Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

  Since Episcopalianism and (for freethinkers) Unitarianism were the preferred escape routes for German-descended Jews who did not wish to be thought of as Jews in America, it is not surprising that my father would claim the Church of England as his original ecclesiastical home. Much later, I would learn that while my father’s family did not take part in any form of religious observance, the children were sent to prep schools where Protestant chapel was compulsory Aunt Edith told me that she had presented herself to grade school classmates as an Episcopalian and to high school friends as a Lutheran. (At Smith College, where she was identified as a Jew by being assigned a Jewish roommate, she abandoned the attempt to obscure her origins and stopped claiming membership in any church.)

  The mixed marriages and conversions in the Jacoby family began not in the twentieth but in the nineteenth century Two of Max Jacoby’s three children—my grandfather’s sister, Geppy, and his older brother, Harold—married gentiles. In 1881, Geppy was married at New York’s City Hall to a German baron named Albrecht von Liebenstein. Harold and Annie Maclear, a granddaughter of Sir Thomas Maclear, the Astronomer Royal in Capetown, South Africa, were married in 1895 by an Episcopal priest. I had heard about Great-Uncle Harold from my father and uncle. He was a mythical figure in the family—a scientist who became a full professor of astronomy at Columbia, the older son who succeeded where his younger brother, my grandfather, did not.

  What my father and his siblings did not know was that Uncle Harold’s real first name was Levi. But that is not surprising: as I found when I finally tracked down Harold’s grandchildren, neither had heard the name Levi attached to their eminent grandfather—and they were quite sure that their parents, Harold’s children, were equally ignorant of the fact that there had ever been a Levi in a family boasting several Episcopal bishops and priests.

  Whether or not Harold formally converted (the nineteenth-century Episcopal Church having been somewhat more relaxed than the Roman Catholic Church about mixed marriages), his children were raised as Episcopalians and were married in the early 1920s in High Church ceremonies noted in the society pages of The New York Times. Both of these weddings took place in New York, but no one from my grandfather’s branch of the Jacoby family was in either wedding party—an omission that suggests a good deal about the degree of estrangement between my grandfather and his prominent brother.

  For Jews who were ashamed of being Jews, the marriages of Uncle Harold and his children unquestionably represented a step up on the social ladder. But unions with Irish Catholics represented no more than a lateral move (if that) in the American class-social hierarchy during the first half of the twentieth century—a realization that galled my Jacoby grandmother. With the hauteur of an Our Crowd Jew (in her case, Our Crowd manqué) Granny Jacoby used to make tart remarks about Uncle Ted’s position as a vice-president of Macy’s. She had taken music lessons (or so she said) from the same teacher as the granddaughters of Isidor Straus, the owner of Macy’s, who went down with his wife on the Titanic. When all was said and done, Granny Jacoby would remind Ted, he was a mere employee of the Straus family. I could not grasp the social implications of these remarks at the time, and I disliked my father’s mother so much that I never followed up and asked what she meant. Whenever Granny Jacoby began to drop names like Straus, Guggenheim, and Schiff, my father and Aunt Edith would yawn and change the subject.

  As one after the other of her children married into Irish Catholic families, Granny Jacoby must have been appalled by the evidence of her failure to transmit her particular brand of snobbery to the next generation. By the time my father converted in 1952, Catholicism was no longer the social debit it had once been (and would cease to be, once and for all, with the 1960 election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as president). In any event, my father’s desire to leave the past behind and begin again with a clean slate had little to do with conventional social climbing and even less to do with theology. Nevertheless, it is still difficult for me to understand how an American Jew, even one as detached from and ashamed of his origins as my father, could turn to the Church of Rome shortly after World War II. In the 1950s—before the ecumenical era ushered in by that great soul, Pope John XXIII—conversion to Catholicism meant accepting a religious tradition (at least insofar as it was translated by many parish priests) that held the Jews responsible for crucifying Jesus. I asked my father, when he was well into his sixties, whether he was ever bothered by the crucifixion story when he was taking instruction. Since Dad did not reveal his Jewish origins, his catechism instructor never raised the subject directly. Nevertheless, Dad remembered that the priest had brought up the culpability of the Jews in the death of Christ. “He said that the Jewish people, also the Romans, did have a special responsibility for crucifying Jesus,” my father recalled with a laugh, “but only the ones who happened to be there in Jerusalem at the time. If Christ had been born in America, he said, the Indians would be to blame.”

  A minority of Jewish converts to Catholicism—like the father of novelist Mary Gordon—became devotees of the reactionary right wing of American Catholicism exemplified in the 1930s by the xenophobic, anti-Semitic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin. Gordon, who describes her search for her father’s past in her 1996 memoir The Shadow Man, grew up with secrets that were an inverted version of those in my family. Unlike me, she knew that her father was a Jew by birth but knew nothing at all about the details of his conversion, which took place long before her birth. Growing up in a working-class urban neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens, surrounded by anti-Semitic neighbors fully aware of who did and didn’t look like a Jew (and with a father far more stereo typically Jewish in appearance than mine), Gordon would surely have figured out at an early age that her father had been born a Jew even if he had tried to lie about his origins. Perhaps that explains why, by her own account, she never questioned the teachings of the Church during her childhood: Catholicism, and her identity as a Catholic, would have been vital to a girl who was told, “That’s the Jew in you,” whenever she displeased her mother’s family.

  Perhaps I would have heard such remarks—though not from anyone in my mom’s family—had we stayed in the Chicago area, where we lived near my Broderick grandparents until we moved to Lansing, Michigan, when I was eight. I made the transition from childhood to adolescence in a postwar suburb where religion and ethnicity were rapidly losing their once-defining importance. Hardly anyone thought about Jews—or, for that matter, any other minority—in Lansing, the state capital and home of the Oldsmobile division of General Motors. Awareness of ethnic origins was even more muted in Okemos, where we bought a house when I was eleven. The new houses, most of them surrounded by lots denuded of trees, were purchased by white-collar state employees, professors from nearby Michigan State University, and small businessmen like my father. (Our lot on the inappropriately named Greenwood Drive was a departure from the treeless norm: my parents had paid extra for the two beautiful maples in our front yard.) Whatever church anyone in the neighborhood attended, religion was not a central part of life. Although many of the parents had grown up in tight-knit blue-collar communities, they now defined themselves not as Catholics or Protestants, Italian-, Polish-, or Irish-Americans, but as residents of one of Okemos’s “subdivisions”—Forest Hills, Indian Hills, Chippewa Hills, Ottawa Hills, Tacoma Hills, and Hiawatha Park.

  New parish schools were built as more and more affluent Catholics moved to the suburbs, but most college-educated Catholics, like my parents, pulled their children out of the parochial system when they reached high school age. It was well known that the aim of Catholic secondary schools was to prepare students to enter Catholic colleges or the still-flourishing network of seminaries and convents. Catholic state officials, professors, doctors, lawyers, and accountants did not set such limited goals for the next generation. Like my parents, they wanted to give their children unrestricted opportunities.

  Judging from the last names in my high school yearbook—in which only
two students (including me) out of a graduating class of 119 bore names that hinted at a Jewish background—the presence of Jews in Okemos must have been minuscule. In this bland suburban environment, no social importance whatsoever was attached to my father’s status as a Catholic convert. I have no real way of knowing whether there was any validity to my father’s belief that our relations with our neighbors would have been altered, subtly or crudely, had they known he was not only a Catholic convert but also a Jew.

  Because I was directly and intimately involved in my father’s earthbound transformation into a Catholic, I never imagined his conversion in the mystical terms used in Lives of the Saints, a tome familiar to every parochial school student in the fifties. It is hard to think of conversion as a blinding light on the road to Damascus, or as a highly spiritual or intellectual process, when the light comes from a flickering television screen, the voice of the deity is Bishop Sheen, and you have drilled your father on his catechism answers. Doubts take years to ripen, but my own misgivings about Catholicism, of which I was fully cognizant by the time I was eleven or twelve, certainly began while I watched (and helped) as my father prepared for the magical transformation that would take place at the actual moment of baptism. I was troubled from a young age by the idea that pouring water over someone’s head could change both his relationship to God (what if my dad had died the day before the ceremony?) and his status as a human being.

  —

  ONE TRUTH: I loved my father so much that I was slightly insulted, even as a small child, by the notion that some words from a priest, and a splatter of holy water, were needed to make him a better man.

  I have an image of him—it may be my earliest memory—running toward me along the elevated train platform near the south Chicago apartment where we lived until I was three and a half. He works in a tall building downtown, and when he calls to say he’s on his way home from the office, my mother and I often walk to the station to meet him. I see him darting through the train door, occasionally tripping over his own feet in his eagerness. I smell the half-smoked Camel he always stubs out just before sweeping me up in his arms, feel the springy texture of his hair, hear him asking, “Are you my little girl?”

  Another truth: During the period of these idyllic memories, my father was on the verge of wrecking his life and losing everything and everyone he loved.

  —

  MY FATHER certainly did want to leave his Jewish past behind, but he was battling another, more immediate demon—the gambling compulsion of the Jacoby men—when he started paying attention to the message of Bishop Sheen. Dad had more in common with Augustine of Hippo than with Saul of Tarsus: he turned to the structure of the Catholic Church in an effort to overcome a character weakness he had not been able to vanquish on his own, or even with the support of my mother and her family.

  Soon after my brother (named Robert James Jacoby, after both my father and Grandfather Broderick) was born in 1948, we left our apartment, with its proximity to Lake Michigan and an endlessly fascinating array of delicatessens, butcher shops, and bakeries, for a tiny “ranch house” in the suburb of Hazel Crest. We were only a ten-minute drive from my grandparents’ old-fashioned two-story house in Harvey, where my grandfather owned a real estate business and a combination bar and bowling alley called Bowl Center, a plain name that sounded utterly exotic to me as a child. My father would no longer be working in the city, I was told, because he would be helping out in Gramps’s businesses.

  A few years later, when I was old enough to understand such concepts, I was told that my father had lost his job (he had been the comptroller of a Chicago advertising agency). Two decades would pass before Dad told me why he had been fired: he simply had not done his work. He was bored by the job—and he had started gambling again. He had given up what he called “the vice of the Jacoby men” when he met my mother, but the old lure proved too strong. There were days when he failed to show up at the office because he was spending his time playing cards or betting at the track. After Dad was fired, my grandfather created a job for his son-in-law, who was reduced to helping out with the bookkeeping and bowling alley. As a bookkeeper, Dad was certainly overqualified: his formidable computational skills were only a notch below the wizardlike talents of his elder brother. At age twenty-one—before he began his sixty-year career as a contract bridge player—Uncle Ozzie had become the youngest person in the United States ever to qualify as a licensed actuary. During World War II, he served in the navy as a code expert, eventually reaching the rank of lieutenant commander. Whenever my father and Ozzie were together as adults, they would compete with each other as human adding machines, totaling six-digit figures in their heads. Ozzie nearly always won, managing to add at least one more row of figures than my father. I have always found it ironic that both men, with mathematical abilities that gave them a far better grasp than the average person has of the odds against winning, were unable to apply a rational calculus to their own chances of success at the gaming tables. But then, my father and my uncle were examples par excellence of the irrationality at the heart of addictive behavior. Not that they would have called themselves addicts. Fifty years ago, gambling was regarded not as a disease but as a character failing (a social and moral judgment my father fully accepted).

  When I began to ask my father about his past, he was in his mid-fifties. He was much more willing to talk about his gambling—indeed, he volunteered information I would have had no way of knowing otherwise—than about his Jewish origins. His conversion, he insisted at the time (an opinion he later revised), had nothing to do with wanting to conceal his Jewish parentage. “I thought I’d already accomplished that before I became a Catholic,” he emphasized. At the time of his conversion, he had been working for my grandfather for nearly four years and had begun to despair of ever finding another job. With a gap in his résumé and a recent employment history that did not square with his educational credentials and previous experience—keeping books for a tavern and bowling alley was hardly likely to land him a position with a large firm—my father had no choice but to tell prospective employers that he had been fired from his postwar job with the advertising agency. As soon as they heard the truth, they showed Dad the door.

  —

  IT IS 1975—I am thirty and he is sixty-one—before he tells me the whole story. “Having lost your job was like having a prison record,” my father recalls with a grimace. “I thought of trying to lie at job interviews, but your grandfather reminded me—he was one of the smartest men I ever knew—that lying, or at least avoiding the truth, was what got me into trouble in the first place. I was so discouraged that I was afraid at that place in my life that I would go back to gambling.”

  Dad tells me that he gambled heavily as a single man, gave it up when he began dating my mother, but started again when I was about a year old. (I wonder whether Mom knows that Dad returned to the gaming tables so soon after their marriage. Maybe not, since he managed to keep his surface life in order, in spite of the gambling, for several more years.) Dad continued to gamble even after losing his job but quit for good after a confrontation with my mother and grandfather. One of my mother’s cousins informed Gramps that Dad had been spotted in an after-hours blackjack game. “There’s always the temptation to try it one more time,” Dad tells me. “It’s just like booze. Your mother had told me she would give me one more chance, but that she’d take you and Robbie and leave if I ever gambled again. I knew she meant it. I was terrified of losing you all. But I needed something more than my family, and the something more was the Church. In those days, the Catholic Church spelled out the rules for living. I thought those rules could help me. No meat on Friday, Mass every Sunday, confession once a month, Holy Days of Obligation, giving up something for Lent—all of it reminded me of what I needed to be doing to stay on the straight road. Later on, I didn’t need the rules so much. But I did then…I did then. And every Sunday, I prayed that someone would give me a second chance. It wasn’t that your gramps ever made me
feel I owed him for giving me a job, but I did owe him. Without that job, you’d have gone hungry. But that’s no way for a man to live, knowing he can’t make it on his own. I give the Church a lot of the credit for my resisting the temptation to fall back into my old ways. You kids and your mother were the main reason I kept on, but the Church helped. Don’t ever think it didn’t.”

  This is my father talking, not giving himself much of the credit for the strength of character and the love that helped him overcome such a powerful compulsion. Love, I think, is what did it. Love for my mother, brother, and for me. But he believes the Church gave him strength, and who am I to argue? Who other than the tempted can speak with authority about the strength of temptation?

  —

  IN RETROSPECT, it is a tribute to my mother and father that my early childhood years—so filled with pain, shame, and anxiety for both of them—were unmarred by any sense of insecurity My mother, with a three-year-old, a new baby, and the knowledge that there wasn’t much more than $100 in the bank, may have been even more devastated than my father. “I don’t think I slept through the night for years,” she would frequently say. If she lay awake, her children never knew. Of course, the possibility of my mother’s returning to work never occurred to either of my parents in 1949, although she had loved her personnel job as a single woman and would demonstrate her ability in the same field when she reentered the labor force in the 1970s. Another irony: my father always had an aptitude for domesticity—from his baking to his instinctive understanding of small children and the pleasure he took in their company—that my mother lacked. But who knows what it would have done to a man with a fragile ego if he and his wife had attempted an outright “role reversal”? And my father so needed protecting—from his own mother, who had criticized him relentlessly as a child and continued to mock his achievements as an adult, and from the memory of a father whose ruined life left a legacy of dissolution for both of his sons. Yet the paternal specter also served as a powerful force for good in Dad’s life. Although he did not fully comprehend the extent of his father’s self-sabotage—for he was only a baby when the senior Oswald Jacoby’s life began to disintegrate—he was nevertheless terrified of reproducing the pattern. Somehow, he summoned up the strength to overcome the character failing, sickness, sin—regardless of the label, the consequences were disastrous—that could have shattered yet another generation. Perhaps the Catholic Church, with its emphasis on the possibility of redemption, did help. In any case, it filled an empty space left by his family’s outright rejection of Judaism as a religion.