Being Black and Jewish in America
“I usually introduce myself as ‘Robin Washington, I’m black and a Jew.’ I want to put my identity in your face; I want you to deal immediately with who I am,” grinned the 37-year-old independent filmmaker and managing editor of Boston’s African-American weekly Bay State Banner. Mr. Washington, who proudly displayed “the first kente cloth kippah,” just sewn by his wife, was the first of three speakers at a symposium “On Being Both Black and Jewish” held at Brandeis University last week.
Heeding the Call That Haunts
Tattoo for a Slave By Hortense Calisher
Harcourt, 336 pages, $24.
‘Your grandmother never kept slaves.”…………With these words spoken to a young, naive Hortense Calisher by her father, born the seventh child of eight in 1861 in Richmond, Va., this unusual book opens. A “tattoo” can be a bugle call, a drum roll
Fatalism and Humor in Israeli Fiction
Uncle Peretz Takes Off: Short Stories By Yaakov Shabtai Translated From the Hebrew by Dalia Bilu
Overlook Duckworth, 239 pages, $24.95. * * *|The Israeli author Yaakov Shabtai, who died in 1981, wrote several morbidly memorable first sentences. “Goldman’s father died on the first of April, whereas Goldman himself committed suicide on
