Exploring treasures from Fall River: The Horvitz family chronicles

Morris Horvitz Jr.

I went to visit the past, and I unexpectedly ran into a long-gone, beloved uncle.

Well, anyway, his voice, which I hadn’t heard since he died in 1996.

And here it is, as he recalls, in an interview recorded in 1984, what life was like as a Jewish boy in Russia – the Ukrainian town of Zhmerinka – early in the century:

“The Christians had no use for me, and I was instructed by my father that when I walk on a sidewalk and a Christian boy comes toward me I should step off in the gutter in case he engages me either in conversation or into a fight, and that stayed with me for a long, LONG time.”

The uncle, then almost 82, was Morris Horvitz Jr. of Fall River, Massachusetts. The Horvitzes had to be the largest Jewish family in the city, with branches in Rhode Island and New Bedford. There were grandparents, brothers, sisters, uncles, nieces and cousins tripping over themselves. In two cases, uncles married nieces. Many folks shared names. Indeed, there were two by the name of Morris Horvitz.

I live in Providence now, but I was born into this Fall River world. My mother was a Horvitz, Anna Horvitz Bakst. Her father was Morris Horvitz Sr. He was the uncle, not the father, of Morris Jr.

When my mother, Anna Horvitz, was growing up, her best friend was a cousin named – wait for it – Anna Horvitz.

It’s complicated, and I wouldn’t advise you to try to figure it all out. I’m 71, and I still get lost.

Recently, I visited an impressive collection of Fall River Jewish artifacts and records at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. These Archives of the Center for Jewish Culture also include New Bedford materials. I didn’t go to brush up on genealogy, but simply to dip into the boxes and boxes of documents, images, rosters, commemorative books, handwritten meeting minutes, old clippings, and over 200 recorded interviews. I wanted to feel the presence of the folks who helped fashion the contours of my life.

My Grandfather Horvitz and his wife, Dora, came to Fall River in the first years of the 20th century. He started as a peddler, but over time built up a major wholesale business, Fall River Paper & Supply. Uncle Morris Jr. eventually succeeded him at the helm.

But we can hear from Morris Jr. himself, especially about his early time here, as he was interviewed in Fall River by Anna Lepes for the UMass Dartmouth oral history collection in 1984. 

When he and his parents joined the parade of Horvitz relatives, and he arrived at age 12 in 1914, he felt wiser than his age. “Hard times mature people,” he says. He also was full of hope. After all, in America he could go to school, something denied him in the old country. Housing, in a tenement, was an improvement.

And there was this. His first friend, Sidney Feinberg, introduced him to the movies. “For five cents, we saw thousands of Indians being killed on the screen. He also introduced me to peanuts. I never knew or saw peanuts until he had an extra nickel, and he bought a bag of peanuts.”

Still, life wasn’t easy. “We were poor in Europe, and we were poor in the United States for quite a while,” he says.

Social contacts were pretty confined. There was little intermingling with other ethnic groups:

“The Jews did not have a very good command of the English language to start with, so that was a problem. Some of the (other) ethnic groups also had a problem. The Portuguese spoke Portuguese, the French spoke French, and so you couldn’t get together. Plus a lot of the Jews had that fear that they brought with them from Europe – whether it be Russia or Poland or Czechoslovakia – not to mix with anybody else.”

Later I discussed this with Morris’ daughter, my cousin Phyllis Friedman, and then with her son, Robert Friedman. They suggest Morris had good reason to be fearful in the old country. Robert says Morris told him of hiding UNDER sidewalks when the Cossacks rode into town, shooting up stores and whipping and beating Jews.  These sidewalks, Robert says, “were like the ones you see in cowboy movies, made of wood and elevated a bit as the streets were dirt.”

Phyllis says that at one point the Cossacks kidnapped Morris, and his father had to pay ransom to retrieve him. Robert says Morris never told him that, but “it is very possible that his father paid someone not to beat him up or even kill him as there was no justice available to the Jews.”

In Fall River, young Morris did not lack for ambition. In the oral interview at the archives, he says his family lived near a barn that housed horses that would draw wagons to carry bales of cotton from the wharves or rails to a cotton mill. The men who drove the wagons worked from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. But they had to labor on their own time beforehand getting the horses ready. Morris says drivers began hiring him, for 20 cents a week per horse, to clean out stalls, and water and feed the horses.

When he was done, “I used to leave, wash up as best as I could, and go to the Lincoln School. Many a time my teacher used to say, ‘Something smells here.’ She never traced it, but I knew that I brought the smell of the horses into the school yard!”

Browsing through the archives, I came upon references to my grandmother on my father’s side.

Here’s a 1958 Fall River Herald News story about a meeting of the Hebrew Ladies Helping Hand Society, founded in 1913 to assist “poor, needy and distressed” people:

“A moment of silence was observed in memory of the late Katie Bakst, a charter member.”

Look at the minutes of a 1949 meeting, where she was named chair of the cake sale. That made sense; she was a skilled baker.

My grandmother ushered her daughter-in-law, my mother, into the organization, which also raised money for such causes as scholarships, camperships, refugee relief and the aged. This was exactly the kind of activity that marked my mother’s life, and it wasn’t always a matter of money. For example, minutes from a 1958 meeting report that a guest speaker urged members to make regular visits to the old Myles Standish School for the Mentally Retarded, a state facility in Taunton, Massachusetts. Twelve women signed up. One was my mother.

Here’s another thing that jumped out at me. Flip through the entries written in the Helping Hand’s Golden Book of Joy, available at the archives, where donations were recorded. In 1953, my Grandmother Bakst contributed in honor of the bar mitzvah of my brother Arthur. And in 1957 she and my parents donated in honor of mine.

Pick up that commemorative book from Fall River’s Temple Beth-El, the then-bustling Conservative congregation, and you will see a picture of my father, Lester, who was president in 1955.

But, really, it was a Horvitz kind of town. An informal 1957 Fall River area Jewish census list in the archives includes:

Jack Horvitz, Jacob and Edith Horvitz, John and Rose Horvitz, Louis Horvitz and son David, Louis A. and Elizabeth Horvitz, Louis and Helen Horvitz, Louis K. and Miriam Horvitz, Max Horvitz, Mendel Horvitz, Milton and Sophie Horvitz, Morris Jr. and Ida Horvitz (my mother’s sister), Morris Horvitz Sr., Rebecca Horvitz, Samuel Horvitz, Mrs. Abraham Horvitz, Benjamin and Helen Horvitz, Clara Horvitz, Daniel and Ruth Horvitz, Ephraim Horvitz, Harris Horvitz, Hyman and Beatrice Horvitz, and Isidore Horvitz.

Speaking of my Great Uncle Mendel, I love a 1957 Herald News photo of him buying an Israel bond at age 87. There he is with his white beard and standard attire: black suit, black hat.

There were so many Horvitzes – and other relatives who, through marriages over the years, now had other last names – that they formed a family association in 1959, held reunions and published a newsletter.

The older generations worshipped at the old Quarry Street Orthodox synagogue in the city’s Flint section, which is centered around Bedford and Pleasant Streets and is home to countless triple-deckers. It was informally known as the Horvitz Family Synagogue. But  the membership eventually dwindled, and by 1959 it was out of business.

Look at the commemorative book from the Adas Israel Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation that moved from downtown to the upscale Highlands area. Outlining the drive to finance the new building, the book says a “most notable” contribution “was given by the Horvitz family from the remaining funds of the now defunct Quarry St. Synagogue.” I actually remember my father talking to my grandfather, Morris Horvitz Sr., about this. My father was a lawyer, and I believe he handled the paperwork.

Archives are a form of time travel. As I explored the Fall River archives, I realized the connections went beyond me. A 1959 newspaper clipping about a meeting to form the Horvitz family association noted that the guest of honor was Mrs. Samuel Horvitz of Santa Monica, California. That would be my Great Aunt Mollie. My daughter Margaret is named for her.

And so it goes.

L’dor v’dor.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Archives of the Center for Jewish Culture are in the Archives and Special Collections unit of the Claire T. Carney Library at UMass Dartmouth. 285 Old Westport Road. North Dartmouth, Mass. 02747-2300. Phone: 508-999-8686. lib.umassd.edu.  The archives/special collections librarian is Judy Farrar.

M. CHARLES BAKST is the retired Providence Journal political columnist. He belongs to Temple Habonim in Barrington. Another member there is Ellen Shand, daughter of Anna Lepes, who conducted the 1984 interview with Morris Horvitz Jr.