ABSTRACT
Samuel S. Bloom’s My Memories and Abraham Frumkin’s In the Springtime of Jewish Socialism are the two autobiographies represent not only in their languages, but also in other respects, polar antitheses of modern Jewish life. In any case, they supplement each other, so that any adequate picture of Jewish life in the last seventy years should take into account the material of both of them. The earlier part of the My Memories contains a great deal of pathos. The orphan’s sufferings due to human indifference, to abject poverty and the horribly crowded conditions not only in the old country but even when he first came here in the early ‘80’s, are told in the everyday unaffected language of a simple person. Young Frumkin gradually broke away from Orthodoxy through his insatiable desire for knowledge, and soon drifted into the Jewish anarchist movement in London and New York.
