Dixie On The Hudson

Eli Evans For keeping the Southern Jewish experience alive in the less-than-genteel North.

Eli Evans For keeping the Southern Jewish experience alive in the less-than-genteel North.

by Sandee Brawarsky
Special To The Jewish Week

The great Southern writer Eudora Welty, in an essay on writing, says, “Place absorbs our earliest
notice and attention, it bestows on us our original awareness. ...Sense of place gives equilibrium; extended, it is sense of direction too.”
For fellow Southerner Eli Evans, sense of place has informed his life and career. While he has been a New Yorker for more than four decades, he is the most eloquent statesman of the Jewish South. Over his long, distinguished career in politics, government and philanthropy, he has written books about Southern Jewish history that are considered classics, lectured extensively around the country, promoted and supported values of democracy and equality, and set an example of graciousness and elegance, in the best Southern tradition.
Evans says that he’s long been running a Southern Jewish embassy in New York City. The newest New Yorkers from places like Greensboro and Savannah seem to find their way to his door, whether looking for jobs, apartments, friendship or some reminder of their roots.
A speechwriter in the L.B.J White House and a senior executive for the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Evans served for more than 25 years as president of the Charles H. Revson Foundation, stepping down in 2003. He chairs the boards of the Covenant Foundation and the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, and has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work has involved civil rights, increasing opportunities for minorities, urban planning, creative projects in media, innovations in Jewish education and advocacy for Israel.
Those interests grew out of his childhood in Durham, N.C. His father, Emanuel J. Evans, known as “Mutt,” served as the city’s mayor for six terms, from 1951 to 1963, and is credited with integrating the city. His mother Sara was very active in all levels of Hadassah, including 40 years on the national board, where she was known as the organization’s Southern voice. In fact, his grandmother founded the first Hadassah chapter in the South in 1919. Before World War II, his parents signed affidavits for 55 German-Jewish refugees, whom they didn’t know, guaranteeing them jobs, thus enabling them to come to America. Their home was bustling with relatives, out-of-town guests, local politicians and townspeople.
In his groundbreaking book, “The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South,” he braids his own family’s story with several hundred years of Southern history. That book, continuously in print since its 1973 publication, was recently reissued in a new edition, with a folk art collage portrait of his mother’s family — now hanging above his fireplace in Manhattan — on the jacket. Readers can hear his distinctive voice — and his love for history, the South, and family — in every well-constructed sentence.
Evans has written, “I believe that no one born and raised in the South, even if one moves away physically, can escape its hold on the imagination. I was touched in childhood by its passions and myths, by its language and literature, by the heartbeat of its music, by the rhythms of its seasons and the beauty of its land.”
Calling on Evans in his Manhattan home, a visitor half expects to find a building with a wide front porch laced with Spanish moss, but instead the man who’s been called the “poet laureate of Southern Jewry” lives in a hi-rise off of Gramercy Park. He’s a longtime member of Brotherhood Synagogue, across the Park. All the doormen in the nearby buildings know his name and, even in this city, he creates neighborhood, connections, affability — a slice of Downtown Dixie.
“New York can be the biggest little town in America,” he says, his Southern accent still evident.
Conversation with Evans is like a road trip over scenic back roads, with lots of detours. He is deeply stirred by the election of President-elect Obama, having grown up in the largely segregated South, especially moved that North Carolina voted for him. He witnessed his family’s role in the integration of Durham, and recalls that Evans United Dollar, the family business, was the first store on Durham’s Main Street to have restrooms for blacks, and the first to have an integrated lunch counter. When the sheriff notified his father that, by law, the store would have to choose which race to serve at the counter, his father refused, and researched the law, which referred only to seated service. According to Evans, his father removed all the stools, thus making it “the only standup integrated lunch counter in Durham.” The black community “never forgot it.”
Evans graduated in 1958 from the University of North Carolina, where he was the first Jewish student body president, served in the U.S. Navy in Japan, and later received his law degree from Yale University. Though he thought of becoming a civil rights attorney, he instead worked in a North Carolina gubernatorial campaign that led him to the White House, and later directed a nationwide study for then Gov. Terry Sanford of North Carolina.
Moving to New York City in June 1967, in the middle of the Six-Day War, Evans immediately experienced the Jewishness of the city, with its wide range of Jewish happenings and tremendous public support for the Jewish state. He remembers the thrill of watching Ambassador Abba Eban speak at the United Nations. Later, the two men became friends and colleagues, working together on the Revson-supported television series, “Heritage: Civilization and the Jews.”
In the late 1960s, he had a long lunch meeting with an old friend from the South, the writer Willie Morris, who was then editor of Harper’s, and Evans took on an assignment to write an essay for the magazine’s “Going Home” series. That assignment turned into 7,000 miles of travel crisscrossing the South over two years, and was the basis for “The Provincials,” in which he interviewed people like Thomas Jefferson Tobias, a ninth-generation Charleston Jew.
Marci Ferris, an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina who regularly teaches a course titled “Shalom Y’All: The Jewish Experience of the American South,” uses “The Provincials” as a text. She describes Evans as a visionary, who brought important attention to the Jewish South within the larger American Jewish experience. She says he had enough distance to speak critically, always realistically and without sentimentality.
After growing up in Durham’s spotlight, Evans at first rather enjoyed the anonymity of New York’s large Jewish community. But he soon found that he knew many Southerners in the city from the Jewish organizations and camps of his youth. While he dated lots of Northerners, he married a woman who grew up in a kosher home in Montgomery, Ala., a woman who shared his love of New York and homesickness for the South.
He likes like to tell a story of his son Joshua’s birth in New York City. In the delivery room, the thrilled father was holding his wife’s hand in one hand, and clutching a vial of North Carolina soil in his pocket in the other, so that his son wouldn’t be born entirely as a Yankee, he says with a wry smile.
When Josh was growing up and would go barefoot, or finish a bowl of grits, and later when he decided to attend the University of North Carolina, Evans and his wife Judith would comment, “The dirt is working.”
When the Evans family would have guests on Friday nights in their Manhattan apartment, he introduced the tradition of his parents’ Shabbat table, with everyone around the table holding hands during kiddush. He says that his guests “assume it’s a Southern Baptist thing,” but it’s actually something he picked up at a Jewish summer camp.
Evans, who has the uncommon distinction of having been awarded honorary doctorates from both Hebrew Union College and The Jewish Theological Seminary, is also the author of the highly-praised biography, “Judah P. Benjamin: The Jewish Confederate” and a collection of essays, “The Lonely Days Were Sundays: Reflections of a Jewish Southerner.” The title is a quote from his grandmother’s life story, about how she felt like an outsider on Sunday mornings, watching all the townspeople going to Church.
“We used to always joke that Eli would write thank-you notes for thank-you notes,” says Judith Ginsberg, executive director of Nash Family Foundation. For more than 10 years, while she served as executive director of The Covenant Foundation, Evans was the board chair, and they worked together closely.
“He’s very generous, witty and creative, and his graciousness and manners are legend. ... He was into media and technology early on, really a leader in trying new things that others weren’t trying. And his reach goes way beyond the Jewish world.”
Some years after his son’s birth, Evans used the soil he clutched in the delivery room to plant a tree in Israel, in his mother’s memory. Like most transplanted Southerners, he vows that he would never want to be buried in an anonymous site in New York. He’s drawn to the resting place of his parents and grandparents in Durham, now also the gravesite of his wife, who died tragically a few months ago.
“The tug of the South is still very strong on me,” Evans says. He and his wife had planned to eventually move back to North Carolina, but now he wants to stay in New York as long as his son, an actor, is in town. From his perch in Manhattan, he closely watches developments in the Jewish South, traveling, writing articles and speaking down there often as he’s working on a new book on the subject. In Gramercy Park, the spirit of the South is very much alive.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization