Overview
In 1691, newly widowed at age forty-four, businesswoman Glikl of Hameln, Germany (1645–1724, born Glikl bas Judah Leib) began writing her memoirs. Her motives were threefold: to allay her grief, to educate her twelve children in ethics and family history, and to articulate how she might support herself. Glikl conceived of seven “books” (long chapters) and realized her project over several decades. Written in Old Yiddish, Glikl’s remarkable account of Jewish life in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Hamburg and Metz abounds with incident, humor, and sociohistorical detail. Glikl describes the legal and financial precarity of Jews in what is now Germany and France. She braves dark roads and drunken servants as she journeys for her profession, the trade of precious gems. She watches casks of dried meat spoil in her home as her father-in-law’s messianic expectations are disappointed. She attends a lavish wedding feast, inadvertently insults potential in-laws, rescues from ruin an impecunious son, survives a rampage in her synagogue, and has a mystical vision. Glikl’s autobiography, preserved by her family and first published in 1896, is the first by a Jewish woman.
In 1792 and 1793, Solomon Maimon (1753-1800, born Shelomo ben Yehoshua), published his Autobiography. An Enlightenment philosopher who took his surname from Maimonides, Maimon critiques the Jewish environment of his youth, a lost world in what is now Belarus, even as he introduces the thought of Maimonides to his non-Jewish readers. His picaresque account of his education, his personal life, his religious and philosophic growth, and his social misadventures dramatizes the Jewish encounter with modernity. Written in German and published in Berlin, Maimon’s is the first modern Jewish autobiography.
On June 12, 1942, Anne Frank (1929-1945), began writing in the diary she received for her thirteenth birthday. Born in Frankfurt am Main, she had been four years old when her family had moved to Amsterdam to seek safer conditions for Jews. On July 6, the Frank family went into hiding. Anne continued keeping her diary, which is in Dutch, writing it as a series of letters addressed largely to characters, “Kitty” among them, in a young-adult book series. On March 28, 1944, Anne heard the Dutch Minister of Education, Gerrit Bolkestein, speak on the radio from exile in London, urging the Dutch to preserve letters and diaries as a national record of the wartime years. Anne immediately began revising her diary for possible postwar publication. Now her diary became “a memoir in the form of diary entries” (Francine Prose), an “epistolary autobiography” (Judith Thurman), and “a coherent testimonial narrative” (Ruth Franklin). On August 4, 1944, the Frank family was arrested. In early 1945, Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. The Diary of Anne Frank, edited by Anne’s father soon after the war, is the most famous account of Jewish life in hiding during the Holocaust.
These three autobiographies, each of them lively and rich and moving, together illuminate three centuries of Ashkenazi Jewish life. Further, the publication history of these works reveals shifts in scholars’ values and readers’ interests. Only in 2019 were the full autobiographies of Glikl and Maimon published in English. Anne Frank’s revisions to her diary were first published in 1986 in Dutch and in 1989 in English, and received renewed attention this year in Ruth Franklin’s The Many Lives of Anne Frank, part of the Jewish Lives series of Yale University Press.
COURSE FORMAT
This is an interactive online seminar course that meets weekly over 6 weeks. Live online sessions will use the zoom platform. Weekly reading or other forms of materials may be assigned. Weekly sessions will be recorded and available for registered participants to access throughout the course.
There are no papers or grades. This course does not offer any credits or certificates. This course is intended for learning for the love of learning.
COURSE MATERIALS
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Registrants will receive access to the course website and the zoom links about two weeks before the course starts.
COURSE CANCELLATION POLICY
Registrants can cancel and receive a full refund up to September 29. After September 29, there will be no refunds issued.
Yale Alumni College courses are subject to schedule changes as well as cancellations. If Yale Alumni College must cancel any course prior to its start due to low enrollment, you will be notified of this by the cancellation date. Upon cancellation of a course, registrants may transfer their registration to another available course or have the registration fee fully refunded.
In the event of a disruption to the original course schedule, including but not limited to; Professor absence, hazardous weather conditions, or local travel restrictions, Yale Alumni College will do its best to reschedule the missed class for the week immediately following the original end date at the same course time and day.
Photos: Glikl
By Leopold Pilichowski - Siehe auch: Artikel Leopold Pilichowski in Palästina mit Abbildung dieses Gemäldes, in der Zeitschrift „Menora“, Jahrgang 1925, Heft 8–9 (August 1925)Uploaded to de.wikipedia 16:05, 26. Jan 2006 Bender235 481 x 602 (226520 Byte) (Bertha Pappenheim im Kostüm der Glikl bas Judah Leib. Gemälde von Leopold Pilichowski (1869-1933)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=751563
Anne Frank
By Unknown photographer - Anne Frank, 1942, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=153728801
Salomon Maimon
By Wilhelm Arndt - Jewish Encyclopedia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=720899