by Susan Jacoby
When she was young, Edith was the only member of her family who was attracted to religion, who noticed or felt deprived by the absence of religious observance in the Jacoby home. And Edith was the only one of the three siblings who took note of the confusion in the household over the relationship between Judaism as a religion and Jewishness as cultural tradition. For her, as for many nonobservant Jews today, the confusion was embodied in the way the family celebrated—and did not celebrate—Christmas.
Ozzie, Edith, and my father had longed for a Christmas tree as children. As an adult, no one loved the holidays more than my dad; I still remember the entranced look on his face as he held my hand tightly while we looked down from a balcony upon a magnificent fifty-foot tree rising through the central atrium of Marshall Field’s landmark Walnut Room. (That tree, in the 1879 building replacing the store that burned down in the great Chicago fire of 1871, was as much a Chicago Christmas tradition as the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is in New York.) Decades later, long after I had discovered the secret of his Jewish birth, Dad made a poignant comment about the difference between his childhood memories of Christmas and mine. “I didn’t look forward to Christmas when I was a boy,” he said, “because we didn’t make any fuss about it at home. I would have been ashamed to invite anyone home during the holidays—not that I ever invited many friends to our house—because there weren’t any decorations. I used to make up stories for my schoolmates about our tree, and what we had for Christmas dinner. But you have all of those memories that I only wanted to have. So you see, I never could have imagined that you would think I was depriving you of something because I didn’t tell you my parents were Jewish. The way I saw it, I was giving you what I hadn’t been given.”
Aunt Edith, seven years older than my dad, had a more complex view of her family’s childhood Christmases—or non-Christmases. That she had given an immense amount of thought to the subject, and had worked hard to unearth her memories, was evident to me when, over a long lunch, she suggested that I take notes. There was plenty for me to write down, as Edith recalled yet another source of serious conflict in her upbringing.
Naturally, we kids wanted a tree. Like your father, I didn’t want to bring friends home from school around the holidays because our house looked so bare and odd, when everyone else’s was beautifully decorated. Father explained—if you can call it an explanation—that we didn’t have a tree because it wasn’t a Jewish thing to do. This was very, very confusing to me and to Ozzie—Bobby hadn’t been born yet. We didn’t understand what a tree had to do with being Jewish, or not being Jewish, because we didn’t know what being Jewish meant. My mother’s brother, Simon, went to something called a temple, which was where Jews went, but none of us, including Mother, ever went there. Father wouldn’t have allowed it. We didn’t go to any church either, though there were Christian prayers in the private schools Ozzie and I attended. The holidays were a tense time. Mother would tell Father that we might as well have a Christmas tree, since the Jewish religion wasn’t practiced in our home, and they hadn’t told their children anything about what the religion meant. She was being sarcastic; I think this was her way of saying she disagreed with Father and would have liked us to know more about Judaism. But she never did anything about it, just sniped. I can only assume that even though Father had no respect for any religion, something in him was still Jewish enough that he didn’t want to do something as Christian as having a tree in his house. After all, Christmas does mean “Christ’s Mass”—even though no one pays much attention to that these days. Uncle Harold and his family did have a tree, and we envied our cousins. Father said his brother had become “very very High Church”—we didn’t know what that meant either—since he had married Aunt Annie. He would put on an English accent and purse up his lips when he said that, the way your father and your uncle used to do when they were making fun of someone.
By that point, in the late 1980s, I had discovered that Uncle Harold’s real first name was Levi. This fascinated Edith almost as much as it did my long-lost cousin, Maclear Jacoby Jr. This piece of information jogged Edith’s memory, and she recalled that her mother had wanted to call her Rachel, but her father had insisted on a first name that did not sound Jewish. “Mother told me this in the 1920s, after she and Father had become completely estranged. Her Sondheim grandmother, whom she never knew, had been named Rachel. My name was just one of the many things she held against Father—and probably against me too. Which was ironic, since Mother’s first name was also Edith.” My grandparents’ decision to name two of their three children after living relatives—themselves—was also a measure of their detachment from Jewish naming practices. Uncle Ozzie, with his full name of Oswald Nathaniel, was a “Junior,” though no one ever called him that, and he conceded that his name was a reflection of his father’s aspirations to WASP status.
Aunt Edith said she felt an inner “spiritual hunger” from early childhood. In her teens, she read a great deal about various religions—she was surprised to hear that I had embarked upon the same quest forty years later—and tried out Protestant and Catholic church services. But Edith had never entered a synagogue, even though she knew her uncle Simon had once been an observant Jew and a member of a temple. “I think I knew this would have been intolerable to Father,” she said. “And if he found out, he might have blamed Simon, whom we all loved dearly.”
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IN A STRANGE twist of fate, Uncle Si, the last observant Jew in either the Sondheim or Jacoby families, was buried in 1970 from a black Christian evangelical church in his neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens. Since the 1930s, he and his sisters had lived together in the same house in an area (not far from their childhood home in Brooklyn) that was once largely Jewish but became predominantly black during the sixties. After Mabel, Carrie, and Adele died during the first half of that decade, Aunt Edith and Uncle Ted tried to persuade Si to move in with them. In his eighties, he refused to leave the home and the neighborhood where he had spent most of his adult life. Edith—aware that her uncle was probably the most stubborn member of a stubborn family—eventually stopped trying to coax him into leaving for the literally greener pastures of Staten Island.
Si’s African-American neighbors looked after the frail old white man in their midst, and when he died, they arranged to hold his funeral in their church. In addition to his neighbors, Uncle Si’s funeral was attended by Uncle Ozzie and Aunt Mary; their son Jon and his wife, Caroline; and Aunt Edith and Uncle Ted. (If Ted thought there had been an extraordinary number of black people at my wedding, he must have felt truly surrounded at a service where his wife’s uncle was eulogized by an African-American pastor and the hallelujahs were sung by a gospel choir.) I was in Moscow at the time, and I do not know why my father failed to make the trip to New York for the funeral of his much-loved uncle. This service in an African-American community church was a first for the Jacobys and the Sondheims; the only variety of funeral my family has never participated in during the past hundred years is a Jewish funeral. I am certainly sorry that I missed Si’s farewell, which I only heard about recently from my cousin Jon. Neither Ozzie nor Edith, who told me subsequently about Si’s having once been a religious Jew, ever mentioned the interesting circumstances surrounding his burial. I simply assumed—a terrible mistake in my family!—that Si had been buried as a Jew. My guess is that Si did not abandon Judaism but that Jewish institutions, including his temple, abandoned the neighborhood when most of the Jewish residents moved out. It would have been very much in character for Si to have become involved with the church (I have no way of knowing whether he was actually a member) attended by the neighbors who helped him maintain his independence in old age.
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EVEN IN college, when her father could not possibly have known anything about her religious practices, Edith never gave Judaism a try. At Smith, her reluctance to identify with Jews in any way was reinforced by the social separation of Jews and gentiles at the Seven Sisters as well
as the men’s Ivy League schools, a separation encouraged by the institutions themselves through dormitory room assignments. Edith—although she, like my father, had declared “no religious preference” on her Smith application—was assigned another Jewish student as a roommate. (At many schools, the practice of assigning Jews and gentiles roommates of “their own kind” lasted into the early sixties.)
“My freshman-year roommate was a girl from a very wealthy German Jewish family,” Edith remembered. “They lived somewhere on Fifth Avenue—I don’t know exactly where, because we didn’t get along very well and I was never invited to her home—and her family belonged to Temple Emmanu-El. She made it very clear that she resented having to room with me, a nobody from Brooklyn, instead of one of the gentile girls who had been her classmates at the Brearley School in Manhattan. And I resented it too. It was very clear that the only reason we had been assigned to room together was that we were both Jewish. All of the Jewish girls were paired off in the dorms with other Jewish girls. When there were mixers, and we went to the boys’ colleges for weekends, there was no dating across Jewish-Christian lines. No official dating, that is. I gravitated to Catholic boys—not that there were so many of them in Ivy League schools in those days—and I think that was part of the attraction for me. They were outsiders too, in a way, and although their families wouldn’t have been happy to know that their sons were going out with Jewish girls, there was more of an equality. Those boys named Lowell and Peabody and Cabot would never have gone out with an Edith Jacoby. And I thought, well, Father was right. There’s really nothing good that can come of being identified as a persecuted minority.”
After Edith graduated from Smith and began working as a salesgirl at B. Altman, she fell in love with the notorious Feeney. They were married by a justice of the peace because, Edith recalled, “he told me his parents would never accept his marrying a Jewish girl, so it would be better not to make a fuss and throw it in their faces. Of course, he never had any intention of staying married to me. He just wanted to get me into bed. Why would he want to celebrate a wedding to me with friends and family? Only when I met my Ted, and he waited and worked and prayed so that we could be married in the Church, did I realize what real love was.”
I listened to this account on a long drive from New York to a Connecticut convent where the widowed Edith was staying while she visited her late husband’s nieces and nephews. Edith’s frugality and indifference to the comfort—or the lack thereof—of her surroundings did not change after her husband’s death. Other wealthy widows might have checked into the Plaza Hotel when they visited New York, but Edith was much happier in a room with a single bed, a crucifix on the wall, and a chapel where she could attend daily Mass with the nuns instead of having to travel to a church. That day, she did consent to go out for lunch at a lavish country inn, but she refused to order dessert because it wasn’t included in the price of the entree.
Over our glasses of wine (which Edith, surprisingly, had suggested) she earnestly explained that her hasty, miserable first marriage was “all part of God’s plan.” Her eyes glowed as she described the “miracle” of finally being able to marry Ted before a priest. “God was watching over me from the beginning,” she said, “because I never could have been happy with Feeney, who could not be faithful to any woman. When I married Ted, I not only found real love but I was also freed to live out the religious life I had always longed for with a man who had a deep spiritual side.” I was doing my best to say nothing, so as not to interrupt Edith’s stream of consciousness, but I must have betrayed my impatience by some physical gesture. She stopped in mid-sentence and said, “I can tell just from the way your chin is tilted that you think I’m a nut—loony Aunt Edith. Well, I can’t explain faith—or the longing for faith—to someone who doesn’t have it. But I can tell you this: if Ted and I had had children, I never would have concealed the fact that I was born Jewish from them the way your father and Ozzie did from you kids. I have too much respect for religion. And also, I am a Catholic who believes deeply in Judaism as the forerunner of Christianity. I was thrilled when Pope John the Twenty-third came along and reached out to the Jewish people in a way no pope ever had. I felt more Jewish after I became a Catholic—certainly more Jewish than Mother or Father ever did, teaching their children nothing about where they came from. And you know, I think it’s wonderful if you write a book about that generation, and the one before, because my main view of our family is how confusing it is not to be able to stand up and be proud of who you are, to claim the past that belongs to you.”
Perhaps it is not surprising, in view of the seriousness with which Edith approached religion, that she was the only one of the siblings who gave any thought to the Jewish covenant when she converted to Catholicism. “If Father had been around when God was choosing the Chosen People,” Ozzie quipped, “he would have said, ‘Thank you very much, you’re too kind, but I’d rather you choose someone else as your favorite.’ ” For Edith, the Jewish covenant was no laughing matter. Like other Jews who made the extraordinary leap of faith into Catholicism, she regarded her new faith not as the negation but the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, an attitude that gave rise to her pious pronouncements, so mystifying to me as a child, about Our Lord having been born a Jew.
As an idealistic young woman, Edith was impressed (as the young Eleanor Roosevelt had been twenty-five years earlier) by the work of the settlement houses on New York’s Lower East Side. She had hoped to become a social worker after graduating from Smith, but the settlement houses ran largely on the volunteer labor of socially conscious (and conscientious) wealthy women who did not need to earn a living wage. Edith, well aware that she would be required to contribute to her mother’s support, established herself in retail sales and eventually worked her way up to an executive position in Macy’s personnel department. One of the mysteries of Edith’s life is how a young woman who admired Jane Addams and Dorothy Day not only fell in love with but stayed happily married to a man who was not only a religious but a political conservative. Ted regarded FDR as a dangerous left-winger, and, although an immensely charitable man in his private life, he believed that New Deal public health and welfare programs were the work of the devil.
Edith gave no hint that she did not fully share her husband’s views until after his death, when she went through a metamorphosis that startled the rest of the family. As a widow, beginning in the mid-1970s, she became deeply involved with Catholic groups pushing for racial and economic justice in society as a whole and for reforms within the Church. Edith wanted a priesthood opened to women and to married men. She had gay friends and declared her disagreement with those who branded homosexuals as mortal sinners. Both my dad and Ozzie regarded her involvement in left-wing Catholic circles as yet another bizarre manifestation of the true-believer temperament that used to manifest itself in pilgrimages to Lourdes and Fatima. I was equally astonished, and initially baffled, by my aunt’s change of heart in old age, because I would have expected her to ally herself with Catholic right-wingers who pined for the Latin Mass, conducted by a priest who kept his back turned to the congregation while celebrating mysteries deemed too sacred for the eyes of the ordinary faithful. After I became better acquainted with Edith in the late 1980s, I came to understand that her enthusiasms in old age were a throwback to her social concerns as a young woman, to a hunger for meaning that might have found an outlet in service to others but was channeled instead into a religious devotion bordering on fanaticism. The personality of the girl who once longed to help immigrants on the Lower East Side had not disappeared during decades as an affluent Staten Island matron, the wife of a Papal Knight; after Ted’s death, Edith’s youthful self reasserted itself in the aging woman’s desire for what she called a more “inclusive” Catholicism.
Edith (again, unlike her brothers) had agonized over the Church’s historical role vis-à-vis Jews. On trips to Italy with her husband, who, as a Papal Knight, was granted private papal audiences, she met thr
ee popes—Pius XII, John XXIII, and Paul VI. In the late sixties and seventies, as historians dissected the Vatican’s role during World War II, Edith became increasingly upset by the harsh assessments of Pius XII’s actions with regard to Jews. She was distressed not because she rejected these assessments but because she feared there was a great deal of truth in them. “I had heard the same thing from priests in places like Assisi,” Edith told me. “I couldn’t dismiss their opinions as anti-Catholic propaganda; they were there during the war, and they knew that most of the help for Jews had come from priests and bishops who acted on their own.” Edith sent me a book titled The Assisi Underground, which describes the activities of Father Ruffino Niccacci, a Franciscan who was instrumental in saving hundreds of Jews (for which he was honored by Israel in its Avenue of the Righteous, established in tribute to gentile rescuers). “You see,” she wrote me, “the history of Jews and Catholics is not only the Inquisition.”