on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire in her
employer’s summer home. By age 16, “Frosty,” as
she was called, had graduated with honors from
Overbrook High School, whose student body was
predominantly white and Jewish. Ross received a
full scholarship to Temple University, where she
earned a B.S. degree in communication, journal-
ism, and theater in 1956.
After working briefly for Curtis Publishing
Company, which housed Saturday Evening Post,
Ross moved to New York in 1960, where she worked
as a proofreader and copy editor at McGraw-Hill
and Simon & Schuster, as well as a freelance writer.
Over the years her articles were published in such
magazines as ESSENCE, Titters, and Playboy. Ross
was also was part owner of a mail-order company
that produced educational media. Moving to Los
Angeles, California, in 1977, Ross worked as a
comedy writer for the short-lived Richard Pryor
Show before returning to New York. According to
poet HARRYETTE MULLEN, who wrote the introduc-
tion to the reissued edition of Ross’s only novel,
Oreo (Greyfalcon House, 1974), Ross “discovered
that she was even more of an anomaly as a black
comedy writer in Los Angeles than she had been
an editor and author in New York” (xvi).
Oreo is the story of bicultural Christine Clark,
who although nicknamed Oriole was called Oreo,
after the cookie. Shortly after Oreo’s brother,
Moishe (Jimmie C), was born, her African-Amer-
ican mother, Helen, and Jewish father, Shmuel
Schwartz, separated and then divorced. Helen
returned briefly to her parents’ home in Phila-
delphia before joining a touring theatrical group,
leaving Oreo and Jimmie C to grow up in an Afri-
can-American home and environment dominated
by their southern grandparents, James and Louise
Clark. However, before separating from the family,
Shmuel had provided Helen with a piece of paper
on which he had written clues that Oreo, when
she was old enough to do so, could use to learn
and understand “the secret of her birth” (Ross, 9).
Before her 18th birthday, Oreo, who had been pri-
vately tutored and had grown into an intelligent
and perceptive teenager, embarked on her journey
to New York to find her father, using the list of
clues he had provided. Her hilarious picaresque
quest, grounded in Ross’s take on African-Ameri-
can–Jewish relations, resounds with the narrative
of the Greek mythological character Theseus, who
also searches for his paternal history and identity.
By the end of the novel, Oreo successfully finds
her father and solves the riddle of her personal
history. As Mullen notes, “Oreo claims no cookie
cutter identity; rather, she is a character whose
cultural hybridity has given her an intimate view
of two of the diverse subcultures that made signif-
icant contributions to the production of Ameri-
can culture” (xxvi).
Although Oreo was published during the height
of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, Ross, like JOHN
EDGAR WIDEMAN, did not make the demands of
the movement’s architects or BLACK AESTHETIC
prophets relevant to her focus or her definition of
herself as a writer. In fact, imaginatively and cre-
atively, Ross seems to move in a counterdirection
to the Black Arts Movement in Oreo. She debuts
as a satirist, adding to this her talent as a writer
of comedy, her interest in cartoons, and her love
for Jewish culture, particularly Yiddish, which
she had heard spoken in school and in the larger
Philadelphia community. The result is not only an
idiosyncratic novel in which Ross combines ghet-
toized vernacular (African-American and Yid-
dish), graffiti, palmistry, cooking recipes, dream
books, jokes, and cartoons, but also her creation
of what might be called post-realist or “innovative
fiction.” This fiction moves beyond postmodern
fiction to “Super Fiction,” in which writers such
as Ronald Sukenick, Donald Barthelme, Kurt Von-
negut, Jr., ISHMAEL REED, and CLARENCE MAJOR, to
name a few, intentionally set out to reconfigure the
language/reality ratio associated with a more tra-
ditional, Western art form (Klinkowitz, 3).
Ross makes form and language central issues in
Oreo. On the one hand, Helen, Oreo’s mother, not
only speaks standard English but also peppers her
sentences with Yiddish, the language she learned
from her father, James, who managed a mail-order
business that catered exclusively to Jews. Ironically,
James had suffered a stroke and stopped talking
when he learned of his daughter’s plans to marry440 Ross, Frances Delores