Here are two voices in this complex and moving narrative, and -- on the surface -- they could not seem more different. One is the voice of a black musician, composer and writer who traces his own evolution and that of his 11 brothers and sisters from childhood in a Brooklyn housing project to accomplished maturity.

The second voice is that of Rachel Shilsky, daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox Jewish rabbi in a virulently anti- Semitic and violently racist small Southern town. She recalls her own bitter childhood, her flight to the Jewish Bronx and then to the Harlem of the early 1940s, and her marriage to a black minister.
Elizabeth Sokolow will lead the discussion.