Jack Marshall is a Jew. He’s even a Brooklyn Jew. But he’s no bagel-and-lox Jew.
“Maybe pita and kibbeh,” he says with a laugh.
The 70-year-old poet is the author of “From Baghdad to Brooklyn,” a reminiscence of growing up in a Jewish home where “we looked Arabic and we cooked Arabic.”
Marshall — whose Iraqi Jewish father anglicized the family name from Mash’aal — grew up in a conflicted household that never managed to find its own miniature version of Mideast peace. His calm, perhaps even passive father blithely allowed his younger, sardonic wife to shower him with insults. Marshall rarely saw his father’s family; his mother’s close-knit family was over all of the time and his father was expected to visit his relatives at their houses.
The seed for Marshall’s memoir, his first prose book after 10 volumes of poetry, was planted six years ago when he solemnly cleared out his sister’s possessions after she died of breast cancer. He discovered a trove of letters written to him by his father, but never sent. Among other revelations, his father confessed that his was an arranged marriage. In retrospect, it explained so much.
“None of us knew. My father was never forthcoming about anything. He was a very private, quiet man,” says Marshall, a resident of El Cerrito for six years after many years in San Francisco.
“They never got along. They had nothing in common. Nothing.”
Marshall’s mother never learned to speak English — she refused to, in fact — and his father only read newspapers, which meant there were no English-language books in the house. The day the would-be author discovered the public library was the day his universe changed. Before long, the vast library near Grand Army Plaza and Prospect Park became his Mecca.
The more Marshall read, however, the more uncomfortable he became with the brand of Judaism he encountered daily in the insular Arab-Jewish community. Still, he accepted a full scholarship to a yeshiva.
“I decided that if I went to yeshiva, maybe I could work out of my religious doubts. Well, it didn’t work that way,” he recalls.
“I was reading Darwin. And I once asked a rabbi how come the Talmud claims the world was created 6,000 years ago when scientists have found fossils in the ground that are millions of years old. And without missing a beat, he said that God put the fossils there to fool the scientists. I couldn’t believe my ears.”
Marshall belongs to the first generation of Jews who moved 3,000 miles away from their parents not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Following the path of so many men of his generation, he hopped a Scandinavian freighter bound for Africa, working as a deckhand.
For the past half-century, Marshall has been doing this and that, whatever it took to support his literary career. And even though he never advanced past high school, the calls have come in from universities hoping to add him to their writing programs.
“I was invited to teach at the University of Iowa when I was running a mod clothing shop in San Francisco after my first book,” he said with a laugh.
“But I never wanted to be an academic. I worked jobs that carried me along while I was writing.”
Marshall’s view of organized religion is still rather dim, and his book details the uneasy peace between him and his Orthodox brother. But “blood is thicker than brains, so we have to talk to each other and get along.”
But while “From Baghdad to Brooklyn” is a tale built largely of domestic strife and religious disillusionment, it isn’t all doom and gloom. Marshall recalls the popular, friendly, athletic kid in his homeroom at Lafayette High School who was a whiz on the basketball court, but found success in another field.
And you may have heard of him, too: Sandy Koufax.
“From Baghdad to Brooklyn,” by Jack Marshall (248 pages, Coffee House Press, $16).