by Zev Chafets
CHAPTER ONE
MACY B. AND THE
DIXIE DIASPORA
On 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 wh
ere 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.
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 a
ctivism, 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.
