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Triple Exposure: Black, Jewish and Red in the 1950's
The author, the son of a Jewish mother and an African American father, recounts his experiences with racism, leftist parents, a name change, military service, and a career as a professor of American literature.
451 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2003
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About the author
Dexter Jeffries
1 book1 follower1953. Queens, New York is his birthplace, and he feels that his years as a taxi driver make him a true New Yorker. A product of New York's public school system from the very beginning, he started at P.S. 37 in Springfield Gardens and finished his Ph.D. in English at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan.
Dexter Jeffries was an English major at Queens College where he had his first teaching experience as a tutor. He also drove a cab to pick up extra cash to make ends meet. Although he was accepted into an MA program at City College after graduation in 1975, he chose instead to join the United States Army. With a three-year stint in a combat engineer battalion in West Germany, he realized that being a soldier overseas in a foreign country earned him a graduate degree, just an unconventional one.
After his discharge in 1979, he finished that MA in English at City College on the GI BIll; again he drove a Checker cab on the weekends. However, he experienced teaching again, this time instructing sections of freshman composition. Since 1980 he has taught English at various units of the City University of New York and at Pratt Institute. In 1995 he was nominated for Distinguished Professor of the Year at Pratt Institute.
In 1996, in conjunction with the film department at Pratt Institute, Dexter produced and directed a documentary film, What's Jazz; it explores jazz and its influence on poetry and film from the 1930s to 1950s.
In 2003, he published his first book, Triple Exposure: Black, Jewish and Red in the 1950s. In June 2018 his play "White Out," a one act play about war and peace, was produced by the Gallery Players Theater. Jeffries lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, New York.
Dexter Jeffries was an English major at Queens College where he had his first teaching experience as a tutor. He also drove a cab to pick up extra cash to make ends meet. Although he was accepted into an MA program at City College after graduation in 1975, he chose instead to join the United States Army. With a three-year stint in a combat engineer battalion in West Germany, he realized that being a soldier overseas in a foreign country earned him a graduate degree, just an unconventional one.
After his discharge in 1979, he finished that MA in English at City College on the GI BIll; again he drove a Checker cab on the weekends. However, he experienced teaching again, this time instructing sections of freshman composition. Since 1980 he has taught English at various units of the City University of New York and at Pratt Institute. In 1995 he was nominated for Distinguished Professor of the Year at Pratt Institute.
In 1996, in conjunction with the film department at Pratt Institute, Dexter produced and directed a documentary film, What's Jazz; it explores jazz and its influence on poetry and film from the 1930s to 1950s.
In 2003, he published his first book, Triple Exposure: Black, Jewish and Red in the 1950s. In June 2018 his play "White Out," a one act play about war and peace, was produced by the Gallery Players Theater. Jeffries lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, New York.
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June 24, 2018
It's a bit tricky, this book. He touches on a lot of important, complicated subjects. Not just the tangled threads of his own identity but many other things as well, like parenting, integration, assimilation... I liked this book, but I don't think I really like Jeffries. I can accept how aspirational he is, if aspirational is a word, and how he relates to his blackness, his Jewishness or communism is his own thing, but he has this thing about not shielding people from the "truth" and some of his honesty about his relationships with women made me very uncomfortable. That part of his life is a huge mess.
I was also a little disappointed about how little he really deals with his Jewish roots or his parents' CP membership. That religion was frowned upon is clear and Jeffries, who spent some time in Germany as a US soldier, has these weird moments of identifying with older Jewish people he meets and kind of taking the holocaust personally, but there was almost nothing here about how his parents' families dealt with each other. There was a big bit though about the Brownsville- Ocean Hill 1968 teachers' strike which is the big crack in Black / Jewish relations in NYC. He was a kid in school at the time and he seems to sympathize with the strike breakers more than the strikers which is interesting.
Even less ink is given to his parents' communism or his own political activism. We get hints of how active his mother was, seen from his perspective as a kid, but as a grown up he doesn't really try to figure it all out... the bit where he wonders if she tried to get any of the Girl Scouts in her troop to join the Party is a good example for how he just doesn't seem to want to try. I guess I would have liked a bit more investigating on his part... into the lives of both his parents. But what really breaks my heart is that he off-hand mentions that he was active with White Lightning in the Bronx! What, what, what!? Tons of pages about his crush on his therapist and only one mention of this strange radical 70s group? I suspect he fell out with them in a not cool way and he doesn't want to write about his comrades... but... just go ask them, man! Tell your side, Jeffries, and then go ask them if they want to tell theirs!
His writing style is strange... He's an English professor in the CUNY system, teaching 19th Century literature and the Harlem Renaissance and he learned how to "talk black" from jazz records and from working at a dry cleaners in Queens and so he has this style that is conversational but kind of tweaked. Like a lot of native New Yorkers, I guess, come across kind of tweaked to me. He can really put the reader in 1950s Queens, in these public schools that weren't integrated and then were, and the scenes in Germany were especially vivid, I thought.
He starts out confused, like am I Black? Am I white? confused and at the end he is still confused, not so much about himself as about all the post Black Power, post hip hop... the people living in the ruins: of the decade of fire, the Reagan 80s, and you know, after plowing up and burning down the neighborhoods and then cutting all the social services came the Clinton era "tough on crime" rounding up of the survivers... he doesn't write about any of that but he writes about not understanding the people who live in that aftermath, and about hating the people who created it. He's from this background of ... I'll just use that word aspirational again... aspirational dignity... talking "correctly," 'if you study and work hard...' racial uplift kind of thing... and at the end of the book he's just as out of place and not one or the other as he was at the beginning. That's deep. I just could have used less about ex-wives and ex-girlfriends and more about Jews and Communists.
I was also a little disappointed about how little he really deals with his Jewish roots or his parents' CP membership. That religion was frowned upon is clear and Jeffries, who spent some time in Germany as a US soldier, has these weird moments of identifying with older Jewish people he meets and kind of taking the holocaust personally, but there was almost nothing here about how his parents' families dealt with each other. There was a big bit though about the Brownsville- Ocean Hill 1968 teachers' strike which is the big crack in Black / Jewish relations in NYC. He was a kid in school at the time and he seems to sympathize with the strike breakers more than the strikers which is interesting.
Even less ink is given to his parents' communism or his own political activism. We get hints of how active his mother was, seen from his perspective as a kid, but as a grown up he doesn't really try to figure it all out... the bit where he wonders if she tried to get any of the Girl Scouts in her troop to join the Party is a good example for how he just doesn't seem to want to try. I guess I would have liked a bit more investigating on his part... into the lives of both his parents. But what really breaks my heart is that he off-hand mentions that he was active with White Lightning in the Bronx! What, what, what!? Tons of pages about his crush on his therapist and only one mention of this strange radical 70s group? I suspect he fell out with them in a not cool way and he doesn't want to write about his comrades... but... just go ask them, man! Tell your side, Jeffries, and then go ask them if they want to tell theirs!
His writing style is strange... He's an English professor in the CUNY system, teaching 19th Century literature and the Harlem Renaissance and he learned how to "talk black" from jazz records and from working at a dry cleaners in Queens and so he has this style that is conversational but kind of tweaked. Like a lot of native New Yorkers, I guess, come across kind of tweaked to me. He can really put the reader in 1950s Queens, in these public schools that weren't integrated and then were, and the scenes in Germany were especially vivid, I thought.
He starts out confused, like am I Black? Am I white? confused and at the end he is still confused, not so much about himself as about all the post Black Power, post hip hop... the people living in the ruins: of the decade of fire, the Reagan 80s, and you know, after plowing up and burning down the neighborhoods and then cutting all the social services came the Clinton era "tough on crime" rounding up of the survivers... he doesn't write about any of that but he writes about not understanding the people who live in that aftermath, and about hating the people who created it. He's from this background of ... I'll just use that word aspirational again... aspirational dignity... talking "correctly," 'if you study and work hard...' racial uplift kind of thing... and at the end of the book he's just as out of place and not one or the other as he was at the beginning. That's deep. I just could have used less about ex-wives and ex-girlfriends and more about Jews and Communists.
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