22. "The Memoirs of Glukel of Hameln", composed over time in the late 1600s and early 1700s, gives us the only glimpse we have into the lives of ordinary Jews in Central Europe at the time. Why did the author choose to commit her memoirs to paper?
From Quiz Women's Autobiographies
Answer:
So her children would know their history.
Several times within the memoir, Glukel repeats that she is writing her memoirs for her children so they will know their history, and the people they came from. This is the reason she documents carefully each process she and her husband went through when they sought out marriage partners for their children, and why they were certain they had made good matches for each one.
Inadvertently, she also records the reason that arranged marriages among European Jews evolved in the first place: Jews who wanted to travel had to request permission from the manager of the larger city where their shtetl was located, in order to get documents granting them permission, and even with the proper documents, Jews often were harassed when they traveled. So when they wanted to make the journey to another shtetl to talk to a marriage broker, and then meet the family of the match they'd chosen for their child, they relied on correspondence at first, in order to try to make the final match in one trip. Parents went outside of their own shtetls in the first place, because the shtetls were usually fairly small, and people understood the advantages of avoiding inbreeding.
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