Members of the Tribe (3 page)

Downtown, at the corner of Crescent and Mississippi, Betty brightened. “Now here’s a place I do recall,” she said, pointing to a large white two-story building with a tattered awning draped over peeling white pillars, iron hitching posts in front, and a sign,
THE BERNARD LEMANN BUILDING
, over the door. “This used to be the grandest building in town. In those days the Lemanns were still Jewish people, Nowadays, they’re all Catholics,” she mused, without evident disapproval.

Macy stopped his van in front of Lemann’s and called to one of the men slouching against its whitewashed wall. “Do y’all know where Mister Gaston Hirsch lives?” he asked, and the idler readily provided directions in French-inflected swamp brogue.

With the window rolled down I got my first real whiff of Donaldsonville. The local economy is based on fishing and sugar refining, and it smells it; the two aromas mingle in the thick bayou air like some rich creole concoction. I was still sniffing when Macy hung a U-turn on the deserted downtown street and headed out to Cajun suburbia, to the home of Gaston Hirsch, the last Jew in Donaldsonville.

Gaston Hirsch didn’t look much like a crawfish eater when he met us at the door of his tract house. Like many of the Jews who once lived in Donaldsonville, he was born in Alsace-Lorraine; for obvious reasons, they gravitated to the French-speaking bayou country. When Hirsch first arrived in town, after World War II, there was still a congregation. But the Jews all died or moved away, and now only he was left. People in Donaldsonville didn’t know or care that he was the last Jew in town. To them he was an old man in his late seventies with a charming accent and a shock
of white hair, spry and energetic despite his advanced age. But in the long, quirky procession of the Dixie diaspora, Gaston Hirsch was the end of the line.

Hirsch was expecting us, and he greeted Macy warmly. He introduced us to his wife, a non-Jewish woman, and they looked at each other as if they were still on their honeymoon. The interior of their home revealed less than their gaze—a place that was not French, Jewish, or southern, but contemporary sitcom. The bland decor stood in contrast to the mysterious countryside, a denial of the bayou’s voodoo legacy as well as the Jewish heritage that Hirsch had brought with him from Europe.

The old man had been careless about his religion—both of his sons were baptized—but in a curious way he was as obsessed as Macy with his Jewish obligations. Foremost among these was the care and maintenance of the Jewish cemetery of Donaldsonville. Nearing the end of his life, he was concerned about the future. “Soon I will be buried there,” he told us, “and then someday, my wife will join me. She is not Jewish, but we have been together so long, and when you love a woman for fifty years, religion is not so important, yes? But who will look after us then, after I am no longer here?”

We decided to go to the cemetery for a look around. I rode with Hirsch, and Macy and the others followed in the van. The old man was anxious to tell me, a visitor from Israel, about his life as the last Jewish consul in this desolate outpost.

“I spent five years in a German prisoner-of-war camp during the war,” he said. “My wife was sentenced to hard labor, just because she was married to a Jew. We survived, and we came here, to Donaldsonville, Louisiana. Well, you are from Jerusalem, so I want you to know that I am very Jewish in my heart. My sons were baptized, yes, but that is the way it is for us here.” He shook his head at the vagaries of the Jewish condition in Acadia. Hirsch mentioned the names of several local families who were once Jewish and no longer are. “These people now call themselves Catholic, Christian. But are they Catholic in their hearts?” He gave me a sly glance. “Believe me, no matter what they call themselves, they are still Jewish in their hearts.”

The Jewish cemetery turned out to be a fenced-off section of a larger graveyard, a city of the dead for a few Protestants, a great
many Catholics, and the Jews. Gaston Hirsch led us with sure steps past ornate tombstones bearing French inscriptions: “
Thérèse Moyse, éspouse du Salamon Block
,” “
Babbette Blumenthal
,” “
Lissette
(
enfant
),” and hundreds more. “It was easier to find someone to write French inscriptions than Hebrew ones,” he explained. Macy seemed bemused by the culture shock. Donaldsonville is in the South, but it is far from the Mississippi Delta, and he was temporarily out of his element.

When we finished our tour of inspection, Gaston Hirsch took Macy aside to confer about the future. He had, he confided, a temporary solution—three men in town had agreed to take care of the cemetery. “They call themselves Christians,” he said conspiratorially, “but they all had a Jewish parent. But these men are in their sixties. The problem is, what happens when they die?” Hirsch looked at Macy with the blatant practicality of the very old.

Macy promised to explore the possibility of arranging perpetual care for the cemetery. He planned to raise money for his museum, and if he succeeded some funds would be left over for an endowment to tend Jewish cemeteries and historic buildings. “I promise you one thing, Mr. Hirsch,” he said, returning the old man’s imploring look. “We’re gonna take care of everything. We won’t let our cemeteries go untended.”

Hirsch nodded, a man who recognizes a Jewish heart when he finds one. As we drove away he stood in the cemetery, among the tombstones of his departed friends, and waved, a white-haired old man among the Jewish ghosts of the bayou.

We headed back to New Orleans in a depressed silence, stopping along the way for some RC Colas and barbecued rinds at a Piggly Wiggly. To break the mood, I told Macy and the others about the time, a few years before, when I had come to New Orleans to give a speech. My host that night had been a young woman rabbi who had taken me out to dinner at Pascale’s Manale, the best barbecue shrimp restaurant in the city. During the course of the meal, her husband mentioned that he was a professional skin diver, working mostly out of the Gulf. I remarked that skin diving was an unusual profession for a Jew. “My husband isn’t Jewish,” she snapped, as if it were an impertinence to assume that a rabbi’s husband would be.

Macy and the others laughed at the story. “Pretty soon you’ll be having Christian rabbis down here,” I said, and Betty nodded vigorously. “Considerin’ some of the rabbis I’ve known, I’m not sure that’s such a bad idea,” she said.

“Heck, they already tried that,” said Macy. “Over in Arkansas, a rabbi hired a Christian woman as his assistant to make hospital calls. The congregation made him stop, but a lot of folks thought she was better than the man they had.” We laughed together, happy to be leaving the bayou and heading back to the land of the living.

We spent the night in New Orleans at the home of Uncle Carol, one of Macy’s ubiquitous southern relatives. There have been Harts in the South for a hundred years, ever since Macy’s great-grandfather, Isaac T. Hart, moved to Woodville, Mississippi, from Kingston, Jamaica. A man of strong patriotic enthusiasms, he became an instant rebel, naming his son, Macy’s grandfather, H. Van E. Hart, after the Confederate general Henry Van Eaton.

The Jewish H. Van grew up in Woodville and became a “dealer in wood, hides, furs, snakeroots, junk, and country produce”—in short, a peddler. He died young, leaving a wife and four small sons. Unable to take care of them, the young widow sent her oldest boy, Julian, to live with relatives in Arizona, and placed the three younger sons, including Uncle Carol and Macy’s father, Ellis, in the Jewish orphanage in New Orleans. It was the only home Carol and his brothers ever had.

“I’m a Jew in my heart, not in my head,” Carol told us, as we sat in his spacious living room. He is a successful lawyer who once ran against Jim Garrison for prosecutor but, like Macy, his passion is the Jewish community. A few days earlier, on Yom Kippur, he had accompanied a visiting Israeli poet to a Conservative synagogue, an experience that had left Carol baffled. Despite his Jewish activism, he knows no Hebrew and was unfamiliar with the traditional service; the orphanage was a resolutely secular institution that assigned religious training of its wards to a very assimilated Reform temple.

In those days the temple’s rabbi, Julian Feibelman, was strongly anti-Zionist, and Carol left the congregation because of it. “I realized that the rabbi was committed to the preservation of Judaism at the corner of St. Charles and Calhoun,” he said. Carol
understood that the Jews needed a place of their own, just as he had found refuge at the orphanage. He has been a devoted Zionist ever since.

Carol Hart has an orphan’s pride in his heritage, and he showed us a stack of yellowing scrapbooks that chronicle the family saga. He was especially proud of his aunt, Rosa Hart, a local theatrical luminary who attended Sophie Newcombe College and, according to Carol, became—in 1919—the first female cheerleader in America.

The Harts are not just Jews, but southern Jews. Like Macy, Carol is rooted in both traditions, a combination reflected in his home. There is a “shalom” doormat on the back porch, and his living room is decorated in a mixture of Jewish and antebellum southern decor. Chagall lithographs hang next to J. W. Buell’s “Louisiana and the Fair,” and Irving Howe’s “World of Our Fathers” shares a shelf with an ornately framed photograph of a young, saucy Carol at the Texas Centennial, 1936. There is also a wedding picture of Carol’s daughter, who recently graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and her husband, a Conservative rabbi. Carol proudly told us the young couple keeps kosher and observes the sabbath. His daughter is a throwback to Isaac T., certainly the most observant Jew the Hart clan has produced in the last hundred years.

The Harts have deep roots in the South, but they are comparative newcomers. Jews, most of them Sephardim from the Caribbean and Europe, began settling in southern seaport towns in the seventeenth century and gradually moved inland. Some were merchants, others became planters and farmers, and they took an active part in the political and cultural life of their region. In the eighteenth century, Judah Touro of New Orleans gained national fame as one of America’s first philanthropists, establishing charitable institutions, including the Jewish orphanage where Carol was raised. Fifty years later, Judah P. Benjamin was elected secretary of state of the Confederacy. “We’ve been a part of things down here ever since the very beginning,” Carol said proudly.

Even before the Civil War, a wave of German Jewish peddlers came south, and many of them stayed, establishing small stores in the towns and hamlets of the region. Later they were joined by a larger group from Eastern Europe. Together they formed Jewish
communities centered around Reform temples, tight-knit little enclaves where people knew each other and forged family alliances through marriage.

That was the Jewish South of Carol’s boyhood, but it no longer exists. Highways and chain stores and a flagging farm economy have forced the small merchants of the South to give way, and the “Jew Stores” of the region are no longer viable. The sons and daughters of the merchants went away to school in the 1960s and 1970s and had no incentive to return. Instead they gravitated to New Orleans, Memphis, Atlanta, and Jackson. The Jewish communities in these cities are holding their own; but elsewhere, congregations that numbered several hundred families only a generation ago are now down to their last few members.

“Where y’all goin’ tomorrow?” asked Carol, and Macy told him that we would be heading up to Natchez. “I used to go up there for dances when I was a young man,” Carol said with a faraway look. “They had an elegant temple. I don’t guess they have too many dances these days, though. I hear that things are pretty bad up there now.”

The next morning we set out early to see for ourselves, following the Mississippi River up the Interstate to the Natchez junction and then on into the town. We passed a Dr. Bug Exterminator shop, the headquarters of an “Indian Spiritual Advisor,” and half a dozen Skoal Chewing Tobacco billboards before turning into a charming antebellum neighborhood of tree-lined streets and tourist attraction mansions.

Temple B’nai Israel isn’t quite in that class, but it is, as Carol had remembered it, an elegant building, a relic of the days when Natchez was an important cotton port with more than three hundred Jewish families. The temple’s sanctuary has a powerful tracker organ, stained glass windows, and a marble ark that holds five Torah scrolls. Polished oak pews seat three hundred downstairs, and there is a special section upstairs which was once reserved for noisy children and their black mammies.

There are no more mammies in Natchez, however, and only four Jewish children. When we arrived we found one of them, a pretty ten-year-old blond named Keely Krouse, solemnly decorating a small succah with holly bush leaves. Her father, Jerry, was waiting for us along with his wife, Betty Jo, and two genteel ladies
in their sixties. These were the leaders of what’s left of the congregation—thirty-four people in all, twenty-four of them over the age of fifty.

In his early forties, Jerry Krouse is a dark, attractive man who looks a little like Henry Winkler. He was born and raised in Natchez, where his family has a scrap business. In those days there were about twenty Jewish kids in town, but most of them went away to college and never came back. Jerry and two contemporaries are the only ones who stayed behind.

Jerry and Macy were old friends, and they chatted easily as Jerry led us into the basement social hall, where Betty Jo and the two older women sat under a
SAVE ETHIOPIAN JEWRY
poster sipping their mid-morning coffee. The women greeted Macy softly, inquiring about his mother and aunts. After a few minutes of small talk, he cleared his throat and the group came to attention. “I want to thank y’all for taking the time to hear me this morning,” he said, talking Southern, a language as natural to him and the others as Yiddish was to their grandparents.

Macy began by explaining how other communities around the South were going under. They listened raptly as he ran off the list of temples that were closing down, congregations that were reduced to three or four members. Once or twice they interrupted to ask about some specific family, but mostly they sat in shocked silence.