Wherever You Go, There They Are

by Annabelle Gurwitch

  The performers, directors, writers, designers, stagehands, and stage managers that make up theatrical tribes aren’t the only artistic communities that form filial bonds. Musicians regularly hold fund-raisers for collaborators who fall ill; visual artists share lives and work spaces; even Larry Page, cofounder of Google, that techie confederation of digital artists, proudly declared, “Google isn’t just a company, it’s a family.” You’d have to Google that to see if his employees agree.

  I can’t speak for the other arts, but our fraternities have great staying power, much like childhood friendships forged on the playground.* I count several members of Thespian Troupe 391 among my nearest and dearest. On the other hand, a theater feud can be lasting and downright Hatfield and McCoy. If you’re a mainstay in one director’s set, you can expect to never work on a rival’s productions; it’s that intense.

  A few years back, I found myself being interviewed by an engaging young journalist named Sam for a TV series I was headlining. At the end of our conversation, he mentioned his last name: Schechner. As in my mentor Richard Schechner’s son, whom I’d last seen when he was three years old. I’m sure there are people who have gone to greater lengths than reminding a journalist that they changed their diapers to get a good write-up in the WSJ, but I don’t know of an example offhand.

  I can’t even count how many times in my life I’ve wished I weren’t a show person. Foiled by math, again! If it weren’t for perennially confusing milliliters and milligrams, I could have gone into medicine and been useful in the way that Doctors Without Borders gets to swoop in and do something like fix fistulas instead of having honed the ability to cry on cue.* But lately, I have been struck by how one of the concepts, that of the restorative power of entering “time without time,” or liminality, which I learned about from Schechner, is more essential than ever. In the ancient world, early humans developed ritualized forms of play that created a poetic world alongside the world of nature, and in this way created a liminal state. Participating in this sacred suspension of time contributed to the cohesiveness of their community.*

  Schechner has developed a slew of improvisational techniques to reinforce the singularity of the theatrical event and unify the performers and audience. He’ll direct his actors to wait until the audience is completely silent before speaking or moving. So if someone coughs or rustles, the performers freeze until you can hear a pin drop in the theater. Often the audience catches on and begins to play along with the performers. They’ll calibrate the speed of scenes by either making sounds or shushing their neighbors so the action can continue. It’s electrifying. Directors regularly incorporate these kind of elements into shows now. What was once avant-garde is now de rigueur as producers seek to provide compelling reasons for people to tear themselves away from binge-watching Transparent.*

  In the recent past, there were many more opportunities for communal transcendence. You might have glimpsed it in a religious service or on a hike or airplane, but there are few places now beyond the reach, temptation, and distraction of our devices. There is nothing more depressing to me than walking into a restaurant and seeing diners sitting together but transfixed by their individual screens. Except when I’m that jerk. Theater remains one of the precious few spaces where the outside world ceases to exist. Kind of like sex, except that your playbill provides more information about the people you’re engaging with than you might glean during a Tinder hookup.

  At theaters around the world, at seven thirty p.m., the stage manager announces, “The house is open,” to let us know you have arrived at our home. When you step through those doors, we welcome you, however briefly, into our tribe. And, if you’re going to the theater? Let’s face it, you’re probably show people too.

  There would be white sand, grand parties, casinos, the full resort life.

  massacre island

  Growing up, I pined for the day when I’d receive a letter or call informing me that I’d inherited something of value, maybe a castle or, even better, a musty but elegant classic six in a prewar building just off of Central Park West, left to me by a forgotten spinster aunt or long-lost cousin.

  My paternal grandmother, Rebecca, was fond of sending care packages. These boxes started arriving when I went off to college in New York. You just couldn’t convince her that stuffed cabbage, even when wrapped in layers of waxed paper and tinfoil, sealed in plastic, and then covered in tinfoil again, didn’t travel well. Homemade banana bread was always included, along with old-world reminders to “stay close to the family” and the dangers of “catching a cold down there.”* As the years went by, she sent increasingly disparate and eccentric items. The last package arrived on my doorstep in 1991, a year before she died. It contained: two teaspoons, a steak knife, an opened box of aspirin, the emerald green brocade tunic she’d worn to my Bat Mitzvah, a signed copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Spinoza of Market Street, and an extension cord coiled around a tattered eggshell-blue Tiffany box lid, upon which she’d made the notation in case I ever get a little house of my own again. Wouldn’t you know it? My grandmother received a gift from Tiffany and all I got was the lid to the box! Still, I treasure these totems and accepted that they represented the totality of my inheritance, when the news I’d longed for finally arrived.

  “Your land is taking a beating,” my dad says on the phone.

  “Whaaaat?”

  It’s August 25, 2005. My husband and I have wrangled a short vacation in Vermont, driving through historic towns, stopping at rustic inns with good wine lists, while CNN broadcasts coverage of Hurricane Katrina barreling across the Gulf Coast. I can’t remember which family members are still scattered across the South, but Dad calls with an update: our friends in NOLA and the few cousins left in Mobile have made it to higher ground, but my Dauphin Island property is in trouble. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  He tells me that a quarter-acre lot, located on a barrier island thirty-five miles south of Mobile in the Gulf of Mexico, that once belonged to my grandmother is now mine. Well, mine and several other family members’. Rebecca intended to leave the land to her three children—my father; his brother, Bert; and their sister, Phyllis—but neither my dad nor his brother wanted assets in his name, as they’d both filed for bankruptcy (not the first time for either) when the will was written. I consider offering up some kind of clever axiom like “The family that prays together stays together,” but no words come to mind that rhyme with “bankruptcy.” That is why my sister; I; Uncle Bert’s kids, Michael and Mindy; and Aunt Phyllis inherited her land. Dad has been paying our share of the taxes for Lisa and me since Rebecca’s death in 1992. Why am I only hearing about this now?

  “Her will has never been probated. Things move slowly in the South.”

  “So, is that ‘Dolphin,’ like the mammal?”

  “It’s French. It was named for Louis XIV’s great-grandson and heir, le dauphin.”*

  “Sounds fancy to me.”

  • • •

  I GIDDILY REPORT the news to my husband: “We’ve inherited an island! Let’s build a summer home! We’re rich! We’ve got land!” I’m over the moon. Our house carries a mortgage, our cars are leased, our son belongs to the future, but this plot of land is owned outright. I Google the island and it’s not just some unlucky sandbar being battered by the storm, it’s my land. I feel the kind of pride of ownership that comes with actual ownership.

  “What’s the place like?” my husband says, getting caught up in my excitement.

  “I have no idea. I’ve never been there.”

  Thus begins a ten-year fascination with my island and deep dive into our family’s Southern roots.

  Four hundred and ninety years before the call from my dad, a Spanish explorer followed the gulf coastline up from Florida and mapped the island, but it wasn’t until January 31, 1699, that the French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville claimed the territory for France and the island enter
ed recorded history with a catchy and evocative name: Massacre Island.

  When d’Iberville landed he encountered massive piles of skeletons, but it wasn’t until years later that it would be understood that what he’d come upon wasn’t the site of a massacre. The island was dotted with burial mounds left there by the earliest known inhabitants of North America and excavated by a recent storm. Not much is known of these indigenous people, the Mound Builders, a collection of nomadic tribes whose territory included the tributaries of the Mississippi from AD 900 to 1500, except for the expansive earthen formations, something like flat-topped pyramids, that they left behind.

  Speculation is that the island was their winter stomping ground. Most likely the Mound Builders succumbed to smallpox or influenza after their first contact with these Eurasian infectious diseases. We do know a lot about their palates: they left millions of clam and oyster shells. Still visible, these enormous piles are evidence of thousands of delicious meals.*

  In 1700, the island, which was now the capital of the Louisiana French territories, became an important trading post for goods from South America and given the much more welcoming name Îsle Dauphine. Then, during the Civil War, in the Battle of Mobile Bay, on August 8, 1864, as the monitor USS Tecumseh hit a mine and began to sink, Admiral David Farragut gave the famous rallying cry “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” and, in what was a decisive victory for the North, took the southernmost outpost of the Confederate army, Fort Gaines. The fort has been lovingly preserved and houses artifacts from early life on the island. Creepy! Historic! Shellfish! My island has it all.

  In the aftermath of Katrina, every major news outlet writes about the island as the canary in the coal mine for how climate change is affecting the coastal areas of North America, and I follow this reporting obsessively. “The western end of this Gulf Coast island has proved to be one of the most hazardous places in the country for waterfront property. Since 1979, nearly a dozen hurricanes and large storms have rolled in and knocked down houses, chewed up sewers and water pipes and hurled sand onto the roads,” I read, in The New York Times, no less. Citing the cost of shoring up the coastline in the face of rising sea levels, scientists are wondering if it isn’t time to give up the ghost. “If ever there were a poster child for a barrier island that shouldn’t have been developed, it’s Dauphin Island, and now we all keep paying for it,” says Orrin H. Pilkey, a Duke University coastal geologist. Katrina not only washed away entire homes, forty or fifty beach lots have been swallowed by the sea. I read that FEMA is offering buyouts to landowners.

  “Some people are already taking the FEMA buyout, Annabelle. Though those are folks whose land is already underwater,” the mayor of the island, Jeff Collier, writes to me in August 2006, in our first correspondence. I call members of my family, imploring them to begin the process of probating the will and issuing a call to completely contradictory actions.

  “We should donate our land to the local estuarium.”

  “We should build a family vacation house!”

  “We should sell before the island is completely underwater.”

  But we’re all busy with our lives in Texas; Atlanta; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; and Los Angeles. We’re five owners who live in five different states. Things move slowly in the South, but things move even slower in our family.

  Everyone I tell about my inheritance, including my own son, says the same thing: “You’re from the South? I didn’t know there were Jewish people in Alabama.”

  More than two million Eastern European Jews came to America between 1887 and the start of World War II. Most arrived at Ellis Island, looking like the bus and truck touring company of Fiddler on the Roof, with nothing more than a letter vouching for them from a family member who’d already immigrated, the clothes on their back, and a case of cholera or TB. While the majority settled in big northern cities like New York and Philadelphia, others entered the country through Boston or southern ports like Charleston and Mobile. The Jewish population of Mobile has never been greater than it was in 1918, with more than 2,200 Jews.*

  By all accounts, Herschel Ripps, my grandmother Rebecca’s father, who went by the anglicized Harry Ripps, came to this country after his brother, a furrier by trade, found work tanning leather along the Mississippi and sent word back that money could be made in America. Great-Grandpa Harry arrived on our shores with his mother, Goldie, and his four sons, settling first in Prichard and eventually in Mobile. He’d left his wife, Pesha, and daughters Rebecca and her older sister Freda in Russia, intending to send for them when he’d made his fortune. When word got to them that Pesha died, Harry married another recent Jewish immigrant in Mobile, and when that wife died as well, he married again. Was it because he’d started a new life or that the daughters were less valuable as workers to him, who knows, but they were either farmed out to other family members or placed in orphanages—we really don’t know that either, because the two refused to ever discuss it. Ever wonder what kind of people send their children alone on perilous journeys across the globe? My people. The Ripps brothers begged Harry to send for their sisters, so young Rebecca and Freda crossed the ocean on a steamship, in steerage. Rebecca showed up in Mobile with her head shaved. She’d entered the country with a terrible case of lice—a good indication that whatever happened during those lost years, it probably wasn’t very good.*

  Meanwhile, my grandfather Ike’s father, Bert Gurwitch, and his clan left from the same part of Eastern Europe to seek their fortune, stopping first in London, where they opened a tobacco store. Family lore says they had tickets on the Lusitania but were engaged in one of those famously endless Jewish good-byes and missed the boat. By trade, Bert was a welder in the shipyards, so they followed the work in the busiest coastal cities, starting in Quincy, Massachusetts, then moving south to Charleston, South Carolina; Chickasaw, Alabama; Prichard; and later Mobile.

  My grandmother Rebecca always stressed the importance of knowing who someone’s “people” were. She never took into account that people might not like us if they considered who our people were.

  Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker in 2014 about “climbing the crooked ladder of success,” immigrant families working on the margins to become respectable pillars of society.* These climbers’ aim wasn’t the establishment of a criminal empire, it was simply advancement of the clan, and that’s what motivated the Gurwitch and Ripps families to team up.

  Great-Grandpa Bert’s welding skills proved invaluable to maintaining the local bootleggers’ stills, while Harry had ties with ship captains because his dry goods shop stocked the “slop chests” (slop chests were essentially a ship’s general store) for the vessels docking in Mobile. Sugar was one of the biggest imports in those days, and as it’s also a key ingredient in making moonshine, the bootleggers were always looking for new ways to score it. If bags of sugar got wet during their journey from the Caribbean, they were legally unsalable, but damp sugar wasn’t a problem for the bootleggers. Bert enlisted Harry because of his relationship with the captains, and he became a broker of the sticky stuff, earning him the nickname “Sugar.” Funny thing: once Bert and Sugar were in league with the bootleggers, an awful lot of wet sugar started showing up on the docks of Mobile. One of Bert’s sons, Isaac, was introduced to Sugar’s daughter Rebecca, and my future grandparents got married. I owe my existence to white-lightning moonshine.

  Bert’s wife, Rose, my great-grandmother, was one enterprising broad. She sold the moonshine from a pickle barrel in her store. You’d tap a sterling silver cup that was attached to the barrel with twine, and she’d pour you a swig for ten cents. Same cup for everyone.* When some “circus people,” the Kurfetses, moved in next door, Rose saw a chance to “make a fast dollar,” as they say in my family. She sold shots of white lightning to the women waiting to get their fortunes told by Mrs. Kurfets. The more they drank, the more time they’d spend with Mrs. Kurfets, who charged by the minute. If the reading ha
d some particularly bracing content, Rose would sell them another shot on the way out. My cousins have made me take a blood oath not to write that Rose ran a brothel, but she did rent out rooms behind the store to a cadre of single ladies who engaged in remarkably short-lived relationships. No one in the family disputes that during the 1950s, all the boys in the family would drop in on Edna’s joint, and when Edna, one of Rose’s former tenants, answered the door, you’d say, “The Gurwitches sent me,” and she’d show you right in. The only door being a member of my family ever opened led to a brothel.

  The Depression hit my family hard. Three generations were living together and everyone worked to put food on the table. Even though Prohibition ended in 1933, Alabama was one of seventeen states that continued to tightly control alcohol distribution, so there was still money in moonshine. Before setting off for grade school, my father was charged with marking the sidewalk outside their home with an X in chalk. It was a signal, part of what was sometimes referred to as “the hobo code” among the unemployed, that work was available. Hard-up locals would line up to pick blackberries in exchange for white bread and baloney sandwiches and cups of coffee that Dad would make and serve on the porch. Dad says the sound of corks popping as blackberry wine fermented in the bathtub would wake them up all through the night.

  As the country geared up for World War II, my father and his first cousin Billy collected scrap metal in Dad’s little red wagon to donate for the war effort. Sometimes this “scrap metal” was copper piping that eight-year-old boys were just small enough to harvest from the crawl spaces under neighbors’ homes. When Ike got wind of this, he was pissed. Why donate when there was a fast dollar to be made? He directed them to sell to the local scrap metal dealers instead. They also hustled pool at the Wide Awake Pool Hall and Café, standing on apple crates they stole from the A&P as they took their shots. No one saw the boys coming and they made a lot of bank.*