Solomon Maimon’s autobiography has delighted readers for more than 200 years, from Goethe, Schiller, and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. Here is the first complete and annotated English edition of this enduring and lively work, says a review on the Princeton University Press website.
Born into a down-on-its-luck provincial Jewish family in 1753, Maimon quickly distinguished himself as a prodigy in learning. Even as a young child, he chafed at the constraints of his Talmudic education and rabbinical training.
This new edition restores text cut from the abridged 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, which has long been the only available English edition. Paul Reitter’s translation is brilliantly sensitive to the subtleties of Maimon’s prose while providing a fluid rendering that contemporary readers will enjoy, and is accompanied by an introduction and notes by Yitzhak Melamed and Abraham Socher that give invaluable insights into Maimon and his extraordinary life.
The book also features an afterword by Gideon Freudenthal that provides an authoritative overview of Maimon’s contribution to modern philosophy.
