| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Michael Stanislawski. Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning. (Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies.) Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 209. Cloth $35.00, paper $18.95.

In his new study, Michael Stanislawski asks how the historian can use autobiography, understood as a form of narrative more beholden to an overriding sense of self than to a full disclosure of the truth about the self. The principle determining which "autobiographical Jews" to include in the work was the author's sense of the compelling interest of their stories, rather than the typicality of their lives. Although Stanislawski modestly states that he makes no claim to a comprehensive discussion of Jewish life or autobiography, his list of subjects, including Josephus, Asher of Reichshofen, Glikl of Hameln, Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Osip Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, and Sarah Kofman, is remarkably inclusive. Notwithstanding the author's stated intention to question the meaningfulness of the category "Jewish history" and the necessity of a boundary between Jewish and non-Jewish history, his book provides a panoramic view of Jewish history and the particular preoccupations of some of its most fascinating actors, without the aura of hagiography that, as Stanislawski points out, has characterized much previous scholarship on these figures.

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