By Steve Pfarrer
AFRICAVILLE
By Jeffrey Colvin
Amistad Press/HarperCollins
jeffreycolvin.com
Born and raised in Alabama but now living in New York City, Jeffrey Colvin has drawn in part on his own life and that of other African Americans who migrated north to craft his first novel, “Africaville.” The book is also based on a little-known community in Halifax, Nova Scotia called Africville, founded by free blacks from the American colonies and the Caribbean in the late 1700s.
“Africaville” is a multi-generational story that unfolds in the 20th century, covering a range of tumultuous events, from the Great Depression and World War II to the civil rights era of the 1960s to the economic upheavals of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Three generations of the Sebolt family — Kath Ella, her son, Omar/Etienne, and her grandson, Warner — trace their lineage to Kath’s ancestors, who settled in Africaville in the 19th century and, like Kath, struggled with the long Canadian winters and lingering distrust from locals about the dark-skinned “outsiders” in town.
In a narrative that examines racial and ethnic identity, cross-racial relationships, migration and the legacy and meaning of home, Kath will have a son, Omar, in 1936 with a man who dies before the boy’s birth. She moves to Montreal and raises baby Omar with a white man, Timothee.
But their son, renamed Etienne, rejects his heritage when he’s older and moves to Alabama, where he marries a white woman, passes as white and ignores the black side of his family — all during the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. His own son, Warner, only discovers the full extent of his mixed roots after his father dies.
But another thrust of the novel is that even as each generation of the family moves further from Africaville, they retain some part of that distant home, which shapes their lives wherever they end up.
In an interview last month with National Public Radio, Colvin, a Marine Corps veteran who later studied at Harvard and Yale universities, said he recalled discovering in the 1980s that his grandmother’s home in rural Alabama had been destroyed; he also later read about how old, rundown homes in Africville had been leveled by city officials in Halifax in the 1960s, over residents’ objections.
“I began to see connections between the stories my grandmother was telling about her former town and also the stories that former residents of Africaville were telling about their town,” he said. “I thought this would be a very interesting exploration, a larger narrative that could expand into a novel.”
Jeffrey Colvin will read from and sign copies of “Africaville” on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley.
HOW YIDDISH CHANGED AMERICA AND HOW AMERICA CHANGED YIDDISH
Edited by Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert
Restless Books
restlessbooks.org
For centuries, it was a language without a country, the editors write. But when Yiddish “hit its stride” in the 1800s, it “flowered into a language not just of commerce and community but of modern theater, journalism, literature and even national aspiration.”
And though Yiddish took a brutal hit during World War II, when the Nazis and their collaborators murdered 6 million Jews, the language had by them gained a firm foothold in the United States, thanks to many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. And today Yiddish is enjoying a revival in the U.S., in part due to access to it via the internet.
In “How Yiddish Changed America and how America Changed Yiddish,” editors Ilan Stavans and Josh Lambert have compiled a rich mix of fiction, memoir, cartoons, plays, history and more to examine how Yiddish words and expressions became part of American culture (such as in the movies), and how Yiddish itself was changed in this new land (by the creation, for instance, of “Yinglish,” a mix of English and Yiddish).
Stavans is a longtime writer on a variety of subjects and an Amherst College professor of humanities, Latin America and Latino culture. Lambert is the academic director of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst — from which much of the material in the new book is drawn — and also teaches American literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“Yiddish is so deeply woven into the fabric of the United States,” they write, “that it can sometimes be difficult to recognize how much it has transformed the world we live in today.”
The anthology also looks at how Yiddish-speaking immigrants first experienced the United States, as well as how their food became part of the country’s cuisine (bagels, anyone?). In addition, the collection examines the impact of Yiddish in other parts of the Western Hemisphere, from Canada to Argentina.
In the end, Stavans and Lambert write, their goal with the book has been to present Yiddish not as “a collection of funny-sounding words,” as some Americans see it, but as “a language and culture that is … radical, dangerous, and sexy, if also sweet, generous, and full of life.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached
at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.