We Jews and Blacks : memoir with poems / Willis Barnstone ; with a dialogue and poems by Yusef Komunyakaa.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barnstone, Willis, 1927-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Barnstone, Willis, 1927-.

Barnstone, Willis.

Barnstone, Willis, 1927---Childhood and youth.

Poets, American--20th century--Biography.

Poets, American.

Translators--United States--Biography.

Translators.

United States.

African Americans--Relations with Jews.

African Americans.

Jews--United States--Biography.

Jews.

Black people--Relations with Jews.

Black people.

Passing (Identity).

United States--Race relations.

Race relations.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

xi, 241 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Bloomington : Indiana University Press, [2004]

Summary:

Willis Barnstone's third book of memoirs begins with his childhood and ends with the death of his brother in 1987. A central theme is that of labels -- names, ethnicities, all distinctions that cause suspicion, anger, and destruction. Barnstone speaks as a Jew who has from early in his life shared parallel experiences with African Americans. He dwells on his own experience of "passing," already present in the name Barnstone, a name changed before his birth to conceal -- or not to advertise -- that he was a Jew, which might affect admission to private schools and college, his integration into society, and his professional life. But the price of dissembling was self-deprecation, fear of rejection, and guilt. Barnstone makes the analogy to the African American experience explicit. He speaks of his black step-grandmother, of childhood playmates, of the activist Bayard Rustin and the turbulent and exhilarating integration of his Quaker boarding school, of his first publication -- a letter to The Nation -- protesting the racial and religious exclusionary practices of the Bowdoin fraternities, of being a soldier with Blacks in the segregated South, and of the eighteenth-century slave memoirist Olaudah Equiano. Finally, there is a dialogue with Yusef Komunyakaa and a small selection of Komunyakaa's Jewish Bible poems. We Jews and Blacks is also a dramatic and whimsical literary memoir. It contains forty-some of Barnstone's poems, which give a second view of an event, a crystallization of his thinking. Both sorrowful and joyful, this memoir is a fresh and significant contribution to American letters.

Contents:

Verse 1 A Chat with the Reader 1

The Hell Face of Sacred Distinctions 3

The Plot 6

Verse 2 Jews and Blacks of Early Childhood 7

Swans over Manhattan 9

Anatole Broyard (1920-90), the Inventor 12

What Was a Jew? 14

Dad Grew Up in the Streets 15

Languages of the Jews 18

Spanish Jews 21

Verse 3 Jews and Blacks of Early Adolescence 25

"At the Red Sea," by Yusef Komunyakaa 27

Assimilation and Passing under the Shadow of War and Holocaust 29

Yehuda Maccabee and Hellenization of the Jews 33

Gnosticism and Other Heresies 35

A Summer Camp in Maine with the Scent of Palestine 36

Sammy Propp of the Black Shoes 38

Black People 43

Leah Scott 47

My Unseen Black Grand-Stepmother 51

Othello 52

Reading the Bible in Hebrew 59

Bar Mitzvah 60

"Othello's Rose," by Yosef Komunyakaa 63

Verse 4 Early Jewish Corruption and Bayard Rustin, the Black Nightingale 65

Early Corruption 67

Yeshua ben Yosef Passing as Jesus Christ 69

So Long, Sammy 74

Off to the Quakers 75

Bayard Rustin, the Black Nightingale Singing His People into the Heart of the Makers of the Underground Railroad 75

More Deadly Application Blanks 83

Verse 5 Jews and Blacks in College, and Freedom in Europe 87

Bowdoin College: The Jewish and Black Ghetto in Old Longfellow Hall 89

A Letter to The Nation 96

Coming Out of My Own Ghetto of Silences 99

Off to Europe, Where Old-Fashioned Bigotry Is Huge, yet Now Who Cares? Not Me 100

Changing Money on the Rue des Rosiers and Getting Married by the Grand Rabbi of Paris 109

Verse 6 Having Fun at Gunpoint in Crete 117

Working in Greece for the King 119

White Islands and Northern Monasteries on Huge Stalagmites 126

Thessaloniki, a City of Peoples 128

Greeks and Jews and Blacks and Russians 130

Jews, Greeks, and Romans in Alexandria 132

Cavafy and His Poem "Of the Jews (A.D. 50)" 133

Romaniot Jews in Byzantium 135

The Sephardim in Muslim Spain 135

Jews and Greeks in Thessaloniki 138

Facts on the Slaughter 140

Thessaloniki and Absence 143

Days and Nights with Odysseus on the Way to Holy Athos 144

The Madness of a Jew Trying to Marry in a Greek Orthodox Church in Crete 152

Verse 7 A Black and White Illumination 159

Friendship in Tangier with a French Baroness Who Told Me I Had Killed Her Lord 161

Verse 8 "Sound Out Your Race Loud and Clear" 165

A Jewman in the U.S. Army 167

A Touch of Freedom 169

Fort Dix: "I'm Black and My Balls Are Made of Brass" 171

"Sound Out Your Race, Loud and Clear! Caucasian or Negra!" Yelled the White Sergeant in Segregated Georgia 173

Holy Communion of Bagels and Lox for Jewish Personnel 177

Black Barbers Brought on Base to Cut Black Men's Hair 179

Captain Hammond, Baritone, and the Children of the Perigord 180

Verse 9 Mumbling about Race and Religion in China, Nigeria, Tuscaloosa, and Buenos Aires 187

Ma Ke, a Chinese Jew with Whom I Shared Suppers in Beijing 189

Olaudah Equiano Bouncing around the Globe as a Slave Sailor under a Quaker Captain Until He Settles Down in London as a Distinguished Writer and Abolitionist 192

"Some of us grow ashamed," by Yusef Komunyakaa 200

Yusef Komunyakaa, the Black Nightingale Singing on Paper with the Richness of a Sweet Potato (YK & WB) 201

A Diversion Down to Argentina 206

Verse 10 Saying a Hebrew Prayer at My Brother's Christian Funeral 209

Saying a Hebrew Prayer at My Brother's Christian Funeral 211

My Brother Needed to Pass Like the Spanish Saints of Jewish Origin. Here Are Ancestors Whom My Brother, Not by Inquisition but by a Deeper Knife of Fire, Emulated 212

My Father, Who Never Tried to Pass, Succumbed to Denial of His Being and Passed from Life 213

Verse 11 Death Has a Way 223

A Little World 226.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [229]-231) and index.

ISBN:

0253344190

OCLC:

53284896