We Jews and Blacks : memoir with poems

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書誌事項

We Jews and Blacks : memoir with poems

Willis Barnstone

Indiana University Press, c2004

  • : cloth

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注記

Includes index

HTTP:URL=http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0410/2003022616.html Information=Table of contents

内容説明・目次

内容説明

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.

目次

Verse 1 A Chat with the ReaderVerse 2 Jews and Blacks of Early ChildhoodVerse 3 Jews and Blacks of Early AdolescenceVerse 4 Early Jewish Corruption and Bayard Rustin, the Black NightingaleVerse 5 Jews and Blacks in College, and Freedom in EuropeVerse 6 Having Fun at Gunpoint in CreteVerse 7 A Black and White IlluminationVerse 8 "Sound Out Your Race Loud and Clear"Verse 9 Mumbling about Race and Religion in China, Nigeria, Tuscaloosa, and Buenos AiresVerse 10 Saying a Hebrew Prayer at My Brother's Christian FuneralDeath Has a Way

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