Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

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  FOR MY FATHER, Dartmouth was always a memory tinged with sadness. I am certain that the emotional turmoil connected with my grandfather’s death must have contributed to his poor academic performance and his overall unhappiness during his two college years. The death of a parent is a heavy burden for any adolescent; a mysterious death, with no chance to say good-bye, imposes a dual burden of loss and secrecy. To me, nothing speaks more eloquently of the crushing nature of this burden than my father’s lifelong insistence that the early death of his father was “not really all that important.”

  I don’t think my dad blamed Ozzie for not paying his tuition after his sophomore year, although he deeply regretted his failure to complete his college education. I do blame my grandmother and my aunt, who were on the scene and could have insisted that my dad finish school in New York City. Of all the dismaying facts I have learned about my father’s family, the worst is its failure to see that its younger son receive an education commensurate with his brains. If Granny Jacoby were still alive, I’d ask her why she didn’t sell the damned diamond rosette to keep my dad in school. What was wrong with a woman who hung on to a hundred-year-old set of china, a huge collection of sterling silver pieces, and a large array of other heirlooms while her son dropped out of college? I think it is perfectly understandable that my father’s education wasn’t the number one concern of the newly married Ozzie. But I do not understand Granny Jacoby—except insofar as “wicked” (if that is the word Ozzie really applied to her) describes her behavior.

  My father might have lived at home and gone to Columbia, which would have been much cheaper than Dartmouth because he would not have had to pay room and board. Even with the strict Jewish quota instituted under Butler, my dad would surely have been admitted as a legacy, given that his father, uncle, and elder brother had all been Columbia men. Or Dad could have gone to that great public institution of higher education, the City College of New York. During the thirties, thousands of New York students, most of them from families much poorer than the Jacobys, received a first-rate, free education there. From 1920 through 1950, the City College of New York was arguably the most distinguished public college in the nation (possibly the world).

  My grandmother, with her snobbery about being a Sondheim of Frankfurt, may have considered City College so far beneath her that it never even occurred to her as a possibility for her son. But that seems unlikely, since her own sisters were graduates of Hunter College, the city’s equally distinguished public institution of higher education for women. Still, Granny Jacoby may well have felt that what was good enough for her siblings wasn’t good enough for her children. However socially undesirable City College might seem to the descendants of German Jews, the academic status of that institution was not in question in 1932. My grandfather, during the last years of his life, could hardly have been unaware of the brilliant legal and scholarly career of Felix Frankfurter—a career unimpeded by Frankfurter’s undergraduate degree from City College. Born in 1882, the future Supreme Court justice, a Viennese Jew who arrived in New York in 1893 with scarcely a word of English, was already, by the 1920s, regarded as one of the most outstanding legal minds of his generation. My grandfather, who had begun life with so many more advantages, was reduced to defending small-time swindlers. Estelle Frankfurter alluded to the comparison when she told me about having met my grandfather. “Your grandfather started out with everything,” she said pointedly.

  By the beginning of the thirties, the student body at City College was composed almost entirely of Jews—but not Jews like the Jacobys (or the Frankfurters, who, though they were poor, came from a long line of rabbinical scholars). The City College students of my father’s generation were, for the most part, the children of uneducated immigrants from Eastern Europe. They were hungry for every form of knowledge, fiercely competitive, and openly ambitious in ways that fit the anti-Semitic stereotypes held at the time not only by the non-Jewish American majority but also by German-descended Jews like my father and his siblings. Had my father gone to City College, he might have rubbed shoulders with Alfred Kazin or Jonas Salk, but my grandmother would have been appalled at the thought of her son associating with Jews who came from Yiddish-speaking homes, were raised in neighborhoods like Brownsville and the Lower East Side, and who spoke English with the coarse accents of the New York streets rather than prep school diction.

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  THE COURSE of my father’s life would surely have been very different had he gone on to finish his education at City College. Fresh out of Poly Prep and two years at Dartmouth, with all that implied about the aping of WASP gentility and restraint, he might have been almost as out of step in his first weeks at City as he had been in a Brooklyn public school. But that wouldn’t have lasted long. His natural gregariousness (in spite of his adolescent shyness with girls), love of wordplay, literary and historical erudition, and enjoyment of numbers would have served him well with his classmates at a commuter school for people who could not afford any other sort of higher education. Young Bob Jacoby—who was, after all, in precisely the same boat—might have benefited greatly from being around contemporaries who were determined to educate themselves with or without ivy-covered walls. When I moved to New York in the early seventies and first encountered New York Jewish intellectuals of my father’s generation, I immediately felt a sense of familiarity because their manner—quick, funny, impatient, argumentative, openly emotional—reminded me so much of Dad. My father would have fitted in here, in a way he never quite did with men whose idea of a good time was an afternoon spent stalking deer in the Michigan woods.

  I am also quite certain that my father would have chosen a very different way of making a living had he completed his education in New York. I doubt that he would have become an accountant—a profession for which he was ill suited, in spite of his mathematical skills, not only because he was chronically disorganized but also because he was more interested in talking to people than in poring over detailed columns of figures. I can see him as a high school history or English teacher, like his Sondheim uncle and aunts, doing work that would have tapped both his love of language and his empathy for kids. And he might have come to terms with his Jewishness had he stayed in the city and gotten to know Jews who hadn’t been shaped by several generations of identification with, and the desire to be identified as, Germans or American WASPs. He might even have married a Jewish girl—if Granny Jacoby didn’t get in the way. And his child would have grown up knowing she was a Jew—even if she received no Jewish education and her parents were completely nonobservant. But the child wouldn’t have been me.

  VII

  Family Contrasts

  MY FATHER WAS ONLY nineteen when he left Dartmouth in the spring of 1933 and returned to the unhappy home that now consisted of his mother and sister. He knew that he would soon be expected to get a job in order to help support his mother and that he would also be expected to go on living under her roof; he had every intention of fulfilling the first expectation and no intention whatsoever of fulfilling the second. Ozzie used his connections to help his younger brother land a position as a junior accountant with the Fiduciary Trust Company in Manhattan. The young accountant’s responsibilities at work did not interfere with his gambling and pursuit of girls, often in the company of old Poly Prep friends who had also been obliged, as a result of the Depression, to go to work instead of finishing college. My dad and his friends were never out of work during the thirties; their families may have lost a good deal of money in the stock market crash, but the Old Boy Network (or, in my father’s case, the Young Boy Network represented by his brother) gave them entree into the straitened job market.

  When he turned twenty-one, like Ozzie before him, the young-man-about-town moved out of his mother’s house and was free to devote himself to having an extremely good time. For my father, the thirties amounted to a lengthy, basically carefree parenthesis, a bridge between his college years and the war. In his early twenties, the shy “Fa
t” turned into a handsome young man, with a ready laugh and a charm that was rooted in his genuine interest in other people. On the whole, he preferred the company of women to that of men (a trait he would exhibit throughout his life). Women were drawn to him, but they tended to see him as a friend rather than as a lover; he lacked the streak of callousness that piques erotic interest in women in their twenties. (In my early twenties, I introduced my father to a male friend who obviously wanted to be something more. “Of course you’re not interested in him that way,” Dad said with an ironic laugh. “He’s too nice. I know the signs.”)

  Like many of his contemporaries, he felt no urgency about settling down during a decade that began with the Depression and ended with the imminent prospect of war. In the spring of 1940, when Hitler’s troops were storming through France and the Low Countries, my father was only twenty-six. While the gathering war clouds propelled some young men into hasty marriages, many others saw the coming conflict as a good reason, as well as a perfect excuse, to put off any serious decisions. It was sensible, as well as more fun, to keep life provisional and uncomplicated. “By the time of Dunkirk, you had to be an idiot not to know we were going to be in the war sooner or later—and probably sooner,” Dad recalled. “If you were going to be sent to god-knows-where, maybe to be killed, why would you get married? Well, some guys thought otherwise. They got married because they wanted something to hang on to, someone to come back to. I was pretty immature then, and I was happy to have another reason not to settle down. Actually, it sounds awful, but I looked forward to the war. I thought we should be in it, that fighting the Nazis was something important to do.”

  Ozzie, twelve years older than my father and as settled down as he was capable of being, also viewed the potential disruption of war with an equanimity that bordered on enthusiasm. The navy, eager to draw on my uncle’s special mathematical skills, commissioned Ozzie and assigned him to an elite unit charged with the responsibility of breaking Japanese and German codes. He was stationed in Washington and Honolulu, with occasional top-secret trips to London. The suspension of international bridge tournaments for the duration of the war did not hurt Ozzie’s finances: high-stakes poker games with admirals and generals replenished his coffers (though only a fraction of his winnings made their way to Aunt Mary in Dallas). “I never had as much fun in my life as I did during the war,” Ozzie said. “Don’t let anyone who had a desk job tell you how much he hated the war, what a terrible sacrifice it was to be away from home. Code analysis was fascinating work, but officers with dull jobs loved the war too. How else could they get to be away from their wives and be praised for serving mankind? Sometimes at the poker table, raking in the money from admirals and two-star generals, I’d wonder how the hell guys who had so little talent for bluffing could expect to win a war. I asked Eisenhower that question the one time I met him during a game, and he said, “That’s why we have men like you to break the enemy codes—so we don’t have to bluff.” Ozzie’s story about meeting Eisenhower in London may be true, since Ike’s enthusiasm for bridge was legendary. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe would certainly have wanted to meet the bridge celebrity and would certainly have had no trouble inveigling him into a game.

  My father’s war, like everything else about his life, was less colorful than Ozzie’s. Legally blind in one eye as the result of his teenage accident, he was deemed unfit for combat. In 1942, however, he was selected for Officer Candidate School (like Ozzie, on the basis of his mathematical aptitude) for noncombat service. In early 1943, he was posted to Chicago, where he worked as an administrator in the Quartermaster Corps until the end of the war. By virtue of its position as a railroad and meatpacking center, as well as its strategic location between the two coasts, Chicago played an important role in the mammoth effort to supply the troops in both Europe and the Pacific. While allocating meat tonnage was hardly as glamorous as breaking Nazi and Japanese codes, my dad’s years in the army gave him far more satisfaction than his accounting jobs had in New York. “I fought the Battle of Michigan Avenue,” he observed, in typical self-deprecating fashion, on his Dartmouth twenty-fifth reunion questionnaire. Still, my dad also remembered the war years, even before he met my mother, as a happy time in his life. “You had the sense that what you were doing mattered—to your country and the world,” he told me at some point in the late sixties, when America and American families were being torn apart by the Vietnam War. “People my age look back to our war with nostalgia because it was a time—the last time, I think—when everyone was pulling together on behalf of a cause greater than themselves. The war made us who we are; it was the turning point for our generation. It can’t be that way now; I personally don’t see Vietnam as a just war in the way I saw World War Two.”

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  THE WAR years would also prove to be a turning point in the flight of the Jacoby family from its Jewish past. In 1944, both my father and my aunt Edith followed their brother in marrying Irish Catholics—and Edith became the first Jacoby actually to convert to Catholicism. My aunt, whose earlier marriage seemed to pose an insuperable obstacle to a second union sanctioned by the Church, had nevertheless been romantically involved with the devout Ted Faller for several years. When Edith’s ex-husband, “that wretch, Feeney,” conveniently dropped dead and made her a widow in the eyes of the Church, she joyfully converted and promptly married Ted. Granny Jacoby disapproved of the conversion—and said so—but did not object to Ted as she had objected to Ozzie’s choice of Aunt Mary. With her characteristic maternal solicitude, she told Edith, then in her late thirties, that she was lucky to have found anyone willing to marry her.

  In fact, Ted was passionately in love with my aunt. The most successful member of a huge Irish-American family, charged with the responsibility of caring for dependent relatives, Ted was nearly forty when he met Edith. He was so devout a Catholic, and so wrapped up in his duties to the rest of his family, that he seemed destined for a lifetime of fussy bachelorhood. But when he spotted my aunt in Macy’s executive offices, he fell in love for the first and last time in his life. In her mid-thirties, the dark-haired, long-limbed, full-bosomed Edith was not a conventional beauty, but she projected a liveliness and sensuality that had always attracted men. And Uncle Ted, used to women who expected men to take care of them, was impressed by a woman with the brains and energy to work her way up to an executive job in a man’s world. Any man who would take on a lifelong relationship with Granny Jacoby, Uncle Ozzie once pointed out, had to have been head over heels in love with her daughter. Already accustomed to supporting his own relatives, Ted cheerfully added my prickly grandmother to his list of dependents and relieved my father and Uncle Ozzie of any further responsibility for her financial support.

  Edith was every bit as much in love with Ted as he was with her. He was the only person in the world who could soften her sharp tone and bring a warm light to her eyes, and he was the only man who received her unqualified approval. Their mutual devotion never wavered, even though both were deeply disappointed when Edith, already in her late thirties at the time of the marriage, proved unable to bear children. Temperamentally, they were opposites. Edith generally regarded pleasure as an indulgence (if not a sin): she dressed plainly, resisting Ted’s desire to buy her fashionable clothes, furs, and jewels; set a frugal and unappetizing table (though Ted loved fine food and wine); and allowed herself to spend money freely only on travel to religious shrines and the art capitals of Europe (she was happiest when she could combine the two pilgrimages). One form of pleasure she did not disdain, however, was sex: the physical attraction between these unlikely characters, who touched each other tenderly at every possible opportunity, was obvious. Their relationship was a source of bemusement and amusement to the other members of the family, who had long considered Edith a prissy spinster (in spite of her youthful divorce). Moreover, Ted’s obvious physical passion for his wife represented a real departure from the repressive sexual upbringing inculcated in Irish Catholi
cs of his generation. I always thought, though I never dared ask my aunt to confirm my suspicions, that Edith and Ted must have broken the laws of the Church by having premarital sex—a mortal sin—during the period before Feeney’s death. The romance that began in New York flourished more freely during the war in Washington, when both Edith and Ted took leave from Macy’s to serve their country in the military. Ted, as was natural in view of his executive status, became a high-level procurement officer, and Edith’s assignments as a Wave lieutenant also drew on her retailing and personnel administration experience at Macy’s. Hundreds of miles from his family and hers (for the first and last time in their lives), these two extremely serious and conscientious people were free, like nearly everyone else after working hours in wartime Washington, to have fun.

  When Ted was in his seventies, sex with Edith was still so important to him that he put off lifesaving prostate cancer surgery because it would have rendered him impotent. (At the time, impotence was inevitable after prostate removal.) Ted could not, as Aunt Edith once told me with a mixture of pride and guilt, “bear the thought of never having marital relations again.” I have never seen a better illustration of the opacity, the ultimate mystery, of enduring love than the bond between my aunt and uncle—two souls who, had they not found each other, would have been condemned to the special hell reserved for those who live on the margins of other people’s lives: Old Maid Edith. Ted-Who-Should-Have-Been-A-Priest—and wasn’t it a shame that he had to take care of his brothers and sisters instead of following his true vocation, but the Lord must have His reasons….