In 1992, composer-lyricist Lou Rosen wrote a song called "WhiteFlight." As he listened to his own words, he realized they werefilled with the weight of unchallenged assumptions that he'd beencarrying around, in his heart and in his head, for more than twodecades.
Rosen, 43, had grown up on the South Side in a neighborhood nowcalled Calumet Heights, a triangular area that stretches from 83rdStreet to 95th Street and from Stony Island Avenue on the west to theChicago Skyway on the east.
In the 1950s and early '60s, this was a predominantly Jewish,middle-class neighborhood anchored by a thriving synagogue, a Jewishcommunity center and strong public schools. By the summer of 1968,when the National Guard was patrolling Stony Island and Cottage Grovein the wake of the riots that followed the assassination of the Rev.Martin Luther King Jr., the racial balance had shifted swiftly andradically. And by 1970, the doors of the synagogue had closed andthe building was sold to the Chicago Board of Education.
The blacks who had moved into the neighborhood were middle class(as they are today), just like the Jews they were replacing. But inthe society at large, there was an atmosphere of fear. And the lackof any tradition of integrated living only fed that fear.
Looking back, Rosen believed that things didn't have to turn outas they did. And he realized he still harbored resentment againstsome of the Jewish families, as well as the charismatic young rabbi,who fled at the first signs of change. He remembered the dynamics ofthe shift from white to black at his own high school. And he thoughtabout his parents, who, along with a small number of other families,did not move out, at least not right away.
"With everything I did, the road eventually led back to thissingle event, this single period in my life," Rosen said. And fromthis obsession emerged a book, The South Side: The RacialTransformation of an American Neighborhood (Ivan R. Dee, $25).Mixing historical fact and fiction, it's a dramatic, multivoiced lookat what went wrong.
Rosen, who has lived in New York for many years, spent much ofthe 1980s and early '90s writing music for the theater, includingnumerous productions at the Goodman Theatre, as well as the New YorkShakespeare Festival, the Guthrie Theatre and Lincoln Center Theatre.In 1995 he received a grant of $10,000 under the National Endowmentfor the Arts' New American Works program, which was designed toencourage innovative projects in opera and musical theater.
Rosen's proposal to the NEA contained the seeds of what wouldbecome his book. But by the time the money came through, he hadalready begun traveling and interviewing people, black and white,about their memories of the neighborhood and about the time thatcontinued to haunt him. And the final shape of the project changed.
"It had become a consuming experience, and a very emotional one,for myself, as well as for the people I talked to," Rosen recalledduring a recent visit to Chicago. "In the 30 years that hadintervened, no one had ever talked to any of the people who were partof this whole change - about what had happened, why it had happened,what they remembered, what they regretted. And few had askedthemselves about the upheaval. So I became the fortunate recipientof tremendous self-revelation. And the passions still burned deeply- the sense of loss and anger and of a missed opportunity."
Rosen quickly gave up on the idea of musicalizing his material."Just the plain voices on a printed page seemed most direct andaffecting," he said.
One of Rosen's crucial decisions was to create 15 compositecharacters from the nearly 70 people spanning two generations (hisparents' and his own) he had questioned. Nine of the characters inthe book represent the Jewish community (including the narrator, aclear stand-in for Rosen himself); six represent the black community,most of them Rosen's teenage contemporaries, now in their 40s. Therealso is one brief but pivotal monologue by the rabbi (with afictional name, Aaron Fineman), whose presence hovers powerfully.
Rosen is well-aware of the recent discussions about thepotentially unholy mixing of history and fiction, but he said the useof composites in what is essentially a dramatic "script" wasessential.
"Coming from a theatrical background, I understood that I neededto lead people through a very direct story line by letting themfollow a limited number of individuals," Rosen said. "And what wasstartling was how similar many of the conversations I had were - tothe point where nearly all the whites I spoke to referred to their`dream house' and all the blacks talked about coming to `dreamland.'"
The book turned into a voyage of discovery and revelation forRosen.
"I went back to the synagogue, which is now a school," Rosenrecalled. "And the principal, a black woman who had not livedthrough the changes in the neighborhood, took me on a tour of theplace, which was essentially unchanged. I sensed her tremendouspride in the school, and felt she wanted me to have a good impressionof it and to know it was being taken care of. She was curious aboutthe building's transformation. And there was this feeling, in bothof us I think, that we were trying to make each other feel welcome."
Rosen had no direct contacts with the black community of CalumetHeights.
"I had some black friends in school, but we didn't socializebeyond the classroom," he said. "That was the nature of thecommunity and of the volatility of the times. But there was ateacher I'd always liked who had lived on my block since the late1960s, and I looked him up in the phone book and started with him.We hadn't spoken for 24 years when I arrived at his door, and wespent the next five hours talking. Up until then, I had never had aclue about what happened as seen from the other (black) perspective.
"One of the things I learned was that the middle-class blackswho moved into the area didn't have integration as their main goal.They just wanted a better home and a better community, and if it wasto be mixed, fine, but if not, that was fine, too. However, many ofthem didn't trust the public schools, so they put their kids inprivate or parochial schools. And that, along with the flight of theJewish community, led to a sharp fall in enrollment and academicstandards in the public schools. I had never understood all this.
"Look, the reality of it is this," Rosen said. "Few of us,black or white, live our lives as foot soldiers for the largersocietal good. We tend to focus on what's best for our families andour kids."
To some extent, this realization has also allowed Rosen to makepeace with the "organized religion" that was closest to him.
"I suppose on some deep level this book is a metaphor for theson confronting the father," Rosen said. "Like many of mygeneration, I blamed the Jewish community for not living up to itsideals. But as the rabbi said to me, `There comes a time when everygeneration of fathers disappoints the sons . . . and the sons mustlearn that the fathers have clay feet.'
"I began to realize that I was on a very Jewish search and thatI had to find my way to some level of acceptance of fallibility, tosome form of deep compassion for my own community," Rosen said.
"I also realized this book had become an imaginary conversationbetween two communities - a conversation that should have happened,but never did."
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