Eli Evans, 85, ‘poet laureate’ of the Jews of the South
Eli N. Evans, an author and memoirist who explored through the lens of his family the history of the Jews of the American South — a population that has been called the Dixie Diaspora — died July 26 at a hospital in New York City. He was 85.
The cause was complications from COVID-19, said his son, Josh Evans.
Mr. Evans was a Yale-trained lawyer who made his professional life in Washington, as a speechwriter for President Lyndon B. Johnson, and later in New York, where he was president of the Charles H. Revson Foundation, a philanthropic organization where he served as president from 1977 to 2003.
But his heart remained forever planted in the South. He was born in North Carolina into one of the many Jewish families whose stories were often overlooked amid the better-known narratives of immigrants who escaped pogroms and persecution in Europe and made new lives in the American Northeast. Mr. Evans recorded those untold stories in “The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South,” a book first published in 1973 and released again in 1997 and 2005.
“The Jews of the South have found their poet laureate,” the Israeli statesman and diplomat Abba Eban was said to have remarked of Mr. Evans.
He described the Jewish South as “my Yoknapatawpha,” a reference to the fictional Mississippi county that was the setting of many of the greatest works of William Faulkner. In “The Provincials,” Mr. Evans evoked the South as he, his parents, his grandparents, and generations of Jews before them had known it, weaving autobiography and history to produce a foundational text of the history of Jews in the Southern United States.
It “explores the nuances of Southern Jewish identity,” a writer for New York Jewish Week once observed, “and belongs on bookshelves next to Irving Howe’s classic ‘World of Our Fathers,’ ” the seminal 1976 history of the immigration of Eastern European Jews to the United States.
Mr. Evans offered his family as evidence that “Jews in the South are not aliens in the Promised Land, as some would have you believe,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1997, but rather “part of the bone and marrow of the place.”
To write his book, he traveled through the history of his family and 7,000 miles from Virginia to Texas, interviewing not only “Jews of all ages but also the black ministers and militants, Klansmen and filing station attendants, farmers, churchwomen, and postmasters” who shared their world.
Calvin Trillin, a humorist and staff writer for the New Yorker magazine who has written about the arrival of his Eastern European forebears in the United States via the port of Galveston, Texas, said in an interview that Mr. Evans’s book “made a big difference in trying to understand my family’s story.”
“Like a lot of people from that background,” he added, “my knowledge of my family sort of stopped at water’s edge.”
Antisemitism was real in the South, but so, too, Mr. Evans wrote, was philosemitism. There were farmers, he recalled, who regarded Jews as God’s chosen people and asked his grandfather to bless their children in Hebrew. The grandfather would oblige, singing “a beautiful brachah in his best tenor,” Mr. Evans wrote, “just like on the Caruso records he owned.”
He saw himself not as a “Southern Jew” but rather a “Jewish Southerner,” one who had “inherited the Jewish longing for a homeland,” he wrote, “while being raised with the Southerner’s sense of home.”