ALEKSANDER ZISKIND HURVITS

ALEKSANDER ZISKIND HURVITS (b. 18590

            He was born in Minsk, and he studied in religious primary school and yeshivas, among them the Volozhin Yeshiva.  After marrying he worked as an itinerant religious teacher and ritual slaughterer.  His bitter material circumstances drove him from one place to the next.  He came to the United States in 1910 and settled in San Antonio, Texas, where he worked as a peddler, a supervisor of kashrut, a ritual slaughterer, and a Hebrew teacher.  He described his wanderings in a two-volume work: Seyfer zikhroynes fun tsvey doyres (Volume of memoirs from two generations), vol. 1 (New York, 1935), 252 pp., vol. 2 (New York, 1935), 229 pp.  His remembrances involved the life of Jews in Ukraine and in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  His descriptions of religious primary school, yeshiva, Jewish ways of making a living, customs, holidays, and the Jewish colonies in Ukraine were written simply and realistically.  He was also the author of Toyre bekharuzim (The Torah in verse)—vol. 1 (New York, 1929), 180 pp.—a retelling in verse of Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus (“Ahead it was empty and vacuous, / Darkness, water and chaos no more, / But God’s holy spirit hovered over the water. / God’s word just once brought all to life.”)  In a similar versions: Numbers, Deuteronomy, the Writings, Job, Proverbs, and other holy texts constituted vol. 2 (New York, 1929), 163 pp.; Pitgeme ḥazal beḥaruzim (Sayings of the sages in verse) (San Antonio, n.d.), 160 pp.; Maamre ḥazal (Sayings of the sages) in the original Hebrew and with Yiddish translation.  He also published in a book letters from Chaim Nachman Bialik, Daniel Perski, and others.

Source: P. Vyernik, in Morgn zhurnal (New York) (May 17, 1931).