We Jews and Blacks : memoir with poems / Willis Barnstone.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barnstone, Willis, 1927-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

Poets, American.

Translators--United States--Biography.

Translators.

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.

United States.

Barnstone, Willis, 1927-.

Barnstone, Willis.

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

Physical Description:

1 online resource (257 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press, c2004.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

A central theme of this memoir by poet and translator Willis Barnstone is that of labels -- names, ethnicities, all distinctions that cause suspicion, anger, and destruction. A fresh and significant contribution to American letters, We Jews and Blacks wrestles with problems of identity, difference, and the human condition. It is a dramatic, whimsical, and literary work that also contains a number of Barnstone's poems, which offer a second view of an event, a crystallization of his thinking, both sorrow

Contents:

Cover; TOC; Acknowledgments; A Chat with the Reader; The Hell Face of Sacred Distinctions; The Plot; Jews and Blacks of Early Childhood; Swans over Manhattan; Anatole Broyard (1920-90), the Inventor; What Was a Jew?; Dad Grew Up in the Streets; Languages of the Jews; Spanish Jews; Jews and Blacks of Early Adolescence; "At the Red Sea," by Yusef Komunyakaa; Assimilation and Passing under the Shadow of War and Holocaust; Yehuda Maccabee and Hellenization of the Jews; Gnosticism and Other Heresies; A Summer Camp in Maine with the Scent of Palestine; Sammy Propp of the Black Shoes; Black People

Leah ScottMy Unseen Black Grand-Stepmother; Othello; Reading the Bible in Hebrew; Bar Mitzvah; "Othello's Rose," by Yosef Komunyakaa; Early Jewish Corruption and Bayard Rustin, the BlackNightingale; Early Corruption; Yeshua ben Yosef Passing as Jesus Christ; So Long, Sammy; Off to the Quakers; Bayard Rustin, the Black Nightingale Singing His People into theHeart of the Makers of the Underground Railroad; More Deadly Application Blanks; Jews and Blacks in College, and Freedom in Europe; Bowdoin College: The Jewish and Black Ghetto in Old LongfellowHall; A Letter to The Nation

Coming Out of My Own Ghetto of SilencesOff to Europe, Where Old-Fashioned Bigotry Is Huge, yet Now WhoCares? Not Me; Changing Money on the Rue des Rosiers and Getting Married by theGrand Rabbi of Paris; Having Fun at Gunpoint in Crete; Working in Greece for the King; White Islands and Northern Monasteries on Huge Stalagmites; Thessaloniki, a City of Peoples; Greeks and Jews and Blacks and Russians; Jews, Greeks, and Romans in Alexandria; Cavafy and His Poem "Of the Jews (a.d. 50)"; Romaniot Jews in Byzantium; The Sephardim in Muslim Spain; Jews and Greeks in Thessaloniki

Facts on the SlaughterThessaloniki and Absence; Days and Nights with Odysseus on the Way to Holy Athos; The Madness of a Jew Trying to Marry in a Greek Orthodox Churchin Crete; A Black and White Illumination; Friendship in Tangier with a French Baroness Who Told Me I HadKilled Her Lord; "Sound Out Your Race Loud and Clear"; A Jewman in the U.S. Army; A Touch of Freedom; Fort Dix: "I'm Black and My Balls Are Made of Brass"; "Sound Out Your Race, Loud and Clear! Caucasian or Negra!"Yelled the White Sergeant in Segregated Georgia; Holy Communion of Bagels and Lox for Jewish Personnel

Black Barbers Brought on Base to Cut Black Men's HairCaptain Hammond, Baritone, and the Children of the Périgord; Mumbling about Race and Religion in China, Nigeria,Tuscaloosa, and Buenos Aires; Ma Ke, a Chinese Jew with Whom I Shared Suppers in Beijing; Olaudah Equiano Bouncing around the Globe as a Slave Sailor under aQuaker Captain Until He Settles Down in London as aDistinguished Writer and Abolitionist; "Some of us grow ashamed," by Yusef Komunyakaa; Yusef Komunyakaa, the Black Nightingale Singing on Paper with theRichness of a Sweet Potato (YK & WB); A Diversion Down to Argentina

Saying a Hebrew Prayer at My Brother's ChristianFuneral

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

9786612072215

1-282-07221-8

0-253-11022-X

OCLC:

475973059