91, 2: 72.

11. Pisarev, D. I., “Bazarov, ” in Sochineniya, 2 (Moscow, 1955): 7–50; translated by Lydia Hooke in the Norton edition of Fathers and Sons, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York, 1966), p. 202.Google Scholar

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., p. 211.

14. What could be more pathetic than Lilienblum's writing a long poem on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his marriage called “A Prisoner's Lament” ('Enqat 'asir, 2: 196–203)?

15. Kol kitvei H. Y. Brenner (Tel Aviv, 1961), 3: 109.

16. On the space of individuality in late nineteenth-century Hebrew literature, see my “Mordecai Zev Feierberg and the Reveries of Redemption, ” AJSreview 2 (1977): esp. 171–74.Google Scholar

17. See the citation Breiman brings from the manuscript of Derekh teshuvah (2: 153, n. 34) in which Lilienblum plays with the reader's curiosity concerning the final outcome of the relationship.

18. This seems to be the case for all intents and purposes, though once again Lilienblum plays with the possibility of persistence when he begins the first two letters of Derekh teshuvahaddressing his correspondent in the feminine as “Yedidati, ” without giving anything away in the letters themselves (2: 154, 156).

19. Breakdown and Bereavement, trans. Halkin, Hillel (Ithaca, 1971), p. 142.Google Scholar

20. Kol kilvei H.Y. Brenner, 3: 109. See also 2: 292–93. On the connection between Brenner and Lillienblum, see Rabinowitz, Ya'aqov, “Mosheh Leib Lilienblum ve-gilgulei mho, ” Gilyonol 15 (1943): 176–81.Google Scholar