"A LITTLE MORE JEWISH, PLEASE": BLACK AND JEWISH SECULARLY AND INVISIBILITY IN FRAN ROSS'S OREO.
Fran Ross's satirical novel Oreo (1974), about a black and Jewish girl's quest to uncover the "secret of her birth," has in recent years received delayed but deserved critical and scholarly attention (2000, 63). (1) In her introduction for the 2015 rerelease of the novel, Danzy Senna observes that Oreo's resistance to easy categorization may help account for its difficulty achieving more notoriety: "Ross is a hard sell for February, black history month, and a hard sell for March, women's history month" (2015, xvi). Still, scholarship on the novel has tended to foreground the novel's black feminist politics: Tru Leverette (2006) and Gabrielle Foreman and Michelle Stein-Evers (2001) have explored the novel as a black feminist text and a sophisticated depiction of multiracial black adolescent identity. (2) In this article, I make the case for considering Oreo within a Jewish American literary tradition. The novel, described by Marilyn Richardson as an "American klezmer novel" (2016, 9), is one of the earlier fictional texts to feature a black and Jewish female protagonist, and merits consideration for its provocative meditation on matrilineal continuity, and its sustained, complex engagement with racism in multiracial Jewish families. (3) Moreover, Oreo's depiction of a secular black and Jewish protagonist rejects the premise that a centrality of faith or religiosity serves as a prerequisite for nonwhite Jewishness. American Jewish literature has frequently articulated seculariry as a viable Jewish identity for white Jewish protagonists. Oreo asserts that Jewish education, literacy, and continuity (as opposed to explicit expression of faith or commitment to observance) can undergird nonwhite Jewish identity just as comprehensively as it does for more common white Jewish fictional protagonists.While I argue for Oreo's significance within Jewish American literature, Fran Ross was not Jewish. However, her novel provides keen insight into post-civil rights era Jewish white racial formation; contemplates black anti-Semitism, cultural appropriation, and labor relations between blacks and Jews in the entertainment industry; and engages Jewish exogamy without relying on the trope of the white blonde shiksa. In analyzing Oreo's significance to Jewish American literature and its complex representations of American Jewish identity vis-a-vis race, I do not mean to suggest that this analysis is definitive or that it is the most crucial interpretive position. Rather, my hope is to expand conversations about the novel (and conversations within American Jewish literature) to include the text's layered engagement with preexisting journalistic and literary depictions of Jews of color; its engagement with matrilineality, Jewish education, and Jewish lineage; and Ross's nuanced depiction of nonwhite Jewish invisibility, a phenomenon widely discussed in anthropological Jewish studies.
Plot-wise, Oreo essentially reworks the Greek myth of Theseus. Christine "Oreo" Clark, the hero-protagonist, sets out on a quest to find her father and the "secret of her birth;" she was conceived, we learn, via artificial insemination (2000, 63). The daughter of a black philo-Semitic mother and a white Jewish father (Helen Clark and Samuel Schwartz, separated since Oreo's infancy), Oreo's "epic" journey requires only a short trip from Philadelphia to New York City. The novel's biting satire accommodates its earnest, emotionally charged core: Oreo is determined to connect with her white Jewish father and grandfather despite their inability to see her as their Jewish daughter/granddaughter. While the premise serves as a recognizable trope for narratives of self-discovery, Oreo's characterization as a black and Jewish adolescent for whom faith and observance bear little significance to her sense of Jewishness merits consideration in the context of prior literary depictions of black and Jewish characters and experience.
BLACK AND JEWISH FIGURES IN FICTION, JOURNALISM, AND THE RAT PACK
The history of Jewish representation in American literature and pop culture has tended toward depictions of white Jews, and particularly white Jews of Ashkenazi descent. That said, representations of Jews of color have become more common and received more prominent placement within popular culture in recent decades. This essay will not provide a comprehensive review of Oreo's place in that growing archive, but I hope to reveal how Oreo's meditations on black Jewish female invisibility and impossibility respond to literary depictions of simultaneously black and Jewish figures published prior to 1974. (4) While none of the subsequent surveys are exhaustive, fiction and American Jewish journalism, taken as a whole, reflect and reveal a consistent skepticism expressed by white Jews about the very possibility of people inhabiting what Katya Gibel Azoulay refers to as "simultaneous identities" (2001, 212) as black and Jewish. I also discuss media treatment of Sammy Davis Jr. and his memoir Yes I Can, and make a case for how Oreo might be read as responding to Davis Jr.'s text. Among novels and short stories authored prior to 1974 that feature simultaneously black and Jewish characters, Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Michael Gold's Jews Without Money (1930), and Bernard Malamud's "Angel Levine" (1955) each suggest that the combination of black and Jewish identity invited disbelief or ridicule. (5) Larsen's Passing makes brief and dismissive mention of a character named Claude Jones, whose conversion and observance ("He won't eat ham and goes to synagogue on Saturday") is presented as absurdity by non-Jewish black characters; one observes, "You'd the laughing if you saw him" (2001, 198). (6) While Larsen was African American and not Jewish, Jewish American authors like Gold and Malamud reflected comparable attitudes held by white Jews. Gold's Jews Without Money finds its white Jewish protagonist's father inviting a pious black and Jewish acquaintance to dinner. The protagonist states, "My mother was thrilled by such orthodoxy in a black man" and refers to it as a "miracle" (175). Malamud's "Angel Levine" depicts a white Jewish protagonist, Manischevitz, expressing sustained skepticism regarding the black and Jewish angel sent by God to answer his prayers for his dying wife; Manischevitz's disbelief stems as much from Levine's claims to be black and Jewish as it does from the possibility he is in fact an angel. (7) Each of these texts represents its simultaneously black and Jewish character alongside assessments of them as other-worldly ("miracle" or angel) or mere punchlines.
The attitudes reflected in these fictional texts are mirrored within the archives of The American Israelite, a nationally circulated Cincinnati-based Jewish newspaper which sometimes ran features culled from other papers. These articles reveal historical instances of simultaneously black and Jewish Americans encountering skepticism from white Jews regarding their existence. In 1898, they ran a story on a black and Jewish congregant at New York's Essex Street Synagogue named Samuel Wolskowi headlined "A JEWISH NEGRO-TRIBE. A Tale Most Wonderful. If True" (7). Later that year, a short article took aim at the credibility of an earlier report on Wolskowi, claiming that his assertion of African roots belies his "purely Polish name," speculating: "He or his parent was the slave of a Polish Jew in the West Indies, was Judaized, and took the name of his Jewish master" ("Editorial Article 1" 4). A 1900 article titled "That Colored Jew" may involve the same man: "Our friends from time to time send us newspapers clippings concerning a certain gentleman of color who gives his name as Samuel Walskowicz" (7). The author of this article dismisses Walskowicz as a con man: "We are inclined [to] think that Samuel has strayed from the fair land of Poland, and assisted nature which kindly gave him a very brunette complection with an additional coat of darkness" (7). The Wolskowi/Walskowicz articles speak to an awareness (and seeming openness) among white American Jews regarding the existence of black and Jewish communities in Africa, but a corresponding discomfort, perhaps, surrounding the history of white Jewish ownership of enslaved persons. If Wolskowi/Walskowicz did gain his name from a white Jewish Polish family, it may be that claiming to be of direct African descent more easily facilitated acceptance within Jewish communities via an invocation of a more romanticized foreign other-ness, rather than evoking histories of rape and white Jewish investment in white supremacy by suggesting that his name came from a Jewish slaveholder of Polish descent.
This tension between reportage that celebrated black and Jewish existence as newsworthy and reportage that normalized skepticism as to whether black and Jewish people might even exist appeared in articles involving Jews of color throughout the country. In 1908, an article titled "Negro Claims to be Jew" discusses a black and Jewish man named Sam Johnson. The article relates that "it was a longing for the Passover food that led to the discovery of a real negro Jew in the jail" in Newark, New Jersey, while also explaining that "[l]ittle credence was put in Johnsons story because his skin is as black as any negro's and he speaks with a Southern dialect" (4). In 1914, the Israelite ran a short article about a black man named Frederick Douglas Berger, "the colored man who claims to be a Jew" ("Jottings" 3). Berger, who went by Itchoch, claimed to have been born in Palestine but admitted in court to being from Buxton, Louisiana, and claimed "that for a while he was the associate of 'Rabbi' Horace, a negro born in the South, who has a colored congregation and worships in the Jewish faith" ("Jottings" 3). The anonymous author suggests that Berger's story about Horace "is probably as apocryphal as the other lies that Berger has been telling" ("Jottings" 3). Skepticism seemed so prevalent that when the newspaper presented a story about Jews of African descent, a simple confirmation merited publishing a letter to the editor. In 1925, a Los Angeles rabbi referenced an earlier article entitled "Negro Congregation New York," offering, "for your additional information I would state that I can verify Mr. Estrugo's statements. Yes, there are Negro Jews in New York City" (Solomon). Other articles in The American Israelite make mention of simultaneously black and Jewish figures and congregations, but the above examples showcase how several of these articles explicitly express or engage with the notion that any claims toward black and Jewish identity were likely fraudulent. The commonplace nature of these articles in The American Israelite speaks to the likelihood of similar examples in other Jewish American English-language newspapers as well as the Yiddish press. Certainly the Harlem congregation about which the Los Angeles rabbi corresponds garnered coverage by the Yiddish Forverts, as Rebecca Gold details in her article "The Black Jews of Harlem."
While these fictional and journalistic accounts provide a framework for considering Ross's literary intervention, there's one particular celebrity figure whose high-profile recounting of his black and Jewish experience Oreo may have referenced in meaningful, if sometimes oblique ways. Media coverage of Sammy Davis Jr. in the years surrounding the 1960 release of Ocean's 11 reveals the level of celebrity he had achieved, as well as the public fascination with the fact that a prominent black entertainer was also Jewish. Davis Jr. provided a comprehensive conversion narrative in Yes I Can, his 1965 memoir written with Jane Boyar and Burt Boyar. (8) But prior to that, in 1960, features in Time, Ebony, and the Saturday Evening Post all devoted attention to the unlikelihood of Davis Jr.'s Jewish identity. The Time article was simply titled "Jewish Negro." That same month (February) Ebony ran an article by Davis Jr. ("as told to Trude B. Feldman") entitled "Why I Became a Jew" (62). In May, Pete Martin's feature in The Saturday Evening Post presented a pull quote on the first page that read, '"The charge most frequently made against me,' says Davis, 'is that I want to be white. That accusation hurts.'" (44). The quote appears just below Martin's subhead in which he describes Davis Jr. as "a Negro convert to Judaism" (44). The juxtaposition may have been deliberate, echoing, as it does, the intimation found in so many features about simultaneously black and Jewish individuals: that these identities are not compatible, because Jews are assumed to be white.
Oreo deals pretty directly with that assumption, but there are other ways that Ross's novel seems to engage Davis Jr.'s navigation and presentation of black and Jewish identity. Throughout his memoir and in his interviews, Davis Jr. himself addressed the imagined inherent conflict between black identity and white ethnic Jewish identity. Rebecca Davis, who explores these ideas in depth in her article on Davis Jr., notes that his "conversion juxtaposed religious, racial, and ethnic identities at a time when all were in flux" (27). Framing Davis Jr.'s identification as Jewish within a historical moment in which "many American Jewish leaders adopted 'sociological' language to describe Jewishness as an ethnic heritage as much as a set of religious beliefs," Rebecca Davis examines how the perceived incompatibility of blackness with Jewishness defined increasingly in white ethnic terms expressed itself in the jokes Davis Jr.'s fellow comedians made at his expense. In Oreo, however, Ross's depiction of the protagonist as inheritor of both black and white Jewish ethnic heritage accentuates that the perceived incompatibility relies upon a blindness to the reality of interracial Jewish exogamy, a topic unaddressed in Davis Jr.'s conversion narrative.
Davis Jr.'s memoir also articulates Jewish masculinity as having a particular aesthetic. He depicts a rabbi and mentor as a "rugged, athletic looking man" resembling "a football player" (Davis Jr., 1965 210). Rebecca Davis contends that Jewishness, and Reform Judaism in particular, presented avenues for masculine self-expression that Davis Jr. found appealing. If Davis Jr.'s conversion narrative provided a high-profile example of black and Jewish experience, it also framed that experience largely in terms of masculinity; Davis Jr.'s conversations about conversion are most often with other Jewish men. Juxtaposing Davis Jr.'s deployment of a mezuzah in his conversion narrative against Ross's use of a mezuzah in her meditation on Jewish continuity in intermarried families shows Ross's attention to the racial and gendered dynamics of popular representations of American Jews.
In considering Oreo in the context of pre-extant fictional, journalistic, and memoir depictions of nonwhite and specifically black and Jewish experience, Davis Jr.'stands out for the level of celebrity he achieved, the centrality of his black and Jewish identity to his persona, and the particular influence of his presentation of a black and Jewish masculine aesthetic. I will consider how Ross's use of the mezuzah acknowledges and challenges aspects of Davis Jr.'s narrative toward the end of this essay, but in segueing to my close reading of Oreo, I want to draw attention to one overarching theme of his personal narrative as relayed in magazine features and memoir. While Davis Jr. came to routinely reference his spiritual and religious commitment to Judaism, "it was the cultural, emotional, and communal aspects of Judaism that Davis claimed at the outset" (R. Davis 39). In Ross's novel, the tension between white Jewish racism and the idealized communal aspects of Judaism necessitated complex negotiation and offered no easy solution for Oreo's
black and Jewish protagonist. Indeed, in Ross's story, the communal aspect of Judaism remains elusive--if not withheld--throughout the novel, as white Jewish racism, including that which she faces from her own family, refuses to accommodate her black body.
JEWISH CULTURAL CHAUVINISM AND MIRROR-IMAGE GRANDFATHERS
Though Ross dwells most extensively on the particulars of Oreo's relationship to her mother and her attempt to locate her father, the characters of Oreo's grandfathers create a multi-generational framework for thinking about lineage and birthright. Both characters reveal adversarial qualities, as each refuse to allow Oreo to simultaneously occupy her black and Jewish identities. Ross wants the reader to consider James and Jacob as counterparts, explicitly referencing the names' etymological roots: Oreo's brother Moishe is called "Jimmie O, after his maternal grandfather and, inadvertently, after his paternal grandfather (James = Jacob)" (9). James also equals Jacob in terms of Jewish cultural chauvinism, which Ross cleverly locates in a black anti-Semite as well as a white Jewish grandfather.
As to James's bigotry, Ross reveals it immediately, in the book's second paragraph:
When James Clark heard from the sweet lips of Helen (Honeychile) Clark that she was going to wed a Jew-boy and would soon be Helen (Honey-chile) Schwartz, he managed to croak one anti-Semitic "Goldberg!" before he turned to stone, as it were, in his straight-backed chair, his body a rigid half swastika. (3)
While Ross insists the reader regard James as Nazi-like, despite his blackness, Ross renders him a particularly "Jewish" kind of black anti-Semite. He is described early on as a "shrewd businessman" (4), and the vague allusion to the Jewish merchant stereotype is solidified by his trade: selling Jewish tchotchkes to Jewish consumers throughout Philadelphia.
That James's hatred of Jews emerges from something quite frivolous (having been given a half-sour pickle, and not a sour, at Zipstein's Noshery) suggests that bigotry never emerges from rational thinking (Ross 2000, 6). But James's bigoted response (a determination to exploit Jews) requires him to study Jewish culture in order to cultivate a "strictly Jewish clientele, whom he overcharged outrageously" (Ross 2000, 6). Ross reveals that James "studied Torah and Talmud, collected midrashim, quoted Rabbi Akiba--root and herb of all the jive-ass copy he wrote for the chrain-swim of flyers he left in Jewish neighborhoods" (2000, 6). Yet James's resentment evolves as he studies Jewish culture and incorporates Yiddish into his and his daughter's vocabulary. He laments including a "historico-religious paragraph" for items in his catalog unfamiliar to irreligious Jews: "You have to explain everything to these apikorsim" (Ross 2000, 6).
James, and later his daughter Helen, both lament the problem of apikorsim despite their non-Jewishness. David Biale writes that "in popular parlance, the epikores signifies much more broadly the rebel against Orthodox Jewish belief and practice whose rebellion is thoroughly grounded in the classical sources themselves" (2008, 1). Ross plays with readers' notions of anti-Semitism here by having James resent the uneducated aspect of non-practicing Jews--but clearly, James is not using the same definition Biale suggests. To James, the apikorsim lack Jewish literacy. Ross accomplishes some significant subversion here: she reveals, within James's bigotry, an ignorance that reflects some religious Jews' ignorance of the very possibility of literate, secular Jews. But James himself is not in any way religious, despite his extensive knowledge of Jewish traditions. In a way, James is the epikores here, which might also make him a sort of self-hating epikores. At another level, this line transforms James's anti-Semitism from superficiality--the sourness of a purchased pickle--to one based in ideology: a rejection of Jews who fail to educate themselves on religious custom, and abide by that custom. James's hatred of his Jewish clientele is motivated by their lack of Jewish knowledge, and their simultaneous consumerist belief that purchasing Jewish tchotchkes can compensate for their lack of Jewish knowledge, custom, and faith. Despite James's lack of Jewish faith, his Jewish knowledge permits him to develop a vocabulary to express his animus toward nonreligious Jews that is more typically utilized by religious Jews.
While Ross provides sustained glimpses of James and his anti-Semitism, we encounter Jacob only briefly. Jacob's wife, Frieda, opens the novel by dying of a "racist/my-son-the-bum coronary" upon learning of Samuel's engagement to Helen (Ross 2000, 3). Jacob, unlike Frieda or James, has no physical reaction upon learning of his son's intermarriage. However, this is not due to open-mindedness. In fact, Jacob's refusal to provide for Samuel in his inheritance ("Kosher kinder or you'll get makkes") may play a role in Samuel and Helen splitting up (Ross 2000, 205).
Jacob's ultimatum to Samuel reveals a different version of James's "Jewish" anxiety: he too is overly concerned with the insufficient Jewishness of those who would claim to be Jews. For James, this involves knowledge of Jewish custom and history--areas of his own expertise. For Jacob, this involves endogamy, lineage, and matrilineal continuity; despite Samuel being Jewish, Helen's non-Jewishness prevents Jacob from considering Oreo as "kosher." (9)
Jacob's rejection of Oreo as not being "kosher" reveals no explicit racism. But given Oreo's negotiation of the conflation of whiteness and Jewishness, Jacob's ultimatum merits consideration alongside larger American Jewish cultural conversations about continuity, endogamy, and exogamy. In 1974, the same year Ross published Oreo, the Board of Jewish Education ran the following copy in the New York Times: "If You're Jewish Chances Are Your Grandchildren Won't Be." The fine print continues, "That's right. Plain and simple: an ever-increasing rate of intermarriage, assimilation, alienation from Judaism; and, a lack of Jewish education is resulting in a decline of American Jewry" ("If You're Jewish" 1974). The ad, which suggests that the trends it identifies will result in the end of American Jewshness, seems like the sort of exultation that might prompt someone like Jacob to present such an ultimatum to his intermarried Jewish son.
In many respects, Ross's novel serves as a clinical deconstruction of the implicit assumptions and cynical emotional appeal of the advertisement. While the ad's allusion to "assimilation" ostensibly identifies non-Jewish whiteness as the inevitable consequence of intermarriage, Oreo reminds us that this assumption turns a blind eye to how racism may contribute, in unspoken ways, toward anxieties about intermarriage. Katya Gibel Azoulay (2007) has observed that the timing of increased Jewish community commentary on the dangers of intermarriage intersected with the Civil Rights movement. She notes that one 1964 study conducted by rabbi/sociologist Albert Gordon reported that
although 91 percent of his Jewish respondents would not favor interracial marriage, only 50 percent would object to interreligious marriage. In other words, race was more than a significant factor in the manner in which Jews--at least the participants in Gordon's study--also viewed themselves. (Gibel Azoulay 1997, 75)
Gibel Azoulay's crucial interrogation of Gordon's study helps reveal that despite Jewish American popular culture's twentieth-century obsession with white, blond, non-Jewish female "skiksas" for many white Jewish Americans, "assimilating into white America was less threatening than disappearance into Black America" (1997, 75). Jennifer Glaser's close reading of Gordon's study arrives at a similar conclusion, noting how it positions Jewishness as "both a racial and religious identity that needed to be protected from dissolution" (2016, 44). Glaser suggests that the purported danger of black/Jewish exogamy helped to bolster broader American racist societal proscriptions against any black/white exogamy. But while much of American Jewish literature sublimates these themes by rehashing, time and again, exogamy as merely a function of the white, non-Jewish shiksa, Oreo's satire illustrates the plausibility of this threatening disappearance into blackness for some white Jews even when correcting for the other anxieties. Oreo's Jewish education is formidable, illustrating how non-Jewish mothers can facilitate their Jewish children's Jewish learning. Furthermore, her parents' intermarriage (and separation) does not leave Oreo questioning the validity of her Jewish identity. Whatever ambivalence or alienation she might feel regarding Judaism or Jewish community, she responds to by spending the novel doggedly pursuing meaningful relationships with the Jewish family members that abandoned and disowned her. Since Jewishness does not merely "disappear" into Oreo, the novel implies that race plays a large, problematic role signifying who is or is not considered Jewish in the broader white Jewish community.
SECULARITY, EDUCATION, AND CONTINUITY
Though Ross makes a point to depict Oreo as knowledgeable about various aspects of Jewish culture, we see very little evidence of any faith or commitment to keeping custom. Still, this is consistent with how Ross depicts all of her characters, Jewish or otherwise. While the novel provides very little evidence of Jacob's religiosity, the narrator identifies Samuel, quite early on, as a "nonobserving Jew" in explaining why he "did not give a fig that his daughter was named after Christ" (Ross 2000, 8). Samuel's second wife, a Jewish immigrant from Georgia, serves shrimp cocktails and consults charts involving "palmistry, astrology, phrenology" with her collection of "tarot cards, tea leaves, and a crystal ball" (Ross 2000, 175). Ross's Jewish characters' "Jewishness" accommodates distinctly un-Jewish food, hobbies, and/or belief systems. But the inclusion of phrenology, historically utilized by the Nazis as well as American white supremacists, as a pseudo-scientific belief system assimilable to Jewishness sharply criticizes the way in which whiteness and Jewish identity can overlap in an American context.
Oreo's mother Helen never identifies herself as Jewish, and never reveals herself to be religious, but educates Oreo about Jewish culture. She imparts this knowledge in a chapter called "Helenic Letters," made up of letters Helen sends her children while she earns money on the road. The section reveals cultural identity imparted via correspondence. If Oreo's black body presents a problem for her acceptance by her white Jewish family, Ross also intimates that disembodied, text-based Jewish education can still provide Jewish knowledge--if not necessarily Jewish community or community acceptance.
Yiddish words saturate Helen's letters and provide surface evidence for how Helen imparts aspects of a Jewish education despite her physical absence. Though we have already found James and Helen using Yiddish in dialogue, Oreo encounters nayfish (24), chaloshes (25), meshumad (35), averah (35), and geshmat (35) in Helen's correspondences. Sprinkled amidst English and African American Vernacular English, Oreo encounters Yiddish in a postvernacular context, a phenomenon Jeffrey Shandler (2006) identifies as one in which Jews learn enough Yiddish to connect with a familial heritage, but not enough to live in that language. Ross inverts this too, as Helen first encounters postvernacular Yiddish via James's anti-Semitism, and yet Helen's Yiddish vocabulary is relatively extensive. Given that the "Helenic Letters" also serve as commentary on theories of "pathology" regarding absence within black families, we should also read these letters as evidence of Helen's child-rearing skills--providing lessons and emotional support--that involve her children's culture. (10) Independent of the Yiddish, Helen's letters impart lessons about being black as well as about being Jewish.
Helen tells Oreo two particular stories that communicate the importance of Oreo developing a sense of Jewish selfhood. The first finds Helen relaying a memory from high school, speaking with two ostensibly Jewish classmates (Brenda Schaeffer and Arlene Melnick), who reveal their ignorance in discussing a family dinner where a "little old lady with the burning eyes of a fanatic was lighting candles" (Ross 2000, 27). Helen becomes the educator: "It is left for Helen the schvartze to explain to these apikorsim the tradition of the shabbes candles" (Ross 2000, 27-28). But the surface lesson about this shabbes custom cannot hold a candle (sorry) to the underlying content, which juxtaposes Jewish knowledge and customs alongside racism, assimilation, and, crucially, self-hatred. Helen's story serves as a warning against ignorance of Jewish custom, but also as a warning that Oreo's blackness will mean that even uneducated white Jews will be more readily considered Jewish than she. Helen's use of apikorsim, which her father James also uses to dismiss uneducated Jews, also puts Helen in the precarious position of pronouncing which Jews are (and aren't) sufficiently Jewish. Certainly, Helen's non-Jewishness, like her father's, makes her use of apikorsim ironic. Consider the stakes for Oreo, though: her own tendentious (to some) claim to matrilineal Jewishness makes double-edged her mother's rejection of her classmates as insufficiently Jewish. Helen here intends simply to warn Oreo against being like Schaeffer and Melnick; that is, being ignorant of her Jewish culture. But in posing this warning in this fashion, Helen also poses an existential threat to Oreo. Helen's assessment of which Jews are or are not adequately Jewish mirrors the sort of assessment to which Oreo is particularly vulnerable, due to her blackness, amongst white Jews.
Serving as a counterpoint to this first anecdote is Helen's wonderfully bizarre decision to diagnose a man she has never met as Jewish and help him to reconnect with his lost Jewish culture. No longer judgmental, here Helen decides that a Montanan named Lenny Birdsong must be a passing Jew, a diagnosis made based on his being subscribed to both Commentary and Partisan Review (Ross 2000, 34). Lenny must be "Leonard Feigelzinger" (Ross 2000, 35). Helen sends a forged note to Lenny from the town's other Jewish occupant (Mel Blankenstein), inviting Lenny to Mel's shabbes dinner. (11) These names possess additional significance: "Birdsong" evokes the stage-name Jack Robin, the blackface singer played by Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, especially because that characters actual name is the more recognizably Jewish Jakie Rabinowitz. The name Mel Blankenstein suggests that Helen is projecting her insecurities onto him, while also clearly referencing the name of the Jewish cartoon voice actor Mel Blanc, who voiced Bugs Bunny, considered by some to have been racialized in Blanc's performance. (12) Both of these allusions layer the scene's complex engagement with authenticity and racial performance, while echoing Samuel Schwartz's work as a voice actor and foreshadowing Oreo's own foray into voice acting and performing a "Jewish voice." Notably, Oreo features no evidence of Helen or Oreo observing shabbes, despite two instances of Helen's mortification at white Jews' not doing so. The "Jewish custom" Helen imparts to Oreo is condescension toward the irreligious and/or those that pass. But Helen's condescension rightly registers as hypocritical, given her own embodiment of a pseudo-Jewishness without any religious belief or custom.
Oreo's response to her parents' Jewish education resembles that of other famous Jewish American fictional characters: like Alexander Portnoy, Augie March, and so many Woody Allen film protagonists, Oreo never seems too concerned with adhering to religious custom. Oreo thus evokes a meaningful and problematic double-standard within the Jewish community. Lewis Gordon has commented on this conflation of secular Jewishness with white secular Jewishness: "Black Jews had to be religious and meet all kind of criteria that white Jews, in fact, did not have to meet. White Jews, in other words, could be secular" (2005, 9). Popular media depictions of religious Jews of color (such as Sammy Davis Jr.) valuably expand Jewish portrayals beyond whiteness, but also may contribute to the notion that only white Jews are allowed to inhabit a secular Jewish identity. Oreo's narrative rejects this premise.
GENETICS, THE BIBLICAL JACOB, AND INVISIBILITY
Since Helen serves as Oreo's primary educator of Jewish culture, Ross locates Oreo's Jewish cultural continuity on the (ironically non-Jewish) matrilineal line. This simultaneously reinforces the importance of matrilineality (Helen does provide Jewish education), and challenges it (Helen is not, technically, the Jewish parent). Helen and James's parental/grandparental counterparts, Samuel and Jacob, are both Jewish, but they are neither physically present nor otherwise communicative in passing on Jewish custom and knowledge. Samuel's ignorance of Judaism extends to his leaving a biblical quote to set her on her quest (along with, to be fair, a very important yet-to-be-discussed mezuzah), but Helen identifies the problem with the text: "Golem,... that's New Testament!" (Ross 2000, 80). While Samuel's Jewish knowledge has lapsed, Ross still writes about Oreo's paternal line as representative of religious tradition. Jacob's name, in particular, evokes a biblical story about continuity and birthright. (13)
The biblical Jacob deceives his father Isaac in order to receive the inheritance promised his brother Esau. Ross confirms the importance of this allusion by having Oreo read a "left over" copy of a coloring book entitled "Esau Gets a Shave" (2000, 24). The scripture implies that some breaking of custom necessarily facilitated the journey toward Jewish peoplehood. The biblical story serves as an analogue for Oreo, who at the end of the novel seeks her grandfather in the hopes he will "greet his granddaughter as a zayde should, with love and affection" (2000, 207). Unlike the biblical Jacob, Oreo does not resort to trickery, but she does have leverage. And all she seeks is his "love and affection;" in essence, his blessing.
Oreo's leverage, in her anticipated meeting with her paternal grandfather, involves the "secret of her birth" (Ross 2000, 63), which is that she was conceived via artificial insemination. This discovery leads to Oreo's securing a briefcase full of her father's sperm samples from "Generation, Incorporated" (Ross 2000, 204), which she plans to bring to Jacob, knowing of his desire to have "kosher" children. With this twist, Ross not only brings the question of Jewish continuity into conversation with medical technological advances not anticipated by ancient texts, she also sets up a meeting between the estranged grandfather/ granddaughter described hopefully as a potential "Judeo-Negro concordat" (Ross 2000, 203). The irony in Oreo's using her father's sperm samples as leverage again evokes the matrilineal custom: if Oreo is not "kosher kinder" it is because her Jewishness is determined by her mother's, and not her father's genetic material (Ross 2000, 205). Ironically, then, Samuel's genetic material may no longer have any definitively, procreatively Jewish qualities: were a Jewish woman to conceive with Samuel's remains, the child would be Jewish on her account, but could not possibly come from a Jewish marriage. (14) As such, the sperm represents the potential for future progeny, but none that could be "kosher" in the way that Jacob originally demanded. (15) Of course, Oreo represents Samuel's genetic potential as well; as Tru Everette notes, Oreo "is a Utopian character not limited by stereotypes of race or gender but one who, instead, offers new options for identity through an understanding of history and through broadened understandings of the present and future" (89). With Oreo's plan to present her grandfather with her father's reproductive potential, Ross implicitly asserts that Oreo fulfills the terms of this offering far more comprehensively, and impressively, than Samuel's frozen sperm samples. Though Jacob has not yet met Oreo, or recognized her as his granddaughter, the novel ends on a hopeful note.
This hopeful note, with its implication that perhaps Jacob will finally recognize, i.e., see, his granddaughter, serves as but one of many ways the novel contemplates Oreo's invisibility. This failure of Jacob (and Samuel, which I explore soon) to see Oreo thus serves as metaphor for American racism. The notion of racism rendering black people invisible finds its most prominent expression in the title of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). While Ellison's novel genders black invisibility as male, Ross's depiction of Oreo evokes Claudia Rankine's observation about the devaluation of black women in particular: "How do you keep the black female body present and how do you own value for something that society won't give value to?" (Cocozza 2015). (16) In setting up Oreo's relationship to her Jewish family and community, Ross reveals Oreo's invisibility, even providing examples of how she internalizes lessons about not keeping her black female body present in interactions with white Jews.
Multiple anthropological scholarly accounts reveal Jews of color commenting on how white Jews often regard them as "impossible;" an assumption buttressed by the presumption that all Jews must be white, and one that intersects in meaningful ways with the idea of nonwhite Jews being invisible. In The Colors of Jews, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz includes autobiographical writing by Yavilah McCoy under the heading "Am I possible?" within a chapter meditating on the consequences of the way in which (predominantly white Jewish) discourse treats black and Jewish as binary (2007, 37). The same chapter quotes Rebecca Walker's memoir, Black, White, and Jewish, in which a white Jewish classmate inquires about Walker being both black and Jewish by asking, "How can that be possible?" (Kaye/Kantrowitz 2007, 44). Helen Kim and Noah Leavitt locate similar anxiety about impossibility in their study of Jewish and Asian identity; they interpret the question, "Where are you from?" as involving "notions of foreignness and impossibility of belonging as an American'" (2016, 116). These anthropological accounts are invaluable counterparts to the aforementioned dehumanizing articles about simultaneously black and Jewish subjects in The American Israelite. Oreo exists as among the earlier sustained fictional iterations of how to navigate the implicit racism within this perceived "impossibility." Unsurprisingly, it reveals no easy answer. Most distressing may be Oreo's attempt to negotiate this perceived impossibility by bodily removing herself from potential interactions, thereby making herself invisible, an unsustainable lesson she learns from her mother.
Ross provides three examples in which Helen and Oreo, in very different ways, remove their black bodies from the site of Jewish societal engagement. The first example involves the entirety of Helen's letters to Oreo, documents that provide for Oreo's socialization and education, even if the stories involve Helen's experiences. As previously mentioned, Helen's education of Oreo finds expression in the book mainly in the form of her letters home; her black body is thus not physically present, for most of Oreo's childhood, to teach her children about Jewishness.
The second example involves a specific story from those letters: that of Helen's determination to reconnect Leonard Birdsong with his supposedly Jewish roots. Helen does this entirely via phone and forged letter--which she then communicates to Oreo via letter. The Birdsong episode reveals a doubled absence: Helen teaches her daughter a lesson about not revealing her physical self while interacting with a (supposedly) Jewish correspondent, while also not being physically present at the time of the lesson.
Lastly, Oreo's most extensive and meaningful attempt to engage with her own Jewishness for a Jewish audience involves her recording of an ad for Tante Ruchel's Kosher Kitchen brand TV dinners at her father's recording studio. After a sub-par take, Slim Jackson, a mute, black producer, asks Oreo to try again, holding up a cardboard word bubble reading, "A LITTLE MORE JEWISH, PLEASE." (Ross 2000, 143). The challenge reminds us of Helen and James's frustration with white Jews who are, in their estimations, insufficiently Jewish. Perhaps due to the familiarity of the critique, Oreo responds without any defensiveness. "Oreo tried to think of how her mother would do this" (Ross 2000, 143); the choice makes sense when we recall that she's never interacted with her Jewish family. But the radio copy she recites, about a religious holiday that is distilled into its commercial, capitalistic appeal to nostalgia, allows her to (literally) make her voice heard by other Jews. The scene undercuts religiosity as the sole grounds for Jewish identification by intimating that religious custom itself has been drained of meaning through cynical, nostalgia-exploitative commercialization. (17) Yet the ad also allows Oreo to articulate her voice (albeit, disembodied and performative) for a Jewish community.
Ross thus provides three examples in which black bodies are removed from the site of Jewish societal engagement in order to facilitate mundane, seemingly inconsequential interactions between Jewishly engaged persons of different racial backgrounds. While Helen never identifies as Jewish, her Jewish knowledge, commitment to raising a Jewish daughter, and insistence on policing white Jews' religious observance, positions her in a purposefully liminal space: she insists, via her actions, that she is part of the Jewish community, even as her removal of herself and choice not to self-identify as Jewish indicate her recognition that she is apart from the Jewish community. Part of what Helen imparts to Oreo here is a (very fraught) method for occupying that fluctuating border-space marking off Jewish from non-Jewish. Oreo at first internalizes these lessons, and her lack of meaningful physical engagement with Jewish community is its own purposeful, meaningful theme. But while race clearly plays a role in how this operates for Helen and Oreo, almost every white Jewish character presented (or suggested) in the text also occupies a recognizably liminal Jewish space. Consider the compromised religiosity of Leonard Birdsong, Samuel, Melnick and Schaeffer, and any Jews who might buy TV dinners for Pesach. Ross creates a large, varied space for Jewish liminality; one that could, ostensibly, be inclusive, though even Helen and James police its boundaries in unhelpful ways.
The novel's consistent engagement with the idea of Oreo's internalized black Jewish "invisibility" makes the novel's seemingly far-fetched climax, in which Oreo finally makes herself visible to her father, all the more poignant. Samuel Schwartz, Oreo's long estranged father, ultimately dies because of his failure to properly see his daughter. Upon finally finding her father, Samuel immediately, coldly, and perhaps cruelly, sends her on an errand. When she returns, Samuel waits by the window of his apartment. Unfortunately, a mirror, carried by a moving crew, distorts his perception with fatal consequences. Oreo, whose inseparable Jewishness and blackness provides a challenge for so many people, appears (to Samuel) as two Oreos, via a full-length mirror carried by a moving crew. As Samuel looks out the window at his daughter, he also sees her reflection in a mirror carried by a moving crew on the opposite side of the block. Confused, Samuel's head swivels back and forth as he sees two Oreos approaching the entrance to the building beneath him, until he loses his balance and falls out the window.
Samuel's failure to come to terms with Oreo's seeming duality--her blackness and her Jewishness--spells his own doom, not hers. Metaphorical blindness turns literal: his inability to see his daughter as his reflection equates to his inability to differentiate between her body (her metaphorical reflection of him) and the visual reflection of her body in a mirror. Samuel's failure to "see" properly, much like Isaac's inability to properly see (the biblical) Jacob, has consequences regarding birthright, lineage, and continuity. Except Samuel, and not his child, reaps the greatest consequence of his failure. Ross suggests that the consequences of white Jewish racism do not merely fall upon black people, Jewish or otherwise. Failing to properly recognize others' humanity robs white Jews of their own--in Samuel's case, quite literally.
CONCLUSION
Oreo's sustained meditation on the invisibility of black Jewish womanhood did not prevent the novel from being woefully misrepresented in earlier manifestations of the book's marketing. Gabrielle Foreman and Michelle Stein-Evers's review of the Northeastern Library of Black Literature edition (2000) claims that Ross "would have despised the back cover, which describes Oreo as 'an uproariously funny novel written about the relations between African Americans and Jews'" (2001, 36). Indeed, the copy fundamentally misrepresents a novel about a protagonist who is black and Jewish. Foreman and Stein-Evers's review underscores how this troubling blurb simplifies and undersells the novel's "(textual) hybridity," and its invaluable iteration of how being "Black and Jewish in America is to be privy to at least two sets of cultural secrets" (2001, 36). The blurb also evokes the genre of "black Jewish relations," which Gibel Azoulay criticizes for its preoccupation with notions of "either group polarization or coalitions" (2001, 211-12).
Oreo offers no easy solution to the problem of its protagonist's black Jewish invisibility. However, Ross repurposes one Jewish ritual object in a meaningful fashion that may have also purposefully positioned her novel within a literary genealogy of black and Jewish experience. Throughout her journey, Oreo wears a mezuzah around her neck. Far more typically, the chai or star of David serve to signify the wearer's Jewishness. But the prospect of wearing a mezuzah as a necklace was not Ross's invention. Sammy Davis Jr., in both his first memoir (1964) and an Ebony feature in 1960, referred to how Eddie Cantor, the famous Jewish entertainer known for his blackface performances (and whose performances Davis Jr. modeled his after), gifted him with a mezuzah. In his memoir, Davis Jr. describes the mezuzah as already having been converted into a necklace: "I noticed a gold chain with a gold capsule attached to it" (1964, 148). Cantor describes the mezuzah as "a holy Hebrew charm. We attach them to the doorposts of our homes or wear them for good luck, good health, and happiness" (1964, 148). Davis Jr. responds, "Do you have to be Jewish to wear one?" (1964, 148). Interestingly, in the Ebony feature, Davis Jr. makes no mention of the mezuzah being a necklace prior to him receiving it from Cantor, nor does he relay Cantor describing a tradition of Jews wearing it around their necks. So Davis Jr.'s mezuzah narrative certainly involves some creative license, as all autobiographical writing does.
A few of Ross's creative choices indicate that she may well have been quite aware of Davis Jr.'s invocation of Cantor's mezuzah in his conversion narrative. The entirety of the Soundman Studios scene speaks, albeit in an inverted fashion, to a history of prominent white Jewish entertainers, like Cantor, performing in blackface, while Leonard Birdsong and Mel Blankenstein allude to Jack Robin's and Mel Blanc's racial performances. And Samuel Schwartz, who, like Cantor, earns a living with his vocal performances, leaves the mezuzah for Oreo "on a thin chain" (Ross 2000, 80). But while Davis Jr. earnestly accepts Cantor's mezuzah, wears it, and ascribes a protective quality to it, Oreo's response is more measured, and understandably so; as indicated earlier, her father has undercut whatever religious legacy he is attempting to pass on by mistakenly attaching scripture from the New Testament to the item (Ross 2000, 80). Oreo learns that jewelry signifying Jewishness, ultimately, does not necessarily reflect the Jewish knowledge of its wearer (or the person who gifts it).
That said, Oreo chooses to wear the mezuzah, even if she never expresses belief in its capacity to bring good luck as Davis Jr. does. The mezuzah traditionally marks a home as Jewish, and thus entitled to God's protection. And Oreo may well deploy the mezuzah on her body for a similar purpose. But in Ross's story, the mezuzah also illustrates how some objects, characteristics, vocabulary, and other perhaps arbitrary markers effectively facilitate Oreo's interlocutors to observe her Jewishness. In that regard, some correspondents recalling aspects of Jewish youth culture during the 1970s and 1980s noted that mezuzahs were not uncommon aesthetic choices; they may have been worn as good luck charms, but also may have served as prideful signifiers of the wearer's Jewishness. While these anecdotal reports indicated Jewish young men and women wore mezuzahs as jewelry, the popularity of the mezuzah necklace among Jewish boys and young men in particular may have something to do with the fact that a famous black and Jewish celebrity popularized the aesthetic. If the mezuzahs popularity among Jewish boys and young men owed anything to Davis Jr.'s wearing a mezuzah and articulations of its importance to him, we might see Oreo's choice to wear her mezuzah through what ends up being a fairly complex set of lenses. In Oreo, the mezuzah is associated with Samuel Schwartz, a voice actor, while in Yes I Can the mezuzah is associated with Eddie Cantor (and, of course, Sammy Davis Jr., himself). The mezuzah is associated with actors, and in particular, actors who engage in racial (and ethno-racial) performance. Cantor's blackface routines are performative, but so, perhaps, is the act of wearing a mezuzah, especially for someone who knows so little about Judaism as to attach New Testament scripture to it. Furthermore, these ethno-racial performances are also depictions and distortions of masculinity. Lastly, the gifting of the mezuzahs evinces complex genealogies regarding how culture is transferred within families or within diverse American society. To his credit, Samuel Schwartz gifts a mezuzah to his daughter, regardless of his religious ignorance. Eddie Cantor gifts a mezuzah to Sammy Davis Jr., which is in turn "gifted," as an aesthetic signifier of Jewishness, to Jewish boys and young men eager to wear an object that signified Jewishness as well as a celebrity figure's black and Jewish expression of masculinity.
Oreo wears the mezuzah, and not a chat or star of David, to assert her cultural inheritance from Samuel Schwartz as well as from Sammy Davis Jr. That signifiers of Jewishness are often signifiers of Jewish masculinity is nothing new, and Oreo rejects this premise in using the mezuzah to signify her black and Jewish girlhood. Ann Pellegrini, for instance, has criticized scholarship focusing merely on the Jewish male body for facilitating a "displacement of Jewish women from the scene of Jewishness" that unintentionally mirrors anti-Semitic discourse that often does the same (1997, 109). Rebecca Davis's scholarship suggests that this same gendering phenomenon occurs within black and Jewish narratives like Davis Jr.'s, as well. Oreo's deployment of the mezuzah resists the displacement of black and Jewish girlhood from the scene of Jewishness in emphatic terms, and through the repurposing of a masculinity-signifying object. (18)
Lastly, Oreo's mezuzah signifies her Jewishness without requiring her to use her words. Oreo thereby avoids the sort of linguistic trap that impacts liminal literary Jews like James Joyce's Leopold Bloom. Consider the verbal gymnastics and contradictions in Bloom's description of his exchange with the anti-Semitic citizen to Stephen Daedalus toward the end of Ulysses: "So I without deviating from plain facts in the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family like me though in reality I'm not" (Joyce 1993, 525). Liminal identity can make for difficult self-expression; it certainly has that effect on Bloom. Oreo has no corresponding difficulty proclaiming her Jewishness, but she only utters it once in the novel, at a Tay Sachs fundraiser, when a white Jewish teenager assumes she's not Jewish: "Nu, I'm half-Jewish" (Ross 2000, 121). And yet, certainly some contest the notion of "half-Jewish" being a viable Jewish identity. If some readers would assert that Oreo must either be or not be Jewish, then even this "half-Jewish" reply might be considered as ineffectual as Joyce's.
Oreo's mezuzah allows her to avoid the linguistic hurdles attached to the verbal proclamation of sufficient Jewishness--a standard to which white Jews are rarely held. Instead, the mezuzah tells the world for her that hers is a Jewish body, while also wryly commenting on the novel's thematic approach to family and home. Both Helen and Samuel are essentially absent from Oreo's home, so Oreo grows up in a home that is not Jewish. While Oreo has no Jewish home on which to place the mezuzah, by wearing it as a necklace, she declares her black female body her own Jewish home, even as her particular choice of signifier ironically alludes to the interplay of black and Jewish performances of ethno-racialized masculinity. Language, which elsewhere in the novel is shown to commodify Jewishness, as in the "Tame Ruchel" advertisement, or reveal literacy without affiliation, as in James's ironic postvernacular Yiddish, may be an imperfect means for declaring identity. While Oreo's upbringing featured no incorporation of Jewish custom into her everyday life, it provides her with enough Jewish knowledge to make a meaningful, inventive choice that repurposes a Jewish symbol and also reclaims it as part of her black and Jewish and female cultural inheritance. Given the novel's obsession with language, it's a meaningful and striking visual image: the mezuzah as bodily talisman, announcing Oreo's Jewishness on her own terms, helping her to combat the black and Jewish and female invisibility that she struggles with throughout the novel.
ELI BROMBERG HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY
ELI BROMBERG received his PhD in English, with a concentration in American Studies, from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently revising his dissertation, on Jewish American incest narratives from the 1990s, into a book manuscript. His interests include Jewish American literature and popular culture, Yiddish literature, and incest studies.
NOTES
(1.) Despite not breaking through in the years directly following its 1974 release, Paul Beatty includes an excerpt from the novel in his anthology of African American humor, and laments in his introduction that the novel took so long to arrive on his "broad, albeit balky, cultural radar" (2006, 4).
(2.) Tru Leverette (2006) argues that Oreo reworks the traveler/quest narrative with a mixed-race protagonist who, while able to assert significant agency due to her intellect and wit, still finds herself hemmed in by racist and sexist societal strictures. (Leverette also notes Oreo's limitations as a feminist text, in particular its seemingly moral reliance on Oreo as a virgin, and its condescension toward prostitutes.) Gabrielle Foreman and Michelle Stein-Evers (2001), who foreground their simultaneously black and Jewish vantage-points in discussing the novel's importance, observe that the text's hyper-specific cultural references, which make the novel so difficult to fully "get," ultimately contribute to the novel's appeal.
(3.) Richardson's observation appears independent from, but consistent with, Jonathan Freedman's (2008) use of "klezmer" as a metaphor for cultural productions emerging from American Jewish artistic partnership with non-Jews.
(4.) A non-exhaustive list of more recently authored representations of Jews of color would include Gish Jen's Mono, in the Promised Land (1996) and Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man (2002). The protagonist of Anya Ulinich's Petropolis (2007) is a Russian Jewish immigrant with a black grandparent, challenging assumptions of "old country" Ashkenazi descent as necessarily being white. In the mystery genre, Kyra Davis's Sophie Katz series features a black and Jewish protagonist, as do John Lescroat's Abe Glitsky books. Recent television representation includes Cristina Yang on Grey's Anatomy, Cindy Hayes on Orange is the New Black, and Duvid the cantor on Transparent.
(5.) For a more comprehensive list of texts that might fit this criteria, Adam Meyer's invaluable annotated bibliography, Black-Jewish Relations in African American and Jewish American Fiction names multiple texts featuring simultaneously black and Jewish characters, including Hal Bennett's The Black Wine (1968), Austin C. Clarke's Storm of Fortune (1973), Nat Hentoff's Call the Keeper (1966), Herbert Tarr's The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen (1963) and Heaven Help Us! (1968), Henry van Dyke's Blood of Strawberries (1969) and Marita Bonner's "Corner Store." Meyer also includes Jean Toomer's "Fern" (1922), which depicts a character named Rosen whose singing is compared to a cantor's, though the narrator never explicitly identifies her as Jewish.
(6.) The portrayal of those who convert to Judaism as inherently comedic figures is not limited to Jews of color: Walter Sobchak, in The Big Lebowski, famously asserts "I don't roll on Shabbos!" Seinfeld inverts this dynamic in the figure of Tim Whatley (played by Bryan Cranston), who converts not for any faith-based reason, but solely to tell edgy jokes without being accused of anti-Semitism (Ackerman, 1997).
(7.) Sidney Poitier and Zero Mostel starred in a much-maligned adaptation of Malamud's short story in 1970.
(8.) Willie "the Lion" Smith, another black and Jewish musician and entertainer, discusses his Jewish identity in creative, engaging terms in his memoir Music on My Mind (1965). While Smith never specifies whether his father or step-father were Jewish (his last name incorporates both of their surnames), he begins his autobiography with the line, "The Lion is here. Full name: William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Berthol-off Smith. Quite a name. Takes in French and Jewish" (1). Smith also discusses how his stepfather (who may have been Jewish) earned money by selling pork to Jewish families, while his mother (who was not Jewish) sent him on errands to a Jewish family's house where he ended up studying Hebrew with a rabbi (11-12). There's no clear evidence that Ross encountered Smith's book, but it would not be surprising: the counterintuitive re-working of matrilineal/patrilineal continuity in Smith's memoir may bear some relation to what Ross conceives in Oreo.
(9.) Textual allusions to Oreo as unkosher also illustrate how Ross's naming of the character functions both as a reclaiming of a racial slur, as well as a reference to the fact that at the time, the cookies upon which the slur was based were made with lard, and thus unkosher.
(10.) Ross, who alludes to the "theory of the so-called black matriarchs" (2000, 54) elsewhere in the text, refutes the notion that non-traditional circumstances prevent a parent (even if physically absent) from raising a well-adjusted, intelligent child. Ross's depiction of a black home with an absent white--and Jewish--father also undercuts the notion of absent fathers as a black pathology. Bluma Goldsteins Enforced Marginality (2007), which explores the problem of Jewish male abandonment of wives in early twentieth century America, provides a reminder that patriarchal behavior occurs across different communities, even as stereotypes adhere to some more than others (and can shift over time). Ta-Nehisi Coates' article, "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," explores how Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the originator of the idea of the "black matriarch," likely projected his own insecurities about his own absent white father in his attempts to theorize black families. Ross's novel seems especially attuned to the absurdity of categorizing, theorizing, and essentializing families in this fashion.
(11.) According to numerous posts on geneology.com, the question of "Birdsong's" etymology is relatively unsettled. It may be Germanic ("Vogelgesang"--not far at all from "Feigelzinger"), English (dating back to the 1600s), French ("Chandoiseau"), or Native American. Interestingly, Ross picks a sort of Rorschach test of a surname--a slightly different version of "Blankenstein." ("Birdsong Family History," Ancestry.com, "Birdsong," Genealogy.com).
(12.) Sarah Hagi recently made this claim about Bugs Bunny (and others) in her article, "All Your Favorite Cartoon Characters are Black."
(13.) Samuel, whose biblical namesake was named in order to celebrate the birth of a child, also registers a meaningful, religiously-engaged choice by Ross. Not only does Samuel's name heighten the irony of Oreo's birth not being celebrated by her grandparents, but a second irony may lie in the novel's Samuel being named after a priest, prophet, and judge, given that he is religiously nonobservant, literally unable to see properly, and frequently exhibits poor judgment.
(14.) Samuel had remarried, but Jacob hates Mildred (Samuel's second wife), ruling her out (205). And of course, being dead, Samuel cannot marry any other Jewish woman at this point.
(15.) Susan Martha Kahn (2010) has written about the tensions present in the various ways of considering Jewish genetics. Orthodox rabbis considering the matrilineal custom tend to locate Jewishness in the mother's egg or the body of the woman within the fetus gestates. Scientists, however, have established that the male line also provides pertinent information about Jewish genetic history, and this has been used in recent years to "legitimate diverse claims to Jewish identity" (Kahn 2010, 15). David Goldstein's Jacob's Legacy (2009) also delves into the genetic aspects of Jewish history.
(16.) Rankine's quote here comes in the context of her discussing contemporary media depictions of the loss of black women's lives alongside black men's lives. Though I do not cover it within this paper, Oreo features extensive meditation on black women (and girls) dealing with the threat of physical and sexual violence.
(17.) This recording session, at "Mr. Soundman, Inc.," features a mute black sound engineer who speaks via word bubble shaped cardboard cutouts, and features layered, biting commentary on the history of Jewish and black labor relations and performance in the entertainment industry. Harryette Mullen provides expert analysis and context here, but the scene also engages with dynamics explored at length by Eric Lott (Love and Theft 1993), Michael Rogin (Blackface, White Noise 1996), Jeffrey Melnick (A Right to Sing the Blues 1999), Lori Harrison-Kahan (The White Negress 2011), and Jennifer Glaser (Borrowed Voices 2016).
(18.) I am reluctant to include the sentence "the mezuzah functions as a phallus" within the body of this article, so I've hidden it in this footnote. But given the masculine investment in the object, it seems worth acknowledging.
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| Author: | Bromberg, Eli |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Studies in American Jewish Literature |
| Article Type: | Critical essay |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Mar 22, 2019 |
| Words: | 10731 |
| Previous Article: | NATHAN ENGLANDER'S THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES AS JEWISH-AMERICAN ANACHRONOTOPE. |
| Next Article: | BETWEEN JEW AND NATURE: TRACING JEWISH ETHICS IN THE ECOLOGICAL IMAGINATION OF BERNARD MALAMUD'S DUBIN'S LIVES. |
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