The Temple Bombing.

Five years ago, when a slim volume called Praying for Sheetrock appeared in my neighborhood bookstore, I wondered: What's this? A construction manual for born-again Christians? But the stark simplicity of its subtitle, "A Work of Non-Fiction," intrigued me. So I took it home and fell under the spell of Melissa Greene's luminous prose and her gripping tale of the civil rights era in McIntosh County, Georgia, a subtropical stretch of our Southern coastline I scarcely knew was there. Praying for Sheetrock did not remain a curiosity for long. It went on to spectacular reviews, becoming a finalist for the National Book Award--it should have won, I thought--and a significant milestone in the development of late-century literary non-fiction. Now comes The Temple Bombing, an account of the events surrounding the explosion that, on October 12, 1958, heavily damaged Atlanta's oldest synagogue and the fragile fabric of civility in the South's most progressive city.

The reform Jewish synagogue, invariably known as, simply, the Temple, had stood in "pillared, domed majesty" on a grassy him above Peachtree Street for the better part of a century when someone mined it with 50 sticks of dynamite, blowing out the white marble and red brick walls, destroying offices and Sunday school classrooms, flapping the stained-glass windows "like tablecloths shaken after dinner." An hour later, a caller claiming to be "General Gordon of the Confederate Underground" told a wire service reporter, This is the last empty building in Atlanta that we will bomb. We are going to blow up all Communist organizations. Negroes and Jews are hereby declared aliens."

General Gordon was evidently a figment of some fevered imagination, but eventually the police and FBI traced the bombing to five segregationists belonging to the National States' Rights Partly. Eventually, one of them--George Bright--was tried and acquitted by a jury of 12 white males. The others were released, with prosecutors confessing they had a "very weak, circumstantial case." The true bombers of the Atlanta Temple have never been identified.

Just as she did in her first book, Greene has handled this rich material in an unconventional manner, exploring a side of this story that might not have attracted another author. Being Jewish, Greene is at least as interested in what the bombing and its aftermath tell us about Atlanta's--and the South's--Jewish community during these years as she is in the more frequently explored reaches of racial conflict during the civil rights era.

I, too, am Jewish--in my case, more a cultural, than a religious, affiliation, which I owe largely to my father, who was utterly agnostic in the spiritual realm. But Ed Lukas was a committed defender of Jewish--and black--civil liberties. Indeed, during the period Greene recounts, he was the civil rights director and general counsel of the American Jewish Committee and a leader of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights. I can remember many an evening listening to his tales of events in Little Rock, Selma, Nashville, and Atlanta--stories often focused on Jewish families caught up in many of the dilemmas that Greene so shrewdly limns here.

I knew my father's ministrations were not entirely welcomed by many Southern Jews. The year of the Temple bombing, Rabbi William S. Malev of Houston declared that, while Southern Jews "have the sovereign and unalienable right to become martyrs in the cause of desegregation," he rejected "any claim on the part of the national `defense' organizations to impose martyrdom on the unwilling Jews of the South and to bask in their reflected gloty of their self-sacrifice." "[I]f they think so much of martyrdom," Malev continued, "they ought to come down South and try it for themselves."

If the civil rights struggle was both a triumph and a torment for Southern blacks, so it was a deeply ambiguous period for Southern Jews, who had carved out a rather special niche for themselves in the caste-ridden society of the post-civil War urban South. This was particularly true for German Jews, who had begun to emigrate to the United States after 1848. This community drew sharp distinctions between itself and the Eastern European Jews whose own hegira took place nearly a half-century later. The Germans often sneered at the newcomers' Yiddish as "piggish jargon," at their religious doctrines as "the shackles of medievalism," and, finally, at the Russian Jews themselves, whose names so often ended in "ki", as in "kikes." The Eastern European Jews, in turn, referred to the German Jews, with something less than affection, as the "Deitch-yiden."

One can understand--if not applaud--the anxieties of the assimilated German Jews when members of their community began to identify with the struggle of Southern blacks for voting rights, equal access to public accommodations, and equal educational opportunities. What would their identification with black rights do to the hard-won status of the German Jews in cities like Atlanta, New Orleans, Knoxville, and Savannah? Didn't they risk becoming pariahs again? Was it fair to ask that sacrifice of them, given the historic suffering of their people?

This is the nub of the social issue which Melissa Greene explores, for the Temple had been the religious headquarters, the very icon of Atlanta's German-Jewish community. Her evocation of the cloistered world of the "Deitch-yiden" matrons at lunch in the elegant dining room of Rich's Department Store is a marvelously executed riff, balancing social criticism and human empathy, imagining the German Jews' wish to enjoy the perquisites of their position without being bothered by the turmoil outside their gates.

"Like passengers on a cruise ship, the daily lunch crowd in Rich's Magnolia Room--with much clinking of silver against china, and chiming of ice cubes in brimming glasses, and chitchat between ladies tilted toward one another across little tables in the acute angles of intimacy--attended to their own wants.... [T]he Magnolia Room lunchers ignored the fact--for who wanted their noses rubbed in it all the time?--that outside the store windows a life-or-death battle raged: that some people clamored to be called human, and others conspired to deny them that."

If the Temple congregants wished to view this contentiousness only as observers, they were pushed in the opposite direction by Northern Jews and a few Southern Jewish activists. One such activist was Jacob Rothschild, the Atlanta Temple's rabbi. "Racky" Rothschild grew up "without money" in Pittsburgh, attended Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and served on Guadalcanal. His chief asset, to the Temple's board, had been that he was a thoroughly assimilated Jew--"a veteran, a practical man, not too otherworldly, not too Jewish, a regular Joe who played poker and football and just happened to be a rabbi." The board had not intended that he shake up its membership's comfortable world, merely that he assure their continued ascension to the upper tiers of Atlanta's social structure.

But Rothschild did exactly what had not been expected: He identified powerfully with the plight of Southern blacks, and repeatedly used his pulpit to champion their cause. It was widely believed that the bombing of the Temple was in retaliation for those acts of conscience.

Greene tracked down and interviewed George Bright, who, though acquitted at trial, certainly expresses many of the racist and anti-semitic notions that lay behind these events. This portion of the book is less successful than others: As hard as she strains for empathy, Greene's obvious contempt for Bright creeps through her prose and makes these sections both more stilted and less convincing than the passages on the Jewish community.

Although I found much to admire in The Temple Bombing, on balance I found it a less fully realized work than Praying for Sheetrock. One reason, perhaps, is that while Melissa Greene lived through the events she described in her first book, here she is reconstructing events which occurred decades ago. In any case, she seems less assured, less fully in control of her material. On too many occasions, she turns to interviews with academic authorities, or uses utterly unnecessary quotations, to buttress her own observations. But these are quibbles. She is a big new talent, rapidly rising in the ranks of those who practice the craft of evocative non-fiction.