At the age of eighteen I hadn’t intended to escape the South, but that’s what I ended up doing. Fleeing from the good son that I was, and from a small stifling place where everyone knew me better than I knew myself, or thought they did.

Thirty-five years later, my husband and I bought a flat in an old house in my hometown of Savannah. I was back. But the foothold I’d gotten in the past turned out to be from a more remote time than I’d expected.

Also available from University of South Carolina Press

This essay, which Moment magazine edited expertly and made look really great, is a taste of the research I’ve been doing over the last few years about the man who had my Savannah townhouse built–the tragedy of his life and the larger tragedy of the times in which he lived.

Essay | Searching for Solomon Cohen

---

“Friedman’s dismantling of myths becomes a thrilling mystery, a fearless reimagining, and a fresh historical portrait that seems to live and breathe. Scrupulous research and shimmering prose make for a fascinating read—I could not put it down. And neither will you.”

-Andrew Sean Greer, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Less

“Written with clarity, intelligence, precision, and a healthy dose of sultry Southern detail.”

– Aaron Hamburger, author of Hotel Cuba

“By the blending of memoir, history (through the eyes of place as character), and social commentary, Liberty Street: A Savannah Family, Its Golden Boy, and the Civil War is a strange and fully compelling bildungsroman, though from a distant perspective, which I’ve never really seen before.”

– Jonathan Rabb, author of Among the Living