In 1910, at the age of fifty-one, Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz made the decision to emigrate from southeastern Ukraine to begin a new life in Texas. In 1935, in his seventies, Gurwitz composed a retrospective autobiography, Memories of Two Generations, that recounts his personal story both of the rich history of the lost Jewish world of Eastern Europe and of the rambunctious development of frontier Jewish communities in the US.