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Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust

I left Judaism in 1911. I know that this is in fact impossible.

—Kurt Tucholsky to Arnold Zweig, 1935

I AM CERTAIN THAT IT was a relief to my father, though he initially responded by becoming extremely upset, to know that he no longer had to hide his Jewish origins from his children. My eighteen-year-old brother, in spite of his general lack of interest in the subject, was neither upset nor particularly surprised to learn that Dad was a Jew. He did suggest that I might be smart to refrain from pressing our father for more details about a part of his life that was obviously a source of great pain.

Of course, I couldn’t stop. In my early twenties, I did not know how to ask Dad questions about his boyhood without distressing and angering him, and he was not quite ready to talk. I still had no real comprehension of the nature of American anti-Semitism in the first four decades of the century, so I could not possibly understand how my father’s view of himself had been affected, and distorted, by attitudes like those expressed in the Dartmouth administrators’ correspondence on the subject of Jewish enrollment. That this ignorance was due, in large measure, to my father’s own omissions and fabrications did not make it easier to talk; on the contrary, the long history of silence and evasion heightened both my combativeness and my father’s defensiveness. Nevertheless, Dad’s attitude began to shift subtly in the late sixties, and only in part because he had already been found out and found blameless by the people who mattered most to him—his children. Of considerable, albeit lesser, importance were the cultural changes taking place in every area of American society, among them the ascendancy of Jewish writers and intellectuals who did not feel obliged to conceal their origins. Even my father could see that a Jew no longer had to put down a phony Washington Square address to increase his chances of being admitted to an Ivy League college—that Jews were beginning to be in charge of college admissions offices. And he knew that I regarded my “Jewish” byline as an asset rather than a liability, that by the late sixties, being a Jew made you more rather than less a member of the journalistic club. One of his most insightful observations during this period—and how I resented my dad for saying it!—was that identifying oneself as a Jew simply because Jewishness had acquired a certain social and professional cachet was just as opportunistic as denying one’s Jewishness to escape social or professional stigmatization.

This dialogue was interrupted in 1969, when I married Anthony Astrachan, who had just become the Moscow correspondent of The Washington Post. I took a leave of absence from the paper to accompany him to the Soviet Union and began writing my first book, which focused on everyday Russian life. I did, however, make a careful record of my conversation with Felix Frankfurter’s sister during my honeymoon in Florence, with notes to myself to follow up on the leads she had given me concerning my paternal grandfather. But that would have to wait until I returned to the United States.

My Moscow experience—we lived there from mid-1969 until the end of 1971—left a permanent imprint on me, as it did on every western journalist who worked there during the repressive era following the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Thanks to Al Meyer, who had encouraged me to study Russian in college, I soon felt at ease speaking the language. Without the ability to speak and understand Russian, I doubt that I would have learned anything about the country in an era when the political climate inhibited all contacts between Russians and foreigners. The Brezhnev gerontocracy was cracking down on all political dissidents, including the first wave of Jews who wished to emigrate, and it was impossible for anyone living in the Soviet Union at the time, whether Russian or foreigner, to imagine that, only fifteen years later, a Soviet leader would embrace many of the basic principles espoused by the dissidents of the sixties—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the freedom to leave.

An eye-opener for me was my first exposure to good old-fashioned Eastern European and Russian anti-Semitism. Whether a foreign correspondent was a Jew or not mattered greatly to Russians of widely varying political views. If you ran afoul of the press department of the Foreign Ministry, which monitored all articles by western correspondents, you could often expect some allusion to your Jewish origins. My husband was actually called a “cosmopolitan”—a code word for Jews that had heralded anti-Semitic campaigns throughout the Stalin era—in an article in the newspaper Trud.

Nonofficial Russians would question me endlessly about my family background when they learned that my maiden name, which I always used professionally, was Jacoby (Yakobi, in Russian, is invariably a Jewish name). What “nationality” (the word Soviets used for what Americans call ethnicity) was my mother? Why had my father converted to Christianity? Was it true that in America there were no barriers to the practice of the Jewish religion? Did a Yakobi have any trouble getting into a university? Quotas in higher education were not a memory but a living reality, and a major impediment to their ambitions, for young Soviet Jews. Sometimes, Russians who did not know I was a Yakobi—who assumed, because of my blond hair (only my hairdresser knew for sure) and blue-gray eyes, that I was a full-blooded gentile—would express their conviction that the American press, banks, and political establishment were controlled by Jews. More important than these stereotypes was what I came to think of as the Flicker—an expression that said “gotcha”—when I would dispute the assertions and add, “I’d be telling you this even if my father weren’t Jewish.” The Flicker said, “Ah, so that explains why you care so much about dissidents and Jews who want to leave their motherland. Of course. You’re one too. And you’re all troublemakers.” Jewishness mattered as much to the Russian philo-Semites we knew (and we knew many in Moscow) as it did to the anti-Semites. The difference between living in Moscow and living in Washington was that nothing to do with Jews was ever treated matter-of-factly in Russia, as a subject requiring neither defense nor attack. Russian Jews, including those who were party members with good jobs and a secure place in the old Soviet system, also behaved differently toward western journalists who were known to be Jews. I remember one long interview with a school principal, Isak Borisovich Piratsky, a creative educator who demonstrated that it was possible, even within a centralized bureaucratic system, to work with initiative and integrity. Piratsky made a point of walking Tony and me out to our car, so that no one could possibly overhear (or record) what we were talking about. “Nu, tovarishchi,” he said (giving the word for “comrades” a meaning very different from its usual political connotation), “you should know that not all Russian Jews want to leave their country. What I would wish is to change my country so Jews wouldn’t want to leave it.” Then he suggested that we go to Moscow’s central synagogue to observe the celebration of Simchat Torah, the Jewish holiday that marks the end of one annual cycle of reading the Torah and the beginning of the next. On that day, secular Jews (joined by the tiny community of observant Jews remaining in Moscow at that time) gathered in the street outside to sing, dance, and proclaim their cultural, if not religious, affiliation. Piratsky’s mention of the celebration was in itself a significant statement of his political orientation, signifying that he was what Russians then called an inakomysliaschii (one who thinks differently). On Simchat Torah, the street outside the synagogue would be filled with people who, though few of them had crossed the dangerous line into open political dissent, were willing to let their presence register their alienation from the official system. The crowds, which grew larger every year, also included many non-Jews with dissident political views. During this period, there was a great deal of overlap between the emerging Jewish emigration movement and the dissidents who were committed to remaining in and changing their native land; both groups agreed that the freedom to emigrate (and to return without penalty) was a crucial right that all Soviet citizens had long been denied by their government. Outside the synagogue on Archipov Street, the number of KGB agents observing the crowd also increased every year. It was on Simchat Torah that Tony and I first heard a song lampooning the folk belief that Jews control everything. “The Jews, the Jews, the Jews encircle us everywhere” was the refrain of the song written by Vladimir Vysotsky, whose satirical verses were known to everyone even though they were never officially published or recorded. My favorite verse, which scans both in English and Russian, went, “Even Khrushchev, glory to God, used to run to the synagogue.” Had he not been a party member and a school principal, Piratsky undoubtedly would have been among those celebrating a Jewish holiday they had never observed in a religious sense. “Shalom,” he said as he waved good-bye to us in front of his school.

In Moscow, I also met Jews born in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia, who had survived the Holocaust because they managed to flee eastward just ahead of the invading Nazi armies in June 1941. After the war, they remained in Moscow because most of them had married Russians—and because they had nothing to go back to: The once-vibrant Jewish communities of Lvov, Riga, Vilna, Minsk, Bialystok, Lodz, and Warsaw had been reduced to human ashes. These Jews were, on the one hand, grateful to the Soviet Union for saving their lives, but they were also bitter because the Soviet government had never acknowledged the special nature of Jewish suffering under the Nazis. At the time, the official Soviet posture was not to distinguish between the Jewish victims of the Nazis and the other Soviet citizens who perished. The result of this policy was the imposition of a public silence about the Holocaust: In a country filled with conspicuous memorials in tribute to the immense sacrifices and suffering of the Soviet people during World War II, there were no monuments, as the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote in his famous poem, at places like Babi Yar. In that infamous ravine outside Kiev, more than 100,000 Soviet citizens, most of them Jews, were shot, their corpses falling over the edge and piling atop one another until the earth could hold no more. At the beginning of the massacre, more than 33,000 Jews were marched out of Kiev and murdered in just two days. Germans did the shooting, and Ukrainian collaborators (according to many firsthand accounts) helped keep the Jews in line while they awaited their fate. During my years in the Soviet Union, it was nearly impossible to persuade an official guide to stop at Babi Yar. Visiting Kiev, we had to elude our official chaperones, who reported to the KGB, in order to drive out to the ravine with a dissident friend. (Babi Yar does have a memorial today; Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost put an end to the long official silence concerning the fate of Jews in Nazi-occupied portions of the Soviet Union.)

From time to time, Russian friends (many of them survivors of Stalin’s gulag) would take me to meet non-Russian Jewish survivors who had, through odd combinations of circumstance, moved eastward instead of westward after their liberation by the Red Army. One of these Jews, who became a good friend in spite of the constrictions on relationships between foreigners and Soviet citizens, had what was, for me, the most resonant story. I tell it now, as she once asked me to, because she and her family are finally beyond the reach of any adverse official “consequences” (as she put it) from the now-defunct Soviet government.

—

KATYA STEIN MOROZOVA (her name has been changed) was born in Budapest in 1924 into a nonobservant, assimilated German-speaking Jewish family. Her father was a doctor, her mother a secondary-school teacher of German and English. When I met her, in 1969, she looked extraordinarily young for a woman who had spent her entire adult life in the Soviet Union, where women in their forties generally bore the marks of having lived through hard times and looked like American women in their sixties. This was all the more remarkable in view of the suffering that had preceded Katya’s life in Moscow.

Until 1944, under the independent Hungarian government of the fascist Nicholas Horthy, Katya and her family, like most Hungarian Jews, remained relatively unharmed, a small island in a sea of Nazi mass murder. During this period, Katya’s father had the foresight to obtain forged papers for her, including a baptismal certificate bearing a non-Jewish name. Should the Nazis ever occupy Hungary, he thought, his blond, blue-eyed daughter would be protected by the documents. In March 1944, with the Russians advancing from the East, the Nazi army finally occupied Hungary. But the forged papers did Katya no good; she became prey for the Nazis not because she was a Jew but because she was a young woman. The beautiful twenty-year-old was scooped up by a German military police patrol while she was walking down the street and was then forced into service in a brothel for troops on leave from the front. This lovely, sheltered daughter of cultivated parents was sterilized without anesthesia.

“I thought constantly of suicide, and I am sure it would have come to pass were it not for one young German soldier. They were each allowed fifteen minutes, and your worst fear was that a soldier would make a bad report about you, that you had not been enthusiastic enough. This young man came to me—he could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen, by then the Germans were throwing babies at the Russian troops—unzipped his pants, and climbed on. But he didn’t do anything. ‘Fräulein,’ he said, ‘please be quiet.’ Can you understand what that meant, being called Fräulein, told ‘please’ in a civilized way, in that place? He said that he could not do this thing, he was sure he was going to be killed in battle, and he could not go to be judged by God with such a sin on his conscience. But it had to look to the others as if he were taking his pleasure with me, or it might go badly for both of us. I understood, of course. In his mouth he had chocolates, and he passed them to me when he pretended to kiss me. This, too, was a miracle for the starving. He told me his name was Kurt, that he came from Stuttgart, and that I must try to live, to survive the war to tell people what the Nazis had done. No German could ever expect forgiveness in this world, he said, but he hoped for forgiveness in the next. I told him, ‘Your God’—this was a slip that could have revealed I was a Jew, saying your God rather than simply God—‘will surely have mercy on you.’ He thanked me—he thanked me—he left, and that was the end of it, but this moment of kindness gave me the courage to go on living. I tried to keep myself clean, so as not to catch a disease from the soldiers, and be shot or deported to the gas, if the weekly test showed I was infected. When people say that all Germans are monsters, as many people in Russia do, I know this is not so. At least one German was not a monster.”

Katya served as a Feldhüre, as the Germans branded the women they forced into prostitution, until she was liberated by the advancing Red Army in October 1944. Almost unimaginably to the tormented women left behind by their Nazi captors, the Russian soldiers took up where the Germans left off and began a new orgy of rape. “Just when it looks like we are all going to die a second time,” Katya said, “I saw Misha for the first time.” Misha was a Red Army captain, and he soon put an end to the rampaging of his troops by ordering summary public executions for all soldiers who raped, assaulted, or robbed civilians. When he saw Katya, who by then weighed less than eighty pounds, it was apparently love at first sight. Standing six feet tall, he picked her up in his arms and carried her to a field hospital behind the Soviet lines. He must have had high-level connections, because he somehow managed to acquire sulfa (virtually unobtainable anywhere in war-torn Europe, much less Russia) to treat her pneumonia. When the war ended, Misha (who was not Jewish, Katya informed me at our first meeting) tracked Katya down in a makeshift displaced persons’ camp and they were married. He was twenty-two years older than Katya and had retired, by the time I met them, as a full colonel.

In 1948, the couple adopted two Jewish children from an orphanage in Moscow. Katya’s parents and the rest of her relatives had all been deported to Auschwitz and gassed in Adolf Eichmann’s eleventh-hour roundup of Hungarian Jews, the last large surviving Jewish community in Europe, in the spring of 1944. “My husband and children reconciled me to life again,” Katya said. In Moscow, Katya learned Russian and followed in her father’s footsteps by studying medicine and becoming an obstetrician. It was the best profession she could have chosen, though her husband had worried that bringing babies into the world would be a painful reminder of her inability to have her own.

“Just the opposite,” she said. “With each baby I helped into this life, I felt that I was repairing the ruined world. And if it was a Jewish baby, I felt this twice over. This was why I specifically chose Jewish children to adopt.” It took only a few minutes with Katya to realize that here was a great soul, one whose experiences had only served to magnify her compassion and empathy. “When Misha asked me to marry him, I at first said no because I was uncertain that I could ever be a normal, loving wife—you understand, after what had happened I was not certain I could ever happily be with a man again. He said he would take his chances, he had enough love for both of us. His wife had died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad, and their only son had been killed in the first year of the war. What I remember is the first time Misha and I were together, I wept when I realized, yes, I could still be with a man and feel happiness, and give happiness. I knew then that I had not just survived, I was still alive, and the Germans had not killed the thing inside that makes a chelovek (human).”

Katya saw nothing ironic about the fact that her particular fate had been determined not by her Jewishness but by her womanhood. “Vsyo ravno (it’s all the same),” she said. “Once someone made the remark to me, ‘Well, your father made quite a mistake, didn’t he. You never would have been taken to the German soldiers if they had known you were a Jew.’ Such ignorance! What mistake? My family all went to the gas. I am here, having pirozhki with you, with a husband who has cared for me all my life, two beautiful children, and someday, maybe grandchildren. My father chose from the many bad choices available to a Jew in those days.”

Katya’s husband, who had of course always known about everything that happened to her, was not happy that she had broken her silence of many years and felt what he saw as a mysterious “compulsion” to tell her story to carefully selected people. This was an understandable fear on his part. Katya’s account had many elements (not the least of them the behavior of certain Soviet soldiers during the liberation) that could do a Soviet citizen no good if the authorities somehow learned what she was saying. But Misha never tried to stop Katya from doing anything she really wanted to do, and he bowed to her wishes even though he was baffled by her need to dig up the past. Finally, Katya told me something I already suspected: the blond (now silver-haired) Red Army officer had a Jewish mother. Even though he was a graduate of the prestigious Frunze Military Academy and a much-decorated war hero, Misha would not have risen to the rank of colonel had he not used his father’s Russian “nationality” on his internal passport. (Soviet citizens of “mixed” backgrounds were allowed to choose the nationality of either parent for registration on their internal passports, mandatory identity cards used for everything from travel within the country to school enrollment. Most Russian half-Jews, mindful of official and unofficial anti-Semitism, chose to be registered as Russians.) Half-Jews with Russian names and Slavic features, like Misha, were extremely careful about disclosing the Jewish side of their backgrounds. They needed time to gauge the attitudes of foreigners (and, for that matter, other Soviet citizens), to decide whether they could be trusted, before revealing their true heritage.

Katya was well aware of the emerging Jewish emigration movement in the Soviet Union. She herself would never wish to leave, she said, but she hoped that one day it might be possible for her children to emigrate. Although they bore the Russian name of their adoptive father, they looked Jewish and had been subjected to anti-Semitic comments, and physical assaults by “hooligans” (as Russians used to call teenage toughs), throughout their lives. Katya was extremely interested in my family story (what I knew of it at the time), for her own family in Hungary had been filled with Catholic converts. The intermarriage rate for non-Orthodox Jews in prewar Hungary was quite high; Katya’s father had four sisters, and three of them married gentiles. None, however, had escaped the Holocaust. Katya urged me, on my return to the United States, to try to find out more about what had happened to the Jacobys in the nineteenth century. “There are always consequences, consequences that can never be anticipated, for pretending that you are someone you aren’t, or you aren’t someone you are,” she observed when we met for the last time before I left the Soviet Union. Her own family’s attachment to German culture, and her aunts’ belief that they would be protected by their marriages to Christians, had led them to underestimate the nature of the threat from Hitler’s Germany. Katya herself had come to feel that Jews must never again be deluded into thinking that they could conceal their Jewishness through conversion or complete assimilation. This deepening conviction played an important role in Katya’s refusal to abide by her husband’s wishes that she keep her story to herself. What had happened to her as a woman, she emphasized repeatedly, had happened within the context of Jewish extermination. “Even in that place,” she said, “I knew things would go far, far worse for me if they ever found out I was a Jew. I tell my children, ‘You can’t write yourself out of Jewish history.’ ”

Soon after I left Moscow, Katya’s husband died of a heart attack. She died of breast cancer in 1983, at the age of fifty-nine, but lived long enough to enjoy the company of her four grandchildren. In 1987, taking advantage of the looser emigration policies under Mikhail Gorbachev, her sons fulfilled their mother’s dream by emigrating with their children to the United States. I carried Katya’s story inside me for many years, mindful that in the absence of her protective and well-connected husband, Katya and her family might still be harmed by Soviet officialdom.

—

I HAVE THOUGHT often of Katya while sifting through the layers of conversion and assimilation that make up the Jacoby family’s history. I find it easy to imagine German or Czech or Hungarian versions of my father, aunt, and uncle embarking on their adult lives in the early 1930s in Berlin or Prague or Budapest. I see them marrying Christians and identifying themselves with the same cosmopolitan culture as their non-Jewish contemporaries. What would Uncle Ozzie have done in Berlin in 1935, had he already been married to a Catholic and fathered a son classified as a first-degree Mischling under the Nuremberg Laws? Would he have gotten out, right away, with his Catholic wife and son? Or would he have told himself, as Katya’s father and aunts did in neighboring Hungary, that this was the twentieth century and that it was quite impossible to imagine the repeal of Jewish emancipation—not to mention civilization itself?

I asked Uncle Ozzie, after my return from Moscow, whether he had ever considered any of these questions during the period around the end of the war, when the full horror of what the Nazis had done to the Jews of Europe was being revealed. He cocked his head and looked at me as if I were asking him whether he had ever considered what it would be like to live on Mars. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he replied. “Like everyone, I found it hard to believe when the first news of the camps came out, how human beings were capable of doing what the Nazis did. But if you mean did I ever think, ‘That could have been me,’ or asked myself what I would have done if I’d been a Jew in Germany, the answer is no, it never really occurred to me. It didn’t really have anything to do with me, because my grandfather got out of Europe in the 1840s.” Uncle Ozzie may well have been the least introspective person I have ever known, but this conversation, which took place in 1975, suggests a degree of emotional obtuseness that still baffles me when I look at my notes. In some respects, Ozzie’s relationship to his own Jewishness was much more complex than my father’s, because he lived in two worlds and my father lived in one. Ozzie’s professional life on the tournament bridge circuit was spent among sophisticated and generally liberal people, who simply assumed that he (like many of them) was Jewish, while his family life in Dallas unfolded in a far more conservative environment than my father’s life in Michigan. Dad’s cronies at the Sip’n Snack in Okemos, who breakfasted together once a week after their early-morning golf game, were (like my father himself) middle-of-the-road small businessmen bemused by the social upheavals of the sixties but flexible enough to try to figure out what was going on with their children. Most were lukewarm postwar Republicans who had voted for Eisenhower in the fifties and for Richard Nixon in 1960 (though my father voted for Kennedy) but had found Barry Goldwater far too conservative for their taste in 1964. If they voted for Nixon again in 1968, it was not because they were opposed to the Democratic social programs of the era but because Hubert Humphrey was too closely identified with the Vietnam War. The main concern of these men was to keep their draft-age sons out of a war that disturbed them deeply—not least because, as veterans of what they all considered an entirely just war, they had never imagined a time when they would encourage their boys to avoid military service. If any of my dad’s friends suspected that he was Jewish, they regarded this as a matter of little consequence. He was one of them.

The denizens of the Dallas Country Club, where Ozzie twitted his cardplaying cronies about their enthusiasm for Goldwater, were another matter altogether. Many of the club members were ultraconservatives who, as Ozzie himself told me, “were only sorry that Kennedy was shot because it gave Dallas a bad name.” Fifty years earlier, they would certainly not have allowed a Jew into their club. These were men who paid the closest attention to race, ethnicity, and religion, and it is highly unlikely that they would have let any Jew into their club unless he possessed some special traits—such as the fame and fondness for high-stakes gambling of my uncle. One thing I never understood about Ozzie was his ability to sit around a table and joke with men to whom words like wetback, nigger, and sheeny came as naturally as a taste for barbecue and neat bourbon. Ozzie was simply a master of compartmentalization: he took what he wanted from people (in this case, the free-and-easy Good Old Boy love of gambling) and ignored what didn’t suit him. My father would have flown into a rage—I saw him do it often enough when people made racist comments—if anyone had joked about the Kennedy assassination in his presence.

Ozzie’s home environment, as a result of Aunt Mary’s devoutness, was also more Catholic than my father’s. It was always understood, for instance, that my cousins Jon and Jim would go to a Catholic college (they both did their undergraduate work at Notre Dame). I once asked Jim, who was thirteen at the time of the Nuremberg trials, whether he remembered having any of the kinds of conversations about the Holocaust that I had with my father while I was growing up. Although Jim remembered many discussions of battles, he could not recall anything special having been said about the concentration camps. “I knew that the Nazis had murdered millions of people in those camps,” he told me, “and I knew they were mostly Jews. But I didn’t connect it in any way with my father’s family. I never had any sense that you say you did, of something being left out of my father’s stories about growing up. But that may be because he wasn’t around as much as your dad was. I never thought of myself as anything other than a Catholic, because that was the way my mom brought me up. And it was very clear that she was the one in charge of raising the children.”

My father, too, said he never gave any thought to the juxtaposition of his own conversion with the still-recent revelation of Hitler’s genocidal war against the Jews. “If I had thought about it at all,” he said, “I would have thought that it [the Holocaust] proved my father was right, that no good could come from identifying yourself with a people that had been so victimized, had suffered so much.” Unlike Ozzie, my father began to have second thoughts (not about his conversion but about his assumption that conversion could eradicate his Jewishness) around the time of the Eichmann trial. It still puzzles me that it took him so long to accept what had been clear since the history of Hitler’s war against the Jews began to unfold during the Nuremberg trials—that “race” and “blood,” not religion, had been the determining factor in the targeting of Jews for extermination. Conversions and intermarriages had only served to delay the closing of the vise around most members of the Jewish “race.” In the end, to stand my dad’s observation on its head, little good came to the Jews who did not identify with their own people. By the mid-seventies, though, my father had altered his thinking and come to the conclusion that his father had been badly mistaken in his belief that assimilation, and abandonment of any connection to religious Judaism, would eventually rule out the possibility that his family would ever be identified as Jews. “You’re proof of that,” he said tartly. “I’d say you’re carrying a Jewish gene if it didn’t make me sound like a Nazi.”

My dad continued to be a reasonably observant (much more so than my mother), if hardly devout, Catholic until the end of his life. He believed in God, and in his view, Catholicism was as good as any other religion. Twenty-five years ago, when I was in my late twenties, it drove me wild when Dad would talk that way. Holocaust scholars were beginning to uncover the record of all that the Roman Catholic Church had not done to protest the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. I felt an unquenchable anger at the Church in which I was raised as the unfolding historical record showed that Roman Catholic officialdom throughout Europe had reserved its concern primarily for Jewish converts to Catholicism. Hearing about the noble exceptions—such as the shelter offered by individual convents and monasteries throughout Europe, or the unremitting efforts of many Italian clergymen outside the Vatican (from cardinals on down) to rescue Jews from deportation—only made me angrier. What if the Church hierarchy in Poland and France had demonstrated as much concern for all Jews as the Catholic clergy did after the Nazis occupied northern Italy? My distress about the role of the Church was not based on the mistaken notion that Protestants in Europe had treated Jews with great benevolence during the war; I cared more about the Catholic record because I was still struggling to come to terms with my own religious upbringing and with my father’s decision to convert. This concern was, perhaps, an ironic remnant of the pride-filled “I-am-a-Catholic” training in parochial school; Catholics, the nuns always said, must judge and be judged according to a higher standard than that applied to people of other faiths.

The more I learned about the role of the Church in most of Nazi-occupied Europe, the more trouble I had comprehending how a Jew, any Jew, of whatever degree of deracination, could have converted to Catholicism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. And yet it happened often enough—and even among camp survivors themselves—to have produced a growing body of memoirs by children of Holocaust survivors for whom the subject of conversion is fraught with far more pain and danger than the American-born Jacoby converts could ever have imagined.

To this day, however, I still do not understand how my father, while taking instruction in the Faith, could have accepted his priest’s flippant rationalization of the deicide charge against Jews with the remark that if Jesus had been born in America instead of Jerusalem, he would have been denounced and crucified by Indians. Relations between Jews and Catholics (as well as other Christian denominations) have improved immeasurably during the past forty years, and the change would never have taken place without the Church’s explicit repudiation of the teaching that Jews, as a people, bore responsibility for the crucifixion of Christ. But the alteration in the Church’s attitude toward Jews was part of the spirit of aggiornamento fostered by Pope John XXIII in the early sixties; the transition had not even begun during the period when my aunt, father, and uncle converted to Catholicism. The deicide accusation was not, as my father implied, some irrelevant theological formality but the very heart of the historical Christian (not only Catholic) animus toward Jews. At the time my father and I were watching the Eichmann trial on television, various Protestant and Catholic publications, arguing against the death penalty for the defendant, brazenly compared the proceedings to the condemnation of Jesus. “The difference in the two trials,” declared an article in a prominent Episcopal publication, The Witness, “is that Eichmann’s condemnation does not save a single man from bondage and service to death, while the condemnation of the other defendant [Jesus] set men free from death and from the power of death in their own sin.” Attitudes informed by this view of Jews—and of their historical responsibility for the murder of Christ—were not universal, but neither were they rare among Christian clergymen during the era when my father and his siblings first embraced Catholicism.

I have always disliked the term “self-hating Jew,” and I dislike it even more today because it most commonly appears as a label applied by right-wing Jewish fundamentalists to anyone who does not share their narrow and repressive view of what one must do to live honorably as a Jew. (Fundamentalist is a better term for these people than ultra-Orthodox, because the latter term—even with an “ultra” in front—does not apply to the millions of Orthodox Jewish believers who would not presume to use their own standards of observance as a measure of who is, and is not, a Jew.) In any event, “self-hatred” is far too gross a term to describe my father’s motivation. Shame, not self-hatred, was the emotion that enveloped my dad when, out of nowhere (as he saw it), he was beaten and called a kike in the schoolyard. It is a particularly shaming, and confusing, experience for a child to be persecuted for belonging to a group, a religion, a cultural tradition that he has been raised to regard as utterly alien. What was remarkable about my father, in view of his upbringing, is that he made a real attempt, at a stage in life when it is difficult to reexamine anything, to understand and come to terms with the profound self-doubt generated by the vacuum in which he was raised. My dad often expressed the conviction that a preoccupation with the Holocaust was not the best way for me to honor the Jewish side of my heritage. “I’m not sure exactly what I’m talking about,” he said with uncharacteristic hesitancy, “but I think it’s…well, kind of a dead end to consider yourself a Jew because Hitler would have sent you to the ovens along with all of the full-blooded Jews. It’s…it’s like letting Hitler define the terms. Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust—well, it seems to me that being a Jew has to mean something more.”

This conversation took place at some point in the late 1970s, when my father was in his early sixties and I was in my early thirties. I was old enough to listen, and he was old enough to talk in ways that he—and we—had never talked before.