Weekly Questions 8

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Use these questions to help you through the readings. Write a one-to-two page (2 pages double-spaced tops) essay based on some aspects of these readings, and be prepared to discuss the readings and your reactions to them in class. Be sure to include comments on all three readings in your essay.

• Siegfried Kapper, To Vaclav Bolemir Nebesky (poem)
  
• Karel Havlicek, "A Jewish Poet Rejected by a Spokesman for the Czechs"
  
• Gisa Pickova-Saudkova memoir in Iggers, Women of Prague
  
• Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew
  
• Rebel and Penitent: Moses Leib Lilienblum (Dawidowicz)
  
• Pavel Axelrod, "Socialist Jews Confront the Pogroms"(Dawidowicz)
  
• Susan Glenn, "A Girl Wasn't Much"

Read and be prepared to discuss all these selections. Write a 1-2 page essay about one of the following two topics:

1. Jews who embraced modernization, often became "assimilated." What is assimilation? What did it mean to Pickova-Saudkova? Isaac Deutscher? Pavel Axelrod? How did Gentile reactions like Havlicek's review of Kapper or the Czech anti-Semitism encountered by Pickova-Saudkova, or the Russian pogroms affect assimilationist Jews?

2. Compare the lives of well-to-do bourgeois Jewish women like Pickova-Saudkova, and those of the working-class women featured in Susan Glenn's chapter "A Girl Wasn't Much." What strains did each of these types of Jewish women experience and what solutions were open to them?