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In what order, Greene muses, did these citizens view their heritage. First American, then Southern, and then Jewish? How intense was their faith (observant? Reform? social?), the internal cultural tension (Russian? German?). How much did the desire, if not to "pass" as ordinary Southerners, at least to get along with their Christian neighbors, smooth over the fear that their Jewishness, their otherness, might make them targets of violence? What did they owe, as historical victims of prejudice, to the black victims of modern prejudice?
Finally, how much did that desire to blend-and the latter-day efforts of separatist blacks to downplay the Jewish troubles-lead Southern Jews of the last generation to protect their children from the past?
"From May 17, 1954-the day the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that states could not segregate schoolchildren by raceŅuntil the end of the 1950s, a hundred homes, schools, and houses of worship across the South exploded. . . . In the twelve months before the Temple bombing, there were forty-seven bombings or attempted bombings around the South."
"I never knew anything about all this," says Greene, who now lives in Atlanta. "My parents must have known about it, and I remember Jim Crow and all that, but it wasn't until I moved back to Georgia that I really found out about it."
Her fascination with the case was fueled by the fact that several of the five suspects in the bombing, members of that tiny but poisonous network of Klans, neo-Nazis, and anti-Semites that still pervade the underclass, were still living in Atlanta. And though her overtures were rejected by some, she was able to make contact with the most notorious of the five, George Bright.
Greene struggles to understand Bright, to pierce his narrow-minded and fanatically repressive manner, make for fascinating reading. And just as she thought she had caught him in a contradiction-the sort of "gotcha!" that Perry Mason would have used to establish guilt-she discovered the even greater ambiguities of memory and inference. (At a dinner party with several Emory University faculty, she says she was informed that one of the experts on memory was at the other end of the table. She "practically ran through the entree" to interview him.) Her final conclusions, though not ornate, are convincing; but they are almost incidental to the issue of community identity.
Jews in Atlanta were unusually comfortable: relatively well-regarded, tolerated, and, at various times in the city's history, extremely well-treated (although the lynching of Leo Frank was well within memory at the time of the bombing). Even as the South began to roil with violence, Greene says, the Jews of Atlanta insulated themselves, saying, "It won't happen here; we're civilized here."
But civilization demands integrity, not insulation. The hero of the book, although a humanly flawed character, is Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, a Pittsburgh import who seeks to push, pull, persuade, and even shame his congregation into actively supporting the civil rights movement. Rothschild's sermonizing is at first resented and even feared by the assimilist Reform attendees, then indulgently dismissed, and only finally-after the bombing-taken for the powerful and pure demand for moral action that it was.
The voice of Ralph McGill, whose editorials following the bombing helped win him the Pulitzer Prize, is the lightning to Rabbi Rothchild's thunder. Greene had originally wanted to name the book When the Wolves of Hate Are Loosed, from his famous warning published the day after the destruction of the Temple.
Writing the book, immersing herself in the many communities of her adopted city, has given Greene a heightened awareness of how history is, and sometimes is not, assimilated into culture. "When I'm driving down streets named after these people, Ralph McGill Boulevard and Hartsfield International Airport-I knew who they were, but I didn't really know their characters. Atlanta's such a boomtown, there are so many people living in suburban cul-de-sacs, that I wonder whether they really know what these things represent.
"And it gave me a real respect for leadership: helping your constituents to see the truth about what the future is likely to hold and not offering hopes and promises and myths like they did in our poor neighbor Alabama, where the politicians were telling people, 'Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!' and being swept back into office in landslides. Not that people here were born humanitarians: McGill had his doubts about what integration would bring; so did Mayor Hartsfield and the police chief, but . . . they didn't lie to the citizens. And I don't think it's just a mere accident that the Olympics are going to be in Atlanta: I think they put this city on a whole different footing than the rest of the South."
Eve Zibart is a staff writer with The Washington Post.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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