Barnstone The idea for the book, explained Barnstone in his introduction, came during a dinner conversation with poet Yusef Komunyakaa, while the two were discussing the bond between blacks and Jews: outsiders to schools, hotels, neighborhoods and political office, companions in music, theater and labor movements—even in the Exodus tale of slavery and liberation sung out in spirituals and houses of worship.

Even though it happened almost 60 years ago, acclaimed poet, biblical scholar and translator Willis Barnstone knows exactly where and when he wrote his first poem—Nathaniel Hawthorne’s room at Bowdoin College, in the dead of winter 1948.

“It was the middle of the night, and I couldn’t sleep,” said Barnstone. “I had been studying mathematics, logic and philosophy, but had started to read Rilke and found myself drawn to fiction and poetry—I needed to move to the ‘thing.’”

In his recent memoir, We Jews and Blacks, which was published by IU Press this summer, Barnstone occasionally recounts riveting epiphanic moments in his intellectual development, but concentrates on the parallel experiences that he, a Jew, has shared with the most important African Americans in his life—Louis Armstrong, Bayard Rustin, Paul Robeson and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, a former IU professor, who contributed to his book.

The idea for the book, explained Barnstone in his introduction, came during a dinner conversation with Komunyakaa while the two were discussing the bond between blacks and Jews: outsiders to schools, hotels, neighborhoods and political office, companions in music, theater and labor movements—even in the Exodus tale of slavery and liberation sung out in spirituals and houses of worship.

Since no conversation between two poets is devoid of references to other writers, Komunyakaa, an admirer of Walt Whitman for his inclusion of common people in his work, also criticized Whitman for occasionally making blacks exotic, thus dehumanizing them. With his encyclopedic memory for literary references, Barnstone can cite numerous examples of writers through the centuries who also exoticized Jews, but considers Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice one of the best-known examples.

“Even though Shylock is depicted with some sympathy—‘If you hit a Jew, he also feels pain’—the pound of flesh theme derives from the then-standard horrible slander that Jews kidnap and slaughter Christian children and use their live flesh—hence the pound of flesh—to mix with their blood, to make matzoh for the Pesah celebration. In traditional literatures, the Jew is a type and usually an unpleasant one,” said Barnstone.

In We Jews and Blacks, Barnstone examines the concept of “passing”—Jews for Gentile and blacks for white—as something shared by both groups in order to avoid negative stereotyping. Fair coloring and a “waspish” last name (changed from Bornstein, when his father’s family emigrated from Poland to the U.S. in 1887) allowed Barnstone to “pass” at a critical juncture in his young life, when being identified as a Jew might have barred him from admission to an elite Eastern school. He went to Bowdoin College in his native Maine, where fraternities had standard, exclusionary clauses for both Jews and blacks. Central to Barnstone’s discussion of “passing” is his example of the late New York Times critic Anatole Broyard, who concealed the fact that he was black until his death. Only the appearance of Broyard’s darker-skinned sister at his memorial service revealed his secret to the world.

“Passing is a curse—its need is a curse, but if in life-or-death crises it saves your life, it’s a blessing. In the history of not only Jews and blacks, but of so many to appear as someone else, passing has often been a necessity. My wife and I just returned from Greece, where only 4 percent of the country’s 80,000 Jews survived the war. Those who survived the hunt did so by hiding and passing, which meant getting false Christian identity papers. As the book suggests, the psychological self-damage of passing is bad, as elaborated in the instance of Broyard. Henri Cartier-Bresson, who just died, was in the French resistance during the war and was captured by the Germans. He managed to escape by getting false papers and passing as someone else. Passing is and has always been around us in different forms. Even the terrorist must pass, in uniform and face, to successfully board a plane or slip into a restaurant with a belt bomb.”

Barnstone considered his Army stint in the early 1950s one of the periods of his life most free from discrimination for Jews and blacks. In Georgia, on the Camp Gordon base, men of all races and denominations received equal treatment, although off the base, the story was totally different.

“The dictatorship of the Army was democratizing. You couldn’t question the authority of someone, whether he was black, white or green if they could give you the order. I learned that racism exists because it is allowed to. Army law forbade its existence in the ordinary ways that it thrived in the segregated South outside the camp gate,” he said.

Throughout this moving memoir, Barnstone punctuates his engaging prose and anecdotes with poems on the themes addressed in the book. Nowhere is this technique more effective than in the final chapter, “Saying a Hebrew Prayer at My Brother’s Christian Funeral.” Barnstone dedicated the book to his older brother, Howard, who took his own life in 1987, almost four decades after their father committed suicide. In “My Brother Enters the Earth on May Day” resides the line: “Insane/or wise, you chose the way our father ran/ (too early) into peace. Your death is weird.”

Weird, but not surprising, we learn. Howard, who suffered from bi-polar disorder, had struggled with the burden and guilt of trying to “pass” his entire life, and, in fact, had converted to high Episcopalianism two years before his death. Willis Barnstone’s recollection of reciting the quintessential Hebrew prayer, the Shema, at Howard’s sterile non-denominational funeral is one of the book’s most touching passages. When asked why he chose to claim his brother’s Jewishness at that moment, Barnstone replied, “The minister was out of control in his mechanical way of painting a picture of a devoted church member, of a soul already in the arms of Christ, which in no way corresponded to Howard’s public life. I wished to affirm, mainly for my sister and his children, that he was born a Jew, that together we buried our parents as Jews. I did not wish to permit the minister to conceal his past and invent a present.”

Written with the candor and confidence of an author with more than 60 volumes to his credit, We Jews and Blacks is a rich, imaginative literary experiment that melds personal experience with historical figures and events from several perspectives. According to Barnstone, “The book is not a confession, but a declaration of world humanity, whose differences inform but often deform, rather than fascinate. Under it all, we all have the same organs and desires and hopes and fears.”