Readers who remember Mel Brooks‘ hilarious routines as the Two Thousand Year Old Man — the quintessential old Jewish codger who has seen it all, knows it all, and is going to tell you all about it — will have no trouble enjoying “People!,” veteran journalist Sol Sanders‘ rambling, far-reaching and often moving memoir. While not two thousand years old, Mr. Sanders is pushing 90 … and has he got a tale to tell.
Although it ranges around the globe, his story is a uniquely American one, and of a special kind: that of small-town Southern Jewry. As a Jewish friend of mine from New York once remarked, “What you’ve got to understand about Southern Jews is that they’re very Jewish, but they’re also very Southern.” Such is Sol. Raised by immigrant parents in a small community in rural North Carolina where his parents, the only Jews in town, ran a successful variety store, young Sol’s love of woods, streams, farm animals and local characters was sometimes overshadowed by a sense of otherness, of apartness from his surroundings and those populating it. This gives his early reminiscences both an authentic feel and a critical objectivity that might otherwise have been lacking. Perhaps it is this same ability to absorb and appreciate the world around him while viewing it with an outsider’s eye that made Sol Sanders a born journalist long before he knew anything about the profession. It is also possible that his homosexuality, which he discusses candidly but, mercifully, not at excessive length or in morbid detail, enabled him to understand and empathize with people, places and situations very different from himself over a long, globe-trotting career in Europe, Asia and Latin America for major publications including the Christian Science Monitor, U.S. News & World Report, Business Week and The Washington Times, among others.