The Quiet Voices: Southern Rabbis and Black Civil Rights, 1880s to 1920sEdited by Mark K. Bauman and Berkley KalinUniv. of Alabama Press 444 pp.; $29.95
Black-Jewish relations have been strained in recent years. The African-American caucuses at several Ivy League universities invited notoriously anti-Semitic black leaders to speak on campus, inspiring passionate debate among students. Scholars and pundits bandy about wildly differing estimations of Jews’ involvement in the slave trade. White supremacists, recalling segregationists of the 1950s who claimed that the NAACP was a mere front for a larger and more subversive “Jewish communist” cabal, accuse the “Jewish media” of conspiring to topple the nation’s racial and social order. On the other side of the fence, some black nationalist leaders accuse Jews of claiming too much credit for the successes of the civil-rights movement. A new volume edited by Mark Bauman and Berkley Kalin, devoted to considering the role of southern rabbis in the struggles for black civil rights, promises to contribute a historically informed voice to the fracas.
One wishes the editors had not chosen to focus exclusively on rabbis. An investigation of these rabbis’ congregants would have been even more fruitful. A study devoted to Jewish laypeople would be particularly valuable because an ex amination of rabbis is almost by default limited to men. The broader historiography on white southerners and the civil-rights movement indicates that white women often formed interracial alliances and took public stances deemed “racially liberal” more freely than white men; one wonders how inclusion of Jewish women would alter historians’ evaluation of Jewish involvement in the struggle for black civil rights.
If most Jews and African Americans have at best a hazy notion that there was a Jewish presence in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, there is no clear popular perception of the position(s) southern Jews took toward African Americans during the century between Emancipation and the Second Reconstruction. The essays in The Quiet Voices that treat the fin-de-siecle, then, will be of special value, as they demonstrate that “Jews in the South advocated civil rights for African Americans long before the 1940s.”
The essays that deal with “The Heyday”—the height of the civil-rights era—draw ambiguous conclusions. Marc Dollinger’s essay, ” ‘Hamans’ and ‘Torquemadas,’ ” compares northern and southern Jews, arguing that the latter were fairly acculturated to the racial mores of the South, while their northern coreligionists, although “overwhelmingly” supporting the struggle for civil rights in the South, were less willing to embrace integration when it came to their own neighborhoods. Other essays in the collection are more positive about southern Jews’ support for civil rights, lauding the contributions of Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Charles Mantinband of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, the spiritual leader of Atlanta’s Reform congregation, who has been catapulted into the public eye 20 years after his death by Melissa Fay Greene’s book The Temple Bombing and Alfred Uhry’s poignant evocation of that 1958 bombing in his prizewinning play, Driving Miss Daisy.
The final essay in the volume, by father-and-son rabbi team Micah and Howard Greenstein, is perhaps the most urgent. Suggesting that the “role of the rabbi during the civil rights era” was akin to that of a biblical prophet, and during the 1970s was that of a “facilitator,” the Greensteins argue that the southern rabbi of the 1990s has more to do with “Jewish renewal … [and] synagogue programming” while devoting “a decreasing percentage of rabbinic time … to intergroup relations. … [W]hereas the battle for civil rights once filled the southern rabbi’s daily agenda, nowadays it is clearly more peripheral.” The same could be said for many Christian leaders. While attention to one’s own flock is not to be underrated, Jews and Christians alike, both lay and ordained, must be careful not to leave the struggles of the oppressed to someone else.
—Lauren F. Winner
The Music of Light: The Extraordinary Story of Hikari and Kenzaburo OeBy Lindsley Cameron Free Press 240 pp.; $24
In these days of hyperbole, the word extraordinary is used routinely, robbing its power to identify the truly remarkable; but the compelling story of the Oe family, as told in Lindsley Cameron’s The Music of Light, fully lives up to its billing. The obvious quickly stuns us: the father, Kenzaburo Oe, is one of Japan’s most distinguished writers, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994; his son, Hikari (which means “light” in Japanese), born with severe physical handicaps and with an I.Q. in the range of 55–70, has become Japan’s best-selling composer of classical music, with his two CDs on the Denon label selling 300,000 copies worldwide.
But the intricate emotional and psychological ties that bind such a family together are equally astonishing in their complexity and subtlety. Cameron is candid about her admiration for father and son and her involvement at a personal level (discussed in an author’s note)—both of which might preclude an objective treatment of the story. While Cameron’s respect for the Oe family glows throughout the book, it does not prevent hard questions from being asked, or difficult scenes from being described.
The first five chapters provide background and context to Hikari’s life leading up to his “Sudden Success” (chap. 6) in 1992. One of the most important issues to surface here—and indeed, throughout the entire book—is Kenzaburo’s concern, even guilt, over possible exploitation of his family for his own success. A powerful reality that fuels this question is the astonishing nature of Kenzaburo’s own writings: almost the entirety of his output since Hikari’s birth in 1963 is an elusive blur of fact and fiction. Indeed, it be comes apparent that writing for Kenzaburo is a vent, his emotional outlet; moreover, as he himself states, he ultimately writes as a “voice” for his son, who until recently had no real form of communication with society. This is why upon receiving the Nobel Prize in 1994, Kenzaburo stunned the world by announcing he would no longer write fiction, since his son had successfully found his own “voice” through composing.
Hikari was born with two brains and underwent surgery that allowed him to live but resulted in permanent damage. It was his uncanny awareness of birdcalls that first revealed his remarkable sensitivity to sounds. Like other savants, Hikari possesses a narrow but very exceptional ability—in his case, to focus on music and the aural dimension (many feel that his poor eyesight has intensified his aural gifts). And this ability was nurtured by extensive exposure to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classical music, beginning when he was still in the womb. Moreover—again, like many other savants—he has a prodigious memory (he has memorized, for example, the entire Kochel listing of Mozart’s works).
It becomes clear, as Cameron so aptly puts it, “that music gives Hikari a sense of being at home, just as writing fiction gives Kenzaburo himself this sense, wherever he happens to be.” Hikari’s sudden enormous popularity as a composer, with the release of his two CDs (1992, 1994), caught everyone, even the record producer, by surprise. And while the music moved thousands of listeners, Hikari’s story was clearly at the center of it all. For as Kenzaburo states it, “My son, who cannot participate in normal social activity, who has lived all his life within the protection of his family, is having all kinds of communication with other people, without our intervention.”
Music, by its very nature, cannot be fully described through words; thus it is, as Cameron points out, that most writings about Hikari dwell on his story and the context of his music composing, rather than the actual music, which ultimately speaks for itself. Nevertheless, I was impressed to see Cameron devote a whole chapter (“The Subject of Great Amazement”) to music itself.
Hikari’s music is tonal, simple, mostly noncontrapuntal and straightforward. This probably reflects the influence of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and others whose works have constituted Hikari’s musical environment. (His compositions show no interest whatsoever in indigenous Japanese music.) It is difficult to assess this “replica” style, for its use by twentieth-century composers is typically within a self-conscious parody of homage to the past (Respighi, or Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony), rather than a serious attempt at an original vision.
Moreover, all of Hikari’s compositions are quite brief; most are one to two minutes in length (although he is said to be working on a four-movement string quartet). Some works are very conventional, featuring many generic gestures “Nocturne,” whereas others show greater originality “Mister Prelude,” which appears to be a tribute to Bach, and “Siciliano”; often there is a mixture of these elements as in the opening cut, “A Favorite Waltz,” or “Star.” The overall effect is one of great charm, and it hardly needs to be said that the uniqueness of Hikari’s situation transforms these simple pieces into truly remarkable expressions.
Ultimately what makes Cameron’s book so compelling are the numerous issues it raises. Her concluding chapters, dealing with savants, make it painfully clear how little we really know about their condition. The nature of creativity, the so-called Mozart Effect, the “new” marketing of classical music (consider, for example, the vogue for chant and the popularity of the movie Shine), the current thirst for tonality and simplicity (as seen in the success of the composer Arvo Part): These and many other issues all come into play with Hikari’s story.
—Jonathan Saylor
The Columbia Guide to Online StyleBy Janice R. Walker and Todd Taylor Columbia Univ. Press 218 pp.; $17.50
Janice Walker and Todd Taylor do not come to bury The Chicago Manual of Style but to supplant it. One glowing blurb says The Columbia Guide “fills the gaps that APA, MLA, and Chicago fail to cover in their latest editions.” If that’s so, academics must be fairly desperate—despite the best work of the American Psychological Association and the Modern Language Association—for timely but well-written style guides.
It’s hard to disagree when Walker and Taylor declare that “if scholarship is to make a successful transition from print to electronic media, as most believe it will, new standards for ensuring scholarly integrity online must be established.” It’s also hard, however, not to laugh at their geek’s pipedream that “We may someday be able to include even smell and taste and touch in our compositions.” The mind reels at the olfactory implications of that great leap forward.
Even without transmitting smell and taste and touch, there is plenty enough silliness in The Columbia Guide. Perhaps some academic papers really must depend on such obscure references as “NN960126: Follow-up to Don’s Comments about Citing URLs” or “Daedalusmoo Purpose Statement”—although such titles lack a certain editorial gravitas. But then, The Columbia Guide surely is the first to point its readers toward the charming “Elsie the MOOteach RoboCow.” Walker and Taylor argue that “discounting work simply because the author is unknown is not a vi ble alternative.” Ponder that irony: certain scholars, at least those relying on The Columbia Guide, answer to a lower standard than most magazine journalists.
At the risk of being accused of shooting fish in a barrel, I must note that the authors indulge in the stilted jargon of academia. Consider this delicious example: “Like the logic of citation style, the logic of document style is based primarily on the desire to facilitate the process of knowledge building.” In the same spirit, the authors refer to style as a “product” and to academic papers as “finished product.” They write of how some online authors try to “disrupt traditional notions of textuality.” The Columbia Guide disrupts traditional notions of clarity. Great idea, poor execution: C-.
—Douglas LeBlanc
Douglas LeBlanc edits United Voice, the national newspaper of Episcopalians United. Jonathan Saylor is associate professor of music at Wheaton Conservatory.
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