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

Susan Jacoby (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 5, 2000

What is a child's emotional legacy when one parent's origins are treated as a shameful secret? This is the provocative question addressed by Susan Jacoby in a probing work of personal memory and social history that excavates four generations of lies and secrets in her father's accomplished but deeply insecure New York German Jewish family.

Blending meticulous historical research with compassionate emotional insight, this writer of "fierce intelligence and a nimble, unfettered imagination" (Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times)" not only reclaims the family's past but also offers a beautifully nuanced close-up of a bond between a father and daughter.

The author knew from early childhood that her father was a Roman Catholic convert but never knew he had been born a Jew. Yet she sensed, growing up Catholic in the 1950s in Michigan, that there were missing pieces in her father's -- and her own -- story.

In search of her family's real history, Jacoby mined New York newspaper and university archives, which yielded a rich cast of characters, beginning in 1849 with the arrival of her great-grandfather from Germany. We meet her tormented grandfather, who built a brilliant legal career in the early 1900s but gambled away a fortune and died a cocaine addict in 1931; her great-uncle Harold, a distinguished astronomer whose map of the constellations still shines brightly on the ceiling of New York's Grand Central Terminal; and her beloved uncle Ozzie, the famous bridge champion Oswald Jacoby.

"Half-Jew" breaks new ground by exploring the link between personal shame -- the gambling compulsion that haunted four generations of Jacobymen -- and the social shame that impelled anentire family to deny its Jewishness. With unflinchinghonesty, and in tender but unsentimental prose, Susan Jacoby explores the damage inflicted by intimate lies and the rich opportunities for repair when a parent and an adult child face long-buried truths.

Editorial Reviews

From 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. Agents, Georges and Anne Borchardt. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A noted journalist uncovers her Jewish roots.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1ST edition (May 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 068483250X
• ISBN-13: 978-0684832500
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,553,542 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating book, March 6, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search For Her Family's Buried Past (Hardcover)

This was an amazing book. I am always interested in books about Jews who convert or who move away from Judaism because my parents, Holocaust survivors, subliminally encouraged assimilation and intermarriage among their children, although not conversion. Ms. Jacoby's analysis of all topics, no matter how brutally honest she had to be, was incredible to read. This book comes out of her journalism background and yet it doesn't read like journalism, it reads like an amazing journey...All in all, I learned much from this book. I learned a history of the German Jewish immigrants that I had never heard before, the history of our own country's anti-semitism, and about pre-Vatican II Catholicism, among other topics. The book put a personal stamp on these topics; it's impossible for me now to judge the "Aunt Edith's" for converting, not when the conversion came out of genuine faith. The book also inspires me to read more about the Holocaust, which I have avoided due to my parents' experiences. Although Ms. Jacoby says you can't stop being a Jew, which I believe, I also believe that if enough generations intermarry, their Jewishness will eventually disappear and they will hide successfully. Maybe not from Nuremberg Laws, but certainly within the pluralism of American society.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An uniquely impressive, engaging, poignant biography., September 7, 2000

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search For Her Family's Buried Past (Hardcover)

Half-Jew is Susan Jacoby's impressive, highly recommended family history in which she shares a meticulous historical research into the suppressed Judaic roots of her personal genealogy. In these pages, Susan writes with compassion, emotional insight, and candor about her father (who was a Roman Catholic convert) and her own search for ancestral roots that led her to the discovery of her German Jewish grand-grandfather who arrived in American in 1849, her tormented grandfather who built a brilliant legal career in the early 1900s only to gamble it away and die a cocaine addiction in 1941, of her great-uncle Harold, a distinguished astronomy whose map of the constellations still shines up on the ceiling of New York's Grand Central Terminal, and her beloved uncle Oswald Jacoby, a famous bridge champion. Susan also explores the damage inflicted by intimate parental lies, and the rich opportunities for redress when a parent and an adult child face long-buried truths about themselves and who they are.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brutal Honesty, October 26, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search For Her Family's Buried Past (Hardcover)

Wow! Susan Jacoby has written a fantastic account of her childhood and her family's history. She thoroughly documents her emotions, thoughts, and historical facts. The reader only wants to support her and discover intrinsic truths regarding their own heritage. A good book for people of all religious backgrounds.