In Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War (U of SC Press 2024), Jason K. Friedman takes an unusual approach to combine the personal story of how he researched this book with the history of a Savannah family and Civil War battles. When Friedman purchases a home in Savannah’s historic district on Liberty Street, he discovers it was owned by a Sephardic Jewish family during the Civil War era, that of Solomon Cohen. Friedman becomes intrigued to know more about this family.
At the book’s center is Solomon Cohen’s son Gratz, a young man who loves boys during a time when it was dangerous and forbidden. A romantic idealist, Gratz has a defect in his feet that won’t allow him to join the Confederate cause as a soldier on the battlefield. He is not a healthy lad. Instead of enlisting, he goes to UVA to study literature, but sometimes finds himself too sick to attend class. He feels unfortunate not to be able to do his duty as a soldier or a student. A poet, he exhorts his fellow students:
Go, for your soldier brothers need you by their side;
Go, fight as we have fought and die and we have died.”
If need there be, a thousand deaths were better than disgrace;
Better that every man should die than live a conquered race;
Better a grave on the battle-field, a martyred hero’s fame.
Than all the acres in the land a legacy of shame.
Gratz’s poem issues a call to arms, but Friedman hears something else in these lines as well: That Gratz doesn’t foresee military victory, only a personal triumph over the fear of death. Gratz is obsessed with death. Friedman doesn’t “think he wants to die. He just can’t find a way, in this world, to live.” Friedman relates to Gratz:
I enter into Gratz’s secret heart and feel the shame I knew as a young man, that queer adolescents still feel even in these more liberated times. For here is what it comes down to—the feelings of not being able to man up, not being enough of a man.
In the end, Gratz does serve in the military as an aide de camp, which is a fitting job for a young man who loves to write. He is killed while serving, devastating his family.
Entwined throughout this thoroughly researched book are various threads, that of Friedman’s journey to various sites to learn more about the Cohen family, Gratz Cohen’s personal story, and detailed descriptions of the Civil War. Liberty Street is a notable additional to gay literature of the South.
Jason K. Friedman
Jason K. Friedman was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, and earned a B.A. from Yale and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. His book of stories, Fire Year, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Award. His work has also appeared in journals and periodicals including the New York Times, Moment, Tablet, The Gettysburg Review, Image, Fjords Review, Cimarron Review, and the Decadent Review, and has been anthologized in Best American Gay Fiction, The Queer South, and the cultural studies reader Goth. He’s also published two terrifying children’s books, Phantom Trucker and Haunted Houses. He lives in San Francisco with his husband, filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman.
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