The process of researching history
Sunday night marks the beginning of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, and I just realized that apart from quoting the late Paul Greenberg, I have not written a lick about Arkansas’ Jewish history. So today I want to offer an overview of the sources available on the subject in Arkansas. I’m also going to break one of my cardinal rules of writing and talk about how the sausage gets made.
“Content, not process” is the rule I learned in history and biology decades ago at Mary Baldwin College, and while I still believe that writers should resist the urge to write about the process of writing and should absolutely never complain about it, I want to open up about the process of historical research because readers have asked about it and because it is so much fun. It’s more than fun. It sustains and consoles, though it sometimes horrifies.
For a quick chronological overview of the history of Jews in Arkansas, the first stop is the Central Arkansas Library System’s invaluable and ever-growing reference work, the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas. A note about the difference between the Encyclopedia of Arkansas and an online reference source such as Wikipedia: While lots of different people contribute articles to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, every article goes through a process of verification by qualified reviewers before publication.
Likewise, if the Encyclopedia of Arkansas publishes an error, the person who discovers the error calls it to the attention of one of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas’s professional editors, who have a specific process for correction.
By contrast, anyone can contribute directly to Wikipedia, and anyone can edit. It’s a great resource, but has to be approached with this caveat in mind: all of that wonderful information is crowd-sourced.
Simply titled “Jews,” the Encyclopedia of Arkansas’ entry is a feat of compression, running chronologically from Abraham Block’s arrival in Washington, Ark., by 1825, through the founding of each congregation in the state. The newest was founded in Bentonville in 2004.
A quick glance yields history that I didn’t know or had forgotten. For example, Jews founded a congregation at Camden in 1869, which makes sense given that it’s a river city (on the Ouachita) and a seat of commerce.
If it sounds like I’m training my successor, that’s the idea. She might not come along for 20 years, but continuity is the name of the game.
The key part of any Encyclopedia of Arkansas article is found at the bottom, under the heading “For additional information.” The works listed are the author’s sources, and the list for this entry is well done but not exhaustive. It directs the reader to the Arkansas Jewish History Collection at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, and to two books that would have been natural starting points before the Encyclopedia of Arkansas days:
Eli Evans’ “The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South” and Carolyn Gray LeMaster’s classic, “A Corner of the Tapestry: A History of the Jewish Experience in Arkansas, 1820s-1990s.”
LeMaster has her own entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. Her sister Ellen Gray does not, but deserves one. LeMaster was born in Pulaski County in 1927 and left school after 10th grade to help support her family, including her widowed mother.
After marrying and raising four children, she attended the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and became a journalist. Her lifelong affinity for the Jewish people came from her mother, and in 1984 LeMaster received a grant from the Arkansas Endowment for the Humanities to begin the research for “A Corner of the Tapestry,” which the University of Arkansas Press published in 1994.
According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, LeMaster visited 127 towns in Arkansas, wrote over 1,000 letters asking people for their stories, took a census of every Jewish cemetery in Arkansas, and read over 1,000 obituaries. Her research papers are held at the Butler Center.
A confession: It took me decades to realize that a researcher can casually read through a collection. New historians take note: You don’t have to have an agenda beforehand. No outline, no hypothesis, no theoretical framework needed. You don’t even have to know what your questions are.
If you’re interested in a time or a place or a person, and there’s a relevant collection, just go read. Serendipity is your friend. Most of my best finds have been accidents. I found Amanda Trulock in a footnote and, far more than a subject of research, that clear-eyed Yankee has been my companion for 23 years.
My research into southern Jewish history proceeds slowly, as I read letters between young Paul Greenberg and Carolyn Levy, who would become his wife.
It’s Oct. 1, 1962, and Paul, a new editorial writer at the Pine Bluff Commercial, has gone home to Shreveport for Rosh Hashanah, and is planning to come back to Shreveport for Yom Kippur. Oxford, Miss., is a riot zone as segregationists try to prevent James Meredith from attending the University of Mississippi.
Paul repeats to Carolyn (living in Manhattan) some phrases about Edwin Walker that Pine Bluff Commercial publisher Ed Freeman cut from an editorial over concerns about libel. Walker was the general who egged on segregationists, along with Mississippi governor Ross Barnett; Walker will perhaps be best known to the ages as the person who inspired the “Dr. Strangelove” character General Ripper. Sterling Hayden played the general.
That’s where I’m writing from, between Shreveport, Pine Bluff, and New York City at the beginning of what might have been the most terrifying month in human history: October 1962.