Half-Jew
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Since childhood, Susan Jacoby, the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of American Unreason, was sure that her father was keeping a secret. At age twenty, just before beginning her writing career as a reporter for the Washington Post, she learned the truth: Robert Jacoby, a Catholic convert with a Catholic wife, was also a Jew.
In Half-Jew, Jacoby grapples with the hidden identity cloaked by the persona of a successful accountant and member of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in East Lansing, Michigan—and with the secrets and lies that had marked her family’s history for three generations on two continents.
Beginning in 1849 when her great-grandfather arrived in America as a political refugee, Jacoby traces her lineage through the lives of her great-uncle Harold, the distinguished astronomer whose map of the constellations is etched on the ceiling of Grand Central Terminal; her uncle, the bridge champion Oswald Jacoby, her aunt Edith, also a Catholic convert and eventually a reformer within the church; and, of course her father himself. At the core of story is the psychic damage that accrues across generations when people conceal their true ethnic and religious origins.
Featuring a new afterword, Half-Jew is a meticulously researched, emotionally poignant examination of the dark legacy of European and American anti-Semitism as well as a tender-hearted account of a daughter coming to understand her father, herself, and her family’s true legacy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this poignant mix of family history and memoir, journalist Jacoby (Wild Justice) unravels the thick fabric of lies that her father, Robert, wove around his past. Raised in a happy Catholic home, Jacoby was in her early 20s when she learned that Robert had been born a Jew. Her surprise intensified when she found out that Robert's brother and sister had also married Catholics and converted. What, she wondered, had caused such a dramatic rupture in the family's history? What emerges from Jacoby's research is not only an account of family estrangement and denial but a social history of anti-Semitism and Jewish acculturation in the U.S. over the last century and a half, beginning with the arrival of the author's German-Jewish great-grandfather in the mid 19th century. Jacoby presents some finely crafted portraits: her grandfather Oswald, a brilliant young lawyer whose career dissolved under the pressure of a gambling addiction; Edith, Oswald's chilly, critical wife; Oswald's brother, Harold, a noted astronomer at Columbia University; Uncle Ozzie, Robert's brother, an admittedly self-centered world-class bridge champion; and Robert himself, a loving father who nevertheless almost ruined his family with his own gambling problem. Jacoby tells how Robert was taunted as a "baby Jew-boy" during his years in a Brooklyn public school and of the two years he spent at Dartmouth at a time when the admissions director believed the college had too many of "the chosen and the heathen." Jacoby's intelligent and compassionate probing extends to her own prolonged process of learning to accept herself as a "half-Jew." This is a moving tribute to her father and a vivid portrait of one family's attempt to find its place in America.
