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recently the temple had been turned over to a local man with an interest in historical renovation who promised to maintain it as a Port Gibson monument.
    We found the restoration man at the temple. He was a Faulkneresque old gent named Bill, dressed in work clothes and sporting a porkpie hat. Macy greeted him warmly, turning up his good ole boy personality half a notch. Carpenters were already tearing up the floor, and the two men sat down to go over the plans.
    “Looks like y’all doin’ a great job,” Macy said, and Bill nodded happily. “Yessir, won’t be long before this ole church is as good as new.” Macy made no comment, but a few minutes later, when Bill again referred to the building as a church, Macy couldn’t keep silent.
    “Now Bill, I don’t mean to be disrespectful at all, but the correct name for this building is a synagogue.”
    “Synagogue? Not a temple?”
    “Temple is all right, too. But not church,” Macy said with polite firmness.
    “Well, I’ll go with temple, ah guess,” said Bill. “It’s easier to say.”
    Macy shot him a grin of southern complicity. “Yep, easier to spell, too.”
    While Macy busied himself with the blueprints, Vicki and I went for a walk. Port Gibson is lucky that U. S. Grant never got downtown, which is depressingly ugly even by the exacting standards of rural Mississippi. Many of the stores along Main Street were boarded up, and most of the others had display windows so dirty you had to go inside to see what they were displaying. Here and there dispirited blacks meandered down the dusty street and an occasional dump truck rumbled by, but nothing broke the oppressive silence of the town. Even Vicki, who was raised in Mississippi, seemed taken aback by the utter hopelessness of the scene.
    Vicki told me that years ago, when Port Gibson was a thriving place, many of the stores downtown had been owned by Jews. As we walked down Main Street, we searched for vestiges of the Jewish mercantile past that might belong in Macy’s museum, and in the middle of the block she spied one—a sign that said FRISHMAN ’ S DRY GOODS .
    Frishman’s turned out to be an old-fashioned department store, totally empty of customers. A black salesman dozed in front of a full-length mirror in the shoe department, a peroxide blond woman of indeterminate age arranged merchandise in a bin, and at the front of the store a man in his late fifties leaned over the counter in an almost stupefied state of boredom. He had thinning brown hair combed in a George Wallace pompadour, and his face showed squint lines from innumerable eyefuls of Chesterfield smoke. He wore a cheap sport jacket, and I would have been willing to bet that he had a service tattoo on his forearm.
    When we entered the store the man regarded us with faint interest, perhaps taking us for travelers with a sudden rip or stain, in the market for an emergency replacement. But when Vicki told him that she was a museum curator interested in the sign outsideand asked permission to take a photograph, he lapsed back into apathy. “Y’all welcome to take your pitcher,” he said in a soupy drawl.
    “Do you have any idea what happened to the Frishman family that used to own this store?” Vicki asked. The man looked at her closely through the cigarette smoke. “Why do you ask?” he said, showing curiosity for the first time.
    Vicki explained that she was collecting material about southern Jews and their history. “I’m a Frishman,” he said after a moment’s hesitation, and Vicki blinked in surprise. Macy had briefed us on the Jews of Port Gibson, and there weren’t supposed to be any Frishmans left. Finding one behind the counter of this old-fashioned store was exciting, and Vicki reintroduced us, mentioning that I was from Jerusalem. The man accepted the news calmly, as if Israelis were frequent shoppers at his dry goods emporium, but Vicki was undeterred by his indifference. For the next fifteen minutes, she bombarded him with