21.07.2012                      02.Aw. 5772                      Matot-Massei

Geschichte:

Her story: A 19th-century Russian grandmother

How Pauline Wengeroff (1833-1916) identified herself in her 1910 two-volume memoir.

The title of this piece is how Pauline Wengeroff (1833-1916) identified herself in her two-volume Memoirs of a Grandmother: "Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the 19th Century". My paternal grandmother, like Wengeroff, hailed from the Minsk district in the Pale of Settlement. The sole surviving document regarding Dora Landress (Levine) granted her freedom of movement for 12 months within the Pale; this 16-year-old was deemed illiterate because she knew only Yiddish….