Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War

Purchasing a historic Savannah home unlocks the sweeping story of a Southern Jewish family

As Jason K. Friedman renovated his flat in a grand townhouse in his hometown of Savannah, Georgia, he discovered a portal to the past.The Cohens, part of a Sephardic community in London, arrived in South Carolina in the mid-1700s; became founding members of Charleston’s Jewish congregation; and went on to build home, community, and success in Savannah.

In Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War Friedman takes the reader on a personal journey to understand the history of the Cohens. At the center of the story is a sensitive young man pulled between love and duty, a close-knit family straining under moral and political conflicts, and a city coming into its own. Friedman draws on letters, diaries, and his experiences traveling from Georgia to Virginia, uncovering hidden histories and exploring the ways place and collective memory haunt the present. At a moment when the hard light of truth shines on gauzy Lost-Cause myths, Liberty Street is a timely work of historical sleuthing.

Jason K. Friedman is the author of the story collection Fire Year (Sarabande, 2013), which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Award, as well as the children’s books Phantom Trucker and Haunted Houses. He earned a B.A. from Yale and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.His work has appeared in the New York Times, Moment, Tablet, San Francisco Chronicle, Gettysburg Review, Image, South Carolina Review, Mission at Tenth, Jonathan, Fjords Review, Decadent Review, and Cimarron Review, and has been anthologized in Best American Gay Fiction, The Queer South, and the cultural studies reader Goth. He lives in San Francisco with his husband, filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman.