In the South especially, Jews languished as the provincials, the Jews of the periphery, not destined to triumph but just to survive.
—Eli N. Evans, The Provincials
Morris Abram’s hometown of Fitzgerald, Georgia had a deep impact on him throughout his life. During his treatment for leukemia in the 1970s, Abram told his psychiatrist that he never really broke away from the town. From his mother, he said, he had acquired the qualities of strength; from his father, he had gotten his more “human” qualities. And while he believed his hometown “gave shape to much of what I am,” his childhood was not without frequent feelings of alienation.
Abram cited numerous factors as essential to shaping his later life: being born a Jew in the South “who had to face the majority world which was hostile”; the cultural divide between his parents, one an Eastern European immigrant, the other who claimed German Jewish roots that enabled her to condescend to those of different origin; his small size throughout his childhood; growing up in a conventional environment of white Protestant fundamentalism in which he absorbed views on morality, ethics, and sexual behavior; and the enormous emphasis in his family on intellectual skills as contrasted with the slight emphasis on athletic achievement.1
Abram spent his childhood in a town of six thousand residents that was unique in American history. He took pride in his hometown that, he believed, incorporated “a profound aspect of the American experience.”2 Located in the rural, piney woods of south central Georgia, Fitzgerald had its origins in the unlikeliest of places: the vision of an Indianapolis, Indiana newspaper owner and editor. Phylander (P. H.) Fitzgerald, a Union drummer boy in the Civil War, had watched in despair as the war’s midwestern pensioners faced drought conditions in the 1880s that forced them to leave their homes. Fitzgerald sent out an appeal to prominent southerners for assistance, and it was Georgia’s governor, William J. Northen, who answered the call by sending two trainloads of supplies to Nebraska, the state most hard hit by the drought.3
It wasn’t long before Captain Fitzgerald and Northen were working together to establish a colony that would be a haven for Union veterans and others most affected by the drought and other difficult climatic conditions. In July 1895 Fitzgerald made the first payment on a large plot of fertile land purchased from two brothers who owned a sawmill in the tiny community of Swan. Word of the purchase spread quickly, as northerners and westerners began their journeys by wagon and train to the new colony. By the end of the year, more than twenty-five hundred settlers arrived and set up camps that would have to await the building of the town named for Captain Fitzgerald.
Some of the Union veterans seeking to spend their final years in the heart of Dixie had ridden with Sherman in his infamous march through the state. Others had been held under the harshest of conditions in the Confederate prison in nearby Andersonville. One had even witnessed the capture of Jefferson Davis a mere ten miles away. The original settlers were soon joined by locals from surrounding towns, many of whom had come originally as tourists to witness history being made.
While planning the layout of the town in a Midwestern-style grid, the leadership of the colony company realized that it would be foolish to alienate the locals, for whom bitter memories of the war remained. Thus, street names reflected the atmosphere of reconciliation that surrounded the building of the town. On the east side of Main Street the avenues were named for Grant, Sherman, and other Union generals. Avenues running north and south on the west side bore the names of Lee, Jackson, and other Confederate generals. The drives in the central part of town were given the familiar names Monitor and Merrimac, as well as other naval ships from both sides of the conflict. The remaining streets were named for trees native to the state. The town’s first big public works project was a four-story, 150-room hotel, the biggest wooden structure in the state at the turn of the twentieth century. Morris Abram’s parents were among the first to hold their wedding reception at the Lee-Grant Hotel.
In addition to the joint naming of streets and buildings, the town did its best to integrate the two cultures. A wall poster located today in the town’s Blue-Gray Museum reads: “The Yankee veterans brought to Fitzgerald their architecture, their churches, their town plan, their midwestern industries, their commercial habits, their family customs, their patriotism to the Grand Army of the Republic—and a host of reminders left behind. The local Confederates contributed their land, their knowledge of agriculture, their labor, their sense of justice for the Confederacy, their churches, their cuisine, their language, and a host of southern traditions.”
At the opening of the town’s large exposition hall in 1896, it was decided to keep the peace by dividing the parade into separate groups of Union and Confederate veterans. But as the band began playing, the soldiers decided to march side by side, carrying the American flag. The next year they formed Battalion I of the Blue and Gray, an unprecedented development.4
By 1900 Fitzgerald had its first Jewish resident, Isadore Goldenberg (née Solomon), who arrived with his new bride Bessie and opened a dry goods store. By the end of the decade, Goldenberg had two other Jewish immigrants as partners, including his nephew Sam Abram, who lived with the Goldenbergs as a boarder.5 Morris Abram remembers “Uncle Ike” Goldenberg as “a gentleman, attractive and sweet,” the most dapper man in town.6 Abram’s father Sam, a man short in stature, had grown up in the small village of Buchesti, Romania, where his large family were the only Jews. “Nobody bothered them,” Sam’s younger brother Shmule later reported. “Of course, when the goyim got drunk, they would usually beat up a Jew, but nobody paid any attention to that.”7
Sam, or Schneur, as he was then known, was one of nine children born to Moshe Avram, a wood dealer, and his wife, Anna Zalman Avram, in 1883. Sam, who would later lose two of his brothers in World War I and a third to the horrific 1941 pogrom in the Romanian city of Iasi that took over thirteen thousand Jewish lives, was only nine when his father died. Apprenticed to a harness maker in nearby Vaslui, Sam eventually became head of the shop, but when he faced the prospect of being conscripted into the army, he began to weigh the decision to emigrate to America.
The source of much anxiety for his mother and siblings, the decision was not an easy one, as emigration was prohibited by the authorities. And, as his brother later estimated, only one in five who set out for America at that time was successful in reaching its shores. Engaged to be married, his fiancée’s father forbade her to go with him. In the end, it was the infamous pogrom in nearby Kishniev in 1903 that led Sam Abram, at the age of twenty, to decide he would leave his native Romania for America.
In 1880, Morris Abram’s maternal great-grandfather, Elias Eppstein, one of the first Reform rabbis in the United States, arrived in Kansas City, Missouri, to take over the pulpit of Congregation B’nai Jehudah. (One of its future congregants was Harry Truman’s close friend and one-time business partner Eddie Jacobson.) Born in Saarwelling, Alsace-Lorraine and educated in France and Germany, Rabbi Eppstein had emigrated to the United States in 1851, accepting a Jewish educational position in Syracuse, New York. Before arriving in Kansas City, he served congregations in New York City; Jackson, Michigan; Milwaukee; and Detroit, where he initiated Friday evening services at Congregation Temple Beth El in 1867 and was the first rabbi to offer sermons in English.8
Rabbi Eppstein kept a journal during his three-year tenure at B’nai Jehudah. In his very first week on the job, he had the religious school partitioned into classrooms to provide age-appropriate education, enlarged the congregational choir, accepted a position as circuit preacher for surrounding communities, and received a commitment from forty-two female congregants to organize a fair to raise money to pay off the synagogue’s mortgage. It was a great start for a Rabbi working on an annual salary of $1,500.9 The fair, held in October 1880, was particularly notable, with the streets surrounding the Grimes Building on Delaware Avenue thronged with crowds on five consecutive days and nights, and the mayor presiding at the opening and closing ceremonies. If the fair was a financial success, it was also a reflection of the integration of the Jewish community into the general populace of Kansas City. As the synagogue’s account notes, “their language was by now almost entirely English, their dress indistinguishable from that of everyone else, and their children imbued with American ways.” As a measure of just how far religious traditions had been publicly set aside, the fair’s luncheon menu featured shellfish, strictly forbidden by Jewish law.10
Rabbi Eppstein’s tenure coincided with the beginning of the great migration of Jews to the United States from Russia following the assassination of Czar Alexander II. At first Rabbi Eppstein reported that the community would gladly provide for those refugees reaching his community. He later tempered this generous outreach, however, by urging the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Committee in New York to desist from sending any more to avoid placing a burden on the next generation.11 In his diary, Rabbi Eppstein noted how many of the newcomers refused to become involved in the community and declined to engage in charitable acts, while at the same time condemning fellow Jews who failed to observe the strictures of Jewish law. Still, he asked, “Should we condemn the whole on account of these hypocrites?”12
The rabbi’s contract was not renewed upon the end of his term in 1883. A sermon he had delivered the previous year on the subject of “Retribution” had incurred the displeasure of a prominent congregant, and the temple’s patriarch was already looking to the first class of graduates of the recently established Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, a center of Reform Judaism, as a recruiting ground for Eppstein’s successor.
Three of the rabbi’s seven children remained in Kansas City when he left for his next pulpit in Philadelphia. Among them was his daughter Mathilda, who became the first secretary of the Kansas City chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women. Her son Harold Kander, father of future Broadway composer John Kander, later served on the synagogue’s board of trustees.
Among the children accompanying, Rabbi Eppstein and his wife, Fannie, to his next pulpit in Philadelphia was his fourteen-year-old daughter, Therese, known throughout most of her life as Daisy. There she met and later married a watchmaker named Morris Cohen, who decided to enter the medical profession after financing his sister Sarah’s education at the pioneering Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Sarah graduated in 1879, later becoming a distinguished obstetrician. After completing his medical education at Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia, Morris Cohen began to practice in a series of small towns, beginning in Quincy, Illinois, where his daughter Irene was born. From there he worked his way south until he ended up in Fitzgerald when Irene was seventeen or eighteen years old.
“He followed a moving star,” Morris Abram said, and would have found Fitzgerald an interesting town in which to settle. Standing at five feet, eight inches, Cohen was remembered by his grandson as a “galvanic figure” of supreme self-confidence, a country doctor “who combined in his person all the traits of master technician and tribal shaman.”13 Abram recalled that his grandfather, although warm and lovable to his grandchildren, was an iconoclast who was on the outs with the other doctors in town, whom he regarded as “dummkophs.” His distrust of the personnel at the local hospital led him to perform his surgeries in his office. His refusal to own a car resulted in him walking to see his patients or requiring the more affluent to drive to see him. When Morris was seven, his grandfather moved from Fitzgerald to Cleveland, leaving behind many fond memories of this somewhat mythic figure and his gentle and loving grandmother, whom Abram later described as “the delight of my life.”14
It was Dr. Cohen who brought Morris Abram into the world on June 19, 1918, the second son of Sam and Irene Cohen Abram. Lamar Perlis, a successful property developer in southern Georgia, now in his mid-nineties, remembered Dr. Cohen’s daughter Irene as “a very dominant, powerful woman. All the things people do today, garden club, you name it, she was involved. And they had a clothing store like everybody else. She was the one who decided whatever needed to be decided.”15
When asked about Irene, Janice Rothschild Blumberg, whose friendship with Morris Abram went back many decades to his days in Atlanta, said, “It’s been a long time, but I remember what she looked like and what she sounded like, and when she said ‘Jump!’ you jumped. I had the feeling that she really kept the family together.”16 Abram’s daughter Ruth, the oldest of his five children, has fond memories of visiting her grandparents in her father’s hometown, which he liked to show off to them while his parents were still alive. “My grandfather,” she recalled, “was a tiny little person with a big pot belly. When he asked me to sit on his lap when I was a little girl, I was always wondering where to sit. My grandmother was much taller than he was and seemed to be the dominant force in that family. And they had a dry goods store, and my father used to love to tell the story of how he had watched his father put a dollar in a suit and say to a farmer that if you buy this suit you’ll have the dollar. And he thought that was such a good trick. But as my father said, the place never really made any money and they were always on the edge.”17 Considering the deep personality differences between Morris Abram’s parents, with his father’s “scorned humanity” and his mother’s “bitter power,” it is not surprising that they frequently clashed. To the young Abram, who learned early on that his mother’s marriage to Sam Abram had been against the advice of her parents, they were “utterly mismatched.”18 As he told Eli Evans many years later, “Mother had always depreciated Daddy and his family and Daddy deeply resented it and it would come out in explosive ways in which he would say that you just don’t know how good people in my family were.”19
The clothing store Lamar Perlis and Ruth Abram remember was not the first one Sam Abram owned after working for his uncle. That one was located on Grant Street, the principal business district of town. The store went bankrupt during the panic of the early 1920s when Morris was five years old. A second store named “Red Star,” opened on Pine Street in a poorer part of town, also failed, and the elder Abram decided to open a shop on the same street that sold and repaired shoes. When the shoe business proved to be less than successful, he added clothing.
“He was not a good businessman,” Abram recalled of his father.
He didn’t keep accounts very well, he never planned, he just operated by the seat of his pants, and the only thing he knew was what he paid for something and if he got a little bit more for it that was fine, he would give credit to people who wouldn’t pay him. He did not really read and write. Mother had to do all of this. He was really a good salesman and had a nice personality, except he was so bedeviled, I think, by his financial problems, and by the host of his angers and anxieties, and relationship with Mother [that he] wasn’t putting his best foot forward.20
The young Abram, who worked in the store after school and on weekends, didn’t like to be seen there, turning his head or walking inside when he saw a car with girls inside. While he felt good about his academic achievements, he felt very “cut down” by his family’s position in the town, by what his father had to do to earn a living, and by his lack of success. He was struck by the fact that the other Jewish merchants in town, “those from Eastern Europe who married wives from Eastern Europe, were doing very well indeed. But I was sort of separated from those people by virtue of my mother’s attitude about them.”21
Abram’s niece Cecily, the daughter of his brother Lewis, remembers the store as dimly lit, with clothes on one side and shoes on the other. If you had to use the facilities, you would need to go outside. “There were these lime steps leading to a ladder that took you into a tent, with a chain to let the water in and out of the toilet.” Sam Abram enjoyed a close relationship with his customers. “My uncle was told not to make fun of them,” Cecily Abram said. “And some of them were able to help his father financially when the business got into trouble.”22
When Morris Abram, his wife Jane, and their second daughter Ann traveled to Vaslui, Romania in the mid-1960s to visit what remained of his father’s family, its members were surprised to learn that their American relative spoke no Yiddish. When asked why his father never taught him the ethnic language of his fellow Jews of Eastern Europe, Abram was too embarrassed to reply that he never heard him speak it at home.23
To his mother, the granddaughter of an Alsatian Rabbi with a degree from the University of Bonn, Judaism was emphatically a religion and, in all other respects, Jews were no different from their neighbors. Just as emphatically, said Abram, his mother’s tradition taught her that Jews are not a distinct people: “The idea of a linkage between people around the world as if we are more than a religion, that we carry certain germ cells, that we carry certain traditions, that we carry certain baggage, that we are tied to certain destinies—not so!”24
There was, in fact, a tiny but tight-knit group of a dozen Jewish families in Fitzgerald during Morris Abram’s childhood. According to Ruth Singer, who was Abram’s one Jewish classmate throughout their school years, Fitzgerald’s Jewish community became the hub for Jews who lived in the surrounding towns and who came together to celebrate Jewish holidays and other occasions. Singer’s father and uncle, the latter of whom became active in local politics, brought with them from their native Lithuania the traditions and liturgies of their Jewish ancestry and were able to lead services in Hebrew.25 The Jews of Fitzgerald met at the local Masonic Lodge, located on the second floor of a building in the business district, until they built a synagogue in the early 1940s that stands today and continues to hold services once a month and during High Holidays. But Irene Abram and her husband Sam, who followed her lead, never became a part of that community.
“I don’t know where I assimilated the idea,” Morris Abram told Eli Evans, “that somehow or other they [Eastern Europeans] were different or less valuable, whatever word of depreciation you want to use, but that idea clearly got through to me.”26
But the relationship with the other Jews in Fitzgerald was also complicated by the fierce competition among the town’s businesses. According to Abram, they were by necessity contesting for every customer. “It was a fairly competitive, vicious environment,” he recalled, “and I suppose that’s the reason for some of my family’s feeling about those other Jewish members of the community because they were so much more successful than my mother and father.”27 In the late 1920s, the Hebrew Commercial Alliance was created to help those merchants who could not borrow money during the Depression. It was a credit cooperative that provided loans to its stockholders. The cooperative’s liberal lending policy helped reduce the number of bankruptcies, and from the time he joined the alliance, Sam Abram never incurred another insolvency.28
Eric Singer remembers his mother Ruth telling him that the Abram family sought acceptance not from the other Jewish families but rather from Fitzgerald’s Protestant society. But according to his mother, “the non-Jewish society resented it, and they were never really accepted.” By contrast, “her family and the other Eastern European Jews were who they were, with their funny accents, and they got along fine with everybody.”29
According to Abram, it was not really acceptance that his family sought, since their aspirations went beyond the world around them. As he told Eli Evans, “I suppose I always had, and maybe the whole family had, a vision that was a little broader, a little wider and a little higher than the people of that town. We always felt ourselves a little misplaced, always stronger, never really at home there, always looking to go somewhere else, and I think our aspirations were higher.”30 Despite his father’s lack of formal education, Abram recalled that “he didn’t give a damn about how far I could throw a football,” certainly an important priority for many fathers in that part of the country. “All he cared about were those grades, and that’s what I emphasized.”31
Abram recalls those rare occasions when his family, which included his older brother Lewis and younger sisters Ruthann and Jeanette, made the ninety-mile trip to the western Georgia city of Albany to attend services at a Reform Temple. But he never had his own Bar Mitzvah service to formally enter the ranks of Jewish adulthood.
This did not mean, however, that the young Morris Abram was entirely removed from his Jewish roots. A bookish youngster, he fell under the influence of a neighbor named Isadore Gelders, a Jew of Dutch origin with politically progressive views who had started his own newspaper, the Leader, Enterprise, and Press, to rival the older and more prosperous Fitzgerald Herald. The paper supported the town’s railroad workers in a bitter strike in 1921. Thirty-four years later, when Morris Abram ran for Congress in Atlanta, the paper ran an editorial endorsement that read, “The career of Morris Abram has proved once again for those who know him best that a good boy makes a good man.”32
Although married to a Methodist woman who had seen to it that their five sons were baptized in the church, Gelders was a regular attendee of Friday night Sabbath services at the Masonic Hall and, after the synagogue was built, he donated a Torah to it. Today he is buried on the edge of Fitzgerald’s Jewish cemetery. Like Irene Abram, a former schoolteacher who knew Gelder’s wife from their membership in a women’s club, of which Irene was president, Isadore Gelders was a regular at Fitzgerald’s Carnegie Free Library.33 Abram greatly admired the editor’s feistiness in challenging the local political and business establishment. Gelders is credited today with making Fitzgerald the first city in Georgia to secure free books for its schoolchildren. When Abram was in high school, Gelders convinced him to start a rival school paper that he distributed with the Leader. The two frequently discussed politics, and Abram called out his mentor for his support for state politicians Eugene Talmadge and Tom Watson.34 Gelders regarded both as populists, but Abram already was sophisticated enough to abhor their bigoted demagoguery.
It was from Gelders that the young Abram first heard that Western civilization was indebted to the Jews for promoting its highest values. Abram’s curiosity about his heritage led him to turn first to the index entry on Jews during his frequent reading of books on history, politics, and philosophy. By the age of thirteen, he was being called upon to offer speeches at local Bar Mitzvah services in lieu of a rabbi, which the small Jewish community could not then afford.35
Abram’s public speaking abilities were soon established not only in Fitzgerald but also in surrounding communities. Lamar Perlis, who was seven years younger, recalled watching Abram perform on stage during his teenage years. “We had a debating club in Cordele,” he recalled, “and they [Fitzgerald] had a debating club. He was on the stage debating in high school and was recognized then as someone with exceptional talent. Whatever developed, that showed early in his life. What a debater this young man was! And his scholarship, if you knew anything about him, you knew how brilliant he was. And he had the command of the language even then.”36
Abram later attributed his interest in performing publicly to “a feeling of inadequacy, insecurity, and inferiority” that resulted from several factors, including growing up as a minority in a small town and being fed by his parents with the notion that “you are really better than your circumstances and different.”37 Abram’s father encouraged his teenage son’s public speaking. When he was fourteen he made the two hundred mile trip to Savannah to address a convention of railroad workers on the topic “Our Shackled Railroads.” The speech was based upon a paper he had written for school that his father had shown to local members of the railroad association. “I was a ninety-pound orator,” Abram wrote, “who succeeded in inciting the burly workers, joined for the occasion with management, to loud huzzahs and a standing ovation.”38
Abram’s interest in politics, stimulated in part by his father’s friendships with local politicians, started very early. On the eve of Jimmy Carter’s nomination for president in July 1976, Abram reflected on his early fascination with the subject:
Until the 1950s, most of the southern population was rural. In those days, the courthouse provided most of the community’s drama and entertainment. Chief attractions were the trials inside and nonstop discussion and argument over political affairs in the halls, on the steps, and spilling into a wide radius of the street. The heroes of my youth (and I belong to the same generation as Jimmy Carter) were not movie stars, sports figures, or the smart set, but politicians. An aware boy grew up with politics in his blood. Local issues unleashed passion which burned like a brand; more remote topics dazzled youthful curiosity. Spurred by the obviously high regard of parents and community for the profession of politics, techniques of debate and persuasive demeanor were studied and assimilated.39
In 1932, when Abram was fourteen, he wrote a letter to the Macon Telegraph, the newspaper the family read at home, responding to a letter attacking Governor Richard Russell. Russell was seeking his first term in the U.S. Senate, one that would propel him to a four-decade career as one of its leading figures. He had gained the young Abram’s support with populist rhetoric that painted his main opponent as a friend of the power companies and the political establishment.
The letter to the Telegraph attracted the governor’s attention, and Abram and his father were invited to a vast hunting preserve in South Georgia for a deer hunt on the property of a Russell associate. Neither had ever shot an animal. Meeting the governor was a great thrill for Abram, and he stayed friendly with Senator Russell, who became the leader of the anti-civil rights bloc in Congress, until he began fighting the county unit system.40
Of all the stories Abram liked to tell throughout his life from his childhood, his favorite was his father’s account of an encounter that took place when he was four years old and an Indiana KKK leader came to town. The Klansman offered the number one membership card to Fitzgerald’s sheriff, Elijah Dorminey, a close friend of Sam Abram’s, and the sheriff asked the Klansman what he stood for. When he replied “Americanism,” and the sheriff asked him for clarification, he replied, “We’re against n—, Catholics, and Jews.” When the sheriff told him that was not what the term meant to him and the Klansman threatened to run him out of office, Dorminey made it clear that any improper behavior on his part would have serious consequences. The man left town after the sheriff discovered that he was wanted for crimes committed in another state. Abram took great pride in the fact that Dorminey loved his father, who helped run his campaigns behind the scenes.
Andrew Young, who admired Abram’s early commitment to civil rights but who later opposed his nomination by President Reagan to serve on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, attributed Abram’s enlightened views on race to the fact that he grew up in “an unusually liberal town.” He compared Fitzgerald to the Louisiana county in which he himself grew up that produced Huey Long, and the city in Mississippi that produced Hodding Carter and his family (Greenwood).41 In 1962 Abram told a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that part of the reason he gravitated to liberalism was the peculiar characteristic of Fitzgerald’s founding.42
While it is true that Fitzgerald was different from many deep South communities in terms of racial hatred—no lynching, for example, was ever committed in the county in which it is located, despite numerous ones in surrounding counties—the town was hardly free from racial bias. Abram told Eli Evans that he never knew an integrationist in Fitzgerald when he was growing up. “I never heard the term,” he said. “There may have been some closet integrationists, but I didn’t know any, and I didn’t detect any difference between the northerners and the southerners on that point.” Moreover, his own parents “accepted the then-conventional wisdom that blacks were stupid, unwashed, and unlettered, and that those who rose above it were the exception.”43
Abram’s own views growing up were not much different. He traced the beginning of his awareness of his own prejudice to a weekend when he was home from college tending to his father’s store on Pine Street. While observing a group of white and black sharecroppers and field hands—ragged, dirty, and illiterate—he tested the idea of desegregation by asking himself how many of those blacks he would invite to his home. The answer was none, but he realized that it was the same for the whites.
Why, then, he asked himself, did he require that all blacks be acceptable before any could be, a standard he did not apply to whites? And wasn’t the same double standard applied to Jews, whereby all are held accountable for the behavior of some? (Interestingly, this was the same question his great-grandfather, Rabbi Eppstein, had asked about Russian Jews, whose behavior he had found distasteful.) From that time on, Abram wrote, “segregation became an abomination to me and irreconcilable with the American tradition.”44
As for antisemitism, no Jew growing up in the state of Georgia during the 1920s could have been unfamiliar with the case of Leo Frank, a New York–born factory manager in Atlanta wrongfully accused of murdering a young employee. His lynching in 1915 after the governor commuted his death sentence “hovered like a black cloud over the region, churning up insecurities and fear, at the same time the South was on the skids economically.”45
Abram later told an audience that he refrained from dating non-Jewish girls in high school given “the reverberations” of that case. In the same speech, he recalled frequent readings in his public school classes of the passage in the Book of John that observes, “Jesus walked in Galilee. He would not walk in Jewry because the Jews sought to kill him.”46 As a youngster he had associated antisemitism with a lack of education, believing that “it was only the white trash, the ignorant, the illiterate, the unwashed, and the unlettered” who were its adherents. But it wasn’t long before he discovered that his eighth grade Algebra teacher, an educated man, disliked Jews. He later described this insight as one of the shattering experiences of his life.47
Abram’s profound sense of alienation in his hometown led to the creation of an alter ego, a character he named Stanley Withers, who stayed with him throughout his high school years. Although Stanley was advanced academically, what distinguished him from Abram himself was his prodigious physicality and athletic ability. “Here was a figure,” Abram wrote, “who could harness space and conquer time.”48
It was physical strength, though not that alone, that Abram greatly admired in his older brother Lewis. While Morris was a runt throughout his years in Fitzgerald, weighing just over one hundred pounds, he took satisfaction in the knowledge that his six-foot-tall brother could beat up everybody in the neighborhood. And he was in awe of the backbreaking labor Lewis was able to manage during summers working the machinery at the local railroad yards.49
His brother played an important role in Abram’s life in a more significant way. Lewis Abram cut in half a two-year medical internship to return to Fitzgerald to open a medical practice. His purpose in doing so was to earn enough money to finance his younger brother’s college education. (One of his patients during that period was the young Lamar Perlis, who traveled thirty miles from his home in Cordele to be treated by Dr. Abram for asthma.) After his service in World War II, Dr. Abram left Fitzgerald for good, taking over his uncle’s allergy practice in Cleveland. Morris Abram told Eli Evans that his brother had set out for the University of Georgia at age fifteen to be a lawyer but changed to medicine when he realized that “lawyers have to lie.”50 Ironically, it was the medical profession and, for a brief time, the rabbinate, that Abram had in mind when he left his home in Fitzgerald for Athens, home of the University of Georgia, in the fall of 1934.