The Temple Bombing.

• Author: Lukas, J. Anthony

Five years ago, when a slim volume called Praying for Sheetrock appeared in my neighborhood bookstore, I wondered: What's this? A construction manual for born-again Christians? But the stark simplicity of its subtitle, "A Work of Non-Fiction," intrigued me. So I took it home and fell under the spell of Melissa Greene's luminous prose and her gripping tale of the civil rights era in McIntosh County, Georgia, a subtropical stretch of our Southern coastline I scarcely knew was there. Praying for Sheetrock did not remain a curiosity for long. It went on to spectacular reviews, becoming a finalist for the National Book Award--it should have won, I thought--and a significant milestone in the development of late-century literary non-fiction. Now comes The Temple Bombing, an account of the events surrounding the explosion that, on October 12, 1958, heavily damaged Atlanta's oldest synagogue and the fragile fabric of civility in the South's most progressive city.

The reform Jewish synagogue, invariably known as, simply, the Temple, had stood in "pillared, domed majesty" on a grassy him above Peachtree Street for the better part of a century when someone mined it with 50 sticks of dynamite, blowing out the white marble and red brick walls, destroying offices and Sunday school classrooms, flapping the stained-glass windows "like tablecloths shaken after dinner." An hour later, a caller claiming to be "General Gordon of the Confederate Underground" told a wire service reporter, This is the last empty building in Atlanta that we will bomb. We are going to blow up all Communist organizations. Negroes and Jews are hereby declared aliens."

General Gordon was evidently a figment of some fevered imagination, but eventually the police and FBI traced the bombing to five segregationists belonging to the National States' Rights Partly. Eventually, one of them--George Bright--was tried and acquitted by a jury of 12 white males. The others were released, with prosecutors confessing they had a "very weak, circumstantial case." The true bombers of the Atlanta Temple have never been identified.

Just as she did in her first book, Greene has handled this rich material in an unconventional manner, exploring a side of this story that might not have attracted another author. Being Jewish, Greene is at least as interested in what the bombing and its aftermath tell us about Atlanta's--and the South's--Jewish community during these years as she is in the more frequently...