Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (review)

Autobiography is more than the vivid, even brilliant, recounting of one’s life. Successful autobiography requires what is enormously difficult, namely, to see and write about oneself as if we were someone else and to do so with dispassionate truth. Rebecca Walker’s autobiography of her “shifting self” is brilliantly written, but it fails because the author lacks insight into its subject—herself.

Rebecca Walker grew up in a myriad of worlds. There was the one of the civil rights movement where she was the daughter of Mel Leventhal, a Jewish lawyer from New York who came to Mississippi to be part of the legal fight against segregation and racism, and Alice Walker, the black writer. (I knew Mel and Alice in the late sixties and early seventies, and Alice Walked dedicated a poem to me in her Revolutionary Petunias. However, I have had no contact with either of them in almost thirty years.) But Rebecca Leventhal, as she was known then, could not find a bridge between the black Southern world of her mother’s Georgia relatives and the white, Jewish one of her father’s New York relatives. While her Jewish great-grandmother rejected her son’s marriage to a black woman, the grandmother often told her granddaughter, “Don’t ever forget . . . you’re a Jew! I don’t care what Mama and Daddy say” (p. 40).

Walker was left on her own to make sense of her black and Jewish worlds because her parents did not accompany her into the world of the opposite parent. She tries to imagine her mother at a gathering of the Jewish relatives and imagines her being “unbearably sensitive, masked, edgy” because her race would be the unspoken issue (p. 46).

With her parents’ divorce, Rebecca’s two worlds become even more separate. Her parents decide she will alternate between them every two years. Walker finds herself forced to seek her identity in worlds whose style and values are almost antagonistic. Her father, now a New York lawyer, marries a Jewish woman with whom he eventually has two children. They move to Riverdale and eventually Larchmont which to Rebecca is the epitome of sterile suburban Jewish life. She goes to a Jewish camp in the Catskills where she is one of only three blacks and she identifies more with the Jewish girls, if calling each other “JAP” qualifies as being Jewishly-identified.

Her mother lives in a more cosmopolitan world of artists and intellectuals in San Francisco, a world in which Rebecca’s friends are almost exclusively black and Latino. However, whether she is living in her father or mother’s world, the one constant seems to be the absence of parental guidance. Her father is unresponsive when she tells him of her anger when she is walking down Larchmont Avenue with her white brother and sister and is asked if she’s “the baby-sitter, the maid, the au pair.” She wonders if he “would like to relax and enjoy his assimilated all-white family without . . . the dark spot in an otherwise picture-perfect suburban life” (p. 228).

Her mother expects Rebecca to be independent and leaves her alone for as much as a week at a time when she goes on book or lecture tours, goes to the country to be alone to write, or locks herself in her room for days at a time. In an interview Alice Walker was quoted as saying that she thought of her daughter more as a friend. Rebecca knew that if her mother thought of her as a friend, she couldn’t be a daughter.

The portraits of her parents are undoubtedly true, but they are one-sided. In an interview in Jerusalem Report, Walker reported that her parents had asked why she didn’t write about the “wonderful things in your childhood?” Her response was, “Yes, there were. But these were the incidents that have stuck with me and haunted me, and needed to come...