by Alex Wagner
*3 Not even close. Liechtenstein is the sixth smallest country in the world. Vatican City is the smallest.
We talk about our identities—our race, our nation, our tribe of like-minded souls—as if they are something inevitable, inextricably tied to who we are, a trait formed in utero. I’ve always known that’s not really true. My own particularly elusive tribal membership was proof that identity is not, in fact, written in our cells: It’s something we learn, something we choose, something we have to cultivate—or lose along the way. Someone’s identity might be a stolen birthright, it might be imprinted in the crib by Mom and Pop, it might be learned (the hard way) on the junior high school blacktop or (most awkwardly) at the office water cooler.
Or it might just rest inside a Pandora’s box, opened against one’s better instincts because, for some people, the answer to the question “Who am I, really?” is pressing and intoxicating enough for a spelunking into the unknown.
I’d missed out on the crib-side branding and the birthright—and to me, for a while at least, not being part of any particular group freed me of race and tribe, the powerful and destructive ideas that were the source of so much of the world’s misery. Let the other kids roam in feral gangs across the schoolyard blacktop, let the high-functioning professionals gossip among the hair dryers after SoulCycle class—Alexandra Swe Wagner could glide through life without a herd. Or at least I thought I could. Because when I was presented with that potentially hazardous Pandora’s box of heritage and identity, it turned out to be too tempting not to open. Taboos, heartbreak, familial fallouts be damned—I was gonna open that thing and peer inside, embracing all the wild shit that flew out of it.
Of course, it wasn’t an actual box (if only it had been that easy!), but a spur on an otherwise fairly humdrum anecdote, a casual aside that turned into a saga all its own. And it came from my father, as he spun a honeyed story about his heritage, having no idea that he was about to steer his own narrative insanely off course.
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On the day of my First Holy Communion, I got a nosebleed. I already felt like I didn’t belong at the church in the first place, given the fact that I’d only sporadically attended the required religious education classes. Accordingly, I didn’t really know any of the Bible passages or the lyrics and hand movements to the happy Catholic songs that all the other kids in my communion class seemed to know by heart. But there, sitting in one of the front pews of Holy Trinity Church, on a chilly May morning, wearing the required white dress, my nose started running bright red. Only my father was with me (my mother the Buddhist did not attend the ceremony), which made it even worse: the white frills, the blood, the sheer lunacy of this proceeding, my entrance into Catholicism.
It was by dint of my father that I was even doing this. The rest of our neighborhood was off celebrating May Day with a group of honey-making, suspender-clad beardos who brought in an actual Maypole every year to celebrate the pagan rites of spring. The juxtaposition between that folksy seasonal hedonism and the stiff, very godly Catholic ritual could not have been more obvious. Here I was in a marble hall, eating the body and blood of Christ for the first time, mopping up nose blood with a roll of toilet paper from the church bathroom. I would so much rather have been on Brandywine Street, running down the block in an azalea crown and celebrating the rites of spring with the rest of my agnostic, liberal neighbors. I was young but in some vague and unarticulated way, I understood my implicit right as an American to bastardize, sample, create, and forget traditions as the mood struck me. Frolicking in the dappled sunlight of the Slatterys’ front yard seemed more worthwhile than trying to remember Catholic prayers in a chilly marble apse. Why wasn’t I out there, twirling around the Maypole?
I was angry with my father for making me take part in this event, which was gussied up as an ostensible entry into my Catholic heritage. It was a sham aimed at connecting me to his family traditions, but it was all happening without context, like reading the middle chapter of a very long history book without knowing what came before and what might follow. I hadn’t gone to religion classes—okay, fine, I had been conned into attendance once or twice with the lure of free doughnuts in the church basement, but I had no real connection to whatever was supposed to be taking place at the altar. If this was my heritage, it was woefully incomplete. My father had made his own mix-and-match choices about Catholic tradition, passing down to me Catholic values but ignoring Catholic liturgy. Secular manifestations of Catholic social justice were part of my education; Isaiah 12:2 was not. (Is it any surprise that I never received the sacrament of Confirmation?)
Being from Iowa, growing up without great resources, knowing the value of a dollar and the importance of a handshake—these were all central to my father’s identity. But being raised Catholic was more than just important to him. It was foundational. Catholic values, as defined by the progressive, anti-poverty wing of the church (rather than the Vatican), were the foundation for my father’s political beliefs. He referred often to Catholic ministries to the poor as a reason why he’d come to Washington in the first place: He’d wanted to solve the problem of hunger in America. My dad’s home-brewed sermons about forgiveness, empathy, and charity were often fairly convincing. And I had to admit, as I grew older, that this strain of Catholicism evolved into a benevolent and guiding force in my own political orientation.
But while my father shaped his life with his religion’s most progressive political values, the pomp and circumstance (and nosebleeds) of Catholic ritual were not as resonant. Maybe this was because he had left the circumscribed life in small-town Iowa where the church—its rituals and community, more than its words and ideas—was necessarily the center of family life. By the time he was a young man, he’d moved to the swingin’, polytheistic Washington of the 1970s, where many of those same words and ideas were reinforced and applied in the political work that obsessed him, but the rituals and community of small-town Iowa grew further and further away.
And when I came along, he didn’t have the room in his schedule—or the desire to make room in it—to indoctrinate his only child to the ways of the institutional church. He figured a Catholic political education, taught in a series of kitchen table homilies—rather than pre-scheduled religion classes—might suffice. I was steeped in my father’s own secular translation of the New Testament, but set adrift from the richness of his familial past, except on the rare occasions when I rested on the unfamiliar oak of a church pew, a stranger in a strange land.
This was no small loss in the transmission of the Wagner legacy. The church was the legacy, in large part. And, outside of the realm of political ideals—a realm both airily untouchable in its intellectualism and boringly earthbound in its pragmatic intent—it was a legacy denied to me. The institution of the church was the basis upon which nearly all of my father’s childhood memories had been built: Religion was the bark wrapped ’round his family tree. My father, Carl Robert Wagner, Jr., attended Catholic schools with all of his sisters and brother, and went to a small Catholic college after that. The nuns and priests were his surrogate parents, his disciplinarians, his spiritual guides. His father, Carl Wagner, Sr., made sure his clan prayed each night and attended mass every Sunday. It was in the sharing of these rituals that they also found their people.
According to my dad, the tiny town of Lansing, Iowa, had five churches, which were organized mostly around ethnicity. The biggest among them was the Church of the Immaculate Conception, where everyone was reportedly of Luxembourger, German, or Irish Catholic stock. The same held true for my father’s Catholic high school—Saint Thomas Aquinas. “It was all Connors and Murphys or Wagners and Schwarzkopfs,” he said. The Lutheran church was virtually all Norwegians; no one had any idea who went to the Seventh-Day Adventist church; Saint Luke’s Episcopal (or maybe Methodist?) Church was where all the “highbrow” Protestants went; and as far as the First Presbyterian churchgoers were conce
rned, my dad “wasn’t sure.”
“There was an incredible awareness of who was and who wasn’t Catholic,” he told me. “The Gaunitz brothers”—the owners of the meat market where he worked—“used to constantly make fun of Catholics and call them ‘mackerel snappers,’ because they ate fish on Friday.”
Ironically, that mackerel was sold by the one Jewish family in town: Jacob and Rose Erlich, who ran the Lansing fish market. Every Thursday, Jacob and his sister Rose would drive to all the Catholic houses and ring their bells. “Mom would answer the door to see what fish was fresh. Jacob would weigh the fish right there and give them to her,” he remembered, with no small amount of nostalgia. “Eating fish on Friday, it was the way things were done in the Catholic church when I was a kid.”
Jacob Erlich was the one to urge my father to go to college: “When I was a senior in high school, he must have asked me twenty-five times where I was gonna go to college,” my dad recalled. “He encouraged me to do it.” I had never heard of Jacob Erlich before; it seemed strange to me that someone who’d played such a pivotal role in his life would appear only now, in such a late chapter.
I asked my dad whether the Erlichs might have faced bigotry as the only Jewish family in a one-horse/five-church Christian town. He dismissed the thought entirely: “No, not at all.” He was sure. “Jacob and Rose were Jewish…but it was irrelevant really,” he proclaimed, as if its lack of relevance to him was definitive.
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But the theoretical irrelevance of other people’s cultural backgrounds was part of what defined the culture of my father’s childhood. When my dad was a junior in high school, he entered the Iowa Oratorical Declamation contest and memorized the essay “I Speak for Democracy” by a young woman named Elizabeth Ellen Evans—and with it, he won the state contest. Fresh off that success, he was asked to reprise the performance in front of the local Kiwanis Club, whose members were made up, in large part, by the town businesspeople—among them, Jacob Erlich.
The speech itself is an earnest bit of mid-century patriotism (ancestors giving their blood for freedom on “the sands of Okinawa,” ancestors bequeathing “the sweet, delicious coldness of the first bite of peppermint ice cream on the Fourth of July”), but it isn’t particularly jingoistic.
As my dad stood in front of that crowd of clerks and grocers and fishmongers, intoning a rudimentary but nonetheless heartfelt homily about religious tolerance and American identity, Jacob Erlich began to cry. By way of an explanation, my father offered: “I think it was the first time in his lifetime in Lansing—the first time in an honorific way—that Judaism had been referred to.” The negative space of that positive emotion seemed pretty evident: If Mr. Erlich was moved by this moment of explicit inclusion, it might be because he’d felt excluded for so long from this community that my father took as his birthright. But when I pressed my father further on whether this single Jewish family might have somehow been marginalized—or if their exclusion from the parish was lonesome, or even possibly miserable—his answer was a firm no.
Instead my father was insistent that the Erlichs were simply interesting secondary characters in the larger tableau of Hunky-Dory Lansing, people who didn’t know compromise or adversity. If anything, Jacob Erlich was a grateful prop—at least in my father’s retelling of his declamation performance—his tears illustrative of the magnificence of our country, where difference was accepted without question, and indeed was often a source of pride. The “I Am an American” anecdote was less about Jacob Erlich than it was about my father and his town and their mutual largesse. It was an affirmation of his tribe’s centrality to the life of this town and country, but also of the graceful way they wielded that power. They were white and Christian; they were American—so powerful as to appear invisible, at least to themselves.
And then, out of the blue, that entire narrative was thrown upside down.
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“Your aunt Susan thinks we were Jewish,” my father mentioned one day in passing, as if everyone had someone in their family who secretly believed they were Jewish, “because we had Mogen David wine at Thanksgiving.”
That day, my dad’s friend Larry Kirk was over at the house, and it was Larry who clarified: “It’s a kosher wine.”
My father seemed unconcerned.
“I didn’t know that,” he said. “Wine was—no one knew anything about it. Beer was the drink of choice in the Midwest.”
For those readers who did not grow up in Jewish households—or devout Irish Catholic households where traditionally Jewish beverages were apparently served at the dinner table—Mogen David wine, like its cousin Manischewitz, is a syrupy concoction consumed mostly at Passover seder, and by young teens who have not yet reached legal age and wish to get blitzed on alcoholic grape drink. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants from the Old World soaked raisins in water and then boiled down the liquid to make their version of bootleg wine for Passover dinner. It sounds undrinkable, but it was surprisingly popular.
By 1890, the six top kosher vendors in New York alone sold forty thousand gallons of the stuff.1 Once the native Concord grape was discovered for winemaking purposes (and extended shelf life!), the first commercial kosher wineries began opening up across the country. In Chicago—a hub for recent arrivals from Luxembourg, as it happened—there was headquartered the hilariously misnamed California Wine Company, which eventually became the Wine Corporation of America. One of its top sellers was Mogen David wine.
My father explained away the consumption of kosher wine at the dinner table of his semi-rural Iowa childhood home as some kind of dalliance with high class, a failed attempt at cosmopolitanism. This seemed fishy to me: There was no other evidence that he could point to that revealed an interest in metropolitan custom or experimental dinner table foodstuffs. In his house, there was fish on Fridays, doughnuts on Sunday, and corn in between.
If one delved deeper, our family patriarch seemed to be oriented in quite the opposite direction of homeschooled oenophile. “My dad was almost a socialist,” my father explained. “He wouldn’t let me join the Boy Scouts—he called it a ‘paramilitary organization.’ He’d turn on the radio every night at six to listen to Lowell Thomas with the news, and he would always say something to the extent of ‘General Motors, General Electric, General Eisenhower!’ He was skeptical of power.”
To be clear: Carl Wagner, Sr., was no Bolshevik Upper West Sider with a taste for NPR and Oregon pinot noir. This was a man who delivered the mail each day, went to church, and lived a decidedly modest life. It was impossible to imagine someone so resolutely proletarian purchasing bottles of what was then a pretty exotic quaff, especially if hops and barley were the standard. Unless, in fact, Aunt Susan was right—and we were Jewish.
So my father’s casual remark didn’t pass, not for me. The possibility of Wagnerian membership in the wandering tribe of Jews was very nearly impossible to imagine. Actually, it was more than that: It was pull-out-the-tablecloth-in-the-middle-of-a-fifteeen-course-dinner disruptive. My father’s family story had been so charmingly anodyne, so painfully white-bread, that the very suggestion of mystery, of lost roots, of secret Jewish ancestry, challenged our conception of the Wagner clan’s “traditional” Irish Catholic roots.
My ancestral bragging rights had till now centered on my far-flung Burmese family on my mother’s side—what was more exotic than Burma?!—but here was a whole new chapter of intrigue. About me. Yes—it was grossly narcissistic. My first thought upon hearing what I will refer to as the Jewish Theory was to reflexively imagine how much more intriguing “Burmese Jewish” sounded than “Burmese American.” Sure, Judaism was passed down through the maternal line, so, technically speaking, I was not on-the-official-books Jewish, but that didn’t negate my theoretical lineage. And, hey, if someone was offering a ticket, I was taking it.
Bu
t really, what excited me most about this development was the sense of belonging that being Jewish conferred. At dinner with my agent Ari, I mentioned this news to him, and he was legitimately happy for me. “I always knew you were part of the Tribe, Alex,” he said, grinning. (It was very difficult to please Ari unless you were offering him a lucrative deal, preferably in the Chinese market—and so this felt particularly rewarding.) I understood “Our Jewish Heritage” to mean something powerful—far more powerful than “Our Iowan Irish Heritage.” To be Jewish was to decisively answer the question of identity and community. The notion of identity that had been forbidden to me—denied to me even as I denied it!—the idea that I could belong somewhere and find myself in that belonging, suddenly became, I realized with some surprise, a thing that I dearly wanted.
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I casually discussed the Jewish Theory with my second cousin Karl, a student in New York City and fifteen years younger, which meant he was possessed of a millennial’s matter-of-factness born presumably out of a footloose attitude toward mortality and bloodlines and procreation thanks to his generation’s dependence on social media (or so I hypothesized). Karl didn’t seem tied to any particular part of our family story, and that made him a reliable narrator. Nor did he find it awkward or uncomfortable that I hadn’t eaten bratwurst with the family lately (which is to say, anytime in the last decade) and suddenly exhibited newfound interest in our family tree.