The people in this book, along with their sweet teas and misdeeds, trials and betrayals, are fictional. Ruth, Davis, Fontaine, Covenant, Temple Shir Shalom, Rabbi Selwick, the Magnolia Ball, the whole premise—inventions, all.
The seed of the story, though, is inspired by a real-life event—the bombing of Atlanta’s oldest synagogue, the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, better known simply as “the Temple.” In the 1950s and ’60s, the Temple was a center for early civil-rights advocacy, led by the outspoken and charismatic Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, who urged his (sometimes reluctant) congregants to join the fight for racial justice.
The bomb—fifty sticks of dynamite detonated early on October 12, 1958—caused extensive damage, though, fortunately, didn’t hurt anyone. Still, the blast was front-page news at the Atlanta Journal (a paper with the tagline “Covers Dixie Like the Dew”) and at newspapers around the country. President Eisenhower condemned the bombing while detectives and FBI agents fanned across the city. Soon five suspects, known for their anti-Jewish beliefs and membership in the National States’ Rights Party and other white supremacist groups, were arrested. The high-profile trial of the alleged ringleader of the bombing ended in a mistrial, and his second trial ended in acquittal. Eventually, charges against the other men were dropped.
And yet the bomb had a lasting impact on the city; many leaders thought it brought Atlantans together, black and white, Jew and Christian. The mayor at the time, William Hartsfield, took a strong stand: “Whether they like it or not, every political rabble-rouser is the godfather of these cross burners and dynamiters who sneak about in the dark and give a bad name to the South. It is high time the decent people of the South rise and take charge.” Rabbi Rothschild’s widow, Janice Rothschild Blumberg, titled her own memoir of the blast “The Bomb That Healed.”
Years later, in the early 2000s, my family moved to Atlanta, where we became members of the Temple and were welcomed with a hearty “Shabbat shalom, y’all.” But the memories of what had happened there still reverberated. Our younger daughter attended Sunday school in one of the classrooms that had been bombed decades before.
And the hate has continued to echo. In Charlottesville, Virginia, where our older daughter lives, in the summer of 2017, white nationalists brandished torches in front of Thomas Jefferson’s rotunda, yelling, “Jews will not replace us.” And then in Pittsburgh in the fall of 2018, eleven congregants were shot during Saturday morning services at the Tree of Life synagogue. I watched the unfolding horror of the Pittsburgh shooting on TV news with my eighty-eight-year-old father, remembering the bat mitzvah the whole family had once attended at a different synagogue nearby. As the names of the dead were read, I kept thinking that my dad could have been one of them. And then I thought, it could have been any of us—over and over, across decades and state lines.
Almost sixty years to the day after the 1958 Atlanta bombing, I found myself pulling up a copy of the sermon Rabbi Rothschild delivered to his congregants after the blast: “Out of the gaping hole that laid bare the havoc wrought within, out of the majestic columns that now lay crumbled and broken, out of the tiny bits of brilliantly colored glass that had once graced with beauty the sanctuary itself—indeed, out of the twisted and evil hearts of bestial men has come a new courage and a new hope.” The sermon was titled “And None Shall Make Them Afraid.” All these years later, I want to believe these words are both a challenge and a stand taken by all people of good faith, no matter what faith that is.
I’m indebted to a variety of books and other resources for helping me capture the mood of Atlanta in the 1950s—fashion, manners, news reporting, school segregation, anti-Semitism, and so on. An incomplete list: As But a Day by Janice Rothschild Blumberg; “Counterblast: How the Temple Bombing Strengthened the Civil Rights Cause” by Clive Webb; The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff; Rich’s: A Southern Institution by Jeff Clemmons; Screening a Lynching by Matthew Bernstein; The South and the Southerner by Ralph McGill; Vogue’s Book of Etiquette (circa 1948) by Millicent Fenwick; Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn by Gary Pomerantz; and especially The Temple Bombing by Melissa Fay Greene, which I read and reread. On a much lighter note, I obsessed over vintage issues of Mademoiselle.
While researching in Atlanta, I poked around various archives—as much as I’d read about the events, there was no substitute for seeing the primary documents: the yellowed newspaper columns of Ralph McGill, the editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials following the bombing; typewritten sermons from Rabbi Rothschild; and fat scrapbooks stuffed with debutante invitations and photographs.
Grateful thanks to the following people and places for granting access and providing context: Gabrielle Dudley and Kathy Shoemaker at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University; Jeremy Katz, director of the Cuba Family Archives at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta; Sue VerHoef, director of oral history and genealogy at the Atlanta History Center. Thanks, too, to Bette Thomas, docent at the Center for Civil and Human Rights museum, who, in a serendipitous conversation, shared her memories of movie nights at the segregated Fox Theatre. And a heartfelt thanks to Mark Jacobson, executive director of the Temple in Atlanta—when I asked if I could take another look from the building’s rotunda, which I’d done years ago as part of a leadership class, he said, “You’re always welcome to come home.”
Any mistakes—of fact or of tone—are mine alone.