Chicken Dreaming Corn (2004) by Roy Hoffman

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Chicken Dreaming Corn (2004)

by Roy Hoffman

Mobile, Alabama

Alabama: 17/18

   This is the first book wholly centered on the "Jewish experience" in this Chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  I myself have family who settled in Atlanta and later in Florida, so I have some idea about Southern Jews (I'm Jewish), but Chicken Dreaming Corn is a fairly conventional first-generation immigration novel about a family of Romanian Jews living in Mobile Alabama immediately before and during the Great Depression.

  Other than physical location there isn't much to distinguish the events here from similar titles from the New York chapter. Historically, Jews were prevented from owning land in much of Europe, and often physically restricted to urban environments, meaning that few Jewish emigrants became farmers in the United States.  In rural areas, they were travelling salesman and shop keepers.  The frontier nature of the Deep South/Cotton Belt in the early 19th century meant that successful Jews did become plantation owners, and the vice president of the Confederacy was Jewish.  Additionally, Jewish merchants and bankers played a key role in financing crops like cotton and getting them to domestic and foreign markets.

  This book though is just a narrowly depicted family history with none of that complexity of the Jewish experience in the South.