The Color of Water
James McBride (1996)
“A Black man searches for his identity — and discovers his white Jewish mother's buried past — in one of the most unexpected and moving memoirs of the twentieth century.”
Character Analysis
Born Rachel Shilsky to an Orthodox Jewish family in Virginia; renamed herself Ruth after conversion to Christianity and marriage to a Black man. She raised twelve children in poverty in New York City, sent every one of them to college, refused to discuss her past for most of her life, and is one of the most formidable people in American nonfiction. Her voice in the memoir — clipped, evasive, peppered with unremarked Yiddish — is a character in itself. She agreed to be the subject of this memoir while fundamentally disagreeing with the project of being known.