A young girl stopped by her workplace to pick up her pay on Confederate Memorial Day, 1913 in Atlanta. She didn't make it out of the building alive. Her death set off one of the most infamous criminal cases of the 20th century. By the end of 1915 the Ku Klux Klan had restarted in her name and the man convicted of her killing was lynched near Mary's birthplace of Marietta, GA.
This is a story with a twist: Leo Frank, the man convicted of her murder, was Jewish. Almost everyone outside of Atlanta thought he was innocent. Kluger moves the story to Savannah and begins the novel with the arrival of another New York Jewish man down south, Seth Adler. By the time the fictionalized Leo Frank, Noah Berg, arrives in Savannah Seth is an accomplished lawyer entrenched in the Savannah power structure.
Kluger has crafted a gripping, interesting look at the Phagan/Frank case and at the Protestant/Jewish and White/Black tensions at play in the South in the 1910s. He wrote the book in the 1970s, before the latest round of drama in the case unfolded, so his conclusion is a little off from what most historians now believe actually happened that fateful Saturday.
There are problems with the book. Only Toni Morrison and Joe Chandler Harris can capture the patois of the rural South. Kluger tries and fails. The ending is a little pat. This is an interesting, captivating piece of historical fiction.
This is a story with a twist: Leo Frank, the man convicted of her murder, was Jewish. Almost everyone outside of Atlanta thought he was innocent. Kluger moves the story to Savannah and begins the novel with the arrival of another New York Jewish man down south, Seth Adler. By the time the fictionalized Leo Frank, Noah Berg, arrives in Savannah Seth is an accomplished lawyer entrenched in the Savannah power structure.
Kluger has crafted a gripping, interesting look at the Phagan/Frank case and at the Protestant/Jewish and White/Black tensions at play in the South in the 1910s. He wrote the book in the 1970s, before the latest round of drama in the case unfolded, so his conclusion is a little off from what most historians now believe actually happened that fateful Saturday.
There are problems with the book. Only Toni Morrison and Joe Chandler Harris can capture the patois of the rural South. Kluger tries and fails. The ending is a little pat. This is an interesting, captivating piece of historical fiction.
