{"id":19177,"date":"2024-10-29T13:49:30","date_gmt":"2024-10-29T18:49:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/?p=19177"},"modified":"2024-11-08T12:03:14","modified_gmt":"2024-11-08T18:03:14","slug":"greetings-from-talahassee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/19177","title":{"rendered":"Greetings From Tallahassee"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a story of Florence, my great-great-aunt, seeking home in a North Florida\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a story of Jewish failure, Florida-style\u2014at least in those first tumultuous years of speculation and collapse, hurricanes and hustle, Depression, and world war.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 an opportunity to train in Europe with a noted vocal impresario\u2014an 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Florence and Helen, the two youngest siblings, seemed to me in my youth to be faded carbon copies of my <\/span>grand-dame <\/span><\/i>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\u2014her older brothers\u2019 territories\u2014but chronicler, jester, and scrapper, as well as daughter, sister, wife, mother.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cSoutherners\u201d\u2014whatever that meant. I grew up Jewish in the Atlanta suburbs when the Jewish community was still relatively small. It didn\u2019t 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\u00a0 majority of American Jews.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And it didn\u2019t 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\u00a0 volume of collected essays on the American Jewish experience, <\/span>Lives and Voices<\/span><\/i>. This, after years of working in a series of family businesses in Tallahassee and Tampa and then, after her\u00a0 husband\u2019s health declined precipitously, as secretary for the state comptroller of Florida. Money, and the lack of it: this too is family history.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

Within two years of their Florida arrival, the Greenbergs\u2014Florence and Abe\u2014packed\u00a0 their bags, leaving Tallahassee for Tampa, hoping for better luck. In late February 1926, Florence\u00a0 sent a letter to a wealthy family friend in New York with a business proposition, writing:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2026When Mother first came to Tampa, she told us that you told her that\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

if she heard of anything \u2018real good\u2019 to tell you about it. Well of course\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

we didn\u2019t want to recommend any speculative property to you, and were\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

on the lookout for what Abe considered a real good investment. You no\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

doubt know that Abe does a brokerage business besides buying and\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

selling his own property, and he has recently accepted a selling contract\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

for a beautiful subdivision touching the city limits of Tampa on one of\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

the main streets which, in his opinion, is a wonderful investment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The development was subdivided into one hundred lots measuring 50 by 150, priced at\u00a0 $900. Cheap, Florence wrote; and the city\u2019s investment in new infrastructure\u2014a \u201chundred foot paved boulevard\u201d nearby was in the works, she confirmed\u2014provided further proof of the\u00a0 soundness of Abe\u2019s latest venture<\/span>. <\/span>Florence laid out the details with a reassuring wink: \u201cIf you can\u2019t sandbag your friends,\u201d she wrote, \u201cwhat else are they good for?\u201d I haven\u2019t found evidence of this friend\u2019s response among the family correspondence.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The couple decided to try their hand, too, in the retail business, opening a millinery store\u2014Tampa\u2019s $5 Hat Shop\u2014in 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\u2014in contrast to Abe\u2019s real estate business, the poor fortunes of which Florence attributed to the sluggish market in Florida generally\u2014was 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\u2019 young son. Yet there were not enough funds that spring for Florence to attend her brother Victor\u2019s rabbinical ordination at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t imagine how very badly I feel to have to miss your graduation for after all I had counted on it so,\u201d she wrote her brother, \u201cbut even tho [<\/span>sic<\/span><\/i>] Abe suggested that I do go, I\u00a0 have sense enough to know that we can\u2019t afford it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

1925 marked the apex of the exuberant, fraud-riddled real estate market in Florida; hurricanes devastated the state in 1926 and 1928.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Florence and Abe spent much of the 1930s up North; they landed for a time in Union City, New Jersey, where Florence and Abe\u2019s second child, their daughter Miriam, was born. Evolving news of the couple\u2019s financial decline in the family correspondence exists only in patchy shorthand.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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. \u201cI\u2019ll pay you and\u00a0 Nat the same amount and in six months I\u2019ll be able to look you all in the eye again,\u201d 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Brother Victor wrote: \u201cI know what it is to be broke for twenty-nine years and what it is to have asked others to help.\u201d He wished he could do more.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Adorning the Atlas Realty stationery of the Tampa period: a muscled, bearded man hoisting a globe. Atlas\u2019s hands pin the globe gently in place above, his feet poised heels-up. You might think he\u2019s dancing\u2014the massive sphere light as an empty bird cage\u2014except 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\u00a0 stomach, his lap.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tampa\u2019s $5 Hat Shop: a woman from the neck up, in profile, gazes from the right toward\u00a0 the shop name and its blunt descriptor, \u201cOnly One Price and That\u2019s $5.00.\u201d A hank of flapper\u2019s 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\u2019s long neck. An accessory that both cocoons and reveals: what more perfect combination of elements could a\u00a0 modern young lady ask of a five-dollar hat?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1927, a different woman appears above a new letterhead, for Mi-lady\u2019s Shop. She faces the viewer from beneath curvaceous folds of dark velvet or felt, as swan-necked as her $5- hatted sister. \u201cReady to Wear,\u201d 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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. \u201cFashionable Clothes for Fashionable Women\u201d is the tagline. Manatee Avenue, Bradenton, Florida.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These artists\u2019 renderings denote a choreography of persistence, a smooth all-American hustle\u2014show girls emerging one after another from a darkly-lit stage. You can trace the shiny\u00a0<\/span>Florida optimism of Florence and Abe\u2019s efforts in the clean art-deco lines of Atlas and the Hat Girls. Or, rather, you can trace the couple\u2019s <\/span>performance <\/span><\/i>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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2014\u201cBetter Values in Ladies\u2019 Ready-to-Wear.\u201d The letterhead is blue, the shop\u2019s name sweeping across the upper left of the page in a simple cursive.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

No illustration\u2014the muscled Greek hero and winsome fashion-plates of the couple\u2019s\u00a0 1920s businesses, gone the way of flapper dresses and silent movies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

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,\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1939, upon the walls of this federal building, the Hungarian-born artist Edward Ulreich completed his eight-part mural, <\/span>The History of Florida<\/span><\/i>, a project of the U.S. Treasury\u00a0 Department\u2019s Section of Painting and Sculpture. Smooth-muscled figures representing the\u00a0<\/span>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\u00a0 resistance to white encroachment. Erect, his left hand gestures peacefully, if cryptically, toward a\u00a0 purse-lipped General Hernandez and the latter\u2019s mass of bristling troops.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You wouldn\u2019t know from this panel that the meeting was no truce, but a trap\u2014Osceola captured and imprisoned for the rest of his foreshortened life. Also, Ulreich devoted no panel to the Confederate epoch of Florida\u2019s 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\u2019s vision celebrates the majesty and dignity of its subjects, white and Indigenous, while eliding the blood and destruction that saturated Florida\u2019s\u00a0 past. By 1939, Tallahassee had weathered the worst of the Depression. Across the Atlantic, the\u00a0 Nazi war machine revved.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There isn\u2019t 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\u2019s only Jewish congregation, Temple Israel, in 1937. Victor traveled from Cincinnati to Tallahassee and preached the sermon\u2014 \u201cBuilding or Burning Synagogues?\u201d\u2014at 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, \u201cOpen the Gates of the Temple.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That same year, the Greenbergs\u2019 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\u00a0<\/span>door and shutters and decorative sun-rays of woodwork above the windows, red. Florence lived\u00a0 there for decades, first with Abe and her young children, and then, for years after the children\u2019s departure and Abe\u2019s death, on her own.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

I was born in Atlanta in 1975. The new-New South; the <\/span>city too busy to hate<\/span><\/i>, 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\u2019s first Black mayor, was elected two years before my\u00a0 birth.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201csafe\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/span>stricture fell away; they didn\u2019t share with my parents what, exactly, changed their minds about intermingling with Jews.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2014or was\u00a0 shown\u2014was the new construction of my grandparents\u2019 two consecutive neighborhoods. New settlement in the area was the master plan of a Levitt Company subsidiary, beginning in 1969.\u00a0 Unassuming houses plunked down on the flats of Flagler County like Monopoly pieces on a game board.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Artist Jim Roche is a Tallahassee native and fifth-generation Floridian, whose\u00a0 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\u2019 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Return to Florida, All in My Background: Piece <\/span><\/i>(1973-74), a series of photographs and scrawled texts documenting the artist\u2019s 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\u2019t visited\u00a0<\/span>the Red Hills region\u2014where Florence spent most of her adult life; where my paternal grandparents lived out their retirement\u2014for years.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Daughter of the New South, I grapple with the nature of Jewish footing on Southern land. Latecomers. Executors, uneasy and not, of American empire\u2019s choreography. I know something\u00a0 of the grasping ache to settle this terrain of pines and red dirt, and I know something of the cost.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Presented with Roche\u2019s images and no explanation, would Great-Great Aunt Florence\u00a0 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?<\/span><\/p>\n

Emily Alice Katz<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a story of Florence, my great-great-aunt, seeking home in a North Florida\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2318,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[82,1],"tags":[24],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-4Zj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2318"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19177"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19336,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19177\/revisions\/19336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}