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. Biography Wengeroff was born in 1833 in Bobrujsk, Belorussia (currently Belarus), and grew up in Brest-Litovsk, in the Minsk district. 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. Writing The first volume of Wengeroff's memoirs reflects the years of her childhood, the 1830s and 40s. It details the lives of traditional Jews in the region Jews called "Lite" (Lithuania), in the years that the Russian Jewish enlightenment movement, the haskalah, was taking off and Jewish traditionalism and modernity began to clash. Raised in a strictly gendered traditional society, Wengeroff gives a rare, detailed account of the ritual practices and beliefs of women (as well as those of men) in her well-to-do, pious, family, and paints keen vignettes that illustrate the collision between traditionalism and modernity playing out intergenerationally in her own and other families. Volume One, while not uncritical, is a loving elegy to a world that Wengeroff felt was being lost by the time she wrote the full version of her memoirs, toward the end of the nineteenth century. Wengeroff's second volume is about her adult life, starting with her being groomed for marriage, which was arranged with the son of a wealthy family from Ukraine who were adherents of Habad hasidism. Here, too, Wengeroff's detailed depiction of the steps toward arranged engagement and the experience of marriage, told from a woman's perspective, provide rare and precious testimony. Wengeroff's husband, Chonon, lost his faith while on pilgrimage to his rebbe, the details of which experience she says he never shared. Conflict between them over traditional observance—she had not lost her own faith—quickly ensued and, within their marriage, the couple fought its own version of the larger Jewish struggle over traditionalism and modernity. Notably, Wengeroff insists that there was a