A Corner of the Tapestry

$39.95

A History of the Jewish Experience in Arkansas, 1820s–1990s
Carolyn Gray LeMaster
632 pages
978-1-68226-190-3 (paper)
July 1994

 

One of the most comprehensive studies ever done on a state’s Jewish community, A Corner of the Tapestry is the story—untold until now—of the Jews who helped to settle Arkansas and who stayed and flourished to become a significant part of the state’s history and culture. LeMaster has spent much of the past sixteen years compiling and writing this saga. Data for the book have been collected in part from the American Jewish Archives, American Jewish Historical Society, the stones in Arkansas’s Jewish cemeteries, more than fifteen hundred articles and obituaries from journals and newspapers, personal letters from hundreds of present and former Jewish Arkansans, congregational histories, census and court records, and some four hundred oral interviews conducted in a hundred cities and towns in Arkansas. This meticulous work chronicles the lives and genealogy of not only the highly visible and successful Jews who settled in Arkansas, but also those who comprised the warp and woof of society. It is a decidedly significant contribution to Arkansas history as well as to the wider study of Jews in the nation.

Carolyn Gray LeMaster (1927 – 2013) was the leading chronicler of Jewish life in Arkansas through her books, articles, and lectures. She was the author of The Ottenheimers of Arkansas.

“. . . with one possible exception, it is the largest history of a Jewish state community that has ever been written . . . [It] is a sourcebook of great value . . . the research is detailed; facts are voluminous enough to satisfy any historian.”
—Dr. Jacob R. Marcus, American Jewish Archives

“It is one of the most thoroughly researched manuscripts that I have ever read. In addition to filling a void in the state’s history, it will also serve as an excellent model for regional history in the South.”
—Dr. C. Fred Williams, Department of History, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

“I find [the] work well crafted and extremely extraordinary in both its extensiveness and content . . . [it is] a work unlikely to be duplicated for generations to come.”
—Charles Elias Archivist, Temple B’nai Israel, Little Rock, Arkansas

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