Memoirs of a Grandmother

Pessele (Pauline, Polina) Epshteyn grew up in Brisk (Brest-Litovsk, Belarus) in an observant and affluent family; she studied in a heder for girls and learned German and Russian from private tutors. In 1849, she married the merchant Khonen Vengerov (Wengeroff), with whom she had seven children; to Wengeroff’s dismay, early in their relationship, Khonen, though raised in a Hasidic household, began to shed his engagement with traditional Judaism and to assimilate ever more actively to Russian civic life. Employed in the state-administered liquor trade, the family became wealthy, integrated into the small but growing subculture of Russified and Russian-speaking Jews, and gave their children a thorough modern European education. Most of Wengeroff’s children converted in their youth to Christianity, which she described as her greatest tragedy. In 1908, she published (in German) her two-volume Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, which interweaves her family’s narrative with her reflections on the traditional Jewish life she had known and the radical transformations of Jewish life she witnessed. The Wengeroffs also founded religious-vocational schools in Minsk for underprivileged Jewish youth.