Customer Reviews

An Autobiography

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This is an amazing book and I am surprised it is not better known. It tells about the life of a Polish Jew who escaped from what he considered the stifling atmosphere of Polish Hasidic life and went to Germany to become part of the German Enlightenment. He translated Kant into Yiddish for the edification of his compatriots back home. The scenes depicting Maimon's marriage at the age of 12 and of Jewish life in eighteenth century Poland are very memorable. Someone told me recently that this book might not actually have been written by Maimon at all but by the "editor," the German writer Karl Philip Moritz, who apparently had a similar life. Perhaps that is why the book has not been reprinted.

Solomon Maimon is known in the history of German Idealism as the person to whom Kant himself attributed the deeper understanding and penetration of the main problems of his Critique of Pure Reason. Moreover Maimon's internal criticism of Transcendental Idealism and his proposed solution to its major, according to him, problem paved the way for the theories of the post Kantian Idealists. So he was one of the thinkers who helped the thansformation of 'critical' to 'dogmatic' idealism. Now this may seem to many a step backward but this is another story.
In this small book just a few pages are devoted to Kant's reception of his manuscrispts. What we have instead is a concise, well written with brevity, wit and humor recounting of the memorable events of his extraordinary life. The form of the narrative is similar to that of a bildungsroman. He tells how he left the confines of his backward, isolated and ridden with prejudices small hometown in Polish Lithouania in search of knowledge.
Maimon was a man of exceptional intelligence and that was obvious not only to himself but also to his countrymen whose high esteem he commanded from a young age due to his excelence in the talmoudic studies. Yet he grew sceptical towards the latter and set out to seek rational and scientific enlightenment in Germany. In this endeavour he even managed because of his destitution to follow a beggar for six whole months, "two such heterogeneous persons were nowhere to be met in the world, I was an educated rabbi, he was an idiot".
His story from successes to misfortunes hovers from the hillarious to the tragic and reveals a personality of a genius whose naivety in social relationships and incistence never to pursue anything but knowledge kept him in almost constant destitution.
It is enjoyable reading and also contains much information about the jewish intellectual world in 18th century Europe.

This autobiography seems to me more important as a historical document than as a work of art. Maimon despite his great intellect and his courage in going where his mind led him does not seem to me to speak of himself or his life with great psychological depth or insight. I too think that he did not understand truly the nature of the Hasidic movement he criticized harshly. Still this is an important work as a document which gives insight into the Jewish world of his time.

If Gimple the Fool had an IQ of 180, he would be like the subject of this autobiography--an oddball, out-of-it Polish-Lithuanian Jew, taken advantage of by many, including his wife. This guy can do the math and is an amazing scholar, but he is a perennial loser. Actually, the Maimon of the Autobiography reminds me more of an ancillary Saul Bellow character than one by I. B. Singer, wonderfully gifted, but disorganized and self-defeating, a brilliant but unworldly schlemiel. Maimon emigrates from medieval shtetl to enlightenment Berlin (last quarter of the 18th century), pursuing philosophy and truth, teaching himself as he goes, trying (unsuccessfully) to earn a living with his pen. He writes well and logically, but is a social naif. He follows his arguments where they take him, impressing strangers, affronting friends, collecting enemies. He is also a slob and a schnorrer. His story is funny and poignant, both intentionally and unintentionally, as self-referential stories told by very smart people who lack a practical bent can be.