Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

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  CAN THERE be Jews without Judaism? A Talmudic question, to which most rabbis answer no (and the more Orthodox they are, the more unequivocal the answer). To the Jewish fundamentalists—the fanatics who are mistakenly regarded by many Americans as synonymous with all Orthodox Jews—the question itself is a blasphemy At any rate, a half-Jew (and one who, by virtue of her mother’s Christianity, is not a Jew at all according to traditional Jewish law) is not ideally situated to respond to the question. But I am certain of one thing: whatever it means to be “culturally Jewish”—a complicated mix of behavior and values that can mean anything from a tendency to pepper conversations with “schmuck” and “schmaltz” to a serious knowledge of Jewish tradition and history—the schmuck-schmaltz school of cultural Jewishness provides an inadequate foundation for moral decision making or for confronting a serious personal weakness like gambling. My father, in his thirties, did not qualify as “culturally Jewish” (and would not have wished to do so) even by the schmuck-schmaltz standard. He was a man with no Jewish education of any kind, a vessel emptied of Jewish content, open to the magical metamorphosis promised by conversion.

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  NOT LONG after his conversion (the two events were always linked in my father’s mind) Dad answered a classified ad placed by a small accounting firm in Michigan. He traveled to Lansing for a personal interview with the firm’s president, a dour man named Fred Vorn. Vorn, who combined rigidity and rectitude in equal measure, did not, at first glance, seem like a boss who would hire a reformed gambler, or anyone with a gap in his employment history, as his right-hand man.

  Nevertheless, he gave my father his second chance and we moved to Michigan in the summer of 1953. For Dad, the move meant the opportunity not only to rebuild his career but to regain his self-respect. Over the years, he would continue to pay dearly for the mistakes of his early thirties. Fred Vorn turned out to be an eccentric autocrat who kept all of his employees in a state of economic uncertainty by giving them a large chunk of their annual salaries as a Christmas cash bonus. Dad worked endless hours—especially in tax season, when he was sometimes gone from five in the morning until ten at night—but he never knew until the annual office Christmas party whether he had had a good, bad, or average year. One of my most vivid childhood memories centers around the Christmas bonus of a thousand dollars that my father received when I was nine. I remember the thousand-dollar bill (something I had never seen before and have never seen since), which my mother made my father deposit in the bank before we left Lansing to drive to Illinois to celebrate the holiday with my grandparents. Dad wanted to show Gramps the actual cash—it would have been a literal demonstration of his trustworthiness as a husband and provider, a man who had learned from his mistakes—but my mother prevailed when she pointed out that Christmas Eve was probably a profitable day for robbers. I remember that Christmas as the happiest of my childhood; from the fuss my grandparents made over my father when they heard about the bonus (as they did the moment we walked through the door), you would have thought that Dad had, at the very least, announced his appointment as the president of a major corporation. Gramps declared repeatedly that he had known all along that Dad would make a great success of his new job in Michigan. What balm all of this praise must have been to a man who had received so little encouragement and approval from his own parents!

  The tale of the bonus of course has another side, one belonging more to the nineteenth than to the twentieth century. The “bonuses” weren’t really bonuses but a portion of my father’s well-deserved salary that his boss chose to keep a secret until the last possible moment. He handed out the annual bonuses at the office Christmas party (just in time to deduct them as business expenses), and the employees had to grovel and thank their boss without knowing whether the amount inside the envelope would make this a merry or a dreary holiday season. When Vorn finally retired many years later and sold the business to my father, one of Dad’s first actions as the new owner was to abolish the practice of uncertain, end-of-the-year cash payments.

  However long and faithfully he serves his new employer, a man who has been fired from his previous job is never in a good negotiating position. That was the main clause in the unwritten contract between my father and Fred Vorn: Vorn would, out of Christian charity, overlook the blot on Dad’s record, and Dad would play Bob Cratchit to his employer’s Mr. Scrooge. We were as solidly middle-class as everyone else in our neighborhood (my father made enough not only to meet the mortgage payments on the new three-bedroom house in Okemos but also to pay for figure-skating lessons, camp, and two-inch-thick porterhouse steaks once a week), but I always knew that Dad was afraid to push his boss too hard. In a family with so many secrets, my parents were surprisingly frank about the true nature of my father’s position. After September, whenever my brother or I asked for something that would cost more than a small amount, the answer was always, “We have to wait and see how much Dad’s bonus is this time.” And every year or so, there would be tense discussions about whether Dad should bring up the subject of a raise or wait for Vorn to make an offer. “Why don’t you get another job?” I asked when I was twelve or thirteen. That was when Dad told me, for the first time, that he had been fired when I was a baby. “Thank God you were too young then to realize it,” he said. “I could never take that chance now with the future of my family.” I never repeated the question.

  By then, I had absorbed a strong sense of my father’s deep insecurities, even though I did not know that his shame about being a Jew was one of them. Having seen the way Dad’s own mother belittled him, I developed strong protective instincts toward him at an early age and deeply regretted having asked him a question that could be interpreted as a challenge to his decisions about how best to support his family. I knew, without anyone saying so, that my job as a daughter to my father was twofold—to excel in school (for that was the one thing I knew Jacobys had been expected to do for generations) and to provide some of the emotional protection Dad needed. I succeeded at the first task and failed, too often (as I saw it then and see it now), at the second.

  When I needed protection—usually at school—I turned to my mother. Whenever there was trouble with the nuns, Mom was the parent who sailed into the fray and defended me. There was trouble with Sister Misericordia in sixth grade after the spider-under-the-dress affair; trouble with Sister Stephen in seventh grade when I expressed doubt about the logic of the Holy Trinity (Sister had offered a paper shamrock into evidence and became enraged when I remarked that the existence of four-leaf clovers didn’t prove there were four persons in one God); trouble with Sister Cyril Therese in eighth grade after she dunked a girl’s head under the water faucet because she had copied a provocative, tousled hairstyle from Photoplay magazine. With its photographs of scantily clad actresses, Sister proclaimed, Photoplay constituted an “occasion of sin.” I was furious because Sister Cyril—one of those butch nuns who had it in for any girl with a hint of sex appeal beneath her green serge school uniform—had chosen to humiliate Barbara, whose sweetness and lack of self-confidence, combined with early puberty, made her a perfect target for bullies of all ages and vocations. Imagine a thirteen-year-old led back from the lavatory (we were told explicitly at St. Thomas Aquinas School that the word bathroom was almost as vulgar as the truly unmentionable toilet) with her once-fluffy head soaked, dripping onto the starched white collar of her regulation blouse. As Barbara’s tears mingled with the runoff from her hair, Sister Cyril looked to the rest of the class for support. “I had no choice,” she screeched. “I had to teach you all a lesson.” After Sister Cyril had ranted on about Photoplay, I spoke up and said, “It was a mean and wicked thing you did.” No one talked that way to a nun; Barbara was so astonished that she stopped crying, and everyone else beat a hasty retreat before Sister had time to begin the usual prayer before dismissal. For a moment, I thought Sister Cyril was going to hit me, but she knew my mother was due to pick me up for an after-school dental appointment. M
y impeccably dressed, impeccably polite mom—I can still see her in the blue shirtwaist dress that was her uniform—drew herself up to her full height of five feet, four inches, after the outraged nun had proferred her version of the story. “Of course, Sue should never have spoken to you that way,” she said mildly, “but I’m sure she must have thought she had a good reason.” Then she asked for my version of what had happened, her mouth tightening as I described Barbara’s public humiliation. She turned back to Sister Cyril and said, “If you ever did that to my child, I would remove her from the school immediately and write a letter to the bishop.” A letter to the bishop. Sister Cyril, for once, had nothing to say. As we left the classroom, my mother offered a parting shot. “I believe Photoplay was allowed to photograph Grace Kelly’s wedding to Prince Rainier inside the cathedral in Monte Carlo,” she informed Sister. “Surely if Photoplay were an occasion of sin, the cardinal who performed the marriage ceremony would never have allowed this.” My mother may have made this up on the spot, but I was awed by her performance. She had made her point without raising her voice—a talent I admired but would never master.

  It was clear to me that Mom liked it when I talked back to the nuns, even though she was disappointed by my failure to learn how to express my opinions in ladylike fashion. She had been stuck in convent school (not a regular parish school) during her teenage years, and she encouraged me to assert myself in ways that her own parents would not have countenanced. My father, as a convert, was both in awe of and mystified by the nuns, and he left my mother in charge of virtually everything to do with Catholic education. He was equally mystified by the frequency and intensity of my disputes with the sisters and, later, with the priests who took over religious instruction for the upper grades (providing the superior male intellect presumably required to resolve moral dilemmas above the sixth-grade level). “Just think what you think and keep it to yourself,” Dad would say. “But how can the pope be infallible?” I would sputter. “The pope’s just a man.” “I’m infallible,” was my father’s reply, “so why shouldn’t the pope be?” Dad was as uninterested in theological debate as he was bemused by my aunt Edith’s pursuit of apparitions and miracles on pilgrimages to Lourdes and Fatima. What mattered to him was that he was a Catholic, married to a Catholic, bringing up Catholic children in a setting far removed from his pained and turbulent youth.

  Even though my father had converted, my background as the child of a “mixed marriage,” as Sister Misericordia’s comments suggested, was never entirely forgotten by the arbiters of Catholic education. When a Catholic married a non-Catholic before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the early sixties, the non-Catholic spouse had to sign a promise to allow any children to be brought up in the True Faith. Even so, mixed couples received a second-class version of the marriage ceremony, performed not in church but in the rectory. By denying the bride and groom the right to pledge themselves to each other before the altar, the Catholic hierarchy voiced its deep reservations about intermarriage even as it bowed to the realities of people who did not necessarily stick to their own kind when they sought a mate.

  Although the nuns explained that truly believing Protestants (no one mentioned truly believing Jews) could go to heaven, the constant drumbeat was that it was much, much better to be a Catholic. We were drilled to declare, “I am a Catholic,” when any form of temptation appeared. A Protestant friend offered you a bite of a hot dog on Friday. “I am a Catholic.” You were invited to a movie condemned by the Legion of Decency. “I am a Catholic.” Later on, “I am a Catholic” would be the appropriate response to a boy who made an “impure suggestion.” Unless the boy was a Catholic himself, in which case an indignant “You are a Catholic” would suffice. The older nuns longed for the days, as they often said, when Catholic children lived in heavily Catholic immigrant neighborhoods and the questions raised by Protestant friends never came up. The nuns were particularly eloquent on the dangers of dating non-Catholics. “It may not seem like an occasion of sin now,” they would say, “but when you are of an age to marry, it can lead to mortal peril for your soul.” I often wondered whether the nuns would have advised my mother to declare, “I am a Catholic,” when my father first asked her out on a date. The thought made me giggle inwardly, but I restrained myself from putting the question to Sister Cyril. I wasn’t sure I could count on my mom to threaten Sister with a letter to the bishop more than once in a school year.

  For all of the space that Catholicism occupied in my mental world, we were not a particularly observant family. We went to church on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation, and that was pretty much it. Both of my parents were openly contemptuous of Catholics who paid attention to what the Church had to say about immoral books and movies. Since my parents had only two children (many of my friends in Catholic elementary school came from huge families with a child in nearly every grade), they must have interpreted the Church’s ban on artificial birth control in a less than rigorous way. Because she had been brought up as a Catholic, my mother understood my struggles with religious training far better than my father did. To Dad, religion was not a belief system that was supposed to make sense but a set of helpful moral road signs calling attention to falling rocks, dead-end streets, and dangerous curves. Doubting Thomasina was one of his nicknames for me, but I am certain he did not know that my doubts, by the time I reached the age of thirteen, had hardened into an outright rejection (one I could not voice at the time) of the faith that had given him so much solace. Dad, who had been a star Latin student in high school (one of the few facts I knew about his childhood), had a habit of reciting Mass, sotto voce, along with the priest. Domine, non sum dignus (Lord, I am not worthy), he would intone, striking his breastbone along with the celebrant on the altar, eliciting a shush from my mother, and demonstrating that he could not possibly have been born a Catholic (for cradle Catholics of that generation, even if they understood Latin, would not have dreamed of usurping the priest’s prerogative by joining in the chant). Thanks to Dad, I knew exactly what the words of the Mass meant by the time I was eight or nine—and that knowledge set me apart from my friends and provided more fuel for my doubts. How could someone be God and man at the same time? How could the Host, delivered from some holy bakery, actually be Jesus? “The Host isn’t Jesus himself, it’s to remind us of Jesus,” my theologically incorrect father would say in exasperation. “Daddy, the priest says corpus Christi during the Mass. That’s what transubstantiation means. Not that the Host is a symbol of Christ but that it really, truly is the body of Christ—even though it looks like a wafer.” By fourth or fifth grade, Catholic schoolchildren were expected to be fluent in the technical language of church dogma. Terms like transubstantiation and incarnation were as familiar to us as, and had something in common with, the formulas for diagramming sentences.

  At the end of one of these disputations, my father shook his head and said, “You remind me of old Uncle Dano.” I’d never heard of an uncle named Dano, and Dad explained that he was an argumentative great-uncle, long deceased, whom he had known and loved as a child. “He was just like you, always cornering people about religion and politics.” “Was he a Catholic?” I asked. Dad said Uncle Dano had probably been an Episcopalian. Forty years later, I would discover that “Uncle Dano” was Daniel Jackson, a younger brother of my great-grandmother, Eve Jackson Jacoby. He was a pawnbroker at the turn of the century in Manhattan’s financial district. And he was definitely not an Episcopalian. Many years ago, Aunt Edith gave me a tiny gold watch that had belonged to her aunt, suspended from a much older gold pin that she said was a Jackson family heirloom of unknown origin. I didn’t realize then that the pin was a precise replica of the traditional three-balled pawnbroker’s symbol, derived from the Medici coat of arms.

  III

  German-Americanization

  “MY FATHER HARDLY EVER talked about being Jewish,” Uncle Ozzie told me just before his death in 1984, “but I knew how he felt. Being a Jew meant you were better than
other people. It also meant you were worse.”

  By the end of the nineteenth century, the myths that would shape the Jacoby family’s image of itself for most of the twentieth century were firmly in place. In the morgue of The New York Times, which includes clippings from other publications as well, I found a glowing 1907 tribute to my grandfather, who had been selected as a worthy profile subject by Men of Affairs in New York. Printed on the creamy, heavy, enduring paper used for substantive periodicals and books at the turn of the century, the account of my grandfather’s family background and early accomplishments as a lawyer was misfiled in a much thicker envelope of clippings on his elder son’s twentieth-century tournament bridge career. The long opening paragraph of the article, which summarizes the circumstances of my great-grandfather’s departure from Germany, provided me with my first glimpse of the way the family saw itself—and wanted to be seen by others—long before my father was born.