Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search For Her Family's Buried Past - Hardcover

Jacoby, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068483250X ISBN 13: 9780684832500

Publisher: Scribner, 2000

Synopsis

A journalist journeys back into her family's own hidden past to uncover the history of her New York German-Jewish family, which attempted to hide its religious and cultural background by converting to Roman Catholicism.

About this title

About the Author:

Susan Jacoby began her career as a reporter for The Washington Post. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, and The Possible She. She lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: Always Say Jewish

My paternal grandfather died in 1931, when my father was only seventeen, and Dad always claimed that every photograph of his dimly remembered parent had been lost in a fire. That, like much of what my father chose to say about his childhood family, was untrue. In 1986, after Dad's funeral, my aunt Edith unexpectedly handed me an eighty-year-old snapshot of the elusive paterfamilias, Oswald Nathaniel Jacoby. At forty, I looked for the first time into the eyes of the man my father claimed not to remember but remembered all too well. The 1906 image, captured at a time when families were just beginning to chronicle their lives in candid photos, has retained a surprising clarity. A robust man, clearly in the prime of life, stretches out in a hammock with an equally robust, curly-haired boy -- his four-year-old son, Ozzie -- and a small terrier. This is my grandfather at thirty-six -- a provocatively handsome and seductive figure, staring into the camera with a sensual, worldly smile that suggests a wide variety of possibilities...anything, really, except the contented Edwardian domesticity implicit in the trio of father, first son, and family dog. I recognize Oswald Jacoby as the sort of man I could fall in love with instantly -- a more dangerous, less reliable version of my father. Beneath the superficial resemblances -- the same lavish dark hair just beginning to gray, the same coiled, barely concealed restlessness that makes the hammock, surrounded by greenery on the porch of a summer house, look more like a stage prop than a resting place -- is a cynical expression I never saw on my father's face. Looking at my grandfather for the first time, I can easily believe that this was a man who let his children down badly, so badly that they never displayed a picture of him in their homes. Perhaps I think this only because I am gazing with hindsight at the appealingly arranged domestic scene. I know that the sunny little boy will be forced to grow up too fast by the fecklessness of the man in the hammock. I know that his daughter, his favorite child, will be scarred forever by discovering him with another woman in the bed he usually shared with his wife. I know that by the time he dies, in mysterious circumstances, he will have gambled away the money that should have taken care of his widow and sent the neglected baby of the family -- the young man who will become my father -- to college. I know that this charmer in the picture is a man who cannot be trusted.

My father, by contrast, was a man who made every effort not to let his children down -- but he too was a man with secrets. Known for his unfailing optimism, gregariousness, and a childlike inability to conceal his emotions, he grew taciturn only when the subject of his family was raised. "What was your daddy like?" I would ask when I was seven or eight. "Why, I hardly knew Father," he would answer. (For my dad and his siblings, their long-dead father was always, in the Victorian manner, Father with a capital F, and their living mother was Mother with a capital M.) For much of my childhood, I assumed that my dad had been a baby, rather than a young man about to enter college, at the time of the death of the distant Father he hardly seemed to remember.

From an early age, then, I sensed the existence of painful secrets somehow connected to my grandfather. I knew that my father, Aunt Edith, and Uncle Ozzie had married Catholics and converted to the Faith; I did not know that they had also invented a Protestant preconversion past and lied, by omission or commission, whenever they were asked a question that might reveal their true origins. "What were you before you were a Catholic, Daddy?" "An Episcopalian." The baffling storehouse of inconsistencies that made up my father's version of his own and his family's past remained closed to me until, in 1965, I left the small Michigan town where I had spent most of my childhood for the more cosmopolitan environment of Washington, D.C. There, at age twenty-one, I managed to put some of the pieces together -- mainly the Jacoby name and my dad's "Jewish" appearance -- and to penetrate the outer layers of avoidance and omission in the family narrative. I finally understood that all of my father's evasions had been designed to conceal the fact that he was born a Jew.

"A Jewish parent is hardly a skeleton in the closet in this day and age," a friend of mine remarked when the Jewish lineage of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright became a major news story in 1997. True. But Albright's evident distress at the revelation, and her initial resistance when reporters, as was quite natural in view of her prominence, began looking into her background, demonstrated that there are people -- only some of them Jews -- for whom Jewish origins remain a highly charged subject. Albright's parents, Czech Jews of considerable prominence who fled to safety in London on the eve of World War II, had determinedly attempted to conceal their Jewishness after the war. They never told their daughter that they were Jews or that most of the family had perished in concentration camps. While it is not surprising that Madeleine the girl believed what her parents told her, it is difficult to credit her assertion that as an adult -- and a diplomat with wide-ranging international contacts -- she never suspected what was well known to many of her contemporaries, including surviving Czech Jewish relatives of whose existence she was fully aware (and whom she stonewalled when they attempted to contact her after she was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations). Even in this day and age, there are still Jews -- some with positions in society that would seem to render them impregnable -- who fear that a clear-eyed glance backward can only consign them to the fate of Lot's wife.

For my own father, his Jewish lineage definitely was a skeleton in the closet, a source of shame that shadowed his entire life and required him to construct a false identity in an effort to shield his children. Long before I had any idea that my father was a Jew, I sensed a reservoir of self-doubt at the core of his nature. It expressed itself in many ways, but nowhere was it more evident than in his lifelong tendency to deprecate the personal and professional achievements that represented a real triumph over his own sense of unworthiness.

As an adult, I felt considerable guilt about asking my father questions that evoked his old sense of shame, but my need to know was stronger than my desire to protect him. "Why do you gnaw at this?" Dad would ask, over and over, until his death. "Didn't your mother and I give you a good foundation? Don't you have a wonderful job? Why can't you just let this Jewish business alone?" He was the reason -- he and the religion in which he and my mother had tried to raise me. I just never could accept it, even in the stage of childhood when it is natural to accept what everyone around you believes. Yet such was the power of the Roman Catholic Church of that era -- "it was the only The Church," a Catholic wit once said -- that I invested a great deal of my emotional energy, at a time when most teenagers' minds are filled with dreams of the opposite sex (not that there wasn't room for those too), in a struggle to escape the prediction of the nuns: "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic." The discovery that my father was a Jew -- just as I embarked upon adult life -- seemed to offer one explanation for the smoldering no that had shaped my girlhood.

When I say I had no idea that my father was a Jew, I mean I had no idea on a conscious level. Until I began writing this book, I had forgotten one of the recurrent dreams of my adolescence -- a nightmare in which I was a prisoner in a concentration camp. My head was shaved, but I wasn't wearing a striped uniform; the yellow star was attached to my everyd

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 068483250X
• ISBN 13: 9780684832500
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304