Members of the Tribe Read Free Page B

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 lawnsof 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 where 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 shockof 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,