The Peddler's Grandson: Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi

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Summary: Diaspora below the Mason- Dixon
Review: A wonderful tale that had me captivated from the first page. Whether you're Jewish, southern or just an appreciative reader... the descriptive flow of this tale is unparalleled.

Cohen writes an excellent tale that weaves the stories of his immigrant grandparents into the time of his owning "bringing up" and struggle with his ethnicity, spiritual and regional. The characters are interesting and personal. The descriptions of the region and of the family scenes create clear mental pictures.

This is a book that I intend to add to my own collection.

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Summary: Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi.....and Beyond
Review: Although it is his own autobiography, Edward Cohen tells in a very readable and entertaining narrative what growing up Jewish in America was like for many of us baby boomers, the children and grandchildren of Eastern Europeon immigrants. The Southern setting and experience is central to the theme of this excellent work. Yet, most of the stories and recollections of his large, extended family, his own coming of age in the 50's and 60's have a universality and reflect many shared experiences with those of us who grew up Jewish during this same time, even in the North. While important parts of the book touch on serious themes as racism and anti-semitism, this book offers terrific humor and warm nostalgia, without being "schmaltzy" or self-serving. Less than 200 pages, The Peddler's Grandson can be enjoyed in one cover-to-cover sitting that will for many readers envoke two stories, the author's and for many of us, the parallels of our own lives. A great read.

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Summary: Warm; sensitive and charming history of 1 Jewish Southerner
Review: Edward Cohen writes a deeply slow moving history of his growing up and his family's hisotry and life in Jackson Mississippi Typical of many late 1800 Jewish settlers in the South they were in retailing from peddlers to store owner.

Combining his life as nearly a solitary Jewish youth growing up during the 50's and 60's together with the varying charm of the Cohen Family we gather another perspective on the changes in the southland.

Starting in the late 1800's with two brothers who married sisters and lived in one house the Cohen family goes from generation to generation strong yet different and survives at a big cost the changes brought by the struggle for civil rights.

Also Edward Cohen does a splendid job of describing the Cohen Brothers Clothing store from its peddler start to its eventual demise in the 1960's, its way of operating and dealing with all kinds of people together with the mores of the segregated society in Jackson.

A necessary addition to any study of Jewish life and also of black peoples lives both before,during and after.

Thank you for writing your family's story.

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Summary: Candor and Universality Guide Peddler's Grandson
Review: Edward Cohen, growing up Jewish in the deep South, felt as though he was an outsider both as a Jew and as a Southerner. Being Jewish, he never quite felt as though he was fully a part of the community he grew up in. Being Southern, he never felt fully attached to the Jewish community which was centered in large, northern metropolitan areas. Oy vay is mir!!! Talk about an identity problem!

I am also a baby boomer who grew up Jewish in a non Jewish area. I grew up in a small village 100 miles from New York City. Like Cohen, I grew up as the son of a second generation owner of a retail business. I was the only Jew in my class in high school and Cohen was one of a very few Jews in his school. Unlike Cohen, I felt more at home, both as a Jew and as a memeber of the secular community. Indeed, my father was twice elected mayor of my hometown. Whereas Cohen married outside of his religion, I grew up with a strong commitment to Judaism. Thus, while I had some of Cohen's experiences in growing up, my reaction to the experiences was different. Cohen tried to fit in to his Jackson, MI community whereas, in my experience, I succeeded in fitting in comfortably to my community. But, then again, despite being non Jewish, my hometown at least was in the north and New York City was close enough to be a day trip.

Interestingly, Cohen mentions that he had a lack of interest in the sports culture of the South and that he had no Jewish sports role models. How did he overlook Sandy Koufax?? I remember Koufax being a demigod to me and other Baby Boomer Jews. Clearly, Cohen felt very isolated in many ways and the causes are both external (the community in which he lived) and internal (his subjective reactions to that community). I think it would have been difficult for a Jew to completely fit into the Jackson, MI community of the 1950s and 60s but, I also think that Cohen's personality was such that fitting in was all the more difficult.

I found this book to be fascinating reading and I enjoyed comparing my experiences with Cohen's. I highly recommend "The Peddler's Grandson."

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Summary: Mogen David meets the Magnolia state in wistful memoir
Review: Exploring the consequences of straddling two cultures, "The Peddler's Grandson" proves that being Jewish in the deep South is a lot more than playing Dixie with a klezmer band. Accurately subtitled "Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi," Edward Cohen's enjoyable and instructive memoir recounts the author's childhood in post World-War II Mississippi and explores the dynamics of being a dual outsider: A Jew in the Bible Belt and a southern Jew in a cosmopolitan Jewish university. Written with perceptive sociological insight and engaging self-deprecatory humor, this memoir sheds light on the profound issue of marginality. As Edward Cohen grows up, he leaves the safe cocoon of his protective Jewish home and discovers the strangely alluring and frightening Christian South.

The grandson of an intinerant peddler, Cohen explains both the coherence of a Jewish life and the centripetal influences the dominant culture exerts on that identity. Once in the public school system, Cohen feels a need to reinvent himself, from invisible Jew to iconoclastic rebel. Yet, with each recreation, Cohen feels less complete, even more dissatisfied. Where he yearns for a fusion of his dual Southern/Jewish identities, he experiences alienation and distancing from both. Culminating with four experimental years at Miami University, his story both extols and berates the divisive nature of his existence.

At its best, "The Peddler's Grandson" serves as a model for every immigrant seeking authentic identity in his/her new land. At once desperately seeking inclusion but discovering that the price of admission is cultural abdication, Cohen warns about the notion that one can gain identity by erasing one's past. "From the first day my Jewish self was suddenly full-immersion baptized into that southern world, I wanted to reconcile what couldn't be joined." We watch, with admiration, as Cohen reaches an adult acceptance of who and what he is. "I've learned the difference between discovering who I am and inventing it. Invention for me meant erasure, and whether it was my southern or my Jewish half that I hoped to lose, each time I tried, I got smaller."

"The Peddler's Grandson" is not pedantic in the least. Delightful family history and marvelous anecdotes pepper this memoir. Cohen's battles with the dyspeptic Rabbi Nussbaum over issues ranging from the existential meaning of life to the Edward's refusal as a child to eat a hard-boiled egg at Passover ring with Jewish humor. With characteristic grace, however, is Cohen's admission that he admires his adversary as a civil rights' leader. The author does not have to mention that Nussbaum's home was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan; yet in so doing, Cohen reminds us of his own profound ambivalence over racism during the late 1950s and early 1960s. One senses that the adult Cohen has not forgiven himself for his acquiescent silence during that crucial decade; indeed, his compassionate recounting of the African-Ameicans who worked in his family's clothes store indicate a sensitivity that began during that formative period.

Cohen writes with an assurance he lacked as a child. His memoir is warm, comforting, and, in parts, genuinely inspiring. The author's adult confidence derives, however, from that childhood, both Southern and Jewish. His adult confidence in his roots and his place in both worlds blossoms from a family which, although profoundly assimilated, nevertheless recognized its marginality. His Jewish identity, compromised by an alien culture which celebrated physicality instead of intellectualism, emerges secure; his Southern roots, nurtured by three generations of life in Jackson, Mississippi and tarnished by national denigration of the very name of his state, endure. Thus, Edward Cohen, child of a Jewish peddler who settled in a locale far beyond the reaches of Northern urban Jewish influence, represents the best of the Ameican expeience; his cultural dialectic results in the best of all possibilities -- a genuine multiculturalism.

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Summary: Living on the Borders
Review: In his book, Edward Cohen captures the essence of what it is like to live on the borders, never feeling fully at home, never quite fitting in, and never being just 'comfortable'. Two of my favorite quotes come near the end of the book. In coming to grips with his conflicting feelings about being a Southern Jew (or is it a Jewish Southerner?) he says: "...whether it was my southern or my Jewish half that I hoped to lose, each time I tried, I got smaller." And the truce he finally arrives at is summed up as: "I may be a man without a country, but I carry two passports." I grew up in Jackson at the same time as Mr. Cohen (he is, I believe, two years older than I am). For the last twenty years I have lived, willingly, in exile. To read his book was, for me, to remember what it is like to love and hate something that is an inseparable part of my identity at one and the same time.

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Summary: It takes a loving family (you-all!)
Review: Interesting insights abound in this wonderful book about growing up Jewish in Mississippi during the 50's and 60's. Mr.Cohen introduces us to his family, friends and surroundings in a way that kept me from putting the book down. I read it in two sittings on a rainy weekend in Rhode Island and I felt like I was on vacation in Mississippi.

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Summary: Charming will written memoir
Review: THE PEDDLER'S GRANDSON Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi by Edward Cohen 193 Pages;University of Mississippi Press

This is a beautifully written memoir that is deeper than an ordinary auto-biography. Cohen discusses his grandparents and their immigration into America from Romania and Poland as well as his own conflict in trying to be oone of the crowd and still establish his own creative identity. His father's father was a peddler who walked through the Mississippi countryside, slept in haylofts and eventually imported his brother to help him open up a small clothing store near Jackson, Mississipi. His mother's parents originated in Poland which, according to Cohen, ". . . compared to Romania, it was postively cosmopoliatan. Her people settled first in Louisiana but eventually moved to Mississippi when she married Cohen's father. In many ways, the most interesting portions of the book were the discussions of how these immigrants to the American culture and the Southern Tradition managed to make their mark and settle into a comfortable way of life. Southern prejudice against Jews, the entire country's aversion to anyone "different", all contributed the elements to Edward Cohen's final immigration to that haven of liberal thought: California. He now lives in Venice, California, and works as a freelance writer and filmmaker. His memoir sheds light on what it was like to grow up Jewish and white in the south in 1950's and it is also an account of the ingenuity and courage of Polish and Romanian immigrants who came to this country determined to escape oppression and make a life for themselves. An excellent read.

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Summary: The Peddler's Grandson
Review: What a book!It will touch not only Jews but any ethnic group of immigrants. It is told in a sweet and poignient way. Never mean spirited in the face of mean prejudice. The chapter on going away to college will appeal to any American family. The Author has a great deal of talent

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Summary: Beautifully written--couldn't wait to get back to reading it
Review: You don't have to be Jewish or even Southern to enjoy this beautifully written book. Who among us has never felt "outside" for one reason or another? Edward Cohen paints an intimate picture of himself, his family and the small Jewish community in his hometown, Jackson, Mississippi and yet it is a microcosm for what goes on in every one's life, all families, all communities. The reader is moved to empathy--by reflecting on personal experiences and also to compassion and forgiveness, borne of that empathy. This book is sweet, tender, insightful--and utterly without bitterness and rancor. It is about healing and acceptance and tolerance--with Cohen's finely crafted storytelling and deliciously sharp wit. READ THIS BOOK.