Life Cycles

In his autobiography, Abraham Halevi Fraenkel describes growing up as an Orthodox Jew in Germany and his development as a mathematician at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his memoir, originally published in German in 1967, Fraenkel painted a unique picture of the complexity of Jewish life in Germany with special emphasis on the developments in the Orthodox community. He described the world of mathematics in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, in the context of the great mathematicians he met, many of whom were Jews or had Jewish roots. In his personal life, Fraenkel merged the worlds of orthodox Judaism, liberal Zionism and mathematics, in a period of global and national upheavals, which included the two World Wars and the establishment of the State of Israel. The last chapter of the book, which describes his extensive public activity in Israel from the 1930s until his death in 1965, was written by Prof. Jiska Cohen-Mansfield. Introductions were added by Prof. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and Prof. Menachem Magidor, the former president of the Hebrew University.