Beginning ~ with a let-down

The Jew Store ~ by Stella Suberman, 1998,  memoir (Tennessee)

My mother always said she'd felt something of a let-down when she first saw the sign reading CONCORDIA TOWN LIMITS.  They had been riding for three days along rutted dirt roads north and west of Nashville.

Synopsis:

"For a real bargain, while you're making a living, you should make also a life," according to Aaron Bronson.  In 1920, in small town America, the ubiquitous dry goods store — suits and coats, shoes and hats, work clothes and school clothes, yard goods and notions — was usually owned by Jews and often referred to as "the Jew store."  That's how Stella Suberman's father's store — Bronson's Low-Priced Store, in Concordia, Tennessee — was known locally.  The Bronsons were the first Jews to ever live in that tiny town (1920 population: 5,318) of one main street, one bank, one drugstore, one picture show, one feed and seed, one hardware, one barber shop, one beauty parlor, one blacksmith, and many Christian churches.  Aaron Bronson moved his family all the way from New York City to that remote corner of northwest Tennessee to prove himself a born salesman — and much more.  A Jew, born into poverty in prerevolutionary Russia and orphaned from birth, finds his way to America, finds a trade, finds a wife, and sets out to find his fortune in a place where Jews are unwelcome.  Suberman turns the clock back to a time when rural America was more peaceful but no less prejudiced, when educated liberals were suspect, and when the Klan was threatening to outsiders.

I wonder what this would have felt like, 95 years ago.
 

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays.  Click here for today's Mister Linky.