Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

  After this detour down miserable memory lane, Dad refocused his attention on Tevye’s travails and cried hardest of all at the ending, in which all of the Jews are expelled from their shtetl by edict of Czar Nicholas II. “There’s nothing to cry about,” I said reasonably as we left the movie house. “It’s a happy ending. Tevye is going to America. He’s not going to be around for World War I, and his family isn’t going to be around to be killed by the Nazis during World War II.” Wiping his eyes, Dad replied, “I’m crying because those are my roots, and I don’t know anything about them.” In 1972, people did not go around talking about their “roots.” For my father, who had never expressed even a casual interest in his family’s past, the reference was extraordinary. “What do you mean, your roots?” I asked. At that point, I was under the mistaken impression that both the Sondheim and Jacoby families had lived in Germany for generations before emigrating in 1849. Dad told me he was sure the Jacobys had originally come from Poland, or even farther east, because his mother—whose family was established in Frankfurt by the middle of the eighteenth century—had always made a point of disparaging his father’s Polish origins. This was one of my first clues to the Jacoby family’s real history.

  On one level, my father’s reaction to Fiddler was no more than the characteristically sentimental response of a sentimental man. In this, he was no different from the millions of unashamedly Jewish Jews who flocked to the play and the movie in order to enjoy a prettied-up glimpse of the past that preceded the American Jewish success story—or, for that matter, from the gentiles who also laughed, cried, and went away with the same message—“Boy, are we all lucky to be here and not there.”

  But my father’s tears had a deeper meaning, revealing a yearning for the full self-acceptance that he could never attain as long as he was still ashamed of being a Jew. By the end of his life, my dad did succeed in transcending the legacy of parents who, in different ways, had failed to give him a sense of his true worth. A significant part of that parental legacy was Dad’s denial of the Jew in him. He—and we—had come a long way since the day when he cried in the kitchen out of fear that his daughter might blame him for having been born a Jew.

  I am a half-Jew, American born.

  My Jewish father is gone.

  Afterword to Vintage Books Edition (2016)

  Like many people raised with a family secret—whatever the secret may be—I thought that my own family’s attempt to obliterate its Jewish origins must be a relatively rare occurrence in the United States.

  I still thought so when this memoir was first published in 2000. Soon, as I began to hear from readers with similar secrets in their backgrounds—not only Jews but also African-Americans with a parent who had passed for white—I realized that my family’s story was more common than I had assumed, and that it was an American as well as a Jewish story. If this were not so, I would never have heard from African-American readers, who, fully aware that slavery, not anti-Semitism, is America’s original sin, nevertheless responded to my father’s experience with strong emotional recognition.

  In a big country with a mobile, heterogeneous population, it is much easier than in smaller, more homogeneous nations for a person to act on the desire to escape what is seen—as a result of external discrimination and internalized shame—as an undesirable ethnic, religious, or racial group. One of the most touching letters I received came from a sixty-five-year-old retired high school teacher who was battling breast cancer.*1 “I thought until I read your book that I was the only person with a story remotely similar,” she wrote, “and I want to share mine with you.” Martha grew up in the 1940s on a ranch in Montana, where her father—who was a toddler when he and his parents immigrated from Russia on the eve of World War I—began his working life cleaning out stables and wound up as the ranch’s manager and the owner’s right-hand man. He had retained strong traces of an obviously foreign accent, and he always said that he came from a family of Cossacks—which also accounted for his knowledge of horses—and that his parents had spoken “Cossack” at home. On his deathbed, Martha’s father—who belonged to the local Methodist church—told her that he came from a family not of Cossacks but of Jews. The language they had spoken at home was, of course, Yiddish. (“Cossack” is not a language; Cossacks in the Tsarist empire spoke either Russian or a Ukrainian dialect—as they do today.) The family’s name had been changed to Smith at Ellis Island in 1913, and Martha’s father claimed not to know his original, Jewish last name. He nevertheless felt guilty about having pretended to be a Cossack, and that guilt probably accounted for his deathbed “confession” of a history he (mistakenly) thought would shock and disappoint his daughter. “The Cossacks were among the worst in their hatred of Jews in Russia and the Ukraine,” he explained. “My parents thought things might be exactly the same here, so they took the chance to start over. And so did I. We went west instead of staying in a city because I had a great-uncle who was a traveling peddler in the nineteenth century and wrote home about places called Wyoming and Montana. I think those names sounded romantic to my father’s family.” Home in the Old World, it turned out, was the cosmopolitan southern city of Odessa—long a center of Jewish culture and population.

  In addition to her sorrow that her father had felt the need to keep his background a secret, Martha regretted that she never was able to have him speak to one of her high school history classes about his immigrant experience. “I don’t think most people here know what a Jew is,” she wrote, “except for the Israelites in the Bible. And they don’t know much about immigrants, except for Mexicans. In fact, people used to say to my dad, because he had an accent, ‘You don’t sound like a Mexican.’ It’s so sad, because I know my students would have been interested and learned so much from him, that my father couldn’t see he had something important to say instead of to hide.”

  Just two years ago, I received an e-mail from a forty-year-old man who had come across an old copy of Half-Jew and had an even more complicated story to tell. Sam was the son of a Jewish mother and a light-skinned African-American father who had passed for white. They both worshipped at an Episcopal church in a large southern city. Sam knew nothing about the real background of either of his parents until a long-lost dark-skinned cousin turned up on his doorstep in 2005. As the fabric of lies on both sides of the family began to unravel, Sam recalled, his father (like my dad) kept saying, “Out of nowhere, out of nowhere.”

  At the same time, Sam’s mother confessed that she was born a Jew; her devout Orthodox parents sat shiva for her when she married a Gentile. They thought that their daughter’s husband was white, not African-American, but his not being a Jew was the deal breaker. Sam, whose parents are both living, is now trying to track down relatives on both sides of his family—with his parents’ ambivalent assent. “The worst thing about it is that both of my parents thought I was going to hate them when I found out,” Sam wrote. “I said, ‘It’s the twenty-first century, the president of the United States had a white mother and a black father. How can you think that way?’ ”

  In the relatively short period (as history measures such matters) since the first edition of Half-Jew was published, there has indeed been significant change in American attitudes toward religious, ethnic, and racial diversity of all kinds. The first fifteen years of the new millennium have been a time of “coming out,” in more ways than one, for Americans. In fact, I strongly suspect that the coming out of gay men and women to their families, friends, and colleagues—and the subsequent realization of many Americans that relationships based on truth are stronger than relationships based on lies—offers a lesson that also applies to the falsification of ethnic, religious, and racial identities practiced more widely by my parents’ generation than by young people today. Someone reveals a previously unspeakable truth—parent to child or child to parent—and, lo and behold, no divine thunderbolt strikes down the family! A few years ago, I spoke on a panel with a convert from Mormonism to Unitarianism who lived in New York City
and managed for some years to hide her conversion—as well as the fact that she was a lesbian—from her devout Mormon parents in Utah. Finally she decided that she must tell them the truth about her life; she introduced them to her partner and confessed her change of religion at the same time. “I just wanted to get it all out at once and didn’t know what to expect,” she said. “I was prepared for anything, beginning with ‘Never darken my doorstep again.’ But I underestimated my parents. What they said about my partner was that if I loved her and she loved me—even though they couldn’t fully understand—there must be much good in her.”

  This is not to suggest that racism, certain kinds of ethnic prejudices, or homophobia have lost their potency as divisive forces in American life. What has changed is that a growing number of Americans—especially young adults—react to these forces not by pretending to be someone else but by affirming more of who and what they really are.

  Between 1980 and 2010, the proportion of new marriages between Americans of different races or ethnicities more than doubled—from under 7 percent to more than 15 percent. Interracial and interethnic marriage often means interreligious marriage, since race and ethnicity—from the colonial era onward—have always influenced religious affiliation in the United States. Among Americans married since 2010, nearly four in ten wed a member of another religious group (including atheists and agnostics and those who describe themselves as “nothing in particular”). Fifty years ago, fewer than one in five Americans married across religious lines.*2 These marriages do not take place in secret: read the “Vows” section of The New York Times and see how many religiously, ethnically, and racially mixed marriages—whether performed by judges, “secular celebrants,” or clergy of various faiths (with or without the approval of their ecclesiastical superiors)—are described in fulsome, approving detail. As for unions between black and white Americans, neither dark-skinned nor light-skinned cousins are waiting thirty years to turn up on a hidden relative’s doorstep anymore; a great many of them are dancing at the wedding. In public opinion polls, nearly two-thirds of Americans say it “would be fine” with them if a member of their family married outside their own racial or ethnic group. In 1986, only one-third of Americans viewed intermarriage as acceptable for anyone—much less for a member of their own family. Even allowing for the fact that Americans today may be claiming a greater degree of tolerance than they actually feel or practice, the difference between their current expressed opinions and what they told pollsters thirty years ago is significant in itself. I strongly suspect that some of the right-wing evangelical preachers who take care to use the term “Judeo-Christian” instead of “Christian” in their public statements would be horrified if one of their children married a Jew. Nevertheless, it is significant that a majority of Americans are more ashamed of being seen as bigots than they used to be. Where bigotry is concerned, the replacement of pride by shame is a backhanded form of social progress.

  My father could not have imagined an America in which his grandchildren, who came of age in the first decade of the twenty-first century, have difficulty understanding why anyone would invest so much emotional energy in denying what seems, to many of their contemporaries, to be a simple biographical fact rather than a tangle of sorrow-laden, conflicting loyalties. I regret that it caused Dad such pain when I learned that he was a Jew and forced him to acknowledge, and reflect on, his family’s real past, but I also think he was a happier and more complete person because this confrontation gave him a glimpse of the new world that was coming. In 1963—the year when my father and I first began to talk about his Jewishness, Philip Roth wrote:

  Jews are people who are not what anti-Semites say they are. That was once a statement out of which a man might begin to construct an identity for himself; now it does not work so well, for it is difficult to act counter to the ways people expect you to act when fewer and fewer people define you by such expectations.

  Dad could not envisage a time when he would be able to dismiss expectations such as “Jews are greedy,” “Jews are vulgar and ostentatious,” “Jews aren’t real Americans because they always take care of their own first.” Roth’s observation in Commentary magazine (before Commentary became the flagship publication of neoconservatism), though made specifically about Jews, underlines the larger American nature of my father’s struggle with the Jewish part of himself and his past. The same template might well be used to encompass other groups: African-Americans are people who are not who racists say they are or Mexican-Americans are people who are not what anti-immigrant Know-Nothings say they are.

  Yet the unevenness of America’s accommodation of ethnic and racial differences means that the old negative stereotypes always lurk beneath the surface of cultural toleration. If the communications I have received from readers over the past fifteen years are any indication, the psychological pain inherent in the construction of an identity based, at least in part, on negating other people’s negative stereotypes remains a powerful force in the lives of many Americans. This is true in spite of (and sometimes because of) the expansion of contact among racial, religious, and ethnic groups brought about by those most intimate of human activities: marriage and child-rearing.

  The greater cultural intermingling of twenty-first-century Americans is no guarantee of sustained cultural tolerance, because more contact does not necessarily produce stronger connection. If one of the primary motives for “marrying out,” for example, is not only love but a need to escape one’s real identity and heritage—as it was for my father and for Sam’s parents—the heritage will likely be lost. If I were not a writer and historian by profession, everything about who the Jacobys really were, and why they made the decisions they did for a century, would have vanished in my generation. None of my cousins or my brother had the slightest interest in pursuing the family’s real history—not because they were ashamed but because they were indifferent to the entire subject (though they were interested in what I uncovered).

  For those who value both their particular history and history in general, it is of utmost importance that intermarriages become a force for encompassing and remembering rather than a route to forgetting whole chunks of familial and social experience. Even though no sane person wants to live in the past, we lose a vital dimension of human experience if the past ceases to live in us.

  Susan Jacoby

  August 2015

  * * *

  *1 Names and certain identifying details have been changed in references to readers’ letters and e-mails.

  *2 Statistics on racial and religious intermarriage come from a combination of U.S. Census data and the gold standard of polling on religious matters, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The Census Bureau is prohibited from asking questions about religion, and the Pew studies have filled this enormous gap in recent decades.