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Book <strong>Review</strong>s 191<br />
Ashkenazi, Elliott, Editor.<br />
The Civil War Diary of Clara Solomon:<br />
Growing Up in New Orleans, 1861-1862.<br />
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.458 pages.<br />
Elliott Ashkenazi's subtitle, "Growing Up in New Orleans:' aptly<br />
encapsulates the central thrust of Clara Solomon's journal. As she<br />
wrote in her diary (which she addressed as "Dear Philomen") from<br />
mid-June 1861 through mid-July 1862, the precocious sixteen-yearold<br />
revealed as much about her anxiety over familial and peer relationships<br />
as she did her concerns for the Confede~acy that she held<br />
in such high esteem. Ashkenazi came across the journal as he was<br />
researching his earlier work on Louisiana's <strong>Jewish</strong> community' and<br />
he immediately recognized the value of Clara's perspective of life<br />
around her in Civil War New Orleans. The second of six daughters of<br />
a comfortable (at least in the antebellum years) merchant, Solomon<br />
Solomon, and his wife, Emma, Clara depicted intimate details of a<br />
life-style typifying that of many assimilated Crescent City Jews.<br />
The polyglot urbanity of their beloved city offered antebellum Jews<br />
acceptance and social access and allowed them to identify primarily<br />
as southerners without completely forsaking their Judaism. The intensity<br />
of this loyalty becomes clear to us when we find Clara signing<br />
her name, "Miss Clara Solomon, New Orleans, La., C.S.Aa1'(13)<br />
and observing that one family friend "has a fine boy who glories in<br />
the name 'Sumter Davis' [LevyIn(54). Like other Sephardic Jews of<br />
the city, the Solomons nevertheless maintained their ritual at Dispersed<br />
of Judah, the congregation largely underwritten by New<br />
Orleans's leading nineteenth-century philanthropist, Judah Touro.<br />
Although Clara's gentile classmates attended school on Saturday,<br />
like most <strong>Jewish</strong> girls Clara honored the Sabbath. On the other<br />
hand, she was not fond of attending Shabbat services and rarely<br />
went. When she did, she responded to the social realities, not the<br />
spiritual dimensions, of the experience. One Sabbath morning, for<br />
example, right after Clara and her older sister entered the "Holy
Change language