…memoirs of Jewish women’s lives in the tsarist empire … are not only remarkable historical sources, but also wonderful to use in the classroom. Whether for general Russian history classes or for learning about the Jewish experience in eastern Europe, they grant us access to the domestic sphere, educational institutions, marriage markets and aspects of interpersonal and intercommunal interactions not typically available in archival documents. … The discovery and publication of a diary of a Jewish woman from the late nineteenth century is thus a rare and valuable source. …Freeze has painstaking recontructed what she terms the “complex jigsaw puzzle” (xv) of this social world…. The result is an intimate portrait of the daily trials of a young woman seeking to define herself in the midst of a large and extravagantly wealthy family living in a highly structured patriarchal society undergoing rapid change.
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