Fantasy and Dissimulation in the Memoirs of Getzel Zelikovits (1855–1926)

ABSTRACT

The Yiddish-language memoirs of the journalist Getzel Zelikovits (1855–1926), published in New York in 1919–1920, present a version of his life that deviates considerably from the version one might glean from other contemporary testimony, such as newspaper articles and institutional records. This paper examines how Zelikovits constructed a counterfactual narrative in which he seeks to present his readership with his life as it should have been. As well as Zelikovits’s sense of injustice at how he had been treated by European and American academia, and by the British and French establishments, another reason for his deviation from the truth is that he was guilty of a number of serious offences: academic fraud, false accusation of murder, and likely sexual assault. I conclude by exploring what is at stake for a biographer, from an ethical and scholarly standpoint, in exposing Zelikovits’s misdeeds and untruths.

KEYWORDS:

• Yiddish literature
• autobiography
• fraud
• academia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use the standard YIVO transcription of Zelikovits’s name as he spells it himself in Yiddish (זעליִקאָוויץ). He appears in other, contemporary and later, sources under variations such as Sélikovitsch, Selikovitch and Zelikovitz.

2 The book was published in Warsaw, but the 1910 United States Census finds Zelikovits (under the name George S. Selikovitsch) and his family living at 365 East 171st Street in the Bronx.

3 The text given throughout this article is for the most part my English rendering of Fenton’s French translation of ‘Meyne Erinerungen’. I have occasionally referred directly to the Yiddish original to clarify individual points.

4 The Pini family were of Venetian origin and had long been resident in Egypt. Zelikovits’s employer was probably the architect Filipo Pini Bey, a legal adviser to the Khedive who was the grandson of Giovanni Pini, whose service to Napoleon’s Expédition d’Égypte led to the family fleeing to Italy for a period (Balboni 1906, 215–221).

5 Negima kept a scrapbook of testimonials from clients, including letters from his military service in Sudan: Mairs 2016. He was not officially employed as an interpreter on the Nile Expedition, but as a headman, and found himself co-opted into the role because of his knowledge of languages.

6 I have not been able to find a copy of Selikovitch’s earlier Egyptological work ‘Le Schéol des Hébreux et le Sest des Égyptiens’, published in the Bulletin de l’Athénée Oriental in 1881.

7 The New Jersey, Marriage Records, 1670–1965 online database (available via Ancestry.com) gives the date of the marriage in Camden City between ‘Geo. Selikovitsch’ and ‘Rebeca Schwartz’ as 13 March 1887. This must be an error for 1888, unless there was an earlier, secret, marriage between the two, which does not fit with the other evidence. The date and location of the marriage may have had something to do with Rebecca Schwartz’s age.

8 New Jersey, Marriage Records, 1670–1965 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016.

9 National Archives at Boston; Waltham, Massachusetts; ARC Title: Copies of Petitions and Records of Naturalization in New England Courts, 1939 – ca. 1942; NAI Number: 4752894; Record Group Title: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787–2004; Record Group Number: RG 85.

10 Unfortunately I have not been able to access Goldberg’s 1995 dissertation, on which his subsequent articles are based.

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Notes on contributors

Rachel Mairs

Rachel Mairs is Professor of Classics and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Reading, United Kingdom. She works on ancient and nineteenth-to-early-twentieth-century multilingual- ism in the Middle East, with a particular interest in interpreters. Her books include The Graeco- Bactrian World (ed. 2021), The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014), Archaeologists, Tourists, Interpreters (with Maya Muratov, 2015) and From Khartoum to Jerusalem: The Dragoman Solomon Negima and his Clients (2016). Her monograph on the history of phrasebooks for colloquial Arabic and their authors, Arabic Dialogues, is forth- coming with University College London Press.