Between Two Worlds: The Memoirs of a Physician

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In his autobiography, Benjamin L. Gordon devotes over 60-pages to his hometown of Zemaiciu Naujamiestis (Nayshtot-Sugind in Yiddish), Lithuania, for which no yizkor book exists. Some Jewish autobiographies include hundreds of pages about their authors’ hometowns in Eastern Europe. Autobiographies are often the only source of communal life in scores of former Jewish communities. For an English-language autobiographer who devotes hundreds of pages to his hometowns in the Ukraine, click here. Project Zikaron is the only website to index the localities described in thousands of autobiographies and provides direct links to the exact page where they are mentioned.

Gordon’s memoirs is one of the most outstanding 19^th-century Jewish autobiographies of an Eastern European Jew written in English. He describes in detail his experiences and hardships in studying in kheyder and later in various Lithuanian yeshivas. He also provides some important overall descriptions of various aspects of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. For example, he describes small-town rabbis (p. 80), a typical Jewish mother in Eastern Europe (p. 67), his experiences of his voyage on a boat to America in 1890 (p. 135), etc. As a physician, he writes about the many diseases which used to kill of so many, particularly children, before the advent of modern medical advances. Upon immigrating to New York in 1890, he became part of the inner circle by Rabbi Ya’akov Joseph, the chief rabbi of New York City (p. 142), for a short while.

Though documents from America give his year of birth as the early 1870s, his autobiography gives two indications that he was born in 1866. He mentions that at the age of 13 he was friends with his relative of the same age Boris (Berl) Schatz (1866-1932), who later became the founder of the Bezalel school of art in Jerusalem (p. 72). He also indicates that when he was fifteen years old, the pogroms of April 1881 occurred (p. 88).