Böcker av Sue Eisenfeld

Sue Eisenfeld is a Yankee by birth, a Virginian by choice, an urbanite who came to love the rural South, a Civil War buff, and a nonobservant Jewish woman. In Wandering Dixie, she travels to nine states, uncovering how the history of Jewish southerners converges with her personal story and the region''s complex, conflicted present. In the process, she discovers the unexpected ways that race, religion, and hidden histories intertwine. From South Carolina to Arkansas, she explores the small towns where Jewish people once lived and thrived. She visits the site of her distant cousin and civil rights activist Andrew Goodman''s murder during 1964''s Freedom Summer. She also talks with the only Jews remaining in some of the "lost" places, from Selma to the Mississippi Delta to Natchitoches, and visits areas with no Jewish community left-except for an old temple or overgrown cemetery. Eisenfeld follows her curiosity about Jewish Confederates and casts an unflinching eye on early southern Jews'' participation in slavery. Her travels become a journey of revelation about our nation''s fraught history and a personal reckoning with the true nature of America. 

For fifteen years Sue Eisenfeld hiked in Shenandoah National Park in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains, unaware of the tragic history behind the creation of the park. In this travel narrative, she tells the story of her on-the-ground discovery of the relics and memories a few thousand mountain residents left behind when the government used eminent domain to kick the people off their land to create the park.With historic maps and notes from hikers who explored before her, Eisenfeld and her husband hike, backpack, and bushwhack the hills and the hollows of this beloved but misbegotten place, searching for stories. Descendants recount memories of their ancestors "grieving themselves to death," and they continue to speak of their people''s displacement from the land as an untold national tragedy.Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal is Eisenfeld''s personal journey into the park''s hidden past based on her off-trail explorations. She describes the turmoil of residents'' removal as well as the human face of the government officials behind the formation of the park. In this conflict between conservation for the benefit of a nation and private land ownership, she explores her own complicated personal relationship with the park-a relationship she would not have without the heartbreak of the thousands of people removed from their homes.Sue Eisenfeld is a freelance writer, communications consultant, and faculty member in the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Gettysburg Review, and other publications. Her website is sueeisenfeld.com.