Members of the Tribe (2 page)

And there was another mystery—my relationship to other Jews. Once, on a family trip to northern Michigan, we stopped at a country inn for lunch. The restaurant was crowded and we stood in line waiting for a table. While we waited, my father idly ran his fingers over the keyboard of an upright piano that stood near the door. “Da da da da DA da, da da da da DA,” he played, picking out the first notes of “Ha-Tikvah,” the Israeli national anthem.

We were halfway through lunch in the bustling dining room when another patron stopped in front of the piano. “Da da da DA da, da da da da dum,” he completed my father’s tune and, without turning to look at us, walked out the door. I felt like I was in the underground.

So there I was. I had a color I couldn’t see, a secret language I couldn’t speak. I had uncles who hurled ancient curses across the centuries and then settled back to watch the Stanley Cup finals on television, aunts who worshiped America and spit superstitiously every time they passed a Christian cemetery. I had an invisible geography and a family that came to the United States out of thin air. No one wanted to explain anything, and yet everyone seemed proud when I figured something out by myself.

It wasn’t until I came to Israel at the age of twenty that things began to fall into place. Gradually my American self became intensely curious about these small mysteries. The Jewish aspect of my life was trivial and the Judaism I knew in Pontiac seemed to be a relatively innocuous kind of modern religion. And yet, I knew that for two thousand years my ancestors had been persecuted and
tortured, even murdered, for practicing it. What, I wondered, did Temple Beth Jacob of Pontiac, Michigan have in common with Auschwitz? How was I, an American kid more or less like my non-Jewish classmates, related to the mythological figures of the Bible? What was really Jewish? What was really Jewish about me?

These questions eventually led me to Israel, where I went to spend my junior year of college. And it was there, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, that things began to make sense. My first glimpse of the country was like emerging from Plato’s cave. Jewishness, an elusive shadow in Pontiac, became a clear, tangible reality. It was in Jerusalem that I found what my ancestors had once had but failed to pass along—the attitudes and skills, spirit and substance of a distinctive, self-contained Jewish civilization.

I stayed in Israel, and gradually I came to understand and adopt its way of looking at Jewishness. Although most Israelis are not Orthodox, people tend to see Jewish life in traditional terms. Holidays are celebrated when and how they always have been; and synagogues look and feel pretty much the way they have for generations. Children are taught what Jewish children need to know—Hebrew, the Bible, and Jewish literature, history, and customs—as a matter of course. The concept of Jewish people-hood is implicit in Israel’s attitudes and explicit in its laws and policies. Even the rebellion against religion is carried out in a Jewish language and intellectual tradition. Israel’s daily life and underlying assumptions would be understandable, if outrageous and offensive, to any eighteenth-century rabbi.

As I came to understand Jewish reality through the prism of Israeli life, and to acquire the skills necessary to participate in it, a strange thing happened; perversely, I became curious about American Judaism. I left the United States when I was a college student, and although I had been back for sporadic visits, I had never lived there as an adult. I began to wonder what it was really like to be a Jew in America.

I heard differing and, to me, confusing reports about the state of Jewish life in the United States. Some experts argued that Jews were disappearing; others claimed that things had never been
better. I read articles proclaiming America a Jewish wasteland; other articles called it a center of Jewish culture. Friends told me that anti-Semitism was dead; other friends spoke fearfully about Louis Farrakhan or the radical right. It was hard to know who or what to believe.

On another level, I was fascinated by the lives of individual Jews in America. I wondered if they were confounded, as I had been, by a sense of their own mysteriousness. I was curious about how they lived, how they were different from other Americans—and other Jews. My interest was partly the product of Zionist concern about the Jewish future; but it was at least as much a personal curiosity about what my own life might have been if I had stayed at home.

In the fall of 1986, I decided to take a trip through Jewish America. I had no itinerary and no special agenda. I wanted to meet as many Jews as possible, talk to them, and see their lives up close. I had no intention of writing an “objective” study, or a comprehensive report. I didn’t look for representative samples or worry about giving every aspect of the community its proper weight. I avoided experts, spokespersons, and superstars. I wanted to see and experience things for myself.

For almost six months I traveled randomly, visiting more than thirty states. I was fascinated by the variety and complexity of American Jewish life, and the unpredictable ways it affects individuals.

In many places I had a contact—a friend, a local journalist, or someone active in the Jewish community. In others, I simply picked up the phone or walked in and introduced myself. It didn’t matter. Jews understand books, Americans are open and friendly, and the combination made it possible to go places and see things I hadn’t expected or imagined.

Some of the customs I encountered during my trip seemed strange, even exotic; there is a do-it-yourself flavor to much of American Judaism that can be disconcerting. And many of the people I met along the way were far from the stereotypical Jews I had expected to find. But no matter where I was—in a Jewish farm town in New England or a black synagogue in Queens, in a gay
temple in San Francisco or among the Jews of the Louisiana bayou—I always felt at home. I came to the United States feeling like an Israeli; I left reminded that I am also, as a friend in Detroit put it, an MOT—a Member of the Tribe.

O
n a muggy, overcast Thursday afternoon in October, Macy B. Hart set out from New Orleans in a white Chevrolet van to bury the Dixie diaspora. His destination was Donaldsonville, Louisiana, a little town in the heart of Cajun country, the first stop on a long, slow procession through the hamlets of the Deep South. Once, Jewish communities had flourished in places like Donaldsonville, but now they were dying, and Macy B. was determined to give them a decent funeral. Nobody assigned him the burial detail. He volunteered for it, because he knew it had to be done and there was no one else to do it.

Macy came to that realization gradually. A few years before, he heard about an old man in Laurel, Mississippi, who—discovering he was the last Jew left in town and uncertain what to do—took the Torah out of the ark of the small temple and locked it in the trunk of his car. Macy wasn’t surprised. For some time, Jewish religious objects had been turning up in boutiques and antique shops around the South, historic temples had been crumbling for lack of attention, and Jewish cemeteries had gone untended.
But the Laurel incident made Macy realize that small-town southern Jewry as he had known it as a boy in Winona, Mississippi, was coming to an end, and he resolved to help make the demise as dignified and painless as possible.

First, he tried unsuccessfully to get the Laurel Torah for the Jacobs Camp for Living Judaism in Utica, Mississippi, a summer camp that Macy has run since 1969. Then he began to search the boutiques for sacred articles, which he brought to Utica. Gradually he became determined to create a museum at the camp as a memorial to southern Jewry and to provide aid to those communities that could no longer help themselves. For months he had been planning the museum; now, in the fall of 1986, he was ready to set out on a barnstorming tour aimed at making it a reality. I was invited along for the ride.

The arrangements had been made a few months earlier. I called Macy’s office from Jerusalem, smiling when his secretary answered the phone in a murky delta drawl: “Jacobs Camp for Livin’ Judaism, shalom y’all.” It was a Macy thing to say, funny and defiant, and I was still chuckling when he came on the line. I told him I wanted to write about southern Jews, and he suggested that I join him on the road.

“Come with me and I’ll show you some Jews you never seen before,” he had promised. “I’m fixin’ to hit Donaldsonville, Laurel, Natchez, Port Gibson—all them big cities.”

“You mean there are really Jews in all those places?” I asked, and he gave me an easygoing country laugh. “Yeah, boy, there are. And I’ll guarantee you one thing. They all eat crawfish.”

It was an old joke between old friends. Macy had been calling himself a crawfish eater ever since we first met, in the summer of 1964, at a camp institute of the National Federation of Temple Youth in upstate New York. None of us Yankees had ever encountered a Jew like Macy, or even suspected that one existed. He was razor thin and country slick with a squeaky southern voice like Deputy Barney Fife on
The Andy Griffith Show
, and he quickly became the focus of amused attention. We learned that his was the only Jewish family in Winona, Mississippi, a town where his father owned the local clothing store, his brother was married to the daughter of the Baptist preacher, and Macy himself led an idyllic Tom Sawyer life, playing basketball for his segregated high
school, riding with the Confederate Cavalry Club, spinning records as a DJ on the town’s underpowered radio station, and chasing girls with innocent abandon.

Macy was perfectly well aware of his impact on us northerners and he played it for all it was worth, deepening his already outrageous Mississippi drawl, calling fifteen-year-old girls “ma’am,” and regaling us with tales about his exotic hometown. In the course of these stories it emerged that there was a serious side to Macy B. Hart. Back home, on Sunday mornings, he drove seventy miles over rural roads to Cleveland, Mississippi, to attend religious school and to take part in the youth group; and despite his lack of a hometown constituency, he had somehow managed to get himself elected a regional officer of SOFTY, the Reform youth movement of the Deep South. Macy’s knowledge of Judaism was tenuous—he was capable of asking, “What do y’all call Friday night, Shabbes?”—but his sincerity was obvious and touching. He came back to the summer institute year after year, and in 1967 he was elected president of the National Federation.

Macy went to Louisiana State University and later to the University of Texas, where he met his wife, Susan, a former high school majorette from Lexington, Mississippi. After graduation he intended to become a lawyer. But the Reform movement wanted to start a camp in Mississippi for Jewish children, and Macy agreed to set it up and run it for one year. Macy and Susan wanted to live in a large city with a real Jewish community; instead they wound up in Utica, a place where Jews are so rare that Susan, whose southern accent makes Dolly Parton sound like Margaret Thatcher, was once asked by a neighbor if she knew of any other foreigners in town.

That was in 1970. Now, almost twenty years later, Macy was still at the camp, still engaged in a quixotic struggle to preserve and defend Jewish life below the Mason-Dixon line. It was a losing battle and he knew it, but something compelled him to keep fighting. I was interested in seeing the South and its Jews, but I was even more curious to learn what made Macy feel such a sense of obligation. I thought I might find the answer on his somewhat macabre burial tour.

There were four of us in the van as Macy headed onto the highway, up the Mississippi from New Orleans in the direction of
the Louisiana bayou. Vicki Fox, a young museum consultant from Los Angeles by way of Hattiesburg, had been brought in to help with the technical details. And Macy had drafted Betty, a New Orleans Jewish matron who grew up in Donaldsonville before World War II, to serve as our guide to Cajun country.

For Betty it was a sentimental journey, and she was in a nostalgic mood. “My daddy had this store in Napoleonville?” she said, ending her declarative sentences with question marks in the southern way. “Well, everybody in town knew we were Jewish, I mean he closed up on the holidays. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? Of course he closed for Christmas, too. And we had a Christmas tree. I never did have a feeling that there was anything too different about being a Jew back then, you want to know the truth.”

“People up north think that the Jews down here were afraid of the Klan,” Macy said, and Betty shook her head. “I can’t honestly say we ever had any anti-Semitism that I knew of. Well, there was this one time when a little nothin’ boy put a note under our door, but nobody got too excited about that.”

As we approached Donaldsonville, Betty began to point out local landmarks. She became especially animated when we reached the Sunshine Bridge. The bridge is a monument to the administration of Huey Long, a politician Betty remembers with fondness. “A lot of people had the wrong idea about that man,” she said in a challenging tone. “He was portrayed as a dictator and all, but he did a lot of good for this state. And I’ll tell you something else, he had a lot of Jewish support down here, and a lot of Jewish officials in his government.”

Huey Long seemed an appropriate hero for this part of Louisiana. In the fall of 1986 New Orleans was in a severe economic slump, victim of the world oil glut and the decline of OPEC, but Donaldsonville was unaffected by such contemporary economic exotica—it was still trying to recover from the Great Depression.

The town calls itself “The Gateway to Acadia,” but on this dismal Thursday afternoon, with gray clouds brooding low and ominous, it seemed less a gateway than a tenement doorway. Aimless groups of men engaged in indolent, fly-swatting, street-corner conversation, and raggedy children clambered over the Studebakers and Packards that rested on blocks on the front lawns
of tar-paper shacks. Betty surveyed the town with dismay, occasionally murmuring “My, my” under her breath. Clearly it had been a long time between visits.

“Miz Betty, do you recollect where the temple was?” Macy asked, and she shook her head in confusion. “I was confirmed in that little ole temple, and now I can’t even remember where it is,” she said. “I think it was this building here.” She pointed to a two-story clapboard structure with the sign
ACE HARDWARE
above a window. Macy, who knows southern Jewish architecture, looked with a practiced eye. “Yes ma’am, there she is,” he said, shaking his head sadly.