ROPE WALKER

The spectacular death of an unknown tightrope walker opens a window on a small-town Texan Jewish community in this debut historical study.

Yarin investigates the colorful legend of the enigmatic “Rope Walker,” an otherwise nameless man buried in the Jewish cemetery in Corsicana, Texas. He was, according to town lore, a man with a prosthetic leg who, in 1884, attempted to traverse a high wire across the town’s main intersection while carrying an iron stove on his back. When he fell and was fatally injured, he asked for a Methodist minister but then said that he was Jewish and proved it by reciting some Hebrew prayers with a Jewish businessman; he then died before revealing his identity. Yarin weighed many long-after-the-fact accounts of the incident for their plausibility and found them a tangle of ill-sourced, sometimes-contradictory rumors. They offered just a few wispy leads, including a report of another one-legged tightrope walker, “Professor Berg,” said to be operating nearby. The trail led him to take a deep dive into Corsicana’s history and to reconstruct backstories of many locals, including the area’s Jewish families; the Methodist minister, a charismatic revival speaker and author named Abe Mulkey; the doctors who may have attended the Rope Walker; assorted gentile town fathers; and other residents or passersby of note. He also includes the legend of a ghost of a murdered sex worker, said to have haunted the hotel where Rope Walker died, and the story of an ornery circus elephant who gored a Corsicana matron to death during a 1929 rampage and was executed by firing squad.

The author, a genealogist, devotes much of the book to a detailed, if sometimes rambling and disjointed, account of his intricate sleuthing through online newspaper databases, census entries, Civil War veterans’ records, municipal archives, and town maps. Researchers, amateur genealogists, and history mavens will find this procedural engrossing, and Yarin arrives at a nifty solution to the riddle of Rope Walker’s identity that vividly fleshes out his picaresque life. (Part of his act, it seems, was using the stove he carried onto the tightrope to cook pancakes while teetering above his amazed audience.) The author’s portrait of Corsicana’s Jewish community is equally detailed, but less intriguing; there were a few ex-Confederates and a tragic suicide among them, but most of its members were simply prosperous and rather staid. Much of his writing in these chapters consists of flat, perfunctory genealogical notes that read like obituaries: “I.N. Cerf (Dec. 23, 1873-June 21, 1935), Louis’s son, was born in Corsicana and lived his whole life there….He was the State National Bank President when it erected its new building, in 1926.” But when Yarin meditates on Rope Walker’s character and exploits, his prose is moved to a lyrical exuberance: “His spirit of adventure, his courage, his jousting with the fates was a lifestyle worthy of respect and deference….his full life will be celebrated, and not just lamented, in chiseled verse.”

An often dry but sometimes-piquant saga of Jewish people in the Old West.