Members of the Tribe by Zev Chafets Read Free Book Online Page B

unwilling to consign any part oftheir little synagogue to a museum. Instead, they preferred to reminisce.
    “When I was a boy, we used to walk to this shul every Saturday morning,” said one old-timer, with a distant look in his eyes. “ ’Course we didn’t have no automobile back then anyways, just this ole Cushman motor scooter my daddy had is all.”
    “Yeah, his daddy was somethin’ else,” said another man. “I remember back during the Six-Day War, he packed his forty-five and flew over to Israel to fight. Hell, he must have been in his seventies at least.”
    The others nodded, recalling the way it had been back when there were still enough Jews to make a minyan, and young fellows didn’t come by to inform them that they were a dying breed. Macy, sensitive to their mood, didn’t push them. “Y’all talk this over amongst yourselves and let me know,” he said. “We’re not talkin’ about anything urgent, just trying to plan for the future is all.” We shook hands all around and then walked out into the overcast Meridian morning, climbed into the van, and headed down the highway for Jackson.
    It had been an exhausting few days out on the road in the Dixie diaspora, and Vicki napped in the backseat while Macy and I discussed the next stage of his plans. For the foreseeable future he would be busy with the new project, crisscrossing Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and western Tennessee, touring museums, spending interminable hours writing grant proposals, and meeting with lawyers, contractors, and benefactors. No one would pay him for his time or trouble, and he didn’t expect them to. He was merely fulfilling an obligation. As we talked, I looked at him closely, as old friends entering middle age sometimes do, and I saw that he had lost his country-boy looks. I was startled by something I saw in him. Balding, with a gray beard and prominent nose, Macy B. looked like a Jew.
    Strangely, he wasn’t sure that he felt like one. “Sometimes I don’t even know if I believe in all this,” he said in a soft voice, careful not to wake Vicki. “I mean, I’m not religious. I don’t know Hebrew or anything. You come right down to it, I’m a Jewish illiterate. And I guarantee you, I never planned my life this way. I got out of college and I thought about a dozen different things, but I sure as hell didn’t think I’d wind up doing this. I’vebeen involved in Jewish things now for goin’ on twenty-five years, goin’ back to my youth group days, and I’m amazed that I have. My only reason, I guess, is that I’m doing it for my kids.”
    “Hey, Mace, you were doing this for more than fifteen years before you had any kids,” I reminded him, and he thought about that for a long moment.
    “Damn, boy, you right,” he said in his squeaky southern twang, and he turned to face me with a grin. “I guess I just got me one of them Jewish hearts everybody keeps talkin’ about.”

CHAPTER TWO
THE GREAT
IOWA JEW HUNT
    I left Macy and flew up the Mississippi to Moline, Illinois. My destination was the Stardust Motel, where I was supposed to meet Lori Posin of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). At the time Lori was based in Washington, but she spent most of her time on the road, searching out and organizing Jews in the boondocks of America. At AIPAC they call it Jew hunting. I came to Moline to join her annual Midwestern Jew Hunt.
    The idea was proposed to me by AIPAC’s director, Tom Dine, over drinks at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Dine is a Brooks Brothers Jew in his forties, a bright, fastidious fellow with a highly developed aesthetic sense, who judges synagogues by their architecture and rabbis by their political connections. In another Jewish organization, Dine’s unemotional approach might be a drawback. But AIPAC is about politics, and Dine is a consummate Washington insider. Since taking over in 1980, he has turned the group into a sophisticated, powerful voice for