Edward Cohen - The Peddlers Grandson: Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi

The Peddlers Grandson

Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi
Edward Cohen

Recollections of a Southern Jew. Selected portions reprinted from 1996 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program book. Used with permission of the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife & Cultural Studies.

http://www.upress.state.ms.us
Copyright 1999 by Edward Cohen
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

02 01 00 99 4 3 2 1

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cohen, Edward, 1948

The peddlers grandson : growing up Jewish in Mississippi / Edward
Cohen.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-57806-167-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Cohen, Edward, 1948- . 2. JewsMississippiJacksonBiography. 3. Jackson (Miss.)Biography. I. Title.
F349.J13C64 1999
976.2510049240092dc21
[B] 99-10146

CIP

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Kathy, wife, editor, best friend

Back in sixth grade in Mississippi, I read a chilling tale, The Man Without a Country, about a man condemned to live forever adrift on a ship, never to come home to his native land. My schoolmates, I imagine, took comfort in knowing that they were still on the shore and always would be. But I, being both southern and Jewish, identified with the man who had no home.

The Protestant South I grew up in was more like a Bible Blanket than a Bible Belt, not so much constricting as smothering everyone in commonality. Fitting in is the First Commandment of childhood, and for no one does this seem more imperative than for a child who cant. Of the hundred thousand people then living in my hometown of Jackson, perhaps three hundred were Jews, and so, by faith and by numbers, I was defined as an outsider. My life would have been far different had my immigrant grandparents stayed with other Jews in the North instead of inexplicably extending their journey even farther, to a land where Jews were as few as they were exotic.

As a child, I sensed that my family moved between two overlapping but impermeable worlds. There was the Jewish world inside the house, where I listened to and mostly understood my grandparents wildly assorted mixture of English and Yiddish. And there was the world without, the southern world, which soon cloaked me like another skin and became a second self.

From the beginning, my life was intertwined with the Christian institutions that pervaded southern culture. I was born in Jacksons Baptist Hospital, attended an Episcopal kindergarten, graduated from a Baptist law school, served on a board of a Methodist college, and was married once in a Baptist Church and once by an Episcopalian priest.

Yet I was always aware of the vast divide between southerners and Jews, at the center of which stood Jesus, whom the overwhelming majority of the population accepted as their savior, while my faith accepted him not at all.

Beyond this chasm lay cultural differences, less defined, more confusing. Traditionally southerners had an abiding sense of place, revered the past, were chary of outsiders; Jews had been outsiders throughout history and had left all they knew behind when they crossed the ocean. Southern culture emphasized the physicalsports, hunting, at times violence; Jewish tradition exalted the mind.

Two powerful symbols of my divided identity stood at opposite ends of Capitol Street, the main thoroughfare of Jacksons downtown. At one end was the Old Capitol, built in 1832 with slave labor, the place from which Jefferson Davis proclaimed secession from the Union. At the other end was Cohen Brothers, the clothing store my grandfather and great-uncle founded when they came over from Romania, where my father worked all his life and where I worked every Saturday for much of my childhood.

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Jackson was a Deep South capital where strangers waved as they drove by, said hello as they passed on the sun-warmed sidewalks. Jackson may have lacked the charm of river towns such as Greenville and Natchez, whose antebellum homes had been spared Grants torch, but there were three weeks in spring when the air was not yet dense with heat and the azaleas flamed pink and red and magenta. Then my hometown was touched with the perfection that only childhood memory can impart.

I also recall that Jackson was a conservative town in every sense of the word. Political, social, and racial orthodoxy was ensured by the presence of the segregationist state legislature, by the Vatican-like power of the sprawling First Baptist Church, and by the hegemony of the citys sole newspaper, the Clarion-Ledger. The Junior League thrived there, a sort of grown-up sorority for young wives who were wealthy or could remember when their family had been, who were white, and who werent Jewish.

The Jackson of my childhood was utterly segregated by race, with most blacks living west of downtown, poor whites mainly in the midcity, and most middle-class (and above) whites in the then-outlying northeast section of the city. It was there that all of Jacksons Jews lived and where our sole Jewish institution, Temple Beth Israel, was located, next door to the state Womens Club, which didnt allow Jews, and down the street from my high school, Murrah, which did allow Jews but not blacks. Farther north was the Jackson Country Club, which allowed neither.

Fortunately for me, the boy without a country, Jackson harbored pockets of liberal thinkers and other outcasts, and they, too, had their institutions, though much smaller and more fragile. Millsaps College was thought to encourage heterodoxy, and its graduates were suspect, unlike those turned out by the state schools such as Ole Miss. The states public television affiliate, Mississippi ETV, where I later worked as a writer, was deemed a hotbed of communism and was forbidden by the legislature to broadcast Sesame Street because it depicted black children and white children playing together. Here and there were artists, writers like Eudora Welty, solitary messengers in the magnolia wasteland.

It was among these messengers that I would find myself most comfortable. From an early age Id known I wanted to write. For someone adrift not only from the land of my birth but also from the moorings of Jewish culture, the calling came naturally.

One can hardly hail from two more historically losing causes than the South and Judaism. Both my cultures have long, tragic pasts, and not one jot of it has been forgotten. If my Jewishness and my southernness meant that I would have no home, no resting spot, I would at least have a singular view of the shore.

The Peddlers Grandson

I saw all four of my grandparents together only once, in the early 1950s, standing on my parents front lawn on a summer day, the two men proud of their American short-sleeved shirts. They conversed in English, though they wouldve been more comfortable speaking Yiddish. They came from countries thousands of miles apart, yet had a shared history about which they would almost never talk.

For my grandparents, time seemed to start at Ellis Island when they entered America as immigrants. Before that event was a great divide, and in their new homes were few family treasures passed down for generations such as those that graced the houses of their southern neighbors. There had been no room in their suitcases, so they had brought almost nothing with them, nothing to reconstruct their lost world except for a handful of photographs and fragments of stories that could only hint at what was left behind.