Half-Jew

by Susan Jacoby

  My grandfather must have gambled away a small fortune between Max’s death and my father’s birth in 1914. He closed down his private practice in 1910, serving a two-year stint as assistant district attorney for New York County. Around the time of my father’s birth, the family moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, where my grandfather reestablished a private legal practice. (All three children had been born in Brooklyn; my grandmother, when her due date neared, would move back into her mother’s home to give birth.) Edith and Ozzie had attended private schools, but my father entered kindergarten in an ordinary Brooklyn public school in 1918. From that point on, there are no more pictures of the family in evening dress, no snapshots of the Jacobys playing croquet on the lawn of a summer home, no evidence of ocean crossings on passenger liners or stops at fashionable hotels in Europe. After 1920, there were no more pictures of Uncle Harold and his family.

  My dad, Aunt Edith, and Uncle Ozzie all said they had no idea what had come between their father and his elder brother. While there is no hard evidence, I feel certain, in view of my grandfather’s predilections, that money must have been involved in some way. It would hardly be surprising if Oswald had borrowed money from his brother and failed to pay it back. Perhaps Harold turned Oswald down when he needed still more money to pay off his gambling debts.

  Oswald Jacoby’s “weaknesses,” as Miss Frankfurter termed them, were not limited to gambling. He was also a longtime cocaine addict and a frequenter of brothels. Cocaine use, it must be noted, did not have the criminal connotations that it has acquired today. Nineteenth-century physicians frequently prescribed cocaine (and morphine and opium) for a variety of medical conditions. Aunt Edith said her father became addicted to the drug as a teenager, when the family doctor prescribed it for the treatment of infected sinuses. (The physician must have been thinking about the numbing, rather than the inflaming, effect of cocaine on the nasal membranes.) He continued to use cocaine in some form—it was easily obtainable in New York during the twenties—for the rest of his life. But even though there were fewer legal risks attached to the use of cocaine than there are today, the drug can only have encouraged my grandfather’s erratic behavior and exacerbated his character weaknesses. The gambling, the cocaine, the use of prostitutes: all add up to a portrait of a man in deep trouble. Perhaps Harold had simply had enough, or perhaps he feared that his own family would be tainted by association. One would not have to be a prig and a bore, as my grandfather described Harold to Ozzie, to be fed up with a brother who was a gambler and a compulsive liar.

  Mac Jacoby Jr. says his father and Uncle Ozzie saw each other occasionally during the 1930s—Mac remembers meeting Ozzie at least once when he was a boy—but that they were not close. “Whatever happened in the previous generation must have been very bad,” Mac says, “because it kept my father and Ozzie apart even though I know my dad loved Ozzie. He would talk about him once in a while in a way you would talk about a brother who had died.”

  In a real sense, my grandfather and his elder brother did die to each other, and that death in the family separated their children forever. The way I found my cousin Mac—by a pure stroke of luck—illustrates the completeness of the breach between the two branches of the family In 1995, not long after I had discovered the records of Harold’s academic career at Columbia, I made a trip to Dallas to look through old family photographs, jammed in boxes in the house that once belonged to Uncle Ozzie. The house is now owned by Judy Jacoby, the widow of Ozzie’s elder son, Jim. While I was staying with Judy in Dallas, she mentioned in the course of a phone conversation with her sister in Washington, D.C., that I was visiting and was thinking of writing a book about the Jacoby family. Her sister said she knew a Maclear Jacoby who was a teacher and tennis coach and asked whether we might be related. Judy had never heard anyone mention a relative named Maclear, but I knew instantly that this unknown teacher must be a descendant of Great-Uncle Harold and his wife, Annie Maclear. How many Maclear Jacobys can there be in the world? When I phoned Mac, who hadn’t even known that Uncle Ozzie had a younger brother, he was delighted to hear from a previously unknown Jacoby relative. Having taught high school math for more than forty years, he had inherited the family aptitude for numbers (but not the “gambling gene,” which seems to have been limited to my grandfather’s descendants). Nearly twenty years my senior, Mac was five—just old enough to remember his grandfather—when Harold died in 1932. He grew up in a family in which Harold Jacoby’s memory was as deep a source of pride for his descendants as Oswald Jacoby’s was a source of humiliation for his children. “My grandmother and father were very proud of his [Harold’s] career as a scientist,” Mac remembered, “but he was also a success as a father. A real family man. I never heard anything but praise for him from anyone who knew him.”

  Perhaps the saddest element in this tale of two brothers is the silence, so emblematic of the Jacoby family style, that enveloped the rupture. As a child, I knew of Harold’s existence—Aunt Edith and Uncle Ozzie referred to him as “the stargazer”—but I was under the misapprehension that he had died not in 1932 but around 1915. Edith and Ozzie both gave me that impression, probably because they did not want to discuss the break between Oswald and Harold.

  For both brothers, the severing of family ties must have been a significant emotional event. As I formed a picture of the two men from the many articles written about them and from their own writings, I came to realize how much they must have shared in spite of their sharply contrasting characters. Both were men of broad intelligence and fierce rationalism; both loved sailing, classical music, and German and English literature. Moreover, both were accomplished and witty writers and public speakers. I never realized, until I discovered Uncle Harold’s books and published accounts of my grandfather’s courtroom speeches, how far back a facility with words could be traced in my family. “A way with words and gambling—our dominant genes,” Ozzie said.

  But when it mattered most, at least two generations of Jacobys had no words. Whatever pained and shamed them remained unexamined and unspoken. In their heritage of warm paternal memories, the “other Jacobys” could not have been more different from my father and his siblings. Yet the two branches of the family—one descended from the good son, the other from the bad son—were united in their denial of the Jacobys’ Jewish origins.

  —

  ONE POSITIVE legacy my grandfather did pass on to his children was his love of the written and spoken word. Learning poems and plays at his father’s knee was one of my dad’s few sweet childhood memories, and he loved to quote from Oswald’s favorites, which ranged from Shakespeare’s sonnets to Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat.” Another of his father’s favorites was John Webster’s seventeenth-century play, The White Devil. “I do not look, / Who went before nor who shall follow me. / No, at myself I will begin and end.” Dad said he could still hear his father reciting those lines. When I was growing up, it did not occur to me that this was a strange philosophy—“at myself I will begin and end”—for a parent to pass on to a child. Now it seems to me that the quote embodies the error and the tragedy of my grandfathers life, along with the burden of secrets bequeathed by both Jacoby brothers to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren they never knew.

  V

  Brothers: Second Generation

  DURING THE SUMMER OF 1916, fourteen-year-old Ozzie Jacoby wrote several letters from his family’s rented beach cottage on Long Island’s north shore to his best friend from school. They are filled with teenage ennui at being stuck with his family for the entire summer, love of sailing and the sea, and pride in his ability to beat everyone in the house, including his father, at bridge. In each of the letters, there are touching references to the baby of the family. “Robert can float in the ocean—which is some going for a two-year-old!!” “Robert begged me to take him sailing with my friends. I could not say no to those eyes. I let him think he was the one who caught the fish.” “If only Robert could play bridge—he would give me a good ga
me. Next year.” “Taught Robert the ‘Jabberwocky’ last week. He recites it almost all the way through. A true Jacoby!”

  In 1995, when I found these letters at the bottom of one of the boxes in Ozzie’s home, he had been dead for eleven years and my dad for nine. I had a deep affection for my uncle—although I knew that Dad’s love for his elder brother was tinged with his envy of a life played out on a larger and more flamboyant stage than that available to an accountant in Lansing, Michigan. Ozzie had always been larger than life—whether he was running away from home at fifteen, in 1917, to join the U.S. Army before the fighting in Europe was over (he made it into the army but the war ended before he made it into combat); confounding his superiors at Metropolitan Life at age twenty-one when, as the youngest licensed actuary in the United States, he solved a mathematical problem in two hours that would ordinarily have taken an adding machine and several actuaries a week to resolve; winning every national and international bridge championship in the thirties, forties, and fifties; serving as a navy code expert during World War II; writing a classic book on canasta that became the second best-selling nonfiction book in 1949 (nosing out Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, which the Times described as “a religious book of another kind”); fighting a $250,000 back tax bill from the Internal Revenue Service in the sixties with the argument that he had gambled away more money in Las Vegas and with his country-club poker-playing cronies than he had earned from his professional bridge tournaments and books; or, just before his death from colon cancer at eighty-one, becoming the oldest competitor ever to win bridge’s prestigious Reisinger Trophy.

  My father, who shared many (though not all) of Ozzie’s talents and personal weaknesses, was a more life-size character. While Ozzie traversed the globe in search of master points in international bridge standings (and side action in casinos and clubs when the tournaments were over), leaving his wife, Mary Zita, with most of the responsibility for bringing up their two sons, my father stayed close to home and got to know his children. That was an achievement Ozzie recognized. “Bobbie was a better father than I’ve been,” my uncle told me. “I was too selfish, you know, to pay much attention to my children when they were little. Yes. I’ve always been interested mainly in myself.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. Ozzie’s old letters, written at a time in life when everyone is interested mainly in himself, evince a precocious tenderness for the little brother who was the unwanted last child of a disintegrating marriage. And Uncle Ozzie never told me one of the most important facts of his life as a young man: at age twenty-one, he assumed the chief financial responsibility for his mother, sister, and brother. It was Aunt Edith who, a few years before her death, told me that Ozzie had paid for her last two years at Smith College, my father’s expenses at private prep school, and the first two years of Dad’s tuition at Dartmouth College. Only when Ozzie became a father himself in 1933—two years after his own father’s death—did he step back from his role as the primary contributor to his original family’s finances. The change in Ozzie’s circumstances would have a major impact on my father’s life, since he then dropped out of college to go to work. But that is hardly a criticism of my uncle; he had already shouldered far more financial responsibility for his younger siblings than most men in their twenties would have undertaken—a responsibility that should, of course, have been borne by his father.

  The years between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Depression were crucial ones for all three Jacoby siblings. Their parents’ marriage and the family finances went from bad to worse, as my grandfather’s life spun more and more out of control. Dad, who was only five years old in 1919, was affected most profoundly, because he was the youngest, by the fall in the family’s fortunes. In the streets and the playground of his public school, Dad was exposed to the ungenteel anti-Semitism—from schoolyard beatings to epithets—that had not been a part of his sister’s and brother’s experiences in private schools. Small for his age and unathletic (except in sports, like swimming, that had no self-defense value), my father was easy prey for tough kids who made fun of his proper, non-Brooklynese diction.

  —

  SIXTY-FIVE years later, when I pressed my father for a description of his schooldays, he responded with long-suppressed rage. This was not his usual outburst of temper, dissipating almost as soon as he raised his voice, but an uncharacteristic, simmering resentment at my persistent questions about his childhood. But the year was 1975, I had just turned thirty, and I no longer had the sense, as one does in one’s twenties, that time and possibilities stretched out limitlessly before me (much less before my parents). Filled with an unfamiliar sense of urgency—even though my father was then a healthy and extremely active sixty-one-year-old—I pushed him when we were talking on the telephone one evening. “All right,” he said furiously. “All right, you want to dig all this up. You’re in second grade, and this is what they sing in the schoolyard. ‘All the girls do dance / with tomatoes in their pants / and the dance they do / is enough to kill a Jew.’ You take a swing at them, though you don’t have any idea what a Jew is. They beat you up, rip your shirt, tear some pages out of your books. You run home, the cries of ‘baby Jew-boy’ ringing in your ears. You’re afraid they’ll get you again on the way. Your mother sends you to your room without dinner as punishment for fighting. You’re too ashamed to tell her why you got into a fight. It wouldn’t make any difference anyway. CA gentleman settles arguments with his brains, not with his fists,’ she would say. Ozzie would understand, but he’s living in the city now. Is that what you want to know about? Is that what you want to write about?” Then the anger died out of Dad’s voice. “Of course, I had a friend. There was Freddie.”

  The friend was Fred Groff, who grew up just a few blocks from the Jacobys in Flatbush and went to the same elementary school as my dad. He eventually became a doctor and established a practice in Schenectady, New York, and we always used to stop there overnight on our way to visit Aunt Edith and Granny Jacoby “Dr. Fred” was the only figure from Dad’s childhood—apart from his family—whom I ever met. A gentle giant of a man, Fred was as big for his age when he was a boy as my father was small. Descended from a family of German (not German Jewish) immigrants, Freddie became my father’s protector on the playground. Not long after Dad’s old anguish erupted during our phone conversation, I happened to be home for a visit when Fred turned up in Lansing to see my parents and to play in a golf tournament for the benefit of the American Cancer Society. My dad told his old friend that I was interested in what it was like to have grown up Jewish in the 1920s, and Fred said, “I thought you didn’t want the kids to know.” “She figured it out,” Dad replied, in a tone of exasperation mixed with pride.

  Then the two men began to talk about the way Fred had defended Dad throughout elementary school. “The smallest kid always gets picked on,” Fred recalled, “and I always hated that. When I heard those kids using words like sheeney and kike and yid, I didn’t even know what they meant. I came home and asked my mother, and she said those were words that ignorant people used for the Israelites in the Bible. Like kraut for the Germans. I said I was going to hit those boys the next time they called Bobbie a kike. She said fighting wasn’t the way, but I should speak up and if someone hit me, I could hit back. I didn’t wait for them to hit first, I pounded away. I figured they’d already hit Bobbie, and that was hitting first. They didn’t have to get the first punch in at me too.” Tears came to my father’s eyes as he listened to that recapitulation. “I never thanked you,” he told his old friend. Dr. Fred replied, “Sure you did, Bobbie. Don’t you remember all the help you gave me with my arithmetic? If it weren’t for you, I’d probably have flunked fourth grade and I never would have gotten into medical school.” Then he turned to me and said, “You know, you should write about this someday. People don’t realize what this kind of thing does to a sensitive kid, that you carry it your whole life. It was the same as being called a nigger. And there are people today who d
on’t understand what that must mean to a child with brown skin. Some become angry at the whole world. Some become ashamed of themselves. Isn’t that right, Bob?” Dad put his hand over mine and said, “That’s right. And some of us became angry and ashamed.”

  —

  MY FATHER must have been a very lonely little boy. Ozzie never lived at home full-time after he enlisted in the army in 1917—with his father’s tacit approval and over his mother’s bitter objections. Ozzie’s account of his military service, which appeared in a 1950 New York Times profile by Gilbert Millstein, provides yet another example of the Jacobys’ habit of fictionalizing their family history His father raised no objections, Ozzie told Millstein, because the family had a long military tradition going back to the War of 1812. (Needless to say, Ozzie’s Jacoby forebears were nowhere in the vicinity of the young United States of America in 1812.) The only break in the family tradition of military service, he added, occurred during the Civil War, when one of Eve Jackson Jacoby’s great-uncles, supposedly a major in a Connecticut regiment, missed the entire conflict as a result of injuries sustained in a fall from his horse. That may or may not have been true. One thing is certain: Ozzie, Aunt Edith (who was a lieutenant in the Waves), and my father were the only Jacobys ever to serve in the U.S. military in any era. My great-grandfather, Max, did not enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War; Great-Uncle Harold and my grandfather belonged to one of those fortunate generations too young or too old to be conscripted for any large-scale war. The only ancestors in Ozzie’s pantheon who had anything to do with the military were Sondheims; my grandmother kept several pictures of older male relatives (including her father) in full uniform, taken in Brooklyn before they went to join their Union Army regiments. Why did Ozzie, in telling the colorful (and true) story of his own enlistment in the army at fifteen, find it necessary to invent a family history of distinguished military service? This can be seen either as pure self-aggrandizement, for Ozzie loved anything that added to his own legend, or as yet another attempt to hide the family’s origins: If we fought in the War of 1812, we can’t be Jews. In any event, Uncle Ozzie’s abbreviated war was spent in upper Manhattan, billeted in an abandoned home for the blind and playing poker with the other members of his outfit waiting to be shipped out. The armistice came first, and the Great War was over. When Ozzie entered Columbia in the autumn of 1919, he had a stake of $500 from his poker winnings to finance his social life as an undergraduate. Ozzie told Millstein that he received just one piece of advice from his father before entering Columbia with his poker stash. “You’re going to be cursed by being a good cardplayer,” he told his son, “but if you have to be one, I want you to remember two things. Always take the worst of it in a situation and never hide the deck.” Cheating at cards seems to have been one of the few social offenses my grandfather never committed, and Uncle Ozzie would have been justifiably offended had anyone ever suggested (and no one ever did) that he needed to cheat in order to win.