History Is Both Personal and Current in “Liberty Street” https://ift.tt/nfyxrm2
In the town of Savannah, Georgia, the purchase of one house leads to a journey of discovery and historical understanding that hits exceptionally close to home in Jason Friedman’s Liberty Street. Through unraveling the stories found in letters and diaries, Friedman is able to chart the rise of the Cohen family as key leaders of the Charleston Jewish community to their eventual downfall with the death of their son in the midst of the Civil War. With a seamless blend between first-person narrative style and historical examination, Liberty Street proves that the past is both personal and intensely present. Friedman applies a thorough, sensitive approach to uncovering the history behind the family that built his home, and in doing so, reveals a complexity and importance to understanding the people and communities that came before us.
Jason K. Friedman was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, and earned a B.A. from Yale and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. His book of stories, Fire Year, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Award. His work has also appeared in journals and periodicals including the New York Times, Moment, Tablet, The Gettysburg Review, Image, Fjords Review, Cimarron Review, and the Decadent Review, and has been anthologized in Best American Gay Fiction, The Queer South, and the cultural studies reader Goth. He’s also published two terrifying children’s books, Phantom Trucker and Haunted Houses. He lives in San Francisco with his husband, filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman.
I was lucky enough to chat with Jason about all of this and more in the following interview conducted over email.
This is the first time I have personally encountered a book with such a seamless blend between memoir and historical research, and in doing so, you’ve created a story that makes the past feel so intensely present. How did that writing process, combining those genres, feel? Were there any authors or novels that gave you inspiration for that route, or was it a choice that just felt like the natural course to take?
I did play with the balance quite a bit. For a while I had more of my family story in there, and more about renovating the apartment — but none of that was as interesting or morally compelling as the tragedy these historical subjects were going through. I was inspired by The Hare with Amber Eyes, where the “I” was more of an eye than an actual presence for most of the book.
As I was reading, there were several times I caught myself imagining what it would be like to be in your shoes during the research process it took to create this book, and I was thinking about the amount of information and family lore that you were taking in. Were there ever moments that digging into all of this information became overwhelming, whether it was due to some of the ugly truths of the time period or the sheer amount of knowledge you were uncovering, and how did you overcome that as a writer?
I imagine it’s less troubling to write about morally correct people than those who hold views we find abhorrent today. But they aren’t as interesting. And they also don’t exist in real life. But yes, it was disheartening to learn that the characters I instinctively found more likable and less morally reprehensible were also racists. But I didn’t just give up on them. I felt it was even more important to understand what made them tick — they became more complex for me. You don’t want to judge — on the other hand, how could I not write about these people from my own contemporary perspective?
It seems like a lot of the information and background about the Cohens you were able to find was from letter writing. I was wondering if this had an effect on the way you think about letter writing, which is often considered to be a lost art in our current world, and if it preserves history in a way that is unique to anything else?
Letters can be really boring, especially ones along the lines of “Hope you’re doing well, here’s what I’ve been up to.” There’s nothing inherently interesting about a letter. But I love good letters. And I’m so happy people wrote so many of them in the nineteenth century — they really helped me get inside their writers’ heads.
What do you think people get wrong, or maybe just don’t know about, your corner of the South?
That there are Jews in the South and there have been Jews in southeast Georgia for almost 300 years. And from the start they were largely accepted there — this was a surprise to me, considering the persistence of anti-Semitism everywhere.
There are a few instances in the book where you mention coming face-to-face with historical landmarks and footprints that you hadn’t noticed before, which I’m positive is something most of us miss often. Do you think that writing his book, and the attention to detail it required, has given you a newly keen eye to picking up on historical footprints? I can imagine it might make someone hyper aware of it after discovering so much.
Oh I’ll probably walk right over the next set of historical footprints — I’m only an amateur historian. But I was lucky to have such good guides, especially Vaughnette Goode-Walker, whose slavery tour Footprints of Savannah was essential to my research and my education.
In your essay “Searching for Solomon Cohen,” you mention that learning about the Cohen family, specifically Gratz, required you to travel all over the South. This travel and the inclusion of maps, as well as excellent imagery of the towns in the book, gave the stories a kind of cartographic feel, like you were charting a map to the past. Was there any spot along your travels that particularly stuck with you, or a memory you have of feeling especially connected to the stories you were writing?
Yes, right in my hometown of Savannah, on Bay Lane, onetime heart of the slave trade. The fact that this lane is a nothing kind of space now with absolutely no historical markers really strikes me whenever I go there. It’s a deafening silence, a roar from the past, that you can’t unhear once you learn what went on there.
I couldn’t help noticing your incredible versatility in your previous works – from children’s horror with Haunted Houses to short stories to this historical focus. Is there a genre that you especially want to do more with in the future, or one you haven’t tapped into yet that you might like to?
I’d like to get a novel for grown-ups out there in the world. Not necessarily a scary one.
Is there anything that you currently have in the works right now, or any ideas about future projects that you might be planning?
Working on a novel and I’ve got an idea for another one. Mostly false starts but there might be something there. I’d be open to writing another narrative nonfiction book too if the subject moves me, as the subject of Liberty Street did.
Thank you again to Jason for taking the time to chat with me about this incredible book. Make sure to keep an eye out for Jason’s upcoming work on his website!
NONFICTION Liberty Street
Jason K. Friedman
University of South Carolina Press
Published April 30, 2024
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