Cohen grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1950s and 1960s. In a city of 100,000 people, mostly Baptists, he was one of about 300 Jews. His immigrant grandparents settled there, coming from Romania, Russia, and Poland. Cohen remembers that the only Jewish institution in town was Temple Beth Israel, located next door to the state women's club, which didn't allow Jews, and down the street from his high school, which did allow Jews but not blacks. Farther north was the Jackson Country Club, which allowed neither. Cohen's grandfather and great uncle founded a clothing store in Jackson, where his father worked all his life and where the author worked every Saturday for much of his childhood. Cohen describes how he left Mississippi for college (the University of Miami), where he met northern Jews and felt again like an outsider because of what he termed his southerness. This thoughtful and beautifully written memoir is a revelation about the allure of assimilation and the evasiveness of identity.
George Cohen
The strength of Edward Cohen's vividly detailed account of growing up Jewish in the Deep South may lie in its dissection of a particular life in a particular town. But by placing under a microscope the culture of Jackson, Miss.--which fueled the imaginations of Eudora Welty, Beth Henley and Willie Morris--Cohen has produced in The Peddler's Grandson a memoir of remarkable universality.
Anyone who has found himself a stranger in a strange land will find Cohen's portrait of the artist as a young outsider a sometimes painfully funny, sometimes painfully honest, always articulate exploration of childhood waters dammed off from an exclusionary mainstream. In Cohen's case, by religion, heritage and culture.
In this gently told coming-of-age story, with temple and rye taking the place of Sunday school and biscuits, Cohen writes with a sensitivity that belies his lack of sentimentality. He forsakes moss-draped Southern romanticism for a detached, scrutinizing eye.
It is perhaps Cohen's experience as a television and movie writer that tempers his voice. But, although his tone is clear and cool, Cohen inspires compassion with his drama of the gifted child torn between a distaste for Bible Belt anti-intellectualism and a need to assimilate among the good ol' boys.
Like most of us over 40, Cohen can recall where he was when he heard Kennedy had been assassinated--between classes at a public high school: "The response of virtually all of my fellow students was jubilant cheering. Though I was myself stricken by the news, to fit in with my Southern classmates I twisted my mouth into an accommodating, agreeing smile.
Sometimes he was trying to fit in as a Southerner. Later he tried to lose his Southern accent to fit in with Northeastern Jews. Such a life made for an inherent schizophrenia that must resonate for any reader who has ever worn the mask of conformity--betraying a friend to be accepted by the team or laughing at a joke to hide his identity or convictions.
The price is self. And one might expect Cohen to have drowned in the swirl of opposing events.
But the author emerges stronger for having learned to put away childish masks and to value his past.
Now in California, Cohen writes: "I treasure my history, and, this time, I know not to change. This time I've held onto my Southern accent."
You walk away from The Peddler's Grandson with a sense of the importance of making a separate peace, an understanding that a person's character can be defined, not by how he fits into the world, but by how he stands defiant in the face of a world apart.
-- --John Webb, Special to USA TODAY-USA Today, September 23, 1999
...a poignant memoir of truth and discovery of how a wandering Jewish family was fashioned into southerners by the power of the South and her traditions. -- Clifton Taulbert, author of Once upon a time when we were Colored
The Peddler's Grandson is an intelligent and candid account of the author's love-hate relationship with each of the powerful, often conflicting cultures that shaped him. You do not have to be Southern and/or Jewish to recognize the importance of this beautifully written memoir. -- Stella Suberman, author of The Jew Store
The Peddler's Grandson takes a clear-eyed look at the changing world of the twentieth century South, beginning with the arrival of Cohen's immigrant grandparents, a world in which he is both an outsider--as a Jew among Christians--and insider--as a member of a large and intimate clan. Cohen is an unsentimental, yet complex and moving and unsparingly honest writer, and his story is absorbing. -- Ellen Douglas, author of Apostles of Light, The Rock Cried Out, and Truth
A delightful, beautifully written memoir. Edward Cohen takes us on an insightful journey in which he learns why being a southern Jew is not a double curse but a double blessing. -- Marcus Rosenbaum, editor of Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman
A rich, evocative and warmhearted memoir about an important but often overlooked aspect of the Jewish experience in America. What arcs between the author's two poles of identity--his Jewishness and his `southernness'--is a new and surprising notion of what it means to be an American. -- Jonathan Kirsch, author of Moses, A Life
This wry memoir is by that one in a thousand, Southern by birth, Jewish by the grace of God--or is it the other way around? Raised in Jackson, Mississippi (surely one of the further flung corners of Jewry), Cohen shows us that there are different ways of being Southern, and, Lord knows, different ways of being Jewish, too. -- John Shelton Reed, author of Whistlin' Dixie: Dispatches from the South
