Staff Picks
Kosher Cornbread: The Jewish Experience in the South
- Sara M.
- Saturday, December 22, 2018
Collection
Shalom, y'all! The South has been home to vibrant Jewish communities for centuries. Enjoy this list of fiction and non-fiction books about the Jewish experience south of the Mason-Dixon line.
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf2019 reading challenge. Find more lists here.
Hot Pursuit
Murder in Mississippi.
Published in 2010
It was the Freedom Summer of 1964. Civil rights workers Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were driving through rural Mississippi. When a police cruiser flashed its lights behind them, they hesitated. Were these law-abiding officers or members of the Ku Klux Klan? Should they pull over or try to outrun their pursuers? The last day in the lives of these courageous young men is relived in this gripping story.
The Lion is in
Published in 2012
Escaping from their personal lives and taking refuge in a nightclub, a runaway bride, a recovering alcoholic, and a downtrodden minister's wife adopt a retired circus lion and spend their days waitressing until the past catches up with them.
Home in the Morning
Published in 2010
A powerful debut from a new literary talent, this novel tells the story of a Jewish family confronting the tumult of the 1960s - and the secrets that bind its members together. Jackson Sassaport is a man who often finds himself in the middle. Whether torn between Stella, his beloved and opinionated Yankee wife, and Katherine Marie, the African American girl who first stole his teenage heart; or between standing up for his beliefs and acquiescing to his prominent Jewish family's imperative to not stand out in the segregated South, Jackson learns to balance the secrets and deceptions of those around him. But one fateful night in 1960 will make the man in the middle reconsider his obligations to propriety and family, and will start a chain of events that will change his life and the lives of those around him forever. Home in the Morning follows Jackson's journey from his childhood as a coddled son of the Old South to his struggle as a young man eager to find his place in the civil rights movement while protecting his family. Flashing back between Jackson's adult life as a successful lawyer and his youth, Mary Glickman's riveting novel traces the ways that race and prejudice, family and love intertwine to shape our lives. This ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's personal collection.
Marching to Zion
A Novel
Published in 2013
The tempestuous, tragic love story of a beautiful Jewish immigrant and a charismatic black man during the early twentieth century Mags Preacher, a young black woman with a dream, arrives in St. Louis from the piney woods of her family home in 1916, hoping to learn the beauty trade. She knows nothing about Jews except that they killed the Lord Jesus Christ. Then she begins working for Mr. Fishbein, an Eastern European m̌igr ̌who fled the pogroms that shattered his life to become the proprietor of Fishbein's Funeral Home. By the time he saves Mags from certain death during the 1917 race riots in East St. Louis, all her perceptions have changed. But Mr. Fishbein's daughter, the troubled redheaded beauty Minerva, is a different matter. There is something wrong with the girl, something dangerous, something fateful. And it is Magnus Bailey, Mags's first friend in the city, who learns to what heights and depths the girl's willful spirit can drive a man. Marching to Zion is the tragic story of Minerva Fishbein and Magnus Bailey, a charismatic black man and the longtime business partner of Minerva's father. From the brutal riots of East St. Louis to Memphis, Tennessee, during the 1920s and the Depression, Marching to Zion is a tale of passion, betrayal, and redemption during an era in America when interracial love could not go unpunished. Readers of Mary Glickman's One More River will celebrate the return of Aurora Mae Stanton, who joins a cast of vibrant new characters in this tense and compelling Southern-Jewish novel that examines the price of love and the interventions of fate.
One More River
Published in 2011
Bernard Levy, always a mystery to his community of Guilford, Mississippi, was even more of a mystery to his son Mickey Moe, who was just four years old when his father died in World War II. Now in 1962, Mickey Moe sets out into backwoods Mississippi and Tennessee to uncover his father's murky past during the Great Flood of 1927.
Undisturbed Peace.
Published in 2016
This sweeping historical novel tells the story of the Trail of Tears as it has never been told before Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar has traveled to America from the filthy streets of East London in search of a better life. But Abe's visions of a privileged apprenticeship in the Sassaporta Brothers' empire are soon replaced with the grim reality of indentured servitude in Greensborough, North Carolina. Some fifty miles west, Dark Water of the Mountains leads a life of irreverent solitude. The daughter of a powerful Cherokee chief, it has been nearly twenty years since she renounced her family's plans for her to marry a wealthy white man. Far away in Georgia, a black slave named Jacob has resigned himself to a life of loss and injustice in a Cherokee city of refuge for criminals. A trio of outsiders linked by love and friendship, Abe, Dark Water, and Jacob face the horrors of President Jackson's Indian Removal Act as the tribes of the South make the grueling journey across the Mississippi River and into Oklahoma.
Carolina Israelite
How Harry Golden Made Us Care About Jews, the South, and Civil Rights
Published in 2015
"This first comprehensive biography of Jewish American writer and humorist Harry Golden (1902-1981), author of the 1958 national best-seller 'Only in America', illuminates a remarkable life intertwined with the rise of the civil rights movement, Jewish popular culture, and the sometimes precarious position of Jews in the South and across America during the 1950s"-- Provided by publisher.
That Pride of Race and Character
The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South
Published in 2014
The Cottoncrest Curse
A Novel.
Published in 2014
The bodies of an elderly colonel and his comely young wife are discovered on the staircase of their stately plantation home, their blood still dripping down the wooden balustrades. Within the sheltered walls of Cottoncrest, Augustine and Rebecca Chastaine have met their deaths under the same shroud of mystery that befell the former owner, who had committed suicide at the end of the Civil War. Locals whisper about the curse of Cottoncrest Plantation, an otherworldly force that has now taken three lives. But Sheriff Raifer Jackson knows that even a specter needs a mortal accomplice, and after investigating the crime scene, he concludes that the apparent murder/suicide is a double homicide, with local peddler Jake Gold as the prime suspect. Assisted by his overzealous deputy, a grizzled Civil War physician, and the racist Knights of the White Camellia, the Sheriff directs a manhunt for Jake through a village of former slaves, the swamps of Cajun country, and the bordellos of New Orleans. But Jake's chameleon-like abilities enable him to elude his pursuers. As a peddler who has built relationships by trading fabric, needles, dry goods, and especially razor-sharp knives in exchange for fur, Jake knows the back roads of the small towns that dot the Mississippi River Delta. Additionally, his uncanny talent for languages allows him to pose as just another local, hiding his true identity as an immigrant Jew who fled Czarist-Russia. Michael H. Rubin's The Cottoncrest Curse takes readers on the bold journey of Jake's flight within an epic sweep of treachery and family rivalry ranging from the Civil War to the civil rights era, as the impact of the 1893 murders ripples through the twentieth century and violence besets the owners of Cottoncrest into the 1960s.
God'll Cut You Down
The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, a Murder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi
Published in 2014
"An unlikely journalist, a murder case in Mississippi, and a fascinating literary true crime story about race, money, sex, and power in the modern American South"-- Provided by publisher.
My New Orleans, Gone Awaya Memoir of Loss and Renewal
Published in 2013
In the wake of Katrina's devastation, a Jewish man looks back on his secular NOLA childhood.