Details

Subject(s)

• Poets, American—20th century—Biography [Browse]
• Translators—United States—Biography [Browse]
• African Americans—Relations with Jews [Browse]
• Jews—United States—Biography [Browse]
• Black people—Relations with Jews [Browse]
• Passing (Identity) [Browse]
• United States—Race relations [Browse]
• Barnstone, Willis 1927-. [Browse]
• Barnstone, Willis 1927-—Childhood and youth [Browse]

Summary note

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

Notes

Includes index.

Language note

English

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

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ISBN

• 9786612072215
• 1-282-07221-8
• 0-253-11022-X

OCLC

• 475973059
• 62697564

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