As anyone who has been in her presence knows, Janice Rothschild Blumberg’s stories have an “in the room where it happened” quality.
This chronicler of Atlanta and Southern Jewish history is marking the centennial of an extraordinary life that provided her with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of material.
Interviews with Janice are tutorials on subjects you do not learn about growing up in the North and may know little about even after living for many years in the 404 area code.
Get The AJT Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories
Free Sign Up
Born Janice Brown Oettinger, her century began on Feb. 13, 1924.
Atlanta’s Jewish community, which then numbered about 11,000, had yet to recover from the lynching of Leo Frank not nine years earlier.
On Aug. 17, 1915, Frank was hung from a tree in a Marietta woods, by a Cobb County cabal furious that Georgia’s governor had commuted the death sentence Frank received when convicted (wrongly, in the judgment of many) of murder in the death of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, an employee of the Atlanta pencil factory where the Jewish native of New York was manager.
“As to how the community talked about it when I was growing up: it didn’t,” Janice said several years ago. “I first heard about it in 1939 in the course of a required course for freshmen at UGA entitled ‘Contemporary Georgia.’ When I asked my mother if she had ever heard of Leo Frank, she said, ‘Of course, dear. You know Miss Lucille.’”
Referring to Alfred Uhry [the playwright whose “Atlanta trilogy” includes “Parade,” based on the Frank case], Janice said, “Both of us knew ‘Miss Lucille’ all of our lives, but it wasn’t unusual for a woman the age that she was when we knew her to be widowed, so we never thought to ask what became of her husband.”
Janice has witnessed Atlanta’s Jewish population grow and the community find its voice, becoming outward facing and publicly engaged.
A significant piece of that…
Read the full article here
