Preparing a Scholarly Annotated Translation of Simon Dubnov's "The Book of Life"

FAIN: RZ-50407-05

University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6205)
Benjamin I. Nathans (Project Director: November 2004 to June 2009)

Publication of an annotated translation of The Book of Life, the memoirs of the Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnov. (24 months)

Simon Dubnov (1860-1941) was one of the most influential historians of modern Jewry. We propose the first English translation of his magisterial autobiography, "The Book of Life" (published between 1934 and 1940), with a substantial introduction and scholarly annotations based on collaborative research on three continents. With its superb weaving of the existential and the ethnographic, "The Book of Life" offers one of the richest and most self-reflective accounts of Jewish life in Europe before the Holocaust. It will appeal to readers interested in modern Jewish history and memory, the history of late Imperial Russia, and 20th-century autobiography.