The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon

The first complete and annotated English translation of Maimon's delightfully entertaining memoir

Solomon Maimon's autobiography has delighted readers for more than two hundred years, from Goethe and George Eliot to Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. Here is the first complete and annotated English edition of this enduring and lively work. Born into a down-on-its-luck provincial Jewish family in 1753, Maimon distinguished himself as a prodigy in learning. After a series of picaresque misadventures, he reached Berlin, where he became part of the city's famed Jewish Enlightenment and achieved the philosophical education he so desperately wanted. This edition restores text cut from the abridged 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray—for long the only available English edition—and includes an introduction and notes by Yitzhak Melamed and Abraham Socher that give invaluable insights into Maimon's extraordinary life.