Confessions of a Jewish-American Belle
An author and playwright navigates her Southern roots and Jewish identity in a world that often saw them as contradictions.
As a novice writer in New York City in the 1980s, I had the honor of meeting the esteemed African American playwright August Wilson, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. After asking me a few simple, direct questions about my background, he declared I came from two vital American literary traditions—namely, Southern and Jewish. Until that moment, I’d never linked those differing realities as a way of defining myself as an artist, much less a person.
Being Southern and Jewish was always just my life.
Coming from a small town in Virginia where almost no one was Jewish, to New York City where most everyone was, people saw me as an anomaly. New Yorkers were shocked to learn that the South bred Jewish people at all, as if the words Southern and Jew might be allergic to each other, a toxic oxymoron. I was struck by how often someone told me, “You're so different.” I was soft-spoken and vulnerable in a wacky Blanche DuBois kind of way and, most confusingly, polite. I didn't fit the well-worn portrait of a brash New York City Jew. In the politically incorrect jargon of the time, I wasn't a JAP, a Jewish-American Princess. I was the lesser-known, Southern variety, a Jewish-American Belle. I was a JAB.
Identity begins at home. How we learn to define ourselves is jump-started by our first memories of home, and what we remember is who we become. The first home I remember was fit for neither Princess nor Belle. The modest baby-blue bungalow had a red-brick stoop the size of a dinner platter. A tiny screened-in back porch looked out over a sloping yard that tilted down to a piece of unkempt meadow beside a railroad track. Beyond the track, high on a hill, was The Odd Fellows Home, a gloomy Victorian orphanage out of Dickens or Stephen King. As a kid, I thought the name referred to the orphans themselves, rather than the guild of unaffiliated odd-jobbers committed to charitable acts for the unfortunate. I wasn't an Odd Fellow—or an orphan—but I definitely felt odd.
Far back as I can recall, I sensed I was different. Later I named that feeling Being Jewish. I had dark unruly hair and olive skin in a sea of fair blondness, yet I often felt unseen. This perception was confirmed in 1955 when I entered first grade at Janet W. Snead Elementary School in Lynchburg.
My older sister Susan had already taught me to read. Painfully shy, I hoped this would help me stand out. I needn't have fretted; I stood out anyway. “Sybil is the only Jewish student in our entire school,” my teacher eagerly announced to the class. I spoke with my parents' Brooklyn accent, bawl for ball, sawft for soft. Worse, I had a funny name no one could pronounce, much less spell.
What I was really trying to ask was, How come I entered this life as Jewish and female? And why in this time and place? Did God make those decisions? Or was something else going on?
“Civil?” my classmates queried. “Is that like the Civil War?”
A boy asked to see my horns. The question confused me. I knew devils had horns. But I did not know some folks considered Jews to be devils. Patiently I explained that, no, we only had horns in our cars.
In Sunday School at Temple Agudath Sholom, we'd been taught that Jews were the Chosen People. That had a nice ring; sounded like a good thing. But after the first week of school, I hated my name, and I just wanted to go home to a white-frame house with a peeling front porch, a hound dog with ticks, eat bacon, and have stick-straight yellow hair.
Mercifully, not everyone thought Jews were horned. I was a good student; my teachers liked me. Our neighbor Mrs. Westman—she of the bright-red beehive do—believed Jews to be holy people, chosen by God's grace. She patted my knee. “Those children in your class are just jealous,” Mrs. Westman opined, “because they can't be Jewish, too.”
What did it mean to be Jewish, anyway? I enjoyed going to synagogue, but now ritual and refreshments weren't enough to satisfy me. I bugged my parents: Why am I Jewish? Each gave the same reply: the tradition is passed down from generation to generation.
This was not news. What I was really trying to ask was, How come I entered this life as Jewish and female? And why in this time and place? Did God make those decisions? Or was something else going on?
I preferred Mrs. Westman's version of Jews, but I was scared. A civil war of identity fomented inside me. What if the cost of being special was just too high?
My great-grandfather, Morris Rosenkofsky, arrived in this country on November 15, 1890, a date which—to read his 1906 naturalization papers—he never forgot. Twenty-five-year-old Morris was riding a tsunami of millions of Jews who were emigrating from Eastern Europe seeking a safer life. Morris's wife had refused to come to America, so apparently, he'd taken his young son Laib and left Minsk, the capital of Belarus, which was then part of the Russian Empire. Minsk was the epicenter of pogroms, violent riots aimed at killing or driving out Jews that began in the wake of Tsar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881.
Morris was a cobbler. Settling on Hicks Street in Brooklyn, he opened a shoe shop. He met Fanny Boesky, a Romanian woman with icicle-blue eyes. They married, had eight children, seven of whom were girls, all of whom were brought up in the back of Morris' store. My grandfather, Benjamin, was the second oldest of that union, Morris' firstborn American son.
Grandpa had a third-grade education. When Fanny fell down the cellar stairs and died at thirty-seven, Bennie hit the streets. He was a peddler and a charmer. His crackerjack energy attracted the attention of Harris Feldman, a German-Jewish immigrant who owned a pajama factory in Manhattan's garment district. Harris also had a bunch of daughters, so when Bennie asked Harris if he could marry his second oldest daughter, Bessie, Harris apparently answered, “Why not?” Bennie and Bessie had one son, Samuel, in 1918, the year the Spanish flu ravaged the globe. Sammy was my father; he had Fanny's translucent blue eyes.
What's remarkable to me about these stories is that there are so few of them. It's logical to assume Morris left Russia to escape violent antisemitism, but I don't know that for a fact. My elder cousins tell me Morris never talked about the old country, but then why would he? From the one photo we have, Morris was a handsome, vigorous man, making his way through a world that was much larger and less knowable than today, when the sum of all knowledge is at our fingertips. Had he learned early on that the only thing that mattered was surviving the life right in front of him?
Sam and Jeannette became garment-district transplants, as much a part of the Biblical diaspora as the original expulsion from Babylonia.
My mother's history is similar to my father's in that there is so little of it. Dark-eyed, beautiful Jeannette was a first-generation Polish immigrant. She spoke only Yiddish until she was five. Learning to speak English in a Bronx kindergarten effectively assimilated her.
Her father, my Grandpa William Berson (originally Berenson), was born in Warsaw, Poland. Grandma Lena Elbaum hailed from Brest-Litovsk, a town in Russia that later belonged to Poland and is now known simply as Brest, Belarus. They met on the boat coming over and married as soon as they arrived. The disconnect of emigration made it possible for them to uproot their lives and create new ones with seemingly no pasts. William had left a wife and son in Warsaw. He didn't divorce his first wife until Lena was six months pregnant with their first child, which made him, for a time, a bigamist in both countries. William's great-aunt and a nephew died in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during World War II. And those are the only stories I know of another lineage lost to war and genocide.
When you have no stories to speak of, you feel a part of you is missing, but you can't point to exactly where it hurts. Maybe that's why for so long I refused to accept the history of my ancestors. For years I denied that antisemitism was engraved in my marrow, tattooed on the DNA that blueprints my physical infrastructure, my karmic inheritance. My racing heart, insomnia, and a nameless, unshakeable anxiety had nothing to do with all that.
Yet roots can also grow from unanticipated seeds, like volunteer jasmine by the back steps. After WWII, Harris Feldman sent several cousins of my father's generation to Lynchburg to manufacture pajamas, lured there by the abundant textile mills and cheap labor of the South. Sam and Jeannette became garment-district transplants, as much a part of the Biblical diaspora as the original expulsion from Babylonia. They brought their accents and their Yankee sensibilities with them.
My sister Susan Faye was born in 1946, I followed four years later, and brother Joshua arrived in 1957. It was a time when Jewish couples were being encouraged to have babies as a way of replenishing the worldwide population decimated the decade before by the murder of six million European Jews.
If my Jewish roots were mired in silence, the Southern infusion was present, sensual, and loud. Applied as pure nurture formed by layers of conditioning like a lemon meringue pie. Dropped as an infant into a lushly vivid world, I absorbed everything around me, willy-nilly, even before I had words. Life was composed of moments like these:
The train whistle hoots from afar. My sister takes my hand, and we go running down to the fence along the track to feel the churning whoosh of the cars and to wave at the conductor as he rushes by. His long johns are hung out to dry in the caboose, arms and legs flapping as if dancing a farewell jig.
To this day, the call of a train—and the feelings it evokes—is one enduring way I know myself. And the thrill of freight cars roaring past my face is as much the South to me as a magnolia in bloom.
The music is like that, too. At home, I danced in the living room to the latest Broadway musicals, shows my New York City parents saw during their courtship. By age seven, I knew every word to My Fair Lady and South Pacific. I never listened to country songs in our house, though we did watch Lawrence Welk. But every time I walked out the door the melodies on the airwaves seeped into me. That music was mine, too, if my feet had anything to say about it. And not just country; I loved God's music, too: gospel and shape note. Also bluegrass, the blues, rhythm and blues, and Elvis.
My thirsty ear drank in the much-mocked Southern drawl, drenched in complexity, musical cadence, and comic poetry.
And then there was the music of language. My thirsty ear drank in the much-mocked Southern drawl, drenched in complexity, musical cadence, and comic poetry. Bertha, our African American housekeeper (we were told not to call her our “maid”), seemed to sing when she spoke. Winter afternoons, she and I watched soap operas together on television while she ironed and I pretended to do homework. Seven of Bertha's eight children were boys; all of them grew to be over six feet tall.
“I got my own basketball team,” she'd sing with pride.
From time to time, my grandparents Bennie and Bessie visited us from Brooklyn, or we visited them, adding their snappy city wit to the voices that soothed and grounded me then. While I grew, these voices wove their way into the fragile psychic patchwork of who I might become.
The years before I entered first grade were marked by the presence of Michael Topiol in our small house. A German Jew and a second cousin to my father on the Feldman side, Michael's story was not told to me then, though I did notice my parents talked softly around him. I assumed this must be because he only had one eye and his leathery brown skin was tough as my dad's battered Army boots. One night at the dinner table, I asked Michael if the numbers tattooed on his arm were his telephone number. That did not go over well. Little did I know then, Michael had spent four years in Auschwitz.
This was the 1950s. The immediate aftermath of the Holocaust came with no language (at least not in English) to describe or absorb the magnitude of the crime. At four years of age what I did get about Michael was this: He was my friend. He held my hand on walks to feed Mrs. McArthur's's goat. He told me my dark curls made me look like a gypsy, something I took as a compliment, never mind I didn't know what a gypsy was. And he could sing.
Near our house was a stone underpass beneath the railroad track. Michael would stop under the arch and bellow German songs—drinking songs, I later learned—his booming voice ricocheting off the rock. I thought he was magic; I never saw his torment. Michael expanded the limits of home; through him I gained confidence and an appetite for adventure. He offered me the attention my young, displaced parents, raising two children and trying for three, did not have time to give. And mind you, they had taken in Michael, too.
One night I awake to the sound of crying coming from the kitchen next to the bedroom I share with Susan. My parents and Michael are standing in the dark. Michael whispers to them in Yiddish, the gibberish language my folks also speak. My mother and father are sobbing.
For too long I clung to denial, maintaining into my thirties that my life had never intersected with history. History was something that happened to other people.
Why are the lights off? What is Michael telling them? Why don't they sit down?
No one, not even Michael, sees me. I go back to bed. I hope I am dreaming.
How else am I to absorb what I saw? Like the numbers on Michael's arm, it makes no sense. And clearly it has nothing to do with me.
For too long I clung to that denial, carrying it into adulthood, maintaining into my thirties that my life had never intersected with history. History was something that happened to other people. This was a delusion and mostly an avoidance, since the currents of history saturate our lives if we're aware of them or not. They're like muons, those invisible elementary particles the sun rains down on us endlessly, cosmic radiation capable of penetrating into the Earth's deepest mines.
The summer before I entered first grade, my family moved into Lynchburg's first split-level, which my father had designed. The pink-and-gray house became a brief local sensation, its lopsided image making its way onto the front page of the city newspaper. Strangers drove by just to see the place with their own two eyes. Their reception mirrored my split-level consciousness. The new house was wondrously modern, but I worried it might make our family seem more different, not less.
The move transformed our lives. The wood and brick house sat on a one-acre lot at the end of a residential block. The street had been parceled out of an old postbellum tobacco plantation, which the burgeoning city of Lynchburg was now consuming. Urban life, even in a small town, was encroaching on the land—our road was evidence of that—yet there were still acres and acres of farmland to give us kids the illusion of growing up in a boundless rural setting. Our backyard poured seamlessly into cow pastures and woods ripe for roaming and imagining, the endless blue mountains a distant hazy backdrop.
The nearby plantation house was square and imposing, dark brick with black shutters, magnolias and weeping willows along its circular drive. Tobacco was no longer cultivated, but the Carringtons planted hay for a herd of milk cows. Back from the main house sat a graying, sharecropper's shack. As long as we lived on that street, there was a Black family living in that cabin, helping out on the farm.
In the summer of 1954, a homemade bomb was thrown into our synagogue, which was in a simple storefront downtown. “No one was hurt, thank God,” my parents said, as if that was all the reassurance we could expect. Plans were made to move the temple to a less accessible location not far from our house. Michael married Sally, a woman he'd met in Auschwitz. They had the same tough sun-baked skin and spiked hair the color of wet ashes. Michael and Sally moved across town.
The situation in the neighborhood soured. Two Baptist teenage boys from down the block roughed up my five-year-old brother because, they insisted, the Jews had killed Jesus Christ.
The situation in the neighborhood soured. Two Baptist teenage boys from down the block roughed up my five-year-old brother because, they insisted, the Jews had killed Jesus Christ. Picking Josh up in my arms, I screamed at them that Jesus was Jewish, an argument my father had supplied. Their shrugged response seemed to say, Well—nobody's perfect.
It was far less frustrating—and way more fun—to play with the kids who lived on the Carringtons’ farm. There was a passel of them. Three little girls Josh's age, two boys around mine, and an older brother in high school on whom I had a middle-school crush. Even though Brown vs. Board of Education had passed six years ago, Lynchburg schools were still segregated. Late afternoons I watched Anthony cross the meadow beside our house, carrying an armload of books as he trudged home from P.L.Dunbar High School, downtown on 12th Street, miles away, named for African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Broad shouldered, dignified Anthony always wore a white shirt with long sleeves and a short black tie.
The boys in the middle, Gilbert and Sam, were eager playmates, always ready for an adventure. I don't recall how we made friends, but after a while we got together most afternoons after school if I wasn't in Hebrew or dance class and on the weekends when we weren't in our respective houses of God. Gilbert's skin was dark, almost blue-black. He was older than Sam and rarely spoke. I think he alone sensed the risks we were taking. Gangly Sam was goofy with a beaming smile. I do not know what they made of me, but they showed up day after day to act out whatever exotic scenario I concocted.
My father had built a tree house in the backyard, a simple, roped, wooden platform perched on two thick, spreading limbs in a substantial oak. A homemade three-stepped ladder led up into it. That tree house became a pirate ship, a spaceship, a Conestoga wagon. Typically, our games involved some version of me being kidnapped and then rescued by the same two people who'd captured me in the first place, but playing different roles for the tale’s finale.
Stories bubbled out of me as if from the void left by my family's lost stories. Sam and Gilbert became pirates, pioneers, soldiers, spacemen, and Maccabees, exchanging imaginary hats with the aplomb of repertory actors. Silent Gilbert made an ideal scout, while Sam was a daredevil and jester, always laughing, often at me.
I was completely comfortable in their company; I never felt judged, held apart, or scrutinized. When we weren't play-acting, we roved around. The time I spent on the farm with Gilbert and Sam was the most exuberant, the freest, of my young life. Experiencing myself through no filter except that of the natural world, I felt received and embedded in life. That wild child persona seemed a true fit.
The two brothers introduced me to cow-tipping, a game where you literally try to tip over a cow by charging into it. Thankfully, the cows found this very annoying and usually moved off before it was my turn. I fed orphaned calves with huge-nippled milk bottles and once pulled the teats on a mama cow's bulging udder, squirting fresh warm milk into a metal pail, a sound like no other.
We clambered throughout the barn, leaping from the loft into thick piles of hay. On Saturdays, we explored forest and pasture, splashing in shallow serpentine creeks, drinking pretend moonshine out of acorn cups, collecting crunchy cicada shells for what end I refuse to remember.
I knew so little about Gilbert and Sam, or they about me. All that mattered was the make-believe and being in nature and being fully engaged with each other. If we talked about anything else, I don't remember what we said. So I can't describe what they felt the day the tree house became an Egyptian chariot.
For a time we occupied an exquisite bubble formed at the end of an unfriendly block, where we could disappear into the farm and the woods and no one interrupted our pretending.
Moses, Aaron, and Miriam ride to the Red Sea (our driveway) after freeing the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt. Behind us is an invisible multitude we're leading to the Promised Land and behind them is Pharoah's army, also invisible and equally determined to bring us all back. We hurry down the ladder to the driveway. This is a miracle and timing is everything. Moses lifts his staff. Aaron beams. The waters part.
Today I wonder how our games moved in them, likely the descendants of enslaved Africans, acting out these Biblical myths of freedom with the serious innocence of children? Did they think of that then? Or were they, like me, just happy to try on other identities besides the ones we'd landed in at birth?
I questioned if my voracious imagining went too far. In the forest was a hollowed-out tree trunk so wide you could stand up in it. My fervid mind transformed that tree into a gas chamber inside a Nazi concentration camp. Sam and Gilbert became resistance fighters pretending to be Jewish prisoners who freed me from the terrible fate of Michael's family and unnamed relatives I would never meet.
Did my pals have any notion where that situation came from? Could they know it was my way of attempting to process an unimaginable past? For all my denial, I innately understood that we were linked: both our ancestors had been enslaved. We came from shunned people who endured profound suffering; that made us the same. There was so much I didn't understand. It'd be years before I could parse out the many ways in which I could hide in my white skin, a luxury Gilbert and Sam did not have.
I thought we were lucky, but perhaps I can only speak for myself. For a time we occupied an exquisite bubble formed at the end of an unfriendly block, where we could disappear into the farm and the woods and no one interrupted our pretending. What's more, Sam and Gilbert were in and out of our house all the time for water, snacks, the restroom. My parents never said a negative word to me about these friendships.
Were my mother and father still recoiling from the horror of the last decade, lived intimately through Michael's anguish? To me, they were fearless. They stood by their social beliefs. When Bertha's husband died, my folks were the only white people at his funeral.
Life only got more painful the braver I tried to be. There were country clubs I couldn't go to for parties, cheerleading squads and sororities I'd never be asked to join, Junior League theater auditions I attended knowing I wouldn't be cast. As the representative of the Jewish community at a citywide ecumenical youth seminar, I had to provide a letter of permission from the district Monsignor even to set foot in St. Mary's, the Catholic church where the event was being held, the only participant requiring such a visa. At thirteen, I began to grasp the concept of irony.
These may seem like small humiliations and disappointments—and they were, weightless aches that accrue like drops of rain in a bucket, drip by drip enlarging the burden of not belonging, of feeling kept away from what is possible, of heeding the repeating message that you just aren't good enough. I was never going to be a Belle. Or a Princess. We weren't rich; my siblings and I weren't spoiled or pampered, though we were sheltered. A pervasive fear hovered over our home as if Michael's shadow lingered in every corner. We started locking our doors at night. I stopped believing in God.
By junior high, I no longer sought out Gilbert and Sam after school. We were older. They'd followed their brother's lead and grown muscular and tall. They were on the Dunbar football team. Our games might not go unnoticed anymore. I'd started straightening my hair and plucking my eyebrow so as to have two instead of one. The more I tried to look conventional, the more I became that other Jewish cliché: neurotic, paranoid, a potential mother of whining Portnoys.
The bubble had broken. Was I aware enough by then to know our friendship could mean trouble for us and our families?
The bubble had broken. Was I aware enough by then to know our friendship could mean trouble for us and our families? Or was I so desperate to be accepted by the gentile kids at school and on the block that I didn't dare jeopardize what I was never going to have?
I wasn't brave like my parents, an admission no teenager likes to make. Secretly I hoped that being an atheist automatically meant I was no longer a Jew. Can an entire identity be dismissed by a word? The burden of being Jewish endured, with or without God.
By my late twenties I was living in New York City. Brooklyn might be my ancestral homeland, but I preferred a roach-infested apartment in Manhattan and a waitress job in Queens. Released from the constraints of geography, race, and religion, I was convinced I'd shed my inconvenient identities. To my mind, that put me squarely in charge of my destiny (I must have read a lot of Ayn Rand in college). I couldn't see then that I was just discarding old selves and attaching to new ones, this time assuming the guise of a renegade artist, a Greenwich Village hippie, a big-city woman living hand-to-mouth.
But as soon as I started writing plays, I was hurled right back into childhood. The first attempt evoked my mother's mother, Grandma Lena, who died from a heart attack while collecting her pennies on a winning hand of poker. Then Grandpa Bennie showed up on the page, followed by Morris. They were in Brooklyn. I could hear Grandpa's merry staccato in the lingo of the streets. Yet by subsequent drafts, Bennie had moved to Florida and acquired a Southern accent. What was going on? Who was pushing my pen across the page? Whose voices were these invading my memory, rewriting my story?
It kept happening. I wrote other characters: a Southern Jewish woman living an elemental life close to the land. A scientist who studied nature and reveled in it, who quoted both testaments, old and new. Writing wasn't only a mirror, it was a compass. I was living the Yiddish riddle that asks, What is truer than the truth? The answer is, The story. I wasn't a Jewish-American Belle after all—I was a Jewish-American Druid! The land itself had made me Southern—the earth and the people that grew out of its fecund, bloody life.
Michael asked to be known in the writing, too, urging a story of a Holocaust survivor's friendship with a little girl. Michael had died in California in the 1960s, and yet twenty more years would have to pass before my mother finally revealed to me that when I was a child, I was the only person in the world at whom Michael did not rage.
“He could even be playful with you,” she recalled.
Momma didn't fault Michael for his anger. In WWI he'd been a foot soldier for Germany, earning an Iron Cross; two decades later, the government he fought for sent him to a death camp. Bitter, he blamed his country and ours—essentially everyone alive then—for the deaths of his family and his own physical and psychological disfigurement. But me he couldn't blame, since I had come after the war.
If I was going to create authentic work, it seemed I needed to remember where I came from and why that mattered. So, after an absence of twenty-six years, I went back to the South.
What Momma revealed about Michael pierced my resistance. The forces of history were inescapable. To learn that I'd had a small positive impact on this man whose life had been so ravaged by history, that I might have given him fleeting passage to his destroyed identity, the vibrant man he'd once been—that thought gave me not only a visceral connection to the past, but also an unexpected sense of comfort.
The epiphany led to the writing of my first book, Speed of Light, a young-adult novel set in the 1950s fictional town of Blue Gap, Virginia. I wanted to explore what can occur when someone who has suffered deeply encounters someone who is completely innocent, and how they nourish each other's hearts. Living alongside a Holocaust survivor, the heroine of the novel—eleven-year-old Audrey Ina Stern—learns to equate the antisemitism of the past war with the racial prejudice she perceives around her.
By the time I plunged into the novel, I'd realized that Anthony's white-shirt/black-tie ensemble might be a clue to his true identity. His respectful black-and-white style was the classic uniform of the young Black men and women who helped orchestrate the history-making voter-registration movement of the 1950s. Might Anthony have been one of them? In my novel, the identities of Anthony, Gilbert, and Sam came to be melded together into the character of Sam Cardwell, a tweener activist for nonviolent resistance, and Audrey Ina's close friend.
If I was going to create authentic work, it seemed I needed to remember where I came from and why that mattered. So, after an absence of twenty-six years, I went back to the South for a visit and basically never left. I had come home.
These days I try to wear the two identities lightly. In many ways, they've become fluid. I've learned I'm more than the sum of my identities, but that doesn't mean they've gone anywhere. History courses through them again and again, weighing them down with human folly, roiling up atavistic terrors, changing the ways they're seen from the outside, altering the way I grapple with them from the inside. Being a Jew and a Southerner remains a burden.
But it's also an embrace. I am indelibly Southern. I'm partial to words like partial; also prodigious, mimosa, and field peas. I love corn dogs, stewed okra, the occasional pie crust made of lard. The scent of red clay, heat, and rain is as known to me as my own odor.
Gilbert, Sam, Anthony, and Bertha have seeped into me, too. My understanding of what it is to be Southern is suffused with the hours I spent with them. The South I knew, the world we were steeped in then, arose out of a tragic collision of cultures—cultures seeking to heal themselves and their commingled history, shaping the American soul and mine.
Being Southern and being Jewish are not mutually exclusive. I can never not be a Jew. A primitive summons in my bones, like the wail of the shofar, the ram's horn, on Rosh Hashanah, the appeal carries equal measures of joy, pride, and trepidation.
So maybe we're born into these particular identities because they have something to teach us. Sometimes I think it's not so much the specifics of where we come from, but where we are called to be.
About the author
Sybil Rosen is an award-winning young-adult novelist, playwright, and short-story writer. Her 2021 picture book, Carpenter's Helper, was recently selected for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. In 2008, she published a memoir of her life with Texas music legend Blaze Foley called Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley. That book became the basis of director Ethan Hawke's 2018 biopic, Blaze, which Rosen co-wrote with Hawke. She lives along the Chattahoochee River with her dog, Shine.
- Sybil Rosenhttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/sybil-rosen/
- Sybil Rosenhttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/sybil-rosen/
Hi Sybil, thank you so much for your wonderful work! You and I are about the same age, and have some parallels in our childhood. However, I am so southern that I can only tell you I’m “Irish and Welsh.” I was so jealous of my southern Jewish neighbors who could trace their family’s linage back generations and who spoke languages other than “southern.” My fisherfolk redneck heritage paled in comparison. The first time I was invited to dinner, I knew I’d gone to a heaven that wasn’t dripping bacon grease. To this day, I crave borscht. It took me years to write stories that honor my heritage, and to appreciate the good aspects of being a southerner.