Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

  Gordon’s story is no more “typical” than my own, and (as my brother’s attitude demonstrates) there are half-Jews, especially those in which the Jewish parent’s Jewishness was always known, who have not been strongly affected for good or ill by their mixed upbringing. When I asked my brother to rethink his assertion that he was never bothered by the huge gaps in our father’s account of his childhood, he insisted—and I believe him—that the contradictions never entered his mind when he was growing up. “I was in my senior year of high school when you told me Dad was Jewish,” he recalled, “and I was mildly interested—but only mildly. I felt bad that Dad thought this was something he had to keep from us, but that was about it. Of course, I was at the age when all you’re thinking about is yourself—but the truth is I’d never given much thought to our father’s family at all, because we were so much closer to Mom’s parents. If I thought about the Jacobys, it was just in terms of ‘Granny Jacoby is mean and Aunt Edith is crazy and Ozzie’s a great cardplayer.’ When I got a little older, the thing that fascinated me wasn’t so much that the Jacobys were Jewish but that they had all married Catholics and converted. What are the odds against that, three siblings, living in different places when they’re adults, all finding an Irish Catholic to marry?

  I don’t know. It was certainly no coincidence that my father, uncle, and aunt all married gentiles: they were set up by their upbringing to regard other Jews as undesirable marriage partners. Aunt Edith was the only one of the siblings who fell in love with the Church itself; I have a feeling that she would somehow have found her way to Catholicism with or without Ted. Neither Uncle Ozzie nor my father showed any particular enthusiasm for the Catholic faith at the outset of their marriages; my father waited eight years to convert, and it took a near-fatal auto accident to draw the recalcitrant Ozzie into the embrace of the Church. One factor—Granny Jacoby’s view that Catholics (American-Irish Catholics, at any rate) were beneath her sons—may, subconsciously or consciously, have pushed Dad and Ozzie in the direction of those very women. What a great way to get back at overbearing Mother! Granny Jacoby would, I suspect, have been quite pleased if either of her sons had made a match with the daughter of an old-line New England WASP family. And the family’s desire to distance itself from Jews could have been served just as well by conversion to some Protestant denomination. But if there was one common theme in each sibling’s conversion to Catholicism, it was the need for an ethical and a practical structure that their upbringing did not provide. And there was nothing like the pre—Vatican II Catholic Church, as my father pointed out, for supplying a structure. “So, what are you now?” was a question no member of my father’s generation would be asked or would have to answer again—not, at least, in the narrow religious sense. But questions of loyalty and belonging—the questions one asks oneself—cannot be laid to rest so easily. Many years before the rabbi asked me where I stood, the issue of loyalty, as distinct from that of religion, had surfaced for me in an unsettling and surprising way when my brother married Eve Moscicki, a daughter of Polish (not Jewish) immigrants who were concentration camp survivors. And what, I wonder, were the odds that my brother, having dated a wide assortment of all-American girls, would fall in love with and marry a daughter of anyone who had survived Hitler’s camps?

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  IN 1998, I took my niece, sixteen-year-old Alex, to a screening of a documentary film, My Knees Were Jumping, about Jewish children who were rescued from Nazi Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia by the Kindertransport movement just before the war. Thousands of desperate Jewish parents, with the aid of a Quaker organization, were able to send their children to safety in England. Most of these parents, unable to get out themselves, perished in the camps—so that what was intended to be a temporary separation turned into a permanent one. The film was made by thirty-eight-year-old Melissa Hacker, herself a daughter of one of the Kindertransport children. I thought Alex would be interested because the Kindertransport survivors, now in their sixties and seventies, were talking about what they had experienced when they were Alex’s age. And she was riveted—but not for the reasons I expected. My niece was much less interested in what the actual Kindertransport survivors had to say than in how their children, now in their thirties, felt about the way their parents communicated, and did not communicate, the true nature of their experience. The grown children of the Kindertransport children spoke of having been raised with the knowledge that their parents went through something painful and terrible—but the precise nature of the pain and terror was off-limits. These American-born children had nightmares about Nazis, but they kept quiet because they knew, without being told, how disturbed their parents would be to hear of these dreams. They grew up knowing that any form of separation was almost unbearable to their parents, but the “why” was rarely, if ever, explored. The parents, in turn, were surprised to hear how deeply the children had been affected by the half-discussed past; they had tried so hard, one said, to blend in and to behave exactly like other Americans.

  As we left the movie theater, Alex told me she identified strongly with the second generation in the documentary. Like those adult children of survivors (and like me so many years ago), Alex has had her own nightmares starring Hitler. “I’m the grandchild, not the child, of people who were in the camps,” she said, “but I have a lot of the same feelings as the grown children in that movie. I was stunned to hear them talk about it—the feeling of growing up with something that’s known, but only half known. It’s there, but something you’re not supposed to get too close to.”

  —

  ALEX’S GRANDPARENTS, Alexander and Maria Moscicki, were waiting for their U.S. entry visas in Sweden when their first daughter, Eve, was born in 1948. Both of Eve’s parents had been in the Polish resistance against the Nazis. Her mother was imprisoned at Auschwitz, her father in a smaller camp. It is one of the ironies of my family history that my two nieces, Alexandra Sara and Anna Sofia Broderick Jacoby, the grandchildren of immigrants who took great pride in their Polish heritage, are also the first Jacobys in this century for whom their Jewish ancestry is a source of pride rather than shame. But in the early 1970s, when my brother and Eve announced that they were getting married, I was not at all happy to learn that her family was Polish (a sentiment I kept to myself because I was, rightfully, ashamed of it).

  I had only recently returned from Russia, which had also been my jumping-off point for reporting trips to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The Polish Jews (and Polish-born Soviet Jews) among my acquaintances had drawn vivid portraits of the intense hostility they had been subjected to by Poles before the war. I spoke with survivors who had attempted to return to their native villages after the war, in the hope that other surviving relatives would also return, only to find a local Polish population filled with hate for the few Jews who had come back alive. Ironically, my negative picture of the treatment of Jews by the majority of Poles was reinforced by my acquaintance with a small number of Jews who had survived only because decent Polish neighbors and friends had risked their lives to hide them and to bring them food. As far as I was concerned, those Poles were the proverbial exceptions that proved the rule. To save a Jew from the Nazis in Poland required even more courage than it did in occupied Western Europe—not only because the German occupation of Poland was far more brutal, in view of the Nazi categorization of Slavs as subhumans, but precisely because of the enthusiasm for the Final Solution on the part of a significant proportion of the Polish population. Polish rescuers were as frightened of being turned in to the Germans by their Polish neighbors as they were of being discovered by the Nazis themselves. Because they thought it wise to keep quiet long after the war about what they had done to save Jews during the occupation, many of these heroic Polish men and women were among the last rescuers to be honored as “Righteous Persons” by Israel. Even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, having helped Jews three decades earlier was nothing to broadcast to one’s neighbors. As a young reporter, I was appalled to fi
nd that such Poles still feared being identified by their countrymen as Jew-lovers. In the nineties, the rescuers, as well as the Jews they helped survive, are dying off, but anti-Semitism continues to flourish in a Poland virtually without Jews. (Even more disturbingly, some right-wing Catholic organizations, inside and outside Poland, still promote the historically false proposition that Catholics and Jews suffered equally under the Nazis. In April 1999, the U.S. Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights ran a quarter-page advertisement, in a prominent spot on the op-ed page of the Times, drawing a parallel between Nazi persecution of Jews and Catholics. The ad equated the deaths of three million Polish Catholics during the war with the deaths of three million Polish Jews. No mention was made of the fact that the three million dead Jews represented more than 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population of Poland, while the three million dead Poles, who included soldiers as well as civilians, represented only 10 percent of the prewar gentile Polish population. No distinction was made between the systematic genocide intended by the Nazis for all Jews and the selective murders of Polish gentiles, including intellectuals and participants in the resistance, who posed a particular threat to the Nazi occupiers. The authors of this misleading advertisement would have done well to speak with the Polish rescuers I interviewed about the attitude of their countrymen toward those who did try to save Jews. It is nothing less than an insult to the memory of those noble Polish souls, who risked everything in aid of Jews who were being hunted down like animals in the forests or gassed in extermination camps, for any organization of American Catholics to suggest today that the behavior of the rescuers was supported by the majority of their fellow Polish Catholics during the war.)

  When my brother and Eve were married in 1973, I brought all of my still-fresh experiences in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the attendant emotional turmoil, to the wedding. I wanted to pack up my baby brother, take him home with me to New York, and find a nice Jewish girl for him to marry. I simply could not still the voice inside me whispering “Holocaust”—though collective guilt was as loathsome an idea to me then as it is today. In 1973, I could still hear Katya’s gentle voice talking about her good German soldier and her disagreement with Russians who hated all Germans. Yet I imagined myself interrogating Eve’s father: “So, Mr. Moscicki, exactly what did you do in the Polish resistance? Were you the kind of partisan who tried to help Jews escape to the woods, or the kind of partisan who turned them in? Did you care when the Warsaw ghetto was burning, or did you only care about what happened to Poles?”

  Fortunately, my husband was able to persuade me that it wasn’t my place to ask such questions or to appoint myself as a spokesperson for murdered Polish Jewry. In 1973, I had known that my father was a Jew for only seven years, and I was searching for a way to identify myself indisputably with the heritage the Jacoby family had cast off. Like many American Jews who had always known they were Jews but who were, nevertheless, grappling with similar questions of identity and memory, I seized upon the Holocaust (with particular eagerness in view of my childhood preoccupation with the destruction of European Jewry) as my only real Jewish legacy. The term Holocaust was not yet widely used outside Jewish intellectual circles, and the event itself had yet to become the institutionalized touchstone of collective identity for American Jews, but the ovens of Auschwitz—before which I had recently stood—were my link to my Jewish “half.” Had my great-grandfather not left Breslau in 1849, I might have been turned to ash in one of those ovens. I saw nothing sad or ironic in my desire to create a Jewish identity for myself by embracing victim status at a three-generation remove. It was a blessing for my relationship with my father that he had not yet delivered his memorable pronouncement on the misguidedness of declaring myself a Jew solely on the basis of my preoccupation with “Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust.” At twenty-eight, I would not have been able to recognize either the intellectual or the emotional acuity of his observation.

  My unease about my new Polish in-laws persisted throughout the marriage ceremony, performed by a Polish-American priest on the shore of Lake Huron, and the celebratory luncheon afterward. (Eastern Michigan, from Detroit to the piece of land, jutting into the lake, known as the Thumb, has had a large Polish immigrant population for more than a century. After the war, the older Polish community was swelled by new immigrants fleeing Communist rule.) The Catholic wedding was a given, since Eve’s parents were devout Catholics—and my brother, in any case, had no objection whatsoever to being married in the Church. I realized that Eve’s parents must know perfectly well, though my family was Catholic, that my father had been born a Jew. There is no possibility that anyone born and raised in Poland, whatever his attitude toward Jews, could fail to identify “Jacoby” as a Jewish name or my father as a Jew from his appearance. I remembered Eastern European Jewish friends telling me that Poles and Ukrainians prided themselves on always being able to spot a Jew even if the Jew had blond hair and blue eyes.

  Then I began talking to Eve’s father, a slender, gentle-appearing, and obviously perceptive man whom I had never met. I liked him immediately and had the uneasy feeling that he was probably reading my mind—and my prejudices. At some point, he took my husband and me aside and said, in formal, lightly accented English, “You know, I am sure Eva has told you something about our background. I must say candidly to you, that before the war I had certain thoughts about the Jewish people [like my dad, Mr. Moscicki did not say Jew] that were in some ways typical of those around me in Poland. It was not until the camps, the deportation of Jewish people from their homes, that I realized fully how wrong these attitudes were, so that after the war I could understand fully—fully—what the Jewish people in Poland, and throughout Europe, had suffered. There are no words to describe those who could go through this evil and not see where beliefs in national and racial superiority end—where they end for all people. I am proud of being Polish, and a large part of the reason I decided to leave was that I did not want to live under a Communist government. However, I also wanted to begin a family, to raise my future children, free of the prejudices and sorrows of that part of the world. I shall be proud, as I hope your parents will, to have grandchildren—I hope there will be grandchildren—who are part of and take pride in the history of all of their ancestors.”

  This long and entirely unsolicited speech astonished me with its honesty and sensitivity, not least because it was addressed to my husband and me instead of to my father. These remarks were surely intended for my parents’ ears, but Alexander Moscicki had chosen instead to speak to the sister and brother-in-law of the groom. I thought he had sought us out because he knew we had spent time in Russia and Eastern Europe and would understand what he meant without his having to spell it out. I did not repeat this conversation to my father until some years later, after Mr. Moscicki’s death in 1978. My reasoning was that it might have upset my dad, in 1973, to know that his Jewish origins had been a subject of discussion on the part of his in-laws. Only now, looking back on everything I did and did not say to my father about his Jewishness over the years, have I come to understand how deeply I was torn between the need to find and speak the truth and the desire to protect him. I saw myself as a disturber of the peace, and was seen that way by my family, but as I grew older, I kept a great deal to myself because I did not want to upset my dad. I did not realize how much he himself had changed, as he demonstrated when I finally told him about my conversation with Eve’s father. “It might have bothered me to hear that at the time,” Dad acknowledged. “But it might have upset Mr. Moscicki too if he’d said those things directly to me. He was a very fine man, and it would probably have been uncomfortable for him to come right out and say, ‘I know you’re Jewish,’ when these things aren’t supposed to matter in America today. What he said was honest—not, ‘I’ve never been prejudiced,’ the way some people say that about blacks and you just know there’s a ‘but’ coming up. He was saying he grew up with the prejudices of his time and place, and he’s tried to overcome th
em. I could say that about myself. Except who I was prejudiced against was myself.”

  My nieces know much more about both sides of their family than I did when I was growing up. That is due, in considerable measure, to my sister-in-law, who is bilingual and was raised with an emphasis on cultural heritage far more characteristic of European than of American families. She was astonished by my brother’s lack of interest in our family’s past, and she has transmitted her sense of the importance of history to her daughters. Anna has just turned ten, but Alex was old enough when I began writing this book to be interested in what I had learned about our family. It was one of the proudest moments of my life when she read the first chapter in manuscript and became caught up in my father’s story. Almost as proud as the moment when my brother phoned to tell me that Alex had been selected to represent her school at the 1993 opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. If only both of her grandfathers had been alive! For my father, having a granddaughter who did not regard him as a skeleton in the closet but as a precious part of her heritage would have closed the circle. The man who feared to tell his children that he was a Jew because they might blame him if they didn’t get everything they wanted in life has a granddaughter who, as her Polish grandfather (for whom she was named) hoped, is able to take pride in her entire ancestry.