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A Jewish Woman of Distinction: The Life and Diaries of Zinaida Poliakova

by ChaeRan Y. Freeze
translated by Gregory L. Freeze

Brandeis University Press, 2019
Cloth: 978-1-68458-002-6 | eISBN: 978-1-68458-003-3 | Paper: 978-1-68458-001-9

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Zinaida Poliakova (1863–1953) was the eldest daughter of Lazar Solomonovich Poliakov, one of the three brothers known as the Russian Rothschilds. They were moguls who dominated Russian finance and business and built almost a quarter of the railroad lines in Imperial Russia.
For more than seventy-five years, Poliakova kept detailed diaries of her world, giving us a rare look into the exclusive world of Jewish elites in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These rare documents reveal how Jews successfully integrated into Russian aristocratic society through their intimate friendships and patronage of the arts and philanthropy. And they did it all without converting—in fact, while staunchly demonstrating their Jewishness.

Poliakova’s life was marked by her dual identity as a Russian and a Jew. She cultivated aristocratic sensibilities and lived an extraordinarily lifestyle, and yet she was limited by the confessional laws of the empire and religious laws that governed her household. She brought her Russian tastes, habits, and sociability to France following her marriage to Reuben Gubbay (the grandson of Sir Albert Abdullah Sassoon). And she had to face the loss of almost all her family members and friends during the Holocaust.

Women’s voices are often lost in the sweep of history, and so A Jewish Women of Distinction is an exceptional, much-needed collection. These newly discovered primary sources will change the way we understand the full breadth of the Russian Jewish experience.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

ChaeRan Y. Freeze is professor of Near Eastern and Judaic studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Brandeis University. Her books include Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia and Everyday Jewish Life in Imperial Russia, 1772–1914: Select Documents. Gregory L. Freeze is the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of History at Brandeis University.

REVIEWS

“Introduced by an excellent discussion of the lives, self-understanding, and fate of Zinaida Poliakova and her family, this impressively annotated translation of Poliakova’s diaries provides a revealing depiction of the world of the Jewish elite in late Imperial Russia as experienced by a young woman from one its most prominent families.”

— William G. Wagner, Williams College

“The remarkable diaries of Zinaida Poliakova, deftly edited by ChaeRan Freeze, open onto the world of the ‘Russian Rothschilds,’ a world of high culture, vast privilege, and the skillful, constant fashioning of a hybrid Jewish-Russian identity. Whether the topic was a game of dominos or a royal reception, a music lesson or a marriage, Poliakova took up her pen and left us an invaluable, detailed record of her day-to-day life. The four diaries included in this volume, translated by Gregory Freeze, cover Poliakova’s Russian years, 1875–87. For the entire life of Poliakova, we turn to Freeze’s superb biographical essay, which extends Poliakova’s story to fin-de-siècle Paris; the whirlwind of the Holocaust; and the harsh realities, both personal and financial, of her postwar life in England. Taken together, the life and diaries of Poliakova comprise an important contribution to modern Jewish history.”

— Esther Schor, Princeton University

"The life of Zinaida Poliakova (1863–1953), Lazar’s eldest daughter, spanned her family’s dramatic rise and extended twilight. In her richly detailed introduction to Zinaida’s early diaries...Chaeran Freeze vividly tells her story, against the background of the Poliakovs’ business and social advancement, and their distinctive blending of Jewish and aristocratic Russian culture."

— Times Literary Supplement

"The research that went into this publication is truly outstanding, covering a wide range of subjects that until now have remained understudied, such as the role of Jewish entrepreneurs in the Russian economy, the everyday life of privileged Russian Jewish families, and the role of women in developing a modern hybrid Russian-Jewish identity.”

— The Russian Review

“I expected these books to show that the rise and fall of Jewish business dynasties tracked the great sweep of modern Jewish history – from the faltering hopes of emancipation, first kindled in late 18th-century Europe, to the Holocaust. To my surprise, in most cases, their demise came earlier. Whether in Austria, Russia or China, it was precipitated above all by war and political revolution, not by the expropriation and extermination of Europe’s Jews. After 1917 many of the Poliakovs and Gunzburgs were already stateless. For those who fled Nazi Europe, or died in Auschwitz like many of Zinaida’s family, the Holocaust marked the end point in a long process of decline."

— London Review of Books

"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."

— Slavic Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Zinaida Poliakova’s Life and Times: An Introduction

The Diaries

Appendix: Family Trees of the Poliakovs and Gubbays

Index

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