The following are extracts (for review purposes) from Lovesong: Becoming a Jew, Julius Lester, 1988:
Part One
Chapter 1
"It is...any summer in the 1940s....
"Grandmomma's house stands alone[:] removed from its neighbors and back from the main road like the monarch of an impoverished kingdom. To the east is a large field[:] 'the orchard,' Momma calls it still...because when she was a girl[,] rows...of [fruit] trees flowered[.]
"In all, there are forty acres of fields and woods enclosed by a sturdy wire fence, whose gate no one ever enters[,] and we seldom go out.
"Beyond the fence, on the west, is a dirt road[.] It is wide enough for a mule wagon as far as Grandmomma's gate, then it narrows to a dusty footpath and winds into the innards of Pine Bluff[, Arkansas]'s black community. [I]n those days[,] change was what the white man at the store might give you when you bought something[.]
"I sit on the porch each day and watch children go back and forth to the little store on the main road. I am a child yearning to be with children, but these wear dirty and torn clothes. ([N]o child ever came to the gate to ask me who I was, where I was from[,] and did I want to play....I never went to the gate so that they could ask.)...
"We are different. Daddy is a Methodist minister and I was robed in a mantle of holiness even before the first diaper was pinned on my nakedness. I cannot do what other kids do—play marbles for keeps [or] listen to popular music[.] We represent Daddy and he represents God.
"My brother hates all of it. He is nine years older than me. [H]e does not come to Grandmomma's[.]
"Daddy tells me, 'God has special plans for you,' and I wonder what they are. I cannot imagine, but I will never know[,] if I do not nurture separateness as if it were my only child.
"We are different, too, because we do not depend on white people for our economic survival. Daddy does not work for white people and we do not have to talk to them or even see them, except when we go to town. We go to town as infrequently as we can.
"There is something else different about us[.] Grandmomma and Momma look like white women. Both have thick, wavy long hair and skin like moonlight.
"(Summer 1982. Daddy has been dead a year....I go to Nashville to help Momma...sell the house[.]
"([N]either Momma nor Grandmomma ever had much use for words....So I am surprised when...Momma...says, 'It was hard growing up looking white. I had a hard time in school. The other kids were always beating me up. And when we went to town, the white people acted like they hated us because we looked white but weren't.'...
"(Silence closes around her again like an enemy....It is the silence of Grandmomma's solitary house and of how solitary we were in that house, in that community and with each other. We were different[:] Grandmomma, Momma and me, holding ourselves back from the world and all in it—reserved, polite [and] formal—acknowledging salutations with the fingertips of white-gloved hands while longing for an embrace.)
"[T]he name on Grandmomma's...mailbox...painted crudely in black...is...A-L-T-S-C-H-U-L. Grandmomma's name is Smith....
"Momma...does[n']t like my questions and generally answers them with 'No,' even when they begin with 'Why?'...
"She chuckles. '[Y]our grandmother...was an Altschul before she married.'
"[S]he hasn't told me who Al[——] is, but if I ask again, she will only say that I ask too many questions." – pp. 5–8
"Daddy teaches ministers in summer school...in Little Rock[, Arkansas.]
"Anybody can tell that Daddy is a preacher. He always dresses in a suit and tie. They are as natural on him as his black skin....Even when he grins and laughs[,] the seriousness does not change. It is as if his grin and laughter are prayers, too....
"Daddy['s] anger taught me that though we were powerless to change segregation, we would not freely choose it. His anger was self-respect[.]
"Walking along a street in downtown Pine Bluff[,] I see a...round clock jutting from a store front. Curved over the top are the letters A-L-T-S-C-H-U-L. Curved at the bottom is the word Jewelers....
"Driving back to Grandmomma's[,] Daddy...says, 'Your great-grandfather was a Jew. Altschul[—t]hat's a German-Jewish name. [Y]our great-grandmother...was a slave[—n]ot when they met[.] His name was Adolph.
" '[T]he story goes...that Adolph came over here from Germany...and...became a peddler. He went around through the countryside selling things off a horse and wagon. [N]ot too many years after slavery[,] him and your great-grandmother—her name was Maggie. Maggie Carson. A little bitty woman who looked like she was white. Well, [h]is brothers disowned him for marrying her....They didn't want to have nothing to do with him when he was alive....
" 'What was he like, Momma?' I ask eagerly.
" 'He was a very nice man,' she says in that proper way. '[W]hen my father died[,] I remember Grandfather came and got us and brought us out here where Momma lives now. And that's where we lived from then on.' " – pp. 9–12
Chapter 2
"After Daddy's death[,] the parsonage...in Kansas City, Kansas[—t]he home of my childhood[—]is as if it never was.
"[I] lived there until I was nine[, in] a childhood as heavy and gray as the stones of the church[—]bare and lifeless[,] and...pruned...until [it] is not even a memory in my veins.
"I was at Grandmomma's for no more than a month each summer, but every detail of her house, the nuances of the heat of the day, the smell of dust and [the] sounds of bees in the heavy air, the textures of silences from waking through sleeping are integral to my daily journeys through memory....
"Only now do I understand that there was...no separation between life in...the parsonage...and the church next door[.] Daddy was not a pious man and our house was not burdened by...Bible readings. But he was deeply religious and the word [']God['] appeared in conversations...casually[.] My children ask me about my childhood, and I am embarrassed and annoyed when images and their attendant emotions slide from memory[.] I am being born only when I think of church and Sundays....
"(Momma...recalled to my wife with pride once that she never allowed me to get [my clothes] dirty.)
"[One] time[,] my brother was making noise during service. Daddy stopped preaching[,] took off his belt [and] beat [him], and...returned to the pulpit[.]
"In the 1940s a black minister was the recognized and accepted authority in the community—the enforcer of divine law, adjudicator of disputes, provider for the poor, [and] intermediary between the white and the black communities....
"The white community regarded the black minister as a tribal leader. I accepted it as normal that Daddy went to court and on his word alone the judge paroled young black men into his custody[.]
"The black minister embodied—in the way he dressed, talked and walked, the dreams and hopes and aspirations of a people[.] That was why I seldom saw Daddy without a suit and a tie on. He exuded dignity as if it were everyone's birthright[.]
"I remember...after church each Sunday...being given the pennies to count....I am the minister's son and I am admitted to the world of men and act like one. Every Sunday someone says, 'He's just like you, Reverend Lester!,' or 'You gon' be a preacher like your daddy!'
"In [a] sixty-fifth-anniversary booklet there is a picture[:] In the middle is Daddy....I have on a dark coat and am staring directly at the camera, intent and serious....I look closely at the photograph and notice both of Daddy's hands on my shoulders. There is no affection in those hands[:] but control, power, dominance[;] and I submit gratefully: This is my father, I am his.
"I do not enjoy...being God's representative among my peers, as Daddy was among us all. But...I do not hate it[,] unlike my brother[. T]o quarrel with how things are is to think you can box with God and win.
"Yet I do not like church, do not understand why the people shout and 'get happy'[.]
"Nor do I like to look at the cross affixed to the wall behind the pulpit....
"Jesus is less real to me than the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk....
"One night...I...turn to the Book of Psalms. [I]ts wholehearted love and praise [make me] so happy that my body wants to jump up and down, dance, turn flips, spin around and around[,] until I collapse in laughter as lilting as sunlight on a wheat field.
"[A child] asks me what [it] means....I [become] angry and...slam...the Bible...on Daddy's desk[.]
"Suddenly my head is like a balloon and...I float...into a deeper blackness....
"I open my eyes. Daddy is looking down at me....
"When he finally speaks his voice is quiet, almost hollow, and more serious even than when he prays. 'Don't ever slam the Bible down again.'...
"In the silence a fear crawls over my flesh like a long-legged spider and I understand in the hollows and crevices and caves of my soul[—]God has chosen me for Himself.
"But I don't tell Daddy." – pp. 13–9
Chapter 3
"I am eight or nine years old. I am playing Bach on the upright piano in the living room[,] a simplified arrangement[.] I forget that I am playing, and I slip through the lines to the other side of the music where I understand all that was, is and will be. When the music ends, however, I return to this side and cannot remember what I understood.
"I love Bach's music more than that of any composer, but my favorite composition is in a thick book Momma bought me....It is not lines or chords[.] It is happy and sad at the same time....The music winds itself around me and...take[s] me somewhere, but I am afraid and do not go. [T]he composition is 'Kol Nidre.'...
"Christmas Day, 1951. I am twelve years old. Momma hands me her present. It is...thick and heavy. A book!...
"She smiles. 'You might want to start by reading...The Merchant of Venice.'...
"Shylock. How odd that in him I encounter myself in literature for the first time[,] because I did not grow up unaware of black...literature. The segregated schools of Kansas City, Kansas, were secret training camps for the black leaders of the next generation. [T]here were books by and about blacks on...Daddy['s] bookshelves, books [which] I read.
"Yet in Shylock I see myself[,] as I do not in...any...black figure. [T]hey are models of success and I need...someone wh[o] gives me permission...to defend my soul[. T]hrough Shylock I learn that blacks are not the only people in the world who must ponder in their flesh the meaning of meaningless suffering[.]" – pp. 20–2
Chapter 4
Summer 1953
"We move to Nashville, Tennessee.
"Because of my summers at Grandmomma's I hate that land...where white men stare with eyes as tiny and unblinking as snakes', where stillness and silence lie...as if the land itself clutches secrets...because we would die[,] black and white, if we knew them....
"Daddy has been offered the position of Director of Negro Affairs for...the Methodist Church, and its headquarters are in Nashville....
"White women are the deepest terror. What a white woman says is truth even when it is a lie....
"(Since 1975 I have taught a course on...the Civil Rights Movement.
"([T]he only salvation was to learn to live outside the terror. Daddy taught me how.)...
" 'I know you don't want to move to the South'[,] Daddy...says gently. 'I'm not too keen on the idea myself'[.]" – pp. 23–6
September 1956
"I enter Fisk University[.]
"[A] heretical thought follows: 'What if there isn't a God at all?'...
"Daddy...says...everything I have comes from God[, and] asks if I understand[:] How can he be telling people about God [when] his son is arguing against God? [But] I can believe what I want[,] as long as I...don't embarrass him by saying publicly that I am an atheist. I marvel at Daddy's wisdom. My declaration of atheism has been like a knife in his heart, but he keeps his hands off my soul." – p. 26
Autumn 1958
"It is a mouse-gray day, the kind only an English major finds romantic. [A] fellow English major...thrusts a book in my hand[.] The book is called Exodus....
"What most deeply affects me in the novel...is the love story...about a people and God and a land." – pp. 29–30
Spring 1960
"I sit on...Robert Hayden's...porch[.] He is a poet and teaches creative writing[.]
He said, 'You're a writer. Anybody can sit-in at a lunch counter. But not anybody can do what you can do, which is write. James Joyce's job was to write Finnegans Wake, not write political tracts or go on a demonstration.'...
"What I really need to know is: Why do I rage over and mourn for murdered European Jews as I never have for my own people? But I am...afraid he will not understand the question as I do not." – pp. 32–3
" 'I want to be a monk,' I say hesitantly.
" 'Monks don't do anything'[,] Momma...replies [with] her back to me[.]
"I learned[:] Holiness is as solemn and unfathomable as a mountain[,] and to be lived as if I am...eternal[.] Holiness is the living of the Oneness of Being. How else can I do that if I don't join the Catholic Church[,] and chant psalms of praise as a monk?
"Now I am told th[is] is doing nothing.
"[F]or...commencement...Momma gives me a book: Disputed Questions, by a Cistercian monk named Thomas Merton. (I still don't know why she gave me a book by a monk after telling me that monks don't do anything.)
"Merton[:]
" 'Contemplation...is the very fullness of a fully integrated life.
" '[W]hat we need are "contemplatives" outside the cloister and outside the rigidly fixed patterns of religious life[—]in the world of art, letters, education, and even politics. This means a solid integration of one's work, thought, religion, and family life and recreations in one vital harmonious unit'[.]" – pp. 34–5
July 1986
"Twenty years ago on this date I was in Atlanta, Georgia, working for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. It was the first summer of Black Power. Stokely Carmichael, SNCC's chairman, was crisscrossing the country carrying the message of Black Power, and in whatever city he spoke, riots blossomed[.]
"My soul did not believe in The Movement[.] What I remember of that time is my soul calling for me to tend it....
"My students at the University of Massachusetts do not hear my woe. They look at me as if they are in the presence of History[.] I see the rapture of nostalgia in their eyes, and shake my head. No one should have to live through a time when History strode across the land like a demented conqueror....
"From 1961 to 1964 I resisted the Siren call of History. I...eked out a living as a folk singer and guitar and banjo teacher. A part of me wanted to be in the South, though[,] where friends were organizing blacks to register to vote....
"History claimed me for Itself; I became a revolutionary.
"Or did I? When I...hear myself introduced as 'a social activist of the Sixties,' I am embarrassed. What did I do? I led singing at mass meetings in Mississippi, took photographs throughout the South, and served on SNCC's Central Committee....
"I remember leading singing at a mass meeting in Laurel, Mississippi, the summer of 1964 and being frightened and repelled by the intensity of emotion with which the people sang[.]
"I joined The Movement, but something essential within me remained unchanged, remained separate and apart, like Grandmomma's house, like those of us who sat on the porch of that house.
"I envied those who believed with their souls that registering people to vote, teaching in freedom schools[,] and challenging the power structure really mattered. They belonged to something greater than their solitary selves....
"Mind conspired with Body to make me believe I was a revolutionary. Soul knew otherwise....In the solitary darkness Soul was safe to come out and live with me. It asked me why I was playing revolutionary. I didn't know. Nor did I know what else to do. No one wanted to hear what I had to say—that death is awful[,] that none of us would be free...until we stopped seeking to create the world in our own images[.] But I was afraid to speak those truths because they seemed alien and irrelevant to almost everyone I knew....
"To my Mind revolution was more imperative than God. [In] the singing of freedom songs at mass meetings I could feel the pain and desperation in people's lives as their voices overwhelmed mine. I shed no tears for the pain as plentiful as cotton. I drank. All of us did. We were too young to carry the pain of all those lives[.]
"Most of us were not destroyed, and none of us became free....
"My Mind did not understand...why hatred was more compelling [to] white people...than love. Yet if I was left alone for more than five minutes my soul surged forward like a tidal wave to remind me that, as compelling and righteous as such emotions were[,] I belonged to the darkness of God.
"May 1966. Lowndes County, Alabama....In the distance, a man plows a field. In the tree above me, birds chirp. I am whole again, at peace and at One with God. [T]he poverty and the pain and the death all around me vanish as if they had never been.
"Th[is] is my most vivid memory of the Civil Rights Movement." – pp. 38–41
Chapter 5
Summer 1968
"My first book is published. Since college I have fantasized that I would write highly praised fiction and be hailed as 'the black James Joyce.' Instead, my first book is a political essay[.]
"Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Momma! is the first book explicating Black Power. It is written in...an angry, colloquial black English. Yet the anger is...the anger of love that mocks and pokes fun at whites. [It] is a very funny book.
"[A] mere book...is all Look Out, Whitey! is—a book delineating the political and cultural 'philosophy' of Black Power and the historical context from which it comes....
"Because I can express black anger does not mean I am angry, and it certainly doesn't mean I hate white people. Because I articulate the experiences of many blacks does not mean I am writing autobiographically....
"Not only am I not a 'militant,' I'm not even political, even if I am involved in a political movement....Writing politically is a function of Mind. Mind is not me. How can others not know that?
"But how can they know if I don't tell them?...
"There is the Julius Lester who is interviewed on television talk shows, and takes phone calls on his radio show; he speaks dispassionately about the necessity for blacks to acquire the power to control the institutions that govern their lives, and [that] whatever means used to acquire that power is justified.
"Am I lying? Not at all. I am simply speaking in that collective black voice.
"That Julius Lester is the creation of a History sweeping across the American landscape....That Julius Lester was a welfare worker in Harlem in 1962[,] where he did not know what to say to the fifteen-year-old girl pregnant with her third child[,] and Julius had nightmares and after four months quit his job...because his rage that any society would...offer [to] so many a perpetual living death threatened to destroy him. He read...and found a way to focus and organize that rage—revolution.
"Yet Julius is never sure how much of his revolutionary zeal is born from justified rage and how much is created by the fear of loneliness, by the need for a secure and uncomplicated identity to relieve him of the uncertainty and the unknown in which his Soul seems to delight....
"How can he argue with the nobility of sacrificing himself for the good of that mysterious entity called 'the people'? That is concrete. It tells him what he is living for and for what he would die. Revolution rescues its devotees from doubt and ambiguity if they relinquish all claims to a life separate from 'the people.' The collective aspirations and identity of blacks is all; the individual not only ceases to matter; the individual ceases to exist....
"What are black people doing to their souls by making power an end[,] in and of itself? Even the redefining of ourselves as 'black' places us closer to those people called white, because we...now claim race as identity. Black Power sounds like the roar of independence but it is the whimper of submission. To make our primary definition the color of our skin is...not...to...be free of...white people[.]
"Persona and Soul....Soul can be a luminous glowing behind Persona. My Persona and Soul are not in communication, are not even living in the same countr[y]. They can't be until I write and speak my Soul's doubts about Black Power and revolution....
"I sympathize with white college students who come to hear me; they...are pathetically grateful when I speak to them as human beings deserving respect. I ache for the black students who need me to be their whip, flaying white flesh for sins, real and imagined. I can't do it, and often after I speak I am surrounded by white students eager to talk with me while the disappointed black ones drift sullenly away." – pp. 42–5
Chapter 6
Winter 1969 [(beginning December 1968)]
"Nineteen sixty-eight was a year that not only tried the soul but left it limp, exhausted, twitching spasmodically on a deserted beach, uncertain [whether] it had the strength to flop its way back into the water or even [whether] it wanted to. [I]n France, students took over Paris. In August, Mayor Daley of Chicago...permitted police to brutalize reporters and demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention, while Russian troops invaded Czechoslovakia....
"In black America the agonized and exhilarating cry of Black Power expunged King's dream of nonviolence[.] Th[os]e very words—Black Power—were a magical incantation conferring instant enlightenment, telling blacks once and for all that the black condition was not the result of genetic inferiority. (A lie we were never absolutely certain was a lie as we searched our souls in the wells of dank nights because we did not understand why we could not succeed to the degree they did[.] Maybe we did have a peculiar odor.)...Freedom rushed forth in cascades when we heard those words—Black Power!—and we [decided] that we were degraded because we lacked the power to be anything else....
"In New York City, blacks and Jews...went to war against each other. The hilltop to be captured was community control of schools." – pp. 46–7
March 1968
"I begin...at WBAI-FM, a listener-supported radio station in New York[.] In the fall [(of 1968)] I am offered a live show for two hours on Thursday evenings. I call it 'The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.' [I]n the humorless atmosphere of the late Sixties[, the] self-mockery [of t]he show's title...is taken seriously.
"As the only black at the station with a live show, I make the airwaves available to blacks who do not have the opportunity to be heard, or are heard only under adversarial questioning from white reporters....
"I am one of the staff people WBAI assigns that fall to cover the strike called by the United Federation of Teachers [(UFT)] over the issue of community control of schools.
"The Board of Education of the City of New York has created three experimental school districts in which boards comprising parents and local leaders are given control[.] One of th[o]se districts is Ocean Hill–Brownsville in Brooklyn, a black and Puerto Rican area.
"[F]rom September 9 to November 18, 1.1 million pupils in the city's nine hundred schools are without teachers.
"From the beginning the UFT has attacked community control with innuendos and slurs. Union president Albert Shanker is quoted [frequently] in The New York Times[.]
"The media does not challenge Shanker's racial code words—'extremist groups,' 'hoodlum element'—by demanding that he be specific and give names. His charge of anti-Semitism is reported as if it is substantiated fact.
"Two leaflets appear mysteriously in Ocean Hill–Brownsville. One...demands black control of black schools but makes no mention of Jews. The other is viciously anti-Semitic, calling Jews 'Middle East Murderers of Colored People'[.]
"The UFT duplicates the leaflets on one sheet of paper [and] distributes them...to union members and [to] the Jewish community[.]
"The New York Civil Liberties Union...investigates the leaflets and...concludes that [they] are another example of 'the UFT's strategy of lying and distorting in order to whip the city into a frenzy of fear of Ocean Hill–Brownsville.' New York's Jewish community is unfazed by facts....
"The UFT is defending an area of institutional life in New York City in which Jews hold real power, for two-thirds of the UFT membership is Jewish, as is Shanker; a majority of supervisors and administrators in black areas are Jewish; and a majority of the Board of Education is Jewish....
"I am unaware of instances of black anti-Semitism but I have heard stories from blacks about Jewish teachers calling black children 'n——' as they enter schools staffed [despite the] strik[e.]
"When I go to Junior High School 271 [in] Ocean Hill–Brownsville...I am surprised to learn that the majority of teachers there are Jews....
"I tape a history class taught by Leslie Campbell, a black man whom the press and the UFT have singled out as the most 'militant' black in the school district. Impressed by his...effectiveness as a history teacher, I invite him on my show.
"Thursday evening, December 26. [B]efore going on the air[,] Les...shows me several poems[.]
" 'I want you to read this one on the air,' I say to Les[.] 'I think it's important for people to know the kinds of feelings being aroused in at least one black child because of what's happening in Ocean Hill–Brownsville.'
"[From] a transcript[:]
" 'Campbell: I...brought with me some works by a young sister in Brooklyn who is fifteen years old...by the name of Thea Behran. She has written a poem about anti-Semitism[,] and she dedicates [it] to Albert Shanker[;] and the [title] is "Anti-Semitism":
" ' "Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head
You pale-faced Jew boy—I wish you were dead.
[Etc.]" '...
" 'Lester: I had you read that in the full knowledge...that probably one half of WBAI's subscribers will immediately cancel their subscriptions to the station, and do all sorts of other things because of the sentiments expressed in that particular poem; but nonetheless, I wanted you to read it because she expresses...how she feels.'
" 'Campbell: [S]ome of our listeners...are going to say that that is anti-Semitism...but I don't think that is the question.'...
" 'Listener: That was a very ugly poem. What was it about the poem that made you feel we should have heard it?'
" 'Lester: People should listen to what a young black woman is expressing. I hope that will properly cause people to do some self-examination and react as you have reacted. An ugly poem, yes, but not one half as ugly as what happened in school strikes[.] I would hope that you would not have the automatic reaction, but raise a few questions inside yourself. I had it read over the air because I felt what she said was valid for a lot of black people, and I think it's time people stop being afraid of it and stop being hysterical about it....
" 'Lester: All black people are saying is, if there is going to be communication between black people [and Jews], our point of view and our attitudes are going to be a major consideration. In the past they have not been because we have kept quiet, and now we are saying it's a two-way street, and you have to at least come one-half way on our terms.'...
"For the next two Thursday evenings I...engage[d] listeners...in a discussion of the underlying issue, namely, the need of blacks for political control over the institutions of their communities....
"January 16, 1969[. M]y answering service [tells me] to call Lee Dembart at the New York Post.
"[His] story...follows:
" 'Julius Lester, the black author, radio commentator and host of the WBAI-FM show on which...an anti-Semitic...poem was read, said that while "the poem did not express my own personal emotion"[,] he thought [its] feelings should not be ignored....
" 'The United Federation of Teachers...has lodged a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission[.]
" ' "I recognized at the time that there would be some understandable reaction," Lester said, but added that he had neither "endorsed the poem" nor "made any anti-Semitic remarks" on the air....
" ' "The sad thing to me is that I feel the UFT is responsible for quite a bit of the feeling that exists among young blacks now in terms of Jews," Lester said. He said the teachers' union had adopted a position that anyone who opposed them was anti-Semitic.
" ' "Regardless of whether the feelings are true or not, they can't be ignored," he said. "They can't be looked at as 'This is wrong.' "
" 'Said Shanker last night:
" ' "Leslie Campbell's proud reading of his student's anti-Semitic poem is an indication of his teaching approach....This city is going to have to decide whether it wants its teachers to teach anti-Semitism or understanding and brotherhood."
" ' "He [Shanker] doesn't want Les Campbell teaching black children. So here's another weapon he's using," Lester said.
" 'Frank A. Millspaugh, WBAI's general manager...and program director Dale Minor presented a special half-hour program last Friday in which they "supported the station's right to air such things," Lester said.
" 'The author said he was gratified by some fifty letters he had received, both agreeing and disagreeing with the poem, all "in the main very serious.
" ' "If I had to do it all over again, I'd do the same thing," he said. "These things are not going to go away by screaming about them." '
"That morning's New York Times carries a front-page headline about the poem and the UFT complaint. The Times...does not then or ever contact me for comment[.]
"Later that morning...on the radio...the lead...news... item...is that I have been fired from the station....Frank Millspaugh [says,] 'I don't know how that got on the air, but we're going to stop it.'...
"The airing of the poem coincides with the organizing of the Jewish Defense League[,] who campaign to get me fired from the station. On...a leaflet...is a picture of me[. A] headline read[s]: 'This is the Outrageous Anti-Semitic Poem which was read by Leslie Campbell on the Julius Lester Program, Dec. 26 over Station WBAI.'...At the bottom in bold letters: 'Cancel Out Julius or he may cancel out you!' [A]t the bottom right is a circle in which are the words 'Cancel Julius Lester.'...
"Most distressing is that Jewish newspapers across the country carry stories about the airing of the poem, but no editor or reporter from a Jewish paper ever seeks my side of the story....
"Naïvely, I['d] thought that airing the poem would facilitate contact between Jews and blacks. Jews needed to know how damaging Shanker's remarks had been; they needed to know the depth of black anger over the UFT's opposition to community control and how they were being exploited by the false accusation of black anti-Semitism....As crude...as the poem was[, i]t was pain expressed as anger at Jews, many of whom found identity by borrowing suffering...while remaining...blind to the suffering of black people around them and actively opposing the political means blacks used to alleviate a portion of that suffering.
"Yet my strongest supporters during these weeks are also Jews....
"Ironically, I do not receive one expression of support from blacks, not even a phone call from a single black friend. I begin wondering why I am so eager to risk my life and reputation in the service of black people when they do not seem to care....Most important are the Jewish listeners who call and write to say that they know I am not an anti-Semite.
"Between January 23 and the following Thursday[,] in the quiet and aloneness I hear an anger within me, an anger that my suffering as a black person is not understood as I feel the suffering of Jews is. I am angry, too, that Jews, the people I thought most able to understand black suffering, do not understand, do not care, even, to try to understand. Once I see my anger staring at me, I cannot deny that part of my motivation in airing the poem had been to hurt Jews as they had hurt me. If such unspoken anger becomes a comfortable habit, there is no way I can prevent myself from sliding into anti-Semitism as if it were a cool lake at the bottom of a grassy slope.
"Then I remember my great-grandfather. I have not thought of him since childhood. I wonder what he is thinking of me[.]
"That evening of January 30, when the Jewish Defense League is to picket me, I walk to the station [and] can hear them shouting and screaming....Jewish counter-demonstrators were there in support of the station and me, and the shouting is between them and the JDL demonstrators....
"The JDL demonstrators surge against the police barricades, screaming and yelling[.] Policemen move toward the demonstrators and begin pushing them back with nightsticks....Seventy-five policemen are needed to maintain order.
"What I said on the air that evening follows[:]
" 'When the teachers' strike began last fall, I thought that the issue involved was community control of schools and that the racism which was exemplified by[,] and in[,] the teachers' strike was a part of that....
" 'Everybody in New York City has more than enough outlets for whatever they might want to say[.] Black people do not. So I'm here two hours a week, trying to serve as a forum for the black community....
" 'A black man in the communications media is generally there as a representative of the Establishment, not as a member of the black community. [H]ere's a black person on the air talking to black people, not trying to mollify white people. Thus, there was pressure on me to disavow...what [certain blacks] said[.] I have no choice but to look upon myself as a black, who as an individual has certain skills that he is trying to make available to blacks.
" '[I]t is...a major mistake...to equate black anti-Semitism, a phrase I will use for the sake of convenience only, with the anti-Semitism which exists in Germany and Eastern Europe. If black people had the capability of organizing and carrying out a pogrom against the Jews, then there would be quite a bit to fear....I doubt very seriously if blacks even have the desire. But Jews have not bothered to try to see that black anti-Semitism is different. It is different because the power relationships which exist in this country are different. In Germany, the Jews were the minority surrounded by a majority which carried out heinous crimes against them. In America, it is we who are the Jews. It is we who are surrounded by a hostile majority. It is we who are constantly under attack....And the greatest irony of all is that it is the Jews who are in the position of being Germans.
" 'In the city of New York a situation exists in which black people, being powerless, are seeking to gain a degree of power over their lives and over the institutions which affect their lives. It so happens that in many of those institutions, the people who hold the power are Jews. In the attempt to gain power, if there is resistance by Jews, then, of course, blacks are going to respond. [W]hen blacks consistently attacked the political position of the UFT, their response was to accuse blacks of being anti-Semitic and to point to their liberal record on race relations and the fact that Shanker marched in Selma. Indeed, Jews tend to be a little self-righteous about their liberal record, always jumping to point out that they have been in the forefront of the fight for racial equality. Yes, they have played a prominent role and blacks always thought it was because they believed in certain principles. When they remind us continually of this role, then we realize that they were pitying us and wanted our gratitude[.]
" 'Maybe that's where the problem comes now. Jews consider themselves liberals. Blacks consider them paternalistic. Blacks do not accept the Jews' definition of either the problem or the claim that Jews have been in the forefront. And what can only be called Jewish contempt for blacks reaches its epitome when Jews continually go to the graveyard and dig up Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, 'who died for you.'...When you're powerless, you reach a point where you realize that you're all alone. You have no one but each other. Those who said that they were your friends were never your friends, because they unilaterally defined the relationship. Nonetheless, you had a certain sympathy from them, and having that sympathy, you expected that it would remain. But we have learned that sympathy exists only when it is a question of morals. When it was a moral issue, a question of integration in the South, for example, blacks had nonblack friends. But...America does not run on morals....America acts on the basis of power. Power, and power alone. [B]lack people [have] reached the point of correctly analyzing that it was not a question of morals, but a question of power[.]
" '[A] colonized people, which blacks are, cannot make fine distinctions as to who holds...power....Jews are no exception because they hold only a measure of that power. It is power, and the Establishment maintains its powers partially through Jews. When a powerless people, a colonized people, begin to fight for power, then the first thing they will do is to lash out verbally at the most immediate enemy. In this particular instance, that hurt, the articulation, the demand that the colonizer listen, is accomplished in a violent manner, like the language of the poem....
" 'To the question of whether or not I am anti-Semitic, I won't answer, because it's not a relevant question to me. The relevant question is changing the structure of this country because that's the only way black people will achieve the necessary power. [We are] seeking...to escape the definition of this controversy which others have put on it. Because what we have seen has been a moral response to a political problem.
" 'We've reached a point where the stage is set now. I think that black people have destroyed the previous relationship which they had with the Jewish community, in which we were the victims of a kind of paternalism, which is only a benevolent racism. It is oppressive, no matter how gentle its touch. That old relationship has been destroyed and the stage is set now for a real relationship where our feelings, our view of America and how to operate have to be given serious consideration....
" 'If there's going to be any resolution of the problem...then it means that Jews and Anglo-Saxons are going to have to examine themselves. They are going to have to relinquish the security which comes from the definition which the society has given them. They're going to have to question themselves and they're going to have to open up, to be, at the least, receptive to what blacks are trying to say....
" 'James Baldwin...says in...The Fire Next Time, which came out in 1962[:]
" ' "Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or to seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point. But I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be accepted by white people, still less to be loved by them"[.]
" 'Black anti-Semitism is not the problem; it has never been the problem. Jews have never suffered at the hands of black people. Individuals, yes[.] But en masse, no. The issue is not black anti-Semitism. The issue is what it has always been: racism. And the physical oppression of black people by a racist system. But that system needs instruments and those instruments have been white people, including Jews. If this fact cannot be faced, then there is little else to be said. It is this which black people understand. I guess it just comes down to questions of who's going to be on what side. If there are Jews and other white people out there who understand, never was there a more opportune time for them to let their voices be heard.'...
"On March 26, 1969, the Federal Communications Commission rules on the UFT complaint against the station, and says that WBAI 'fulfilled its obligation imposed by the fairness doctrine'[.] It...quotes extensively from...the remarks I made on the air [on] January 30[.]
"[N]either The New York Times nor any radio or television station reported what I said on the air that [evening; and] I am anathema to Jews across the country." – pp. 47–65
Chapter 7
Spring 1969
"For Christmas 1968, my wife gives me...a human skull....
"My marriage of seven years bleeds from wounds that...neither my wife nor I know how [to] suture[.] The end is in sight and we wait passively for it to arrive.
"That political movement in which I have been involved full-time since 1966 is disintegrating into factions and acrimony. Such disintegration is...a sign of The Movement's success. With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, The Movement effectively put itself out of business....Why do we not celebrate the victories that make our slave ancestors weep for joy from their graves?
"[W]hite Americans...still believe that by being white they partake of innate and God-endowed superiority.
"[B]lacks are jumping to the other side, and in redefining ourselves as blacks, we impose racial definitions on the rest of humanity. Murder is committed when we define others as anything except a variation of ourselves[,] and we of them. And the greater victim of that murder is the murderer.
"It is we who are the executioners of ourselves, and our paeans to blackness are like the rouge morticians rub into the cheeks of the dead. Blackness is a cosmetic, obscuring the reality of human existence." – pp. 67–9
Chapter 8
Autumn 1970
"My wife and I have separated....Why did the silence of tenderness become the foreboding stillness of unspoken hurt and anger? Who have I become that the...love I offered...now feels like dust [which] I am eager to wash from my hands?...
"Me is a voice on the radio trying to get out of the net of blackness in which I have become entangled....Me is a lonely child disguised as a man, frightened by suicidal depressions.
"[B]eneath the[se] I sense something as compressed and unchanging as a stone, something with the power to direct all the Me's to their proper places...where they will be relieved to speak their lines at the proper times[.]
"Merton. I return to him in...Contemplation in a World of Action[:]
" 'What is meant by identity?...We are talking about one's own authentic and personal beliefs and convictions, based on [the] experience of oneself as a person'[.]
"How am I supposed to recognize the truth of my life?...I do not even know where or how to begin." – pp. 71–2
Autumn 1971
"Since the anti-Semitic poem controversy, I have been changing the...radio show....I add rock...as well as...classical pieces. It is a subtle attempt to express more of my personality[. My] listeners are uncomfortable with the mix of the familiar and the new....I have lost my audience.
"I leave the radio station. I can no longer be the person my listeners need me to be. (Nine months later WBAI asks me to do a show from seven to nine on Monday and Tuesday mornings....For the first time I allow myself to be me in public. To my surprise, people like me.)...
"I stare at my name on the spines of the nine books I have published and wonder who Julius Lester is and what all those words are that he has written....If I am not in those books, where am I?
"I do not know and am ashamed that I don't. I have written books that, while not false, are not wholly true. I have lived the life others needed me to live. By doing so I have sold my birthright and I never knew what it was." – pp. 73–4
Summer 1973
"July 5, Waynesboro, Virginia....The worst legacy of having grown up in the South is not knowing how to trust reality; I do not have the capacity even to know reality....
"August 3, Lawrence, Kansas. [R]eligious professionals...can't talk without quoting...others with whom I am not familiar. I wonder if they lack their own words because they have not experienced God. Tell me about you, I want to yell at them....
"I listen to their emotions and perceive that they are people without hope, and thus are in despair. They feel abandoned by God. This is not surprising because their religion is a politicized Christianity. They think Christians are supposed to save the world.
"What gives them the right to think [that] they should save the world?...
"I...tell them that there is no hope, and as long as you think there is, you are saying that life is valid only to the degree that one's impact on the world is for the good. The meaning of life is not found in the effect we have on...what we think to be the world. We are called to live our lives and be instruments of God. We are merely human[.] As long as Christianity thinks it should...change the world, it will be nothing more than a caucus in the Democratic or Republican parties....Christianity has become a wing of Caesar's Bureau of Propaganda.
"In all the times I've spoken publicly, this is the first I've felt wholly myself, hiding nothing. [W]ords came that I do not recall ever saying even to myself. They came from somewhere within me that had never known words, and for the first time I was not ashamed to be one who hungers and thirsts for righteousness. There is only one reason to be alive and that is GOD ALONE....
"August 4–6, Kansas City, Kansas....I told my parents I was coming and they told friends, who arranged a public gathering, and in a moment of weakness, I consented to it....
"Whatever someone says about me is not true, and I refuse to be pinned by anyone's words, even my own.
"August 13–16, Abbey of Gethsemani....On my last day[,] a feeling of utter sweetness begins to permeate me[.] I...lie in the grass. It is as if I am rocking gently back and forth in the bottom of the sky....
"I hug myself in delirious joy....
"The monastery is pure Being, and that is the world, too[.] I cannot know myself as long as I confuse me with who the world defines as me." – pp. 74–86
Part Two
Chapter 9
Autumn 1975: Amherst, Massachusetts
"For six months now I haven't given myself to the pictures rising from the grave of night, the nocturnal messages from unknown parts of my soul which the ancients knew as visitations from the gods....
"I am afraid my life is an unclean thing.
"Is that what God wants me to know? If so, then why doesn't He tell me how to cleanse this life He has given me? I...learn only that I am not the person I could be and I do not know what to do.
"Each morning [I] try...to gather the night pictures before they are scattered by the broom of day's light[.]
"Five years after his mother and I divorced [m]y son...has come to live with me....She asked me to come from Amherst for a conference with her and our son's second-grade teacher.
"Malcolm's having problems in school.
"What do you mean?...
"All he likes is sports, doing something where he can run into someone and knock them down.
"He's testing himself against others. It's a way of learning who he is, what he can do....
"But he's so violent, which is possibly repressed anger at your having left.
"[And, h]e might hurt me!
"You're a grown woman!
"I wonder if she knows it is not physical strength she fears but the power of the masculine. My son's burden is to grow up when feminism roams the streets with all the intelligence of a lynch mob. His teacher at the private, multiracial, nonsexist, 'progressive' school to which I am paying three thousand nondeductible dollars a year does not love the ecstasy of leaping toward where clouds are born to glove a high line drive, the mesmerizing magic of the spinning spiral of a football arcing through an autumn afternoon as dazzling as a stained-glass window, the pride of ripped pants and grass-stained shirts, or the gleeful power in a tiny clenched fist.
"There is nothing wrong with him, but there will be if he isn't respected and loved for who he is. And who he is, is male. [M]aleness must be a source of joy and delight for him.
"He has my permission to defend himself in any way he can against feminist tyranny. If he doesn't, he'll find himself hanging from a nonsexist lamppost, crows pecking at his penis.
"[H]is mother...asks, 'How would you feel about him coming to live with you?['] I respond with...vehemence[:] 'I want him!'...
"I am entering middle age without having left childhood. How can that be?" – pp. 89–91
"How did that pasty liquid which spurted from my penis create this miracle of bone and flesh[?] I am ashamed at how casually his life was conceived....But Nature is intent only on its own renewal and doesn't notice or care about me." – pp. 91–2
"Daddy and I used to do jigsaw puzzles....
"My son taught me a new way to do this. I match pieces by color. He sees shapes....
"I want to see my son [as] the man forming in the boy's soul....
"My son...demands that I live as a whole person[.]
"I was twenty before I lived among whites. His mother is white and he has never lived among blacks....
"I am arguing with him as [with] a drunk in a bar....I say, coldly, 'Babe Ruth was a white man, and probably didn't like black people.'
"I am immediately ashamed....
"I remember interviewing Muhammad Ali in the fall of 1968. [M]aybe it was because I was black that he felt compelled to recruit me for the Nation of Islam.
"[F]ather[s] need...who [they] are as a man[,] to be understood and continued[.]
"[T]he essence of me...cannot be separated from Sundays in church listening to Daddy preach[,] as only black ministers can[;] from sitting on Grandmomma's porch at night[,] listening to her and Momma and Uncle Rudolph[.]
"[T]here is nothing racial in his being called Milk Chocolate[,] my son...insists.
"[F]or the first time[,] our lives have met in the suffering place, which is the only place I can be known." – pp. 92–6
"I assumed...children...would appear out of the fog one day...and listen avidly while I discoursed[.]
"Sometimes I think children cry out from the trunk of my penis to be born, and it angers me when I hear women say it is their right to do as they wish with their bodies. How came it to be theirs? That body was put into their keeping, but it is not their property....
"Once seed and egg unite, a man and a woman no longer have rights. [W]hen abortion is reduced to a political right, my daughter and my son grow up without humility before the mystery of Life." – pp. 96–7
"My son's clothes amaze me...for they are smaller versions of my clothes. They are not children's clothes, but child-sized men's clothes....
"I am left...with the burden and terror of my life. [W]hat we accomplish is not as important as who we are." – pp. 97–8
Chapter 10
Spring 1976
"Spring...is winter's child and summer's parent, and I try to find my place[.]
"The definition by which I have known myself since I was eighteen died this winter[.]
"[F]or five months not only have I been unable to write, I don't know why I should, or how I ever did.
"Now my son lives with me....
"In less than a year I have learned that you become a parent the day you stand before a human being barely four feet high, who weighs forty pounds, and realize that he has...power and control over your life....
"I no longer do anything when I want....I must be prepared to answer questions[.]
"I never learned to care for myself; now I must think about and for him. [N]othing makes you more aware of your total inadequacy....
"I want...to provide a...compassionate answer for his life, but I have nothing to offer except that I am a writer.
"Now, I am unable to write." – pp. 100–1
"I am of that generation of Southern blacks whose parents made the journey from the sweat of cotton fields and vegetable patches to the ease of city living[.]
"I see...Daddy...go out the back door after supper, still dressed in a suit, his gray straw hat on his head, a seat cushion in his hand. He takes the hoe from the garage and walks behind it to the square patch of ground[.]
"[H]is garden...was what remained of his life before, and each spring he renewed the covenant with his father and his father's father, whose lives were bounded by fields and haunted by train whistles calling them[.] Daddy had ridden the train his father and grandfather and great-grandfather could only look at while leaning on their hoes. Now my life is acted out in worlds my father cannot imagine. When we see each other, he glows with pride as he tells me of meeting people and being asked, 'Are you any kin to Julius Lester, the writer?'...I feel a yearning[,] a hunger...for the common ground that father and son are.
"Every evening as I wash the dirt of the garden from my hands, I experience that ground[.]" – pp. 102–3
Chapter 11
Summer 1976
"[In] the years with...my son['s] mother...I lived as if all a marriage needed to be fragrant and many-petaled was my having said, 'I do.' I was young and did not know that other people are real, too....
"Sometimes I wonder if I do not need to atone for the sins of an entire generation. [T]here is an evil arrogance in attempting to remake the world in your own image. That is what we tried to do, we who called ourselves revolutionaries....
"There is no greater terror than doing what you think God wants of you." – p. 104
"It is not surprising that...whites who live...toward the mountains [of] Arizona...north [of] Phoenix...are among the most conservative in the country....Nature is not a mother's breast, nourishing anyone who places the nipple in his mouth....
"The politics of fear is powerful here because the land is harsh and unyielding to those who do not love their [own] finitude....
"Dusk. There is a howling in the distance. It is a coyote. It is the sound my soul makes at dawn." – pp. 104–5
Tuzigoot National Monument[;] Montezuma Castle National Monument
"Tuzigoot is the ruin of a ninety-room pueblo in the Verde Valley....
"Eight hundred years ago[,] someone...here...knew only what he needed to know: how to irrigate the fields, grind the corn, build a house with small stones, and praise his gods....
"Montezuma Castle...was carved from the face of limestone cliffs....
"That Indians created such an edifice without modern machinery amazes white people....We are the oddities of humanity, wholly dependent on machines and technology, [while] damning those who aren't[,] as underdeveloped.
"[T]he...ceiling...is...so low[:] these rooms were only for sleeping....The National Park Service booklet speculates that...high...on the cliff, the people were immune to attack from enemies[—h]ow American. [I]t is only here that one does not intrude on the land. Here...I sit[,] as dusk descends as relentlessly as a hawk[,] and know that my rightful place in the world is a low dark room in the face of a cliff." – pp. 105–7
Hopiland
"From...three mesas...the Hopi[s] saw the Spanish coming and fought them, century after century, never incurring defeat....
"The Hopis are known for two things to outsiders: draft resistance during World War II...and the Snake Dance[.]
"[In] an interview[, a] Christian...snake handler...said [t]he only time he was bitten was the Sunday morning he thought about handling a snake. After that[,] he waited until the urge to handle was so strong that it was the only way to give witness to his joy in knowing God....
"The snake...represents...that energy and power which is life itself. The Snake Dance reconciles earth and sky, passion and reason, cathedral and kiva[;] and the monk becomes a lover." – pp. 107–8
Taos
"[A] drunken Indian...ask[s] for a ride to the pueblo....Those who live in the continuous miracle are few. Most of us are drunkards looking for a ride home[.]" – p. 109
Taos Pueblo
"The Taos Indians say [that] this is the spiritual center of the world. The Hopis claim the same for their land. I believe them both....
"A young Indian...gives me...the Black Solidarity handshake, and...proceeds to tell me that he and I are brothers and must come together to fight the white man. Even here[,] I am defined by my skin color." – p. 109
San Cristobal, New Mexico
" 'D.H. Lawrence Ranch'
"I...pay homage to this man who tried to find the way to live—with integrity—in right relationship to the demands of the blood[:] that part of us which is instinctual. Until I learn to live with [this] I will not be...truly religious." – pp. 109–10
Chapter 12
Winter 1977 [(beginning December 1976)]
"[I]n the 1940s, [e]ducation in...all-black schools was a process of being trained—intellectually and emotionally—to survive and persevere. We were not allowed to think that the white world could defeat us....If we didn't succeed in becoming doctors, lawyers, teachers, ministers or writers[,] we were to...pass...on[,] to the next generation[,] the dream and the toughness to endure when dreams do not come true....
"I am...suspicious, angry and afraid that...my son['s] white mother and relatives are undermining him with their cuddly gifts[,] render[ing] him weak and defenseless [for] when it is his time to traverse the valley of the shadow of death....He will need strength to believe in himself when he has no reason to. I demand perfection of him now[,] so he will demand perfection of himself later[,] because white people do not care if he lives or dies, do not care even that he is.
"I know that I am too harsh with him, too strict[.] But I did not know what it is to have a childhood. I lay awake nights...wondering if I would be strong enough and bright enough not only to endure but to make my forebears proud and the way a little easier for my descendants.
"I am merely one in the generations of black intellectuals and professionals who were required to sacrifice their childhoods, personal dreams[,] and desires because our task was to prepare the way....
"I have wondered often who I would be if I were not black. But I cannot imagine what it is to live without my life dangling in space, stretched and broken by the noose of race....
"I went to Tanglewood one Saturday last summer....I saw a young black kid hurrying by[.] I hated him for having opportunities I did not. I suffer in the shadows of the unrealized and unfulfilled parts of my soul, parts which will be forever stillborn. I could have been a classical musician[. T]here is still a part of me that wishes he could have studied harpsichord with Wanda Landowska[.]
"It will never be, and grief and rage bubble inside me like molten iron. Even now, at age thirty-seven, I ask myself, What do you want? and do not understand the question. It's a white folks' question, the rage and grief respond contemptuously.
"That is not so, I respond weakly. If I do not know what I want, how can I live? To have done what history considered necessary has not been sufficient.
"What do you want? I ask myself again, and, enraged, I shout back: I want not to live with the spirits of my slave ancestors needing me to sing the song they couldn't sing....
"When rage subsides I realize that I have stated what I don't want....
"What do I want?
"I honestly don't know." – pp. 111–3
"My son is at school and I cry. Every morning when I hear the school bus pull away, I lie across my bed and the tears come. I cry for the childhood I could not have. I cry because...I will never know who I could have been....I cry because I hurt so damned much." – p. 113
"I am planning the garden.
"[T]he seasons do not come in orderly succession. They are intertwined[.]
"I missed spring last year because I was looking for it." – p. 113
Chapter 13
Spring 1978
"My time of depression is over. I do not know...when...it ended[.]
"Something has changed within me. [T]he tears of others are my own now. S. is a beautiful blond girl who was in my 'Contemporary Afro-American Novel' course last spring. [I]f she had applied her above-average intelligence as diligently to my class as she so obviously did to Vogue, she could have replaced me as teacher. She always sat in the front row, her perfect legs crossed to reveal the beginning of a thigh, the top buttons of her blouse undone to show the lacy border of her bra. I wanted to give her an 'A' for the sheer pleasure her presence brought me and the enrichment of my fantasy life.
"She came into my office at the beginning of this school year[.] Minutes passed....
"Finally she said, 'I had an abortion this summer....
" 'I knew that I couldn't have the baby. I'm still a baby myself. But nobody told me that...I would feel like I'd killed my own baby!'
"She sobbed. I closed the door of my office and held her for a long time.
"I could not have done that before....
"I want to live as if I am a song of praise composed by God[.]" – pp. 114–5
"My daughter [Jody] and her mother have moved to Amherst. [T]he differences between her mother and me are most evident in how we raise our children. My daughter is accustomed to a kind of freedom that is alien to me....
"She argued with me about her 'rights.' [S]he is growing up at a time when the concept of rights has been perverted until it is synonymous with desires. Even a cursory reading of the Bill of Rights makes it clear that rights are guaranteed to the individual as protection from the power of government and that is all. People talk as if rights were handed down by God at Sinai and sanction anything their hearts desire. I knew better than to say to my daughter that abortion per se is not a woman's right[.] She would not have understood[.]
"[S]ometimes...I am the agent for the suffering of others.
"To suffer and inflict suffering are as much a part of God as love." – pp. 115–6
"Last year I met a woman who knows that the night pictures are the soul's mirror, and who wants to live holiness in family. [W]e have married....
"I know how to live [in that way,] how to imbue our children with reverence for their lives[:] By the way we live the ordinary. Yet I watch...news...during supper[,] which angers my wife. [W]hen she and the children ask me to quit...smok[ing,] I tell them angrily to mind their own business.
"I betray holiness while wanting so much to be holy, to make my marriage holy, to make my new family holy.
"[S]omething is missing and I don't know what it is. It should be easy to make the ordinary sacred. For some reason it isn't." – p. 117
"Every Sunday morning the university radio station plays Jewish music for two hours. I don't know why but I listen every week....
"I listen and that loneliness lying within me like a black hole threatening to suck the entire universe into its nothingness is destroyed and stars shine with a white heat and I become infinity.
"Every week when I listen to the show 'Zamir,' I pretend that I am a Jew and the Hebrew words are my language[.]" – p. 117
Chapter 14
Spring 1979
"Tillie Olsen...once...remarked, 'We should be allowed one child to make all our mistakes on. Then, that child would disappear and we would have our first one.'...
"I have been more authoritarian than I needed to be; I have not loved with the clarity their souls deserved." – p. 118
"[During] my sabbatical[,] I happened to pick up Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews from [my] pile of unread books[.]
"I wanted to understand the historical conditions which led to the Holocaust so I could recognize them if they ever appeared in this country[.] Of course[, i]f America were going to destroy blacks, the scenario would be so different that I, like the Jews of Europe, could not recognize what was before my eyes....
"Each evening[,] I read[.]
"On January 27, 1939, Jewish children were born across Europe as I was born in St. Louis, Missouri....
"To be innocent is to deceive myself about what it means to be human." – pp. 119–20
"I am five or six years old[.]
"The war was...little children at church on Father's Day[,] pinned [with] white flowers[.] Their fathers had died in the war and on that Sunday we were afraid of them....
"Why am I alive?
"Why are the [Jewish Holocaust] children...dead?" – pp. 121–2
Chapter 15
Summer 1979
"[U.N.] ambassador...Andrew Young...has resigned, and Jesse Jackson...and other black leaders have accused Jews of pressuring President Carter into forcing Young to [do so.]
"Young met secretly with the Palestine Liberation Organization's representative to the [United Nations]. Official U.S. policy is...that there be no contacts between the U.S. and the P.L.O....Young...admitted that...a meeting had taken place[. B]oth President Carter and the Israeli government urged Young not to resign. Young said he chose to resign so he could speak freely on foreign policy and not because Jews demanded his resignation.
"Why, then, are blacks blaming Jews? Why are blacks responding as if an injustice has been done [to] the entire race? [I]nsisting on innocence...is what blacks indulge in[,] with these attacks on Jews.
"Since the Sixties a profound transformation has occurred in the souls of black folks and I fear we have become unworthy of our foreparents. I am beginning to realize that I am part of the last generation of blacks to grow up with a morality which demands that we recognize and acknowledge the humanity of white people, especially because they made the denial of ours a creed by which they lived. 'You have to be better than them,' teacher after teacher in those segregated schools told us. 'We got to save them po' people from theyselves,' the old ones would say. What I understood was that I protected my soul only to the extent that I did not give my soul over to hating those who had earned my hatred.
"It was a paradox. I was educated to live with an unbearable tension between the real and the ideal, recognizing the real but acting, always, in relationship to the ideal. By believing in the humanity of whites, we of the generations before the Sixties avoided becoming victims or executioners, to use Camus's formulation.
"With the coming of Black Power, blacks chose to resolve the tension by becoming victims[;] that is, they allowed their souls to be identified and synonymous with their political condition. They chose blackness, which did not permit whites to be other than white. The humanity of whites was denied by blacks as the humanity of blacks had been denied by whites....
"By resolving the tension through canonizing themselves as victims, blacks relinquished the courage to suffer. They began singing songs of sorrow to one another[.] Now they languish in the sentimental and self-righteous security of being victims. But a victim is merely an executioner too cowardly to sharpen his or her sword.
"[B]lacks are thinking with damaged emotion[al system]s. They no longer perceive their [own] pain. If one does not know he hurts, he cannot cry[, a]nd...there is no salvation....
"I don't want...to be the center of controversy again, but sentences form in my mind against my will....
"I cannot expunge the thought of...absolution[.] I would not have th[is] need...if I were not guilty....
"Reluctantly, I call David Schneiderman, editor of the Voice.
"[T]he sentences rush into life with...eagerness[.] Quickly the article is done.
"[D]isturb[ingly,] I have written as if I am a Jew[:]
" ' "The Uses of Suffering"
" '[H]ow self-righteous and arrogant Black leaders sounded: "Jews must show more sensitivity and be prepared for more consultation before taking positions contrary to the best interests of the Black community."...
" 'I understand that such a statement comes from years of anger at active Jewish opposition to affirmative action, and how deeply Blacks were hurt by this opposition to what was in our "best interests"[.]
" 'Arrogance is...a common fault of oppressed people when they believe [that] their own status as victims gives them the advantage[.] Morality [instead] is painfully earned by constant awareness of one's own limitations, mistakes, and fragile humanity. Morality comes by constantly adjuring yourself and not others to "show more sensitivity."
" 'It is the absence of sensitivity to point the finger at Israel's relations with South Africa[.] How dare Black leadership thrust itself into foreign affairs on the issue of Palestinian rights[!] The lack of Black sensitivity on matters of deep and abiding concern to Jews has wounded Jews as much as Jewish opposition to affirmative action has wounded us....
" 'Black leadership not only wraps itself in a cloak of moral excellence; it goes further and chooses sides in the Mideast conflict. [A]s Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker expressed it, "The Palestinians are the n[——]s of the Middle East." [W]ho in the course of Western civilization has ever cared when Jews were killed?...
" 'Not being different, Black leadership takes its stand for "human rights and self-determination for Palestinians."...How can Black leadership even think about self-determination for people who attack children? To do so[,] implicitly condones the murder of children.
" '[H]ave we forgotten the four children murdered in that Birmingham church in 1963? And surely we've forgotten that at the memorial services and rallies after the bombing, it was Jews, more so than other Americans, who stood beside us and shared our pain. Black leadership insults...Jews...when it says that Jewish support for the Black struggle was given when it was "in their [the Jews'] best interest to do so."...
" 'That Jews have not supported affirmative action does nothing to negate this....I cannot understand why Black leadership lacks the simple humanity to express gratitude for past support[.] Black leadership has acted as if Jews were responsible for Andy Young's resignation. [W]henever something goes wrong, it is easy to blame the Jews.
" 'By doing so, Black leadership has shown itself to be morally barren. By its support of the Palestinians, it exemplifies a callousness of spirit to the meaning of the Holocaust, because when six million Jews are killed while the world is indifferent, the right of Israel to exist is unassailable. [W]hat I hear in the self-righteousness of Black leaders...is[,] we don't give a damn.
" 'The irony is that this new expression of anti-Semitism was spearheaded by the organization founded by Martin Luther King, Jr.—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Dr. King has been dead only 11 years, but when I listen to his SCLC successors, it is hard to believe that Dr. King ever lived.
" '[T]hough I suffer by virtue of my race, I cannot indulge that suffering. Neither can I use suffering to crown myself with a tiara of moral superiority. I must learn to carry that suffering as if it were a long-stemmed rose I offer to humanity. I do that by living with my suffering so intimately as to never forget that, having suffered evil, I must be careful not to do something that will, as Dr. King put it, "intensify the existence of evil in the universe." Because I have suffered as a Black person I do not succumb to the thrill of making others suffer. I look at my own suffering and say[:] let this inhuman suffering end here.
" '[T]he positions espoused recently by Black leaders...show that Blacks, too, can be Germans.'
" * * *
" 'It's very personal,'...my wife...says....
"Much of my writing has a tone of calm detachment, reflecting the fact that, regardless of how angry my words have been[,] my anger lacked personal conviction. I wrote as an observer, not a believer. This time[,] something [has] opened within me[.]
"She reaches for my hand and holds it tightly." – pp. 125–31
"[I]t will appear in the September 10 issue. The deed is done....
"I tremble uncontrollably....
"My body gives an involuntary shudder....What do [I] fear?...
"All my life I have tried to be who Daddy, Momma and the blacks of Kansas City and Nashville needed me to be—a servant of...my people. Now I...attack...them, and a multitude of black voices ask, 'Why[?] Our enemies will take great pride in your words and use them against us. We hope you're proud of yourself.'...
"I have lived these past nine months amidst...Auschwitz and Treblinka[.] The spirits of murdered Jewish children shoot marbles with me in the dirt of a parsonage yard. [So] I had to write as I did[.]
"Proud of myself? I say to the voices finally....Yes, I am." – pp. 131–2
September 12, 1979
"Our child [was] born as summer withdraws with clear skies and cool winds.
"We name him David. It is my favorite name....It is important to me...that this child have a Jewish name....
"I am thinking of developing a course [to compare] Jewish and black histories[.] Jews believe they have much in common with blacks. Many blacks are insulted by the idea. Probably both are right.
" * * *
"I come in early [to] the third floor of New Africa House...to...stare out the window at the mountains....
"I pass the open door of A.B.'s office.
"[H]e screams[,] 'I'm sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust! You don't know Jews like I do!...I'd see them go from school to Hebrew school. I'd see them make the highest scores on tests!" – p. 133
"Did people like me merely because they thought I confirmed their picture of reality? If that is so, I was mistaken in thinking they were ever friends....
"David Hillel, an Israeli friend who teaches soil science at the university...invites me to be his guest at Kol Nidre services with the Jewish Community of Amherst. [S]omething in me needs to go, needs to be with[—]needs to be with other Jews.
" * * *
"The synagogue of the Jewish Community of Amherst used to be a Congregational church[.]
"I've been to services here once when Daniel...invited us to the bat mitzvah of their daughter[,] a close friend of my daughter....
"I liked the rabbi. A soft-spoken man with a white beard, he talked gently, lovingly[,] about what bat mitzvah meant[:] to accept the covenant of being a Jew." – pp. 134–5
Chapter 16
Autumn 1979
"I refuse to understand a morality that is selectively indignant.
"[B]eing known as the 'black defender of Jews' would be the same as having been thought a 'black anti-Semite.' I am neither." – pp. 137–8
"Haim Gunner...teaches in the Environmental Sciences Department at the university and is one of the leaders of the Jewish Community of Amherst....
"He...invite[s] me to [his] house for lunch to talk about [my] course next semester on blacks and Jews. [T]he doorbell rings. Haim returns with...the rabbi who conducted the bat mitzvah. He is introduced to me as Yechiael Lander, the Hillel rabbi at Smith College and Amherst College, and...rabbi of the Jewish Community of Amherst.
"[H]e says[,] 'Thank you for...your article[.] I know that I'll be able to fill your class with students from Smith and Amherst alone.' " – pp. 138–9
"Paul Puryear, the chairman of the Afro-Am Department, calls me into his office....A blunt, outspoken man, he, too, is a Southerner bred in the creed that morality was the standard applied to one's own behavior first[.]
"[H]e says[,] 'They called a special...departmental faculty meeting[. T]he subject...was your new course...on blacks and Jews....
" 'So...I said, "Ain't you fools ever heard of academic freedom?" I told 'em that if you wanted to teach the course, there wasn't a thing they could do about it[.]
" 'They said you wouldn't teach it from the quote[,] correct political point of view[,] unquote.' " – pp. 139–40
"I imagine telling...Daddy that...Jesus was a Jew[,] who never addressed his aphorisms...to non-Jews. Jesus belongs to Jewish history, although in a minor and aberrant role. I imagine saying such things to Daddy and the entire universe crumbles[.]
"Judaism...is a way of living in the world through small actions[:] mak[ing] holy the ordinary, find[ing] the mystical in the mundane." – p. 142
Winter 1980 [(beginning December 1979)]
"I've never had many black students in my classes[.] A black student told me once it was because my wife is white....
"Would I want to...convert...if I were not so isolated from blacks now?...I...feel lonely and abandoned by my people. [I]f Jews did not accept me, I would be devastated. I can only become a Jew when I know [that] that is what God wants of me[,] even if no Jew in the world accepts me....
"I must accept that this loneliness is how God wants me to live." – pp. 144–5
Chapter 17
Summer 1980
"Daddy['s] handshake is firm as he gives me his traditional greeting: 'Well, what you saying about yourself?'
"[T]his man['s] warmth and laughter and clumsy tenderness taught me love....
"Father's Day. It is the only time I will sit at one end of the table and stare at my father at the other[,] and along the sides, my children and his grandchildren. I will not see him alive again." – pp. 146–8
Spring 1981
"[From] an essay I wrote for Katallagete[:]
" 'It was my task to mediate...my sins....
" 'To lift my stone. To live with the suffering that comes to me...as a consequence of...being born black.
" '[Or, just] because I was born.
" 'How do you lift a stone that weeps?
" 'You reach down and pick it up.'
"Daddy does not understand and, I realize now, has never understood. He has tried to accept but he cannot. How could he have spent most of his eighty-three years traveling and preaching[,] yet neither of his sons goes to church[?]
"But I hear him say[,] 'I knew that you were attracted to the Catholic Church. I would be happy if you went to somebody's church.'...
"How can he not know how insanely religious I am? How can he not know?
"He doesn't and I will never be able to convince him. But I do not need to and I hear a smile in my voice as I say, 'I'm sorry you don't know, Daddy[.] You didn't fail!' " – pp. 148–9
July 31, 1981
"Momma is direct[:] 'He's dead.'
"[M]emories[,] unbidden, rush forward like a lover[.]
[(A Joycean paragraph of prose follows.)]" – pp. 150–1
Chapter 18
Autumn 1981
"[M]y wife['s and] the children['s] faces are familiar, but who are they? My father is dead and I do not understand why.
"I know he was old. I do not understand why he had to die.
"[A]s I watched his casket being slid into the vault at the mausoleum the next afternoon[,] and heard my brother cry out and watched my father's youngest...brother collapse, I knew, for an instant, that I would never see him again.
"In the next instant, I thought[:] My father, dead? Ridiculous!" – pp. 152–3
"I sit on the couch in the family room and the tears come....I...write in my journal[:]
" '[S]o sorry. He was such an alive person....
" 'For so long[,] I didn't feel much. I was afraid to feel, because I was afraid the feelings of loss and abandonment would kill me....
" 'He just isn't alive[—]because if he's dead, then what's to become of me?...What am I supposed to do?...Who am I supposed to be now?...
"My daddy loved me so much and now all that love is gone....All that love has been withdrawn[.] When the sun goes out, the solar system is destroyed....
"So much of who I am is because of him. So many of my strengths are because of who he was and what he taught me and who he raised me to be. And so much of what I have done with my life was for him, too—thinking about him, wanting my life to compensate him for...disappointments in my brother....What am I supposed to do with my life now that it can't be an offering to him[?]
"[H]e gave me the encouragement to be an individual; he gave me warmth and let his pride in me show[,] forming so many of the essentials of my character.
"I am so much like him. I talk like him. I look like him. I speak publicly, as he did. I use humor like he did. My interest in folklore comes from him telling jokes and stories. My interest in history comes from him talking about the past. My feelings as a Southerner and my connection to slavery come through him. My religiosity comes from him. My faith comes through him. I have his quick temper and sternness[.]
"I [am] lonely without you there[,] like some pillar on which I stood and out of which I grew. You were my roots—personal, religious, racial....
"Sometimes I had the feeling that there was nothing you wanted to say but that you just wanted to look at me. It was enough for you that I was there[,] and it was enough for me that you were there.
"[I]t was the mere presence of you that could make a difference. It was your presence, and the knowing [of] where you'd come from[,] and what you'd made of your life....
"I'll miss the act of making an offering to you[.]
"To take who the father is and carry it into the future[:] I don't know...any other way to live....
"We understood a lot of things about each other...without agreeing on most and that's pretty amazing....
"I don't see how I can accept that our relationship is dead[.]
"I've wanted to ask you how it was for you when your father died." – pp. 154–6
Part Three
Chapter 19
December 18, 1981
"I am no longer a son but do not know what else there is to be. With sadness, the thought comes—I can be me." – p. 159
"Night....Suddenly, I see myself dancing in the middle of a brick-laid street....
"I want to shout[:] I am a Jew! I am a Jew dancing the joy of God!" – p. 160
"Two weeks pass. Joy is no longer an emotion[;] it is who I am....
"I tell my wife[,] 'I think I'm going to convert to Judaism.'
" 'I'm not surprised,' she says....
"[So] I am a Jew. I wonder if I have been always[.] I will not be converting to Judaism. I am becoming...who I always have been....I'm...sorry it has taken me forty-two years to accept [i]t." – pp. 160–1
"Two more weeks go by. I must be sure that this is...what I need to do. But why do I doubt? The joy is there each morning when I awake." – p. 161
"Julius Lester, former black militant, former anti-Semite, becomes a Jew?...
"My wife had not been surprised. Rabbi Lander is not surprised. Was I the last to know?" – pp. 161–2
Chapter 20
Winter 1982 [(beginning December 1981)]
"Parents are supposed to be like the face of a mountain—solid, unchanging and always there. What is it like for them to have a father who is more like a bird, and you never know in which tree he is going to be roosting[?]" – p. 165
"[U]nless I make peace with the concept of chosenness, my conversion will be stillborn. I'm afraid to discuss it with Rabbi Lander, afraid he will say I can't be a Jew.
"Rabbi Lander explains that chosenness [means] Jews are responsible for living in the world...with ethical values, with a sense of morality and divine purpose....
"There isn't anyone on earth who wouldn't claim that.
"How do you belong to the Chosen People without thinking yourself better than everybody else?" – p. 166
"[N]ow...I understand...the saying of an Israeli poet: 'It is not that Israel has kept the Sabbath; the Sabbath has kept Israel.'
"When it is time for Shabbat to begin...I go upstairs and put on a suit. Sometimes when we are all dressed, my wife and I sit and have a drink, staring with happiness[.]" – pp. 167–8
"The Jewish Community of Amherst does not have Saturday services.
"[O]n Saturday...afternoons[,] I'm not so sure I wouldn't be able to convince God to pull up a chair and watch Patrick Ewing slam-dunk!" – pp. 169–170
"The revelation of God as One enters history through the Jews. [T]his tiny group of people...dared to be different, dared [to] insist...there is only one God[.] This is extraordinary[.]
"Judaism does not believe in reason; it uses it as a tool of worship[,] but reason itself is without intrinsic value. Value is found in suffusing the daily with holiness[.]
"The unseen soul is as real as what is seen....To guard and embody that experience[,] with attentiveness to the nuances and intricacies of holiness[,] is the Jews' task.
"[N]ow that I am entering the covenant, I experience it as a blessing[.]" – pp. 170–1
Chapter 21
Passover 1982
"I...wonder if a Gentile can understand Judaism and Jewishness. The thought is as repugnant to me as when blacks tell whites they cannot know what it is to be black. It is a statement that negates...art and...the realm of the imaginative....
"My wife fears that I am becoming unfamiliar to her....
"Does...my wife...look into my eyes now, expecting to see a reflection of herself, to see my love giving her back to herself[,] and instead see[ing] something called a Gentile?
"[S]ometimes that is so. On Shabbat, I...say: 'O God, You have chosen us and set us apart from all the peoples'[. S]he...hears those words, is humiliated, even, by them. But if I need those words [in order] to be me, she is willing to extract more love[,] from deep within the pain [that] my becoming a Jew is causing her. [M]y becoming a Jew is separating us[,] more than her whiteness and my blackness ever could have....
"To be like everyone else is to cease to be a Jew....
"It is not possible for Gentiles to experience this separateness as other than a rejection of them....
"My wife is right; I am changing when I can think that she is a spectator to my life." – pp. 172–4
Shavuot 1982
"Certainly there are many laws in...Torah; they are the means by which...one is led...deeper into Torah....
"Orthodox Jews believe that at Sinai God gave Jews not only the...Hebrew Bible...but all the commentaries[.]
"[R]eading Torah is not merely saying the words[.] I imagine myself into the text....
"It is Shavuot and...I walk through the tall, white double doors of the Jewish Community of Amherst[. W]hen I go into a synagogue my new identity is not strong enough to...see...myself with my [own] eyes.
"[A]s I listen to the music, th[e] voice within that mocks me...is replaced by a wondrous love." – pp. 174–6
Summer 1982
"I...hear shouting and look to see a group of students marching down the street[:] 'Israel out of Lebanon!'...
"How can a...student...so...easily feel that he knows who is right[?]
"I recognize them as belonging to Amherst's radical left fringe. I look at the face of my former student and his eyes gleam with a dangerous righteousness, as if God had come down that morning and tied the cloak of truth around his shoulders. It is the same look I see in photographs of some Palestinians and some Israelis. It is undoubtedly the same look that burned my face during the Sixties....
"I do not want to see Jews treating Arabs as blacks were treated in the South. I do not want to see how racist many Jews can be. I fear that if I go to Israel I will have to write a Hebrew version of Look Out, Whitey!...
"Jews no longer expect non-Jews to approve of them...and certainly not love them as members of the human family. Jewish survival depends upon the willingness and ability of Jews to act in their own defense....That is why Israeli planes are bombing Beirut.
"I can defend what Israel is doing. That does not mean I like it[.] I want Israel to be 'a light unto the nations.' I want Israel to be better than other nations, to set a new standard for politics and international relations. It is not going to do that." – pp. 176–7
Chapter 22
Summer 1982
"Daddy lives in my soul; Momma lives in my personality. [E]ven to...my wife...I do not speak from that place of silence in me as distant and hard as the farthest star.
"Momma and I share, also, a suspicion of emotion. [W]e do not know how to show the emotion expected of us....
"Mother is matter-of-fact and blunt. She hurts other people's feelings and if it is pointed out to her, she says, 'What I said was true. If his feelings were hurt, that's not my fault.' I can be matter-of-fact and blunt, too....Even Daddy was afraid of her.
"In the spring of 1978...Daddy called me and said she had lost the will to live[.] I flew down[.]
" 'Well, are you going to live or die?' I greeted her.
"She laughed. 'I'm still thinking about it.'
" '[Y]ou're about to worry Daddy to death.'
"I...found Daddy...and said, 'She's going to live.' " – pp. 178–9
"In a corner near the furnace is the round picture tube from the first TV set we owned—1948.
"[E]motion caused him to save tiny bars of soap, each one still in its wrapper....
"What do I do with...the proclamation from the governor and legislature of the state of Tennessee honoring him on his retirement[?]
"I do not want to impose on any of my children the...burden of burying me, object by object, memory by memory....
"I must not deprive my children of this bitter intimacy of knowing me in ways they could not[,] when I was flesh....
"I want to put my arms around...Malcolm...and say, 'In my boxes are memories of you like golden threads spun by fairies in the deepest night and left on my pillow'[. Y]ou will yearn for your child to receive these offerings...because by offering...your memories, you are offering the child another birth, one through a canal of memory you will not know you have[,] until you hold in your hand a golden thread gleaming like dandelions[,] and you will despair if your child sees only dirt and grime and age on a teddy bear that kept you safe from night's dragons[.]
"I open a box....It is...letter[s that] Momma...wrote Daddy before they were married....Do I want to know? Or do I want them always to shine in the nave of my soul? To read and to know will be the final task in ceasing to be my father's son." – pp. 179–82
"I am going to the morning minyan at the Chasidic shul on West End Avenue...in Nashville, Tennessee[.]
"I am going because I am afraid. I am afraid more and more, so afraid that I fear to name the fear....
"This fear is existential, because I do not understand myself. I do not understand how I have lived, and how I have arrived at this place of so radically changing not only how I live but how I conceive of myself. The only answer I can offer is that I am following my soul, but what does that mean? What the hell is the soul, anyway? How do I know when I am hearing it and not some neurosis or complex? Is the language of the soul that swelling exaltation of tears and laughter?...Is it a silence as deep and eternal and incomprehensible as death?...
"I went to the mausoleum to see Daddy. I told him that I am becoming a Jew and I didn't want him to be hurt. I wasn't repudiating him but affirming all [that] he gave me—the faith, the passion, the courage. I told him...I wanted him to be happy that God had led me to a place of joy and peace. I told him how much I missed him, but that if he had not died[,] I did not know if I would have been able to become a Jew because only now, now that I am no longer his son, can I be me[;] and then I cried because my life needed his death.
"Services have begun....I slip quietly into a seat in the back...and begin reading....In the far corner two men are talking loudly about last night's game on 'Monday Night Baseball.'...
"Someone catches my eye[,] and nods his head in greeting. I return the nod....I am half-involved in the conversation about the baseball game[:] which is becoming an argument over whether the manager should have taken out the starting pitcher in the seventh inning.
"[Eventually], people close their prayerbooks, shake hands with each other, and start talking and laughing....I slip quietly out the...door.
"I have no idea what I just experienced because it bore no resemblance to anything I've ever known as religion. Reform services are similar in style to Protestant worship.
"[And yet], there might be some mornings when God is more interested in hearing about a baseball game." – pp. 183–5
"It has been...thirty years since I[']ve been to Pine Bluff....
"Where Grandmomma's house [once] stood is thick woods....
"Malcolm and I...walk across a clearing [and] past a pile of discarded furniture...and unidentifiable debris. I am saddened that the forty acres of land my great-grandfather purchased has become the neighborhood garbage dump....
"I feel foolish for not having thought that the cemetery would be on the other side of the dump....
"I point to a grave. 'That's your great-great-grandmother[,] Maggie Carson. She was a slave.' The birth date on the tombstone reads 1846....One [of] her children...is missing[:] Florence. She moved to Indiana and passed for white. Momma told me...she came back once, in the middle of the night, to see Maggie[,] and was gone before sunrise....
"There is so much I want to tell my son about those who lie here[,] because I fear that when I die, there will be no one to remember....
"I want...to...tell...my son...about Grandmomma raising four children alone on these forty acres. I want to tell...how...that thin woman...looked so much like a white woman[,] and that whatever that did to her was passed to her oldest daughter and then to me and now it is his[.] I want...my son [to] look into her piercing eyes, so he can see the absence of sentimentality in that face[,] and maybe then he will understand why there are moments I answer his questions with a stare and it is her stare and it is a stare that says, 'We survived the fire and the flood'[.]
"Aunt Rena lived at the eastern edge of the property next to the railroad tracks....She was as white-looking as Grandmomma[,] and her husband, Fate McGowan...looked white, too. 'Your aunt Rena hated it when I married your mother,' Daddy told me once[.] ' "That n—— is too black," she told your mother. She didn't know she would end up stark raving mad, without a dime to her name'[.]
"A path led through the field from Grandmomma's to Aunt Rena's. I must have been fifteen...the last time I walked that path with Momma...up to the house[.] We...stopped in horror[.]
"I did not see Momma cry when Daddy died [later] but she cried that day[,] and I knew she cried not only for what was[,] but for what had been and would never be again[.] I wanted to feel something more than repulsion and disgust and fear of that mad and ugly and dirty and old white woman who was my great-aunt.
"[T]hat is the sadness of memory. But as long as...Malcolm...remembers to remember[,] he will know that the lives of his children did not begin with their births, or even his." – pp. 185–8
"Momma...answer[ed my question,] 'After Grandfather died, Momma used to light a candle once a year'[.]
"It was a Yahrzeit candle, I am sure. Grandmomma remembered....Did Adolph ask her to do that for him as he lay dying? [W]hat was the link between him and her that he knew she was the one? Grandmomma remembered. And Momma remembered Grandmomma's remembering[.]
"If I can ever find the date of Great-grandfather's death, I will remember that of which I have no memory." – p. 189
Chapter 23
Autumn 1982: Rosh HaShana
"The...traditional Jewish term for the ten days from Rosh HaShana to Yom Kippur is Days of Awe....I have not experienced any awe....I am...discouraged. The more...I study, the more difficult becoming Jewish is....
"I sat in synagogue[.] If people didn't know anyone else was there, they knew I was, with my black self. How can I become a part of the Jewish people when I don't look like other Jews?...I...came home.
"I sit on the couch now[:] silent, angry, disappointed in myself[. —]I can't be a Jew. What made me think I could? I wish I knew another convert, a black one[.]
"But if I do not become a Jew, who am I?
"I cannot go back to who I was, and I do not know who I am becoming." – p. 191
Yom Kippur
"Instead of sitting at the rear of the synagogue I sit at the front[.] I do not see all the people[.]
"The cantor is an Israeli, Gadi Elon. [T]his time I...give myself over to the sound, allowing it to beat at me, to flay at my self-consciousness, my sense of foreignness until they are like granules of pulverized stone and I am emptied of who I was....
"Part of the service [is] Yizkor[,] the service of remembering the dead....I thought of...Daddy...and was glad...to be with others and remember." – p. 192
January 3, 1983
"Tonight I publicly proclaim that I have chosen to become part of the Jewish people.
"Last week...Rabbi Lander...was...disappointed that I decided not to be circumcised....I knew that if he insisted on circumcision I would not continue with the conversion process. I have done as much as I can[.] I will keep my foreskin.
"Near the end of the service, Rabbi Lander calls me to the bimah[.]
"A chill goes through me and I think of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother[,] and it is not in my imagination but in my body that I feel them joined once more. I feel also a deep peace[:] for at long last[,] my great-grandfather is at peace.
"So am I." – pp. 194–5
Part Four
Chapter 24
September 1983
"It is the day after Yom Kippur[.]
"The Days of Awe do not begin with Rosh HaShana...but in Elul, the month preceding. That is when you begin preparing yourself to stand before God to be judged[.] During Elul you ask forgiveness from those you have sinned against[.]
"I was not strong enough to...silence...my pride[,] so I didn't ask my wife to forgive me for all the times I threw silence at her like stones as sharp as knives. [R]ecently...a friend...said, 'You must be hell to live with. [Y]ou seem like fire under ice.'...
"How do I explain how I must live[:] to tend and nurture the images and words that continually rise within like fish coming from the depths of a river whose darkness only they have penetrated?...
"Elul teaches that to be human is to be destructive as well as creative....
"I only know how to glorify myself for my goodness and indulge in self-flagellation for my evil. Both are sentimental responses, and my goodness brutalizes others with the same force as my evil." – pp. 199–201
Winter 1984 [(beginning December 1983)]
"I am in love...with being a Jew. But this passion is not...blindness[.]" – p. 202
"[C]entral to Judaism [is] separating the sacred from the profane in every way, on every level[:] being a people apart in order to be holy, to belong only to God....
"I am used to thinking of holiness as powerful[;] but it isn't, which is why Judaism is so much work, why it is so concrete, why it demands so much. Holiness cannot be taken for granted. It must be fought for and won each day." – pp. 204–5
"Though I was converted by a Reform rabbi, I never assumed I would be a Reform Jew....I am very traditional, conservative even....
"I prefer Conservative services. Through the use of Hebrew the link with Jews throughout history is reaffirmed....If I lived in a Jewish community, I would want to be Orthodox, but I could never accept...women [being] prohibited from...participating fully in the service....
"As long as I remain uncircumcised, I am a Reform Jew. Even though I've studied the rabbinic commentaries on the meaning of the covenant of circumcision, I do not understand why it is so important....
"If somebody would promise me that circumcision would not affect my enjoyment of sex adversely, I would do it. But the medical books I read talk about the sensitivity of the foreskin and what it adds to sexual pleasure. Some maintain that circumcision diminishes not only sexual pleasure but sexual desire.
"Well, if I have to choose between being a circumcised Jew and sexual desire, forget it!
"[W]hen I began[,] my one rule was not to do something simply because it was Jewish. I do only that which makes sense to my heart. For that reason I have not observed the holiday of Succoth, the Festival of Booths....
"Chanukah was incomprehensible when I read about it, but my heart had no objection[. That] final night...we turned out the lights and the entire room was ablaze at the time of year when there is the greatest darkness!
"Judaism is a doing which can be grasped only by the heart.
"Maybe it's that way with circumcision[.]" – pp. 205–6
"I...offer[ed] to write an essay about my journey to Judaism.
"Copies of New Traditions arrived today. It is a good magazine. I like the layout and typeface.
"I write instinctually....I'm not a literary person[.] I write, but I'm not a writer. Writing is the means by which I seek to render myself holy.
"That is the only way I can understand why someone as intensely private as I am reveals so much of my life in print. It is not my life I write about so much as it is the lives of everyone." – pp. 206–7
Spring 1984
"When Jesse Jackson announced his candidacy for the presidency[,] I knew his Achilles' heel was his attitude toward Jews, and I waited for him to nick himself with his poisonous arrow[.]
"He referred to Jews as 'Hymies' in what he thought was an off-the-record conversation with a black reporter for The Washington Post....
"This is one issue I will not go public on....
"I suppose I am no longer black[,] if blackness is synonymous with black nationalism warmed over once too often. If blackness is synonymous with unthinking...blind loyalty to the race, regardless of what any of its members do, then I am not black.
"James Baldwin is teaching on campus this academic year. [W]e have talked and argued...many nights about our definitions of ourselves as writers, about blacks, about Israel[.] He has sat at our Shabbat table and read the words from Psalms that are part of our Sabbath evening ritual....The personal bond between me and Jimmy is quite deep because we know the penalties writing extracts, how its demands diminish our human capacities[:] even as what we write seeks to expand the capacity for being human in us....
"Last Tuesday Jimmy devoted his lecture to the Jesse Jackson affair....
"Jimmy's view was that Mondale and Hart say things like that about blacks but the media won't report it. His sense of history is supposed to be better than that....Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, had to resign for telling an anti-black joke in a setting similar to the one in which Jackson made his 'Hymie' reference. Jimmy insisted on blaming the messenger, however.
"He then went on to hold Jews responsible....Maybe because we were so ungracious as to say that we were insulted by being referred to as 'Hymies.'...
"It was reading Notes of a Native Son [in] my sophomore year at Fisk that told me that I, too, could be a writer, because Jimmy wrote with a lyricism and love closer to me than the anger of Richard Wright....
"At the conclusion of his lecture, he called for questions[.] His words had given black students permission to stand up and mouth every anti-Semitic cliché they knew[,] castigating Jewish landlords and Jews in general. Jimmy listened and said nothing. [A]n Afro-Am faculty member stood up to say that Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights Movement should not be denigrated...as [mere] paternalism....
"I found myself surrounded by Jewish students[,] most of whom had tears in their eyes....
"In my section of the [same] class on Thursday, [t]he Jewish students were hurt and angry...and the black students were silent....I told them [that] I thought...Baldwin was wrong in his analysis of the Jackson affair because his outrage was misdirected. Why weren't he and other blacks angry at Jesse?
"I did not expect...people in the Afro-Am Department...to include a hostility in their silence[,] which frightens me....The look of cold defiance in...one department member['s] face was chilling.
"I wish they would...be done with me." – pp. 208–11
"I had lunch with Jimmy to talk about his Jackson lecture. He was...distressed to hear how I and the Jewish students felt about his remarks....
" 'In your lecture you didn't speak as someone who understands Jewish suffering and Jewish fears.'
"He admitted I was right and said that next Tuesday he will apologize to the Jewish students." – p. 211
"The semester has ended[—h]e never apologized to [them.]" – p. 211
Chapter 25
Summer 1984
"One afternoon eight years ago...my son...looked at me and said, 'Dad, do you know why I like to play hockey?' [—] 'Because I like to hit people,' he answered solemnly. At that moment I knew...my task was simple—to love him as he was.
"Each evening I listen to the sounds of him lifting weights in the basement. He is male in ways...foreign to me[.] Girls cheer and call his name when he knocks an opposing player on the ice....
"He walks through the family room wearing only a pair of shorts and I see what the male body is supposed to look like....His body is so beautiful he should be posing for a sculpture to be placed in the Parthenon. He is taller than me now and I do not mind raising my eyes to look into his face. [J]ust as my father had to raise his eyes to look into mine and those of my brother, it is only proper that I look up....
"This time next year he will be preparing to leave for an as-yet-unknown college. Already[,] home is just the place where his bed is located. I do not know where he goes or what he does....
"It is not enough to simply love another; I must learn to love as that other needs to be loved. If I do not, my love is merely an emotional generalization, suitable for all and mattering to none." – pp. 212–3
"After Abraham was circumcised[,] three...angels...came along....
"This was my first operation and I was terrified....An hour later I awoke in the recovery room[.]
"No rational thought process led to the decision to be circumcised. More and more I felt incomplete as a Jew....
"On the first day of Passover we read the section from Joshua where he orders all the men circumcised immediately after crossing the Jordan and entering the Promised Land[.] The place where the circumcisions occur is called Gibeath-ha-aralot[h], hill of the foreskins....
"I hear my penis plotting to get back at me. It is planning on not becoming erect for the rest of my life." – pp. 214–5
"I received a letter from...Rabbi Allen Maller of Culver City, California....Enclosed were some extracts from his book, God, Sex, and Kabbalah:
" '[N]ot all non-Jews who convert to Judaism are the reincarnated souls of Jews who had been separated from Judaism in former lives....
" 'The religious tradition of their birth never seems to fit them well....They begin searching here and there, restlessly. [T]hey are drawn to a particular...group of Jews, and by this means gradually become part of the Jewish people. Much to their surprise, frequently such people discover...that one of their great-grandparents had been a Jew.' " – pp. 216–7
"IT WORKS!
"IT WORKS BETTER THAN EVER!!!" – p. 218
Chapter 26
"I hold [an] envelope in my hands and stare at the name...in the upper-left-hand corner[:] 'Samuel Altschul'[.]
"The final document [i]nside...is a copy of a newspaper clipping....Under a heading that reads 'Death Record' are the following words[:]
" 'Mr. Adolph Altschul...died at his country home...after a lingering illness....The remains will be interred in the Jewish cemetery this afternoon, the funeral taking place from the residence at 2 o'clock.'...
"Did Great-grandmother go to the cemetery, or did she stand on that porch and watch as the hearse moved slowly up Sheridan Pike?
"Once again I find myself hating the silence of my family. I would like to think [that] all [of] that silence compelled me to be a writer. That is not so, because words are another dimension of silence for me.
"I read the letter. Samuel Altschul is a twenty-two-year-old student at the University of Arkansas[.]
" 'The Altschul family,' he writes, 'originally came from Ober Lustadt[,] a small village [in the western German province of] Rheinland-Pfalz[.]'
"Adolph's grandmother was Barbara Altschul[.] One day in 1816 Barbara appeared at the town hall in Ober [L]ustadt to register the birth of a son, Samuel....The name of Samuel's father was not recorded[.] Barbara was already married...for three years, to a Joseph Levy....
"In 1823 Barbara had another son, Jacob[;] and once again, no father's name is listed.
"[H]er firstborn[,] my great-great[-]grandfather, Samuel Altschul, had four children[. In order:] Joseph[;] Adolph (1841–1901); Jeanette[;] and Morris[.] Joseph and Adolph were in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy....Joseph was the Confederate Army bandleader and Adolph played in the band....
"I read further and...learn that there was never an Altschul Jewelers in Pine Bluff. The Altschuls owned a wholesale tobacco company[, which] did sell jewelry....
"I notice that the name 'Julia' appears and reappears. I was named Julius for my mother, Julia. I did not know that Julia was the name of a cousin of Adolph's father....Adolph named one of his daughters Julia[.] I, not knowing the name had been passed from generation to generation, [gave] David the middle name of Julius, making him the fifth generation[.]
"[O]f all the Hebrew names I could have chosen, I chose Yaacov, Jacob. Only now do I learn that it was the name of my great-great-great-great-grandfather.
"[From] the end of the letter:
" 'We found it interesting that you converted to Judaism while our family has gone in the other direction.
" '[T]he Altschuls are Kohens (Kohanim), which means that they are direct descendants of Aaron. Several older members of the family have told us this fact, and many of the tombstones...have the Kohanim symbol.' " – pp. 220–5
June 1985
"What is Malcolm feeling tonight?...I finished high school a year early[,] and had completed my freshman year at Fisk when my high school class graduated. I...had almost graduated from college before I thought to go by the high school and get my diploma.
"Is he alternately elated, relieved, apprehensive and sad? It is the sadness I cannot imagine....Malcolm enjoyed high school, especially this past year....
"I remembered I took him to Wollman Rink in Central Park for the first time...and...led him to the ice....He ignored me, pushed himself up, and clinging to the boards, he began making his way around the rink. It was my first experience of letting him go.
"[In] lacrosse[, h]e was...considered the best in the school's history. I teased him, sometimes, about choosing sports that black people know nothing about. [W]henever he has asked me, 'What do you think I should do?,' my response has always been, 'If you do what you love, you'll be all right.'...
"He...found himself being recruited by college football and lacrosse coaches....
"When we visited the college that was his first choice, I was not prepared when he said, 'How would you feel if we went to the meeting for potential English majors[? I] held my breath for the next hour[:] anything I said would be wrong....
"I don't know why fathers want and even need at least one of their children to follow in their footsteps. Are we so unsure of how we have lived that we cannot know...that we have lived well[,] unless one of our children continues what we began?...As a man, do I need to feel that from my soul the souls of my children are born[?]
"When Jody was ten I gave her a guitar, hoping but not daring to expect that, through that instrument, she would take me into her soul and find her own. To my amazement she did. [W]hen I listen to her, I am at peace. [W]hen she holds the guitar in her arms[,] and plays it better than I ever did, I know that I gave her something...important[.]
"[W]hen we know that you choose to use us...fathers...as...bridges[,] across which you walk to reach your souls[,] then we know that we have been equal participants in what will be, we hope, your unceasing act of creating yourself....
"Once or twice a year I allowed myself to say [to]...Malcolm[,] 'You write well,' daring to say no more....He says he wants to be a sports journalist. I wish I wrote as well as some of the men who write for Sports Illustrated. Some of the best writing in America appears in that magazine....
"After reading one of my books, my father looked at me and said, 'Well, I guess you became a preacher after all. You just did it a little differently.'
"I smiled as tears rushed to my eyes. 'Daddy, I'm so glad you know that.'...
"What was it like to be my son?...Sometimes it was a fear of being eclipsed....He had chosen athletics over academics because, he said, 'I want an area that's mine, that you've had nothing to do with.'...Jody sa[id] to me once[,] 'You've done almost everything, Dad. You haven't left anything for us.'
"How do the children of high-achieving parents find their own identities? [T]hey are robbed of identity when they are seen as 'Julius Lester's son,' 'Julius Lester's daughter.'
"I have tried to protect their separateness[.] But when Malcolm says, 'Why didn't you tell me you had an article in such-and-such?' publication, there is hurt in his voice, as if he thinks I want to exclude him....
"I do not want my children sacrificed on the altar of black people's needs or mine.
"I fear that one day they will tell me I was wrong, that it was their [own] task to fight for their separateness[.]
"Michael McIntosh, senior class president...and one of Malcolm's...hockey...linemates, is introducing me[:] 'I'll say only the most important...thing[.] He is Malcolm Lester's father.'
"[T]he mystery is...that we are each unknown and unknowable to the other[.]" – pp. 225–9
Chapter 27
October 7, 1985
"It is Simchat Torah, the night we...complete the reading of the five books of Moses and begin again immediately[,] and...sing and dance our joy in Torah.
"I stand outside the Pennsylvania Station–Madison Square Garden complex in New York City....
"The sun has not gone down so I still have time to get to a synagogue, any synagogue....
"A few days ago Marty Peretz, editor of The New Republic, called. 'I'd like you to cover [a] rally'[.]
"[In] the summer of 1960[,] someone played for me a 45 rpm record called 'White Man's Heaven Is Black Man's Hell.' It was a song with a calypso beat sung seductively and persuasively by a man named Louis X....What a relief it would be to condemn all white people as unredeemable. I would be free of having to live with...uncertainty and ambiguity[.]
"After the death of Elijah Muhammad, the [leader] of the Nation of Islam, the Nation rejected Elijah's racial philosophy, changed its name and aligned itself with more traditional Islamic thinking and practice. Louis X, or maybe he was Louis Farrakhan by then, [resurrected and] assumed control of the Nation.
"Farrakhan delighted in shocking people, and nothing was more so than his description of Hitler as 'wickedly great.'...
"I knew that I would have to do it because I was curious about what I would write. Would I respond to him as a Jew or would I be seduced by his charisma, his rhetoric? Would his expressions of anger and hatred be so comforting to the hurt and bleeding parts in me that I would applaud his sharp...anti-white and anti-Semitic...rebukes[?] I could not be sure that I wouldn't[. H]ow humiliating[!]
"Walking among the crowds are black men in suits [wearing] billed caps on their heads with the initials FOI, Fruit of Islam....Their eyes are hard with dangerous pride. Farrakhan has given them...simple solutions for every problem. I look at the women of the Nation[.] They carry themselves with a regal arrogance as if...they are the owners of the future....
"I live in a beautiful New England town[.] I read about social problems...but they do not sit at my doorstep as they would if I lived in an urban community. As I walk...among the crowds[,] I look at their faces and see poverty. I look at their clothes and hands and see menial work....My hands are soft and my eyes gentle. My walk is slow and languid, as if the world is not a dangerous and threatening place[.] I feel tension, fear and desperation in their bodies, even in the women in white and the Fruit of Islam. Clothes are merely a polyester shield against reality, and tomorrow[,] despair will settle down once again like fog[.]
"Sitting next to me is a white writer from New York magazine. [On] stage[,] a tall black man in a long, flowing white robe is talking with someone.
"Whoever he is, he is quite elegant and looks like a member of some royal African family. [Suddenly,] out of my mouth comes 'My God!' It is Stokely Carmichael.
"[I say,] 'Stokely needs an audience to know he's alive[,] and obviously he has no scruples about how he finds one.'
"[H]e spoke to my Civil Rights Movement class more than ten years ago[. T]he year was close enough to the days of The Movement that its dying glow still infused our relationship with some warmth. [C]lose relationship with Stokely depended on ideological agreement. [A]s he became more nationalistic, he could not accept that I was married to a white woman, and...I would not leave my wife merely because she was white. [F]riends told me: 'Stokely has some real problems with you because of your wife.'...Stokely...had been to our apartment in New York, had...sat at our dinner table, laughing and joking. But when the personal becomes political, persons cease to exist....
"All the memories of the laughter and danger Stokely and I shared are not compelling enough for me to regard him as other than my enemy....
"He calls himself Kwame Touré [(Ture)] now and heads something called the All African People's Revolutionary Party....Only when Stokely begins attacking Israel, Zionism and Judaism does it seem that he finds what [anyone] came to hear. 'Africa gave Judaism to the world,' he shouts [to] applau[se.] 'Moses was an Egyptian! Moses was an African!' The audience is on its feet, cheering.
"Looking at Stokely I realize that he is really a Las Vegas entertainer whose name used to be on the marquee as a headliner.
"[A] representative of the Palestinian Congress of America is introduced. He proceeds to equate Zionism with cancer, and 'the supports of Zionism are cancerous.' The implication is obvious: Cancer kills unless it is killed. [T]he audience greets each anti-Semitic thrust by rising to its feet, cheering, arms outstretched at forty-five-degree angles, fists clenched. I feel that I have been set down in the midst of one of the Nuremberg rallies.
"[Then] Farrakhan walks onto the red-carpeted stage, flanked by six women in white hats and white suits with red tassels at the shoulders. More than twenty thousand people rise, cheering and applauding[.] Farrakhan steps to the edge of the stage, his arms outstretched as if he is posing as the Lamb of God.
"[He says,] 'Somebody has to come to separate God from Satan[,] oppressor and oppressed, so they can see each other and then go to war to see who is going to rule—God or Satan.' And he is that someone....
" 'Who are those who support me? The righteous! You have been deprived of justice, and if God sends a deliverer, will the oppressor love him?'...
" 'I am resurrecting the minds of black people from the dead, and they attack [me,] Farrakhan.'...
"I see black reporters and photographers putting down their pens and cameras to laugh and applaud.
" 'I am your last chance, Jews! The scriptures charge your people with killing the prophets of God.' Farrakhan goes on to contend that God has not made Jews pay for such alleged deeds. However, if something happens to him, then God will make the Jews pay for all the prophets killed from biblical times to the present. '[W]hen God puts you in the oven, "never again" don't mean a thing.'...
"I leave because I am too frightened....I expect to see someone point at me and yell, 'He's a Jew!' and to find myself running from an angry crowd....
"It is one experience to read the words of...anti-Semitism in books; it is entirely another to hear them spoken with intensity, urgency and conviction, to hear them affirmed with cheers, the stamping of feet, laughter, applause and arms thrust toward heaven. I am afraid and enraged....
"As a black I am ashamed. I do not understand what is happening to blacks that so many could revel in vicarious bloodletting. Despair, poverty, deprivation and the relentless heat of racism do not justify hatred. Those blacks inside Madison Square Garden act as if they are the first generation of blacks to make its way through the valley of the shadow of death. They are not. They are the first, however, to wear suffering as if it were the divine right of kings. They are the first to use suffering as if it gives them divine exemption from moral and ethical responsibility to the rest of humanity." – pp. 230–6
Chapter 28
Winter 1986 [(beginning December 1985)]
"I look at her sitting at the table, studying Hebrew. I admire this woman whom I am blessed to also call my wife....I try to imagine my life without her presence and I cannot....
"If it had been she who had plunged the marriage into the fires of Judaism, would I have sat at the Sabbath table week after week with love and respect for her and a way of being I had not chosen?...
"I would like to think yes, but I cannot be sure....
"I am afraid to give my joy a place in my body, afraid that joy of such magnitude will terrify her, will block the entranceway of her own joy....
"Would it have been wrong for her to become a Jew because she loves me?...I assumed that...offer[ing] her the opportunity to...become Jews together...would violate my separateness and hers....
"Unbidden, the image comes to me of that house sitting far back from the road and of me, Momma and Grandmomma sitting on the porch in the evenings. Separateness was survival, I understand now.
"When Adolph and Maggie decided to live their love in that time and...place, they separated themselves from family and community to live unto themselves by a value system which no one agreed with or approved. And that separateness was handed down, generation to generation[.]
"My wife is becoming a Jew and I am freed." – pp. 237–8
"David is six now[.] I have taught him the alef-bet[.] Sometimes when he is playing by himself, we hear him singing under his breath, and listening closely, we hear 'Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ehad.'...
"Nomi, one of his teachers and the daughter of Haim...Gunner...said[,] 'One day [when] Hebrew [was mentioned,] David...said, "My God speaks Hebrew"[.]'...
"David has a love for Judaism...which surprises and startles me. After my wife becomes officially Jewish, we will have him converted. H[e] regret[s] giving up Christmas. Last December was the first time there was not a Christmas tree in the house. How pure the house was for me without it....
"I resent...Christmas[.] I think I will wear a Star of David...every year. Maybe that will force Gentiles to limit their greetings to 'Hello.'
"[My wife's daughter] Elena [stated] that she was released from the monumental expectations Christmas creates as well as the anxieties of not having those expectations met....
"It used to be the custom for Jewish males to write out their own copies of the Torah. That is how I would like to spend my old age[:] slowly, reverently meditating on each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, each one a holy picture delineating my soul and the face of God. I want my last years to be lived in holy silence, opening my lips only to sing the prayers of worship....
"Last June I attended a three-day seminar on...the cantorate as a profession at the University of Hartford.
"[O]nly one [of t]wenty-five people...was older than me, a man who served as cantor in a small Connecticut town and had come because he felt the lack of formal cantorial training....
"The comment I hear most often is 'Didn't you have enough problems being black?' The remark startles me[. T]he person is really saying...he has problems being Jewish. I generally respond by saying, 'Being Jewish is a joy for me.'...
"Many Jews (and Gentiles) feel that if you're not born Jewish, then you aren't really a Jew. I am learning...that [o]nly secularly identified Jews cannot accept that I, too, am a Jew....
"Even though I had recorded two albums of original songs in the mid-Sixties, my voice was untrained and it no longer had the richness and purity of twenty years ago....
"I learned [of] men in the shtetls of Eastern Europe who prayed to God for the congregation. [T]he sacredness they brought to the prayers caused them to be chosen by their congregations to pray in song. That was who I wanted to be—a baal t'filah, a 'master of prayer.'
"At the end of the seminar, I knew [that] on Shabbat mornings...I needed to be in synagogue[:] needed to be with other Jews, singing prayers to God....So the following Saturday David and I drove the ten miles to the synagogue in Northampton....
"The synagogue had no cantor, but the rabbi, Edward Friedman, had a strong tenor voice and, most important, knew that his voice and the music were vehicles for prayer....
"A few months after I started attending B'nai Israel I told Rabbi Friedman that I wanted to have my conversion done Halachically, since I had not been circumcised [the first time.]
"The next week I met him and two other rabbis at the mikveh in Springfield. The mohel took a sharp instrument...and drew a drop of blood from my circumcised penis. I immersed myself in the ritual bath, said the appropriate blessings, and it was done." – pp. 238–42
May 10, 1986
"It is Shabbat[,] the second day of Rosh Chodesh, the New Moon.
"[E]arly in the spring...Rabbi Friedman said casually to me after services, 'When are we going to get that bass voice of yours up on the bimah?'...
"I know...my voice...is deep and loud, which is why I tried to sing quietly. But...joy [had] banished timidity, especially during the repetition of the amidah when we sang 'Yismach Moshe' and 'Sim Shalom.'
"In a few moments...Rabbi Friedman will say, 'Julius Lester will lead us in the Hallel.' I will rise, walk to the bimah and begin to sing Psalms 113 to 118, those special psalms of praise that are only sung on holidays and when Rosh Chodesh coincides with the Sabbath. At long last I will stand in a synagogue and sing Jewish liturgical music as a Jew....
"I close my eyes and begin to chant the opening blessing[.] The melody is my own and it is simultaneously joyous and mournful, because that is the essence of Chosenness.
"As I hear the voices from the congregation rising to meet mine, there is no separateness between me and them. We have become music[. H]eaven has now become earth...and the two are one[,] as God is One....
"All those years[,] I sang folk songs, spirituals, blues [and] work songs, and always knew that something was absent[:] that as much as I loved spirituals, I was not wholly present when I sang them. Now I know why. It is this music [which] my voice was meant to sing[,] of praise and love that releases my soul into my voice, and I have known that[,] ever since I was seven years old and sat at the piano playing 'Kol Nidre' over and over....
"I know now who I am. I am a Jew and I am a lovesong to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a praisesong to the God of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.
"Th[is] is all the 613 mitzvot are, the midrashim, the Talmud, the Torah, kashrut, tzdekah [(tzedakah)], and everything else in Judaism. They are lovesongs to HaShem.
"And so am I." – pp. 242–4
Copyright (c) 2022 Mark D. Blackwell.
