Blacks & Jews EntangledPosted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Judaism, Media Archive, Religion, United States on 2016-06-24 00:35Z by Steven |
The New York Review of Books
2016-07-14
Oreo by Fran Ross, with a foreword by Danzy Senna and an afterword by Harryette Mullen, New Directions, 230 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Google wasnât around when Oreo was first published in 1974. You are hit with Greek mythology and Yiddish right away and just the look of the pages of Fran Rossâs novel about an Afro-Jewish girlâs quest to find her white father can discourage or intimidate. Oreo, by an African-American writer who died in 1985, promises a degree of difficulty; the chapter titles, paragraph titles (âHelen and Oreo shmoozâ), different font sizes, a graph showing shades of blackness, letters, an elaborate five-page menu of a daughterâs homecoming meal, footnotes, and mathematical equations say this is no naturalistic tale of two ghettoes. The protagonist is called âOreoâ not because of the cookieâi.e., because she is mixed-race or reluctantly black, as in black on the outside but white on the inside. Her black grandmother had been trying to give Oreo the nickname âOriole,â but couldnât make herself understood to the family.
In addition to Greek myth and Yiddish, Ross makes use of black slang, popular culture of the time, puns, raunch, her own made-up wordsâbut this is not vernacular, not jive. Rossâs voice is literary, and thrilled with itself, joking about Villon or Bellow, totally into what it takes to get up to outrageous parody. Nothing about the narrative is restful; you have to stay on the alert. Oreo is quick, obscure, sly, and every line is working hard, doing its bit. Ross makes Oreo relentless in her shtick. âOreo was soon engrossed in âBurp: The Course of Smiling Among Groups of Israeli Infants in the First Eighteen Months of Life,â the cover story in Pitfalls of Gynecology.â
In fractured, short chapters, Oreo decides arbitrarily that she has fulfilled a given task and therefore deserves another cryptic clue from her father. Ross gives us not a send-up of Theseusâs journey of labors, but her appropriation of his battles as her structure, her frame for her provocative urban picaresque…
Read the review here.