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Members of the Tribe
Seth Adler, setting out alone from New York in the latter part of the nineteenth century as a young Jew in quest of a freer, open life in the South land, was sure all adversity could be overcome by courage and perseverance. In his struggle to build a place for himself, first as an enterprising merchant and then as a skillful lawyer in Savannah, he meets both kindness and cruelty in winning the respect, however grudging at times, of the Gentile community. And then Noah Berg, a fellow Jew, comes to town.
A generation younger than Seth, Noah advances by ingenuity and drive to the position of superintendent of a soda-pop producing factory without ever coming to terms with the Christian society that surrounds him. Early one Sunday morning in the spring of 1913, a pretty teenage employee named Jean Dugan is found murdered in the basement of Noah's factory. Based on a thin tissue of circumstantial evidence and a sizable dose of latent anti-Semitism,police soon charge Noah with the crime. Saving Noah's neck becomes attorney Seth Adler's consuming mission.
Members of the Tribe is, on one level, the terrifying story of a murder trial in which a community's outrage overwhelms its allegiance to due process of law as a governing moral tenet. But the courtroom is only the staging ground -and the trial the climactic encounter - in the moving ordeal that has been Seth Adler's life as a stranger in his adopted homeland.
His adventures, interwoven with America's social, political, and economic life at its most tumultuous,are sustained by a conviction that what the Jews of this nation share in spirit with their countrymen matters far more than what separates them. Yet the question abides, as this powerful and memorable novel closes,whether even America possesses the moral stamina not to seek and destroy scapegoats when a dark hour arrives.
Much of the novel is based on actual events.
A generation younger than Seth, Noah advances by ingenuity and drive to the position of superintendent of a soda-pop producing factory without ever coming to terms with the Christian society that surrounds him. Early one Sunday morning in the spring of 1913, a pretty teenage employee named Jean Dugan is found murdered in the basement of Noah's factory. Based on a thin tissue of circumstantial evidence and a sizable dose of latent anti-Semitism,police soon charge Noah with the crime. Saving Noah's neck becomes attorney Seth Adler's consuming mission.
Members of the Tribe is, on one level, the terrifying story of a murder trial in which a community's outrage overwhelms its allegiance to due process of law as a governing moral tenet. But the courtroom is only the staging ground -and the trial the climactic encounter - in the moving ordeal that has been Seth Adler's life as a stranger in his adopted homeland.
His adventures, interwoven with America's social, political, and economic life at its most tumultuous,are sustained by a conviction that what the Jews of this nation share in spirit with their countrymen matters far more than what separates them. Yet the question abides, as this powerful and memorable novel closes,whether even America possesses the moral stamina not to seek and destroy scapegoats when a dark hour arrives.
Much of the novel is based on actual events.
471 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1977
1 person is currently reading
19 people want to read
About the author
Richard Kluger
29 books55 followersRichard Kluger is an American social historian and novelist who, after working as a New York journalist and publishing executive, turned in mid-career to writing books that have won wide critical acclaim. His two best known works are Simple Justice, considered the definitive account of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision outlawing racially segregated public schools, and Ashes to Ashes, a critical history of the cigarette industry and its lethal toll on smokers, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
Born in Paterson, N.J., Kluger grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Princeton University, where he chaired The Daily Princetonian. As a young journalist, he wrote and edited for The Wall Street Journal, the pre-Murdoch New York Post and Forbes magazine, and became the last literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune and its literary supplement, Book Week. When the Tribune folded, Kluger entered the book industry, rising to executive editor of Simon and Schuster, editor-in-chief of Atheneum, and publisher of Charterhouse Books.
Moved by the cultural upheavals sweeping across the U.S., Kluger left publishing and devoted five years to writing Simple Justice, which The Nation hailed as “a monumental accomplishment” and the Harvard Law Review termed “a major contribution to our understanding of the Supreme Court.” It was a finalist for the National Book Award, as was Kluger’s second nonfiction work, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. It was followed by Ashes to Ashes and three other well received works of history,
Seizing Destiny , about the relentless expansion of America’s territorial boundaries; The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek, about a tragic clash between white settlers and tribal natives in territorial Washington, and Indelible Ink, about publisher John Peter Zenger and the origins of press freedom in America.
Of his seven novels, the most widely read were Members of the Tribe, warmly praised by the Chicago Tribune said, and The Sheriff of Nottingham, which Time called “richly imagined and beautifully written.” He also co-authored two novels with his wife Phyllis, a fiber artist and herself the author of two books on needlework design. The Klugers live in Berkeley.
Born in Paterson, N.J., Kluger grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Princeton University, where he chaired The Daily Princetonian. As a young journalist, he wrote and edited for The Wall Street Journal, the pre-Murdoch New York Post and Forbes magazine, and became the last literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune and its literary supplement, Book Week. When the Tribune folded, Kluger entered the book industry, rising to executive editor of Simon and Schuster, editor-in-chief of Atheneum, and publisher of Charterhouse Books.
Moved by the cultural upheavals sweeping across the U.S., Kluger left publishing and devoted five years to writing Simple Justice, which The Nation hailed as “a monumental accomplishment” and the Harvard Law Review termed “a major contribution to our understanding of the Supreme Court.” It was a finalist for the National Book Award, as was Kluger’s second nonfiction work, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. It was followed by Ashes to Ashes and three other well received works of history,
Seizing Destiny , about the relentless expansion of America’s territorial boundaries; The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek, about a tragic clash between white settlers and tribal natives in territorial Washington, and Indelible Ink, about publisher John Peter Zenger and the origins of press freedom in America.
Of his seven novels, the most widely read were Members of the Tribe, warmly praised by the Chicago Tribune said, and The Sheriff of Nottingham, which Time called “richly imagined and beautifully written.” He also co-authored two novels with his wife Phyllis, a fiber artist and herself the author of two books on needlework design. The Klugers live in Berkeley.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 30, 2023
This author kept going on rants about various topics. Don’t want to know this much about soda, know way too much about social injustice, and prefer to have a little bit more about the internal workings of the characters.
Displaying 1 of 1 review