Touched with Fire: Morris B. Abram and the Battle against Racial and Religious Discrimination
320
Touched with Fire: Morris B. Abram and the Battle against Racial and Religious Discrimination
320Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781640120969 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Potomac Books |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2019 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d) |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
Childhood
In the South especially, Jews languished as the provincials, the Jews of the periphery, not destined to triumph but just to survive.
— Eli N. Evans, The Provincials
Morris Abram's hometown of Fitzgerald, Georgia had a deep impact on him throughout his life. During his treatment for leukemia in the 1970s, Abram told his psychiatrist that he never really broke away from the town. From his mother, he said, he had acquired the qualities of strength; from his father, he had gotten his more "human" qualities. And while he believed his hometown "gave shape to much of what I am," his childhood was not without frequent feelings of alienation.
Abram cited numerous factors as essential to shaping his later life: being born a Jew in the South "who had to face the majority world which was hostile"; the cultural divide between his parents, one an Eastern European immigrant, the other who claimed German Jewish roots that enabled her to condescend to those of different origin; his small size throughout his childhood; growing up in a conventional environment of white Protestant fundamentalism in which he absorbed views on morality, ethics, and sexual behavior; and the enormous emphasis in his family on intellectual skills as contrasted with the slight emphasis on athletic achievement.
Abram spent his childhood in a town of six thousand residents that was unique in American history. He took pride in his hometown that, he believed, incorporated "a profound aspect of the American experience." Located in the rural, piney woods of south central Georgia, Fitzgerald had its origins in the unlikeliest of places: the vision of an Indianapolis, Indiana newspaper owner and editor. Phylander (P. H.) Fitzgerald, a Union drummer boy in the Civil War, had watched in despair as the war's midwestern pensioners faced drought conditions in the 1880s that forced them to leave their homes. Fitzgerald sent out an appeal to prominent southerners for assistance, and it was Georgia's governor, William J. Northen, who answered the call by sending two trainloads of supplies to Nebraska, the state most hard hit by the drought.
It wasn't long before Captain Fitzgerald and Northen were working together to establish a colony that would be a haven for Union veterans and others most affected by the drought and other difficult climatic conditions. In July 1895 Fitzgerald made the first payment on a large plot of fertile land purchased from two brothers who owned a sawmill in the tiny community of Swan. Word of the purchase spread quickly, as northerners and westerners began their journeys by wagon and train to the new colony. By the end of the year, more than twenty-five hundred settlers arrived and set up camps that would have to await the building of the town named for Captain Fitzgerald.
Some of the Union veterans seeking to spend their final years in the heart of Dixie had ridden with Sherman in his infamous march through the state. Others had been held under the harshest of conditions in the Confederate prison in nearby Andersonville. One had even witnessed the capture of Jefferson Davis a mere ten miles away. The original settlers were soon joined by locals from surrounding towns, many of whom had come originally as tourists to witness history being made.
While planning the layout of the town in a Midwestern-style grid, the leadership of the colony company realized that it would be foolish to alienate the locals, for whom bitter memories of the war remained. Thus, street names reflected the atmosphere of reconciliation that surrounded the building of the town. On the east side of Main Street the avenues were named for Grant, Sherman, and other Union generals. Avenues running north and south on the west side bore the names of Lee, Jackson, and other Confederate generals. The drives in the central part of town were given the familiar names Monitor and Merrimac, as well as other naval ships from both sides of the conflict. The remaining streets were named for trees native to the state. The town's first big public works project was a four-story, 150-room hotel, the biggest wooden structure in the state at the turn of the twentieth century. Morris Abram's parents were among the first to hold their wedding reception at the Lee-Grant Hotel.
In addition to the joint naming of streets and buildings, the town did its best to integrate the two cultures. A wall poster located today in the town's Blue-Gray Museum reads: "The Yankee veterans brought to Fitzgerald their architecture, their churches, their town plan, their midwestern industries, their commercial habits, their family customs, their patriotism to the Grand Army of the Republic — and a host of reminders left behind. The local Confederates contributed their land, their knowledge of agriculture, their labor, their sense of justice for the Confederacy, their churches, their cuisine, their language, and a host of southern traditions."
At the opening of the town's large exposition hall in 1896, it was decided to keep the peace by dividing the parade into separate groups of Union and Confederate veterans. But as the band began playing, the soldiers decided to march side by side, carrying the American flag. The next year they formed Battalion I of the Blue and Gray, an unprecedented development.
By 1900 Fitzgerald had its first Jewish resident, Isadore Goldenberg (née Solomon), who arrived with his new bride Bessie and opened a dry goods store. By the end of the decade, Goldenberg had two other Jewish immigrants as partners, including his nephew Sam Abram, who lived with the Goldenbergs as a boarder. Morris Abram remembers "Uncle Ike" Goldenberg as "a gentleman, attractive and sweet," the most dapper man in town. Abram's father Sam, a man short in stature, had grown up in the small village of Buchesti, Romania, where his large family were the only Jews. "Nobody bothered them," Sam's younger brother Shmule later reported. "Of course, when the goyim got drunk, they would usually beat up a Jew, but nobody paid any attention to that."
Sam, or Schneur, as he was then known, was one of nine children born to Moshe Avram, a wood dealer, and his wife, Anna Zalman Avram, in 1883. Sam, who would later lose two of his brothers in World War I and a third to the horrific 1941 pogrom in the Romanian city of Iasi that took over thirteen thousand Jewish lives, was only nine when his father died. Apprenticed to a harness maker in nearby Vaslui, Sam eventually became head of the shop, but when he faced the prospect of being conscripted into the army, he began to weigh the decision to emigrate to America.
The source of much anxiety for his mother and siblings, the decision was not an easy one, as emigration was prohibited by the authorities. And, as his brother later estimated, only one in five who set out for America at that time was successful in reaching its shores. Engaged to be married, his fiancée's father forbade her to go with him. In the end, it was the infamous pogrom in nearby Kishniev in 1903 that led Sam Abram, at the age of twenty, to decide he would leave his native Romania for America.
In 1880, Morris Abram's maternal great-grandfather, Elias Eppstein, one of the first Reform rabbis in the United States, arrived in Kansas City, Missouri, to take over the pulpit of Congregation B'nai Jehudah. (One of its future congregants was Harry Truman's close friend and onetime business partner Eddie Jacobson.) Born in Saarwelling, Alsace-Lorraine and educated in France and Germany, Rabbi Eppstein had emigrated to the United States in 1851, accepting a Jewish educational position in Syracuse, New York. Before arriving in Kansas City, he served congregations in New York City; Jackson, Michigan; Milwaukee; and Detroit, where he initiated Friday evening services at Congregation Temple Beth El in 1867 and was the first rabbi to offer sermons in English.
Rabbi Eppstein kept a journal during his three-year tenure at B'nai Jehudah. In his very first week on the job, he had the religious school partitioned into classrooms to provide age-appropriate education, enlarged the congregational choir, accepted a position as circuit preacher for surrounding communities, and received a commitment from forty-two female congregants to organize a fair to raise money to pay off the synagogue's mortgage. It was a great start for a Rabbi working on an annual salary of $1,500.9 The fair, held in October 1880, was particularly notable, with the streets surrounding the Grimes Building on Delaware Avenue thronged with crowds on five consecutive days and nights, and the mayor presiding at the opening and closing ceremonies. If the fair was a financial success, it was also a reflection of the integration of the Jewish community into the general populace of Kansas City. As the synagogue's account notes, "their language was by now almost entirely English, their dress indistinguishable from that of everyone else, and their children imbued with American ways." As a measure of just how far religious traditions had been publicly set aside, the fair's luncheon menu featured shellfish, strictly forbidden by Jewish law.
Rabbi Eppstein's tenure coincided with the beginning of the great migration of Jews to the United States from Russia following the assassination of Czar Alexander II. At first Rabbi Eppstein reported that the community would gladly provide for those refugees reaching his community. He later tempered this generous outreach, however, by urging the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Committee in New York to desist from sending any more to avoid placing a burden on the next generation. In his diary, Rabbi Eppstein noted how many of the newcomers refused to become involved in the community and declined to engage in charitable acts, while at the same time condemning fellow Jews who failed to observe the strictures of Jewish law. Still, he asked, "Should we condemn the whole on account of these hypocrites?"
The rabbi's contract was not renewed upon the end of his term in 1883. A sermon he had delivered the previous year on the subject of "Retribution" had incurred the displeasure of a prominent congregant, and the temple's patriarch was already looking to the first class of graduates of the recently established Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, a center of Reform Judaism, as a recruiting ground for Eppstein's successor.
Three of the rabbi's seven children remained in Kansas City when he left for his next pulpit in Philadelphia. Among them was his daughter Mathilda, who became the first secretary of the Kansas City chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women. Her son Harold Kander, father of future Broadway composer John Kander, later served on the synagogue's board of trustees.
Among the children accompanying, Rabbi Eppstein and his wife, Fannie, to his next pulpit in Philadelphia was his fourteen-year-old daughter, Therese, known throughout most of her life as Daisy. There she met and later married a watchmaker named Morris Cohen, who decided to enter the medical profession after financing his sister Sarah's education at the pioneering Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania. Sarah graduated in 1879, later becoming a distinguished obstetrician. After completing his medical education at Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia, Morris Cohen began to practice in a series of small towns, beginning in Quincy, Illinois, where his daughter Irene was born. From there he worked his way south until he ended up in Fitzgerald when Irene was seventeen or eighteen years old.
"He followed a moving star," Morris Abram said, and would have found Fitzgerald an interesting town in which to settle. Standing at five feet, eight inches, Cohen was remembered by his grandson as a "galvanic figure" of supreme self-confidence, a country doctor "who combined in his person all the traits of master technician and tribal shaman." Abram recalled that his grandfather, although warm and lovable to his grandchildren, was an iconoclast who was on the outs with the other doctors in town, whom he regarded as "dummkophs." His distrust of the personnel at the local hospital led him to perform his surgeries in his office. His refusal to own a car resulted in him walking to see his patients or requiring the more affluent to drive to see him. When Morris was seven, his grandfather moved from Fitzgerald to Cleveland, leaving behind many fond memories of this somewhat mythic figure and his gentle and loving grandmother, whom Abram later described as "the delight of my life."
It was Dr. Cohen who brought Morris Abram into the world on June 19, 1918, the second son of Sam and Irene Cohen Abram. Lamar Perlis, a successful property developer in southern Georgia, now in his midnineties, remembered Dr. Cohen's daughter Irene as "a very dominant, powerful woman. All the things people do today, garden club, you name it, she was involved. And they had a clothing store like everybody else. She was the one who decided whatever needed to be decided."
When asked about Irene, Janice Rothschild Blumberg, whose friendship with Morris Abram went back many decades to his days in Atlanta, said, "It's been a long time, but I remember what she looked like and what she sounded like, and when she said 'Jump!' you jumped. I had the feeling that she really kept the family together." Abram's daughter Ruth, the oldest of his five children, has fond memories of visiting her grandparents in her father's hometown, which he liked to show off to them while his parents were still alive. "My grandfather," she recalled, "was a tiny little person with a big pot belly. When he asked me to sit on his lap when I was a little girl, I was always wondering where to sit. My grandmother was much taller than he was and seemed to be the dominant force in that family. And they had a dry goods store, and my father used to love to tell the story of how he had watched his father put a dollar in a suit and say to a farmer that if you buy this suit you'll have the dollar. And he thought that was such a good trick. But as my father said, the place never really made any money and they were always on the edge." Considering the deep personality differences between Morris Abram's parents, with his father's "scorned humanity" and his mother's "bitter power," it is not surprising that they frequently clashed. To the young Abram, who learned early on that his mother's marriage to Sam Abram had been against the advice of her parents, they were "utterly mismatched." As he told Eli Evans many years later, "Mother had always depreciated Daddy and his family and Daddy deeply resented it and it would come out in explosive ways in which he would say that you just don't know how good people in my family were."
The clothing store Lamar Perlis and Ruth Abram remember was not the first one Sam Abram owned after working for his uncle. That one was located on Grant Street, the principal business district of town. The store went bankrupt during the panic of the early 1920s when Morris was five years old. A second store named "Red Star," opened on Pine Street in a poorer part of town, also failed, and the elder Abram decided to open a shop on the same street that sold and repaired shoes. When the shoe business proved to be less than successful, he added clothing.
"He was not a good businessman," Abram recalled of his father.
He didn't keep accounts very well, he never planned, he just operated by the seat of his pants, and the only thing he knew was what he paid for something and if he got a little bit more for it that was fine, he would give credit to people who wouldn't pay him. He did not really read and write. Mother had to do all of this. He was really a good salesman and had a nice personality, except he was so bedeviled, I think, by his financial problems, and by the host of his angers and anxieties, and relationship with Mother [that he] wasn't putting his best foot forward.
The young Abram, who worked in the store after school and on weekends, didn't like to be seen there, turning his head or walking inside when he saw a car with girls inside. While he felt good about his academic achievements, he felt very "cut down" by his family's position in the town, by what his father had to do to earn a living, and by his lack of success. He was struck by the fact that the other Jewish merchants in town, "those from Eastern Europe who married wives from Eastern Europe, were doing very well indeed. But I was sort of separated from those people by virtue of my mother's attitude about them."
Abram's niece Cecily, the daughter of his brother Lewis, remembers the store as dimly lit, with clothes on one side and shoes on the other. If you had to use the facilities, you would need to go outside. "There were these lime steps leading to a ladder that took you into a tent, with a chain to let the water in and out of the toilet." Sam Abram enjoyed a close relationship with his customers. "My uncle was told not to make fun of them," Cecily Abram said. "And some of them were able to help his father financially when the business got into trouble."
When Morris Abram, his wife Jane, and their second daughter Ann traveled to Vaslui, Romania in the mid-1960s to visit what remained of his father's family, its members were surprised to learn that their American relative spoke no Yiddish. When asked why his father never taught him the ethnic language of his fellow Jews of Eastern Europe, Abram was too embarrassed to reply that he never heard him speak it at home.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Touched with Fire"
by .
Copyright © 2019 David E. Lowe.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Timeline of Morris Abram’s Life
Introduction
1. Childhood
2. Education
3. Atlanta Lawyer
4. Victory
5. Jewish Imperatives
6. Continuing the Struggle
7. Brandeis
8. Values
9. New York Lawyer
10. Transition
11. Challenging New Definitions of Civil Rights
12. Leadership
13. Back to the United Nations
14. Legacy
Notes
Bibliography