A businesswoman, philanthropist, daughter of a prominent Jewish family, the wife (sequentially) of two wealthy men influential in German and French Jewish communal affairs, and the mother of fourteen children, Glikl of Hameln (1645–1724) was also the author of a remarkable Yiddish memoir. Chava Turniansky, who has edited a new English translation of this work, notes that although Glikl carefully composed it for posterity, she did not give it a title, or, as was the convention then, identify its genre:
Why did Glikl refrain from giving her book a title or naming its genre? Was it only because she did not intend to have it published? . . . [E]ven later on, when Glikl’s grandson supplied the copy his father had made from her manuscript with a regular title page, he, too, abstained from providing a title. He did adorn the page with a biblical verse in the conventional manner, but when referring to the work itself called it simply haksav (the writing). Not only did Glikl refrain from granting her book a title, but throughout her writing she avoided labeling it in any way, referring to it only as “it,” “this,” “such,” or “what I am writing.”
“I intend, God willing, to leave all this for you [i.e., her children] in seven little books, if God grants me life”—she says. “Therefore I think it would be most appropriate to begin with my birth.” Glikl’s “seven little books” (by which she means chapters) are so utterly different from anything published and known in the Jewish world until then that it is not surprising that she did not have a word to describe what she was writing.
Among those works written by Ashkenazi women before the Enlightenment that have come down to us—all but one or two of them in Yiddish—no other account of a personal life exists.
[There is but one] missing leaf from the nearly 200 the manuscript comprises. However, this can hardly be the reason for the fact that the period of the writer’s formative years, her growth and education, her evolution from childhood into maturity—precisely the topic that research of modern autobiography since Rousseau’s Confessions considers to be the key to and the quintessence of the genre—is almost entirely missing from her book.
Two brief excerpts from the memoir can be read at the link below.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/5773/the-warning-song-and-the-medlars-two-stories/