Liberty Street by Jason K Friedman
The story of one of Savannah's first and most prominent Jewish families, the son who died on the battlefield, and the house that remembers it all.Gratz Cohen's ghost seemed to haunt the apartment as its new owner worked to bring it back to life. As the work progressed, Jason Friedman became obsessed with understanding who the Cohens were, and how their story fit into existing narratives about the Jewish South and the Civil War. Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War is a family saga wrapped in a memoir of Friedman's own southern Jewish upbringing and return home, and the way an old house became a portal to another world. The Cohens are well-known among those versed in southern Jewish history, but sensing that there was more to their story than had yet been told, Friedman set out to learn as much as he could about the family and their world. Friedman provides a nuanced look at what it meant to be a wealthy Jewish family before and during the Civil War, and paints a portrait of a sensitive young man tormented by conflicting pulls of love and duty. Delving into the lives of an extraordinary Southern Jewish family, Liberty Street meditates on the uses of memory and the ways our understanding of the past influences how we live today.
A revealing prism through which to examine a dark period of American history" - Publishers Weekly
"The insightful product of years of research" - Savannah Morning News
"[A]n engrossing and thoughtful investigation of a slave owning Jewish family in the American South, with all of its attendant contradictions, self-justifications, and cognitive dissonances" - Lauren Gilbert Jewish Book council
"The insightful product of years of research" - Savannah Morning News
"[A]n engrossing and thoughtful investigation of a slave owning Jewish family in the American South, with all of its attendant contradictions, self-justifications, and cognitive dissonances" - Lauren Gilbert Jewish Book council
Jason K. Friedman is the author of the story collection Fire Year (Sarabande, 2013), which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Award, as well as the children's books Phantom Trucker and Haunted Houses. He earned a B.A. from Yale and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.His work has appeared in the New York Times, Moment, Tablet, San Francisco Chronicle, Gettysburg Review, Image, South Carolina Review, Mission at Tenth, Jonathan, Fjords Review, Decadent Review, and Cimarron Review, and has been anthologized in Best American Gay Fiction, The Queer South, and the cultural studies reader Goth. He lives in San Francisco with his husband, filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781643364698 |
| ISBN 10 | 1643364693 |
| Title | Liberty Street |
| Author | Jason K Friedman |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | University of South Carolina Press |
| Year published | 2024-04-30 |
| Number of pages | 288 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |