Pauline Wengeroff

Pauline Wengeroff (1833–1916), born Pessele Epstein, was the author of a first-of-its kind memoir by a Jewish woman, in which she refracts a period in Jewish history—the emergence and unfolding of Jewish modernity in nineteenth-century Russian Poland—through the experience of women and families. Her two-volume memoirs, Memoiren einer Grossmutter, Bilder aus der Kulturgeschichte der Juden Russlands im 19 Jahrhundert ('Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century'), were originally published in German (with some Hebrew and Yiddish and a few words in Polish) by the German-Jewish publishing house, Poppelauer, beginning in 1908. The work was subsequently re-published several times to rave reviews in the Jewish and non-Jewish presses.