Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

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  THE SEVENTIES, during which the feminist movement forced a continuous reconsideration and renegotiation of privileges and obligations between men and women, were hard on all marriages. Settling in New York after our return from Moscow in 1972, Tony and I lived in a world in which unions of much longer duration than ours—marriages with children to be considered—were collapsing all around us. An additional problem was our shared profession, even though our journalistic interests and experiences also created a powerful bond between us. While we were never in direct competition for the same job or the same writing assignment, we were engaged in a fierce indirect contest in which we measured our work, and our professional selves, against each other. This was an abrasive, corrosive, and ultimately exhausting process that made it necessary for us to divorce in order to save a remnant of the love, respect, and common enthusiasms we had brought to our marriage. The zeitgeist of the Me Decade was, to be sure, the main factor in our divorce, but the huge blank spaces in my father’s and his family’s history—and the persistent sense of insecurity he had communicated to me—also played a role. Many years would pass before I began to understand that I had been raised on the unspoken (and all the more powerful for being unspoken) message that malleability in the pursuit of social mobility is no vice. Had I not been my father’s daughter, I would not have entered a marriage in which my husband and I had failed to discuss something as important as the reasons why we were pledging ourselves to each other in a Christian sanctuary where neither of us truly belonged. While Tony and I were in the process of a sorrowful but nonrancorous divorce in the late seventies, I told a friend that I hadn’t wanted to veto a church wedding, and spoil everyone’s pleasure in the occasion, by taking an antireligious stance that was, after all, based on an abstract principle that had little to do with everyday life. “But people are their principles,” she replied. That is an overstatement, but I cannot deny that my views on religion, while they have little to do with quotidian matters, have had a great deal to do with what I hold most dear in life—with the people I love and the passions that engage me as a writer. It is now difficult for me to recapture the state of mind that allowed me to begin a marriage by setting aside one of my most deeply held—yes, sacred—convictions. People are more (and frequently less) than the sum of their principles, but some principles matter more than others.

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  DURING MY thirties, while my marriage unraveled and I moved from straightforward journalism to more analytical historical writing, I began to comprehend, bit by bit, the impact of the unfinished business in my father’s family on my own life. This was due in part to living in New York City, the first place where I had ever felt completely at home. In an environment with the thrillingly high human decibel level I remembered from my childhood visits, I fitted in in a way I never had anywhere else. And I saw that my dad, after more than thirty-five years in the Midwest, had remained a New Yorker in many respects. When my parents visited me in Manhattan, my mother would become anxious when two strangers started arguing with each other on the street. Only recently, when I fell into a mild dispute with a fellow bus passenger about Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s pedestrian barricades and attitude toward political demonstrations—all right, so I might have compared His Honor to “the little man on the balcony”—my mother turned to me and said, sotto voce, “That’s a total stranger, why are you opening your mouth? What if he had a gun? Why do you care what he thinks?” “He doesn’t have a gun, Mom.” “How do you know?”

  My dad, by contrast, relished the abrasiveness of New York discourse and easily slipped back into the rhythms of city life—disappearing into the subway, where he remembered all of the stops; shaking his fist at errant (more errant than in his youth) taxi drivers; racing off to the deli on Sunday morning for bagels and lox. He used the word salmon, though, instead of the customary New York lox. He remembered his mother telling him that salmon was the correct term for what they were eating and that lox was a “vulgar colloquialism.” Way too Jewish. My dad told me this with considerable amusement in his voice; by his late sixties, he had begun to view his mother and his upbringing with greater detachment.

  During these years, my father, Uncle Ozzie, and Aunt Edith all began to open up more about their childhoods. The idea of writing a book about my father’s family began to crystallize during the second half of the seventies. I never explicitly told Dad that I was gathering material for a book, but Uncle Ozzie did know—or rather, he guessed. And his help was invaluable, because he was the only one of the three siblings old enough to have known his grandfather, Max, and to possess such basic information as our common ancestor’s first name. Over lunch at the 21 Club—Ozzie’s favorite New York restaurant—he cocked his head and skewered me with the intense gray eyes he, my dad, and I had inherited from Eve Jackson Jacoby. “Of course you’re writing a book about all this,” he said. “I’ll help you all I can, ask me anything you want, just make sure to present me in a favorable light for the ages.” In his late seventies, Ozzie, having announced and rescinded his “retirement” from bridge on several occasions, had scarcely slowed down at all. Still standing over six feet and boasting a mane of curly white hair, still tripping over his own sentences because his mind moved faster than his tongue, still bubbling with the manic energy he and my father shared, Ozzie always turned up with no warning. He had a constitutional aversion to calling and making plans in advance: if I didn’t happen to be home when he was making one of his whirlwind passages through town, he was always surprised and aggrieved. He never came to my apartment and always took me out to eat; his refusals of my invitations for a home-cooked meal were, I suspect, born of his suspicion that I might not satisfy his demands for “white” food. (The only other person I have ever heard of who shared this preoccupation with the color of his food was the Broadway producer Leland Hayward.) Restaurants like 21, where Ozzie had been a customer since the 1930s, catered to his taste for what was essentially baby food—the only exception being his insistence on very rare steak. On the day Ozzie got me to confess that yes, I was writing a book, he was tucking into a repast consisting of chicken hash smothered in cream sauce, creamed corn, and mashed potatoes, followed by a coconut-covered dessert called a snowball. All of this was accompanied by milk. Ozzie shunned alcohol, an abstemiousness attributable not to any drinking problem but to a conditioning regimen he considered necessary to maintain the alertness and stamina required of him during marathon card tournaments. He was also—unusually for a man of his generation—a committed nonsmoker.

  My eccentric, and egocentric, uncle really tried to help me. Sometimes the phone would ring because an old memory, usually of something his father told him, had just bobbed to the surface. He called me excitedly one night in the early eighties because he had just recalled his father’s bitterness about the exclusion of Jews from social fraternities at Columbia during the 1880s. “Does that help you?” he asked. “I still don’t really understand why anyone would care about fraternities, but maybe you can make sense of it.” I have absolutely no way of knowing whether Ozzie had been hurt in any way by anti-Semitism; if he had, the experience was buried beneath a monumental self-regard that armed him with a shell of indifference to the opinions of others.

  Ozzie demonstrated his thick skin in 1969, when the Internal Revenue Service went after him for more than $250,000 in back taxes on what the IRS claimed were gambling winnings and Ozzie claimed as gambling losses. He promptly filed a lawsuit disputing the IRS’s findings. The widely publicized trial, reported in Time magazine and The New York Times as well as in the Dallas papers, did not involve Ozzie’s income from professional bridge tournaments or writing but from his extracurricular gambling activities. (The IRS basically took the position that anyone as successful as my uncle was at professional cardplaying must have been equally successful at after-hours games and must therefore have underreported his income.) One newspaper observed that “the white-haired Jacoby listened with an amused expression” as h
is wife, Mary Zita, testified that he had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because he was “like an alcoholic who is drunk. He can’t control himself.” Aunt Mary testified that Ozzie had cashed in his own life insurance policy, and sold most of her stocks, to make good on his gambling debts. Ozzie had paid off his bookies with checks made out to cash, which the IRS did not regard as sufficient proof of losses. Ozzie told the tax court judge that many of his creditors, who wanted to hide their identity as gamblers, had endorsed his checks with other names or signed their own names in illegible scrawls. Many of his poker losses, he testified, came in high-stakes games—for at least $5 a chip—at the Texas, Petroleum, Cipango, and Dallas country clubs in his home town. Small wonder that his cronies at the Dallas Country Club didn’t care that Ozzie was a Jew! Eventually, as is the case with most such disputes, Ozzie and the IRS reached an out-of-court settlement. At the time (and to the end of his life) Ozzie was unrepentant and unashamed. The case had one important domestic outcome, however: Ozzie ceded (or was forced to cede) complete control of the family finances to his wife, whom he dubbed the Boss. He accepted this with equanimity, and although he did not die a wealthy man (which he surely would have had he not been a compulsive gambler), he did die a solvent one.

  For my father, as the owner of an accounting business in a small town, the national disclosure of Ozzie’s tax problems in Time was more than a trifle embarrassing. It is not unreasonable for people to assume that a man’s brother might also be his tax preparer (though this was emphatically not the case). Dad had reason to be relieved when Ozzie’s real accountant, the unfortunate Harold S. Sparks, was called to testify at the trial. I was living in Moscow at the time of Ozzie’s tax travails, but my father told me years later that his chief reaction had not been one of embarrassment but of relief that he was not the one forced to account for gambling losses. “That could have been me—would have been me if I hadn’t gotten control of my gambling,” he said. “And I wouldn’t ever have been able to make enough money to pay off what I owed.” I asked Dad if he didn’t envy Ozzie because his legitimate earning capacity was large enough for him to eventually make good on his debts. My father looked at me with unfeigned astonishment. “You mean, do I think that if only I were a bridge champion and not an accountant, I could have had the fun of gambling on the side and gotten away with it? Are you serious? That’s the kind of thinking that gets people into the hole in the first place. I may have thought that way at thirty, but it wouldn’t even occur to me today. Which, come to think of it, shows how far I’ve come in my life.”

  I repeated these remarks to Ozzie, and he nodded. “That just proves what I’m telling you,” he said. “Your father has grown up to be a hell of a man. A good man. Which, considering what our father was like, is a huge achievement. Not huge. Colossal.” I never told my dad about this conversation—an omission I deeply regret, because I know that praise from his older brother would have meant a great deal to him. I can only explain my behavior in terms of the inchoate sense of disloyalty I felt whenever I talked about my father with my uncle—a feeling rooted in my knowledge that Ozzie had always been his mother’s favorite and that my father had been deeply wounded as a result. Even though my dad and Ozzie became much closer during what turned out to be the last decade of both of their lives, I suppose I didn’t really want my father to know how much I had come to love my uncle, in spite of his faults, as I began to know him better. I wasn’t giving my dad enough credit, for he never considered love a finite commodity, in which any tenderness directed toward one must be subtracted from the total available to another. When my book tour for Wild Justice brought me to Dallas in the autumn of 1983, my father was deeply gratified that Ozzie insisted I stay in his home. Ozzie had already been stricken by the cancer that would kill him nine months later, and he was battling chemotherapy-induced nausea, but he wouldn’t hear of my staying in a hotel. He had a special reason for wanting to see me: he had gone through as many old papers as he could unearth from the boxes of unsorted memorabilia in his house, and he had prepared a list of birth and death dates that might help me find out more about his father’s, and his grandfather’s, generation of Jacobys.

  It was my good fortune that most of my Jacoby relatives lived into their ninth decade with intact minds and memories. In my father’s generation, he was the only sibling who died before age eighty. Moreover, the Jacoby men—beginning with my great-grandfather—were all over thirty when they married and started having children. Max Jacoby, born in 1831, had three grandchildren—my father, aunt, and uncle—who were alive and well 150 years later.

  Because Ozzie never lived at home for any length of time after 1918, he was unfamiliar with the day-to-day details of his family’s life (apart from its need for his financial contributions) during the period of progressive paternal withdrawal and marital disintegration that scarred my father’s childhood. But he told me one story, during our final meeting in Dallas, that certainly goes a long way toward explaining why my father disliked talking or thinking about his boyhood.

  After a visit to the Bronx Zoo when he was about five years old, my father somehow got the idea that his stuffed teddy bears had once been alive, and he refused to play with them. His easily annoyed mother boxed up the bears and took them to his school, suggesting—no doubt out of a sense of noblesse oblige—that the kindergarten teacher distribute them among her son’s less fortunate classmates. My father was thus forced to endure the double pain of seeing his beloved toys given away to other children while being reminded of his anguish at the thought that his teddies had once been alive and had been killed for use as playthings. He told his classmates that the bears should be given a proper burial, and most of the children scoffed at him. Only one boy took my father’s worries to heart, and the two buried the bear in a vacant lot. That pal was my father’s schoolyard defender, Fred Groff. Ozzie, who was seventeen at the time and still in the army, heard the story secondhand from his mother, who caught the boys burying the bear and promptly sent her son to bed without his supper. “Mother’s point was how could I have left home, when Bobbie needed a ‘brotherly influence’ to make him grow up and stop clinging to these childish ideas. Father had been no use at all, she said, because he told Mother he didn’t see any reason, no, no reason at all, why Bobbie shouldn’t bury the bears if it would make him happier. So you see, though your aunt Edith would never admit it, Father also had his side when it came to the story of that marriage. Mother’s view was that Bobbie was just too tenderhearted for his own good, and he needed to grow out of that. Well, he never did grow out of that, did he? A good thing for you and your brother.”

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  UNCLE OZZIE’s story about the teddy bears offered a different, more sympathetic prism through which my grandfather might be viewed. He was a man who, whatever his failings, was able to understand the emotions of an imaginative and sensitive child. That he allowed his wife to inflict so much emotional damage on that child is another black mark on his record, but my father might have suffered more acutely had his father physically left home. Many years would pass, and both my uncle and my father would be dead, before I would begin to think of Oswald Jacoby more as a tragic than as an evil character. The cache of articles about my grandfather’s witty 1909 defense of the feckless literary agent Broughton Brandenburg, which I unearthed only recently, reinforced this shift in perspective: for a man of such immense ability to have become his own worst enemy is surely the essence of tragedy. I would not have wanted this Shakespearean character for a father, but I cannot deny that both of his sons—who had much better luck with wives than their father did—inherited many of Oswald’s character failings (albeit in attenuated form) along with his charm and formidable intelligence. I loved my father and my uncle, so, at a merciful remove, a part of me loves a part of the self-destructive grandfather I never met.

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  I HOPE THAT my dad forgot the maternal cruelty expressed in the teddy bear episode—but somehow I doubt it. Dad could neve
r stand to be around the stuffed hunting trophies that so many of his neighbors had mounted in their basement recreation rooms. I have an indelible image of my dad disrupting a party when one neighbor unveiled his newly acquired glass-eyed buck with antlers. “It takes a real man to bring that home,” he said. “Was it a fair fight? Did the deer have a gun?” The neighbors didn’t hold it against Dad: most of the women agreed with him anyway, and the men accepted his disdain for hunting as yet another eccentricity over which my father had no control. Dad’s contempt for hunting had been inculcated in him by his father, who told him that “Jewish people don’t hunt other living creatures.” Dad told me this only a month before he died of lung cancer, when he allowed many elusive memories of childhood to come flooding back. When Dad asked why Jewish people didn’t hunt, his father replied, “It’s simple. We know how it feels to be hunted.” This was the only time my father recalled his father using a first-person pronoun when he talked, as he rarely did, about the heritage he had abandoned.

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  DURING THESE years, I also brought up the subject of the family’s rejection of Judaism with Aunt Edith, whom I approached with considerable trepidation not only because she was the only truly devout Catholic in the family but also because she was a thorny, critical personality (in some respects very like her mother). Neither my father nor Ozzie had much to do with their sister, who talked unendingly about religion, treated her brothers like two-year-olds, and (perhaps the most important factor) rubbed both of their wives the wrong way. While I never came to know or to love my aunt as I loved my uncle, I found, as I became better acquainted with her during the eighties, that she was a far more complex, and a much warmer, person than she had seemed to me when I was younger. I never made any real attempt to get to know my aunt until after my father’s death in 1986. She had flown out to Michigan for my father’s funeral, and I had told her of my desire to find out more about what had made the Jacoby family turn away from Judaism so decisively. She remarked, in the prickly fashion that pushed away the very people she most wanted to draw close, that she supposed I was finally asking for her help only because both of her brothers were dead. Yet she responded with surprising (to me) good humor when I conceded that she was absolutely right and asked, “Is that such a bad reason for me to be coming to you now?” Edith half barked and half laughed in a fashion that reminded me of Uncle Ozzie, and she said that the question of why the Jacobys were so ashamed of being Jews had always interested her too. A few weeks later, she sent me several nineteenth-century photographs of both the Sondheim and Jacoby families.