Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas by Alexander Z. Gurwitz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texasby Alexander Z. Gurwitz Joshua J. Furman Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas. By Alexander Z. Gurwitz. Edited by Bryan Edward Stone. Translated by Amram Prero. Jews and Judaism: History and Culture. ( Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016. Pp. xxiv, 416. $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-1903-8.) In August 1910, when he was fifty-one years old, Alexander Z. Gurwitz set out from a Ukrainian town in czarist Russia along with his wife and four children. A month later, the Gurwitz family boarded the ship in Bremen, Germany, that eventually brought them to Galveston, Texas, and a new life in San Antonio. Twenty-five years later, in his seventies, Gurwitz composed a Yiddish-language memoir about his traditional religious upbringing in eastern Europe and his experiences as an immigrant and member of the San Antonio Jewish community in the early twentieth century. Thanks to an older English translation by Rabbi Amram Prero and a new scholarly introduction and footnotes by historian Bryan Edward Stone, both scholars and laypeople will find Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texasa treasure trove of information about Jewish life spanning two eras and two continents. The first 240 pages of the memoir offer an intimate account of eastern European Jewish life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gurwitz narrates in detail the rhythms of his family's religious observances, the particulars of his yeshiva education, and the vicissitudes of his life as a married man, kosher butcher, and teacher who spent twenty years of his adult life in eastern Ukraine. Regular readers of this journal will be drawn to the final sixty pages of Gurwitz's book, which describe his immigration journey and his impressions of America and Texas. [End Page 728] From the standpoint of southern Jewish historical scholarship, the memoir is particularly notable on two counts. First, it offers a rare full account from an individual who participated in the "Galveston Immigration Movement," the coordinated effort on the part of Jewish community leaders to redirect eastern European immigrants away from the East Coast in the decade before World War I (p. 4). Second, Gurwitz's memoir sheds valuable light on the inner workings of a small but viable Orthodox Jewish community in early-twentieth-century San Antonio, helping reframe the way scholars think about immigrant Jewish life in pockets of settlement far from the major urban centers of the East Coast and Midwest. Gurwitz himself offers a somewhat unusual portrait of an eastern European Jewish immigrant, as editor Bryan Edward Stone notes. Poverty did not drive him and his family away from Russia; unlike the majority of his contemporaries, Gurwitz enjoyed relative economic stability at the time he made the decision to emigrate. By leaving for America, Gurwitz hoped to protect his family from a cholera outbreak raging in their town, and from the ever-present threats of anti-Semitic violence and czarist persecution. "Thus," Stone writes, "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 was a better place for an Orthodox Jew to lead a traditional life than Russia was" (p. 2). Notwithstanding a few minor errors in the book's glossary of foreign terms, Stone is to be commended for shepherding this valuable new edition of Gurwitz's memoir into our hands. Joshua J. Furman Rice University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association