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Eli Evan’s memoir, “Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South,” starts with a brief descriptions of Hayti, one of African American settlements in Durham. Why did he decide to demonstrate African American settlements when the book itself talks about Jewish experience in the South? What is the relationship between Jewish and Black people in 1950’s America? This books gives answer to this questions and shed light into variety of the Civil Right movements.
Jewish communities in the South had struggled to fight against conventions existed among early “White” Southern settlers in its very beginning. Southern Jewish had to face inconsistent and unequal treat from Southern Whites as they were accepted as both White and outsiders. Ironically, this gave them a power to act as an intermediate between two strong communities in the South: Black and White community. The first chapter of the Evan’s memoir shows this Southern spirit that represents a harmony, respect and integrity and gave him and his family a power to success as Jews and Southerners: “I was touched in childhood by its passions and myth...With such entanglements, a native son remains irredeemably and endurably Southern” (xv). The first chapter of the Evan’s memoir successfully delivers the story of this Southern Spirit that Eli Evans and his family experienced and depicted in the eyes of a reporter with very concise and detailed historical backgrounds. The story of his father’s public funding for African American communities in Durham and of how he ended up running for Mayor with an enthusiastic support from the black communities and anxious and vigorous opposition from his own “downtown crowd” shows the struggle that southern Jewish has to encounter in a way to success in its settlement in the South. Eli Evan’s description of his fear in this time of his life tells us how audacious his father was and Jewish leaders in the South worked hard to become a history of the South.
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The Jew Store is not just a memoir of a single person. It demonstrated how early Jewish Southerner from Eastern Europe had struggled to live among people from completely different cultural and historical backgrounds. In its detail depiction of opening of the low-priced store, which is called “Jew Store” by locals, Suberman demonstrates the complexity of racial discrimination issues. Instead of solely focusing on the superficial, violent, and destructive part of the discrimination, this memoir accomplished to show real life aspects of it by showing how Suberman interacts with Southern people; how they are misled and manipulated by conceptual convention. For example, Brookie Simmons is one of the enlightened southerner who provides a home for Suberman’s family and fights against Child labor in the factory of the town.
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