While her Jewish great-grandmother rejected her son's marriage to a black woman, the grandmother often told her granddaughter, "Don't ever forget. 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. (I knew Mel and Alice in the late sixties and early seventies, and Alice Walked dedicated a poem to me in her Revolutionary Petunias. 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. Rebecca Walker grew up in a myriad of worlds. Rebecca Walker's autobiography of her "shifting self" is brilliantly written, but it fails because the author lacks insight into its subject-herself. 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. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22.1 (2003) 136-137Īutobiography is more than the vivid, even brilliant, recounting of one's life.
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