This moving narrative combines the memoir of Berk's immigrant mother with her own experiences:

My family was among those early Jewish pioneers in Florida. A cousin of mine got himself a wagon and drove through the hot streets of Tampa shouting: “Vatty mallons, vatty mallons,” the first to sell watermelon by the slice.
 

In Jacksonville in 1907, there was a lot to get used to: the whippings and horse-hidings that had replaced the now-outlawed duels; the public’s lust for lynching. The unresolved conflicts of the Civil War had left a thirst for violence in its wake. My mother Lara, who had not even known black people existed, was 16 when she heard her first, dreadful account of a lynching and it left her with a horror of male violence.
 

She worked side by side with her husband Bercu and bore him seven children. “Whenever you saw me,” she said, “it was one by the hand, one in my arms and one in my belly.” But his passionate ardor no less than his fiery temper echoed the violence she abhorred. “The hot pepper,” was what my grandmother called him.
 

The events of the early 20th century played out against the lives of this newly southern Jewish family. For them Leo Frank’s lynching and the subsequent riots in Atlanta were not much different from and just as immediate as the pogrom 10 years before in Kishinev had been. When victory came at the end of WWI, Bercu celebrated the first time he, a Jew, had been on the winning side.
 

One day towards the end of her life my mother said, “Why don’t you write my story? It’s very interesting.” I told her only she could write it. So a week later she handed me 67 pages of slanted script written in her own unique voice and language. CALL HER BLESSED presents this memoir embedded in my own narrative, which gives the background of the world in which she lived. My mother spoke little about her inner life; I wanted to depict her joys and losses, her struggles and sorrows as an eye-witness so that readers could see how a shy uncertain girl became the extraordinary woman who ended her story: “You get what you Build. That’s my Life.”

 

This Living Jewish history in a gripping true story of an extraordinary woman told in her own words and those of her daughter; pioneers in the 20th century South. The text contains over 160 original photos and illustrations.