This is a story of Florence, my great-great-aunt, seeking home in a North Florida landscape foreign to her upbringing. As newlyweds in 1924, New York-born Florence and her Georgia-bred husband planted themselves among the hills and longleaf pines of Leon County in Tallahassee, the state capitol.They hoped to make a living in real estate and retail, the forays of many second-generation Jews scrambling for a foothold in American life.
This is a story of Jewish failure, Florida-style—at least in those first tumultuous years of speculation and collapse, hurricanes and hustle, Depression, and world war.
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There were five siblings in this first American-born generation of the Reichert family. My great-grandmother, Natalie, the eldest: as a young woman in New York City, she was offered an opportunity to train in Europe with a noted vocal impresario—an invitation rejected by her immigrant father, a Reform rabbi, a man of restless intellectual and spiritual ambition and Victorian morals. In family lore at its most hagiographic, it is always the two Reichert brothers who loom as eminent figures. Irving, ensconced as rabbi at the Reform mothership Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco from 1930-1947, was a respected public orator, a defender of refugees and human rights, and, for a time, vice-president of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism.Victor was rabbi of Rockdale Avenue Temple in Cincinnati from 1938 to 1962; he was a noted translator and commentator of medieval Hebrew poetry and classic Jewish texts, as well as a poet himself and friend of Robert Frost.
Florence and Helen, the two youngest siblings, seemed to me in my youth to be faded carbon copies of my grand-dame great-grandmother, Natalie. Two eighty-something-old ladies in wigs toasting me in warbling voices at my Bat Mitzvah luncheon in suburban Atlanta in April of 1988. Florence counted herself neither talented dramatist, like Natalie, nor spiritual eminence—her older brothers’ territories—but chronicler, jester, and scrapper, as well as daughter, sister, wife, mother.
In my childhood, the existence of Florence and her Southern branch of the Reichert line functioned as a notable factoid; a rider to the story I told myself (and others) about me and my immediate family not being true “Southerners”—whatever that meant. I grew up Jewish in the Atlanta suburbs when the Jewish community was still relatively small. It didn’t occur to me at the time to contemplate the experience of my Great-Great-Aunt Florence and her family in a region of the country that, before World War II, still constituted terra incognita for the vast majority of American Jews.
And it didn’t strike me till years later that Florence, like her older siblings, harbored ambitions. I know now that she wrote extensively to her siblings for decades and, after years of encouragement to publish by her closest brother, Victor, saw her short memoir appear in a 1972 volume of collected essays on the American Jewish experience, Lives and Voices. This, after years of working in a series of family businesses in Tallahassee and Tampa and then, after her husband’s health declined precipitously, as secretary for the state comptroller of Florida. Money, and the lack of it: this too is family history.
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Within two years of their Florida arrival, the Greenbergs—Florence and Abe—packed their bags, leaving Tallahassee for Tampa, hoping for better luck. In late February 1926, Florence sent a letter to a wealthy family friend in New York with a business proposition, writing:
…When Mother first came to Tampa, she told us that you told her that
if she heard of anything ‘real good’ to tell you about it. Well of course
we didn’t want to recommend any speculative property to you, and were
on the lookout for what Abe considered a real good investment. You no
doubt know that Abe does a brokerage business besides buying and
selling his own property, and he has recently accepted a selling contract
for a beautiful subdivision touching the city limits of Tampa on one of
the main streets which, in his opinion, is a wonderful investment.
The development was subdivided into one hundred lots measuring 50 by 150, priced at $900. Cheap, Florence wrote; and the city’s investment in new infrastructure—a “hundred foot paved boulevard” nearby was in the works, she confirmed—provided further proof of the soundness of Abe’s latest venture. Florence laid out the details with a reassuring wink: “If you can’t sandbag your friends,” she wrote, “what else are they good for?” I haven’t found evidence of this friend’s response among the family correspondence.
The couple decided to try their hand, too, in the retail business, opening a millinery store—Tampa’s $5 Hat Shop—in early spring, 1926. Sister Helen, on an extended visit with their mother Miriam, was installed as a one-third partner with a small weekly income. By mid April, the hat shop—in contrast to Abe’s real estate business, the poor fortunes of which Florence attributed to the sluggish market in Florida generally—was in full swing. Minding the lovely rose-and-green shop kept sisters Florence and Helen and their mother busy and paid for new shoes for Bobby, the Greenbergs’ young son. Yet there were not enough funds that spring for Florence to attend her brother Victor’s rabbinical ordination at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
“You can’t imagine how very badly I feel to have to miss your graduation for after all I had counted on it so,” she wrote her brother, “but even tho [sic] Abe suggested that I do go, I have sense enough to know that we can’t afford it.”
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1925 marked the apex of the exuberant, fraud-riddled real estate market in Florida; hurricanes devastated the state in 1926 and 1928.
Florence and Abe spent much of the 1930s up North; they landed for a time in Union City, New Jersey, where Florence and Abe’s second child, their daughter Miriam, was born. Evolving news of the couple’s financial decline in the family correspondence exists only in patchy shorthand.
What I do know of the time before they left Florida: Florence and Abe lost $45,000 in a bank failure. Florence pawned her engagement ring. Victor sent his sister $300 in August of 1927 and Florence pledged to pay him back in $25 monthly installments, starting in November, as well as repaying funds sent by her older sister Natalie and brother-in-law. “I’ll pay you and Nat the same amount and in six months I’ll be able to look you all in the eye again,” Florence wrote. She used the money, at least in part, to buy back her ring, though her husband at first advised her to send the entire sum back to her brother.
Brother Victor wrote: “I know what it is to be broke for twenty-nine years and what it is to have asked others to help.” He wished he could do more.
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Nothing speaks with such poignant economy of these lean and expectant Florida years than the procession of company designs of the stationery on which Florence typed her letters.
Adorning the Atlas Realty stationery of the Tampa period: a muscled, bearded man hoisting a globe. Atlas’s hands pin the globe gently in place above, his feet poised heels-up. You might think he’s dancing—the massive sphere light as an empty bird cage—except for the near impossible angle at which his head bows underneath the literal weight of the world. His left arm, farther from view, is black with shadow, and darkness falls across his right shoulder, his stomach, his lap.
Tampa’s $5 Hat Shop: a woman from the neck up, in profile, gazes from the right toward the shop name and its blunt descriptor, “Only One Price and That’s $5.00.” A hank of flapper’s bob slips from beneath the downward swoop of a high-crowned cloche; a sprig of small flowers and leaves cascades from the hat in parallel with the elegant slash of the woman’s long neck. An accessory that both cocoons and reveals: what more perfect combination of elements could a modern young lady ask of a five-dollar hat?
In 1927, a different woman appears above a new letterhead, for Mi-lady’s Shop. She faces the viewer from beneath curvaceous folds of dark velvet or felt, as swan-necked as her $5- hatted sister. “Ready to Wear,” in all caps, runs along the upper right of the paper. The address beneath the dreamy cameo is a street in Bradenton, Florida, a town on the Gulf not far south of Tampa.
So: another year, another Florida town in which the Greenbergs attempted to harness the market and right their fortunes. A 1928 letter from Florence unscrolls from beneath yet another shop name: The Fashion. “Fashionable Clothes for Fashionable Women” is the tagline. Manatee Avenue, Bradenton, Florida.
These artists’ renderings denote a choreography of persistence, a smooth all-American hustle—show girls emerging one after another from a darkly-lit stage. You can trace the shiny Florida optimism of Florence and Abe’s efforts in the clean art-deco lines of Atlas and the Hat Girls. Or, rather, you can trace the couple’s performance of this optimism. Read the words beneath the illustrations, and grasp that the relentless hoisting of globes and peeking from beneath cloches is a dance of futility.
Florence and Abe and young Bobby and Mimi did make it back to Florida from New Jersey, as company stationary from early 1939 testifies. The couple opened a retail store on West Jefferson Street in Tallahassee, near the campus of the (white) Florida State College for Women. They named it the Better Value Shop—“Better Values in Ladies’ Ready-to-Wear.” The letterhead is blue, the shop’s name sweeping across the upper left of the page in a simple cursive.
No illustration—the muscled Greek hero and winsome fashion-plates of the couple’s 1920s businesses, gone the way of flapper dresses and silent movies.
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By the late 1930s, when the Greenberg family returned to Tallahassee, the city had grown to roughly 16,000. The majority of its citizens were Black. There was still no public hospital; dirt roads abounded; Jim Crow reigned. But under the New Deal, the city embarked on a campaign of new construction and improvements. Beneficiaries of federal funds included roads and sewers, factories, banks, schools, the two local universities, one white, one Black. The natural landscape, too, was conserved and transformed by means of the local (segregated) CCC brigades. A new, combined post office and U.S. District Court building had been erected in 1936 on East Park Avenue, around the time Florence and Abe were devising plans to repatriate as Floridians.
In 1939, upon the walls of this federal building, the Hungarian-born artist Edward Ulreich completed his eight-part mural, The History of Florida, a project of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture. Smooth-muscled figures representing the Indigenous, Spanish, French, English, Jacksonian, and contemporary eras strike dignified poses in each of the horizontal panels. The penultimate scene centers Chief Osceola, leader of Indian resistance to white encroachment. Erect, his left hand gestures peacefully, if cryptically, toward a purse-lipped General Hernandez and the latter’s mass of bristling troops.
You wouldn’t know from this panel that the meeting was no truce, but a trap—Osceola captured and imprisoned for the rest of his foreshortened life. Also, Ulreich devoted no panel to the Confederate epoch of Florida’s history; though, in the first of the mural paintings, the Confederate flag flies among the five of the various eras depicted. Brown and pale bodies, pink sky, heroic gazes into the distance: Ulreich’s vision celebrates the majesty and dignity of its subjects, white and Indigenous, while eliding the blood and destruction that saturated Florida’s past. By 1939, Tallahassee had weathered the worst of the Depression. Across the Atlantic, the Nazi war machine revved.
There isn’t much by way of documentation or correspondence from these years of resettling for the Greenbergs in Tallahassee. I know that the family joined about thirty others in establishing the city’s only Jewish congregation, Temple Israel, in 1937. Victor traveled from Cincinnati to Tallahassee and preached the sermon— “Building or Burning Synagogues?”—at the dedication ceremony of the brand-new temple on February 23, 1940. My great-grandmother Natalie, forty-seven in January, came to town for the dedication ceremony, too, and performed a song, “Open the Gates of the Temple.”
That same year, the Greenbergs’ new house on McDaniel Street, in the Lafayette Park neighborhood just northeast of downtown, was built. A brick storybook cottage distinguished by a sharply peaked roof. Around it, Spanish moss hangs gauzily from towering oaks. In the contemporary street view, available online, the house is the pale green of a wedding mint; the door and shutters and decorative sun-rays of woodwork above the windows, red. Florence lived there for decades, first with Abe and her young children, and then, for years after the children’s departure and Abe’s death, on her own.
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I was born in Atlanta in 1975. The new-New South; the city too busy to hate, as its boosters crowed beginning in the 1960s. In the decade of my birth, a Black-majority and Black led city: Maynard Jackson, Jr., the city’s first Black mayor, was elected two years before my birth.
But the Northeast-Atlanta suburbs where I grew up were mostly white. A small but growing population of Jews called Atlanta home by the time of my appearance, just on the “safe” side of the color line, as American Jews had been for years. My parents, transplants from, most recently, Chicago, bought a house on Karen Lane in the newly developed outer reaches of Marietta. A creek ran through the neighborhood not far from our property; so too did escaped horses. An eight-mile drive from the neighborhood would take you to historic Marietta Square, near the site of the lynching of Jewish newcomer Leo Frank, found guilty in 1913 of the killing of a young female laborer in his pencil factory. His trial and murder haunted the Jewish community of Atlanta for decades afterward.
I remember the waxy shine of the linoleum floor in the kitchen on Karen Lane. I remember the gloam of the shag-carpeted living room, twilight breezing in from the sliding door to the backyard where a small swing-set perched. The couches and walls in a 1970s corduroy palette: rust and olive green and sandy brown. A set of affable neighbors admitted to my parents, a few years after we appeared, that they had never met Jews until we moved in. They confessed that, at first, they determined not to let their children play with me. At some point this unspoken stricture fell away; they didn’t share with my parents what, exactly, changed their minds about intermingling with Jews.
My paternal grandparents ultimately came South, too, moving to Palm Coast, Florida, from Long Island in 1980. Three-and-a-half hours by car from Florence’s Tallahassee, where she had lived by then for decades. The sequestered northern Florida of my youthful visits to my grandparents was a settlement hatched from seemingly nothing, former swampland and pine forests. Though farms and beach houses once dotted the landscape, all I ever saw—or was shown—was the new construction of my grandparents’ two consecutive neighborhoods. New settlement in the area was the master plan of a Levitt Company subsidiary, beginning in 1969. Unassuming houses plunked down on the flats of Flagler County like Monopoly pieces on a game board.
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Artist Jim Roche is a Tallahassee native and fifth-generation Floridian, whose grandmother was a member of the Creek Nation. Since the 1970s, he has made art of the landscape, real and imagined, in which he grew up. His early site-specific installations bristle with horseshoe-crab carcasses and rabbit skins and sharks’ jaws and rubber snakes and wooden ducks and plastic eagles. Fake roses. Real starfish. The uprising of the undead from beneath the asphalt of drive-over country.
In Return to Florida, All in My Background: Piece (1973-74), a series of photographs and scrawled texts documenting the artist’s surveying of the terrain of his childhood, Roche walks among cypress fronds, scrubby clearings, a long dirt road stretching like a canyon between walls of leafy trees. The landscape is as magisterial and as foreboding as an alligator flashing ancient, ragged teeth. It feels familiar to me, this north Florida finery and funk, though I haven’t visited the Red Hills region—where Florence spent most of her adult life; where my paternal grandparents lived out their retirement—for years.
Daughter of the New South, I grapple with the nature of Jewish footing on Southern land. Latecomers. Executors, uneasy and not, of American empire’s choreography. I know something of the grasping ache to settle this terrain of pines and red dirt, and I know something of the cost.
Presented with Roche’s images and no explanation, would Great-Great Aunt Florence have known, at once, what landscape she was looking upon? Would she remember her first years of encounter with Florida: the boom and bust, the laboring and dreaming, the exile and return? Would she see home?