by Susan Jacoby
Edith’s admiration for the clergymen and nuns who acted on their own to save Italian Jews played an important role in her attraction to Catholic groups dedicated to the renewal of the Church from the bottom up rather than the top down. With her unshakable, albeit socially adaptable faith, Edith tried to convince me to give Catholicism another try. “Real religion, true religion, religion that feeds the hungry and rescues those who are persecuted, doesn’t come from a small group of men in Rome but from the hearts of everyone,” she said. “I wish you could see that.”
One of the last things my aunt said to me before her mind clouded over was that she hoped I would someday realize “that you can be both a Jew and a Catholic—just as Jesus was.” She pursed her lips—that Jacoby twitch of amusement—when she recalled Uncle Ozzie’s response to her statement of dual loyalty: “But Sis, think about what happened to him.”
XII
Loyalties
HALF-JEW. IT HAS A nasty sound, with its “half-breed” connotations, even if not intended nastily. When someone—Jew or gentile—calls you a half-Jew, don’t expect an invitation to join his club. The Nazi definition of a Mischling, embodying the detested mating of Aryan and Jew, speaks for itself. The inevitable association with the Nuremberg Laws, and their life-and-death calibration based on the number and propinquity of one’s Jewish ancestors, has rendered the term “half-Jew” especially suspect, especially unsettling, when applied by one Jew to another. The writer Cynthia Ozick once noted casually in a lecture—her observation presumably was intended not in a pejorative but in a descriptive sense—that the Diaspora has produced no major Jewish writers, “unless you insist on including two French half-Jews, Montaigne and Proust.” Do I insist? I would like to. Actually, I would like to argue with both halves of the proposition.
What I hear, when Jews talk about half-Jews in this fashion, is an undertone of exclusion. Not quite kosher. Not quite One of Us. Ozick’s remark reminds me of the first time I met my future mother-in-law (the same woman who once tried to talk her son out of a bar mitzvah), when she asked if it was true that I was a “half.” I did not understand this odd dangling locution at first, but I soon realized that Manley (born Malka in Riga), who, unlike my father, had no problem using the word Jew by itself, considered “half-Jew” very rude indeed. When I answered that my mother was Irish, and my Jewish father a Catholic convert, she looked pensive for a moment and then brightened. “But I understand you don’t go in for any of that stuff,” she said. When I assured her that I didn’t go in for any of that stuff, she seemed satisfied—though she did question me closely about whether I knew the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel. Oh yes, I told her, I was going to marry her son because he didn’t fall into either category. We got along wonderfully after that, and she never subjected me to another Yiddish vocabulary quiz. Over the years, I have become largely—but never entirely—accustomed to such little tests, designed to determine whether a half-Jew has a right to consider herself “culturally Jewish.” In my extended phase (which lasted into my mid-thirties) of yearning to be a whole Jew instead of a half-Jew, I leaped at every chance to demonstrate my Jewish credentials. I was not ready to subject my own behavior to the same scrutiny I had long applied to my father and the rest of the Jacobys, not yet able to acknowledge that I was exhibiting my own mutation of the family trait that impelled my ancestors to shed unwanted and inconvenient identities without looking back. Craving acceptance as a New York Jew, I actually felt obliged to answer when someone twitted me by asking, “Why is lobster Newburg doubly forbidden to those who observe the laws of kashrut?” Why either my inquisitor or I thought that knowing the answer to such a question might qualify me as a Jew is another question altogether. A Talmudic scholar told me his reply would have been, “Lobster Newburg is forbidden only once if you use nondairy creamer for the sauce.” What I should have done was ask my interrogator if he could explain the Pauline Privilege.
As I moved through my thirties, I began to deal with the emotional fallout from my mixed heritage and from the long cover-up of that heritage within my family. For much of the 1980s, I wrote a column for the magazine Present Tense, a journal of liberal Jewish opinion—a sort of counter-Commentary—then published (and later abandoned) by the American Jewish Committee. An essay titled “I Am a Half-Jew, American-Born” brought me more mail than I have ever received in response to any article on any subject (including those published in general-interest magazines with a much larger circulation than the AJC’s stepchild). I got a kick out of calling myself a half-Jew, without qualifications and explanations—a very different sensation from hearing the term applied to me in an exclusionary way by others. I suspect Alfred Kazin got a similar kick out of seeing the title of his 1978 memoir, New York Jew, in print. My father gasped, shook his head in bewilderment, and finally laughed out loud when he saw Kazin’s title—which he found far more vulgar than the word Jew by itself—staring out at him from the window of a bookstore as we walked along Broadway during one of his visits to New York.
In my Present Tense essay I made the point (it is still valid) that the unprecedented American tolerance of marriages between Jews and Christians had not yet produced a literature reflecting the complexity and importance of a social experiment that used to be viewed as equally threatening by Christians and Jews. When Saul Bellow opened The Adventures of Augie March with the line, “I am an American, Chicago-born,” he was asserting a specifically Jewish claim to everything America had to offer. Jewish readers in 1953 understood Bellow perfectly, and it is obvious that the line would have had no meaning (for Jews or gentiles) if its author had been Henry James. But what would readers have made of a sentence written by a man—let us call him Paul Bellow—declaring, “I am a half-Jewish American, Chicago-born”? Many of the readers who responded to my Present Tense essay were miffed, even angry, at my play on Bellow’s line. “Half-Jew,” scoffed one woman. “It means nothing. You are an American, that’s it.” Another correspondent said flatly, “You aren’t any kind of Jew, and your writings don’t belong in a Jewish magazine.” A Conservative rabbi commented, “You write about half-Jewishness as if it were a special condition. But it is not a condition—not, at any rate, in a country with no Nuremberg Laws. What would be the attributes of this condition? What does a half-Jew believe? Eat? For that matter, where is a half-Jew buried?”
That rabbi really knew how to hurt a girl, and I was tempted to answer, “Hath not a half-Jew eyes…if you prick us, do we not bleed?” But these rhetorical questions only serve to underscore rather than to negate the specialness and ambiguity of the half-Jewish condition. It really boils down to the old question, “So what will the children be?”—the predecessor of the Scranton rabbi’s “So, what are you now?” People would continue to ask me the latter question, and I would continue to ask it of myself, even if my father had not lied to his children about his and their origins. But this is not a fundamentally religious inquiry, although it is usually framed in religious terms when a Jew marries a Christian. At its heart, “So, what are you now?” really means, “Where do you belong?” It is a question of loyalty. To what and to whom, beyond ourselves and our immediate families, do we owe our deepest moral obligations?
It is one thing for a Jew to try to sort out the cultural legacy of an assimilationist upbringing burdened by shame and conflict, as my father’s was, yet presided over by parents who at least acknowledged that they were Jews. It is quite another matter (though obviously a part of progressive deracination) for a half-Jew to sort out the loyalties attached to two separate heritages—especially when the Jewish portion of the heritage has been denigrated or, as was the case in my family, covered up altogether. Because my father and uncle pretended for so many years that the family’s Jewish past did not exist, they made it far more difficult for my generation of half-Jews to know where or how to begin the sorting-out process. The slow fading of both the invidious and the ennobling distinctions that set peoples apart from one another is a nig
htmare undreamed of in the traditional Jewish parent’s warning, delivered to a child contemplating marriage to one of the goyim, that the gentile partner will surely shout “kike” at the first hint of marital discord.
For the most part, America allows—indeed encourages—me and others like me to minimize the dissonances and accentuate the harmonies of a mixed heritage (a far more problematic stance for the children of racially mixed unions). Intermarriages of every sort are no longer viewed as marginal to the majority culture of America; they are rapidly becoming the majority culture. Few Jews sit shiva for a child who marries a gentile, and few Christians go to their family Bible (if they have a family Bible) to strike out the name of a child who marries out of the faith. Even in the days when there were more shiva sitters and name strikers, the proverbial reconciliation upon the birth of a grandchild was, like so many clichés, more fact than fiction. Putative offspring—the source of fierce parental arguments against mixed marriages—became, when they actually appeared, ex post facto justification for the betrayal of tribal loyalty. The grandchildren were redeemers, infant messiahs to both Jews and gentiles.
Four basic patterns of child-rearing are commonly practiced by mixed couples, and each fosters a different kind of ambiguity. The first ignores the whole issue of religion. If the practice of religion holds little importance for either the Jewish or Christian partner, symbols like Christmas trees lose all nonsecular content. As long as there is no Baby Jesus among the gaily wrapped packages, everyone can have a good time. The second pattern, touted by the Jewish-Methodist couple in Newsweek, relies on the utopian (or hellish, depending on your point of view) notion of educating children in both religions and allowing them to make their own choices. This relatively recent, quintessentially American experiment is based on the notion of faith as a “lifestyle choice” roughly equivalent to vegetarianism vs. meat-eating. Happy little children, with a crèche under the tree and a menorah on the table. In a third and somewhat more unusual pattern, neither parent converts to the other’s faith, but the children are raised in the religion of the parent to whom religion matters most.
The conversion of one spouse—the course taken by my family for generations—was (and for all I know, may still be) the most popular strategy for child-rearing within mixed marriages. Through centuries of intermarriage between Jews and Christians, the Jewish partner was almost always the one who converted. Few Jews of my father’s generation—observant or not, proud of their heritage or not—could have imagined a time when certain Christians, upon marrying Jews, would find it not only spiritually fulfilling but socially expedient to convert. If my dad was startled by the words New York Jew on the cover of a book, he would have been utterly baffled by the greeting cards proclaiming, “Congratulations on Your Conversion,” now sold next to bar and bat mitzvah cards in Judaica shops. American children now being raised as Jews, after the conversion of a Christian parent, may prove to be a unique and unprecedented group of Mischlinge—bound to the Jewish covenant by a parent’s genuine choice instead of to the New Testament covenant by the subtle-to-blatant coercion that runs through the history of Jewish conversions to Christianity.
Such conversions, however joyfully they may have been celebrated by unusual, spiritually motivated converts like my aunt Edith, have never been occasions on which one Jew offered congratulations to another. Conversions by Jews have, for the most part, been tainted by shame, self-loathing, fear of persecution, and jockeying for social advantage—in varying proportions and accompanied by varying degrees of coerciveness. No cause for celebration there. In some instances, conversion has nothing to do with mixed marriages but instead represents a collaboration between two Jewish parents, like Madeleine Albright’s mother and father, united in their determination to rewrite the past for the next generation. But when the denial of Jewishness plays out within a mixed marriage, the children inherit a double whammy: the Jewish parent’s heritage is not only hidden but abandoned in favor of, and therefore presumed to be inferior to, the other parent’s lineage. This might not matter in a psychological sense to the next generation if a family’s true past could be completely and permanently erased, but there is almost always a chink in the wall of suppression. Yet Jews who try to pass as gentiles, whether or not they marry non-Jews, usually manage to convince themselves (even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary) that no one will ever find out. How else can one explain the behavior of Albright’s sophisticated father, Josef Korbel, in failing to prepare his daughter for the likelihood that the family’s past—its Jewish past in Czechoslovakia—might well resurface as her career in government service took off? Or, for that matter, the behavior of Albright herself, who finally acknowledged her Jewish parentage only after she learned that The Washington Post was about to publish an article tracing the history of the Korbels in Czechoslovakia and revealing that most of the family had perished in the Holocaust?
My uncle Ozzie, also a sophisticated and well-traveled man, was just as convinced that no one was likely to suspect the Jewish origins of the Jacoby family. He insisted that I absolutely must be wrong when I told him that Jacoby/Yakobi was instantly recognizable as a Jewish name everywhere in Russia and Eastern Europe. Both my uncle and my father subscribed to their father’s credo—“At myself I will begin and end.” And they were both surprised to be confronted with the evidence, in the form of my increasingly insistent questions about the past, that their father had been mistaken.
Whether a Jewish parent converts to Christianity openly or tries to “pass” by denying his or her origins altogether, the need to know why a father or mother took such a radical step often becomes a lifelong preoccupation for the next generation. The writings of Mary Gordon, who offered no hint in her early work of a background that was anything but Catholic, provide a window into the emotional conflict—engendered by parental withholding or outright lying—that prevents so many half-Jews from fully owning up to and owning their heritage.
Gordon’s first novel, Final Payments, was widely praised in 1978 as a Catholic coming-of-age story The narrator, Isabel Moore, has devoted the first decade of her adulthood to caring for her invalid father, a devout Catholic intellectual in a working-class community where no one but his daughter truly understands him. Physically released but not spiritually freed by her father’s death, Isabel describes his passion for the Catholic faith as being “clear as that of a child who dies before the age of reason….He loved the sense of his own orthodoxy, of holding out for the purest and the finest and the most refined sense of truth against the slick hucksters who promised happiness on earth and the supremacy of human reason.” Nowhere in this novel, or in Gordon’s other early work, is there even a hint of what my sixth-grade nun called “certain influences.” I was utterly surprised to learn, many years later, that the author’s real father, like mine, had been a Jewish convert to Catholicism. Nearly two decades after the publication of Final Payments, Gordon finally attempted to come to terms with her father’s tangled legacy in her memoir, The Shadow Man.
It is a terrible story. David Gordon, who died of a heart attack when his daughter was seven, had lied about nearly everything except his Jewish birth. He told his family that he was born in America and a graduate of Harvard. His real first name was Israel; he was born in Vilna; and he dropped out of high school to go to work. That is not the terrible part. As Gordon delved further—she knew her father had written for Catholic publications after his conversion in the 1930s—she learned that he had found a spiritual home among the most reactionary, anti-Semitic elements in the American Catholic Church. He became a follower of Father Coughlin’s home-grown fascism and wrote letters and articles declaring his support for Mussolini and Franco. Later on, he made it clear that he was more concerned about the Nazis’ treatment of Catholics than the deaths of Jews in concentration camps. In a 1943 article titled “Can Christianity Survive Hollywood?” he wrote that “we do not allow Jews, even of the highest caliber, to control our schools, but we allow the worst cl
ass of them to control the mind-molding amusement of old and young, boy and maiden, indiscriminately.” And on and on. This devoted father, who taught his daughter to read and left her with an indelible love of language before she was seven, was also a fascist fellow traveler who reviled Jews—as he had rejected the Jew in himself.
It is hard for me to imagine how Gordon found the courage to read, much less write about, the true history of a father whose memory could only have been more precious to her because he died when she was so young. I don’t know how I could have borne the discovery of such poison in my father’s life. I knew my father as a man who had lied to protect his own children (and himself) from the painful slights he had endured as a child, a man whose parents did not give him enough pride in himself, or in his heritage, to sustain him into adulthood. But my father’s internal sense of shame never metamorphosed, as David Gordon’s did, into an emotional alliance with bigots and persecutors. My dad possessed a basic sanity, and a congenital indisposition to extremism, that protected him from the wilder ideological possibilities his upbringing might have nurtured.
Even though Gordon’s father took one of the most twisted paths available to a man wishing to escape his Jewishness, he could no more avoid passing on a sense of an unarticulated past to his daughter than my father could. The one thing Gordon’s father and mine had in common was that their stories didn’t add up; no child can begin to make sense of her upbringing until the true background of the parent is known. The labyrinthine nature of the search for long-concealed truth, with its inevitable false starts and dead ends, may explain why half-Jews have not yet established an imaginative voice in American literature—why a writer as talented as Gordon spoke for so long only in the voice of a Catholic (or a lapsed Catholic). As a young writer and a young woman, she was neither ready nor able to speak in the voice of a daughter whose father had denied the Jew in him, of a girl who, whenever she displeased her maternal relatives, had been told, “That’s the Jew in you.”