Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

From an early age, then, I sensed the existence of painful secrets somehow connected to my grandfather. I knew that my father, Aunt Edith, and Uncle Ozzie had married Catholics and converted to the Faith; I did not know that they had also invented a Protestant pre-conversion past and lied, by omission or commission, whenever they were asked a question that might reveal their true origins. “What were you before you were a Catholic, Daddy?” “An Episcopalian.” The baffling storehouse of inconsistencies that made up my father’s version of his own and his family’s past remained closed to me until, in 1965, I left the small Michigan town where I had spent most of my childhood for the more cosmopolitan environment of Washington, D.C. There, at age twenty-one, I managed to put some of the pieces together—mainly the Jacoby name and my dad’s “Jewish” appearance—and to penetrate the outer layers of avoidance and omission in the family narrative. I finally understood that all of my father’s evasions had been designed to conceal the fact that he was born a Jew.

  “A Jewish parent is hardly a skeleton in the closet in this day and age,” a friend of mine remarked when the Jewish lineage of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright became a major news story in 1997. True. But Albright’s evident distress at the revelation, and her initial resistance when reporters, as was quite natural in view of her prominence, began looking into her background, demonstrated that there are people—only some of them Jews—for whom Jewish origins remain a highly charged subject. Albright’s parents, Czech Jews of considerable prominence who fled to safety in London on the eve of World War II, had determinedly attempted to conceal their Jewishness after the war. They never told their daughter that they were Jews or that most of the family had perished in concentration camps. While it is not surprising that Madeleine the girl believed what her parents told her, it is difficult to credit her assertion that as an adult—and a diplomat with wide-ranging international contacts—she never suspected what was well known to many of her contemporaries, including surviving Czech Jewish relatives of whose existence she was fully aware (and whom she stonewalled when they attempted to contact her after she was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations). Even in this day and age, there are still Jews—some with positions in society that would seem to render them impregnable—who fear that a clear-eyed glance backward can only consign them to the fate of Lot’s wife.

  For my own father, his Jewish lineage definitely was a skeleton in the closet, a source of shame that shadowed his entire life and required him to construct a false identity in an effort to shield his children. Long before I had any idea that my father was a Jew, I sensed a reservoir of self-doubt at the core of his nature. It expressed itself in many ways, but nowhere was it more evident than in his lifelong tendency to deprecate the personal and professional achievements that represented a real triumph over his own sense of unworthiness.

  As an adult, I felt considerable guilt about asking my father questions that evoked his old sense of shame, but my need to know was stronger than my desire to protect him. “Why do you gnaw at this?” Dad would ask, over and over, until his death. “Didn’t your mother and I give you a good foundation? Don’t you have a wonderful job? Why can’t you just let this Jewish business alone?” He was the reason—he and the religion in which he and my mother had tried to raise me. I just never could accept it, even in the stage of childhood when it is natural to accept what everyone around you believes. Yet such was the power of the Roman Catholic Church of that era—“it was the only The Church,” a Catholic wit once said—that I invested a great deal of my emotional energy, at a time when most teenagers’ minds are filled with dreams of the opposite sex (not that there wasn’t room for those too), in a struggle to escape the prediction of the nuns: “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.” The discovery that my father was a Jew—just as I embarked upon adult life—seemed to offer one explanation for the smoldering no that had shaped my girlhood.

  When I say I had no idea that my father was a Jew, I mean I had no idea on a conscious level. Until I began writing this book, I had forgotten one of the recurrent dreams of my adolescence—a nightmare in which I was a prisoner in a concentration camp. My head was shaved, but I wasn’t wearing a striped uniform; the yellow star was attached to my everyday clothes. “I haven’t done anything, I don’t belong here,” I would say. Adolf Hitler himself would reply, “That’s what every prisoner says. And we’ve even let you keep your clothes. But they won’t last long. You’re no better than anyone else here.” Concentration camp dreams, I learned as an adult, were in no way unusual among my contemporaries—children born shortly before, during, or soon after World War II. But while I have many friends who remember similar dreams, every one of them is Jewish, brought up in a Jewish home where the murder of the six million was treated (and this was sometimes literally the case) as a death in the family.

  As teenagers, some of my Jewish friends were exasperated at their parents’ “harping” on the Holocaust—and they were angry that they could not escape the camps even in their dreams. It never occurred to me, as an adolescent, that either of my parents had any connection with the nightmares that left me in a cold sweat. Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews was discussed in my home—and this was unusual in Okemos, Michigan, a small suburban community, with few Jewish residents, where we lived throughout my teenage years. My parents talked about the Holocaust (though they, like most Americans at the time, did not call it that) in the same informative tone that they talked about the Depression, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the Cold War. If we watched large portions of the trial of Adolf Eichmann on television in 1961, this merely reflected my parents’ customary interest in history and current events. Neither my mother nor my father said anything to indicate that our family had any extra reason (indignation at injustice and suffering being a given) to worry about what had been done to the Jews of Europe. But my vivid nightmares suggest that I was receiving another, unarticulated message: You’re no better than anyone else here.

  I stopped having that dream in my early twenties, not long after I figured out, and my father acknowledged, that he was a Jew.

  —

  WHEN CERTAIN subjects are routinely suppressed rather than explicitly and dramatically forbidden, they impinge upon the consciousness of a child intermittently, as minor discordances that cause a momentary sense of unease before being dismissed. One day, when I was in the sixth grade at St. Thomas Aquinas School—one of the thousands of parochial schools built by upwardly mobile American Catholics who moved to the suburbs after the war—I proudly read my composition about a girl trying to concentrate on her homework while a spider concentrated on spinning a web underneath her dress. Everyone in the class laughed out loud—everyone, that is, except Sister Misericordia. She called me up to her desk after school and said sharply, “That composition was in very poor taste.” Mortified, I blinked back tears as I made my way to the cloakroom to put on my boots. Sister was whispering to another nun, “Of course, there may be certain influences within the family The father, you know, is a convert. I believe he was born in New York.” Later that night, I repeated Sister’s comments to my mother. “Just forget it,” she advised, ignoring my question about the meaning of those “certain influences” and reminding me that no nun would have been pleased with a story alluding to undergarments or bare legs. After kissing me good night, Mom added with a studied casualness, “Don’t bother your father about this.”

  I never forgot the incident and my teacher’s tone, with its faint but unmistakably derogatory implications. I could summon up the sound of Sister’s voice a decade later in Washington, where most of my colleagues at the Post assumed, because of my last name, that I was Jewish—and where I finally realized that a man named Jacoby, with a mother whose maiden name was Sondheim, must have been born a Jew. Which made me a half-Jew—whatever that might mean. As a reporter in the racially charged atmosphere of Washington in the mid-sixties, I was much more interested in how it felt to be black in white America than in what it me
ant to be a half-Jew raised as a Catholic.

  At that point, I simply could not understand why my father had tried so hard, throughout my childhood and even after I was old enough to figure out the secret for myself, to conceal his true background. I was still measuring time by years, not by generations. I knew that he knew that I knew, but I never brought up the subject until I blurted out my knowledge of my father’s Jewish origins in a manner calculated to establish his misguidedness and the superiority of my own “moral compass” (a term that turns up with embarrassing frequency in my writings from that era). In the kitchen of the house where I grew up on Greenwood Drive, Dad was making blueberry muffins—cooking (but not cleaning up after himself) being one of the many pursuits that set him apart from my friends’ more conventional Father-Knows-Best fathers. At fifty-two, a bundle of nervous energy who would never develop a paunch, my dad usually jumped out of bed around five o’clock and was deeply involved in something—cooking, gardening, cleaning out the basement—by the time the rest of the family woke up. On this particular morning, he had been looking forward to nothing more complicated than sharing a hot buttered muffin with his little girl. Home for a brief break from my dream job at the Post—I was in that transitional stage when fledgling adults still refer to their parents’ house as “home”—I disrupted the morning peace and ended the silence between us by informing my father that it was no longer necessary for him to “go on pretending” that he hadn’t been born into a Jewish family I announced my absolute delight at the certainty that “at least one” of my parents was a Jew. The only thing that could make me happier, I added, would be to learn there was also a Negro in the family tree.

  Choking on the flour that coated his nostrils and lips, Dad turned toward me, lit a cigarette, and cursed under his breath as an ash fell into the batter. His eyes filled with tears as he said, “I never wanted you and your brother to feel that if you didn’t get something you wanted in life, it was because you were Jewish. I never wanted you to blame me for this…this burden, this cross. And by the way, always say Jewish. Jew is rude and disrespectful.”

  My father refused to explain himself any further, and though I experienced a belated sense of shame at my outburst, I was incapable of understanding the sources of his raw emotion. Not only had my father told me almost nothing about his past, but his suggestion that being a Jew, or a half-Jew, might prevent me from getting anything I wanted seemed preposterous in 1966. By then it had become chic to be Jewish—in the journalistic world I already inhabited in Washington and in the broader cultural world to which I aspired. Because I had been raised as a Catholic and educated in parochial elementary schools, and spent most of my childhood in a relatively small town with few Jews (though I was born in Chicago), I did not really think about the meaning of my father’s name and appearance until I started meeting a great many Jews as an adult. Only then did it become apparent to me—with the obviousness of a lightbulb flashing over a cartoon character’s head—that my father, born and raised in New York City, must be a Jew. New York Jew. With his lavish, curly black hair and his moderately but unmistakably hooked nose, my father looked so very Jewish—or so very much like what Jews are thought to look like.

  In Washington, friends often asked about my background because they had trouble putting my last name together with the blond shiksa looks I had inherited from my mother’s Irish-German side of the family. The truth was that my shiksa image would have been much less striking without the assistance of Lady Clairol. When I began sifting through childhood pictures for this book, I was quite surprised to see snapshots of a little girl with light-to-medium-brown hair. I have thought of myself as a blonde since my mom began applying peroxide to my tresses in ninth grade. Most of my friends’ mothers, at a time when artificial hair coloring still conveyed a whiff of moral turpitude (hence the success of the advertising campaign with the sly question, “Does she or doesn’t she?,” and the immortal answer, “Only her hairdresser knows for sure…”), would have grounded their daughters for pursuing blondness in a bottle. “You mean it was your mom’s idea?” an envious friend asked. I now wonder whether my mother’s alteration of my hair color at such an early age was an attempt, on a conscious or unconscious level, to make me look more like her family and less like a Jacoby. I do know that when I recently tried on a brown-haired wig over my blond “highlights”—just to see what sort of a brunette I would make—the face in the mirror looked like no one in my mother’s family but instead bore a startling resemblance to a nineteenth-century portrait of my Jacoby great-grandmother. How easily I discarded the memory of the brown-haired girl—even though I am perfectly aware that my blondness as an adult is attributable not to nature but to the efforts of professional hair colorists who took up, at considerable expense to me, where my mother left off.

  At any rate, I looked like an archetypal shiksa to people who met me in the mid-sixties in Washington. When my name prompted them to ask if I was Jewish, I always answered “half”—and wished that I didn’t have to qualify my reply. Interestingly, black acquaintances asked the question more readily than whites—and I interpreted the inquiry as a compliment in an era when Jews and blacks, at least in my world, were linked by a commitment to the civil rights movement and were more than willing to give each other the benefit of the doubt. For this and many other reasons, I longed to identify myself with Jews as deeply as my father had once longed to deny his origins. How could I understand a man who would not use the word Jew as a noun because he viewed it as an epithet? Until the end of his life in 1986, I never heard my father call himself, or anyone else, a Jew. Jewish was as Jewish as he got.

  —

  I WAS SEVEN when Dad converted to Catholicism—from the Episcopal Church, I was led to believe. There was no shame attached to being a convert in the American Catholic world of the fifties. Quite the contrary The nuns and priests always emphasized that converts were far more deserving of praise than “born” Catholics, because a convert had voluntarily chosen to assume the obligations imposed by the Church. That was why I didn’t know what to make of the unfamiliar edge in Sister Misericordia’s voice when she linked conversion with “certain influences.”

  My mother and her parents knew the truth about my father’s origins, and they acceded to his request that the facts be concealed from my brother Rob and me. My maternal grandmother, who was still vibrant and clearheaded before she died in 1999 at the age of ninety-nine, told me not long before her death that she vividly remembered the day my father revealed his “secret.” “Bob told us he wanted us to know ‘the whole truth’ about him before we gave our blessing to the marriage,” Granny recalled. “Of course, he also told us he and your mother were going to get married whether we gave our blessing or not….When it was all out in the open, your gramps said, ‘Well, that’s a relief. I thought we were going to find out you’d been in jail.’ I felt bad for Bob that he felt so bad—there were tears in his eyes—but those were different times and I understand his not wanting you kids to know when you came along. Later, when the war was over, and we knew about the concentration camps…well, it’s not something you’d want to pass on to your children, if you could avoid it. Of course, that was probably a wrong way of thinking, an old-fashioned way of thinking. But it was how your dad felt. And to be honest, it was how we felt too. I feel a little ashamed of that today.”

  Don’t ask, don’t tell. At the time of our kitchen confrontation in the summer of 1966, my father’s closed-off attitude toward his own and his family’s past had not changed appreciably since the 1940s. But he began to open up that same year when his mother, Edith Sondheim Jacoby, died in New York at the age of eighty-eight.

  We buried her on a raw November day, surrounded by driving sleet that undermined the footing of the mourners at the grave site, in St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Cemetery on Staten Island. My mother was recovering from an illness and could not make the trip from Michigan, so my father phoned me in Washington and asked me to fly up to New York to meet
him for the funeral—an extraordinary request in view of his usual impulse to keep his children far removed from the family into which he was born. His desire to have me near him, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the expected presence of his brother and sister at the funeral, spoke eloquently of his unwillingness to deal with the family of his childhood without support and comfort from the family he had created, and drawn solace from, as an adult.

  When Dad was born in 1914—the youngest of three siblings—his mother was thirty-six. A chilly woman of Victorian demeanor, Granny Jacoby frequently referred to my father as her “accident.” When my brother and I wrote to thank her for a birthday present (usually something, like a bookmark, that no child wants for a gift), we would open with “Dear Granny Jacoby”—never just “Granny”—because, as far as we were concerned, our real granny was our mom’s softhearted mother. Granny Jacoby once suggested that I call her Nana, but I never did. On our annual visits, I addressed her as nothing but “you”—an omission she was too perceptive to miss. To my “Would you please pass the potatoes,” she would reply, “Whom are you addressing? A ewe is a female sheep.”

  One of the least pleasant experiences of my girlhood was my family’s annual thousand-mile drive from our home in Michigan to the quiet Staten Island street where my father’s mother and sister lived. Equally oppressed by the discomfort of car travel before the age of air-conditioning and by the prospect of seeing Granny Jacoby again, I suffered from severe nausea during those days on the road. My usually cheerful father grew more snappish as we approached New York. Somewhere in the Bronx, he always managed to lose his way and miss the turnoff for Brooklyn and the Bay Ridge terminal of the Staten Island ferry.

  As we passed through Brooklyn, Dad never stopped to show us his old school or the house where he spent most of his childhood. Nor did I ask to visit any of the scenes of my father’s youth. Even though the declared purpose of these trips to New York was to enable my brother and me to become acquainted with our Jacoby relatives, I surely sensed that on some level, my father didn’t want to be there at all.