We Jews and Blacks

by Barnstone, Willis

• ISBN13: 9780253344199
• ISBN10: 0253344190
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-06-01
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr

Summary

Willis Barnstone's third book of memoirs begins with his childhood and ends with his brother's death in 1987. A central theme is 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 18th-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 a number of Barnstone's poems, which give a second view of an event, a crystallization of his thinking. Both sorrowful and joyful, Barnstone's memoir is a fresh and significant contribution to American letters.

Author Biography

Willis Barnstone is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Indiana University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xiii
A Chat with the Reader	p. 1
The Hell Face of Sacred Distinctions	p. 3
The Plot	p. 6
Jews and Blacks of Early Childhood	p. 7
Swans over Manhattan	p. 9
Anatole Broyard (1920-90), the Inventor	p. 12
What Was a Jew?	p. 14
Dad Grew Up in the Streets	p. 15
Languages of the Jews	p. 18
Spanish Jews	p. 21
Jews and Blacks of Early Adolescence	p. 25
"At the Red Sea," by Yusef Komunyakaa	p. 27
Assimilation and Passing under the Shadow of War and Holocaust	p. 29
Yehuda Maccabee and Hellenization of the Jews	p. 33
Gnosticism and Other Heresies	p. 35
A Summer Camp in Maine with the Scent of Palestine	p. 36
Sammy Propp of the Black Shoes	p. 38
Black People	p. 43
Leah Scott	p. 47
My Unseen Black Grand-Stepmother	p. 51
Othello	p. 52
Reading the Bible in Hebrew	p. 59
Bar Mitzvah	p. 60
"Othello's Rose," by Yosef Komunyakaa	p. 63
Early Jewish Corruption and Bayard Rustin, the Black Nightingale	p. 65
Early Corruption	p. 67
Yeshua ben Yosef Passing as Jesus Christ	p. 69
So Long, Sammy	p. 74
Off to the Quakers	p. 75
Bayard Rustin, the Black Nightingale Singing His People into the Heart of the Makers of the Underground Railroad	p. 75
More Deadly Application Blanks	p. 83
Jews and Blacks in College, and Freedom in Europe	p. 87
Bowdoin College: The Jewish and Black Ghetto in Old Longfellow Hall	p. 89
A Letter to The Nation	p. 96
Coming Out of My Own Ghetto of Silences	p. 99
Off to Europe, Where Old-Fashioned Bigotry Is Huge, yet Now Who Cares? Not Me	p. 100
Changing Money on the Rue des Rosiers and Getting Married by the Grand Rabbi of Paris	p. 109
Having Fun at Gunpoint in Crete	p. 117
Working in Greece for the King	p. 119
White Islands and Northern Monasteries on Huge Stalagmites	p. 126
Thessaloniki, a City of Peoples	p. 128
Greeks and Jews and Blacks and Russians	p. 130
Jews, Greeks, and Romans in Alexandria	p. 132
Cavafy and His Poem "Of the Jews (A.D. 50)"	p. 133
Romaniot Jews in Byzantium	p. 135
The Sephardim in Muslim Spain	p. 135
Jews and Greeks in Thessaloniki	p. 138
Facts on the Slaughter	p. 140
Thessaloniki and Absence	p. 143
Days and Nights with Odysseus on the Way to Holy Athos	p. 144
The Madness of a Jew Trying to Marry in a Greek Orthodox Church in Crete	p. 152
A Black and White Illumination	p. 159
Friendship in Tangier with a French Baroness Who Told Me I Had Killed Her Lord	p. 161
"Sound Out Your Race Loud and Clear"	p. 165
A Jewman in the U.S. Army	p. 167
A Touch of Freedom	p. 169
Fort Dix: "I'm Black and My Balls Are Made of Brass"	p. 171
"Sound Out Your Race, Loud and Clear! Caucasian or Negra!" Yelled the White Sergeant in Segregated Georgia	p. 173
Holy Communion of Bagels and Lox for Jewish Personnel	p. 177
Black Barbers Brought on Base to Cut Black Men's Hair	p. 179
Captain Hammond, Baritone, and the Children of the Perigord	p. 180
Mumbling about Race and Religion in China, Nigeria, Tuscaloosa, and Buenos Aires	p. 187
Ma Ke, a Chinese Jew with Whom I Shared Suppers in Beijing	p. 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	p. 192
"Some of us grow ashamed," by Yusef Komunyakaa	p. 200
Yusef Komunyakaa, the Black Nightingale Singing on Paper with the Richness of a Sweet Potato (YK & WB)	p. 201
A Diversion Down to Argentina	p. 206
Saying a Hebrew Prayer at My Brother's Christian Funeral	p. 209
Saying a Hebrew Prayer at My Brother's Christian Funeral	p. 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	p. 212
My Father, Who Never Tried to Pass, Succumbed to Denial of His Being and Passed from Life	p. 213
Death Has a Way	p. 223
A Little World	p. 226
Appendix	p. 227
Notes	p. 229
Index	p. 233
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