Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

  The Eichmann trial, which began a year later in Israel, opened a new chapter in public consciousness of what would come to be called the Holocaust. The horror that had greeted the disclosures of mass murder at the end of the war, bolstered by the vast amount of evidence presented at the Nuremberg trials, had faded in fifteen years. Moreover, the trial provided the first opportunity for anyone under roughly age twenty-five (many of the details were new to most Americans, whatever their age) to absorb the magnitude of what had happened. The news media, including television, covered the Eichmann trial extensively. In the basement “rec room,” containing our new twenty-inch TV, my father would watch, tight-lipped, as “the man in the glass booth” appeared on the evening news. There had been considerable dispute in the press over whether Israel had the right to try Eichmann, but the controversy dissipated as the grave statistics poured forth in the courtroom. (I was unaware of this dispute at the time; none of the adults I knew ever suggested that Eichmann should be tried anywhere but in Israel.) “He’s in a courtroom, he has a lawyer,” my father would say. “Did he give any of his victims a trial?”

  In New Lives, an account of the experiences of Holocaust survivors in America, Dorothy Rabinowitz observes that “for a great many American Jews, the Eichmann trial was a galvanizing force, bringing them face to face with emotions theretofore repressed, with events whose full scope and reverberations had been kept, rumbling, beneath the surface of consciousness.” This was true even for a Jew as detached from his origins as my father had been for so long. His mask began to slip, and if he did not come face to face with his emotions, he did allow some of them to escape from the place where they had been buried, submerged in the persona of a Catholic convert. Only five years later, he would be able to face his daughter’s knowledge that he was a Jew without running away, and he would enter into a dialogue—however anxious and acerbic—about the reasons for his family’s long denial.

  The Eichmann trial was definitely a turning point for me. My concentration camp nightmares were reinforced by my reading in the public library, where I sought out everything that was available (though there wasn’t much) about the camps. I became obsessed (and this is not too strong a word) with learning more about the tortured history of the Jews. The pull of this obsession was strengthened by my unwillingness to share it with others; my friends weren’t interested and knew almost nothing about the subject, and I understood, without being told, that my father would not like it if he knew how many books I was reading about Nazi Germany and the camps and how much time I spent thinking about what it meant to be a Jewish victim. In addition to my nighttime terrors, I daydreamed about what it would be like, at my age, to have my head shaved (a particularly horrifying detail for a teenage girl), to be hungry, to be deprived of everything and everyone I had ever known. I reread Anne’s diary, feeling happy that she had at least kissed a boy before she was taken away into the darkness. I also read Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical Night, an account of his experiences, and survival, as a fifteen-year-old in Auschwitz. If Anne’s story impressed me with an ordinariness that encouraged identification, Night made its mark for precisely the opposite reason: nothing in my experience had prepared me for the knowledge of exactly what went on in a facility designed expressly for the purpose of murdering human beings. I was fifteen when I read Night; Wiesel was fifteen when he descended into hell: that was enough.

  It must be remembered that the Holocaust, even after the Eichmann trial, had not become an integral element of public consciousness by the early sixties; scholars had not yet focused on Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews, and written accounts by survivors were rare. The majority of survivors in America were still in their thirties or early forties, occupied with raising their families, looking to the future rather than the past, and disinclined to talk publicly about an experience that could only elicit pity and horror, setting them apart from their fellow Americans in a land that had given them the opportunity to rebuild their lives. The infrequent survivor’s account, like Night, caused not a ripple among gentiles in a town like Lansing; I found out about the book only because the Okemos librarian, Hope Borbas, who knew I was interested in the camps, recommended it to me. She also recommended John Hersey’s novel The Wall, based on the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. I wasn’t nearly as impressed by The Wall as I was by Night, because the author, unlike Wiesel, hadn’t lived through the events he was describing. Little did I know that Hersey’s novel, which was quite faithful to the historical facts, would eventually be eclipsed by Mila 18, a florid and distorted popular novel on the same theme by Leon Uris, the author of the best-selling novel Exodus. Uris, as he did in Exodus, gave his Jewish hero a shiksa lover. They moved easily back and forth through the ghetto wall (somehow the Nazis never caught either of them), enjoying romantic assignations even as the last ghetto defenders were being burned and buried alive.

  If one is interested in postwar American images of Jews (as distinct from images of the Holocaust), there is no better place to start than Leon Uris. My father loved the book Exodus and the 1960 movie starring Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, and Sal Mineo. In this, he reacted like the millions of Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike (including his daughter), who were enthralled by the sexy Newman as Ari Ben Canaan, the Israeli independence fighter, and by Saint as his American girlfriend. Uris could conjure up a Jewish lover neither for his Israeli hero nor for a Jewish fighter in the Warsaw ghetto. Ari’s shiksa is a nurse, who finally overcomes her initial discomfort at the combative behavior of the Jews she meets in Israel, decides to stay there with her lover, and allies herself with the cause of the new Jewish state. He, in turn, overcomes his initial fear that a woman who looks like she could have flown in the day before from Darien might not fit in on a kibbutz. This was truly a romance fit for the fantasies of a fifteen-year-old. For several years, Paul Newman was my idea of what a Jewish man looked like (though I didn’t know that he, like me, had a Jewish father). And oh, how I wanted such a man for myself! Strong but sensitive, he might even recite the Song of Solomon while making love to me.

  Dad’s enthusiasm for Israel (the real state as well as the sentimental fantasy portrayed in Exodus) was boundless; he approved of everything about Israel, including—and especially—the incomparable courage and effectiveness of its army. This bellicose enthusiasm was uncharacteristic of my father, who was leery of everything to do with the military and military actions (with the exception of his generation’s war). My father’s boredom with military matters was so great that he blew his chance at a fat army pension by failing to keep up his reserve status as an officer after the war. As soon as the Nazis were defeated, he lost all interest in putting on a uniform.

  Israel’s army, however, was quite another matter. The Arabs, Dad said, would never be able to do to the Israelis what the Nazis had done to the Jews in Europe. The Jews would not go quietly again. This was something that Jewish parents were saying to Jewish children across America and around the world, but I was not a Jewish child and my father was not…well, perhaps in this instance he was behaving like any other American Jewish parent. The birth of Israel, and the new image of the Jew as a fierce and effective warrior, must have touched a deep chord within my dad. The boy who ran away when he was attacked and called “baby Jew-boy” was thrilled by the spectacle of an entire country of Jews who stood up to their enemies. He was happy that I had read the book and seen the movie of Exodus (in contrast to his indifferent reaction when he looked at the jacket of my library copy of Night) and more than happy to go with me himself when I begged (longing for another look at my idol Newman/Ari) to see the film a second time. Exodus was released around the same time as the capture of Eichmann, so it is not surprising that images from the trial and scenes from the movie were fused in my head for many years. Life magazine’s cover story on the arrest of the most prominent war criminal to evade the dock in Nuremberg was followed, only a few weeks afterward, with a cover on Exodus, the movie, featuring a still photo of the young
Sal Mineo playing a former Sonderkommando—a concentration camp inmate who had once performed the terrible task of hauling corpses out of the gas chambers and shoving them into the crematoria—reborn as a fighter for Israel. It is a tribute to the overwhelming imaginative hold of Hollywood that I never questioned the historical authenticity of Uris’s Exodus; to me, his tale was every bit as true as the testimony against Eichmann. I would have been surprised at the time had I been informed that Uris’s epic was not received nearly as favorably in Israel as it was in America and that the real Israeli captain of the real blockade-running ship had said the book was filled with inaccurate stereotypes and outright errors.

  There is no question that the effect of the movie, at least in the portion of Middle America where I lived, was to suggest that one good thing had arisen from the ashes of European Jewry. To my father, the rebirth of Israel was another proof that God existed. As we were coming out of the movie, he told me the existence of Israel was a “miracle” that proved God always had a plan for everything, even if it took a long time for his aims to be recognized by men. The Israelis were a free people, he pointed out, while Eichmann would surely never see the outside of a prison again, even if he didn’t receive a death sentence. “You mean, six million people had to die so there could be an Israel,” I said angrily. “If God had such a good plan, why can’t there still be an Israel without killing six million people?” “Miss Has-to-Know-It-All” was his reply.

  By the 1970s, when I began talking with my father about his and his family’s attitudes toward Jews, he remembered nothing of our conversations about Israel in 1960 and 1961. He had also forgotten that we had watched any portion of the Eichmann trial together, though he had a vague recollection of having been pleased at the sight of the war criminal confined within a glass booth. What my dad did remember was having read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem when it originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1963. He had disagreed with Arendt’s phrase, “the banality of evil,” and he remarked that nothing truly evil could ever be banal. “I guess what she meant,” he said, “was that Eichmann looked like your average ordinary accountant. But she mixed up the doer and the deed.” Then my father added, “I’m not a New York intellectual, I probably don’t know anything.” I told him, with absolute honesty, that if I had been writing book reviews in 1963, I would have begun my review with his words. He flushed with pleasure and said, “Well, you may be an intellectual but at least you’ve got some common sense.”

  In retrospect, it is easy to see that my father, for all of his intense desire to leave the baby Jew-boy behind, and to conceal that part of himself from his children, was a pretty poor liar. To put it another way, he lacked the essential attribute of all effective con men—the capacity to believe in his own fictions. Growing up in an environment free of Jewish cultural influences, I could not possibly have developed such an intense interest in Jews and things Jewish without the subtle cues I received at home. Furthermore, I received as many of these cues from my non-Jewish mother as from my father—if only because she encouraged me to read anything I wanted about Jews even as she suggested, without ever coming right out and saying so, that there was no reason to become embroiled in arguments about these books (or their appropriateness for a young teenager) with my dad. I cannot imagine what my life would have been like if my mother had been as devout and single-minded a Catholic as the man Aunt Edith married. At one point during my childhood, Aunt Edith offered to pay for my college education, on the condition that I be sent to the Roman Catholic Trinity University in Washington. My parents turned her down without giving the offer a second thought.

  Throughout our childhood, my brother was as indifferent to as I was interested in everything to do with Jews and religion. I believe this was partly a matter of the age difference between us—Rob was too young to have been impressed by all of the somber war anniversaries that made such an impression on me—but mainly a matter of temperament. My brother was not, at that time, an avid reader. He was more outgoing, more athletic, more popular, more in tune (at least outwardly) with our suburban environment. Rob and I were teen allies: we talked not about the Bomb or the Jews or the fate of the nation but about tactics to get our own way with our parents. My little brother had toughened up considerably since the days when he saved me chocolate cake in spite of my cruel pretend-suicide. He had become a hardened negotiator who demanded $5 cash when I begged him to fake being desperately sick so that my mother would have to stay home and take care of him instead of embarrassing me by attending a high school basketball game. At the game, I planned to meet a boyfriend of whom Mom vehemently disapproved, and I just knew she would ruin the evening for me. Of course, we both got caught, but Rob somehow contrived to keep my money. How could I share my lofty thoughts on history with someone who would do that to his loving sister? Nearly two decades would pass before my brother, after he became a father himself, began to share my interest in the hidden history of our father’s family.

  —

  DURING MY senior year in high school, I began practicing the craft of journalism, which would become my life’s work. My entry into the newspaper world stimulated my curiosity about Jews still further, because many of my editors and colleagues at my first job, on the Michigan State University college newspaper, were Jewish. They were the first openly Jewish Jews (apart from my high school French teacher, “Madame” Betty Goldstein, whose last name was identifiably Jewish even in Okemos) I had ever known.

  I started working on the State News, which was no ordinary student newspaper but a profitmaking enterprise run on a professional basis with salaried student editors, while I was still in high school. After I attended a summer journalism seminar on Michigan State’s East Lansing campus, about a fifteen-minute drive from our home in Okemos, the State News editors asked me if I would like to continue working there after school during my senior year. Would I ever! The job offered me an escape from the boredom of the obligatory but superfluous final year of high school, which I regarded as an infuriating obstacle in the way of my plan to finish college as quickly as possible so that I could go to work on a big-city newspaper.

  Michigan State had a substantial number of Jewish students, most of them from New York. MSU’s archrival, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, had long been a magnet for New York students whose parents could not afford pricier private institutions but were unwilling to consign their children to the then unimpressive New York State university system. MSU, still known disdainfully as “Moo U” because of its huge agricultural school, was a second choice but had managed to attract a growing number of out-of-state students by the early sixties. President John Hannah, determined to improve the academic standing of his school and achieve the national reputation enjoyed by his Ann Arbor rival, had made a concerted effort to attract top students from other states. In 1962, Hannah inaugurated a program offering a $100 bonus to any National Merit Scholar who chose MSU. This small carrot, combined with an intensive public relations campaign informing high school seniors and their parents about the advantages of the university’s Honors College for top-ranking students, was hugely successful and soon brought more Merit Scholars to MSU than to any other university in the country. By the time I began working on the State News in the fall of 1962, Moo U was rapidly being transformed from a parochial backwater into a cosmopolitan institution with an increasingly distinguished faculty (Hannah also offered huge salary inducements to lure big-name professors away from better-known universities) and a more heterogeneous student body. The Jews on the student newspaper, nearly all of them from New York, were part of the change occurring in every aspect of campus life. The newspaper’s faculty adviser, and my first professional mentor, was Lou Berman (who was not a New Yorker but the Jewish owner of a small-town newspaper in Whitehall, Michigan). The advertising manager was Leo Goldberg (not his real name), a swarthy, wisecracking Jew who bore a slight resemblance to Lenny Bruce and who fascinated me with his brashness, his open pride in being a Jew, and hi
s sexual charisma. I knew I was much too young for Leo, but that didn’t stop me from dreaming. I must have talked a little bit too much about him at home, because my dad dropped by the offices of the State News one day and insisted, in a highly unsubtle and mortifying (to me) fashion, on meeting “that smart ad manager I’ve been hearing about.” His comment was succinct: “That’s a Sammy Glick if I ever saw one.” I had no idea who Sammy Glick was, and Dad told me he was a character in a novel. When I read Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?, I accused my dad of being an anti-Semite. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Hustlers come in all races and religions. This just happens to be a Jewish hustler.”

  My father need not have worried about Leo, who was certainly interested in blondes but definitely not interested in seventeen-year-olds. He had two girlfriends (that I knew of), an adoring shiksa named Mary Ann, and the stunningly beautiful (and Jewish) Debbie. Mary Ann was always hanging around the office, hoping for a last-minute date with Leo, while Debbie was a self-possessed young woman who would never have thrown herself at a man. Poor Mary Ann. Leo never called her in advance for a date, frequently failed to show up when they had agreed to meet, and generally treated her like dirt. The sexual dynamic of their relationship—her yearning, his callousness—was obvious even to someone as inexperienced with men as I was.

  I didn’t connect any of this with his being a Jew and her being a snub-nosed shiksa until I met Debbie at the annual party Mr. Berman (whom I never called by his first name) threw for the State News staff. Leo’s respectful attitude toward Debbie stunned me: I had assumed he treated all girls the way he treated Mary Ann. Debbie and Leo, Mr. Berman told me, planned to be married after graduation. He had tried to warn Mary Ann that she was wasting her time (Mr. Berman was a real yenta who knew everything that was going on with his student editors), but Mary Ann wouldn’t listen when he told her there was no chance that Leo would ever marry a gentile. I don’t know whether this was true or whether Mr. Berman wanted it to be true. By then, I had begun to feel as sorry for Debbie as I did for Mary Ann. I had already heard the conventional wisdom that Jewish men make the best husbands, but I had ample reason for doubting the applicability of the generalization to Leo. When he told me my first JAP joke, I wondered why, if he wouldn’t consider marrying a Christian, he was telling jokes with Jewish women as the targets. Of course I laughed, as we all did in those days to show that we were one of the boys. A decade would pass before Jewish feminists pointed out that JAP humor was the creation of Jewish men projecting anti-Semitic stereotypes onto Jewish women. Greedy. Pushy. Manipulative.