Members of the Tribe

by Zev Chafets

  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.

  Macy spoke gently, aware that he was telling these people something they knew but had never been able to admit. They had all grown up in this temple, and they had bittersweet memories of the intimate, vibrant congregation that was now gone. For years they had seen the signs, watched the numbers decline, but somehow they had continued to hope. Now Macy was here to tell them that there was no hope, that they were the last generation, the end of the line, and that they had an obligation to make an orderly exit.

  They listened to Macy and they believed him. He was no sociologist here to predict the demise of their way of life, no rabbi armed with dire warnings about the future. The future was already here, and Macy, Ellis Hart’s boy from Winona, had come to tell them that it was too late for remorse or remission.

  “We want to keep our religious articles out of Christian homes where they’ll get used as objects d’art—is that how you pronounce that word, Jerry?” he said, and the ladies smiled. “We want to keep the Jewish South in the South. What we intend to do is to provide for these things in Vicksburg, Meridian, Greenwood, and all the other places that are coming to an end. Now, we don’t want y’all to give us anything right now—I’m talking about the future. I want these things to stay right here in Natchez, as long as there is a single Jew to use them.” He lowered his voice and looked slowly at each one. “But when the time comes, we want to gather them at the camp where your grandchildren can come and worship in a temple where the ‘ner tamid’ (the ritual eternal light) comes from Natchez and the ark comes from the temple in Greenwood and maybe the Torah is from Meridian.”

  When he finished talking, there was a long silence. “Macy’s absolutely right,” Jerry said finally, and the others nodded in agreement. “Now, some of the people here in town are going to be opposed to this, but we need to explain it to them the way Macy’s explained it to us. As far as I’m concerned, we ought to give up these things as soon as y’all open up your museum.” One of the older women murmured her assent. “We’ve got to be practical about this,” she said in a genteel tone. “We simply cannot allow ourselves to be ostriches.”

  The meeting broke up and Jerry took us on a tour of the temple. We entered a classroom where Hebrew letters were written in chalk on a blackboard. The letters had been there for years. Natchez no longer has a religious school and Jerry drives his children to Alexandria, Louisiana—160 miles round trip—for Sunday school each week. They’ve been attending school there for six years, and in that time enrollment has dropped from fifty-five to thirty-eight. “It won’t be long before Alexandria goes the way of Natchez,” Jerry sighed.

  In a storeroom off the social hall I spotted some Purim games stacked on a shelf—Queen Esther Roulette, Pin the Tail on Hamen, Loop the Groger—that are used every year when the temple puts on a Purim carnival for Keely Krause and the other three children. “Purim used to be a fun holiday,” recalled Jerry. “Now, to tell you the truth, it’s downright discouraging.”

  Jerry Krouse is far from religious, but he tries to go to temple every Friday night. “My Jewish identity is just about the most important thing in my life right now,” he said. “That’s partly why I go. But the main thing is, I’m afraid that if I don’t go, no one will be there, and I don’t want our temple to be empty on Friday night. I just couldn’t handle that at all.”

  We entered the sanctuary, where Keely and her mother were still working on the model succah. “How does it feel to be one of the last Jewish women in Natchez?” I asked Betty Jo, and she looked at her husband before answering. “Oh, I’m not Jewish,” she said finally, laying holly branches over the roof of the small structure. “I belong to the First Assembly of Christ. Charismatic Christians?”

  “You ever hear of a Christian woman who keeps kosher?” Jerry demanded. “Well, you’re looking at one right here.” His tone indicated that he was not pleased by her piety.

  “Why are you kosher? For Jerry?” I asked, and she shook her head emphatically. “Him? Please, he’ll eat anything.” She said it in a determined tone of voice; obviously this was territory they had been over before. “I just feel like the Lord had a good reason to forbid those foods. I can’t help it, that’s mah belief.”

  We said good-bye to Betty Jo and Keely and drove across the river for a barbecue lunch that Jerry’s wi
fe would not have appreciated. “Betty Jo is a very religious woman, and religious people have a tendency to get carried away,” Jerry said, chewing thoughtfully on a hickory-smoked rib. “Now, I’m not saying I’m perfect, either. In fact, I’m about the most prejudiced person my wife knows. I believe most Christians hate Jews. They think we killed Christ if you want to know the truth. I’m anti-Christian myself, and I guess that’s pretty strange considering that both my wife and my mother are Christian women.”

  Macy almost choked on his Dr Pepper. “You mean to tell me Miz Krouse wasn’t Jewish?” he said incredulously, and turned to me. “Miz Krouse was one of the most active Jewish women in this state. She helped us with the camp, and I believe she was president of the sisterhood right here in Natchez.”

  Jerry nodded his assent. “My mother practically ran the temple. Hell, she organized everything, but she never was Jewish—at least not that she’d admit. But she raised me Jewish because that’s what she promised my father, and that’s just exactly what I intend to do with my children.”

  “Why?” I asked him. “I mean, what kind of Jews can they be down here, anyway? There’s no community left. What’s the point?”

  “Do you play chess?” Jerry asked, and I nodded. “Well, I’m a chess player, three-time champion of the state of Mississippi. Down here I’m considered good, but let me tell you, I’m nothing compared to the really great players. Look at them and what do y’all notice? Every last one of those boys is a Jew.” He ticked the names off on his fingers. “Fischer, Spassky, Kasparov—his real name is Weinstein—Mikhail Tal, all Jews. Now what does that tell you about the Jewish mentality?”

  “Good at board games?” I asked, but Jerry was serious. “Hell no, what it tells you is that Jews are naturally smart. That’s our heritage, and I intend to pass it along to my children.”

  After lunch we dropped Jerry off at his scrap yard and headed down the highway for Port Gibson, a small town that U.S. Grant reputedly spared because it was too beautiful to burn. Near the entrance to the town we stopped in front of the temple, a small, domed building that is, according to Macy, the only example of Moorish architecture in the state.

  The temple, which was built in the 1890s, looked foreign among the surrounding southern mansions. Back when there were Jews in Port Gibson, the building must have excited local curiosity; it speaks of strange rituals and exotic customs. But over the years, the Jewish community dwindled down to two people and recently the temple had been turned over to a local man with an interest in historical renovation who promised to maintain it as a Port Gibson monument.

  We found the restoration man at the temple. He was a Faulkneresque old gent named Bill, dressed in work clothes and sporting a porkpie hat. Macy greeted him warmly, turning up his good ole boy personality half a notch. Carpenters were already tearing up the floor, and the two men sat down to go over the plans.

  “Looks like y’all doin’ a great job,” Macy said, and Bill nodded happily. “Yessir, won’t be long before this ole church is as good as new.” Macy made no comment, but a few minutes later, when Bill again referred to the building as a church, Macy couldn’t keep silent.

  “Now Bill, I don’t mean to be disrespectful at all, but the correct name for this building is a synagogue.”

  “Synagogue? Not a temple?”

  “Temple is all right, too. But not church,” Macy said with polite firmness.

  “Well, I’ll go with temple, ah guess,” said Bill. “It’s easier to say.”

  Macy shot him a grin of southern complicity. “Yep, easier to spell, too.”

  While Macy busied himself with the blueprints, Vicki and I went for a walk. Port Gibson is lucky that U. S. Grant never got downtown, which is depressingly ugly even by the exacting standards of rural Mississippi. Many of the stores along Main Street were boarded up, and most of the others had display windows so dirty you had to go inside to see what they were displaying. Here and there dispirited blacks meandered down the dusty street and an occasional dump truck rumbled by, but nothing broke the oppressive silence of the town. Even Vicki, who was raised in Mississippi, seemed taken aback by the utter hopelessness of the scene.

  Vicki told me that years ago, when Port Gibson was a thriving place, many of the stores downtown had been owned by Jews. As we walked down Main Street, we searched for vestiges of the Jewish mercantile past that might belong in Macy’s museum, and in the middle of the block she spied one—a sign that said FRISHMAN’S DRY GOODS.

  Frishman’s turned out to be an old-fashioned department store, totally empty of customers. A black salesman dozed in front of a full-length mirror in the shoe department, a peroxide blond woman of indeterminate age arranged merchandise in a bin, and at the front of the store a man in his late fifties leaned over the counter in an almost stupefied state of boredom. He had thinning brown hair combed in a George Wallace pompadour, and his face showed squint lines from innumerable eyefuls of Chesterfield smoke. He wore a cheap sport jacket, and I would have been willing to bet that he had a service tattoo on his forearm.

  When we entered the store the man regarded us with faint interest, perhaps taking us for travelers with a sudden rip or stain, in the market for an emergency replacement. But when Vicki told him that she was a museum curator interested in the sign outside and asked permission to take a photograph, he lapsed back into apathy. “Y’all welcome to take your pitcher,” he said in a soupy drawl.

  “Do you have any idea what happened to the Frishman family that used to own this store?” Vicki asked. The man looked at her closely through the cigarette smoke. “Why do you ask?” he said, showing curiosity for the first time.

  Vicki explained that she was collecting material about southern Jews and their history. “I’m a Frishman,” he said after a moment’s hesitation, and Vicki blinked in surprise. Macy had briefed us on the Jews of Port Gibson, and there weren’t supposed to be any Frishmans left. Finding one behind the counter of this old-fashioned store was exciting, and Vicki reintroduced us, mentioning that I was from Jerusalem. The man accepted the news calmly, as if Israelis were frequent shoppers at his dry goods emporium, but Vicki was undeterred by his indifference. For the next fifteen minutes, she bombarded him with questions about himself and the town.

  As we talked, the blond woman ambled over to the cash register to listen in and the shoe salesman stirred briefly before lapsing back into a deep sleep, but Frishman refused to let sudden celebrity go to his head. He answered Vicki’s questions in a laconic way, and after a quarter of an hour all we really knew about him was that he was a native of Port Gibson, had served in the Marines, was unmarried, and was related to a gaggle of other Frishmans, Shiffmans, and Marxes around the South. He vaguely knew that the temple, only a few blocks away, was undergoing some restoration and that there had been a dispute about its sale, but he seemed reluctant to discuss it. “I didn’t really want to get mixed up in all that ruckus,” he said. “I go for my religious needs to the temple in Hattiesburg.” It was a southern sentiment; in the Bible Belt, respectable people belong to a house of God and have “religious needs,” but Mr. Frishman seemed notably unenthusiastic about his.

  On the way back to meet Macy it occurred to me that Frishman had accomplished the considerable feat of remaining unaffiliated in a town of only three Jews. Perhaps because we had stumbled on him by accident, he seemed to me a kind of Marrano, an underground figure poised in the netherworld between Jew and gentile, a Dixie version of the missing link. Macy was amused by the conceit. “I told you that you were gonna meet some crawfish-eating Jews down here,” he said, laughing, as we crossed Little Bayou Pierre on the way out of town.

  It was almost nightfall when we reached Jackson, where Macy and Susan Hart live when they are not at camp. The capital of Mississippi, it is a charmless city of half a million, but after Port Gibson, Natchez, and Donaldsonville, it seemed like Paris. Macy had recently been elected vice president of the temple, a Reform congregation of 250 members, and he intended to go to ser
vices that night. I suddenly realized that it was Simchat Torah, and I decided to go along to see how the holiday is celebrated in Mississippi.

  “You’re gonna have to wait till next year for that one,” Macy said. “We celebrated Simchat Torah last week.”

  “What are you talking about? Last week was Succot,” I told him, certain that he was confusing the two holidays, which are always a week apart, but Macy was sure of his ground.

  “See, we kind of combined them this year. It made for a bigger crowd.”

  My Israeli sensibilities, strained all week by Christian Hadassah women and Mississippi Marranos, came undone. “You can’t change the date of holidays! It doesn’t work like that!” I insisted, but Macy raised a placating hand. “Now, Ze’ev, if you want to understand what’s goin’ on down here, you have to realize one thing—this isn’t New York City or Israel. We’re doin’ the very best we can.”

  After services that night, Macy and Susan took their small children to an ice cream parlor for sodas. It is a weekly ritual, an integral part of the southern Jewish experience.

  “Actually, it’s a bribe,” Macy confided. “The kids don’t like coming to temple and I don’t blame them. It’s even hard for us sometimes—there aren’t many people of our generation there either.”