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

Ready for a veritable Fiddler on the Roof in Texas? Memories of Two Generations provides just that. The book’s subtitle—A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas—sounds contradictory, almost comical. Yet it aptly describes an immigrant saga filled with dichotomies and ironies as told through the sardonic pen of Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz. A Talmudic teacher and kosher butcher, Gurwitz spent his first fifty-one years, which make up the first three-quarters of his memoir, in Russia’s Pale of Settlement. In 1910 he settled in San Antonio. By 1935, writing in his mother tongue, he completed this chronicle, a time capsule that straddles two worlds. Long hidden in typescript form in a handful of archives, his translated life story is at last available, richly annotated and expertly introduced by editor Bryan Edward Stone, who examined Texas Jewry in his 2010 book, The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas (University of Texas Press).

Memories of Two Generations brings back to life a San Antonio of muddy roads where scrawny horses pulled wagons to Little Jerusalem, a four-block stretch of West Commerce Street. Yiddish-speaking merchants whose storefronts had Spanish names sold yards of cloth to Mexican Americans. Amid the commercial confusion, as many as three kosher butchers competed to carve beef for Jewish households, evidence of a vibrant ethnic enclave that has received scant attention from scholars.

Most Texas Jewish histories focus on acculturated Reform Jews who arrived during the frontier days or the cattle era and rapidly integrated into the mainstream. Few histories examine Orthodox Jews who clung to Eastern European foodways and worshipped in synagogues where Old World rabbis, hired and fired at whim, delivered sermons and lessons in Yiddish. Though largely insulated from the rest of the city, this isolated enclave could not seal itself off from the 1921 rains that deluged San Antonio. Gurwitz’s eyewitness account adds to descriptions of the city’s worst recorded floods when he writes that “there was grave danger that the entire synagogue building might be washed away. … The benches were floating” (310).

Gurwitz immigrated to Texas via the Galveston Movement, a channel that from 1907 to 1913 delivered 10,000 Eastern European Jews to the Gulf Coast island. Memories of Two Generations provides the only first-person published account of the complete journey, starting with his family’s departure from the shtetl. “Half the town accompanied us to the station,” he writes (273). As the train left Russia behind, Gurwitz recalls, “We took deep breaths … free at last from Tsar Nicholas and his miserable agents” (276). However, as the Gurwitz family continued across German soil to the Baltic Sea, agents working for the Galveston Movement were rude and condescending; fellow émigrés traveling in steerage were pushy and coarse. “I saw at once this was to be no pleasure trip” (277). Gurwitz paid to upgrade his shipboard accommodations, thus skirting “this gehinnom” (279), the Hebrew term for the cursed place where ancient kings of Judah sacrificed their children by fire. This Old Testament analogy is among dozens intertwined throughout the memoir, making Gurwitz’s autobiography a treasure for biblical scholars as well as ethnographers and urban historians. What’s more, the Yiddish rhythm and Talmudic reasoning throughout the text make this primary source a delight to read.