Early years Isaac Aronovich Hourwich was born April 26, 1860, in
Vilna,
Lithuania, then part of the
Russian Empire. The Hourwich family was of the
middle class, his father Aaron Hourwich was a well-educated employee in a bank who provided a quality
secular education to his children. Hourwich graduated from a classical
gymnasium in the Belarusian city of
Minsk in 1877. Thereafter he attended the
University of St. Petersburg, where he studied mathematics. Hourwich earned his doctorate from Columbia after successfully defending a pioneering
dissertation on the economics of the Russian village. A committed
socialist from his early years, in the United States Hourwich first joined the
Socialist Labor Party of America, leaving it in 1897 to join the
Social Democratic Party of America (SDP) headed by
Eugene V. Debs. Moreover, as was the case in his earlier run for the Russian Duma, Hourwich was unsuccessful in his effort to win a seat in Congress. Hourwich learned to write in
Yiddish only at the age of 35. Thereafter he became a prolific writer in that language, writing for a variety of publications under various
pseudonyms, including "Isaac Halevy" and "Yitzchok Isaac." Hourwich joined the
Socialist Party of America for the first time during
World War I. In his later years Hourwich became involved in the
Zionist movement and in 1917 he was among those who helped to organize the
American Jewish Congress. He remained active in the socialist movement as well, publishing a Yiddish translation of
Das Kapital by
Karl Marx in 1919 and publishing fragments of his uncompleted Yiddish autobiography,
Memoirs of a Heretic, in the Socialist
The Jewish Daily Forward and the
anarchist Fraye Arbeter Shtimme (Free Worker's Voice). In 1919 Hourwich became involved with the semi-official mission of
Soviet Russia in America, the
Russian Soviet Government Bureau, as its legal advisor. Hourwich would visit briefly Soviet Russia in 1922 but he was thoroughly disillusioned by the experience, and he emerged as a critic of the tactics of the
Bolshevik Party of
V.I. Lenin.
Death Isaac Hourwich died of
pneumonia on July 9, 1924. He was 64 years old at the time of his death. Hourwich was remembered by his friend, journalist
William M. Feigenbaum, as "a man of charm and genuine brilliance" with a tendency to intentionally hold contrarian opinions. "People disagreed with him but he made them think to justify their position," Feigenbaum recalled. ==Legacy==