THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 25, 1994 TAG: 9412210202
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MARK G. MALVASI
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
THE LONELY DAYS WERE SUNDAYS
Reflections of a Jewish Southerner
ELI N. EVANS
University of Mississippi Press. 381 pp. $25.
CONTRARY TO the slanders of Yankee critics and historians, antebellum Southerners were neither rubes nor barbarians. Despite its fair share of fakers and monsters, who exist always and everywhere, the South boasted a vigorous intellectual and cultural life in the decades before the Civil War. The men and women who peopled Southern society were decent, God-fearing and morally responsible.
Moreover, again in contrast to Northern bias and misconception, antebellum Southerners were far more tolerant of cultural and religious differences than were Northerners - provided, of course, that those devoted to diverse customs and beliefs remained orthodox on certain questions, such as slavery.
Nowhere is Southern acceptance of the ``other'' more dramatically illustrated than in the status of Southern Jews. Jews, in general, fared better south of the Mason-Dixon line. Mordecai Sheftall, Francis Salvador, Jacob N. Cardozo, David Yulee and Judah P. Benjamin, to name only a few of the more prominent Jewish figures, enjoyed successful public careers in the South and were celebrated among their Southern contemporaries.
But for all the beneficence of Christian Southerners, Jews remained in some important respects perennial outsiders in an overwhelmingly Christian world. In The Lonely Days Were Sundays: Reflections of a Jewish Southerner, Eli N. Evans explores the complexity of this dual legacy.
There is nothing in Evans' account to suggest that he encourages or accepts the fashionable status of victim, in which so many currently revel. Indeed, Evans is as unabashedly proud of his Southern heritage as he is of his Jewish heritage and does not regard either as a disability. A resident of New York for more than two decades, he can nevertheless write that ``the very word `home' still conjures up the South for me. . . '' Those Southerners, young and old, who now seek to forget their history, or to remember it with shame, will do well to recognize with Evans that self-hatred is no more attractive in white Southerners than it is in blacks, Jews or anybody else.
But as his title suggests, Evans knows that there is a deep loneliness of the soul that haunts every Jew who lives in the South. The same observation could be made in reverse about Southerners who have wandered among the myriad ethnic cultures of the Northeast, if William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice is indicative of their experience. That poignant inner torment may at last prove insurmountable and debilitating, although, as in Evans' case, it may also be the source of great creativity and insight. It should be no surprise, for example, that the best American fiction this century has come from Jewish and Southern writers, members of groups imperfectly assimilated into the American mainstream.
Evans occupies an enviable position. His dual inheritance has endowed him with a love of the land, a sense of the mystery of nature, a respect for the majesty of God and an appreciation of man's ceaseless and ultimately tragic struggle ``to understand deity and creation.'' Those who do not traffic in things Southern or things Jewish may acquire this sense only indirectly and vicariously, or not at all.
For native and adopted sons and daughters of the South, for Jews and Gentiles alike, Evans' eclectic volume will prove a revelation. The essays range from interpretations of Southern history, politics and culture to reflections on national and international affairs. Although the South is his principal subject, Evans celebrates particular qualities, as Stark Young wrote long ago, ``not because they belong to the South, but because the South belongs to them.'' MEMO: Mark G. Malvasi is on the staff of the history department at
Randolph-Macon College. by CNB