Returning, p.15
Returning, page 15
I have the impression that the reason Lazard was writing Pop was that he didn’t believe Myer and Ferdinand fully grasped the gravity of their situation. They were too casual in their dealings with creditors. They were exploring unrealistic expansion plans with neighboring planters—the Godchauxs, the Kocks, the McCalls—in the vain hope that they could grow their way out of the crisis. Pop, a lawyer and a sober young man, physically close by in Louisiana, might be able to impose some discipline on his relatives, to make them understand how the business world worked in the twentieth century (that is, rapidly and unsentimentally). In 1914, well into a second wave of the crisis, with the plantation business in receivership, Pop wrote a stern letter to Ferdinand: he’d had a visit from a “credit man” from Swift and Company, the giant Chicago meat-packing company, a crucial supplier of goods to the family store and of feed to the plantations. Swift hadn’t been paid, and its representative obviously hadn’t gotten the attention he’d expected from the Lemanns in Donaldsonville—so he went to New Orleans to see Pop, who wasn’t yet thirty. In the letter, Pop lectured his older brother: “I consider it important to pay them their account even two or three days before it is due if possible.” He also wrote the Swift man a long letter promising that from now on the Lemanns would pay promptly, and asking that the family’s troubles be kept strictly confidential.
The tide that was running against the family plantations couldn’t be reversed. In the spring of 1919, the formerly buoyant Ferdinand wrote to the youngest of his siblings, Jack: “The winter was a very hard one and conditions very difficult and unfavorable for planters—it rained almost incessantly from middle of November until end of February. Plantation roads became not only impassable but actively impossible—in worst condition ever known.” Ferdinand was writing from New Orleans, where he’d gone to have doctors look at a mysterious stomach ailment. Less than two weeks later he was dead, at the age of forty-eight. During the Lemanns’ forty-year heyday in the plantation business, people called Donaldsonville “Little Jerusalem,” because the town was completely encircled by one Jewish family’s landholdings. Now, one by one, the plantations were sold off, leaving Palo Alto as the remnant; the store in town continued to operate. My cousin Bubs, who lived at Palo Alto and ran both businesses when I was a child, wrote a short memoir about his father, one of Pop’s younger brothers, who had spent his life in Donaldsonville. “A sugar cane plantation during his lifetime must have been one disappointment after another,” Bubs wrote, “and he, like his brothers and sisters, no doubt suffered to see the holdings that their grandfather and father acquired shrink a little more each year. It was to this, however, that he devoted his life.”
Of Bernard and Harriet’s eight children who survived to adulthood, three, all boys, spent their adult lives in Donaldsonville and worked in the family businesses. The other five moved away. In group photographs they all appear formal, serious; they look straight at the camera, neatly dressed in dark suits and heavy dresses that must have been stiflingly uncomfortable in Louisiana’s sticky, moist heat. Seven of the eight children married Jews. During the time of the plantation economic crises, there was also a religious crisis, because, in 1914, Pop’s younger brother Arthur, the subject of the poignant description that I just quoted, married Mary Lee Landry, a member of Ascension Parish’s leading Catholic family. According to family lore, Arthur’s brothers and sisters, all more or less observant practicing Jews, stayed up all night with him trying to talk him out of intermarrying, fruitlessly. Arthur wound up having eight children, all raised as Catholics. Mary Lee, in addition to being a Landry, was also a descendant of the Ayrauds, the family that had owned Palo Alto before the Civil War. As the story was handed down to me, their marriage was a Romeo and Juliet drama in reverse: whatever lingering bad feelings there may still have been over the Lemanns taking the plantation, and whatever contemporary bad feelings there were over the mixed marriage, love triumphed, and they lived together for many evidently happy decades, with the two streams of family heritage behind Palo Alto united.
Jacob Lemann had come to America knowing that he would be immediately unable to function as a practicing Jew. He had intermarried. Over the decades, through a great deal of effort on his and Miriam’s part, he had been able to establish a Jewish life for his large family. A few days after he was born, Arthur, like his brothers, had been the star attraction at a bris, a celebratory public circumcision to mark a male child’s entry into the covenant. Now the Lemanns were dividing into two categories: those who remained in Donaldsonville, who became Catholic, and those who left, who remained Jews. One by one, the other Jewish families in Donaldsonville left too. Like many small towns in the South—and for that matter, but for different reasons, in Europe—Donaldsonville for years had an official last Jew, a small, gray old man. His name was Irv Birnbaum, and he tended Bikur Cholim cemetery until he died in 2004. When I met with the Julien family at the Sportsman Lounge, they objected to the idea that there were no Jews left in Donaldsonville. What about the Lemanns? By one standard, fair enough, but loyalty to Donaldsonville had entailed leaving organized Jewish life behind. And Jewish life is organized; it has to be, by Jewish law.
The Lemanns who remained in Donaldsonville had launched an unfamiliar project, living as non-Jews. The Lemanns who left, like Pop, had launched a different unfamiliar project of their own, living as mainstream Americans. Pop’s grandparents had gone to a lot of trouble to avoid the Civil War, but Pop, along with two of his brothers, served in the First World War, which the United States entered when he was in his midthirties. He worked as a lawyer for the U.S. Shipping Board in Washington. In his letters home, he complained about how hard he was working, but it was a propitious assignment—as one family member put it, “he is deriving considerable benefit from meeting and knowing big men who are doing things.” He renewed his friendship with Felix Frankfurter, who also had a wartime government job and was living in the “House of Truth,” a Washington townhouse that functioned as the capital’s leading salon for rising liberals. Pop went to Yom Kippur services. He dined with Herbert Lehman, then on leave from Lehman Brothers to work for the army, later to become governor of New York, “who seems to be a very nice chap.” Twice, during visits to the theater, he saw President Wilson, looking “very old and worn,” and his “pretty buxom” wife, Edith. Wilson, almost three decades older than Pop, was an unreconstructed child of the Reconstruction South, dedicated to white supremacy. Pop was not, but he disapproved of Wilson for other reasons. Why was the President spending his evenings “entirely as a successful business man rather than as a man of letters, a scholar and a statesman would”—at the theater rather than in gatherings of “the sparking brains of the country” that he had convened at the White House? Such judgments are evidence of a scope of ambition that no previous Lemann, going back infinitely through the generations, would have been able to harbor.
Though not always at the same impressively high level as Pop, other Lemanns in those early years of the new century, like Reform Jews back in Germany, were getting university degrees, entering the professions, and finding work in institutions that were not Jewish. Through the previous decades of the family’s rise that had not happened. The Lemanns had been in family businesses that most of the time operated through close connections to other German-Jewish family businesses. The overwhelming main line of Jewish history up to that point was one of separation from non-Jews, economically, socially, legally, ritually, thanks to some combination of choice and exclusion. If, indeed, the gates to the ghetto had been locked from both the inside and the outside, what would a Jew who ventured outside the gates encounter there? What would need to be given up? What could a Jew offer to the world that would turn the world’s historic and customary revulsion into a warm embrace? These questions had never been entirely absent, but now, for Jews like us, they were becoming primary.
Court Jews
As it does on all big questions, the Torah has a good deal to say about these—or, rather, it has stories to offer, whose meaning and application it’s for us to figure out. Before we are even out of the Book of Genesis, we have encountered a long, complicated, unforgettable account of a Jew who operates at a high level in a non-Jewish society: Joseph, who becomes the vizier of Egypt, at the behest of Pharaoh. He is hardly the only Jew in the Torah who has extensive adventures outside of the confines of the tribe, as the Lemanns began to do in the twentieth century. Moses, the Torah’s main human character, was raised, his identity disguised, inside the Egyptian court. Like Joseph, he married a non-Jewish woman. Outside of the confines of the Torah, in other canonical Jewish writings, Daniel, in the Book of Daniel, and my grandfather’s namesake, Mordecai, in the Book of Esther, both served as the right-hand man to non-Jewish rulers—a series of Babylonian kings in Daniel’s case and Ahasuerus of Persia in Mordecai’s. Joseph and Daniel were elevated from their previous status at the very bottom of society on the strength of their ability to interpret the ruler’s dreams.
Not just Scripture but real Jewish history, and for that matter the Jewish present, offers a long procession of Jews who have served in high-level advisory roles out in the big world. The Jew has something to offer, some expertise, and is awarded special privileges in return. Yes, it was a Jew who wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, but that’s more often the canonical ticket to these roles than the real-life one. The most famous European court Jew, probably, was Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who provided financial services to Prince Wilhelm of the German state of Hesse-Cassel—not far from where my family comes from—and founded his family’s bank. Jews have a reputation for understanding about money. Jews can communicate across national boundaries. Jews are doctors and scientists. Jews are adept with words and ideas. Jews can plan. Jews can organize. Powerful people who need these special skills and can’t find them any other way install Jews in high positions. But there are always conditions, aren’t there?
Sometimes in Scripture, and surely far more often in real life, the ruler may be unaware of the court Jew’s tribal identity, which makes disguise a condition of elevation and revealing the truth a risk. King Ahasuerus made Mordecai’s adopted daughter Esther—a distinctly Jewish name now, but then a camouflaged one (in Hebrew Esther means “hidden”; she was really named Hadassah)—his concubine and then his queen because he didn’t know who she really was. Pharaoh knew that Joseph, whom he first encountered as a slave who had been imprisoned as a falsely accused rapist, was a Hebrew, but it was only after Joseph had been a miraculously successful administrator for more than a decade that he sought Pharaoh’s permission to import his Jewish family, numbering seventy people, to Egypt to live there. Both Joseph and Esther began their rise in the world as slaves whose physical beauty attracted their owners to them. Joseph, Esther, Mordecai, and Daniel all wound up being gorgeously garbed in magnificent non-Jewish raiments as an aspect of their new roles at court. Joseph was given a new, Egyptian name. We are never even told Mordecai’s Hebrew name. Except for Daniel, all the biblical court Jews abandoned the Jewish dietary laws at court.
If the Rothschilds are the best known court Jews, the most memorably rendered artistically is probably Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, court Jew to Duke Charles Alexander of Württemburg in the early eighteenth century. Mayer Rothschild, born more than forty years after Oppenheimer, looks almost modern, balding, with large clear eyes and white side-whiskers; the bewigged, crudely rendered Oppenheimer is a figure from another age. Oppenheimer, a banker who, like Rothschild, came from southwest Germany, has been the subject of two novels, two films, and several biographies. Like his biblical forebears, he rose quickly on the basis of his special skills. He lived outside the ghetto, ostentatiously and gorgeously dressed. And when his noble patron suddenly died, he was hanged, following a flurry of accusations of lechery and financial impropriety. What put Oppenheimer in the spotlight in the twentieth century was the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger’s popular novel Jud Süss, published in 1925. In Feuchtwanger’s version of the story, it emerges that Oppenheimer was secretly not Jewish but, instead, the illegitimate son of a nobleman, and that, rather than his being a rapist, his daughter had been raped. On the gallows, he is offered the opportunity to reveal all this and to convert to Christianity—a venerable life-saving opportunity offered to imperiled Jews—but he refuses. Instead, defiantly, he recites the Shema, the brief and most essential Jewish utterance, and dies.
Pop was an exact contemporary of two famous Jews, Feuchtwanger, the German novelist, and Leo Frank, the German-Jewish manager of an Atlanta factory who was lynched in 1915 by a mob that believed he had raped and killed a young white girl who worked for him. Feuchtwanger was, along with the Austro-Hungarian visionary writer Joseph Roth, one of a cohort of ardent early warners about Adolf Hitler and the Nazis—in his case, beginning in the early 1920s. As soon as Hitler came to power, Feuchtwanger fled Germany. After a series of daring escapes, he arrived in Los Angeles in 1941, quickly becoming a leading member of the colony of artistic German refugees in Los Angeles, along with Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. Leo Frank’s lynching took place just as Pop was rising in the world. It landed heavily with German Jews in America, not merely as an injustice but also as a reminder that our new status was anything but secure—that the mob was always waiting for us somewhere just out of view, obsessed with our supercharged greed and sexuality, waiting for a pretext to strike.
In Parade, the musical about Frank by Alfred Uhry (an Alsatian-descended Jew from Atlanta), the final scene has Frank reenacting the ending of Feuchtwanger’s Jud Süss by reciting the Shema on the gallows just before the curtain falls. In real life that didn’t happen; Frank merely said that he loved his wife and his mother. The German Jews in America, with some exceptions, took pains to be careful, muted, not defiant. We may not have known many Eastern European Jews, but we knew the stereotypes about them—loud, vulgar, radical—and we designed our self-presentation with the aim of seeming different. There was nothing to be gained by calling attention to yourself, by ardently advocating for the tribe.
Even the uncharacteristically strident Feuchtwanger, who had been raised Orthodox, had internalized the idea of an implausibly binary distinction between ordinary Jews and court Jews, at least in the way he imagined life in late-medieval Germany. There was a sharp, irreconcilable gulf between the two categories. In the ghetto, he wrote, “their men slunk with bowed heads, their women faded early; of every ten children whom they bore, seven died. They were like dead brackish water, cut off from the free-flowing life outside, dammed off from the language, the art, the spirit of others.” But if you were anointed as one of the lucky few, everything changed: “On the door of the Jew with money no watch was set; the Jew with money stank no more, and no magistracy clapped a ridiculous, pointed cap on his head. The princes and great lords needed him, they could not make wars and levy regiments without him, they allowed him to spread himself in their sunlight and to grow great and magnificent.” Feuchtwanger didn’t have to add: temporarily. There’s no opportunity for a full Jewish life in such a choice, is there?
The biblical court Jews had it easier than the real-life ones. All of them wound up not only ably serving the ruler but also, and more significantly, helping Jews to escape whichever of the terrible fates that are periodically visited on us was lurking at that moment. (One reason the German Jews in America became so uncomfortable with Purim was that in the Book of Esther, Mordecai leads a merciless revenge on the enemies of the Jews, which we are commanded to celebrate joyously forever.) The Book of Genesis ends with the peaceful deaths of Joseph’s father Jacob, the last of the patriarchs, and then of Joseph himself. The Book of Exodus begins—as if anticipating the plot of Jud Süss—with the ascension of a new Pharaoh “who knew not Joseph.” It’s Pharaoh’s failure to realize the advantages of Jews, especially court Jews, that sets off the great drama of mass enslavement, oppression, and escape from Egypt. Joseph didn’t have to see that. Looking for lessons in his story, I see that, in contrast to many real-life court Jews, he never forgot who he was, and that, when he had the chance, he used his power to serve his people. He advocated not only for his large family but for the whole Hebrew tribe, for whom, as vizier, he secured the fruitful land of Goshen as an Egyptian home.
The scriptural court Jew is never vain. Joseph didn’t imagine, and never said, that his special skills were the product of his own abilities, rather than of his covenanted relationship with God. “Not I!” he tells Pharaoh, who has asked Joseph to explain a dream he has had. “God will see to Pharaoh’s welfare.” Later, he forgives his brothers for having sold him into slavery and telling their father that he was dead; he puts the higher principle of reunion above the option of cutting them off, which the combination of his high status and his understandable bitterness would have made possible. Through the whole story, he adapts, but he doesn’t assimilate. For centuries learned rabbis have scratched their heads over why Joseph had his father and then himself embalmed, and, in his father’s case, why Joseph staged a grand funeral procession from Egypt back to the land of Canaan, where Jacob was buried. These are profound violations of Jewish burial law. But the point is that Jacob, and later Joseph, were both buried back home, with their people, not in Egypt. The result—solidarity—and not the means of achieving it that circumstances dictated, is the point.
