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February 16, 2001/Shevet 23, 5761, Vol. 53, No.20
Black, white and Jewish: writer fits pieces together
TJ MICHELS
Jewish Bulletin of Northern California
Picture a frenetic airport terminal filled with confused travelers confronting endless departures and arrivals, delays and cancellations. It's the last place in the world in which most people would feel grounded.
But author Rebecca Walker is not only soothed by this imagery, she takes it a step further: She feels more comfortable in airports than in any of the homes or schools she spent her childhood in.
"Airports are limbo spaces - blank, undemanding, neutral. Expectations are clear. I am the passenger. I am coming or going. I am late, on time, or early. I must have a ticket," writes Walker in "Black, White and Jewish: An Autobiography of a Shifting Self" (Riverhead Books, $23.95 hardcover).
"Beyond these qualifications, I do not have to define this body. I do not have to belong to one camp, school, or race, one fixed set of qualifiers; adjectives based on someone else's experience. I am transitional space, form-shifting space, place of a thousand hellos and a million good-byes."
The 31-year-old Walker wrote her memoirs to create "some sort of semblance" to the many fragments of her identity - black, Jewish, white - in a society that often believes these things are mutually exclusive.
"This constant shifting I felt, having to choose one over the other and not feeling more this or more that - for me, the real departure of the book is that I stand with those who stand with me; I love and have compassion for others who struggle, who suffer," Walker explained during an interview from her home in Berkeley, Calif., where she lives with her girlfriend.
Struggle is a theme that pervades her life experience. Walker is the late-1960s Mississippi-born "movement child" born to parents of the left.
Walker's father, Mel Leventhal, was once an attorney active in the civil rights movement when Jews were among the few advocating for black equality. Her mother, Alice Walker, was at the forefront of feminism's second wave and later went on to craft the powerful Pulitzer Prize-winning book "The Color Purple."
However, despite their shared commitment to the movement, the couple divorced when Walker was 8. Her father went on to wed a Jewish woman, and her mother fell for a sweetheart from Morehouse College. (Coincidentally, Alice Walker just published "The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart," a collection of stories about that marriage.)
Trying to understand herself, and trying to be understood by others while growing up, made for a complex relationship between Rebecca and her parents. "Black, White, and Jewish" arguably becomes as much about family as it is about race and religion.
Having lived in the South, San Francisco, Washington and New York while growing up, Walker, who graduated cum laude from Yale University in 1992, struggled with fitting in an atypical amalgam of relatives and peers.
Her great-grandmother from Kiev fled Russian pogroms and hardly spoke a word to her; a grandmother initially sat shiva (mourned) when her son married a black woman. She later came to dote on her oldest grandchild as any bubbe would, admonishing her lovingly, "Don't ever forget you're a Jew!" and teaching her to crochet.
In junior high, bullies threatened to beat Walker up for "acting like a white girl;" and kids from Jewish summer camp alienated her for being "intimidating," leading Walker to wonder if it was a coded way of saying "black."
Small wonder then, why Walker bluntly begins one chapter with, "I stopped making sense in the third grade." However, she says confronting her fragmented childhood through this autobiography was part of an effort "to face some of the memories I hadn't been able to integrate."
But for those hoping for a rosy romp down Walker's path to perfect ethnic harmony, think again. Her politics today, shaped by not possessing white skin in a white man's world and laced with anti-xenophobic and anti-classist sentiment, have produced a few critics who view her prose as harsh characterizations of the Jewish components of her life. Especially concerning her time spent in Larchmont, an affluent New York suburb.
Describing her house straight out of "Father Knows Best" and a school where the "black kids are scruffy, unkempt, ashy" and did not mix with "a sea of white, rich, Jewish kids," Walker has expressed concern that accounts of the stereotypes she observed will be misinterpreted by readers.
"That upsets me a lot," she says. "That's the community I was in - extremely privileged - and I tried to be as honest to the experience as I could be."
She's also had to defend her choice to legally change her name from Rebecca Grant Leventhal to Rebecca Leventhal Walker as a feminist move, not one designed to distance herself from her Jewishness. Although she acknowledges that carrying "Walker" is now "privileging my blackness and downplaying what I think of as my whiteness," her first critic was her father, who accused her of internal anti-Semitism.
"For me it was much more about a matrilineal, feminist connection," Walker explains. "My grandfather disowned my father when he was 8 years old. At that point in my life I decided, why should I carry this person's name? It was also a decision to let my mother take some of the credit for who I was."
Merging feminism and multiculturalism is a large part of her work today.
Walker founded the Third Wave Foundation, a national, activist-philanthropic organization for young women ages 15-30. She also writes on these issues for numerous publications, including Ms., Harper's, Essence and Vibe. Walker has been named by both Time magazine and the Advocate as a future leader to watch for, and her other publishing credits include editing the anthology "To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism."
Although "Black, White, and Jewish" is but a segment of Walker's life the past decade, which includes political organizing and her current relationship with a woman, these adolescent memories she returns to were once shards of jubilation, pain, excitement and sorrow.
"My main focus was to create a symbolic place where all of the places of my psyche could exist," she says.
The book is also both dedicated to, and difficult for, her mother and father.
"It's hard for my parents, but it's par for the course. I've made true peace with my childhood; it gave me the strength of who I am."
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