Literary El Paso

Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Sylvia Deener Cohen

142 Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Sylvia Deener Cohen Mimi Reisel Gladstein was raised in El Paso. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico and is a faculty member at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is the author of five books, including The Ayn Rand Companion and In Search of Steinbeck: A Continuing Journey, and co-editor of The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga and Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand. Gladstein has been recognized internationally for her John Steinbeck scholarship and teaching. She has chaired several departments at the University of Texas at El Paso, was the first director of the women’s studies program, and has served as associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts. In 2003 she received the award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement in the College of Liberal Arts and in 2006 received the award for Outstanding Service to Students. She is also head of the Content Committee for the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center and was the director of the first Holocaust Remembrance Program in El Paso. Sylvia Deener Cohen moved to El Paso from the Bronx and became aware of the resettlement of Holocaust survivors in her role as administrative assistant to Emil Reisel at the Rio Grande Sales Company. In 1986 she went to many concentration camps as part of the March of the Living project. She did survivor interviews through Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation and was the senior adult director of the Jewish Community Center. Now retired, Cohen was the first executive director of the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center. She continues to work with survivors through Jewish Family and Children’s Services and serves on the Advisory Board and Content Committee of the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center. 143 From Lone Stars of David: The Wild West Welcomes Holocaust Survivors El Paso, the international city that borders two countries and two states, has long been a crossroads of people and cultures, from nomadic Indians and migrating Mexicans to Jews who came as frontier merchants and later as Holocaust-era refugees. Both haven and highway , this city at the southernmost point of the Rocky Mountains is a natural passageway that diverse groups have traversed for centuries. Through this mountain pass, Spanish explorers journeyed from the Chihuahuan Desert to Santa Fe. The first Anglo settlers arrived shortly after the Texas Revolution in 1836, and Jewish entrepreneurs began setting up shop in 1849 after the U.S. Army constructed an adobe outpost named Fort Bliss.Outlaws hid in El Paso in the 1880s, the decade during which two Jewish merchants were elected mayor. Throughout the Mexican Revolution, from 1910 to 1920, El Paso served as a center of intrigue. Exiled leaders sought refuge there. Revolutionary general Pancho Villa—bandit to some,folk hero to others—contacted Jewish merchants and tailors to outfit his troops. One of those merchants, Rubin Cohen, recalled: “Whatever Villa wanted, Villa got!” Since World War II, El Paso’s Jewish population has held steady at around five thousand people. While the Jewish numbers remained stable, the city’s total population nearly tripled to seven hundred thousand at the end of the century, making El Paso the largest American city along the Mexican border. Despite the Jewish community’s shrinking proportion to the whole, El Paso’s Jewish families maintained a high profile. Ever since the city’s first rabbi arrived in 1898, Jewish religious leaders—along with a priest and a minister—have presided at civic occasions as if they represented a third of the populace. The city’s long-time Reform rabbi, Martin Zielonka, who served from 1900 until his death in 1938, was among the founders of the College of the City of El Paso. Conservative Rabbi Joseph Roth, who served Congregation B’nai Zion from 1923 to 1953, headed the Philosophy Department at the Texas College of Mines, forerunner of the University of Texas at El Paso. A post-World War II rabbi, Floyd S. Fierman, wrote a series of colorfully titled history books—Roots 144 and Boots and Guts and Ruts—that record experiences of the region’s Jewish pioneers and demonstrate the degree to which Jews were among the mix of people that settled the Southwest. When the Chamizal National Monument, celebrating the end of a centuryold border dispute, opened in 1967 on an...