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Gymnasium-Wien

2009 Aue

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COLOR OF WATER


Biography of the author


James McBride


James McBride is an award-winning writer and composer.

He was born in 1957 and was the eighth of twelve children. He was raised in Brooklyn´s Red Hook housing projects. He received a degree in music composition in Ohio. He also pursued a master´s degree in Journalism at the Columbia university.

His book The color of water won the 1997 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Literary Excellence. The book spent more than two years on The New York Times bestseller list.

The color of water has sold more than 1.7 million copies in the United States alone.

It has been published in 16 languages and in more than 20 countries.

McBride is a former staff writer for The Washington Post, People Magazine and Boston Globe. His work has also appeared in Essence, Rolling Stone and The New York Times.

James McBride is also a musician. He has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Purafe , Gary Burton, the Silver Burdett music textbook series, and even for the television character Barney.

He is the recipient of several awards for his work as a composer in musical theatre, including the 1996 American Arts an Letters Richard Rodgers Award, the 1996 ASCAP Richard Rodgers Horizons Award, and the American Music Festival´s 1993 Stephen Sondheim Award.

In 2004, he was nominated by President George bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the National Council on the Arts.


Characters


Ruth McBride

Ruth Jordan was a Jewish immigrant to the United States. She was born in Poland in 1921.

Ruth´s father was racist and especially hated black people. Ruth resisted her father´s prejudices and sympathised with black people in her town.

Ruth found herself excluded from the white world of the South, and felt she could partially identify with the hardships of her black neighbours.

She worked at draining , poorly paid jobs. She socialised exclusively with black people and essentially lives the life of a black woman.

Ruth converted from Judaism to Christianity after her move to New York.

Ruth´s parents had forced Judaism on her. After her separations from her family , Ruth needed some source of relief from the guilt she felt. She found that relief in Christianity´s emphasis on the power of forgiveness.


James McBride

James is Ruth´s son and the narrator of The Color of Water. By delving into his mother´s past, as well as his own past he honed to find a better understanding of his racial, religious, and social identity.

James could not deal with the fact that his mother was white. He was embarrassed by his mother´s whiteness, because it signified her difference from his peer.

After his stepfather died James fell into a phase of drug use and crime. As he matured he began to understand the consequences of squandered time and intelligence.

He had always liked music and writing and he began to invest himself more seriously in those activities.


Andrew Dennis McBride

Although Dennis died while Ruth was pregnant with James, he is a palpable force in the lives of both James and Ruth . He gently guided Ruth toward an acceptance of the Christian faith. Ruth describes Dennis glowingly and we sense that theirs was a true love.


Summary

The Book is subdivided into 25 chapters. The chapters alternate between James´s story and the early history of his mother, Ruth McBride.


Ruth´s early history:


The Color of Water opens with the words of the narrator James's mother Ruth, who describes her early life with her family. She was born with the Jewish name Ruchel Dwarja Aylska on April 1, 1921, into a Polish Orthodox Jewish family. Her parents changed her name to Rachel when they immigrated to America.

When Rachel was nineteen she changed her name to Ruth. Ruth`s father, Tateh, is an Orthodox rabbi named Fishel Shilsky. He is a hard and unyielding man. Her mother, gentle and meek, suffered from polio.


Her father was able to come to America as a result of his wife´s higher class.

At the time the family arrived, Ruth was two; her brother, Sam, was four. The family stayed with her grandparents, Bubeh and Zaydeh. Her grandfather died while she was still very young. His

death, and the way it was handled, provoked a life-long fear of death in her.


In 1924, Ruth's younger sister Gladys( Dee-Dee) was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. Being poor and jewish and having a handicapped mother embarrassed Ruth.

Then the faily moved south to Suffolk,Virginia,because her father wanted to open a synagogue. When her father accepted that he had failed as a rabbi, Ruth's family opened a store.


Ruth´s older brother Sam rns away from home at the age of 15 because he can not tolerate the life he has to live and the tyranny of his father.

Ruth never sees her brother again. Years later she learns that he joined the Army and was killed in the 2nd World War.


Ruth hates being Jewish because the whites at her school hates Jews. She had difficulty making friends there, but she found one true childhood friend in Frances, a gentile girl who accepted Ruth's Jewish background.


She continues to like black people because they do not

judge her. Her first boyfriend, Peter, is black.

Ruth and Peter had to meet secretly. At the age of 15 Ruth became pregnant with Peter's child, she did not dare tell any white people. Her mother founds it out and suggests that Ruth go to New York for the summer.


In New York Aunt Betsy connects Ruth to a doctor willing to perform abortions.

During her junior year of high school, Ruth stayed with Bubeh in New York. Then she returns to Suffolk to complete high school.


When Ruth arrived in New York, she lived with her grandmother and worked at her Aunt Mary's leather factory, where she met James's father, Dennis. Ruth could no longer tolerate her aunt's bad treatment of her, and quits her job at the factory. Then she works at a nail salon.

The manager, Rocky wants her to become a prostitute. Ruth cuts off contact with Rocky and moves back in with Bubeh.


Dennis and Ruth found a room and lived there together. When Dennis first introduced Ruth to his family and friends, her race shocked them, but they were welcoming to her nonetheless. Mameh became sick, and Ruth temporarily returned to Suffolk to help out. Tateh became involved in an affair with a woman who lived nearby.


Ruth became dead to her family as a result of her marriage to James’s African American father, Andrew Dennis McBride. A few days later her mother died.


In 1942 she joines the Metropolitan Church and becomes the church secretary. She and Dennis married and had their first child in 1943. They lived in a one-room apartment for nine years, which she describes as the happiest years of her life.

Dennis became seriously ill. While he was sick, Ruth discovered she was pregnant with their eighth child, James. Dennis died lung cancer. Ruth meets her second husband, Hunter, who promises to take her of her and remains true to his word.


James´s story:

Ruth lives with her children and her 2nd husband, hunter Jordan, who is father to four of Rth´s twelve children in St. Albans, Queens. James knew Hunter as »Daddy«.

Ruth spend hours riding her bicycle. She also starts piano lessons and lets the house fall into disrepair.

This bicycle symbolized Ruth's differentness, and his own embarrassment. James had always sensed his mother was different, although in his early life he was not sure why she was different.


James becomes more aware of the divide between blacks and whites. Sometimes James even assumed that he had been adopted.

This societal force left him conflicted over love for his mother and the desire to feel a solidarity with his peers and neighbors makes his feel ashamed of his mother.

Ruth ignors these issues, emphasizing that school, church, and family were to take priority.


One day James asks his mother if God is black or white and she answers that God is the color of water.


James is surprised to hear his mother speaking Yiddish when she takes the children to Jewish stores for school clothes.

During this time James discovers music and books. The 60s sweep through the house, and the older siblings react to the changing times. In public, James becomes ashamed of his white mother.


James is sent to stay with his half-sister Jack in Louisville. He secures a job at the gas station, but loses it when he gets into a fight with his boss´s friend. When james returns to his junior year of high school, he resolves to mend his ways.



In 1984, James is working on the staff of the Boston Globe, unable to

decide whether he wants to be a musician or a writer. He is also caught

between the two worlds of black and white.

Armed with only the location of his mother's old house, and her best friend's first name, Frances, James goes to Suffolk. There he meets Eddi Thompson. Eddie tells him about “Old Man Shilsky”, who disliked and cheated blacks.

James continued his exploration of Suffolk, locating the synagogue his mother's family had attended. While standing in front of the synagogue he decides to return to New York.


James realizes that Andrew McBride left behind the groundwork for Ruth to raise twelve kids. In 1994, the family attends the 40th anniversary of the New Brown Church. Ruth, now 74, addresses the assembly speaking stiffly at first, and then with certainty and joy.






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