During the 1940s and well into the ’50s, the ladder was, if not crooked, tilted at a perilous angle. Our cousins owned a jewelry and pawn store, Gulf Coast Jewelry and Tobacco. One of their surefire ways of making a fast dollar was to announce a going-out-of-business sale and price things at a great discount. Legally, you could only sell merchandise already in the store, so in the middle of the night, my dad and all the cousins were rounded up to load in more stock. Like pennies in a junk drawer, inventory seemed to magically multiply.
Our family was run by a matriarch, the wife of Becca’s older brother, Uncle Sam: Annie Mitchell Ripps, the cousin I’m named for. She brought her father Meyer’s wealth into the family, so her opinion carried a lot of weight. Every Sunday, all the family would gather at her home. She made business decisions and even dictated when and how many children you were going to have. But even Annie couldn’t solve every problem. President Truman’s Justice Department got wind of irregularities with the jewelry store. My dad was sent to Washington, D.C., with fifty thousand dollars strapped to his waist to drop off at the office of a federal prosecutor. The bribe was accepted, but Sam and cousin Joe were found guilty of tax evasion and sent to “camp,” as the family referred to it.*
The family didn’t just go to “camp” together, they traveled in a pack. Dad and his cousins would sneak out on Saturday nights. The Klan met up just before midnight, and the boys watched them spew their hate-filled rhetoric around a bonfire. Knowing that you are the target of such ire can only bind you closer together.
The private clubs in Mobile restricted Jews, so the women started the Ladies Aid Society and the men founded the Jewish Progressive Club. Both were formed to uplift the community, and the Aid Society and the Progressive hosted parties and sponsored charitable projects. Planning meetings can really drag on, so the Progressive installed hand-cranked slot machines, nicknamed one-armed bandits, in the back room, and card games were a regular feature, until the police shut the casino down. Everyone in the family played cards, and my grandfather Ike was known as a particularly high roller. One night he lost all of their savings, seventy-five thousand dollars, shooting craps. Rebecca threatened to kill him and Sam had to wrestle the gun away from her.
Becca, Rose, and Annie had an ongoing poker game, playing for pennies lifted from the pushke—the charity collection jar. Word has it they were viciously competitive, formed secret alliances, and were rampant cursers and unrepentant cheaters. My dad says that Rose taught him to play poker and shoot craps when he was five. I don’t doubt that.
“What is going on here?” I said when I discovered Dad and my then-five-year-old son crowding around a corner of my parents’ living room in Florida.
“Grandpa’s teaching me to shoot craps!” my son gleefully exclaimed. My father presented him a “legacy gift” on that trip: a set of hand-carved ivory dice and a leather cup given to him by Rose.*
I met my great-grandmother near the end of her life. She was a kindly old lady, five feet at most, who wore blousy housedresses, orthopedic shoes, and wire-rimmed glasses. She spoke only Yiddish but always kissed our cheeks and handed out hard candies from a cut-glass bowl in the living room of her modest home. I would never have pegged her for a potty-mouthed moonshiner in league with prostitutes.
My cousin Ruth says she was talking to her dad, Bert Larry, and when she told him, “Cousin Harry said—” he interrupted her, “If Cousin Harry said it, don’t believe it,” because his reputation as a fabulist is well established in the family. Dad claims that he was sent to New York in 1947 with other young men from the South to pack arms to send to Israel. They loaded guns in shipping containers labeled “Farm Equipment” and stayed at the Waldorf. Only, the next time he told me this story, they bunked at a hostel in Brooklyn. This effort, funded by wealthy Northern Jewish bankers, including the Lehman brothers, is well documented, but whether my father participated, there’s no way of knowing. One thing is for sure: during the 1950s, money was flowing into Mobile. Resources were pooled; Dad and his cousins were sent to boarding schools and included in male-bonding adventures, like ferrying over to Havana, where they gambled at the Tropicana, took in live sex acts at the Shanghai Club, and attempted to pick up women, claiming their ROTC uniforms were the official garb of the Royal Canadian Tank Corps.*
Around this time, the family got the idea to offer casino cruises that would run back and forth to Dauphin Island in Mobile Bay. There was very little on the island at that time, just a refreshment stand frequented by people fishing in the waters nearby. All the males in the family went on these fishing “rodeos,” as they were called, weekend fishing trips off the shores of Dauphin Island. It was on one of these rodeos that someone came up with the idea to pool money together to rent a riverboat, outfit it with slot machines and booze, and spread the word. So many people showed up for the maiden voyage that the boat ran aground a few feet offshore. Luckily, they’d paid off the Coast Guard, who were standing by to escort the boat, so no one was injured.
Other folks saw the potential for making money on the island as well.
The island boosters put out brochures in 1954, touting it as “the Riviera of the South.” At the time, there were approximately two hundred full-time human residents—fishermen and their families—not counting the wild goats, cattle, and the occasional alligator that roamed freely. The warmth and wetness of the gulf makes for a fantastic breeding ground for mosquitoes, ticks, and water moccasins, all of which call the island home. An article ran in the Birmingham Register headlined “Alabama Marshland Now Valuable Beachfront.” My grandparents and other family members bought land in the summer of 1954. This early investor money was used to build a bridge to the island. Our lot cost $2,400 and included a lifetime membership to the country club. The family planned to build summer homes close to each other and enjoy “the romance of a home on an island,” as it was described in the brochures. There would be grand parties, casinos, golfing—the full resort life.
Mobilians snapped up all the lots available, and once the bridge was completed in 1955, you could go over to the Sand Dunes Casino, the Fort Gaines Club, or the Isle Dauphine Golf Course and Club. My mom and dad as newlyweds often went to the island to serve as chaperones for hayrides sponsored by the synagogue.
Dauphin Island’s growth stalled in the late sixties and early seventies. There were disagreements about how much of the beach was private property and how much was public. The Fort Gaines Club burned down and in 1971 the Sand Dunes Casino was bulldozed, after being vandalized and falling into disrepair. Our cousins built homes on adjoining lots, but in 1979, Hurricane Frederic hit. The storm not only washed houses away, it took the bridge and public beach out. With no bridge for several years, people who might have built on Dauphin Island moved on to places like Gulf Shores or Biloxi, and our family moved on as well.
By the time I came into the picture in the early 1960s, the first American generation of my family, including my father, his siblings, and his cousins, had been sent to college and were becoming professionals: doctors, dentists, and lawyers. Their immigrant parents gained status in the community; they had real estate holdings, and Gurwitch’s, which under Rose’s watch was a dry goods store, was passed down to Ike and Becca and became an upscale clothing shop. My mother says Annie remained the family matriarch right up until her death, a few months before I was born, which is how I came to be named for her, but it seemed like the family had climbed that ladder. Still, Jews weren’t welcome in churchy Mobile. Our cousin Bubba was, by this time, a wealthy and powerful personage in Alabama, but when he applied for membership at the country club in Mobile, they sent him a letter. “We’re not taking any of your kind.”* So the cousins in my father’s generation who had grown up together still socialized and vacationed en masse.
In 1967, my immediate family led the first wave of our clan away from “the bosom of our family,” as Becca called it. But soon, Ike and Becca and other cousins followed. We hop
ped over the Mason-Dixon Line and never went back to Mobile. Not for weddings or holidays, not even for funerals, until Ike died in 1977. Still, I had fond memories of the few weeks in the summers when my sister and I were sent to Atlanta to stay with Becca and Ike. Hot days were spent indoors playing Old Maid and Go Fish. There were weeks-long Marco Polo marathons in the pool at the Standard Club, the one Jewish club in Atlanta, with our cousins; all the while we wondered if that dreaded red chemical line would really trail you if you peed in the pool.* We’d visit Ike’s store, now a furniture outlet. All of us kids tore through the living room setups, trying out sofas and chairs, pretending we lived in each of the model rooms. There was also the memorable evening that Ike and Becca took my sister and me, aged eleven and fourteen, to see Portnoy’s Complaint through the fingers of their hands, which shielded our eyes. I never did get an answer as to why that boy was sniffing his sister’s underwear or why we never went to Mobile.
The cousins of my generation are scattered far and wide across the country. We’re down to weddings, funerals, and Bar Mitzvahs, and I never made attendance a priority. I even missed Becca’s funeral.
After that phone call with my dad, I started paying my share of the property taxes and was determined to see my grandmother’s land. Even though I had gigs nearby in New Orleans and northern Florida, I just couldn’t get to Dauphin Island. Every year there was another reason that made a trip impossible: too much work, too little money, and then the 2010 Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill, which devastated the coast and the local seafood. As if it weren’t bad enough that Katrina flooded the local oyster beds, which thrive in brackish water, with salty ocean water the retardants used to break up the surface oil sank the oil to the bottom, further decimating the delicate ecosystem that the oysters depend on. How can I go down if I can’t eat the oysters?
In 2011, Fort Gaines was named in Time magazine’s annual Most Endangered Historic Places list but I still didn’t make it down.
When Uncle Bert, my father’s brother, suddenly dropped dead in the fall of 2015, I debated skipping the memorial in Atlanta. But my parents were too ill to travel and Lisa convinced me to make the trip.
“Would someone please put Annabelle in the basement?” is the first thing I hear when I arrive at Bert’s house. It’s been so long since we’ve spoken, I didn’t know that he had a dog named Annabelle. He was actually on the second dog he’d named Annabelle. No one will tell me if this is a coincidence or not, and it does cause some confusion. I can’t tell if people want to go for a walk with the dog or me. But it makes sense; it’s in keeping with one family tradition: big family, small pool of names. Bert, who has just died, was named for Great-Grandpa Bert Gurwitch, and my father, Harry, was named for Great-Grandpa Sugar. We’ve had a slew of Berts, Bert Larrys, Mayers, Meyers, and Annies. We’ve got Maxes, Cookies, Fannies, Bubbas (every Southern family does), multiple Robins and Mindys and cousins who are known only as Cousin, and one who went by Cousin Brother. “Cousin Brother” might have been the name on his birth certificate; I never once heard him referred to in any other way.
My sister asks to say a few words at the memorial. She tells a story I know well. It was winter of 1967. Our parents didn’t have two pennies to rub together, as they say in the South, and we were about to move to Delaware. There wasn’t even enough money to buy us winter coats. But there is a detail I didn’t know. Uncle Bert bought mittens, scarves, and hats for us. The hats and scarves have been lost to time, but Lisa’s taken those mittens with her everywhere she’s ever lived. She produces the mittens from her pocket and holds them out for all of us to see. There isn’t a dry eye in the house. Looking around, it dawns on me that we’re not the next generation of the family: we’re the elders now. Our parents are failing, if not dead already, and we will need to remember them to each other.
I tell the cousins about the land on Dauphin Island. No one, except the ones listed on the deed, knew our family still had property there. Wouldn’t you know it? Everyone else’s grandparents sold their parcels at the one brief moment between hurricanes when property values spiked.
“Let’s go down. Let’s do a cousins’ trip,” I suggest.
Maybe it’s the carbohydrate rush from the bagels we’ve just inhaled, but we all get excited by the idea that this sandy lot could be our geographic connective tissue. It’s hard to believe we’re not in some Southern gothic novel and it’s 2015 and not 1895 when cousin Robin says, “You have to go to the cemetery in Mobile. You’ll love it, you know everyone there!”
We promise to arrange a trip and take photos, striking our best Becca poses. Our grandmother took annual buying trips to New York for the clothing store and considered herself extremely fashion forward. Every picture is carefully posed. Standing at a slimming angle, always making sure to keep her chin lifted, one foot forward, featuring her slender ankles. “She was ahead of her time” is the phrase I’ve heard since I was little.* At every gathering I can remember, someone has called out, “Do the Becca pose.” And so we do.
We all return to our busy lives, and it’s only after Cousin Bert Larry, the last of our Berts, passes away a month later that I spring into action. I check an Alabama seafood safety watch site. They’ve been testing the oysters, and they’ve been deemed clean enough to eat. It’s tough to pin down a date, but it seems like January can work. I pull the trigger and send a group e-mail.
Responses start to come in: Sounds great. Let me check on dates. Ike and Becca would have loved this. What a great idea. Let’s get gumbo, y’all!
Robin arranges for me to spend the night at her parents’ home before heading to the island. Sandy, her mother, is one of the few remaining cousins in Mobile. Her husband, Billy, was Dad’s cohort in the scrap metal and pool hustles.
A month out, the tide starts to turn: I can’t come because of my son’s upcoming Bar Mitzvah. It’s not looking good, but will check back in a few days. We’re going to be on a cruise. I might have to be in Saipan. All of the reasons people can’t come are valid. Robin teaches at Duke and works with the CDC. She lectures all over the world, and she really does need to be in the Mariana Islands.
My sister is coming and Bert’s son, Michael, is on board as well. He might even bring Annabelle, which seems fitting.
Hoping to get the legal issues resolved so we can make a decision about the future of the property, I tell Michael that my dad says his dad had the will and the deed to the land, but they hadn’t spoken in the five years before Bert died. One owed the other money and wrote off the debt in a settlement with the IRS, but the other reported that debt on his tax returns as being a different amount. I am 100 percent certain that at some point in the past the situation was reversed and they were equally at fault.
Michael thinks he saw the will in a box somewhere. Having just been at his father’s house, I can only imagine how hard it might be to locate it. I opened the microwave to heat up a bagel and it was stuffed with appliance manuals from the 1960s and photographs of Rebecca modeling outfits from Ike’s Clothing Store.
Michael promises to look for the documents and get back to me. When I hang up the phone, I feel so good that he and I have reconnected, but then it’s the last week in December and I don’t hear from him again. The week before our scheduled pilgrimage my sister e-mails Would you hate me if I don’t come?
I am the only cousin in the cousins’ club going home.
Fruit stand at the intersection of Hellfire and Legume.
massacre island, part II
It’s a point of pride for natives that Mardi Gras originated in Mobile and not New Orleans, but it’s only been since 1994 that Dauphin Island has held Krewe de la Dauphine, their own Carnival celebration. The idea was to boost visibility for the island, but it’s a bit of a stretch. Mardi Gras is traditionally held on Fat Tuesday, the last hurrah before Ash Wednesday, so a Mardi Gras on January 9? Still, I have to give it up to the Dauphin Island city council for going for it, an
d I’ve planned my trip to coincide with the parade. Creepiness! History! Shellfish! And gumption!
On my way to the airport, I tell my Uber driver, Kanas, “I’m going home.” It’s an hour ride and I’m speaking so animatedly about my upcoming adventure that I’m afraid I’ll get a bad customer rating, so I turn my attention to him. I learn he was born in Fairouzeh, a village two miles outside of Homs in Syria, a city that’s been hit hard by war. Like our family, his people have worked to bring family members to America. Many from his village are related through intermarriage, own liquor stores, and live in an old-world-style tightly knit community.*
“We used to go back every summer, but it’s been five years since we’ve been home. It’s good that you’re going,” he tells me, in the perfect send-off. I promise to get in touch when I return and we award each other five stars.
The trip to Mobile takes a full twelve hours of travel time, and I’m anxious the entire time. What was I thinking? Will I recognize anything or anyone? But when I head out of the parking lot of the Mobile airport, I am instantly flooded with nostalgia. The terminal has been given a face-lift, but the airfield is still bordered by a chain-link fence, just like when I was little. On Saturday nights, we parked on the patch of grass in front of the fence and watched the planes take off for entertainment.
Wherever You Go, There They Are Page 5
