by Susan Jacoby
After we found the ferry entrance and made our way to Granny Jacoby’s apartment—always several hours late—she would say something like, “Robert, it’s fortunate that we planned a cold supper so that supper couldn’t get cold.” “Mother,” my dad would reply, “it’s wonderful to see you too.” I developed a real antipathy toward my aging grandmother during those brief visits. She belittled my father’s job as an accountant and compared him negatively (as she had when he was a boy) to his elder brother and her favorite child, Ozzie. Ozzie—the little boy in the 1906 snapshot—was born in 1902 and named after his father. He would grow up to become the family star—one of the two most famous tournament bridge players (the other was Charles Goren) of his generation; a syndicated newspaper columnist; and a prolific author of books on bridge, canasta, and backgammon. A calculating professional at the card games, requiring immense skill, that made his reputation, Ozzie was also a compulsive gambler who would come out on top in a lucrative bridge or backgammon tournament and promptly lose his winnings in after-hours games and gambling establishments. There the odds always favored the house (as Ozzie himself wrote in many newspaper articles intended to discourage novices who thought they had figured out a way to beat the system). But my uncle didn’t take his own advice. In the absence of formalized gambling, he would bet on anything from the length of time it would take room service to arrive to the number of steps in the staircase of an apartment building. My father shared this “gambling gene” (as he called it many years later), but I didn’t know that until I was in my teens and Dad’s gambling was only a bad memory for my parents, who always conducted their arguments about money behind closed doors. The gambling of the Jacoby men, although it was a pattern formed over generations, was a subject the family rarely discussed openly; reckless and profligate were words the Jacoby wives applied to their husbands when they thought the children were asleep.
At those rare Jacoby family gatherings in New York, there was talk of a moneyed past, but no one explained how or why the money had disappeared. Nostalgic references were made to the early part of the century—before my father came along—when the Jacobys had owned a summer home near Saratoga in upstate New York and lived in a splendid apartment on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. Granny Jacoby almost never mentioned her long-deceased husband, and I was not even sure of his birth and death dates until I looked up his name in The New York Times Index in 1990. To my surprise (for I had never placed much credence in the occasional allusions to my grandfather’s brilliance), he turned out to have merited a substantial collection of clippings in the Times morgue—especially substantial in view of the fact that most of the articles appeared when he was still under thirty-five.
The man whose family tried to erase him from its collective memory was born on December 24, 1870, and entered Columbia University in the fall of 1886. Oswald Jacoby had passed the Columbia entrance examination at fourteen but could not begin his studies until the following year because fifteen was the mandatory minimum age for entering freshmen. He would graduate as the youngest member of the Class of 1890. Benjamin Cardozo, who graduated in 1889, was also the youngest in his class—a social liability that may have brought the precocious teenagers together at Columbia. After graduation, the nineteen-year-old Oswald bowed to his father’s wish that he join him in the family import business. Soon afterward, though, Max gave in to his son’s desire to enter law school. By the early 1900s, Oswald was an up-and-coming Manhattan lawyer, often mentioned in the press as a brilliant trial attorney, and had started his own family with Edith Sondheim, the daughter of a Brooklyn classics teacher.
By the time my father was born, just before the outbreak of World War I, something had gone terribly wrong with Oswald’s career. The family had moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn—a definite step down from Riverside Drive. While Uncle Ozzie and Aunt Edith had attended private schools, my father had to make do with a public elementary school. In the homes of my grandmother and aunt, there were pictures on display of Ozzie, Edith, and Bobbie as children—always with their mother or aunts but not with their father. My father, aunt, and uncle were unable or unwilling (probably both) to provide a context for these snapshots. The one unfailing topic of conversation on our family visits to Staten Island—always introduced by Edith—was the remarkable coincidence, if that is what it was, of the Jacoby siblings all having met, fallen in love with, and married Catholics, thereby placing themselves directly in the beam of God’s grace.
Edith, born in 1907, had married and divorced in her wild youth—but by the time I met her, she had become a truly devout Catholic convert and a devoted wife to Uncle Ted. Ted—Theodore S. Faller—was a Macy’s executive and a millionaire landowner on Staten Island, where real estate values had skyrocketed in anticipation of the opening of the Verrazano Bridge. Uncle Ted was also a Papal Knight, an honor conferred for extraordinary services (and contributions) to the Church. Edith’s status as a divorcee, as divorced women of her generation were customarily called, had posed a grave problem when she and Ted fell in love in the late thirties. Then (as now), divorced Catholics were prohibited from remarrying within the Church unless their original marriages had been ecclesiastically annulled; the same prohibition applied to a marriage between a Catholic like Ted, who had never been married, and any divorced person—Catholic or non-Catholic. Edith and Ted had originally applied for an arcane ecclesiastical exemption, called the Pauline Privilege, which might have allowed them to marry within the Church because Edith had not been baptized in any faith at the time of her first marriage. But it turned out that the Privilege applied only when both partners in the original marriage were unbaptized. Edith’s first husband, whom she and her mother always called “that wretch, Feeney,” had been a Catholic himself. Just when it seemed that Edith and Ted would have to give each other up or live in sin, the wretched Feeney died (a victim, it was said, of liver failure brought on by chronic alcoholism)—a fortuitous event that Edith considered nothing less than miraculous. She had become a widow in the eyes of the Church, and she and Ted were free to marry.
In view of Ted’s piety, it is highly unlikely that he would have married Edith had he not been able to make her his wife within the Church. If they had been wed in a civil ceremony, he would have had to resign himself to living in what the Church declared to be a state of mortal sin. That hadn’t bothered Feeney, but it would have proved an insupportable burden to Ted, who, in spite of a demanding executive schedule, made time to attend Mass and receive communion several times a week. Edith herself attended daily Mass and constantly prayed for the souls of her less pious brothers; she considered it a sign of God’s special grace that Uncle Ozzie, who had avoided (or evaded) the embrace of the Church throughout many years of marriage, finally agreed to be baptized after he broke his back in an automobile accident and his survival seemed to be in doubt. Ozzie did recover, and his wife took great pleasure in reminding him that baptism wasn’t something you could undo. Of all the Jacobys, only my obdurate grandmother continued to resist her daughter’s pleas that she convert to Catholicism. From time to time, Aunt Edith would declare, “We must always remember that Our Lord was born a Jew”—an admonition that struck me as an utterly mad non sequitur when I was a child. Why should I care that Our Lord was born a Jew?
In my father’s family, two and two never made four—whether the subject was something as complicated as religion or as straightforward as a cause and date of death. Dad believed his father had died of a stroke. When I was in my twenties, Aunt Edith told me her father had expired of a heart attack after being run over by a car—the first of her many versions of the end of the paterfamilias. Still later, she told me he had died of syphilis as well as of a failing heart (something Ozzie agreed was a distinct possibility, if not a certainty).
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MY GRANDMOTHER’S funeral was one of the few occasions that brought my father, aunt, and uncle together—at least for a half hour at the grave site. And Aunt Edith got her wish: my grandmother died a nom
inal Catholic, though she was already suffering from senile dementia when she agreed (or so it was said) to be baptized in the nursing home where she spent her last years. Her funeral Mass was held in St. Christopher’s Church, where the Faller family had long been parishioners, and her eulogy was delivered by a priest who obviously never knew her. “Mrs. Jacoby was a woman of great charity and culture,” he declared. “Culture, yes,” whispered Ozzie, who had announced his arrival, en route from his home in Dallas to a bridge tournament in Paris, by propping his portable typewriter directly in front of the coffin in a manner suggestive of a pharaonic offering intended to accompany Mother into the afterworld. “Don’t you think Mother would rather have a lock of your hair?” asked my father. Ozzie explained that he needed to turn out one of his newspaper columns before taking off for Paris, and he didn’t want to forget the typewriter. “Take that thing out to the vestibule,” Aunt Edith hissed. “You know how Mother hated lateness.” Dies irae.
In the cemetery, Edith Sondheim Jacoby was laid to rest in Uncle Ted’s family plot, where she became the lone Jacoby under a headstone inscribed with the names and dates of countless Fallers, Doughertys, and Keegans. As we drove away after the burial ceremony, my father turned to me and said in a bleak and unfamiliar voice, “She never really loved me, and now she never will.” I asked him whether he would mind if I tried to discover more about his family’s shuttered past. “Even if I did, I couldn’t stop you,” he replied, neatly sidestepping the question. As he put me on the plane for Washington, his last words were, “I hope you’re not going to become too obsessed with this Jewish business.”
II
Conversions
And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?
—The Acts of the Apostles, 9:3–4
IN THE RELIGION CLASSES of my childhood, Paul was always described as “the first Jewish convert.” That Jesus himself was a Jew was never mentioned explicitly until high school, when the apparent paradox would presumably be less puzzling to the students. Saul’s transformation into Paul was presented as a metaphor for the miracle of newfound faith: blinded by error, a man regains his sight through the inexplicable grace of God. “Conversions of convenience”—sometimes called “social conversions”—were discouraged by the Church. Before baptism, a non-Catholic married to a Catholic was questioned at great length about the sincerity of his intentions, in an effort to ascertain whether he was converting out of a true belief in Roman Catholic teachings or simply to please his spouse. I have no idea how my father answered these questions, because his was surely a social conversion—if social motivation is understood not only as the need to fit in and please others but as the desire to slough off a past identity in order to escape external persecution or self-laceration. Saul would doubtless have understood my dad’s motivation perfectly, but the priest who baptized Robert Jacoby in 1952 did not know that he was welcoming yet another Jew into the Catholic fold. Only my mother and her parents were privy to that secret.
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MY PARENTS met, as so many couples did during the war, over drinks at an officers’ club. Thirty years old and deemed unfit for combat because he was blind in one eye as a result of a teenage accident with a stick, my father was stationed in Chicago as a first lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps. Irma Broderick, nicknamed Stevie, was working in the personnel department of a large company and living, at age twenty-three, in her own apartment in downtown Chicago. Her parents, who lived just south of the city in the blue-collar town of Harvey, regarded their daughter’s living arrangements with an unease perfectly understandable for members of a generation born in an era when girls, whatever their economic circumstances, lived at home with their parents until they married. They took an immediate liking to Bob Jacoby because he was intelligent, witty, handsome (with the infectious smile and thick, wavy black hair inherited from his father), and—above all—obviously and overwhelmingly in love with my mother. My Broderick grandmother, who bore scars of a childhood in a home dominated by the rages of her alcoholic father, regarded my dad’s Jewishness as something of a plus. She had never really known any Jews, but, like many gentiles, she was convinced that Jewish men didn’t drink and doted on their wives. For my father, the child of a cold and critical mother and a largely absent father, my mother’s parents were more than a plus: they gave him the unwavering affection and approval (which would, in time, be sorely tested by his own actions) so conspicuously lacking in his upbringing.
Although my grandparents definitely wanted their grandchildren to be raised in the Church, they would never have pressured my father to become a Catholic. Even so, I find it slightly surprising that Dad did not even think about conversion until he and my mother had been married for eight years. Although conversions were somewhat more unusual (even from one Christian denomination to another) in the forties and early fifties than they are today, they were already a familiar phenomenon, extending back several generations, in both the Broderick and Jacoby families.
Aunt Edith, the first Jacoby convert in my father’s generation, had already become the kind of Catholic who made pilgrimages to Lourdes, prayed for the conversion of Russia, and regarded the anticommunist crusades of the fifties as the work of the Lord. Her brothers, even after their own conversions, regarded her views as bizarre. “Sis, couldn’t you just be content with reading G. K. Chesterton?” Uncle Ozzie once asked her. Edith’s extremism probably rendered conversion a less appealing prospect than it would otherwise have been to her two brothers. But my dad had another, more agreeable example of what it meant to be a Catholic convert (albeit from Protestantism) in the person of my Broderick grandmother.
To the former Minnie Rothenhoefer, who had been a Lutheran but became a Catholic when she married Jim Broderick in 1919, conversion had nothing to do with theology and everything to do with pleasing her husband’s family. “It’s the same God, no matter what church you go to,” she would say. My grandfather concurred. Granny had converted, he explained, in order to make his mother happy. My mother’s parents would have been mystified by the pejorative meaning attached by the Church hierarchy to “social conversion”; as far as Granny and Gramps were concerned, it made perfect sense to change religions in order to attend church services with the rest of one’s family.
When my father finally decided to take instruction in the Faith, he was drawn in not only by his marriage to a Catholic but by that greatest of socializing instruments, television, and by the first American televangelist, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. When I was seven and he was thirty-eight, Dad began to watch Bishop Sheen’s weekly show, Life Is Worth Living, on our nine-inch black-and-white screen. I remember being pleased about my father’s interest in Bishop Sheen’s message, because it meant extra television-watching time for me. In the first half of the fifties, when television was still a novelty (at least in our house) rather than the metronome of daily life, any program—even one filled with sober homilies—was a treat. Dad decided to begin instruction only a few weeks after he began watching the show. I remember this period very well, because I used to drill Dad on the Baltimore Catechism (our parish priest used the same book for adults that he did for parochial elementary school students). “Who is God?” “God is the Supreme Being.” “Why did God make us?” “God made us to know, love, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.”
While it seemed perfectly natural to me that my father would, as my grandmother suggested, want to go to Mass and take Holy Communion with his family, I was nevertheless slightly mystified by his willingness to take on all of the spiritual obligations incumbent upon Catholics at that time—abstaining from meat on Fridays, fasting after midnight if you intended to take communion the next morning, waiting in line for confession if you had a serious sin on your conscience. I already knew that Protestants did not need a priest to register their contrit
ion with God and wondered why my dad would abandon a direct pipeline to the Almighty in favor of an intermediary. He told me he had been raised as a Protestant—specifically, as an Episcopalian.
Thus, my father’s baptism, which could have provided an opportunity for a discussion of his real origins, instead served to promote an elaborate fictitious version of his past. Catholicism was a truer religion, Dad explained, because there would never have been an Episcopal Church in the first place if an English king had not wanted to divorce his wife in defiance of the Pope. Had it not been for Henry VIII’s break with Rome, the American descendants of the English colonists—my dad presumably among them—would all have been Catholics instead of Protestants. This overly elaborate, and slightly wacky, explanation of his embrace of the Church can have had only one purpose—to suggest that my father, like my Broderick grandmother, was simply shifting from one branch of Christianity to another.
My father’s construction of an Episcopal boyhood was entirely consistent with the behavior of the many German Jews who chose, in his father’s and grandfather’s generation, to bury their “Hebrew” backgrounds. In 1848—the year before Maximilian Jacoby left Germany for America—John Jacob Astor (who had inserted John in front of his first name in order to sound less Jewish) died and was buried in a service conducted by six of New York’s most prominent Episcopal clergymen. The same year saw the wedding of the financier August Belmont to the daughter of Commodore Matthew Perry The son of a German Jewish merchant named Simon Schönburg, Belmont had obscured his origins by translating his name (meaning “beautiful mountain”) into French. His Episcopal marriage service was conducted in Grace Church, with a socially impeccable congregation that included members of the wealthiest old Dutch and English families in the city.
