Tova Mirvis

The Ladies Auxiliary

An Excerpt, Part 1 of 2

We knew the city as well as we knew our own faces, could map each turn and bump in the roads the way we followed the curves of our chins. Memphis is built on a bluff, a high-rising strip of land that overlooks the Mississippi River, shielding us from the tornadoes that sweep across Arkansas every year just as spring is around the corner. When the warning sirens ring, winds hurl and rain pounds against our thick roofs, we breathe easier up here on this God-given piece of land. When it is done with, when the skies lighten again to their usual peaceful blue and the trees stop their frantic swaying, we open our doors to see that once again, we have been passed over.

Memphis folds slowly off the Mississippi, whose murky waters flow on to larger, faster places. Along the riverbanks, tall office buildings, luxury hotels, and parking garages have sprung up only recently, changing the sleepy streets once filled with general stores, rundown music clubs, and pawnshops into a city that could have been anywhere. With this, the city was transformed; cars sped up, people walked faster, too hurried to stop by or wave hello anymore. But Memphis doesn't seem ready for the glass and steel buildings, the eight-lane highway and the new sports stadium. It is like a child dressed in adult clothing, too big and too old, too soon.

From the river, the city spreads out, east, north and south. We aren't the only ones who live in East Memphis—we are the few among the many non-Jews—but still we exist as a city within a city, with fortress walls surrounding us on all sides, drawing divisions in our minds if not in our yards. The only thing that has seeped in is a southern flavor, creating a strange new combination. And after living here for so long, who can remember what originally was ours and what was theirs?

Because no one knows why Orthodox Jews settled in Memphis while everyone else headed to New York or Chicago, the community seems dropped like manna from heaven. It is said that the early Jews came because someone had a cousin here (maybe a dry goods peddler, maybe a textile merchant), but though many have tried, no family has laid definitive claim to this cousin. Once our families came, they stayed, spreading out and multiplying, sinking new roots into this soil and making it their own. After a few generations, the lines between families blurred, melting us into one; in Memphis, Levys become Friedmans become Sheinbergs become Levys again.

The thought of anyone leaving was impossible. We hadn't built this city for nothing, all our history and tradition to end with us. Moving away a few years, we understood. But the children always came back, carrying our community and our history forward. We saw ourselves as the Jerusalem of the South, our families part of a chain of Jewish Memphians that would extend into the future forever, as long and as far away as God in Heaven.

When it didn't happen that way, it was the last thing we had expected. Maybe we heard the warning signs, maybe we saw the darkening skies and felt the pattering of rain. But even so, it was as if we were watching from beneath the green-gray waters of the Mississippi. Later, it was all we could think about. Was it something we had done? Or something we hadn't done? Was it because of us all along? These things we think about now. But at the time, all we could see was that we were losing our children. And so what else was there to do?