We Jews and Blacks: Memoir with Poems

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