About the Book
FAMILY HISTORY
The non-fiction book "Abe's Way" is the remarkable true story of an impoverished Jewish family who fled Russia at the turn of the 20th century and established an extensive department store and grocery empire on the Texas Gulf Coast. Over the years, this tight-knit cast of immigrants and its offspring parlayed their mercantile success into a major cotton, cattle, and light manufacturing conglomerate. They developed partnerships and struck agreements with an array of the Lone Star State's most legendary, intriguing, and colorful characters. By century's end, the forces of change, competition, family squabbles, suicide, and a fatal plane crash brought down the curtains on their epic business venture. Readers interested in United States history, particularly as it relates to the wave of immigration from Europe to America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, will certainly enjoy this book; as will those attracted to assimilation and the Jewish experience in America. If Texas history, cattle ranching, farming, and the culture of the American West are among your interests, then this book is for you. Business, entrepreneurship, and economic development are also key components of "Abe's Way," as are psychiatry, genius, patriotism, philanthropy, abuse, and the scourge of mental illness.
About the Author :
Joe Robinowitz has spent more than six decades in media, journalism, and mass communication, principally as a newspaper and magazine editor and television station executive in New York City, Boston, San Antonio, and Philadelphia. When he was nine years old, he founded, published, and edited a weekly community newspaper in his hometown of Richmond, Texas. He worked on his high school yearbook staff and wrote for community newspapers in high school and college. From 1973 to 1977, he was a reporter and copy editor at the San Antonio (Texas) Express-News. He was an assistant managing editor at the New York Post from 1978 to 1982. In 1982, he became editor of the Boston Herald. After more than four years in that position, he became vice president and general manager of WFXT-TV in Boston. Joe served as editor and then executive vice president of TV Guide magazine from 1989 to 1993. In 1993, he returned to the New York Post as managing editor. He served in that capacity until his retirement in 2020, helping run the Post's newsroom, its daily operation and production, launching the Post's website, and acting as editor-in-chief of the company's Community Newspaper Group from 2006 to 2011. Joe is married and is the father of three grown children. He is a 1973 graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Joe is a 23-year resident of Scarsdale, New York, where he presides over a 97-year-old Tudor house with his wife, Marjorie Meiman, an accomplished photographer and artist. He enjoys history, gardening, photography, barbecue, music, travel, and baseball. "Abe's Way" is Joe's first book. He can be reached at jrobohome@gmail.com.
Review :
" 'Abe's Way' is a meticulously researched and well-crafted work. The storytelling is like a warm, personal, entertaining letter sent back home."
Charles Kaufman, past president, B'nai B'rith International
"As we follow the narrative of the Robinowitz brothers and their extended family in their journey from the Russian Pale of Settlement to southeast Texas in search of freedom and prosperity, we encounter a family of Jewish immigrants whose hard-won empire of dry goods stores, cattle herds, and manufacturing companies impacted thousands."
Joshua Furman, Ph.D., Director of the Rocky Mountain Jewish Historical Society at the University of Denver and founder of the Joan and Stanford Alexander South Texas Jewish Archives at Rice University
"Joe Robinowitz's study of his own family reveals the depth to which Jewish businesses and business people made outsized contributions to the development of communities where they might not be expected to be found at all ... Comprehensively researched and engagingly written, 'Abe's Way' presents the breadth of this story and depicts an aspect of the Jewish experience in America that readers will find surprising and informative."
Bryan Edward Stone, Ph.D., Del Mar College professor and author of 'The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas'
"Abe Robinowitz's mania and his tragic, depressive demise at the height of his success, awakened his son, Eli, to the medical reality of mental illness. It moved Eli to become a leading figure in guiding American psychiatry into the realm of science and helped redirect it from the obscurities of Freudian thought, making it possible to develop effective medical treatments for serious psychiatric maladies."
J. Alexander Bodkin, M.D., Chief, Clinical Psychopharmacology Research Program, McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts
"This is a great read that warms the heart."
Barbara Rosenberg, past president, Texas Jewish Historical Society
