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Item Details
| Title:
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WE JEWS AND BLACKS
MEMOIR WITH POEMS |
| By: |
Willis Barnstone |
| Format: |
Hardback |
| List price:
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£25.95 |
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We currently do not stock this item, please contact the publisher directly for
further information.
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| ISBN 10: |
0253344190 |
| ISBN 13: |
9780253344199 |
| Publisher: |
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS |
| Pub. date: |
1 May, 2004 |
| Pages: |
248 |
| Description: |
A book of memoirs beginning with the author's childhood and ending with his brother's death in 1987. The author speaks as a Jew who has from early in his life shared parallel experiences with African Americans. It also contains his poems, which attempt to give a second view of an event, a crystallization of his thinking. |
| Synopsis: |
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. |
| Illustrations: |
19 b&w |
| Publication: |
US |
| Imprint: |
Indiana University Press |
| Returns: |
Non-returnable |
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