Members of the Tribe Read Free

introduced myself. It didn’t matter. Jews understand books, Americans are open and friendly, and the combination made it possible to go places and see things I hadn’t expected or imagined.
    Some of the customs I encountered during my trip seemed strange, even exotic; there is a do-it-yourself flavor to much of American Judaism that can be disconcerting. And many of the people I met along the way were far from the stereotypical Jews I had expected to find. But no matter where I was—in a Jewish farm town in New England or a black synagogue in Queens, in a gaytemple in San Francisco or among the Jews of the Louisiana bayou—I always felt at home. I came to the United States feeling like an Israeli; I left reminded that I am also, as a friend in Detroit put it, an MOT—a Member of the Tribe.

CHAPTER ONE
MACY B. AND THE
DIXIE DIASPORA
    O n 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