Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Susan Jacoby investigates and explores her family's past, particularly her father's German-Jewish ancestry. The first Jacoby came to the United States in 1849. Over time, members of the family came to deny their Jewish identity. Jacoby's father and his two siblings married Catholics. Her father converted to Catholocism and Jacoby was raised as a Catholic, with no knowledge of her father's Jewish background. Jacoby clearly had a precocious, inquiring mind even as a young child, and the book she has written is honest, perceptive, and compassionate. Her quest of discovery extends to related issues, such as, restricted Jewish enrollment in elite universities in the 1920s, elementary education in parochial schools, and is, at all times, fascinating, and often refreshingly out-spoken. This is one of the best of the many books I've read about hidden pasts.

I always pick up books on being part Jewish, if only to counter the religious view that there is no such thing. Flipping through Susan Jacoby's book, I really identified with her feelings about uncovering a hidden Jewish past (my own "Russian" grandfather was Jewish) and gambling (he was a bookie). I'm more convinced than ever that "part Jewish" is a valid identity. But the most startling part was to realize that Susan is a cousin of my best friend in college, Mary Jacoby Simpson. Weird small world...

I had to quit reading this book at page 189. Terminal boredom had set in. I wish Jacoby had written her book in chronological order instead of dividing the chapters by subject matter. Maybe then I would not have had to hear over and over about her nasty grandmother, brilliant uncle and unloving grandfather. I never felt like I knew these people or empathized with their emotions. Jacoby added some interesting insights into the history of Jewish-Americans, but not enough to support a book-length account of her ordinary 1950s childhood. Turbulent Souls by Stephen Dubner and A Good Enough Daughter by Aliz Kates Shulman are far better examples of this genre.

I have read almost every book by this author. This is a gem. The issue is not specific to Jew's issues but rather it lays the foundation of the importance of education. Ms. Jacoby outlines the struggle her father went through to make sure his daughter would get the best education and she has achieved much. I think this a great primer for her other important books that she has written.

If you're Jewish, or Catholic, or not Jewish but married to a Jew, or an ex-Catholic, or a non-believer, you'll find a lot in this book that is satisfyingly familiar. Why would someone in the United States deny being a Jew? It's hard to understand in contemporary times, but it has happened in our lifetimes, and may still be happening. Susan Jacoby illluminates that deception in her own extended family, after years of believing they had been born Christian and converted to Catholicism. She writes with honesty and compassion, and because she writes so well her story is fascinating.