ABSTRACT
The author of this autobiography, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922), was born in Luzhky, in Lithuania, at that time part of the Czarist empire. Lithuania contained some of the major centers of East European Jewry. At the close of the nineteenth century, when the first reliable census was taken, about 1,500,000 Jews lived in Lithuania—more than one-eighth of the total population—and there were over three hundred communities with more than 1,000 Jews in them. In some of the smaller towns and villages, Jews were a majority of the population. (It should be noted, though, that in the 1860s and 1870s, when Ben-Yehuda was growing up, the population must have been somewhat smaller than at the time of the census of 1897; a considerable population explosion took place during the nineteenth century, and it was even greater among the Jews than among the rest of the inhabitants.)
