Affirmations: All God's Children
LESTER, JULIUS
AFFIRMATIONS ALL GOD'S JULIUS CHILDREN LESTER Let us speak of the racism each of us carries. For, though racism is political, it also resides in our persons. It could not be otherwise,...
...I never told my father, but I wasn't too sure that I wouldn't have cast my vote for Barabbas, too...
...And that brings me full circle to those two people who affirmed Life...
...Beneath that is that layer about which Maggie, my great-grandmother, said, "I don't talk about that...
...In and of itself, suffering does not bring knowledge, I was beginning to learn...
...And, for the first time since spelling out that name on my grandmother's mailbox, I remembered my great-grandfather...
...No matter...
...The boy didn't expect mail, but went because he wanted to solve the mystery of the name on his grandmother's mailbox...
...Life resides there...
...The fact remained that I had not dissociated myself from the sentiments expressed in the anti-Semitic poem...
...It did not matter that my intention had been to create a dialogue between blacks and Jews...
...The decade that began with the singing of "We Shall Overcome" came to its end with shouts of "Burn, Baby, Burn...
...The adversaries were Blacks and Jews...
...The spring semester of my junior year, 1959,1 transferred to San Diego State College for a semester, where I happened to meet, among my three roommates, a Palestinian named Khalid Tuck-Tuck...
...Especially since I was still angry at those Jews who had denounced black nationalism...
...How could I reconcile the anger and the shame...
...For three weeks I took phone calls on the air about the poem, and talked with Jews about Jewish racism...
...the boy was fighting his tears...
...But maybe there was something about the way we listened, or maybe he developed a crush on Roma...
...So, the courage of Adolf and Maggie was great, because they chose to accept the consequences of courageous love and do the unacceptable: They married...
...Jews had no substance or reality in my child-consciousness...
...Instead, I shed myself of one of the worst remnants of anti-Semitism, the one which says that "Jews should know better, because they have suffered, too...
...Jews were the people who demanded that Pontius Pilate free Barabbas and crucify Jesus...
...It doesn't matter now, because Adolf and Maggie offered themselves to Life...
...Anyway, in the 1940s and 1950s, as I blundered my way toward some imitation of adulthood, it was hard enough to make sense of a world that was harsh, violent and hateful to me because I was black, a world I had to prepare myself to enter...
...They trusted their love, not only for each other, but for something wider and higher and nameless...
...I did not wish I were Jewish, but was glad that Jews had a land of their own, even if blacks didn't...
...Remembering him, I was flooded with a deep and abiding shame, because I had betrayed him...
...Demons cannot abide the sight of tears and the sound of weeping...
...They pressed him to drink, to drink and to say I'chaim...
...Rhoda and I had much to talk about, because she wanted to do the same...
...That is when my education began, as true education must begin—in the awful experience of shame...
...Life is always intruding with such accidents, such strange occurrences, which are really invitations from God, and if you're male, God's ! agent is generally female, not giving you what you think you want, but offering what you could not know you needed, would not know that you needed for many years...
...We don't talk about that...
...Roma had called my name...
...The first is from Elie Wiesel's A Jew Today...
...I begin with a story...
...I perceived dimly that it had something to do with Jews, but those were the people my father preached about...
...The next story is from the affidavit of Hermann Graebe, an eyewitness to a massacre of Jews in the Ukraine in 1942...
...I share this deeply personal story not because I claim any Jewish ancestry...
...I went to college, a black college with many white teachers...
...I imagine that my great-grandfather lay beside her in the night and helped her stare down terror and if he could not dissolve that memory-filled-with-pain, he could whisper into night's-dread-silence, "It's over, Maggie...
...The boy didn't enjoy these visits, for his grandmother's home was so rural, there were no other children around, and the adults were too busy doing whatever adults do to know he was there—except when he did something wrong...
...But what to do about it...
...That is too long and too arduous a journey to travel in a mere ten years...
...What an extraordinary couple they must have been, because they trusted their souls...
...This was said by someone who has never met my wife, who, incidentally, is not Jewish...
...We must go into the suffering...
...Perhaps some read only passivity in these stories...
...It is only recently, however, that I've realized that when Jews were presented as a model, they weren't called Jews...
...To do this is difficult, because we must do it as solitary individuals in the privacy and terror of our souls, where angels sing and demons scream and God is deaf to our cries for help...
...And I feel that you passed your suffering down to your daughter, Emma Smith, who was my grandmother, and she didn't "talk about that, either," and she passed the accumulated suffering down to my mother, Julia Smith Lester, who doesn't talk about that, either, and she passed it all to me—a legacy of suffering passed down for three generations like a precious heirloom at which I stare and hear the wind in the sails of slave ships, and see the water spraying outward from the thrust of the pointed bow...
...Elements in the Jewish community pressured the radio station to fire me, which it didn't...
...I asked him to read the poem because I wanted to illustrate the psychological impact of the strike on black children...
...And I hear the lash of whips and see blood fall like manna and one day at some time in the mid-seventies, I was plunged into that suffering, which had accumulated through the generations like a miser's hoard of gold...
...It did not matter that the New York Times had used me as a pawn to rally support against black community control of the schools...
...That's the same name on grand-I mama's mailbox," he said, with , that calculated innocence of which i seven-year-olds are masters...
...Once he came near tears describing what had been his family's home in Palestine and the beauty of the surrounding orange groves...
...I, who had suffered because of how others regarded my race, had grievously hurt many who suffered because of their religion and cultural identity...
...Why then was A-L-T-S-C-H-U-L painted on her mailbox...
...It is never enough, because anger is seductive and one can easily become trapped by and imprisoned by anger...
...Whatever it was, he said, "I'm not supposed to do this, but...
...Occasionally I'd overhear one of my parents refer to someone as a "Shylock," or my father would come home with a purchase, saying with a chuckle, "I jewed him down to five dollars," and maybe once or twice I heard my mother say, "Oh, he's like an ol' Jew...
...In that time and that place, it was acceptable for a white man to be in relationship to a black woman only if the relationship were for the white man's sexual [ pleasure...
...They were pressed together so that they could hardly move or breathe...
...If he is still alive, I have no doubt that he is...
...Even in the most propitious of circumstances, love requires courage, because what is more dangerous than to look at another and say, "I give myself to you...
...Parenthetically, I must add that I j know there will be some who will use this story as the explanation i they've needed to "explain" my recent essay articulating my support of Israel which appeared in the Village Voice, and reprinted in the Sunday New York Times...
...I took great care to explain to my listeners that my purpose in having the poem read was not to insult Jews, but to begin a dialogue...
...Thinking that it would give me something to say to her other than "Duh, duh, duh," I read it...
...He began each day, literally, cursing Jews...
...so, too, Jews and/or whites have absorbed anti-Black racism...
...I had noticed that my classmates at school liked to call me by the first syllable of my name when they taunted me, standing before me and spitting out, "Ju...
...Israel spoke to the need I had as a young black man for a place where I could be free of being an object of hatred...
...The final story is again from Weisel's A Jew Today, adapted by him from the testimony of Leib Langfuss, who was a member of the Sonder (Commando, those Jews forced to burn the bodies...
...The turning point was in 1966 when black nationalism became the dominant tone of "the movement" and Black Power its rallying cry...
...It was worthy of Jesse Jackson, I am ashamed to say, but all the anti-Semitism I had imbibed came forth, though I did not recognize it as such...
...I graduated from college in 1960, and after a year of bridge-playing (what else can you do with a B.A...
...Jews...
...And they began to sing, to sway, since they could not dance...
...Our task is to learn how to cast away the unholy birthrights bequeathed us by this culture...
...Somebody had managed to smuggle a small Sefer Torah aboard the train...
...I doubt i that he was Jewish in any living : sense, for no hint of Judaism or Jewish culture survive in my family...
...I knew they were trying to hurt me, but not knowing how calling me "Ju...
...Well, in the tradition of my foremothers, I don't talk about that...
...The boy dared not ask, because his family did not appreciate questions and answered them, generally, with a "No," even if the questions began with "Why...
...We become what we hate...
...The mailbox is no longer there and the house that Adolf Altschul built burned, turning all his letters to ashes...
...I look at him, shrug, and say, "You know...
...To be a human being...
...At that moment the S.S...
...They were Hebrews, or the children of Israel — Moses parting the Red Sea...
...I realized, finally, that if she wouldn't go on a date with me, she certainly wouldn't go to Israel with me...
...Julius Lester, who achieved tibntro-versial prominence as a radio talk show host on WBA1 during the 1960s, is now teaching in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
...He took us up to the Ark, parted the curtains, and showed us the Torah...
...And they went on singing and celebrating the Torah, all the while knowing that every motion of the train was bringing them closer to their end...
...The Jewish Defense League passed out leaflets reading, "Cancel Out Julius Before He Cancels Out You...
...As improbable as it was in that time and that place when hooded Klansmen rode at night bringing death as if it were a present, Adolf and Maggie came ; to love each other...
...And my comrade said yes...
...That was not to be the end, for in the fall of 1968, there was a bitter school strike in New York City over the issue of community control...
...It was myself...
...Old woman...
...I picture you as lean and black as an apple tree in autumn and as silent as Death...
...Many people, especially those who are twenty years younger than I, look back on the 1960s with a yearning, a regret at having been born too late to participate in the excitement of marches in Alabama, organizing in Mississippi, demonstrating against the war in Vietnam at the Pentagon...
...I was left branded an anti-Semite, however...
...He handed it to the rabbi...
...Eventually I realized that it was condescending to say even that...
...After that Tuck and I were never in the apartment at the same time...
...So, I learned with agonizing pain that being a victim of racism did not give me automatic immunity from carrying and spreading the disease...
...Black Power was our attempt to create institutions that were controlled by black people alone...
...My great-grandfather was a Jew, j but what does that mean...
...Not one caller objected to my having aired the poem...
...How fraught with terror her nights must have been if memory contained naught except pain, a pain so total that she could open her mouth only wide enough to say, "I don't talk about that...
...In and of itself, suffering brings only pain, and sometimes, the desire to cause others pain, as I had done...
...So they took a bottle of brandy and drank from it while shouting I'chaim, to life, to one another with true joy...
...Two Jews turned to a member of our Kommando and asked if they should recite the Viddui, the last confession before dying...
...So, cry, cry your guilt, cry your shame...
...Among them was the family which I have mentioned...
...So, I continued absorbing anti-Semitism...
...The child was cooing with delight...
...James Reeb, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, William Moore...
...There is only one way to be human and that is found in how we use our suffering...
...Resistance has many faces, and the most difficult to see and to appreciate is that tiny, prosaic act, which affirms life even as Death's jaws close upon us...
...It was of a man named Adolf Altschul, a German Jew who came to Arkansas sometime after the Civil War...
...I was hurt and angered when people we had thought were friends denounced us and called us racists...
...I was stunned when many Jews responded by accusing us of kicking them out of "the movement...
...Yes, it was an exciting time, a time of incredible hope, a time of intense belief that the ideals of freedom and justice could be made manifest...
...It was not Jews whom I was allowing to be human...
...The decade that began with blacks and whites working together to create what we called "the beloved community" ended with blacks and whites alienated, hurt and angry with each other...
...I would have read poetry to a brussel sprout if Roma had asked me...
...And the betrayal had little to do with the fact that he was a Jew, but with something else I could not yet name...
...And by suffering I do not mean the sentimentality of those who see themselves as victims, of those who define themselves as oppressed...
...I guess he didn't want to talk either...
...It could not be otherwise, because anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism are an integral part of Western culture...
...Suddenly I found myself labeled an anti-Semite...
...I was again angry, but this time my anger did not take the form of striking back...
...And perhaps it was in the course of his rounds that he met a woman, a half-African, half Cherokee ex-slave, named Maggie Carson...
...The book was Exodus...
...Perhaps he was buried as one, because when he died, his brothers, the ancestors of the jewelry story owners, took his body for burial...
...Samson bringing down the temple walls...
...There was another day, a year or so later, a mouse-gray day that an English major finds romantic...
...And he said no, but they continued on page 26 refused to let him go...
...I studied nothing by or about Jews...
...His mother gave a short, bitter laugh...
...I remember how strange I felt in a place of worship whose rites I could not imagine...
...It was an odd name, made even odder by the fact that his grandmother's name was Smith...
...Once we confront the demons within, the demons without lose some of their power...
...How, then, could I be viewed except as an anti-Semite...
...Suffering is one...
...I remember reading Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta," and Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice," but the professor didn't talk about Jews...
...The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly...
...I want to say more, but I think I hear an old women's gruff voice saying, "Boy, hush...
...The 1970s came and another confrontation between blacks and Jews, this time over affirmative action...
...The reconciliation of shame and anger came when I allowed myself to be a human being...
...At least I began, because in an instant, his hands were around my throat, and our roommates had to pull him off me...
...I watched a family of about 8 persons, a man and woman, both about 50, with their children of about 1, 8, and 10, and two grownup daughters of about 20 to 24...
...The boy was, of course, me...
...We went to the synagogue...
...And that was not the end, for the end is always a paradox: The embrace of suffering does not bring pain, but a surprising shout of affirmation flung joyfully in the teeth of negation...
...Maggie never talked about her husband, or much else, it seems...
...Israel did not fade...
...A high point of each day was to walk to the road, sit beside the mailbox and await the mailman...
...By suffering I mean the pain which comes when you look at yourself and see yourself as you truly are — a mere mortal, limited, frail, full of pretense, bloated with self-importance, very alone and very afraid...
...man at the pit shouted something to his comrade...
...How did I get there...
...That was not so easy...
...Have we forgotten what Jews are ordered to do on Simhath Torah...
...Who was A-L-T-S-C-H-U-L...
...Such a moment of tenderness was singular...
...My name had touched her lips and as far as I was concerned, that was enough to con-' summate the relationship...
...Many Jews did not understand, did not try to understand, and in a rage, I struck back by publishing an article attacking Jews and Israel...
...But there were also Jews who defended me...
...Each summer he went with his mother to his grandmother's house in the backwoods of Arkansas...
...At least, that is what their story is about for me...
...A month after the poem's airing, the New York Times carried a front page story about the broadcasting of an anti-Semitic poem, but without mentioning the context in which it was broadcast...
...was to accomplish that, I was unfazed...
...The latter counted off about 20 persons...
...It is a story about a young black child, around seven or eight...
...If there were Jews among them, they never said so...
...It is easy to become so wholly focused on those who cause our suffering that, without knowing it, we become marionettes, dangling from the hands of the oppressors, who pull our strings, and we respond with the appropriate gestures, imprecations and slogans...
...And they insisted that my comrade drink, too, but he felt too embarrassed, and ashamed...
...Let me illustrate what I mean with three brief stories...
...A racist lies in wait there, eager to mock you, scorn you, spit on you, and laugh at you...
...Adolf s brothers disowned him...
...Two sets of friends in particular—the parents of Micky Schwerner and Andrew Goodman —supported me personally and publicly...
...I do not and I could not...
...I was walking across campus and Roma Jones called me...
...Sometimes, affirming life means anger, protest, defiance, self-defense...
...Yet, the most enduring response to racism, and my response to anti-Semitism, is precisely this: To affirm Life...
...I had thought that if anyone would understand the need for black nationalism, it would be Jews...
...That was hard enough, without demanding that they live up to my expectations...
...Jews were human...
...Of course I wanted to go to the synagogue and I'd find out what it was when I got there...
...There were threats on my life and my children's lives...
...The setting is a train carrying Jews to a death camp...
...After all, black nationalism was a form of Zionism...
...Eventually, I emerged and within me, I discovered something quite new: in the embracing of my suffering as a black person, I embraced the pain that everyone carries...
...The father pointed toward the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him...
...The rabbi talked, but about what, I don't remember...
...My mother knew her and asked her once what slavery had been like...
...As a Gentile I grew up absorbing anti-Semitism without even knowing that it was anti-Semitism...
...So, he lived his days listening to the sounds of the bees, wondering if the buzz of the bees seemed louder because of the deep summer silence, or was the silence made deeper by the sound of the bees...
...Suddenly an old rabbi exclaimed, "Today is Simhath Torah...
...You can't trust him...
...I picture you sitting on the front porch and staring across the fields with eyes so filled with pain that you are blind...
...And that is only the beginning...
...Learning that my great-grandfather was a Jew was a curious fact, but nothing more...
...She said she was going to visit a synagogue and did I want to come...
...I forgot him until the '67 war, and every time I hear of a Palestinian raid or bombing, I wonder if he was involved...
...Many of those whites were Jews...
...in English...
...I was still angry at those Jews who refused to recognize the legitimacy of community control...
...We do not meet their hatred with an equal hatred, but we suffuse our anger with compassion, our despair with joy...
...Our task is not to flagellate ourselves with guilt...
...I was into the third year, at least, of my crush on Roma, and indeed, was in real danger of dying of terminal heartache and galloping acne...
...Indeed, there seem to be those so baffled tjy the essay that I was told recently that I supported Israel because my wife is Jewish...
...An old woman with snow-white hair was holding the one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it...
...But one day, Rhoda Miller, a classmate and fellow English major, on whom I had a crush of extraordinary proportions, thrust a book at me and told me to read it...
...Love is another...
...One day he was in town with his parents and while walking along a street, he looked up to see a large clock suspended above a store front...
...I knew only that I had been deeply hurt, and I wanted to hurt Jews in return and I knew exactly how to do it...
...CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP...
...The FBI called to tell me that they had uncovered a plot to kidnap me, but couldn't act until I'd been carried across state lines...
...You're right...
...Eventually, I began responding by reading passages aloud from Exodus, which did not help our relationship...
...The primary force of his life was hatred, and it was difficult to live with, day in, day out...
...David killing Goliath...
...And always, we affirm that life is, and it is good, despite everything, and especially despite those who would have it be otherwise for those of us who are Black and who are Jews...
...The couple were looking on with tears in their eyes...
...There is nothing else possible when we become mired in our suffering, when suffering becomes our badge of identity...
...We didn't have a nation, but we had to have something...
...I do not want to mislead you into thinking that because you might understand the words you therefore know the experience...
...You're not there anymore...
...And once I interrupted one of his tirades with a loud rendition of Hava Nagila...
...Exactly how a program of study can be called liberal education and omit Judaism, Jewish history and culture, is beyond me...
...Adolf and Maggie had five children, including the boy's grandmother and the man the boy knew as Uncle Rudolph, whose surname j it was on the mailbox...
...He could read, but he could not pronounce the name painted rudely there in black: A-L-T-S-C-H-U-L...
...But that is not enough...
...Not to mention those who were killed in the riots of the long, hot summers...
...Of course, her brother lived with her, but his name was Uncle Rudolph...
...Perhaps some people are uncomfortable and angry and even a little ashamed that those Jews did not go to their deaths trying to take a Nazi with them...
...Daniel in the lion's den...
...There are experiences which elude the finest words one can find...
...Events that shook you to the soul happened too often and too frequently: The assassinations of a president, that president's brother, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Che Guevara...
...I moved to New York City, where I also graduated from crushes to love affairs, learning painfully that crushes have a loveliness and integrity of their own, which is devalued when the crush is asked to rise to the plateau of love...
...Those were Hebrews...
...Suffice it to say that I dwelled in nothingness and that if God heard my cries, He did not respond because I was not screaming loud enough...
...So my fantasies of living on a kibbutz with her faded...
...You think about things like that when you're seven...
...All of these were isolated events, significant, but occurring on the outskirts of my life...
...Even now, I can see myself standing there, gazing at the Torah, not knowing at what I was looking, but knowing that it was a moment that ! would remain with me...
...At age seven, Jesus couldn't compare with The Lone Ranger, or even Tonto, and Barabbas did...
...And I see a man looking at me in real confusion and he says, with a German accent: "Blacks...
...I haven't read it since 1958, but its impact on me was so extraordinary that I wanted to go and fight for Israel, even die, if need be, for Israel...
...None of this had a context for me, because I could see only two kinds of people in the world—black and white...
...Copyright ® 1979 Julius Lester...
...So, the boy sat by the mailbox and stared and wondered...
...Adolf became a farmer, buying the land and building the house where the little boy's grandmother still lived...
...But it was also a time too big to grasp, or to understand, or even to know what it was you were experiencing...
...I had a radio show then, and a black teacher read an anti-Semitic poem on it, written by one of his students...
...Around the clock was the name on his grandmother's mailbox, followed by the word, "Jeweller's...
...Tuck," as we called him, was an adumbration of the Middle Eastern nightmare that was to come...
...In all likelihood, Adolf Altschul did not live as a Jew...
...Not to mention the martyrs of the civil rights movement—Jimmie Lee Jackson, Viola Liuzzo, Jonathan Daniels, Rev...
...Do not be cowed by that demon...
...Later that day, she told him a story...
...Adolf Altschul was my great-grandfather...
...I have never known a human being so filled with rage...
...Her response was, "I don't talk about that," which in itself says a lot about slavery...
...Angered and hurt as I was by those Jews who opposed affirmative action, I began to accept that it was wrong, very wrong, to expect Jews to be better than anyone else, to expect Jews to understand more and to be more...
...He came with his j brothers and, while the boy's I mother did not know what the ; brothers did, Adolf Altschul became a peddler...
Vol. 5 • April 1980 • No. 4
