Customer Reviews

Oreo (Northeastern Library of Black Literature)

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Oreo is the name of a brilliant black-and-Jewish girl who sets out in search of her father. The story is an absurd picaresque quest, overtly paralelling the journey of the Greek hero Theseus.

Oreo isn't for everyone. You'll enjoy Oreo if you like puns, enjoy linguistics, appreciate mythological allusions, or like thinking about the sociology and history of racism in America.

The writing is full of multilingual puns and linguistic twists. I constantly felt that I might be missing some of the jokes due to ignorance of one or another language. To catch everything, one would need to know English, Black Vernacular English ("Jive"), Yiddish, German, French, Italian, and who knows what else. For example, one character in the book speaks entirely in English words, but used translated French idioms. Another typical example: a shopkeeper tucked his hands next to his "stove-bellied pot." Even Oreo's last name is a pun: Schwartz (German and Yiddish for "black"). Occasionally the writing snaps into the author's voice and becomes explicitly self-conscious.

I enjoyed the variety of mental practices exercised by the characters--"head equations," rationalizations, and observation games to pass the time.

Suggestions for readers: Do keep a Yiddish dictionary nearby (The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten was a good choice for me). Do review the story of the journey of Theseus (see Wikipedia or the author's key at the back of Oreo). Do not read the foreword before you read the book.

The foreword (2000 printing, by Harryette Mullen) seems deliberately designed to suck the life out of the text. It's wordy, more analytical than insightful, and contains spoilers.

I discovered Oreo through a 2011 review on NPR, which proclaimed it ahead of its time and one of the funniest works ever written. I agree that it's funny, but not that funny. I downgraded my rating due to one chapter of explicit pornography which added little to the story.

I heard a review for this book that said it was funny and a great read, but I found the writing style to be very hard to follow. There was too much unexplained jargon as well - I had been hoping to learn about Jewish and African American culture, but instead I was just confused.

I was so excited to get this book - and then so disappointed. It seems to me that Ross just inserted every Yiddish word she could come up with. It was so obnoxious I couldn't get through it.

I was totally unprepared for the delight I experienced while reading this book. I expected an historical artifact. Instead, I found that, while it frequently deals with extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant situations, and often not very lovely people, Jean Ross has a surprisingly humorous and entertaining take on life. I was frequently tempted to read sections aloud to share particularly vivid images and anecdotes with my family.