Willis Barnstone We Memoir with Poems JEWS AND BLACKS Contents We Jews and Blacks i ii Contents Contents W I LLI S B A R N S TO N E We Jews and Blacks Memoir with Poems With a Dialogue and Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis iii iv Contents This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders Fax orders Orders by e-mail 800-842-6796 812-855-7931 iuporder@indiana.edu © 2004 by Willis Barnstone All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barnstone, Willis, date We Jews and Blacks : memoir with poems / Willis Barnstone p cm ISBN 0-253-34419-0 (cloth : alk paper) Barnstone, Willis, date Barnstone, Willis, date—Childhood and youth Poets, American—20th century—Biography Translators—United States— Biography African Americans—Relations with Jews Jews—United States— Biography United States—Race relations Blacks—Relations with Jews Passing (Identity) I Title PS3552.A722Z478 2004 811'.54—dc22 2003022616 09 08 07 06 05 04 Contents for Howard Barnstone who lay in sorrow in his Rothko chapel v vi Contents Contents vii God created the world and us and the others And he commanded us to believe in him and to punish the others And when necessary to kill the others But everywhere in the world, God changed appearance and ideas and to many even he has been the infidel Jews and Blacks understand God’s problems of appearance and identity, for they’ve been uniquely plagued by the same dilemma But they are lucky too, as God is, for their otherness Who wants to be all the same? Years ago God was a woman and in the Hebrew Bible he even began as several gods Genesis 1.1 reads “In the beginning the gods (elohim) created heaven and earth.”* So God started out as a team But we Jews and Blacks have often been seen as a strange species, as if no god had remembered to make us, or had done so in an alien land under a wrong name And with our difference came divine punishment: slavery, demonization, and murder But that distinction of otherness has also given Jews and Blacks a knowledge of affection and play, and a habit of compassion —Pierre Grange, On God and the Other God cooked up birth and billed us with death, leaving us in a global soup bowl filled with every different plant under the sun And then abandoned us to stew in tasty mystery! —Velvel Bornstein, Laughter of the Stoics *Although el is God and elohim gods (as in Psalms), in Genesis 1.1 elohim is called a “plural of majesty,” whose meaning is singular viii Contents Contents ix Contents Acknowledgments xiii Verse A Chat with the Reader The Hell Face of Sacred Distinctions The Plot Verse Jews and Blacks of Early Childhood Swans over Manhattan Anatole Broyard (1920–90), the Inventor What Was a Jew? 14 Dad Grew Up in the Streets 15 Languages of the Jews 18 Spanish Jews 21 12 Verse Jews and Blacks of Early Adolescence 25 “At the Red Sea,” by Yusef Komunyakaa 27 Assimilation and Passing under the Shadow of War and Holocaust Yehuda Maccabee and Hellenization of the Jews 33 Gnosticism and Other Heresies 35 A Summer Camp in Maine with the Scent of Palestine 36 Sammy Propp of the Black Shoes 38 Black People 43 Leah Scott 47 My Unseen Black Grand-Stepmother 51 Othello 52 Reading the Bible in Hebrew 59 Bar Mitzvah 60 “Othello’s Rose,” by Yosef Komunyakaa 63 29 Verse Early Jewish Corruption and Bayard Rustin, the Black Nightingale 65 Early Corruption 67 Yeshua ben Yosef Passing as Jesus Christ 69 228 Appendix Walking Around the City with My Dad Theft of a Brother Architect Howard and His Stray Dog Carlos My Brother Enters the Earth on May Day Gospel of Black Hats Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa At the Red Sea Othello’s Rose Some of us grow ashamed Poems by Aliki Barnstone Day Breaks on Andros, by Eva Victoria Perera, an imaginary Greek poet from Thessaloniki, translated by Aliki Barnstone Of the Jews (a.d 50), by Constantine Cavafy, a modern Greek poet, translated by Aliki Barnstone Parables by Pierre Grange and His Aliases God created the world —Pierre Grange God cooked up birth —Velvel Bornstein I’m fascinated by the other —Wilhelm Scheunenstein When you’re a kid —Peter Stabler When Moses looked around —León Hebreo There is a time to fight —Pierre Grange Human life began in Africa —Pedro Granero Better to be poor in a white room —Petros Stavlos It is a joy to feel sun —Kefa the Bedouin Mapmaker Who knows the Holy Mountain of Athos —Piotr Ambárov When Abraham left Ur —Boutros Tola God got weary of mist —Pierre Grange In the late sixteenth century —Ban Weili A funeral is a sad gathering —Kim Billysu Barnstonsu Do not call on me, who am Death —Anonymous Appendix 229 Notes Jews and Blacks of Early Childhood Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Passing of Anatole Broyard,” in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1997) Jews and Blacks of Early Adolescence See “Between Alexandria and Antioch: Jew and Judaism in the Hellenistic Period,” Leonard J Greenspoon, in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, ed Michael D Coogan (New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 437 The large gnostic presence in northwestern China was erased in the thirteenth century by Ghengis Khan, but there continued to be neomanichaean Bogomils in Constantinople and the Balkans well into the fifteenth century The Cartharist troubadours in Provence and especially in Languedoc in southwestern France were the last artistic expression of European gnosis See Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), p 269 Bergreen, 57 Bergreen, 50 Early Jewish Corruption and Bayard Rustin, the Black Nightingale For a discussion of Jews and Christians in antiquity, see James Carroll’s magnificent Constantine’s Word: The Church and the Jews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) See Elaine Pagels’s The Origin of Satan (New York: Vintage Books, 1996) See my chapter “How through False Translation into and from the Bible, Jesus Christ Ceased to Be a Jew,” in The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 1993), 62–81 The account of Jesus in the canonical gospels is based on oral witnesses and on a presumed written Q (Quelle) source text Origen of Alexandria in the mid-third century exercised the most authority in choosing the main books of the New 230 Notes to pages 114–136 Testament; the canon of twenty-seven books was accepted by the councils of Laodicea (363), Hippo (393), and Carthage (397) (During those years of redaction and copying, the texts and the number of books that would find their way into the canon changed as they also changed as they were translated out of Greek into other tongues.) Accepted finally were the three Synoptic Gospels, variations of each other There are no original texts from the councils in Laodicea, Hippo, or Carthage; modern versions of the Greek scriptures are based on about 3,500 diverse early manuscripts The best preserved gospel is John, which may be the only gospel written in Greek (by John, who like Paul, was a hellenized Jew whose literary language was Greek) We now have sixteen other gospels of the life of Jesus that did not make it into the original canon They appear in excellent editions in The Complete Gospels, edited by Robert J Miller (Sonoma, Calif.: Polebridge Press, 1995), and include: Gospels of Thomas, Secret Book of James, Dialogue of the Savior, Gospel of Mary, Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Greek Fragments of Thomas, Infancy of James, Gospel of Peter, Secret Gospel of Mark, Egerton Gospel, Gospel Oxyrhynchus 840, Gospel Oxyrhynchus 1224, Gospel of the Hebrews, Gospel of the Ebionites, and Gospel of Nazoreans Jews and Blacks in College, and Freedom in Europe “Pre-Christian” is a common appellation for Jews prior to or contemporary with Jesus who, like Peter, Paul, and Matthew, had a major place in later Christian hagiography Having Fun at Gunpoint in Crete Between the Phoenician alphabet (c.1000) and Egyptian hieroglyph (3rd millennium) is the Proto-Canaanite alphabet (c.1500) Before the Egyptian is the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform (c.3300) The Septuagint actually took about a century to complete B H H Ben-Sasson, A History of the Jews (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 371 Nicholas Stavroulakis, The Jews of Greece (Athens: Talos Press, 1997), This number seems to be a low estimate, if we can believe Tacitus and Josephus, who put the Jewish dead alone at the end of the first Jewish War (66–70/3) at 600,000, and at 850,000 Jewish victims following the rebellion of 135 During the Roman siege of Jerusalem, Josephus writes that five hundred Jews were crucified each day The first of these wars saw the destruction of the Temple In the second of 135, the Romans razed all of Jerusalem In this same period, especially under Nero, the Christian Jews were also horribly slaughtered and their churches were burnt See María Rosa Menocal, Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2002) Menocal, 106 Victor Perera, The Cross and the Pear Tree (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 40 Notes to pages 137–207 231 Perera, 41 Among those wanderers were the Spanish-Portuguese ancestors of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), whose path eventurally led to them to the tranquility of the Amsterdam ghetto, where the philosopher was born 10 From “Echo & Elixir 2,” in Zodiac of Echoes (Keene, N.Y.: Ausable Press, 2003) Khaled Mattawa is a Libyan-born American poet 11 These numbers, as all numbers in historical documents, vary from source to source, often according to whim or wish The number of Jews in turn-of-the-century Salonikia is frequently set at 90,000 12 Stavroulakis, Jews of Greece, 56 13 Much of the information with respect to official numbers, which are never exact, comes from two sources: Joshua Eli Plaut, Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 1913–83; and Documents on the History of the Greek Jews: Records from the Historical Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, edited by Photini Constantopoulou and Thanos Veremis, Introduction by Steven Bowman (Athens: Kasttaniotis Editions, 1998) 14 The event of the university’s complicity was told to me by Rosa Benveniste, docent of the Jewish Museum in Athens She survived the Salonika occupation I have her word, but not independent confirmation, though I suspect there are documents that elaborate what happened in detail 15 Involved with the deportation of Yugoslav and Greek Jews was Kurt Waldheim (1918–), then a young Austrian officer in the German army His military past concealed, Waldheim later was two-time secretary general of the U.N After his role in the deportations was internationally pronounced, he was elected president of Austria (1986–92) Waldheim denied all knowledge of the atrocities, but during his presidency of Austria, his tenure was marked by international isolation 16 A significant recent exception is the earlier cited Documents on the History of the Greek Jews, published in 1998 and sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Greece Though these documents appeared four decades after World War II, they reflect progress, if not transparency Using the same metaphor of light, Theodoros Pangolos, Minister of Foreign Affairs, prefaces the volume: “The purpose of the present publication is to illuminate certain aspects of the history of Greek citizens of the Jewish faith which have long remained obscure.” 17 Plaut, Greek Jewry in the Twentieth Century, 55 18 Christ is from Hristos, Greek for the Hebrew mashiah, “anointed.” Mumbling about Race and Religion in China, Nigeria, Tuscaloosa, and Buenos Aires With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires: A Memoir (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993) Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations Abel (biblical), 3–4 Achebe, Chinua, 193 actors, Jewish, 30 Adam (biblical), Africa, 104, 192–93, 198–99 Albania, 150, 151 Albigensian crusade, 35 Alexander the Great, 140, 145 Alexandria, city of, 132–33 Almohad Berbers, 136 Almoravid Berbers, 136 Altamira, Rafael, 212 Ambárov, Piotr, 144 American Friends Service Committee, 96 Amichai, Yehuda, 37, 43 Anderson, Capt Ken, 176 Anderson, Marian, 14–15, 44 Andonis, Captain, 126, 127 “Andrews Sisters, The,” 30 antisemitism, 30, 37, 68 in Germany and Austria, 67 origins of, 70, 163 on U.S college campuses, 92 Antiochos IV (Seleucid monarch), 33, 131 Apocrypha, biblical, 70, 101 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 105, 106 Arabic language, 19, 20–21, 136, 160 Aragon, Louis, 104 Aramaic language, 70, 72, 132 Archimedes, 132 “Architect Howard and His Stray Dog Carlos” (Barnstone), 219 Argentina, 4, 5, 131, 206–208 Aristotle, 20–21, 67 Armenians, 139 Armstrong, Louis, 44–46, 46 Ashkenazim, 20 assimilation, 32 “At the Red Sea” (Komunyakaa), 27–28, 200 Atatürk, Kemal, 139 Athanasius of Alexandria, Bishop, 70 Athens, 119–20, 121, 127, 141 Athos, Mount (Greece), 144–52 Au revoir les enfants (film), 68–69 Auschwitz death camp, 31–32, 38, 69, 140, 142 Babylonian Captivity, 109, 140, 189 Babylonian Talmud, 134 Bacall, Lauren, 30 “Back in 1901” (Barnstone), 17–18 Baker, Josephine, 103 Baldwin, James, 103 Balkans, 120, 123, 137 Bamberger, Louis, 11 baptism, Christian, 114 bar mitzvah, 59, 60–62 Barnstone, Aliki (author’s daughter), 180 Barnstone, Beatrice (author’s sister), 221, 222 Barnstone, Gertrude Levy (author’s sister-in-law), 218 Barnstone, Helle Tzalopoulou (author’s wife), 95–96, 107, 124–25, 149, 182 civil wedding ceremony in Paris and, 110–16 Greek Orthodox wedding ceremony and, 152–53, 154, 157 Barnstone, Howard (author’s brother), 113, 114, 211–12, 215–22 234 Index Barnstone, Robert (author’s brother), 220 Barnstone, Robert (author’s son), 218–19 Barnstonsu, Kim Billysu, 210 Barrault, Jean Louis, 106 Barzel, Hillel, 43 baseball, 8, 214 Basques, Bates, Allan, 154 Bauhaus, 216 Beat writers, 103, 162 Bekale, Zeléke, 96 Benny, Jack, 14 Bergen-Belsen death camp, 142 Bergson, Henri, 99, 102 Bernstein, Jeremy, 11 Bernstein, Leonard, 68 Beyazid II (Ottoman sultan), 138 Bible, Hebrew, 34, 43, 59–60, 70 allegorical exegesis of, 136 Asian Jews and missing books of, 109, 188 as Old Testament of Christianity, 71, 204 pseudepigrapha in, 71 translated into Greek, 132 verses from, 171, 192, 224 bigotry, 3, 43, 169, 225 in college fraternities, 90, 91, 92, 99 in education, 11, 77, 205 in France, 106 Jewish, 115–16, 221 Blacks American jazz musicians in Paris, 103 Black Jews, 21 boxing champions, 46–47 discrimination in education and, 77, 90, 96 domestic servants, 47–51 from French African colonies, 104 jazz musicians, 44–46, 46 passing as White, 12–14, 201–202 quotas in school admissions and, 67 in the segregated South, 67, 97, 174, 202 slave narratives, 192–99 tribal nationalism and, 130 in U.S military, 32, 170, 171–77, 179–80, 181 Blake, William, 35 Blum, Léon, 67 body language, racism and, 202–203 Boehme, Jacob, 81 Bondanella, Peter, 168 “Boot Camp in Georgia” (Barnstone), 175 Borges, Jorge Luis, 35, 36, 72, 81 apartment in Buenos Aires, 131 conversation with, 206–208 on lonely singularity, 163 on Spanish Jews, 138–39 the unknown and, 147 Bornstein, Velvel, 84, 85–86 “Bowdoin, 1948” (Barnstone), 92 Bowdoin College, 89–96, 97–98 Bowles, Paul, 162 Branch, Matt, 89, 90, 91 Brenan, Gerald, 212 Brent’s Bookstore (Chicago), 11 Brinckerhoff, Henry, III, 182–83 Broyard, Anatole, 12–14, 131 Broyard-Williams, Shirley, 13 Bruno, Giordano, 35 Buchwald, Art, 104 Bulgarians, 139, 140–41 Burton, Richard, 71 Byron, Lord, 151 Byzantium, 113, 123, 127, 128, 135, 150 See also Constantinople Cabala (Wilder), 162 Cain (biblical), 3–4 Calloway, Cab, 45 Cambodian refugees, 78 Camden, John, 167 “Camp near Kraków, The” (Barnstone), 31–32 Campanella, Roy, 203 Camus, Albert, 124, 130 Canetti, Elias, 22, 115 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 216 Castro, Américo, 212 Cathar heresy, 35–36, 137, 229n2 Catholics, 68, 104, 191 Cavafy, Constantine, 107, 133–34, 192 cemeteries, Jewish, 142 Cernuda, Luis, 97 Cervantes, Miguel de, 208 Césaire, Aimé, 104 Chagall, Marc, 106 Chaplin, Charlie, 29–30 Childe Harold (Byron), 151 children, 185 China, 4, 110 Cultural Revolution period, 158, 189 gnosticism in, 229n2 Jews in, 109, 188, 189–91 Chirico, Giorgio de, 106 Chocolate Soldier, 52 Index Christian X (king of Denmark), 115 Christianity, 3, 10, 34, 36, 99, 136 baptism ceremony, 114 early Christian (“messianic”) Jews, 70, 114, 133, 148 emergence of, 71–73 gnosticism and, 35 modern Jewish conversions to, 114, 212–13, 217–18, 221–22 rise to power in Roman Empire, 135 white identity and, 11 women and, 146 See also New Testament Citroën, Bernard, 103 civil rights, 77 Civil War, 77 Coffin, Robert Peter Tristram, 82 College as Lunacy (Granero), 88 Commentary magazine, 12 Communists, in Greece, 123 Confessions of an Ideologue (Scheunenstein), Connelly, John, 218 Conservative Judaism, 18 Constantine (Roman emperor), 113, 114, 128, 135, 139 Constantinople, 113, 123, 127, 139, 151, 229n2 See also Byzantium conversos, 212–13 corruption, 67–69 cosmopolitan cities, 105–106 Cotton Club, 44 Coughlin, Father, 15 Count Basie, 44 Crete, 150, 152–58 Croats, 120 Cromwell, Oliver, 139 Crook, David, 191 Crouch, Stanley, 206 Crusaders, 123, 130, 135 Cullen, Susan, 198 Cultural Revolution (China), 4, 189 Cyrus the Great (Persian emperor), 109, 132, 189 Dada movement, 106 “Daddy” (Plath), 100 Dalaras, George, 143 Dance of Life, The (Anonymous), 224 Dante Alighieri, 207 Daoism, 34 Daughters of the American Revolution, 14 235 “Day Breaks on Andros, 1944” (Perera), 151–52 death, 184–85, 211–22, 225 Deng Xiaoping, 189 Denmark, Jews of, 115 Diary of a Russian (Ambárov), 144 diaspora, 19, 61 Disreali, Benjamin, 114 Dix, Fort (New Jersey), 171–73, 178 Dominican friars, 35–36, 137 Donne, John, 93–94 Douglas, Kirk, 30 Douglass, Frederick, 193, 204 Dreams from Hell’s Kitchen (Stabler), Dreyfus, Capt Alfred, 37 Du Bois, W E B., 202 du Pont family (industrialists), 125 Early Diasporas to the East (Weili), 188 East Timor, Eberscht, Jakob, 67 “Ecstasy of Hatred, An” (Time article), 174 Eden, Garden of, 4, 66, 146 Egypt, 3, 134 Einstein, Albert, 11, 115 El Libro de Saber (The Book of Learning), 136–37 “Eleanor Rigby” (Beatles song), 163 Ellington, Duke, 44 Éluard, Paul, 104 Elytis, Odysseus, 107, 121 England, 198 English language, 19 Enguídanos, Miguel, 222 Episcopalian Church, 217–18 Epstein, Israel, 189, 190–91 Equiano, Olaudah, 192–99, 195, 211 Essenes, 33, 34, 73, 148 Esterhazy, Maj Ferdinand, 37 ETA (Basque revolutionary group), Ethical Culture, 68 Ethiopia, 21, 26 “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” (Whitman), 205 Euclid, 132 Eve (biblical), 4, 35, 146, 221 Falashim, 21 families, at war, 4, fascism, 15, 140 “Father on Glass Wings” (Barnstone), 213 “Feeling His Midnight Arm, 1975” (Barnstone), 208 236 Index Ford, Henry, 15 France, 67, 84, 100–109 American jazz musicians in, 103, 201 military service in, 180–85 Nazi-occupied, 69 See also Paris France, Anatole, 37 Franco, Francisco, 22, 161 Franco, Marti (Matilde), 21, 22–23, 220 fraternities, campus, 90, 91, 94–95, 97– 98, 116 French language, 19 Freud, Sigmund, 115 Frost, Robert, 82 Fuld, Felix, Mrs., 11 funerals, 210–12 Furrow, Buford O., Jr., 221 Galveston that Was, The (Barnstone and Cartier-Bresson), 216 Gandhi, Mahatma, 78 gangsters, 15, 48 García Lorca, Federico, 106 Garfield, John ( Julius Garfinkle), 30, 106–107 “Gas Lamp, 1893” (Barnstone), 51 Gates, Henry Louis, 12 Gemara, 134 Gentleman’s Agreement (film), 29, 30 George School, 67, 75, 77–78, 79–83, 90 Géricault, Théodore, 105 German American Bund, 16 German Jews, 11, 40–41 German language, 19–20, 22 Germany, 20 GI Bill, 98 Gide, André, 106 “Girl in a Coma in the Cancer Ward at the Nuns Hospital in Périgueux, A” (Barnstone), 183–84 Glückberg, Pavlos, 122 gnosticism, 34, 35–36, 229n2 “Going Muleback in the Snow on the Holy Mountain of Athos during the Greek Civil War” (Barnstone), 148 Goodman, Benny, 44–45 Gordon, Camp (Georgia), 173–80 “Gospel of Black Hats” (Barnstone), 226 Gospel of the Secret Supper, The (Cathar scripture), 36 Gospels, 69, 70, 72, 132, 229–30n4 See also New Testament Granada, city of, 136 “Grandfather” (Barnstone), 52 Granero, Pedro, 88 Grange, Pierre, 66, 84, 86, 166 Grant, Cary, 30 Greece, 4, 126–28 civil war (1940s), 146, 156 history of, 119–26 islands of, 154 journey to Mount Athos, 144–52 War of Independence (1821), 123, 139 Greek Jews, 130–31, 140–42, 141 after the Holocaust, 143–44, 145 of Epirus, 151 Greek language, 20, 69, 70–71 Greek Orthodox Church, 113, 119, 126 intermarriage and, 152–58 Mount Athos and, 146, 148 Green Mansions (Hudson), 53 Gregory IX, Pope, 35 Gris, Juan, 106 Guerrerol, Lila, Guide for the Perplexed, The (Maimonides), 21, 62, 136 Guillén, Jorge, 97 Gypsies, 31, 106, 120 Hadzidakis, Manos, 124 Halevi, Judah, 20, 75–76, 135–36 Haley, Alex, 193 Hammond, Capt Eldrich N., 181–83, 185 Hannibal, Abram, 131 Harodok, Poland, 84, 86 Harper, Frances, 204 Hasidic Jews, 34, 40 Hasmoneans, 33–34 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 82 Hebreo, León, 26 Hebrew language, 18, 19, 20–21, 39 alphabet, 21, 131 Bible and, 70 prayers in, 114, 222 reading the Bible in, 59–60 Zionism and, 37, 38 “Heebie Jeebies” (song), 45 Heine, Heinrich, 114 Hellenic culture, Jews and, 33–35, 131– 33 Hemingway, Ernest, 86, 119 Herbert, George, 93, 94 Index Here the Lion and Lamb Ate Breakfast from the Same Blue Ceramic Plate (Tola), 160 heresies, 35–36 Hermes Trismegistos, 34 Herzl, Theodor, 37 “Hidden” (Cavafy), 192 Hillel, 133 History of Our Myth (Barnstonsu), 210 Hitler, Adolf, 11, 15, 16, 29, 32, 126 boxing champions and, 47 Kristallnacht and, 151 Rosenberg and, 142 Hollywood film industry, 30 Holocaust, 29–32, 115 Nazi occupation of Greece, 95–96, 128, 140–42, 141 U.S Army liberation of concentration camps, 203 See also Nazis and sympathizers Holocaust Memorial Council, 78 holocausts, 36 homosexuality, 32, 79, 170, 192 Hong Kong, 201 Horne, Lena, 14 Hutus, Hypatia, 34 “I don’t love Paris” (Barnstone), 111–12 “I Have a Dream” (King speech), 78 Ibn Gabirol, Solomon, 20, 136 identity, 3, 20, 69, 93 India, 78, 108, 189 Indians, Mexican, 181 Inferno (Dante), 207 Innocent III, Pope, 35 Inquisition, Portuguese, 137 Inquisition, Spanish, 212–14 Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (Equiano), 193 intermarriage, 115, 157 interracial romance, 51–52, 180 Ireland, Irish Americans, 9, 10, 14 Isabela and Fernando (monarchs of Spain), 35, 137, 212 Islam, 20, 35, 135–38, 194 Israel, ancient, 34 Israel, modern state of, 32, 191 Italian Americans, 14, 16 237 Italy, 67, 153–54, 156 Ivy League schools, 89 Jacob, Harriet, 193 Jacobs, Phoebe, 45 James, Saint, 132 JAP ( Jewish American Princess), 60 Japan, 30, 189, 190 jazz, 44–46, 103, 201, 204 Jerusalem, destruction of, 71, 230n4 Jesus the Christ, 29, 33, 34, 93–94, 131, 132 Essenes and, 148 gospel canonization and, 229–30n4 Jews blamed for death of, 163 See also Yeshua ben Yosef (the Messiah), R “Jewish Cemetery at Newport, The” (Longfellow), 92–93, 94 Jewish Center (New York), 59, 60 Jewish War (66–70 c.e.), 138, 230n4 Jews African writer on, 197 American Jews and the Holocaust, 29–32 Ashkenazim, 20 in the Balkans, 120 in China, 109, 188, 189–91 college admissions and, 67, 90–91 defining, 14–15 denial of Jewishness, 10 in early messianic Christianity, 70, 114, 133, 148 expulsion from Spain, 23, 106, 130– 31, 132, 137–38, 212 French, 110 as gnostics, 35 hellenization of, 33–35 historical interaction with Greeks, 131–33, 138–40 in India, 108–109 languages of, 18–21, 132, 138 massacred by Romans, 134 religious and nonreligious, 43 Sephardim, 20, 21, 30, 135–38 tribal nationalism and, 130 in U.S Army, 167–69, 172–73, 175, 177–79 See also Greek Jews; passing, by Jews; Spanish Jews “Jews, The” (Donne), 94 Jews in Old China (Shapiro), 189 John (Christian apostle), 119, 132 238 Index John of Patmos, 119, 143 John of the Cross (Christian saint), 81, 212 John the Baptist, 69, 72, 114, 221 Johnson, Philip, 216 Josephus (Yosef ben Mattias), 70, 134, 230n4 Judaism, 18, 33, 37, 72, 133, 145 Judeo-Arabic, 21 Justinian (Byzantine emperor), 150 Kabbalah, 61 Kafka, Franz, 37–38, 61, 208 Kahlo, Frida, Kaifeng, China, 189, 190 Kandinsky, Vassily, 106 Kazan, Eliah, 29, 30 Kazin, Alfred, 13 Kefa (Cephas), 132 Kennedy, John, 68 Kerouac, Jack, 103–104 “Key in Salonika, A” (Borges), 139 kibbutzim, 38 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 78 King, Robert, 194 Kissinger, Henry, 19 Kodama, María, 208 Komunyakaa, Yusef, 6, 64, 193, 200, 201–206, 207 Korean War, 32, 83, 167 Koreans, in Japan, 30, 190 Kristallnacht (1938), 151 La Guardia, Fiorello, 14, 58 La Question juive (Sartre), 99 “La rue Jacob, 1948” (Barnstone), 105 Ladino language, 21, 22, 138 Laoze, 34 Latin language, 72, 83 Lattimore, Richmond, 72 Lehrer, Tom, 120 Lennon, John, 163 León, Fray Luis de, 212 Lessons in Greek Hygiene (Stavlos), 118 Levy, Alan, 183 Liberaki, Magarita, 124 Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself ( Jacob), 193 Life of Olaudah Equiano, The (Equiano), 198 Lindbergh, Charles, 15 Lithuanian language, 19 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 92 Longinus, 132 Longley, James, 92 López-Pinedo, Alejandro, 145–46 Louis, Joe, 46–47 Lowell, Robert, 99 lynching, Ma Ke, 191 Maccabee of Modin, Yehuda, 33–35 Machado, Antonio, 168 Maimonides, Moses, 21, 136, 160 Malraux, André, 162 Mao Zedong, 158, 189 Marx, Chico, 53 Marx, Karl, 114 Marxism, 189 Mary (mother of Jesus), 15, 146, 221 Matarasso family, 129 Mattawa, Khaled, 138 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, meditation, 81 Melville, Herman, 35, 86, 130 Mendelssohn, Felix, 114 Merten, Max, 142 Mexico, 5, 96–97 Middle East, Midrash, 39 mikvah pool, 114 Milton, John, 35, 207, 208 Mishnah, 134 Modigliani, Amedeo, 22, 103, 106 Molino, Sgt Anthony, 168 Mondrian, Piet, 106 Moors, 20, 106 Morales, Moses, 149 “Morning in the Schoolyard” (Barnstone), 122 Morocco, 161–64 Morrison, Toni, 193 Moses (biblical), 3, 26 Muslims See Islam “My Brother Enters the Earth on May Day” (Barnstone), 220–21 “Mythistorema 3” (Seferis), 107 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (Douglass), 193 Nation, The ( journal), 95, 96–98 nationalism, 105, 130, 144 Nazis and sympathizers, 31–32, 67, 81, 84, 99 Anglo-American, 15 in Argentina, 208 occupation of Greece, 140–42 Protestant churches and, 73 Index wartime propaganda of, 126 See also antisemitism; Holocaust neoplatonism, 34, 72 New Testament, 34, 69, 70, 204 Greek language and, 132–33 Jesus’ Jewishness erased from, 72 pseudepigrapha in, 71 See also Christianity; Gospels New York Athletic Club, 43 New York City, 3, 9–11, 14, 15, 27 Bedford-Stuyvesant, 12 Chinatown, 40, 41 Harlem, 44 Lower East Side, 41 Nigeria, 193 Nixon, Richard, 158 North Africa, Jews of, 20 “Of the Jews” (Cavafy), 133–34 Offenbach, Jacques, 67 “Ol’ Man River” (song), 54 On God’s Redemption (Grange), 166 On Moses, the Dreamer (Hebreo), 26 Orthodox Judaism, 18 orthodoxy, persecution and, 36 Othello (Shakespeare), 54–59 “Othello’s Rose” (Komunyakaa), 63–64 Other Alexander, The (Liberaki), 124 Ott, Mel, 214 Ottoman Empire, 135, 137–38 “Overlooking Rock Meadows of Forbidden Albania” (Barnstone), 150 paganism, Greek, 34 Palestine, 29, 32, 36–38 Paradiso (Dante), 207 Paris, 99, 100–16, 119, 153 See also France Pascal, Lt Michael Henry, 194 Pasha, Ali, 150–51 passing, by Blacks, 12–14, 201–202 passing, by Jews, 9, 14, 68–69 in college, 83–84, 90–91, 116 conversos, 212–13 Hollywood actors, 30 Jesus Christ and, 69–73, 93 summer camps and, 29 Paul (Christian saint), 128, 131, 140, 143 authentic letters of, 70–71, 72 Hillel and, 133 peace, 6, 75, 77, 156, 167 Peck, Gregory, 29, 86 “Peddler and Tailor” (Barnstone), 211 239 Penn, William, 77 Perera, Eva Victoria, 136, 151 Perón, Juan, 208 Persia, 132 Peter, Saint, 132 Peter Stuyvesant High School (New York), 74–75 Peter the Great, 131 Phillips, Caryl, 193 Philo of Alexandria (Philo Judaeus), 34, 81, 133, 143 Phoenician alphabet, 131 Picabia, Francis, 106 Picasso, Pablo, 101, 103, 106 Pilate, Pontius, 132 Pittman, Wesley, 201 Plath, Sylvia, 100 Plato, 70 Plotinos, 34, 132 Poetics of Translation, The: History, Theory & Practice (Barnstone), 84 pogroms, 3, 37 Points (poetic journal), 103 “Poking Mexico, 1943” (Barnstone), 22 Poland and Poles, 17, 31, 84, 189 Polish language, 19 Politics (Aristotle), 67 “Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro” (Broyard), 12–13 Portugal, 137 Portuguese language, 19 Powell, Adam Clayton, 202 Princeton University, 11 private schools, 67, 77 Propp, Sammy, 38–43 Protestants, 73, 104, 191 pseudepigrapha, biblical, 71, 101 Purgatorio (Dante), 207 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 131 Quakers, 4, 62, 68, 75 Bayard Rustin and, 75–83 college experience and, 89, 95 military service and, 167 as slave owners, 194, 197 race and racism, 3, 14, 177, 202–203 Rallis, Constantine, 141 Reform Judaism, 18 religion, 43, 47, 204–205 Renan, Ernest, 73 Ricci, Matteo, 188, 189 Ritsos,Yannis, 121 240 Index Rivera, Diego, Robeson, Paul, 44, 54, 56, 57, 77–78 Robinson, Jackie, 203 Roman Empire, 135 Romaniot Jews, 135, 138 Romans, ancient, 71, 131–32, 134 Romberg, Sigmund, 52–53 “Room of the orphans, 1947” (Barnstone), 23–24 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 14 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 125–26 Rosenberg, Alfred, 142 Rothko, Mark, 216 Rothko Chapel (Houston, Tex.), 154, 215, 221, 222 Russian language, 19 Rustin, Bayard, 75–83, 76 Ruth, Babe, 8, 8, 76 Rwanda, Sacco, Nicola, 16 Salinas, Jaime, 82 Salinas, Pedro, 97 Salonika See Thessaloniki, Greece Samuel the Nagid, 136 Sappho, 107, 210 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 99 scat singing, 45 Scheunenstein, Wilhelm, Schmeling, Max, 46–47 Schultz, Dutch, 15 Schüpbach, Albert, 128 Schwartzkopf, Elizabeth, 78 Scott, Leah, 47–51, 55–56, 58–59, 182 Second Balkan War (1912), 140 Second Temple, 70, 131 Seferis, George, 107, 121 Segal, George, 75 segregation, 44, 97, 202 in education, 67, 204 U.S military breakdown of, 174, 177 Senghor, Abbe Diamancoun, 104 Sephardim, 20, 21, 30, 135–38 Septuagint, 70, 133 Serbs, 120, 139 sex, 3, 74–75, 79–80 Shakers, 75 Shakespeare, William, 106, 224 shamanism, 81 Shapiro, Sidney, 189 Sharp, Granville, 198 Sheba (biblical), 6, 26, 27–28, 200 shtetls, in Eastern Europe, 19 Simitis, Konstantinos, 142 Sinatra, Frank, 14 Singing for Bread (Grange), 66 slavery, 3, 52, 193, 195–96, 205 Slavs, as victims of Nazis, 31, 32 Socrates, 70, 79 Solomon, King, 6, 26, 27–28, 200, 221 Sondheim, Stephen, 75 “Song of Myself ” (Whitman), 205 South, segregation in, 174, 177, 202 Soutine, Chaim, 106 Soviet Union, 77–78, 190 Spain, 4–5, 76 civil war (1930s), 14 converso saints in, 212–13 under Franco, 161 Jews expelled from (1492), 23, 106, 130–31, 137–38, 143, 212 Moorish, 20 Sephardic Jews under Muslim rule, 135–38 Spanish Inquisition, 35–36, 115 Spanish Jews, 21–24, 61, 114, 120, 212–13 See also Greek Jews; Sephardim Spanish language, 19, 20, 22, 149 Spinoza, Baruch, 29, 35, 231n9 Stabler, Pete, Stavlos, Petros, 118 Stein, Gertrude, 106, 119 stereotyping, ethnic, 30 Stevens, Wallace, 43 Stroop, Jürgen, 142 suicide, 212, 213, 219 summer camps, 29, 36–38 “Sunny Room at Mount Sinai, A” (Barnstone), 184 Swarthmore College, 83–84 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 208 synagogues, 18, 60, 61 in ancient Greece, 128, 131 early Christianity in, 72 in Germany, 151 marriage in, 112, 113 in modern Greece, 140 in Poland, 142 in Spain, 137 Tangier, Morocco, 161–64 Teresa, Saint, 61, 212 “Theft of a Brother” (Barnstone), 217 Theodosius I (Roman emperor), 135 Index Thessaloniki, Greece, 128, 129–30, 138–40 Jewish absence from, 143–44 Third Reich, 70, 73 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (Gates), 12 Thomas, Dylan, 59 Thomas, Norman, 16 Tibet, 4, 154, 156, 158 Titus (Roman emperor), 138 Tola, Boutros, 160 Tolstoy, Alexander, 147 Tolstoy, Lev, 147 Torah, 33, 34, 71 Torquemada, Tomás de, 137 “Tower in Tangier, A” (Barnstone), 163–64 Trajan (Roman emperor), 134 Treblinka death camp, 141 Truman, Harry S., 32, 170 Turkey, 20, 23, 123, 137, 140, 156 Tutsis, “Two Souls Meet on a Windy Night and Worry about a Marble Face” (Barnstone), 108 Tzalopoulou, Elektra, 157 Tzalopoulou, Helle See Barnstone, Helle Tzalopoulou (author’s wife) Tzalopoulou, María, 124–25 Tzalopoulou, Vassili, 112, 113, 121, 124– 26, 148 Greek Orthodox wedding ceremony and, 153 native village of, 149–50 Tzara, Tristan, 106 241 Wang Wei, 107 war, 4, 78, 120, 156, 199 Warsaw Ghetto, 85–86, 142 Weili, Ban, 188 West, Cornel, 206 Whalen, John, 202 “White Island” (Barnstone), 126–27 Whites, 3, 10 in campus fraternities, 98 jazz musicians, 44–45 second-class, 11 in U.S Army, 173–77 Whitman, Nathan, 89 Whitman, Walt, 205 Wilder, Thornton, 162 Windsor, Duke of, 15 Winter, John, 190 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 115 women, 19, 34–35, 80 Asian women, 205 in college, 89, 205 compared with Jews and Blacks, 146 dowry custom and, 122 Wordsworth, William, 49 World War, first, 30 World War, second, 30–32, 126, 128 Argentina’s neutrality in, 208 Black units in, 203 in Pacific, 189 World Zionist Congress, 37 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 216 Wright, Richard, 103 xenophobia, 190 Uganda, 37 Ummayad Caliphate, 135 Underground Railroad, 77 Unitarians, 68 universities, 11, 12, 14, 67, 68, 205–206 U.S Army, 167–77, 180–85, 203 U.S Navy, 181 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 16 Vassa, Gustavus, 193, 194, 195 “Velvel Bornstein in the Warsaw Ghetto” (Barnstone), 85–86 Vietnamese “boat people,” 78 Von Stroheim, Erich, 30 Wagner, Richard, 67 “Walking Around the City with My Dad” (Barnstone), 214–15 Yahweh, 35 Yale University, 84, 100 “Yeshua ben Yosef at the Stake” (Barnstone), 71 Yeshua ben Yosef (the Messiah), R., 29, 33, 34, 132, 221 as a “passing” Jew, 69–73 See also Jesus the Christ Yiddish language, 19–20, 21 Yohanan the Dipper, 69, 72, 94 Yugoslavia, 156 Zealots, 33, 34, 73 Zielinski, Bronislaw, 84–85, 85 Zionism, 29, 33, 36–38 Zola, Émile, 37 WILLIS BARNSTONE is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Indiana University His publications include From This White Island; Modern European Poetry; The Other Bible; Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice; Funny Ways of Staying Alive; The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets; With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires; Algebra of Night: Selected Poems 1948–1998; The Apocalypse; Life Watch; Border of a Dream: Poems of Antonio Machado; and The Gnostic Bible His literary translation, The New Covenant: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse, was an April 2002 Book-of-the-Month Club selection A Guggenheim fellow, Barnstone has been the recipient of many awards over the years, including NEA, NEH, Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America, W H Auden Award of the New York State Council on the Arts, the Midland Authors Award, four Book-of-the-Month Club selections, and four Pulitzer nominations ...Contents We Jews and Blacks i ii Contents Contents W I LLI S B A R N S TO N E We Jews and Blacks Memoir with Poems With a Dialogue and Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and. .. Data Barnstone, Willis, date We Jews and Blacks : memoir with poems / Willis Barnstone p cm ISBN 0-253-34419-0 (cloth : alk paper) Barnstone, Willis, date Barnstone, Willis, date—Childhood and. .. City of Peoples 128 Greeks and Jews and Blacks and Russians 130 Jews, Greeks, and Romans in Alexandria 132 Cavafy and His Poem “Of the Jews (a.d 50)” 133 Romaniot Jews in Byzantium 135 The Sephardim