We Jews and Blacks memoir with poems

257 Pages·2004·3.63 MB·English

by  Barnstone, Willis

Willis
Barnstone

We
Memoir with Poems
JEWS AND BLACKS
Contents i
We Jews and Blacks
ii Contents
Contents iii
W I LLI S
B A R N S T O N E
We Jews and Blacks
Memoir with Poems
With a Dialogue and Poems by
Yusef Komunyakaa
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
iv Contents
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
Orders by e-mail [email protected]
© 2004 by Willis Barnstone
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on
Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnstone, Willis, date
We Jews and Blacks : memoir with poems / Willis Barnstone.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-253-34419-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Barnstone, Willis, date 2. Barnstone, Willis, date—Childhood and youth. 3.
Poets, American—20th century—Biography. 4. Translators—United States—
Biography. 5. African Americans—Relations with Jews. 6. Jews—United States—
Biography. 7. United States—Race relations. 8. Blacks—Relations with Jews. 9.
Passing (Identity) I. Title.
PS3552.A722Z478 2004
811'.54—dc22
2003022616
1 2 3 4 5 09 08 07 06 05 04
Contents v
for Howard Barnstone
who lay in sorrow
in his Rothko chapel
vi Contents
Contents vii
God created the world and us and the others. And he
commanded us to believe in him and to punish the others. And
when necessary to kill the others. But everywhere in the world,
God changed appearance and ideas and to many even he has
been the infidel. Jews and Blacks understand God’s problems of
appearance and identity, for they’ve been uniquely plagued by
the same dilemma. But they are lucky too, as God is, for their
otherness. Who wants to be all the same? Years ago God was a
woman and in the Hebrew Bible he even began as several gods.
Genesis 1.1 reads “In the beginning the gods (elohim) created
heaven and earth.”* So God started out as a team. But we Jews
and Blacks have often been seen as a strange species, as if no god
had remembered to make us, or had done so in an alien land
under a wrong name. And with our difference came divine
punishment: slavery, demonization, and murder. But that dis-
tinction of otherness has also given Jews and Blacks a knowl-
edge of affection and play, and a habit of compassion.
—Pierre Grange, On God and the Other
God cooked up birth and billed us with death, leaving us in
a global soup bowl filled with every different plant under the
sun. And then abandoned us to stew in tasty mystery!
—Velvel Bornstein, Laughter of the Stoics
*Although el is God and elohim gods (as in Psalms), in Genesis 1.1 elohim is called a “plural of
majesty,” whose meaning is singular.
viii Contents
Contents ix
Contents
Acknowledgments xiii
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