by Susan Jacoby
—
MY JOURNEY would surely have been more complicated if I had had my own children. While Jewishness is something else, and something more, than a religion, the Jewish fundamentalists are right on one point: the history of the Jews cannot be separated from the history of Judaism as a faith. To understand what it means to be a Jew today—or, in my case, to honor the Jewish part of me—it is impossible simply to ignore Judaism. And yet I would no more want a child of mine to believe what is taught in Jewish day schools (or even in the Sunday schools where the stern God of Israel becomes the cozy figure in the song “There Is No God Like Our God”) than I would want them to believe in the Virgin Birth. Alex tells me I’m making this all too complicated: kids have to be taught something, she reminds me, and they can make up their own minds about what they’ve been told as they learn to think for themselves. And she has a point: I do not regret my Catholic education for a moment, because it exposed me to a history and a theology I would not otherwise have encountered. When I decided I did not believe in that system of thought, I abandoned the religion and kept the education. As a parent, though, I could hardly subject my children to indoctrination in what I believe to be falsehood. Yet if I had had children with a Jewish husband, I would have been strongly tempted to swallow my atheist principles and see that they received some sort of Jewish education. Oh yes, I can just hear myself explaining that Mommy doesn’t really believe it was very nice of God to strike down the Egyptian firstborn, and, to be perfectly honest, Mommy doesn’t really believe that God exists, but darling, Mommy wants you to know where you come from….The whole relationship between religion and cultural identity is so much more complicated for a Jew than for a Christian. One may be an ex-Catholic but never an ex-Jew; to be a Catholic or a Christian is purely a matter of belief, whether one is born to the faith or not. But it is impossible, as I believe my father came to realize, to abandon Jewishness along with the Jewish God.
That is why conversions to Christianity are generally perceived as a form of betrayal by secular as well as religious Jews. For a Jew, conversion is not simply a rejection of religion but a rejection of history that bears more of a resemblance to an African-American’s passing for white than it does to any conversion from one Christian sect to another. I doubt that even my grandfather, so attuned to the slights he had experienced as a Jew and to the social advantages of being a Christian, would have sent “congratulations on your conversion” cards to his children. I have no doubt that the Christian parents of a child who converts to Judaism also feel a sense of loss, but betrayal may be experienced in its fullest sense only by those whose very existence is at stake (or who believe their existence to be at stake). The Jews for Jesus are wrong, and so was my aunt. You cannot be both a Christian and a Jew.
When I recently read the English translation of Victor Klemperer’s diaries—he was one of a minuscule number of Jews who managed to survive the entire Nazi era within Germany—I bristled at his account of the polite treatment he received during a brief incarceration for violating blackout regulations in Dresden. The local jailers, who were not Gestapo but ordinary prison workers, treated Klemperer in kindly and respectful fashion, lending him a pair of glasses because his had been taken away. “Religion Mosaic?” they asked, preparing a document for the prisoner’s signature. Klemperer, a convert whose father had been a rabbi, replied, “Protestant.” Because Klemperer’s identity card was stamped with the “J” required of all Jews, the workers were surprised at his declaration that he was a Christian. Their prisoner then explained that he was Jewish not by religion but “by [Nazi] law, by descent.” In his diary, Klemperer notes that his jailers reacted with “even greater politeness than before.”
Why does this passage bother me so much? It is not because Klemperer is reporting decent behavior on the part of some Germans during the Nazi era; it is well known that the few German Jews who escaped deportation to the death camps after 1942 (like the Jews who survived in Poland) did so because they were helped by gentiles. What is so unnerving, what makes the passage so insufferable to me, is the undertone of pride in Klemperer’s description of having confounded his jailers by identifying himself as a Protestant. That’ll show ’em how idiotic those Nuremberg Laws are. I’m a Protestant, and still they stamp me with a J.
I find that I cannot think about Jewish conversions to Christianity without being aware of an echo—an echo that seems to come simultaneously from a distant place and from deep within—of what my ancestors (those legendary rabbis) would surely have regarded as betrayal. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t have converted, at various points in Jewish history, in an effort to save my own skin. But there is a difference between converting to preserve life (even if the lifesaving property turns out, as it so often has, to be illusory) and converting for social advantage—as Klemperer surely did long before the Nazi era, as many members of my father’s family did for several generations. As my father himself did. That such conversions may involve a mixture of spiritual and temporal motives only means that the convert, like my father, has already been deprived of the spiritual sustenance offered both by religious Judaism and cultural Jewishness.
My problem with Victor Klemperer is the problem I had with my dad. Conversion could no more erase the “J” from my father’s image of himself than it could render Klemperer impervious to the externally imposed “J” of the Nazis. I am no longer angry at my father—how could I be, with everything I now know about his upbringing?—but his story still engenders a deep sadness in me. I cannot see the family’s determined abandonment of its Jewish past as anything but a loss, intertwined as it was with generations of shame and lies.
At the same time, I no longer experience the legacy of my ancestors’ choices, the “special condition” of half-Jewishness, as a burden. While I will never know the consolations or the confinement of belonging to one tribe in which everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do, I derive a sense of pleasure, excitement, and purpose from being both an outsider and an insider in not one but two cultures. America has allowed Jews unprecedented freedom to be simultaneously outsiders and insiders; to be an American half-Jew is to experience this condition twice over. Yes, if we are talking about Diaspora Jews, I insist on being included. The Jacoby family was mistaken not in its reach for a more expansive future but in its failure to honestly acknowledge the importance of the past. What does a half-Jew believe? “Anything she wants,” I would now tell everyone who was aggravated by my Present Tense essay. There are worse, and certainly much less interesting, fates.
Yet I live with the certainty that something precious was lost along the way—lost by my father’s family, lost to him, and lost to me. For much of his life, my dad lacked what the writer Adam Hochschild (also a half-Jew with a father who was extremely ambivalent about his origins) aptly describes, in his memoir Half the Way Home, as a sense of “possession as you possess your own past, which belongs to no one else, and whose power over you must be admitted, felt, accepted, before you can leave it behind and live the life before you.”
Nevertheless, the older I become, the more I realize how right Katya was to tell her children that they couldn’t write themselves out of Jewish history. My niece’s interest in the Jewish part of her heritage is proof enough of the surprising ways in which the past makes itself felt in each generation. As the old Yiddish saying goes, “The heart is half a prophet.” I have felt a deep obligation, as a half-Jew and my father’s daughter, to reconstruct what could be reconstructed of the fragments the Jacoby family left behind, to leave a record for my nieces of how and why we came to be who we are. That has been my way of fulfilling Dad’s wish that my identification with Jewishness amount to something more than “Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust.”
XIII
Elegy
The place where I have not been
I never shall be.
The place where I have been
is as though I have never been there. People stray
f
ar from the places where they were born
and far from the words which were spoken
as if by their mouths
and still wide of the promise
which they were promised.
And they eat standing and die sitting
and lying down they remember.
And what I shall never in the world return to
And look at, I am to love forever.
Only a stranger will return to my place. But I will set down
all these things once more, as Moses did,
after he smashed the first tablets.
—YEHUDA AMICHAI
“The Place Where I Have Not Been”
(Translated by Ted Hughes and Assia Gutmann)
I DO NOT HAVE TO look at my copy of this poem when I read it at my father’s funeral in 1986, for I know the lines by heart. Many years ago, when I came across “The Place Where I Have Not Been” in a magazine, it instantly spoke to me not only of what had been lost but of what remained in the heart of a man who wanted to protect his children from the cries of “baby Jew-boy.” I hope these lines, translated from the Hebrew, will honor the Jewishness in my father and his effort to come to terms, late in life, with all that caused him such unnecessary shame. For this funeral, I have my mother, and her increasingly antireligious tendencies, to thank. A priest presides—appropriately enough, since my father died a Catholic—but there is no Mass, and the service is held in a funeral home instead of a church. This infuriates Aunt Edith, but her meddlesome outrage is familiar and somehow comforting. I am relieved beyond measure at the nonecclesiastical tone of the proceedings. My brother and I do most of the talking, which is what Mom says our dad wanted. Rob is very funny; he describes our father’s indifference to and ineptitude at the usual Michigan father-and-son activities—hunting, fishing, and camping. The people who knew Dad best laugh out loud at the image of him trying to stake down a tent in the woods. The interment takes place, thankfully, in an indoor mausoleum: two feet of snow have fallen on Lansing during the three days since my father’s death. My mother, who hates nothing more than the Michigan winter, looks out the limousine window at the falling snow and whispers, “Fairyland.” That does it. Here come the tears I did not shed while I was eulogizing Dad. He loved snow. When snow had fallen during the night, he would rush to the living room picture window, gaze with the wonder of a child at the white coating on the bare branches of our maple trees, and wake us up with the cry of “Fairyland.”
The process of burial has become much more sanitized than it was only twenty years ago, when we buried Granny Jacoby. Then we stood by an actual hole in the ground, as people have for millennia, and saw the coffin being lowered. I have a sudden, mirth-filled memory of my father standing too close to the edge, losing his footing, and being rescued by Uncle Ozzie, who said, “Bobbie, Mother’s being gone doesn’t mean you have to plant one foot in the grave yourself.” Now my father and my uncle are both gone. That expression, “he’s gone,” once sounded in my ears as a euphemism for death, like “passed away.” Now it resonates within me as a literal description of both the physical and metaphysical realities. My dad is gone. Not here. He won’t see his three-year-old granddaughter grow up. She’ll never see him dancing by the light of the moon as he recites “The Owl and the Pussycat.”
At the luncheon after the interment, I find out how much Dad was loved and cherished by his friends. It is no surprise to hear about his many small kindnesses—the jar of homemade (by him) gazpacho left for a neighbor whose wife was in the hospital; the sympathetic ear offered to an old friend whose husband had dumped her after thirty-five years of marriage; the breakfast visits, bringing doughnuts or muffins, to my aging Granny Broderick, who moved from Chicago after my grandfather’s death to a small apartment near my parents. What does surprise me is that people valued my father most for the quality I respected most in him—his utter lack of hypocrisy. “You always knew where you stood with Bob,” says our former next-door neighbor, who has driven hundreds of miles in a blizzard in order to attend the funeral. Then he surprises me by adding, “I think your father would have liked that poem you recited. You know, your dad told me you were looking into the Jewish side of your family, and that he was proud of you for doing that.” I didn’t know that my father had revealed his background to anyone outside the family, but now I realize that it has been many years since he last urged me to drop “this Jewish business.” I hope this means that, by the end of Dad’s life, at least one of the wounds of his upbringing had truly healed—insofar as healing is possible for any child raised to be ashamed of his lineage, his heritage, his flesh and blood.
—
I HOPE SO, but I do not know, for I was not truly present during the time of his dying. It all happened with such suddenness for a man who, at seventy-one, had looked and acted like a man in his fifties. I saw him healthy for the last time in the summer of 1985, on one of my regular trips to Michigan. He was swimming with his customary vigor in the pool of the apartment complex where he and my mother had lived since they sold their home—my childhood home—on Greenwood Drive. In October, I flew off to England on a rather cushy magazine assignment that enabled me to visit Disraeli’s and Churchill’s homes. In London, I made a point of stopping at Fortnum & Mason to order a special Christmas present for Dad—a package that included some of his favorite foods, including Scotch shortbread and canned clam chowder. Fresh clams, like most of the seafood Dad loved, were unavailable in Michigan, so he was always on the lookout for high-quality canned chowder. Since Dad was something of an Anglophile, I anticipated his delight at opening a package with a label from Fortnum & Mason, purveyors to Her Majesty. I did not know that by Christmas, my father would be so nauseated from chemotherapy that he would scarcely be able to stand the sight of food.
In November, Dad was diagnosed with lung cancer that had already metastasized to the bone. All those years of unfiltered Camels had caught up with him; he had managed to quit—too late—only in his mid-sixties. Surgery was pointless: Dad went into the hospital for a round of chemotherapy and then went home to die. He tried hard to put on a cheerful face at first, to insist that he was going to “beat this thing” in spite of the grim prognosis, but the family knew better. At the time, we were stunned and numbed by the suddenness of his decline—one day poised on the diving board, the next day gasping for breath. Coming from a family whose members generally lived active and healthy lives well into their eighties, I was unprepared at forty to face the death of a parent.
During those awful two months, my mother didn’t seem to want any help from her children. I held this against her. My brother and I both flew home for brief visits, during which we felt like intruders, mere witnesses to our parents’ last collaboration. Mom didn’t even want us to come home for Christmas, because she said it would be too much of a burden, for her and my father, to celebrate a holiday when he had so little time left. She wants him all to herself, I thought resentfully. In an era when most people die in hospitals—regardless of their true desires—Mom enabled my father to die on his own terms, in his own bed. That he wasn’t hooked up to machines or IV tubes was mostly her doing, with the help of a sympathetic family doctor who saw that Dad had all the morphine he needed to keep him comfortable. Now I think if my mother did want her husband all to herself, she was surely entitled. There aren’t many people who have the fortitude to witness a partner’s suffering and death, twenty-four hours a day, in their own home instead of at a sterile institutional remove. One of the last things my father said to my mother before he died was, “I could never have made it without you.” Now I see clearly what I did not want to see then—that when a husband and wife are sharing the end of a long and complicated journey through life, children really are outsiders. Including Daddy’s Little Girl.
In truth, nothing important was unsaid between my father and me by the end of his life. He still reproached himself for having spent too much time at work when Rob and I were growing up, and I assured hi
m, when I saw him in January for the last time, that he had always been the most emotionally present father I knew. In my last image of him, he is sitting in the den, trying, crumb by crumb, to please me by forcing down a piece of shortbread.
—
IN 1972, during one of my summer visits, Dad asked if I would go with him to see the film version of Fiddler on the Roof at a local movie theater. I was touched by this suggestion, coming as it did only six years after I had brusquely pushed my father—forced him, really—to admit that he was a Jew. He was trying to tell me that even if he was not entirely comfortable with his origins, or with my knowledge of those origins, he was not as uncomfortable as he had once been.
In spite of my father’s propensity for weeping over everything from TV episodes of Lassie to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, I was not prepared for his reaction to the immensely popular adaptation of Sholom Aleichem’s tales of shtetl life. He cried through the wedding scene (all right, everyone gets misty over “Sunrise, Sunset”). He cried when the locals ruined Tevye’s eldest daughter’s wedding feast with a mini-pogrom; when Tevye’s middle daughter went off to join her anticzarist revolutionary boyfriend in exile in Siberia; when the youngest daughter ran off and married a goy. He was crying, he whispered to the urgent shushes of the other moviegoers, because the scene reminded him of my first wedding, when I had been just nineteen years old. Did I remember? Shush. Oh yes, I certainly did remember that wedding. Dad, understandably unenthusiastic about his daughter’s decision to marry before she finished college, had begged me to reconsider. He had initially assumed that I was pregnant, but he eventually decided, when my flat stomach throughout a six-month engagement attested to my nonpregnant state, that I was merely out of my mind. He had even tried to talk me out of going through with the wedding as we were about to walk down the aisle. In the movie theater, I responded to my father as I had years before in church—with the “Oh, Daddy” of an exasperated teenager.