Glikl, daughter of R. Leib Pinkerle, began writing her memoirs in the year 5451 (1691), after the death of her beloved husband R. Hayim of Hameln, "to ease, through writing, her sorrow and grief in the days of her widowhood." The book is divided into seven "books": the last six describe her life and her era, while the first is a kind of ethical will and summation of her religious and moral ideas. AZR translated from the Yiddish original ("Ivri-Taytsh") according to the edition of Dr. David Kaufmann (Pressburg, 1892).
"She merited that her manuscript was preserved by her sons and grandsons until it made its way to the State Library in Munich... And when the manuscript came into the hands of the warm-hearted professor Dr. David Kaufmann of blessed memory, he seized upon the find and published it as it was, with an introduction and notes. I translated from the original book published by Dr. Kaufmann of blessed memory." AZR, "A Word from the Translator" to "Glikl's Memoirs," Tel Aviv, 24 Shevat 5689 (1929).
The portrait AZR paints in his preface goes beyond introducing an author: he sees in Glikl a learned and believing woman, a rare combination of commercial shrewdness and spiritual depth.
"From this book we can grasp the character of Glikl, who is regarded as the symbol of the Hebrew woman in the loftiest sense: devoted to her husband, diligent in the material and spiritual education of her children, honoring her parents, careful to avoid any act of wrongdoing... loving Torah and wisdom, and wholehearted with the Lord, God of Israel, like one of the Matriarchs." Ibid.
"She was not merely steeped in Jewishness from her patriarchal surroundings; she was also learned in Torah, knowing the Bible and the Talmudic aggadah in their original. And she was astonishingly shrewd. All the byways of commerce were clear to her... She knew not only the accounts of the merchant's ledgers, but also the accounting of the soul." Ibid.
AZR's choice to translate a woman's memoirs, and to present her as "learned in Torah" and as a spiritual "symbol," aligns with a familiar side of him: in his historical sketches he defends the learned Bruriah against patriarchal slander, and elevates the figure of Adel (see "Historical Sketches"). The Glikl translation adds to these the living testimony of a woman writer of the 17th century.
The preface reveals two translation decisions characteristic of AZR. The first is editorial: he moved the first book (the ethical will) to the end of the volume, so that the reader would understand it only after coming to know the story of her life.
"The translator... permitted himself to place the first book last and to begin from the second book, for after the reader passes through the earlier books and sees with his own eyes the events that befell Glikl and her brethren in that era, what is written in the last book (which for her was the first) will be more intelligible to him." Ibid.
The second is linguistic, and embodies his realist aesthetic (see "AZR the Historian" and the testimony of Streit and Brenner on his language): he preserved the Hebrew words that Glikl had woven into her Yiddish, and aimed at a clean style "without any ornaments of rhetoric."
"The translator brought the Hebrew words into the translation just as they are, and strove to match to them the style of the book as a whole, so that it would be without any ornaments of rhetoric." Ibid.
And another facet of AZR the scholar: Glikl did not cite the sources of the quotations she brought, "and I filled this lack according to what Dr. Kaufmann of blessed memory had noted, and I added further, where he had omitted, as far as I was able." Thus the translation becomes an annotated edition as well.
Glikl's first book, which AZR moved to the end, opens with a moral parable about a poor pious man and a riddle: "A bird flew from heaven to earth without wings and settled on a small bush." In the solution, as AZR translated it, the bird is the human soul and the bush is the body; and the person who draws to himself more strength than is his own withers like the bush:
"The bird that flew from heaven is the human soul, and it sits upon a small bush, which is his body... And the bush draws strength to itself from outside until it withers; this is the person who is not content with what he has... for what he acquires through wrongdoing causes him to lose even what he acquired justly." "Glikl's Memoirs," Book One, in AZR's translation.
AZR's complete translation of "Glikl's Memoirs" — all seven "books" together with "A Word from the Translator" — is freely available at Project Ben-Yehuda (public domain): Glikl's Memoirs · full text.