Members of the Tribe

by Zev Chafets

“Then why go?”

  “Well, it’s an obligation to the community. Now, the children have to realize that they’re Jews, and that that entails an obligation. So, we force ’em to go and then we bribe ’em afterwards.”

  Most of Macy’s and Susan’s close friends are Jews, although Macy isn’t sure why. Certainly, to an outside observer, the Jews of Mississippi seem just about like everyone else. They have no language of their own, no special ethnic customs. But at some indefinable level they feel connected to each other, see themselves as separate, and they communicate on Jewish wavelengths beyond the range of the northern ear.

  After ice cream that night, Eric Hearon and Rona Bloom came over for a visit. Rona is a stylish blond in her early forties who looks and sounds like Lee Remick playing the part of a southern senator’s wife—coquettish, demure, and charming. Actually, under the taffeta is a tough political intelligence. Rona is a veteran of Democratic politics and that fall she was managing the reelection campaign of Congressman Wayne Dowdy.

  Rona Bloom has the conventional southern Jewish biography. She grew up in a small Mississippi town where her father ran a dry goods store, went away to school, married a Jewish boy from another little town, and settled in Jackson. Recently divorced, she met Eric at temple and they have been going together for some time.

  Eric’s story is a little more unusual. A Jimmy Carter look-alike, he is a CPA who flies for the Air Force reserve on weekends. Although he is one of the most active members of the temple, he was born and raised a Baptist. He grew up in Jackson, but his family was originally from a Mississippi town so small that, as he told me with a grin, “one day it plain went out of business.”

  As a boy Eric never saw a Jew, and he assumed that they had gone out of business as well, a group of people who existed only in Sunday school stories. But in college he met some live ones, and they kindled his interest, especially after he heard Abba Eban’s speech at the United Nations during the Six-Day War.

  Three years later he married a Jackson girl whose parents had once been—but no longer considered themselves to be—Jews. By this time Eric was thoroughly intrigued by Judaism and wanted to convert, but his wife resisted. “She said that Jewish children were subject to harassment in Mississippi, and at one point she even threatened to divorce me if I converted,” he said. Eric was persistent, though. He began to attend services in Jackson and studied with the rabbi. In 1977, he became a Jew.

  “Before my conversion, people at the temple used to tell me, ‘You’re really going to be surprised by what you find out about us once you get inside.’ But actually, I wasn’t surprised by very much at all. Now, there was a time when I believed that Jews were way above average in their interpersonal relations, and I was a little taken aback by all the gossiping and backbiting, but that’s just human nature, I guess. Yeah, and I was surprised when I found out about all the intolerance of the Orthodox Jews for Reform and Conservative,” he said.

  “How about intolerance of Jews for non-Jews? Did you find any of that?” I asked. He shrugged and grinned. “Not really. And sometimes the goyim deserve a little intolerance, you know what I mean?”

  Eric was divorced in 1983 and he is raising his children to be Jews, but it isn’t easy. “Macy and Susan, they can relate to their children from a Jewish family background. But in all honesty, I never had a Jewish childhood and the conversion program doesn’t prepare you for everything. For instance, I still have a hard time keeping up on the holidays, and I feel a little left out on some of the household ceremonies, not knowing just the right rituals and all.

  “I wouldn’t want my children to marry out of the faith, but I’ve got to be realistic about it,” he said. “Their own mother married a non-Jew who converted. I can’t tell my kids, ‘What your ancestors were, that’s what you should be.’ I can’t tell them that their great-grandfather was a rabbi in Poland. Hell, when we get to the kaddish prayer in temple I’ve got nobody to say it for—I doubt my Baptist grandparents would appreciate it. But other than that, I feel pretty comfortable at services. Actually, they’re a whole lot like the Protestant services I grew up with, and I’m kinda sorry about that. Except for the Hebrew, you can’t really tell the difference between theirs and ours.”

  When Eric Hearon says “ours” there is no doubt what he means. Like Macy, he sees being Jewish largely in terms of commitment to the Jewish people. Israel is his passion. He is a national board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), helped establish a local political action committee on behalf of Israel, and has visited the country four times in the last few years.

  “I’ve taken congressmen from Mississippi over to see it,” he told me, “but my most exciting visit was when I had the honor of commanding the first plane in our Air National Guard unit to fly into Israel. I got out of the cockpit and kissed the ground. That turned a few heads.”

  As we talked, I noticed that Eric was wearing an I.D. bracelet inscribed with the name of Russian refusenik Boris Kelman. “I got it from the Council on Soviet Jewry,” he said with a shrug, and Rona started to laugh. “Honestly,” she said, “people down here are just so backward sometimes. We met these people at a dinner one night? And the woman just kept staring at Eric’s wrist? And the next time I met her she said, ‘Now you say hello to Boris for me, hear?’ ” Macy, Susan, and I burst out laughing—you have to see Eric Hearon to know what an unlikely Boris Kelman he makes.

  Eric flushed, and then laughed along with everybody else. “Now how do you know what Boris Kelman looks like?” he asked, and someone said, “That’s easy. He looks like Irv Feldman,” and they all laughed again.

  The next morning I went to pay a visit to Irv Feldman and his wife Judy, who are the proprietors of Jackson’s only Jewish restaurant, the Olde Tyme Delicatessen. Feldman has a hook nose and sad eyes—not the kind of deli man who wisecracks with the customers. He was raised in St. Louis and came south when he married Judy. She is a Clarksdale girl, the daughter of a Jewish dirt farmer who went bust in the Depression, moved into Jackson, and opened the Olde Tyme. Irv and Judy run it now, and under their guidance it has become one of the principal Jewish institutions in Mississippi.

  “Watch out, though,” Susan Hart cautioned me before I went to see them. “They serve Christian samwiches.”

  “What’s a Christian samwich?” I asked her.

  “A thin one,” she said with a giggle.

  Irv Feldman disagrees. He considers himself a deli man with a sense of proportion. “I was up in New York at the Carnegie Delicatessen,” he told me. “And I’m going to tell you something—they give you too much. You can hardly eat it, it falls apart in your hands, you can’t even finish it. Who needs it?” He contemplated the waste with a pained expression.

  “Now, I’m not saying the New York delis aren’t great, not at all. I was up there a few years ago and I went to the Stage every day for a week, just to watch how they make their Reuben sandwich. And today, the Reuben is my third leading sandwich,” he said, his sad eyes sparkling at the memory of his successful venture into industrial espionage.

  Feldman told me that ninety-five percent of his customers are Christians with an imperfect grasp of deli idiom. “A lot of people order ‘kosher ham,’ ” he said. “They think ‘kosher’ means ‘better’ in Yiddish.” The Olde Tyme’s menu is a concession to local tastes, with grits and gumbo alongside matzoh ball soup and kosher beef rib. Jewish patrons go for corned beef (Feldman sells four hundred pounds a week) and bagels and lox. When they first opened up twenty-five years ago, the Feldmans catered mostly weddings. Today, with the trend at the temple toward a more traditional style of Judaism, they do five or six bar mitzvahs a year.

  Irv Feldman was obviously proud of his role in the Jackson Jewish community, and indeed throughout Mississippi. He imports kosher meat for the three families in the state who keep the dietary laws, and on Passover he stocks his deli with a full line of Manischewitz and Rokeach products. “I try to make sure we get everything people ne
ed,” he said in a serious voice. “It’s not like New York down here—if I don’t carry it, you can’t get it. I believe that we’ve got the only Yahrzeit candles between here and Memphis.”

  Feldman’s clientele has included a number of visiting celebrities, such as Jan Peerce, Rosalyn Carter, and the Allman Brothers, but his fondest memories are of the time back in the sixties when the restaurant was a hangout for Jewish civil rights lawyers and activists. The Jews of Mississippi supported civil rights, and in those violent days such support could be dangerous.

  Macy and Vicki Fox talked about growing up during the civil rights era as we drove to Meridian on Sunday morning. Black church music on the radio provided a sound track as they discussed the fear and confusion of those days. For Macy, much of it was secondhand—Winona made a relatively peaceful adjustment, and the Harts, as the only Jewish family in town, were never identified with the northern agitators. But Vicki, who grew up in Hattiesburg, had vivid recollections of firebombings and frightened conversations among her parents’ friends.

  As southerners invariably do, they assured me that things have changed radically since then. But the memories and scars are still fresh, and Meridian is a particular symbol of the time when it was dangerous to be a Jew in Mississippi.

  Back in the 1960s, Meridian had a flourishing Jewish community, self-confident enough to have built an impressive temple, complete with a modern Sunday school wing. But not long after it was finished the temple was firebombed, and one of the town’s leading Jewish citizens received death threats. The Jews of Meridian banded together, raised money, and funded an FBI investigation that led to the capture of the would-be assassins, who included a local grade school teacher moonlighting as a Ku Klux Klan hitperson.

  Those were days of high drama for the Jews of Meridian—days that contrast sharply with the present drab reality of the community. The religious school, built with such optimism only a generation ago, stands empty and padlocked—there isn’t a single Jewish child left in town. The Meridian Jewish community is coming to its end, not with a white-sheeted bang, but a whimper.

  As we pulled into town, Macy informed me that we would have not one, but two meetings. Meridian, despite its depleted condition, has both a Reform temple and an Orthodox shul. The split is a relic of the flush days when Meridian had enough Jews to indulge in theological contentiousness.

  We went first to the Herzogs’, transplanted New Yorkers whose Honda Accord SE bears the vanity plate CHAI 18. About twenty members of the temple, most of them in their fifties or sixties, were gathered in the spacious family room, munching bagels and lox imported from the Olde Tyme. Macy greeted each person by name and asked about their children—his contemporaries—now scattered across the South. Most of the people had known Macy since his teenage youth group days, and they treated him with respect, even deference.

  Al Herzog called the meeting to order in a hoarse Yankee voice and gave Macy the floor. As Macy described the decline of communities in Port Gibson, Laurel, Natchez, and elsewhere, his audience listened with dismay. But no one contradicted him. He spoke quietly, almost dryly, leading them step by step to the need to face the future and prepare for the end.

  It was an exercise in grass roots leadership that reminded me of the Rabbinical injunction: “Where there is no man, be a man,” and the people in the room responded with gratitude. When Al Herzog proposed that the community draw up a “last will and testament,” several flinched, but again no one disagreed.

  As the meeting was breaking up, a man in a golf outfit took me aside and introduced himself as Arnold Frishman. He asked if I had run across his son, Arnold, Jr., in Jerusalem. “He’s a student at the Or Samach Yeshiva,” he said in a deep drawl, naming an ultra-Orthodox rabbinical academy that caters to born-again Jews. Mr. Frishman didn’t seem very happy with his son’s choice of life-style. A hundred years ago his people had left a European ghetto for a new life in America. Now Arnold, Jr., was swimming against the tide, recrossing the ocean to the Eastern European pietism of long-departed ancestors. Arnold, Sr., clearly didn’t understand how or why this genetic time bomb had gone off in his son.

  I promised to say hello to Arnold Jr., and suddenly I remembered Port Gibson. “I met a man over there who runs a store called Frishman’s,” I told him.

  “Yeah, he’s a cousin of mine,” he said.

  “He goes to Hattiesburg for his religious needs,” I said, and Arnold, Sr., whose boy has gone to Jerusalem for his, looked at me blankly.

  Macy approached with Sammy Davidson, a wizened old man with a bulldog face. Davidson was born and raised in Meridian and he was related to many of the guests at the Herzogs’, but as the president of the rival Orthodox synagogue he had discreetly waited outside until the temple people had finished their business.

  “Ah’m gonna carry y’all over to the shul now,” he said, “so’s Macy B. can talk to the minyan.”

  As we followed Sammy’s car through the Sunday morning quiet, Macy described him admiringly as “the stubbornest old Jew in Mississippi.” The shul’s membership was down to eleven and finding the requisite ten men for prayers is an ornery problem, but Sammy refused to give up. Occasionally one of the men from the temple dropped by, but most days were a scramble. That year Davidson had taken out ads in several national Jewish newspapers, offering to pay transportation and expenses for Jews willing to come down to Meridian for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But there had been no takers, and the regulars were forced to spend all day in synagogue, a team with no bench.

  Sammy stopped alongside a tiny white shingled building with no identifying sign, located on the corner of two run-down residential streets. As we walked around front, I saw half a dozen old men leaning against a red pickup truck, like characters in a Jack Daniels advertisement. These were the good ole boychiks of Meridian. One wore a fishing cap over his yarmulke, another sported a baseball hat compliments of “Red Pylate’s Machine and Welding.” They greeted us with a chorus of howdys, pushed themselves off the truck with effort, and ambled into their clapboard shul.

  The synagogue consisted of one room. Six wood benches faced a small platform decorated with dusty Israeli and American flags. On the far wall was a small ark and a memorial plaque. The wood floor was unvarnished, and the other walls, made of pea-green plasterboard, were bare. A small storage closet contained some prayer books and a King Edward cigar box full of filmy shot glasses for the morning schnapps. Off the sanctuary was a small restroom with a brass spittoon on the floor next to the sink.

  Only two of the men were under seventy, and only one, Jeff Winters, was not a native. Winters, a Brooklyn-born flight instructor at the nearby naval base, was discovered and recruited by Sammy in the course of his relentless pursuit of a minyan. He told me he wasn’t particularly religious and was married to a non-Jewish woman, but he felt a sense of solidarity with the boychiks and came to services when he wasn’t on duty. His presence lent a touch of vitality to the congregation, and the old men were obviously fond of him; but military life is unpredictable, and they knew he might well be gone before they were.

  Sammy introduced Macy to the men, and for the first time on the tour there were several people who didn’t know him. Still, they were able to place him with a couple of questions—“Are you Ellis Hart’s boy from over in Winona? Is Miss Riva your momma?”—and he went to go into his appeal. Looking around the chapel there seemed little of historical value, although the spittoon would make an interesting addition to Macy’s aggregate temple in Utica. But the men were noncommittal, unwilling to consign any part of their little synagogue to a museum. Instead, they preferred to reminisce.

  “When I was a boy, we used to walk to this shul every Saturday morning,” said one old-timer, with a distant look in his eyes. “ ’Course we didn’t have no automobile back then anyways, just this ole Cushman motor scooter my daddy had is all.”

  “Yeah, his daddy was somethin’ else,” said another man. “I remember back during the Six-Day War, he packed
his forty-five and flew over to Israel to fight. Hell, he must have been in his seventies at least.”

  The others nodded, recalling the way it had been back when there were still enough Jews to make a minyan, and young fellows didn’t come by to inform them that they were a dying breed. Macy, sensitive to their mood, didn’t push them. “Y’all talk this over amongst yourselves and let me know,” he said. “We’re not talkin’ about anything urgent, just trying to plan for the future is all.” We shook hands all around and then walked out into the overcast Meridian morning, climbed into the van, and headed down the highway for Jackson.

  It had been an exhausting few days out on the road in the Dixie diaspora, and Vicki napped in the backseat while Macy and I discussed the next stage of his plans. For the foreseeable future he would be busy with the new project, crisscrossing Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and western Tennessee, touring museums, spending interminable hours writing grant proposals, and meeting with lawyers, contractors, and benefactors. No one would pay him for his time or trouble, and he didn’t expect them to. He was merely fulfilling an obligation. As we talked, I looked at him closely, as old friends entering middle age sometimes do, and I saw that he had lost his country-boy looks. I was startled by something I saw in him. Balding, with a gray beard and prominent nose, Macy B. looked like a Jew.

  Strangely, he wasn’t sure that he felt like one. “Sometimes I don’t even know if I believe in all this,” he said in a soft voice, careful not to wake Vicki. “I mean, I’m not religious. I don’t know Hebrew or anything. You come right down to it, I’m a Jewish illiterate. And I guarantee you, I never planned my life this way. I got out of college and I thought about a dozen different things, but I sure as hell didn’t think I’d wind up doing this. I’ve been involved in Jewish things now for goin’ on twenty-five years, goin’ back to my youth group days, and I’m amazed that I have. My only reason, I guess, is that I’m doing it for my kids.”