After years of living in San Francisco, writer Jason K. Friedman purchased an apartment in Savannah, Georgia to be near his family. Despite having grown up there, Friedman had a complicated relationship with his hometown and knew surprisingly little about Southern Jewish history. When he fell for a charming, run-down condo located on the somewhat ironically named “Liberty Street” in the city’s historic district, he was amused by the building’s designation as the “Solomon Cohen House,” which seemed incongruous with the more conventional Southern surnames displayed on nearby historic homes. After he moved in, Friedman opened a kitchen cabinet to find a short history of the home’s original owner, who was described as “a wealthy slave owner” with “extensive business interests,” as well as a bio of his son, Gratz Cohen, who “enlisted in the CSA and was killed in the Battle of Bentonville in the closing months of the war.”
Intrigued by this brief description, Friedman did a deep dive into the archives to learn everything he could about the Cohen family and their life in nineteenth-century Savannah, which led him to uncover the larger story of the Jews in the region — some of whom, like Solomon Cohen, achieved great wealth and influence in the Antebellum South. Solomon’s list of titles and accomplishments is long: real estate developer, banker, US attorney, alderman, postmaster, state senator, and founder of the Hebrew Benevolent Society, among others. And the catalog of Cohen family friends and relations reads like a “Who’s Who” of nineteenth-century American Jewry. Philadelphian Rebecca Gratz, founder of several philanthropic organizations, was the aunt and surrogate mother of Solomon’s accomplished wife, Miriam. Solomon and Miriam were married by Isaac Leeser, the most important Orthodox rabbi of his era. Solomon assisted celebrated Jewish novelist Grace Aguilar with the distribution of her books in the South.
Solomon and Miriam’s son, the doomed Gratz Cohen, began life as a thoughtful, depressive little boy, who bore his soul in his journals and in letters to a beloved aunt in Richmond. Considered too sensitive and effeminate in his youth, Cohen wrote of his love and longing for his college friends (he was the first Jewish student at the University of Virginia) as well as for his slave, Louis. As a gay man, Friedman recognizes and empathizes with Cohen — his self-loathing, his fear of not being manly enough and disappointing his father.
Cohen had a romantic view of the war. He dreamed of “a manly death for a noble cause,” but he also desperately wanted his rich father to help him avoid conscription. Unspecified problems with his feet, as well as other vague Victorian maladies like “torpor of the liver,” kept him out of harm’s way for the first few years. However, after the fall of Savannah, he was called up as a general’s aide-de-camp, a plum and usually safe assignment.
Though Liberty Street was published by a university press, and Friedman conducted extensive research, he is not by and large a historian. He brings a fiction writer’s sensibility to his storytelling, which results in a rich and sensitive portrayal of Cohen family dynamics. Friedman’s book is also a memoir: we follow him as he journeys into Savannah’s past. The result is an engrossing and thoughtful investigation of a slave-owning Jewish family in the American South, with all of its attendant contradictions, self-justifications, and cognitive dissonances.
Lauren Gilbert is Director of Public Services at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, where she manages the Lillian Goldman Reading Room and Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute and arranges and moderates online book discussions.
