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Thus there began to form, or to show itself within me that heart so proud and yet so tender, that effeminate and yet indomitable character which, constantly vacillating between weakness and courage,…
For the two reasons specified below, I have given myself the surname “Wasserzug”; the first reason is that when I was five or six years of age, I was playing with some young children, I believe, in a…
With the passing of childhood and the waning of the impatient eagerness of adolescence, I was rapidly realizing that this was neither the best of all possible worlds, nor one that the optimism of late…
[ . . . ] I have always felt it as a particular honor that a man of such outstanding importance as Theodor Herzl was the first to champion me publicly from his exposed and therefore responsible…
I was born on 19 February 1758 in Nový Bydžov [in Bohemia] of well-to-do parents who destined me at birth to be a rabbi, a common practice among the Israelites then. For at that time, when all…
On the twelfth of the month of Elul in the year five thousand four hundred and eighty-nine, Menaḥem the scribe and teacher of young children in the community of Dessau, became the father of Moses,…
The new Rabbi pleased everybody, because he was beyond all doubt a righteous man. I was then a boy of twelve. My father received two letters from Rabbi Yukel on the subject of a good match for me in…
However modestly my parents lived in the country, however little I was used to luxury and every comfort, at least at home I was used to cleanliness and order…
In Brownsville tenements the kitchen is always the largest room and the center of the household. As a child I felt that we lived in a kitchen to which four other rooms were annexed. My mother, a “home…
I was the fourth [child] born and the first son, a tender darling to my father and my mother (cf. Prov. 4:3) after my mother had given birth to three daughters. My parents were worriers and trembled…