We Jews and Blacks Memoir with Poems

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.


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