Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas

Memories of Two Generations

JEWS AND JUDAISM: HISTORY AND CULTURE

SERIES EDITORS

Mark K. Bauman

Adam D. Mendelsohn

FOUNDING EDITOR

Leon J. Weinberger

ADVISORY BOARD

Tobias Brinkmann

Ellen Eisenberg

David Feldman

Kirsten Fermaglich

Jeffrey S. Gurock

Nahum Karlinsky

Richard Menkis

Riv-Ellen Prell

Raanan Rein

Jonathan Schorsch

Stephen J. Whitfield

Marcin Wodzinski

Memories of Two Generations

A YIDDISH LIFE IN RUSSIA AND TEXAS

ALEXANDER Z. GURWITZ

Edited by BRYAN EDWARD STONE

Translated by RABBI AMRAM PRERO

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2016 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Publication of this work is supported in part through the generous funding of the Texas Jewish Historical Society.

Typeface: Caslon

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover image: Rev. Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz, c. 1925; courtesy of Dr. Neil Gurwitz

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gurwitz, Z., 1859–, author.

  Memories of two generations : a Yiddish life in Russia and Texas / Alexander Z. Gurwitz ; edited by Bryan Edward Stone ; translated by Rabbi Amram Prero.

        pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8173-1903-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ¬— ISBN 978-0-8173-8955-0 (ebook)

1. Gurwitz, Z., 1859– 2. Jews, Russian—Texas—San Antonio—Biography. I. Stone, Bryan Edward, 1967– editor. II. Prero, Amram, 1915–1991, translator. III. Title.

  E184.37.G87A3 2016

  947’.004924—dc23

                                                                              2015035113

"My deeply loyal friend, my companion through all

that was important, my life partner.

It is her name that I inscribe in this volume."

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Text

Editor’s Introduction

1. Childhood

2. In the Heder

3. The Holidays: High Holy Days

4. The Holidays: Fall and Winter

5. The Holidays: Spring and Summer

6. Half a Yeshiva Bocher

7. A Student in Minsk

8. The Volozhin Yeshiva

9. From Student to Bridegroom

10. Married and Widowed

11. On the Road

12. Settled in Pavlograd

13. Leaving for America

14. From Sea to San Antonio

15. Resuming a Life

16. Jews We Are!

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Photographs

Preface

A small world, an entire little world is man, say our sages.¹

Each person in his brief lifespan is a complete world, if on a miniature scale, with his own uniquely wondrous life history.² At the same time, he is the tiniest of cogs in the infinite world machine, which has existed long before him and will continue after him for countless thousands of years.³

Each individual is a portion of the whole of the community of man. But all portions are not equal. Those of the great ones, the wise and the learned in all branches of knowledge, are much larger than the portions of the ordinary, common people. The master mechanics who drive the world machine, the kings, the generals, the political leaders, the heroes of every generation—whether the good and noble who have distinguished themselves with their nobility, or the arrogant tyrants with their tyranny—all of these are engraved on the world monument we call world history, each according to his deserts.

But such outstanding people are few in each generation. The mass of humanity, the common folk, collectively has the largest portion of that world machine. They are no less instrumental in driving it—indeed, more—than the great ones. Theirs are the hands and the strength; theirs the blood and sweat. With theoretical wisdom alone the world could not be built. The machine would not move.

And yet, each individual within the mass of humanity is not noteworthy enough to warrant having his biography written. Possibly the reliving of such a little world would be fascinating. But whom can one interest in writing the life story of an ordinary, simple man?

And so, unwritten and unsung, the hundreds of millions in every generation crawl about on our planet like the ants, struggle for their daily bread throughout their mortal years, and close up their little worlds. They are swallowed up in the awesome swamp that consumes all creatures. They are cast into oblivion, into the underground of the forgotten, and no memory of them remains. They lived in shadow, died in shadow, and their names are enshrouded in shadow.

This is the cycle. The wheel of the world revolves unceasingly. It lifts up one generation, deposits it again, and in its place another rises. As the wise man puts it, One generation departs and another arrives, and there is no recollection of the first.⁴ This is the way our Creator established the world. This is how it functions, uninterrupted and unaltered.

Contemplating all of this, I recognize that mine is a very humble portion in that world machine. I was not sufficiently privileged to be gifted with remarkable capacities. I have not distinguished myself from the ordinary flesh and blood, surely not to the point where my biography would be written by another.

So, believing that I am capable of writing it myself, and that perhaps my life story will be of interest, why shall I not write it? The great sage Hillel said, If I am not for myself, who will be for me?⁵

Our Torah teaches, Ask your father and he will tell you, your grandparents and they will inform you.⁶

This means that every individual should take personal interest in the experiences of his father and grandfather. Every human being must know what transpired in at least his two preceding generations. This can benefit him greatly. Therefore, my autobiography should interest at least my children and grandchildren!

How I was raised by my parents, of blessed memory; my experiences in the heder (Jewish primary school) with the old-world teachers, and later in the yeshivas (advanced Jewish schools); how I spun out my youthful and middle years; and then how I lived my older years until the current, mellow age when I write this Book of Memories.⁷

Let them remember me, as they read this book, sometimes with a sympathetic sigh and occasionally with a little smile. And who knows, perhaps they will even discover a useful lesson or two for their own lives in this odyssey of their older folk!

Candidly, it is my hope that this book will prove meaningful even for strangers who did not know me nor ever heard my name. For I have not really written the story of an individual. This is the story of a community, a society. Neither my father (of blessed memory) nor I were exceptional during that period. All the Jews in nineteenth-century eastern Europe comported themselves in the same way. All the customs and practices and traditions depicted here blend into a collective portrait of Jewish life in that place and time.

How the Jew lived out his yearly cycle of life, with his Sabbaths and weekdays, his festivals and fast days; the mournful days when he lamented ancient tragedies of his people; and the days of heartbreaking petition and prayer for the future, his people’s and his own, such as Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.⁸

There was an awe, a fright, an inner turmoil in the heart of the Jew as he put on his white kitl (ceremonial robe) and covered his head with his tallith (fringed prayer shawl). He intoned his confessional (of sins he never committed!) and poured out his tears before God the entire twenty-four hours of Yom Kippur, oblivious to hunger and fatigue. And then, from his solemn, introspective, somber immersion, he leaped into the joy of Simchat Torah!⁹ Wondrously his eyes dried, his spirits lifted, and he was transported into a world of ecstasy—for thus God commanded him.

He never failed to perform the slightest mitzvah (good deed) or custom.¹⁰ His mood, his whole being, moved in harmony with each sacred occasion—and of sacred occasions there was an abundance.

There is also described here the earnest striving of every Jew to educate his children in the Jewish spirit and way of life. What a joy it was for parents to live to see the day when they could send their child to a heder or to a yeshiva!

I also have depicted those old, depressing classrooms and their teachers; the curriculum; the yeshivas and their students; and the students’ lifestyles, as well as the kind of adults produced there. There will also be found here portraits of the rabbis, cantors, and shochatim (ritual slaughterers), all of whom sustained the essence and the ongoing conduct of Jewish life in those days.¹¹

In the first section I deal with my childhood years, from the age of four until I left for the yeshiva.

How beloved are my recollections of those childhood years! They are the best, the most fortunate, the most sacred, the purest years of a human life, innocent of any blemish upon the soul. Sweet and lovely are my memories of that child’s world—especially now, so much later, when the spring blossoms have gone, and the summer days have cooled. The sun now casts its rays but feebly. Autumn has come with its brooding, overcast days. Cold wet winds blow, heralding the lifeless winter that enfolds all of its victims in its powerful hands, that swallows every living creature and is never satiated.

Now, in these older days, as one turns backward and perceives clearly the long road already traversed, what does one see? A long shadow—no more! One is momentarily overwhelmed by a feeling of futility. All those dreams of long ago, and the fantasies—dissipated. All those hopes crumbled into pieces cast into the stormy sea of life. From all, chaos and nothingness.

Sometimes the soul is smothered in dark melancholy. The old lust for life is lost. The entire world is meaningless. And then, precisely at such black introspective moments, a golden ray pierces through! A bright, glowing vision of those childhood years (that wonderful sweet time!) overtakes the melancholy. The heart is renewed, the soul quickened. One becomes young again, and lives once again in that child’s world. Then one forgets the lamentation, the doubt that beclouded the horizon.

Blessed be the recollections of childhood years, the memories of the forgotten days in a world that is past.

In the second section, I write of my adolescence and young adulthood, from the time I became a yeshiva student. I describe how I, and all boys like me, lived through that period, both in trial and in gratification. I delve into the effects of the yeshivas on their students, and (as I have said) on what kind of products those yeshivas produced.

The third section deals with the years of my growth as a young man, from my marriage through my middle years—how I lived and what happened with me.

The fourth section is devoted to my declining years, from the first aging stages into my advanced age, during which I write this book.¹²

This is a verbal portrait of a simple, ordinary man. And yet, as I have noted, each man is reckoned as a miniature world. So perhaps his story may be no less interesting than the biographies of outstanding men. I hope that the reader will derive some meaning and gain spiritual satisfaction from these pages.

I want to add that although this autobiography begins when I was four and I am now more than seventy, all the episodes that made an impression on me are clearly engraved on my mind. I remember every detail sharply, as though each was just experienced. I do not exaggerate anything. Everything is recorded precisely as it appeared at the time.

I have titled this Memories of Two Generations because mirrored here are the life and times of two distinct eras. I have attempted to portray the typical Jews in each: their customs and traditions, their strengths and weaknesses. These were steadily altered before my very eyes in almost every aspect. If my grandfather, who went to his immortality fifty years ago, were now to be resurrected, he would find a totally different, completely alien world.

Since I write of the way of life and daily practices of seventy years ago, there may be those who will scoff. Some may think that our fathers observed foolish customs. Know you, therefore, that all Jewish customs are sacred, although some may appear rather rigid by today’s standards. For each Jewish practice has its roots in holiness, whether the source be the Talmud or an event in Jewish history.¹³ All stem from a pure wellspring.

True, there are some dubious customs. Our sages recognized this. It must be understood that our fathers wandered among many nations in the Diaspora, the dispersion of Jews throughout the world. Local foolish customs were occasionally adopted and passed on to succeeding generations. But these form a miniscule portion of Jewish practices. The overwhelming majority of the legacy of customs is free of foolishness, and we are obliged to observe what our parents deemed sacred. There is a popular and wise saying among Jews: A custom can break (supersede) a law.¹⁴

I pray that my book will be deemed useful, and that its reading bring pleasure to the reader. This will be my reward.

Alexander Z. Gurwitz

Son of Jacob Meir, z"l¹⁵

Acknowledgments

When I was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), I had the good fortune to discover a marvelous book in the library there. To call it a book, however, may be a bit of an exaggeration. Really it was a photocopy of a typed manuscript, literally tied together with strings and cardboard. This was Rabbi Amram Prero’s translation of Alexander Gurwitz’s autobiography, Memories of Two Generations. Of course, to say I discovered it is another exaggeration: someone had to put it in the stacks for me to find. That, I learned later, was Seth Wolitz, a UT Jewish Studies professor who had obtained the manuscript from the Gurwitz family, copied it, and donated it to the library—stocking the pond, so to speak, in which I would later go fishing. As a member of my dissertation committee, he shared with me his own interpretations of Gurwitz’s work as he prepared the first scholarly article to cite the memoir. For putting Gurwitz in my path and for helping me to recognize the memoir’s great historical value, my first debt of gratitude is to Professor Wolitz.

When I decided to seek publication of the memoir, I contacted Dr. Neil Gurwitz, the author’s grandson, to gain his family’s permission to pursue the project. Dr. Gurwitz responded quickly and enthusiastically, as he has done many times whenever I had questions about his family or about his own memories of his Zadie, his grandfather. Dr. Gurwitz has been generous with information, family records, and photographs, and this project would have been quite impossible without his avid assistance. The Gurwitz family in general has been extraordinarily supportive, for which I thank them all. I’m especially grateful for an invitation, arranged by Rabbi Barry Block in 2012, to speak about Alexander Gurwitz at the bar mitzvah of his great-great-grandson, Jordan Gurwitz. This was a unique and unforgettable honor.

I’m delighted to have the opportunity to work with the University of Alabama Press and to join their prestigious Jewish Studies list. Editor Dan Waterman responded with welcome enthusiasm to my initial proposal, and he has been a steady source of guidance all along. Mark K. Bauman, now the series coeditor, is someone whose advice I would have sought in any case, but I’m fortunate to have him involved in an official editorial capacity. Mark’s meticulous recommendations, as they have done for me so many times in the past, have made this a much better book. I also thank the anonymous reader whose peer review directed me to several errors and points that needed strengthening. Finally, for their outstanding help in bringing this book to print, I’m grateful to Jon Berry, Vanessa Rusch, Penelope Cray, Courtney Blanchard, and J. D. Wilson of the University of Alabama Press.

With no knowledge of Yiddish or Hebrew, no experience with the Talmud, and no background in Orthodox Judaism or eastern European history, I was perhaps singularly unready for a project like this. I learned much, first, from Gurwitz himself, whose instructional digressions throughout the memoir were my first and best sources of information: nearly seventy years after his death, he enrolled a new student.

I also have been able, fortunately, to depend on many people whose expertise is greater than my own. Rabbi Kenneth Roseman of Congregation Beth Israel in Corpus Christi answered many of my questions about the Talmud and other classic works of Jewish scholarship and helped guide me into this vast sea of knowledge—even if I have yet to stray past the shallows. He also opened the temple’s library to me, with its Talmuds and prayer books, so I could search out the passages that Gurwitz quoted from memory. Alan Astro of Trinity University, a fellow Gurwitz admirer who discovered the memoir independently in the original Yiddish, has become a valued colleague, and his skill as a translator has been crucial. Michael Robbins and Lynn Waghalter, both of Congregation Agudas Achim in San Antonio, were generous with information as I needed it. Lenore Karp, perhaps the foremost authority on San Antonio Jewry, met me at the city’s central library and guided me to her notecard index of the entire run of the city’s three Jewish newspapers. This index is, in itself, a breathtaking feat of research. For a variety of other help, advice, and information, I thank Marcie Cohen Ferris, Aliza Orent, Stuart Rockoff, Jarrod Tanny, Judy Weidman, and Hollace Ava Weiner.

I also have relied greatly on the help of librarians, beginning with the patient and grossly underpaid staff of the William F. White Jr. Library at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. Vivian Brown, especially, came through for me again, processing countless interlibrary loan requests and obtaining copies of rare documents when the owners couldn’t release them. Lorin Sklamberg at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York identified a Yiddish song from just a few lines quoted by Gurwitz, even pointing me to a recording and liner notes about it. For help locating photographs and obtaining permission to use them, I’m grateful to Tom Shelton at UT San Antonio Libraries Special Collections; Krysia Fisher at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research; Frank Faulkner, Matt Dewaelsche, and Andy Crews at the San Antonio Public Library; and Rabbi Howard Siegel and congregation president Randy Pulman of Congregation Agudas Achim in San Antonio.

This project has benefited enormously from two grants that provided critical financial support. My thanks, first, to grants chairman Sonny Gerber and to the board and membership of the Texas Jewish Historical Society, whose $1,500 award helped to assure the publication of this long work in its entirety. The Southern Jewish Historical Society provided a $500 Project Completion Grant that allowed me to secure many of the illustrations included here; many thanks to Phyllis Leffler for helping to facilitate the grant. And, though it is not exactly financial assistance, I would be remiss not to thank Robert Abzug, my mentor-turned-colleague, whose offer of a recurring summer teaching position at the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at UT Austin gave me access to the university’s unmatched research facilities and the time to use them. My long and evolving relationship with him has been one of the highlights of my career.

My parents, Barbara and Edward Stone, and my parents-in-law, Robert and Marilyn Dougherty, have been a constant source of support and encouragement for which I am always grateful. My grandmother, Dorothy Green, was an inspiration to me, sharp and curious to the end. Finally, I cannot properly express my immense gratitude to my wife, Shannon. I shaped this book’s dedication from words Alexander Gurwitz wrote for his wife: I could find none better to describe my own.

Bryan Edward Stone

Corpus Christi, Texas

January, 2016

A Note on the Text

I have prepared the following text from the typescript copy of Rabbi Amram Prero’s translation of Memories of Two Generations at the Perry-Castañeda Library at the University of Texas at Austin. After scanning each page of the typescript, I used optical-character-recognition software, proofing page by page against the original, to convert it into a digital format that I could modify as necessary. The typescript includes Prero’s handwritten corrections, which in every case I introduced into the text as he clearly intended. In my view, without exception, Prero’s corrections improved the readability of the translation.

To the greatest extent possible, I have retained Prero’s words exactly, although I have made spellings consistent and have adjusted grammar where necessary. I also have corrected obvious typographical errors; made improvements and corrections to punctuation (removing unnecessary ellipses, for example) and typeface (the original typescript is entirely in italics); and made minor editorial adjustments to make the text clearer and more readable. In only three cases have I adjusted Prero’s wording. His use of the word thong to describe a leather handwhip is, to twenty-first-century ears, outdated, not to mention disconcerting: I have replaced it with whip, strap, or lash. Because it is confusing to describe the traumas suffered by European Jews during World War I as a holocaust, I have changed his word to horror. And I have replaced Prero’s niggardly with stingy to avoid any incidental confusion or offense.

I do not have a copy of the Yiddish original, which Gurwitz self-published in 1935 and which Prero used as the basis for his translation, nor could I read it if I did. I have not, therefore, compared Prero’s translation to the original. On at least three occasions, however, reliable authorities have spot-checked the translation. First, when Prero delivered it to the Gurwitz family in 1978, family members who were adept in Yiddish would have surely noticed if the translation were faulty. More recently, Jewish Studies professor Seth Wolitz, of the University of Texas at Austin, who quoted from the memoir in a scholarly article, compared several portions of Prero’s translation to the original and found them accurate. And, in 2003, Professor Alan Astro, of Trinity University in San Antonio, independently translated several pages of the memoir (the section of chapter 14 subtitled City of San Antonio Twenty-Two Years Ago) for his collection of Yiddish works from Latin-American locales.¹ A comparison between Prero’s and Astro’s translations of the same passage reveals few and only minor differences. Although Prero’s entire translation has never been corroborated word for word against the original Yiddish, these cursory inspections give me confidence that his work is as accurate as it is clear and engaging.

Gurwitz originally divided the memoir into 147 chapters, some only a few paragraphs long. I combined these into sixteen chapters of a more uniform length, dividing each into sections according to the original chapter divisions. The sixteen new chapter titles are mine, but I have retained Gurwitz’s colorful and evocative titles as the section headings within each.

Prero’s frequent retention of transliterated Hebrew, Yiddish, and other foreign words is one of the document’s most effective features, imparting something of the tone of the original language. Prero’s approach to defining these terms, however, was inconsistent. Sometimes he glossed foreign expressions in parentheses in the text, sometimes in the narrative itself, and sometimes in footnotes. Words might be defined more than once or not at all. I have tried to make the treatment of non-English terms uniform. Each non-English term is defined once, in parentheses immediately following its first use. Further explanation, if needed, is provided in the endnotes. Later uses of the term appear without explanation, but the selected glossary contains expressions that appear more than once in the text to help readers recall them.

Prero’s spelling of non-English words was also haphazard, and I have tried to make it consistent, up-to-date, and useful to both scholars and general readers. I have treated words that appear in Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (2003) as English words; they are spelled according to Webster’s and are not italicized. For Hebrew and Yiddish words, which are transliterated and italicized, I relied on Webster’s New World Hebrew Dictionary (1992), Harduf’s Transliterated English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary (2003), and the online Encyclopaedia Judaica (2nd edition). In most cases I have used the spellings they provide. In a significant exception to this rule, however, I have opted to retain the familiar ch (as in charoset and shochet) and tz (as in tzedakah) in place of the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s . I was concerned that these specialized characters might be unfamiliar to many readers.

Prero supplied a few explanatory footnotes, but they are very brief and entirely uncited. I have retained them without deletion or revision, expanding and elaborating as necessary, and I have inserted the notation [Prero] to distinguish his contributions from mine. I also have moved to the endnotes some comments that he placed in brackets within the text.

Except where otherwise noted, I collected biographical information about Gurwitz’s family and acquaintances in San Antonio from public documents available on Ancestry.com. These include the US Census; birth, death, and burial records; city directories; and published obituaries. I also found some biographical information in the San Antonio city papers, available in online archives, and in the city’s Jewish newspapers, on microfilm at the San Antonio Public Library, fully indexed in a wonderfully useful card file.

Place names for European cities present particular difficulties. It is my impression that Prero did not work with a Russian atlas but rather transliterated Gurwitz’s geographical names from Yiddish into English characters letter-for-letter. This made it difficult to correlate the results to known cities and towns. In addition, place names in eastern Europe have changed many times since Gurwitz’s day. Writing in 1932, he used names that had been familiar to him in childhood but were already obsolete. For the sake of style and historical accuracy, I have kept the names Gurwitz used whenever possible, correcting and/or updating the spelling as necessary. This seems preferable to inserting modern names with which he was unfamiliar (e.g., replacing his Yekaterinoslav with Dnipropetrovsk). Whenever possible, I have provided each town’s modern name in the endnotes along with a brief description of its location relative to larger cities; in doing so, JewishGen’s Shtetl Finder (http://www.jewishgen.org/infofiles/ShtetlFinder.html) was a priceless resource. I have adopted the spellings used in the Oxford Atlas of the World, Deluxe Edition (2005) or, if they do not appear there, on Google Earth. In the few cases where it has proven impossible to identify a town, I have left Prero’s transliteration intact.

Similarly, I have tried to leave passages from the Talmud, Bible, and other sources as Gurwitz quoted and Prero translated them, even if the result does not accurately reflect familiar English versions of the same texts. In many cases, Gurwitz misquotes or misremembers a passage (whether deliberately or not, who can say?), and the result is often significant, reflecting his own interpretation and adaptation of the passage’s meaning. I have included complete, verified quotations in the footnotes to provide contrast to those in the text. For biblical passages, I have used the Jewish Publication Society translation that is common in modern Jewish worship and scholarship. Talmudic quotations, all of which are from the Babylonian Talmud except where indicated, are from the Soncino Talmud, ed. Isidore Epstein (London: Soncino Press, 1935–1952).

Editor’s Introduction

On September 28, 1910, the North German Lloyd steamship Köln docked at Galveston, Texas. The ship’s nearly 250 passengers included a few American residents returning from European visits, but the vast majority were immigrants from central and eastern Europe preparing to disperse throughout the United States to pursue their various futures. Among them were Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz, his wife, Feigeh (Fannie), and their four children. The family had left their home in Yenaveh, in southeastern Ukraine near the Black Sea, more than six weeks earlier bound for San Antonio, where Feigeh’s sister lived with her husband and their children.

In most ways, the Gurwitzes typified the more than two million eastern European Jews who arrived in America during the first decades of the twentieth century. Fleeing religious persecution, political repression, and restricted economic opportunity, they arrived with a mixture of hope and trepidation, generally optimistic but dislocated from the communities that had sustained them religiously and ethnically. The Gurwitzes’ arrival in Texas, rather than at New York or another east coast port, was atypical but not uncommon: about ten thousand Russian Jews entered the country through Galveston in the decade before World War I in a deliberate campaign by national Jewish leaders to ease overcrowding in eastern cities. The Gurwitzes also were like many others who followed family members, through a process known as chain migration, to southern and western regions of the country that might have seemed remote and inhospitable to their brethren on the Lower East Side.¹

In other ways, however, this family’s experience was unusual. At fifty-one, Alexander Gurwitz was older than the average immigrant, a fact that troubled him as he worked his way past US customs officials, who looked for any reason, including age or poor health, to deny entry. He also worried about his two adult children from a previous marriage who remained behind in Russia with their families. More than a decade later, after he had settled in San Antonio, Gurwitz helped facilitate their immigration as well, a reversal of the usual practice of children working in America to bring their parents after them.

Partly as a consequence of his age and long years of frugality, Gurwitz possessed greater personal wealth than most of his fellow immigrants, bringing with him to America the means accumulated from a lifetime of work as a melamed (teacher of Hebrew to young children) and a shochet (kosher butcher). He had sold his house in Russia and sent a portion of the proceeds ahead to the United States, where laws required immigrants to demonstrate their ability to support themselves. The remainder allowed the Gurwitzes to trade the hardships of steerage for a second-class stateroom and to pay porters to carry their baggage, small comforts that made the arduous voyage a bit easier. Gurwitz had spent his life in modest parochial trades and was far from wealthy, but unlike many of his fellow passengers, he was not indigent.

Whereas most Jewish immigrants of the era came to America out of desperation, pursuing economic opportunities absent at home, for the Gurwitzes immigration was a free choice. They had attained financial security in Russia and did not need to seek it in America. Nor was their migration a gamble to acquire greater fortune in a new country. On the contrary, Gurwitz continued to work the same parochial trades that he had in Russia, and they were less in demand in San Antonio. This family’s decision to immigrate, rather, was an attempt to ensure their physical safety and religious freedom. Gurwitz feared that pogroms or cholera could take his children from him (as an epidemic two decades earlier had taken three young daughters) and worried that Russia’s growing political instability would rob them of the few religious liberties Russian Jews still possessed. America, he hoped, would provide the safety necessary to raise his children in health and the freedom to educate them in the Jewish tradition he held sacred. Thus Gurwitz reversed the conventional narrative in which Russia was the site of traditional Jewish worship and America of assimilation and secularism. He came to America believing it a better place for an Orthodox Jew to lead a traditional life than Russia was.

In 1935, twenty-five years later, after his children had married and Fannie had died, Gurwitz published his memoir in Yiddish, the language he still used almost exclusively. Memories of Two Generations tells of his childhood and youth in Russia, his education in European primary schools and yeshivas, his marriages and professional life, his family’s journey to America, and the years they spent in San Antonio. He traveled to New York to arrange for its private publication in two hardcover volumes and distributed copies to friends and family, many containing handwritten Yiddish inscriptions, sometimes in original verse.²

Gurwitz died in 1947, and about thirty years later his descendants hired Rabbi Amram Prero of Congregation Agudas Achim in San Antonio, the synagogue to which Gurwitz had belonged, to prepare an English translation of the memoir. Prero’s clear and elegantly written prose preserves much of the cadence and tone of the author’s native Yiddish. I have lived through the allotted lifespan of our tradition, seventy years, runs a typical passage. I say ‘lived through’ in the sense of ‘managed to endure’ rather than ‘lived,’ because most of my life could not really be called living in any satisfactory way. . . . My way was not strewn with flowers.

Gurwitz’s family hoped to see the translation published, but that goal was never achieved. They distributed unbound copies of Prero’s work in typescript, with his handwritten corrections still on many pages, to a few libraries and archival collections. In addition, Seth Wolitz, a Jewish Studies professor at the University of Texas at Austin, obtained a copy of the typescript from the Gurwitz family and placed it in the university’s research library. Wolitz was the first scholar to recognize and to write about the memoir’s historical value, and many others have followed him, finding in it a wealth of insight about the Jewish world Gurwitz inhabited.³ Memories of Two Generations is about much more than a single man: I have not really written the story of an individual, Gurwitz says in his preface. This is the story of a community, a society.⁴ His memoir, published now for the first time in English, is an invaluable historical, literary, and cultural document.

Memories of Two Generations contributes to a large body of autobiographical writing by nineteenth-century Jewish men and women that focuses on the shtetls (Jewish villages) of eastern Europe. Most of these works, like Gurwitz’s, were written in Yiddish, although many were produced in Hebrew, English, or other languages. Some of their authors emigrated to the United States or Israel, and some never left Russia. Some were well-known writers, such as Sholem Aleichem, while others were ordinary and anonymous people who never wrote anything but their memoirs. In addition to the dozens of such works that have been published, either in their original languages or in translation, many more languish in unpublished form, as this one did for decades, in libraries, archives, and private collections around the world.⁵ They deserve discovery partly because they have the power to open a window onto a way of life that no longer exists.

Gurwitz fits well in this autobiographical tradition, but Memories of Two Generations also provides much that is new. Its close attention to childhood, for example, is something that few other shtetl memoirists have matched. In particular, Gurwitz’s detailed description of the annual Jewish holiday cycle as he experienced it as a nine-year-old boy is an extraordinary and unique achievement. Holiday observance figures prominently in other memoirs, to be sure, including those of Yekhezkel Kotik and Menachem Mendel Frieden, but its treatment there is limited. Frieden’s editor, Lee Shai Weissbach, observes, The account of the Jewish holidays Frieden provides is by no means systematic. Rather, he seems to have recorded only those elements of Jewish tradition and practice that came to mind as he drafted his memoir, perhaps focusing on those he found most noteworthy.⁶ In contrast, Gurwitz takes the reader methodically through every significant event in the Jewish calendar from Rosh Hashanah to Tishah be-Av, describing the preparations, practice, and prayer associated with each. The cycle fills more than one hundred pages of the original English typescript, three chapters of the current volume.

What prevents this survey from becoming tedious is Gurwitz’s presentation of sacred events from a child’s point of view. Perhaps Hanukkah for him was more about gelt (gift money, coins) than about the Maccabees, or maybe his appreciation for the Yom Kippur service was overwhelmed by his gnawing hunger and boredom as it dragged on. Nonetheless these childlike insights make the events more real and alive than would straightforward descriptions of their historical or liturgical meaning. Gurwitz does not sentimentalize the Jewish holidays or pretend that he or his community was flawlessly devout. He depicts his holiday experiences honestly, acknowledging the veniality they sometimes evoked in him and others.

Gurwitz is similarly truthful in describing the professions to which he devoted his life, in particular his years as a yeshiva student and long career as a melamed. As a teenager, he studied at the Volozhin Yeshiva, the foremost Jewish academy in nineteenth-century eastern Europe, and his experiences there provide a glimpse behind the walls of one of Europe’s most important Jewish institutions. After abandoning his rabbinical studies to marry and raise a family, he earned his living for decades in Russia and then in San Antonio as a Hebrew teacher. Shtetl memoirs frequently deal in depth with the Jewish educational system, but Gurwitz contributes the perspective of a seasoned teacher. Furthermore, Gurwitz’s instructional project extends to the memoir itself, which he presents to his readers (ostensibly his grandchildren), as a lesson in Jewish tradition and vanishing customs. He not only describes his life in education but also advances it in the memoir.

Another important novelty of Memories of Two Generations is Gurwitz’s detailed attention to the Galveston Immigration Movement, the effort between 1907 and 1914 to divert the flow of Jewish immigration from Russia to Galveston, bypassing the crowded Jewish neighborhoods of New York. Gurwitz and his family followed the path of the ten thousand Jews the Galveston Movement directed to Texas, and although they chose their destination independently—moving to San Antonio because Fannie’s sister was already there—they took advantage of a route that movement leaders pioneered. Memories of Two Generations contains what may be the only complete account of the Galveston Movement from an immigrant’s point of view. Gurwitz describes the entire voyage from eastern Europe to America—by rail across Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, through Germany to the port of Bremen, then by sea to Philadelphia and on to Texas. With a sharp memory and clearly rendered detail, Gurwitz takes us door-to-door, from Yenaveh to San Antonio.

Finally, this book contributes greatly to our knowledge of the Jewish community of San Antonio. Although the portion of the memoir set in Texas is relatively small—approximately 20 percent of the whole—it provides information available nowhere else.⁷ As Gurwitz shows, San Antonio was home to a small but devoted traditional Jewish population, many of them recent, Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Most histories of Texas Jewry have given the Orthodox scant attention, and Gurwitz provides a powerful and important corrective. Not only does he show how he lived a traditional Jewish life in San Antonio, but he also describes the entire support system of traditional worshippers who sought to preserve much of the European culture they had brought with them. The fact that Gurwitz made his living for decades teaching Hebrew to Jewish children (in Yiddish) and preparing and selling kosher meat underscores the presence of a devout Jewish clientele in a place where they are rarely acknowledged to have lived. The chapters set in San Antonio trace the activities of this community in detail over a twenty-five-year period.

Gurwitz wrote Memories of Two Generations between 1932 and 1935, when he was in his seventies. Many of the events he relates had occurred six decades before, which raises inevitable questions about his accuracy and reliability as a narrator. It is not known what materials he worked with as he wrote, if he referred to diaries he had kept previously or to other writers’ accounts of the same or similar places, or if he discussed his recollections with friends and family members to confirm their accuracy. It is reasonable to assume that he did all of these, but we cannot know for certain. There is much in the text itself, however, to attest to the accuracy of his recollections.

No reader can fail to notice, especially in the chapters set in Russia, the depth of detail Gurwitz provides and the precision of his memory. He records exactly the distances between towns—most of which I have been able to verify—the amounts he paid or received in various long-ago transactions, and the precise dates of many of the events he describes. He recalls the names not only of his family members, which is to be expected, but also of neighbors, teachers, fellow students, and casual acquaintances. His chronological recollection is also firm and rendered in detail, as he accounts for every year of his life and sets events accurately within the verifiable historical record.

It is impossible, of course, to authenticate most of the details of his experiences in Russia. We cannot know whether he records the names of his early teachers correctly or whether a particular conversation in fact occurred when he was eighteen rather than twenty. Such precision, however, is neither expected nor necessary in a document like this. The detail of Gurwitz’s recollection and his personal reaction to the things he remembers provide the memoir’s real value.

This is important to keep in mind in the later chapters, set in San Antonio, where gaps and inaccuracies are easier to detect. Here Gurwitz makes a number of identifiable errors in chronology, conflating events that were actually disconnected or placing events in incorrect order. He states, for example, that Rabbi Nathan Gerstein of San Antonio’s Congregation Agudas Achim died while traveling to solicit funds to rebuild the synagogue after its destruction in a flood. Gerstein did die while traveling, but it was two years before the flood in 1921 that ruined the synagogue. Similarly, Gurwitz confuses many details of the various schisms and rabbinical controversies revolving around Agudas Achim in the 1920s and 1930s. His recollection throughout the later chapters is sketchy and error-prone, leading one to wonder if the richly textured rendering of his life in Russia might also contain multiple errors of fact.

A number of things may account for the imprecision of the later chapters. First, simply, is the ordinary phenomenon of a person remembering long-ago events more clearly than recent ones. It is also possible that Gurwitz used written materials, perhaps a diary, to jog his memory of earlier events, while no such document existed for his later years. He mentions in the memoir, too, that his wife, Fannie, helped him with the early chapters but died before he completed the memoir; the errors apparent in the later portions may result from her absent contribution. Maybe, as would hardly be unusual, he did not find the years of his aging as absorbing a topic as those of his youth, or, as he approached the final chapters, he began to tire of the project and gave it less attention. The book’s structure, in fact, becomes notably less clear and well organized in the memoir’s final sections, giving it a rushed, unfinished quality. He entirely omits major events such as the emergence of the anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s. Even Nazism, whose purpose was apparent by the time he was writing, merits just a single mention.

More important than comprehensiveness or factual accuracy, however, is truthfulness: does Gurwitz address himself and his life honestly and with awareness of his own flaws and errors? Certainly he does. Throughout the memoir, he is profoundly self-aware and self-deprecating. He does not attempt to conceal his more unpleasant actions, as when he tells us how he ignobly fled from a girl to whom he was supposed to become engaged because her physical appearance appalled him. Self-aggrandizement is an occupational hazard of every memoirist, but Gurwitz guards against it well, taking pains to depict himself and the environments he occupied with fairness and candor. Memories of Two Generations is as honest a portrayal of a person and an era as one can reasonably expect.

A Russian Boyhood

Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz (known as Zissal or Zisha to his relatives) was born in 1859 in Minsk, although his family soon moved to a shtetl nearby.⁸ He was the youngest of nine children, younger than his oldest sibling by at least twelve years. His parents, Jacob Meir and Abigail Gurwitz, were not outstanding or unusual among Russian Jews of their time. They were devout, hardworking, opportunistic, and suspicious of gentiles. Judaism was for them a fixed and essential reality, not at all the amorphous mass of characteristics that modern Americans call identity, but deep, rich, and seamless. Being Jewish defined them utterly, far more than being Russian, and it gave form to everything else in their lives from the most elevated to the most mundane.⁹ This profound awareness of himself as a Jew is the most important inheritance Alexander Gurwitz received from his parents. Preserving it and passing it along to his children and to theirs was the prevailing object of his long life. While his memoir is continually concerned with earthly matters—education, career, marriage and family, friends and community, and always the need for money—he projects all of these against the backdrop of Jewish tradition and ritual obligation.

In recalling the shtetls of his youth, Gurwitz describes an exclusively Jewish world that was not in reality exclusively Jewish. On the contrary, Christians constituted the majority in most of the towns where Gurwitz lived. Nevertheless, he perceived his environment as Jewish, almost completely ignoring the gentile presence except insofar as Christians contributed to Jewish life—operating the ritual bathhouse on the Sabbath, for example, or participating in the fictional purchase of forbidden foods for the duration of Passover. As literary historian Dan Miron indicates, this Judaization of the shtetl was common among Yiddish authors of the period, and in fact was a vital component of most Yiddish literature.¹⁰ It is intriguing to note, furthermore, that Gurwitz also ignores the Christian population of San Antonio, who constituted a much larger majority than did gentiles in the shtetls. He describes San Antonio as if it were just another shtetl, where Jews were central to the community while a few Christians floated around the periphery. This is, in reality, the opposite of the truth.

When Gurwitz was five or six years old, after demonstrating a quick grasp of basic Hebrew, he began to receive his first formal religious education. His deepest aspiration—it was really his mother’s hope for him, naturally—was to become a rav, an ordained rabbi. For much of his youth he pursued that goal, studying with private teachers and at a series of academies under some of the leading Jewish educators of the day. When he was fifteen, he became a student at the Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania, where he studied under Rabbi Naftali Berlin, the Netziv, one of the most important Talmudic scholars of the age. As Gurwitz pursued his rabbinical career, his teachers (by his own account anyway) saw that he possessed the necessary ability and sharpness of mind.

The scholastic world in which Gurwitz immersed himself was undergoing dramatic, even transformative, change. Since the late eighteenth century, Jews of every social level, but especially scholars and rabbis, had grappled with the influence of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. Emanating directly from the scientific revolution and the Age of Reason that had begun in western Europe in the late seventeenth century, the Haskalah came a generation later. As it spread through deliberate propagation by intellectuals, known as maskilim, from western to eastern Europe, it manifested itself as a gradually increasing openness to secular concerns, scientific evidence, and the languages and ideas of non-Jews.

In a direct assault on the rigid traditionalism and insularity of the rabbinate and the religious communities they led, maskilim believed that true education must encompass secular subjects outside of Jewish law and ritual. They promoted the cultural importance of Hebrew and disseminated scholarly and artistic works in that ancient, sacred language. They also encouraged instruction in non-Jewish languages—German, Russian, and French, in particular—and although they generally opposed the continued use of Yiddish, which they perceived as a low language of corrupt origin, their efforts had the unintended effect of elevating Yiddish into a language suitable for literature and scholarship. Many maskilim also accepted the spiritual equality of women and supported their Jewish and secular education. These goals accorded with those of European rulers who, influenced by the Enlightenment, viewed compulsory education as a way to integrate Jews into national life and made the study of secular subjects, even among religious leaders, a precondition of political emancipation and political equality.

The impact of this movement was deep and far-reaching. The solitary authority that the eastern European rabbinate had long enjoyed evaporated. In its place, a new category of Jewish scholars and writers emerged, able to work in a multitude of vernacular languages and open to the literature of the world, no longer bound to the singular authority of the Torah and Talmud. New avenues for Jewish intellectual discourse also emerged, challenging the primacy of the yeshivot, the Jewish Talmudic academies that had proliferated throughout Europe and constituted the core of the Jewish scholarly world. Instead, maskilim adopted secular outlets for disseminating their ideas—publishing houses, newspapers, salons—and produced works in genres forbidden in the yeshivot—poetry, fiction, drama, political polemic, and autobiography.

These developments, furthermore, laid the groundwork for a diffusion of Jewish political activism that proved to be crucial in the latter nineteenth century and the twentieth century. The Haskalah provided the cradle of Jewish socialism, Bundism, labor unionism, and Zionism, as well as the Reform and Conservative Jewish worship styles. Historian Shmuel Feiner compares the tremendous impact of the Haskalah to that of the French Revolution: Here the historical process of a shift in sovereignty in the Jewish community began; an intellectual elite appeared that confronted the rabbinical, scholarly elite of the Jewish ancien régime and competed with it. . . . The religious establishment’s monopoly on knowledge was broken and so too was its monopoly on the guidance of the community, on criticism and moral preaching, on education, and even on the most intimate aspects of life—dress, manners, and family.¹¹ Under the influence of the Haskalah, the conservative, superstitious Jews of eastern Europe gradually admitted the secular and scientific worlds, with all of their potential and threat.

Neither a rabbi nor a maskil, Gurwitz was not a partisan in this cultural conflict. Nonetheless, it affected him, as it did all Russian Jews of his generation. To a modern reader, the Jewishness of his parents, their rigorous adherence to every ritualistic detail, seems all-encompassing, so old-world. Gurwitz was aware, however, that his parents were in fact moderate in their religious behavior, genuine in their faith but accommodating to changing times. His integrity and nobility of character were matched by his piety, Gurwitz writes of his father, a devoted student of Torah. Yet he was no fanatic, living in friendly fashion with everyone, no matter their views. His mother, too, was a devout, God-fearing, scrupulously observant Jewess, yet a fanatic she was not. Gurwitz often describes Jews whose practices are, in his judgment, too hidebound and reactionary as fanatics and provides numerous examples of the hazards of unreflective adherence to the forms of tradition.¹² To modern eyes Gurwitz was antiquarian; to his own, he was suitably, but not excessively, modern.

Gurwitz encountered the Haskalah most directly as a teenage student at the Volozhin Yeshiva. It is ironic that Volozhin would be the setting for Gurwitz’s discovery of the secular literary world, as the institution’s founder, Isaac ben Hayyim Volozhiner, was a disciple of one of the Haskalah’s leading opponents. Still, such a development was hardly unique. Throughout eastern Europe in Gurwitz’s day, and no less at the leading yeshivot, students privately studied secular and Hebrew texts that were officially prohibited; some of these were so popular, in fact, even among the instructors, that they became unofficial components of the yeshiva curriculum. Anthropologists Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, who produced a timeless ethnographic study of shtetl culture, provide a particularly colorful description of these clandestine secular studies:

Groups of boys met in secret to read Schiller’s poetry together in the woods. Popularizations of Darwin’s theory, printed in small books in the Hebrew language, would be smuggled into the yeshiva itself and read under the sheltering mask of the Gemara [Talmud volume]. In attics and privies they would follow the novels of Mapu, a popular and prohibited writer who based his fiction on biblical themes, portraying the Jews as proud, fiery and independent—far from the resignation approved by the shtetl—and as glamorous exponents of the romantic love that ran counter to shtetl conceptions of the family and the proper subjects of study. In the dead of night, crouching over his dim candle, a pale yeshiva boy in yarmelkeh and traditional earlocks would pore over the pages of Anna Karenina, swaying back and forth as he chanted its words with the melody that was his only way of reading.¹³

For Gurwitz, the path to modernity ran directly through Jewish religious studies. Restricted by the teachers of his youth to the Pentateuch and Talmud, he was (astonishingly to a modern reader) almost entirely unfamiliar with the rest of the Hebrew Bible. "At the most, I was exposed to the occasional Psalm, or one of the Five Megilloth (Scrolls) when these were read in the synagogue. Expanding his scope beyond these childhood restraints to discover the rest of the Bible was Gurwitz’s first step into a broader intellectual engagement. This reading necessitated a knowledge of Hebrew—study of which, paradoxically, his teachers both required and discouraged—in contrast to the already familiar Aramaic of the Talmud. As his Hebrew improved, he began to explore the growing body of secular literary works in that language. All of this, he writes, went on outside the yeshiva: Since we were not permitted to have such ‘unsacred’ books in our possession, I was compelled to pursue my Hebrew study in secret. This, I later learned, was what many of the boys did." The Netziv, the formidable scholar who headed the Volozhin Yeshiva, embodied the ambivalence of the age by disapproving such reading as bittul zeman (a waste of time), yet unofficially allowing it.

From these beginnings, Haskalah principles affected Gurwitz throughout the rest of his life as he sought a balance between religious fanaticism, on the one hand, and secular modernity, on the other. His commitment to Jewish education, to the Torah and Talmud, is evident in his lifelong career as a teacher of those subjects. Years later, however, when he operated his own Jewish school, he considered obtaining certification from the Russian government to teach a full secular curriculum (deciding ultimately not to). He studied the Russian language so as to be conversant with the general public in Pavlograd, where he lived with his family for twenty years, and sent his daughters to gymnasium and university for the Russian equivalent of a public education. Restricted in childhood to a narrow set of canonical Jewish texts, as an adult Gurwitz embraced the panoply of educational opportunities for himself and his family.

Even in his later years in San Antonio, Gurwitz persisted in scholarship in a way that demonstrated both the appeal of traditional Jewish study and the modernizing effect of the Haskalah. In his first published work, Torah in Rhyme, completed in 1929, he translated the Pentateuch into rhyming Yiddish verse. In 1943, eight years after completing the memoir, he published Proverbs of the Talmudic Sages in Rhyme, a selection of Talmudic sayings in Yiddish verse. His search for a middle intellectual ground is apparent in these efforts to render the canonical Jewish texts he knew from his own rigid schooling into a poetic, accessible vernacular. It is reinforced in his composition of a memoir, a secular form adopted by maskilim.

As a final effect of the Haskalah outlook, Gurwitz demonstrated throughout his life an extraordinary pluralism concerning the tendency of Jews in Europe and America to divide into factions and sects. He had his own opinions, certainly, but he shows great ability to respect, learn from, and even live among those with contrary views. He identifies himself many times, for example, as a mitnagged, an opponent of Hasidism, the mystical strain of Judaism that differed greatly from Gurwitz’s own scholastic upbringing. Nonetheless, he visits Hasidic communities, reports admiringly on their practices and customs, works for a time in the home of a Hasidic landowner, and shows great curiosity, even respect, for this alternative form of Jewish worship. His pluralistic approach to Jewish diversity is made most plain in the concluding pages of the memoir, where he emphasizes the unity of the Jewish people. As all the roots of a tree may grow outward in all directions, he writes, but are firmly fixed in their one point of origin—the tree itself—so are we. All branches of the tree are equally to be cherished and respected. This is the outlook of a genuine scholar and teacher, one affected deeply by Enlightenment ideals and by American democratic ideology. In an era when Jews were fragmenting along a variety of political, denominational, national, and spiritual lines, Gurwitz offers a plea for solidarity. As the Nazi threat simultaneously emerged in Europe, it could not have been more timely.

Family Life and Livelihood

Gurwitz had entered Volozhin with the intent of becoming a rabbi, but that career was not to be. Under pressure from his future in-laws, he opted to end his studies, marry, and obtain certification as a shochet, a more remunerative trade than scholarship. This choice set the direction of the remainder of his life. Thereafter, he devoted himself to securing a living to support his growing family. He tried his hand unsuccessfully in a variety of business schemes, but he remained forever a shochet and melamed. He became a devoted and attentive family man, clearly proud of the responsibility he bore for sustaining Jewish identity—for feeding both the body and the soul with Jewish food—but it is clear from the memoir that he remained wistful for the contemplative life he had abandoned.

He and his first wife,