In the past couple of decades, a number of memoirs of Jewish women's lives in the tsarist empire have been translated and published. These 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. At the same time, these are also mediated narratives, usually produced only after the upheaval of wars, genocides, and revolutions has destroyed the world they describe. The discovery and publication of a diary of a Jewish woman from the late nineteenth century is thus a rare and valuable source.

Zinaida Lazarevna Poliakova lived from 1863–1952 and kept a diary for much of that time. ChaeRan Freeze's edition of the diary, smoothly and ably translated by Gregory Freeze, includes a lengthy and detailed introduction and the diary entries from 1875 through 1887. The Poliakov family, as Freeze carefully documents in the introduction, were among the elite of Russian Jewish society. They resided in Moscow, where most Jews could not legally live, and their social circles included the handful of other wealthy Jewish families as well as members of the upper crust of Russian society. In the introduction, in explanatory notes in the diary, and in an essential family tree in the appendix, Freeze has painstaking recontructed what she terms the “complex jigsaw puzzle” (xv) of this social world based on evolving diminutives, initials, and other hints. 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.

Like most adolescents, Poliakova uses her diary mainly to vent about perceived slights and rivalries within the home, to gossip about friends and relatives and their entanglements, and to discuss recent and upcoming social events. Russian politics and Jewish life make only brief cameo appearances in the flow of operas, illnesses, international travel, balls, engagements, and the politics of home life. In an entry from July 11, 1881 written from the family dacha in Sokol΄niki, Poliakova mentions a cousin's engagement, the weather, her attire, the previous evening's musical event, visitors, the commutation of Gesia Gel΄man's death sentence, her uncle's business contacts, further plans for the day, and relations with a prickly governess all in quick succession. The names of a variety of Russian political leaders and cultural figures are sprinkled throughout the diary, but mainly without much comment. Poliakova was proud of the private synagogue her father had built in Moscow but largely indifferent to the practice of Judaism. Birthdays and name days receive far more attention than Jewish holidays.

Diaries are, by their nature, self-centered documents. Anyone looking for a cogent analysis of the state of the Russian autocracy, what it means to live a Jewish life in the rarified atmosphere of the social and financial elite, or gendered expectations in Russian and Jewish life will be disappointed. Nonetheless, the attentive reader can find evidence of all of these aspects of society mixed in among the minutiae of daily life in a household of great privilege. Those interested in fashion, education, books, music, social hierarchies, and the customs governing entertainment and interactions in this class will find a wealth of information.

While the diary portion of the book covers only the period of Poliakova's early notebooks, before her marriage and move to France in 1891, the introduction treats the rise and fall of the Poliakov family as well as Poliakova's wartime and postwar experiences. Indeed, the tremendous span of her life reminds us that these seemingly distinct time periods were in fact connected. Although it would have been interesting to have access to the later materials, especially regarding Poliakova and her daughter's fortunate escape from France during the Holocaust, Freeze explains in the Preface that the later portions of the diary were “elliptical and laconic” (xiii) and thus not possible to include. One hopes that Freeze may be able to prepare other notebooks for publication at some later stage.

In her diary, Zinaida Poliakova comes across as a strong-willed, socially adept, frustrating, and frustrated woman. In combination with ChaeRan Freeze's thorough introduction, the reader can appreciate Poliakova's own limitations, as well as the limitations imposed on her by her time and place. While she is certainly not representative of Russian Jews of the era, she grants us an inside view of usually hidden aspects of Russian and Jewish life as seen through the eyes of a privileged witness.