As soon as she begins to form relationships and interests, she is moved across coasts yet again. This keeps Rebecca from establishing roots anywhere, and, because of this frequent change, she is never given the opportunity to establish a true self. Rebecca alternates spending two years at a time with her mother and father. Rebecca’s mother, in the meantime, moves to San Francisco. Rebecca’s parents later divorce, and her father remarries a white, Jewish woman, which proves to place even more distance between Rebecca and her father’s identity. This early rejection is instrumental to Rebecca’s feelings of rejection and displacement from even her own family. This element of being shut out by her own family seems to haunt Rebecca, as she later admits to a desire to “be recognized as family”, despite her outward appearance setting her apart from her father’s white Jewish ancestry (48). However, Rebecca recognizes her great-grandmother’s distance as something more personal and responds with “I am not too young to feel shut out.” (48) Rebecca’s father later explains that she is simply “too young to understand about the pogroms Great-grandma Jennie ran from, the burning of Jewish villages, homes, people” (p. Even though Rebecca is but a small child in grade school, she is met with only angry silence from her eldest living relative. As Rebecca tries to reach out to her great-grandma Jennie, she is pushed away by the older woman and denied any warmth or acceptance from her great-grandma. From the beginning of the story, there is a strong sense of separation in Rebecca’s life.
Rebecca writes about the strife between her and her father’s Jewish family, as some accept her and others push her away. This cross section results in the memoir Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self.ĭuring Walker’s childhood, her family moves from Mississippi to New York to further their activism in the civil rights movement. A product of Mississippi’s first interracial marriage, Rebecca Walker finds herself at a cross section of identities. Rebecca Walker is the daughter of acclaimed African-American writer, Alice Walker and Jewish civil rights attorney Mel Leventhal.
0 kommentar(er)
