Anatole Broyard

Anatole Paul Broyard (born July 16, 1920 in New Orleans , † October 11, 1990 in Boston ) was an American author , literary critic and editor for the New York Times . It was only after his death that it became public knowledge that Broyard, who had passed himself off as a " white man " all his life , was of black ancestry, and his so-called passing was controversial.

Life

Anatole Broyard
Link to a photograph from 1971
(Please note copyrights )

Anatole Broyard grew up in the French Quarter in New Orleans before the family moved to New York in 1927 as part of the Great Migration , where they settled in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district. Both parents had black ancestors, but were light-skinned, so that Anatole's father, a trained carpenter and construction worker, could pass himself off as white when looking for work. Anatole, who attended Brooklyn College , was fair-skinned like one of his two sisters. Early on he showed an interest in culture, European film and European literature, which was unusual in the working class family.

In 1938 Broyard, whose birth certificate showed him to be colored, ticked the skin color "white" for the first time on a social security card. Even when he married a light-skinned Puerto Rican woman in 1940, he retained the changed identity. At the side of his wife, he increasingly distanced himself from his familiar surroundings. The marriage, which had a daughter, was divorced in 1945 after Broyard returned from three years of service in the US Army overseas and on the west coast. Under the strict segregation of the armed forces , he had only been able to complete the officer training as a white, which made him captain of a battalion of black dockers.

After the Second World War , Broyard opened a bookstore in Greenwich Village and attended evening classes at the New School for Social Research , benefiting from the GI Bill of Rights . He felt he belonged to an artistic avant-garde and was alienated from his family roots. He described his bohemian life at the time in the posthumously published memoirs Kafka Was the Rage (German: Crazy about Kafka ). In the late 1940s, Broyard published his first essays in magazines such as Commentary , Partisan Review and The New Republic . He has taught creative writing at New School, New York University, and Columbia University . His few short stories have received rave reviews from Norman Mailer . However, one novel he was working on never came about due to writer's block. In 1961 Broyard married the Scandinavian dancer Alexandra Nelson, who was seventeen years his junior. The couple moved from New York to southeast Connecticut , where their two children (born in 1964 and 1966) grew up in a white neighborhood.

In 1971 Broyard, who had drawn attention to himself through free reviews for the New York Times Book Review , was offered the position of a permanent literary critic for the Times , one of the most influential positions in the American book market. As a result, he wrote daily reviews for the New York Times for almost 15 years . He then took over the publication of the Book Review for three years . Even after his retirement in June 1989 he remained active as a columnist and essayist for the paper. A selection of his literary reviews and essays appeared in two books. When he learned that he had prostate cancer , he began a report of his illness that appeared posthumously. Broyard died on October 11, 1990 at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston . It was only a few weeks before his death that his wife had revealed his ancestry, which had been hidden until then, to their children.

Aftermath

Six years after Broyard's death, the American literary scholar Henry Louis Gates made his black background publicly known in an article in the New Yorker in 1996 and criticized Broyard for his passing . The following year he revised the essay for a book edition under the title The Passing of Anatole Broyard . The magazine Literaturen published the German translation in 2001 in a special edition. Gates wrote of Broyard:

“In his terms, he did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy. "

“By his standards he didn't want to write about black love, black lust, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and lust and suffering and joy. "

- Henry Louis Gates : The Passing of Anatole Broyard

In an editorial the New York Times , the black journalist and author Brent Staples 2003 ruled:

"Anatole Broyard wanted to be a writer - and not just a Negro writer consigned to the back of the literary bus."

"Anatole Broyard wanted to be a writer - and not just a Negro writer who would be assigned the last rows of seats on the literary bus."

- Brent Staples : Editorial for the New York Times

In 2007, Broyard's daughter Bliss published her search for traces of the skin under the title One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life: A Story of Race and Family Secrets (German: A drop. The hidden life of my father. A story of skin color and family secrets ) Father and after their own identity. At the end of her investigation, Bliss Broyard saw her father as a victim of the compulsion to choose between “black” and “white”. The drawer-like classification of people based on their skin color is a remnant of the racism that has long prevailed in the USA . Broyard, however, also stands for the American "freedom to invent oneself, which my father embodies like hardly anyone else".

After the publication of Philip Roth's novel The Human Blemish in 2000, numerous critics, including Michiko Kakutani and Lorrie Moore in the New York Times , recognized Anatole Broyard as the model of the main character Coleman Silk, a black literature professor who also called himself throughout his life Weisser and whose true identity only comes to light after his death. Philip Roth contradicted this representation several times, most recently in 2012 in an open letter to the English Wikipedia .

Publications

• Aroused by Books (1974)
• Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes (1980)
• Intoxicated by My Illness And Other Writings of Life and Death (1992)
• Kafka Was the Rage. A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993)
  • German: Crazy about Kafka. Memories of Greenwich Village . Berlin, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-8270-0355-5 .

literature

• Henry Louis Gates : White Like Me . In: The New Yorker, June 17, 1996, pp. 66-81.
  • Reprinted in: David Remnick: Life Stories. Profiles from the New Yorker . Random House, New York 2001, pp. 275-300.
• Henry Louis Gates: The Passing of Anatole Broyard . In: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man . Random House, New York, 1997. pp. 180-214 ( online ).
  • German: Henry Louis Gates: The secret of Anatole Broyard . In: Literatures Special, No. 7/8 2001.
• Bliss Broyard: One drop. My father's hidden life. A story of skin color and family secrets . Berlin, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-8270-0088-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Anatole Broyard in the catalog of the German National Library
• Herbert Mitgang: Anatole Broyard, 70, Book Critic And Editor at The Times, Is Dead . In: The New York Times, October 12, 1990.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Henry Louis Gates: The Passing of Anatole Broyard . In: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man . Random House, New York, 1997. pp. 180-214 ( online ( December 16, 2005 memento on the Internet Archive )).
2. ↑ Bliss Broyard: A Drop . Berlin, Berlin 2009, pp. 427-428.
3. ↑ Bliss Broyard: A Drop . Berlin, Berlin 2009, p. 446.
4. ↑ Bliss Broyard: A Drop . Berlin, Berlin 2009, pp. 455, 459.
5. ^ ^{A b} Morris Dickstein : Bohemian Rhapsody . In: The New York Times, October 31, 1993.
6. ↑ ^{a b} Herbert Mitgang: Anatole Broyard, 70, Book Critic And Editor at The Times, Is Dead . In: The New York Times, October 12, 1990.
7. ↑ Bliss Broyard: A Drop . Berlin, Berlin 2009, pp. 499, 509.
8. ↑ Bliss Broyard: A Drop . Berlin, Berlin 2009, pp. 511-512.
9. ↑ Bliss Broyard: A Drop . Berlin, Berlin 2009, p. 522.
10. ↑ Bliss Broyard: A Drop . Berlin, Berlin 2009, p. 29.
11. ↑ Brent Staples: Editorial Observer; Back When Skin Color Was Destiny - Unless You Passed for White . In: The New York Times, September 7, 2003.
12. ↑ Sebastian Moll: "My father was a victim" . In: Frankfurter Rundschau from April 20, 2009.
13. ↑ Michiko Kakutani : Confronting the Failures Of a Professor Who Passes . In: The New York Times, May 2, 2000.
14. ^ Lorrie Moore : The Wrath of Athena . In: The New York Times, May 7, 2000.
15. ^ Robert Hilferty: Philip Roth Serves Up Blood and Guts in 'Indignation' (Update 1) . On Bloomberg September 16, 2008.
16. ^ Philip Roth : An Open Letter to Wikipedia . In: The New Yorker of September 7, 2012.