EVERITHING that Wengeroff valued in traditional culture—above all, subordination of personal wishes to higher (religious) ideals and to parental authority and that of the community—she says her children and their generation had violated. True, she blames the parents but she does not absolve this youth.

Another youth, however, arose during the era of the pogroms. Not the youth of some bygone, pre-modern time to which Wengeroff supposedly harked back but an ‘enlightened’ youth who nonetheless, in her words, had not gone ‘astray to the alien in that dark time’. Among them were many who found their way back to the Jewish people and who, under the influence of recent events, closed ranks. Indeed, as a reaction to antisemitism (she uses this word, coined only in 1879, in Germany), ‘the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) society arose, founded by Dr. Pinsker, Dr. Lilienblum, and others’. It is to this youth that Wengeroff says she relates—for the first time—the ‘dreadful event’ of her sons’ conversion, something she had not previously shared even with her intimates:

These are Wengeroff 's grandchildren, for whom Memoirs is written.