Review: Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness - The Jewish Chronicle

By Jane Lazarre
Duke University Press, £17.99

Jane Lazarre's Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness undertakes a journey that invites her readers on to the road to enlightenment about our fellows and ourselves.

This is a twentieth anniversary edition of the author's original memoir with an important new preface, and those readers must feel sadness that not much has improved since her observation of a layered and defensive society into which she delivered her two sons, Adam and Khary - black Americans, as is their father, Douglas.

To add spice to the mixture, the boys are Jewish, too, as is their mother, Jane Lazarre herself.

Lazarre's book is deeply personal and at the same time profoundly observant and knowledgeable about what she describes as: "mixed bloods and joined cultural heritages… more layered and new than either Douglas or I imagined when I told him… I was pregnant with our first child."

Although America - "land of the free" - was the main market-place for historical slave trading and New York is the main venue for Lazarre's story, we cannot forget that other nations --including Great Britain - were complicit in the collection and sale of human souls and bodies, a business so stinking that the reek lingers on even now in our western streets.

As a teacher of creative writing and literature in American colleges, Lazarre can illustrate her comments about bred-in-the-bone racial prejudices with excerpts from the pulsing body of literature by black authors. Which is not to suggest that Lazarre's emotions mind their own business in silence while cool observation gets on with the tale she is telling us.

On the contrary, when, for example, Lazarre writes about her visit to the Richmond Museum of the Confederacy and describes its recall to her mind of a previous visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, a tremor must invade her readers' hearts.

"Do my children think of me as white…" - a pertinent question Lazarre puts early in the book - "before or after they think of me as 'Mother'?" Later, she writes tellingly: "In spite of my conviction about the falseness of Racial categories… I wish I could become Black for my sons."

The immense significance of becoming a mother, the paradox of a lifelong love that begins with a separation at birth, is an ongoing theme in this brave and complex treatise.

Lazarre is informative and positive about her relationship with her husband's black relatives who greeted her with love beyond mere tolerance of their white in-law.

Yet, engrossed though I was by Jane Lazarre's experience and thoughts, I had to wonder why she had not more to say about her Jewish family's response to the introduction of a black son-in-law.