"The life of Zinaida Poliakova (1863–1953), Lazar’s eldest daughter, spanned her family’s dramatic rise and extended twilight. In her richly detailed introduction to Zinaida’s early diaries...Chaeran Freeze vividly tells her story, against the background of the Poliakovs’ business and social advancement, and their distinctive blending of Jewish and aristocratic Russian culture."

Times Literary Supplement

“I expected these books to show that the rise and fall of Jewish business dynasties tracked the great sweep of modern Jewish history – from the faltering hopes of emancipation, first kindled in late 18th-century Europe, to the Holocaust. To my surprise, in most cases, their demise came earlier. Whether in Austria, Russia or China, it was precipitated above all by war and political revolution, not by the expropriation and extermination of Europe’s Jews. After 1917 many of the Poliakovs and Gunzburgs were already stateless. For those who fled Nazi Europe, or died in Auschwitz like many of Zinaida’s family, the Holocaust marked the end point in a long process of decline."

London Review of Books

"The research that went into this publication is truly outstanding, covering a wide range of subjects that until now have remained understudied, such as the role of Jewish entrepreneurs in the Russian economy, the everyday life of privileged Russian Jewish families, and the role of women in developing a modern hybrid Russian-Jewish identity.”

The Russian Review

"Memoirs of Jewish women’s lives in the tsarist empire . . . 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. . . . The discovery and publication of a diary of a Jewish woman from the late nineteenth century is thus a rare and valuable source. . . . Freeze has painstaking recontructed what she terms the “complex jigsaw puzzle” (xv) of this social world. . . . 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."

Slavic Review

“The remarkable diaries of Zinaida Poliakova, deftly edited by ChaeRan Freeze, open onto the world of the ‘Russian Rothschilds,’ a world of high culture, vast privilege, and the skillful, constant fashioning of a hybrid Jewish-Russian identity. Whether the topic was a game of dominos or a royal reception, a music lesson or a marriage, Poliakova took up her pen and left us an invaluable, detailed record of her day-to-day life. The four diaries included in this volume, translated by Gregory Freeze, cover Poliakova’s Russian years, 1875–87. For the entire life of Poliakova, we turn to Freeze’s superb biographical essay, which extends Poliakova’s story to fin-de-siècle Paris; the whirlwind of the Holocaust; and the harsh realities, both personal and financial, of her postwar life in England. Taken together, the life and diaries of Poliakova comprise an important contribution to modern Jewish history.”

Esther Schor, Princeton University

“Introduced by an excellent discussion of the lives, self-understanding, and fate of Zinaida Poliakova and her family, this impressively annotated translation of Poliakova’s diaries provides a revealing depiction of the world of the Jewish elite in late Imperial Russia as experienced by a young woman from one its most prominent families.”

William G. Wagner, Williams College