Jason Friedman grew up in Savannah, Georgia, became a short story writer, winning the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction with the collection “Fire Year,” and lives in San Francisco with his husband. Wishing to reconnect with his home place, Friedman bought a condo, on Liberty Street, in historic downtown Savannah, the 1975 Greek Revival Solomon Cohen House.
Friedman himself of course already knew a great deal about growing up Jewish in Georgia, and he became intrigued by the story of the Cohen family. The patriarch, Solomon Cohen, was a hugely successful lawyer, banker, politician, postmaster of Savannah before and during the Civil War, president of the synagogue and a founder of the Georgia Historical Society. He was also a slaveowner.
The Cohens’ two dozen enslaved people were of course, urban: some were household help and others rented out for work to others, but slaves nevertheless, and Solomon was convinced, for obvious financial reasons and, after research into theological writings, for sophisticated religious reasons, that slavery was a proper, even benevolent system, and best for all concerned. Solomon was thus a dedicated Confederate and so was his son, Gratz, who, we are told early on, died of a gunshot wound, in North Carolina, near Bentonville, March 19, 1865, in the last weeks of the Civil War.
Friedman became interested, then determined, to learn all there was to know about Gratz. The young man had been a student at The University of Virginia and so was written about in “The University Memorial,” a volume of contemporaneous accounts of UVA students killed in the war. There were also obituaries in Savannah. He found troves of letters from Gratz, and for background consulted serious works such as “The Jewish Confederates” and “American Jewry and the Civil War.”
A biography of Gratz Cohen is created. He was, in photos and portraits, a “beautiful” young man, beyond handsome. He was also rather frail, often sick with ailments of the lung. He was sensitive, kept a journal, wrote poetry, a novel, and volumes of letters. He had what we would call flat feet, in those days not curable and very painful. Gratz served as an aide de camp to generals and, although a good rider, he could not march or even stand guard duty. Thus, in short, he had no business being a soldier. Why did he persist?
Throughout the study Friedman cites letters and poetry that suggest intimacy on Gratz’s part with other men. In letters, Gratz expresses a powerful fondness for his black valet, Louis, and affection for friends in Savannah, in the Army and at UVA. Friedman never says it outright, but seems to be suggesting that Gratz, perhaps unhappy with the way he had been living, had served and died to prove he was, by the standards of the time, a real man.
