Neither Fish nor Fowl: A Mercantile Jewish Family on the Rio Grande

After Michael’s retirement in the 1950s, Morris took over management of the store, which had become a local institution catering to and employing a wide variety of the area’s residents, including Anglos and Latinos, US and Mexican residents.

As the themes of Jewish identity, family business, and the borderland intersect in the Riskind store, they provide the foundation of Morris Riskind’s memoir, which, although set mostly in one small Texas city, chronicles Riskind’s vast life experience. The book’s interest lies in Riskind’s distinctive point of view, the many ways in which his life diverged from the expected norms of both American Jewish history and borderland society. This lively, far-ranging story depicts not only a family, a business, and a very small Jewish community but an altogether neglected facet of the American Jewish experience.

Bryan Edward Stone is a professor of history at Del Mar College, where he teaches courses in US history. He was named a 2024 Piper Professor by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation, which recognizes ten Texas college and university faculty annually. He also received the 2019 Aileen Creighton Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2021 Teacher of the Year award from Del Mar College. Stone is the author of The Chosen Folks: Jews on the Frontiers of Texas (2010), which won the Southern Jewish Historical Society Book Prize in 2011, and the editor of Alexander Gurwitz’s historical memoir Memories of Two Generations: A Yiddish Life in Russia and Texas (2016). He lives in Corpus Christi, Texas.