by Susan Jacoby
My father must have realized, from the moment I entered the world of journalism—a world in which I was bound to meet a great many Jews—that it was only a matter of time until I put the pieces together and figured out that he too was a Jew. Even so, he was still trying to keep the secret from me. Mr. Berman, who took one look at my father and knew he must be Jewish, told me years later that my dad had specifically asked him not to tell me that Jacoby was a Jewish name. After assuring my father that he would not be the one to break the news, Mr. Berman remarked that I was sure to find out anyway—that I must already suspect the truth. “You should be the one to tell her,” he advised my dad. “I’m sure this is not going to upset her.” My father, according to Mr. Berman, became extremely angry and told him to mind his own business.
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I DID SUSPECT—deep down, I knew—the truth by the time I finished college in 1965, but I hadn’t really allowed the knowledge to penetrate because I was engaged in an unusually turbulent transition from adolescence to young adulthood. That passage included a headlong rush to earn my bachelor’s degree in just two years, by taking double credit loads and going to summer school. If I regret one thing about my youth, it is the pell-mell nature of my formal education at MSU. I was a National Merit Scholar and could have gone to school anywhere—my dad hoped I would choose Radcliffe, my mother wanted me to go to Northwestern—but I insisted on going no farther than East Lansing. It wasn’t as capricious a decision as it appeared to my parents (though a boyfriend did play a role). I knew myself fairly well, and I knew I had just about had it with classes, financial dependence on parents, and the nonadult status of college students during that era before the youth revolt of the sixties (the end of in loco parentis policies in academia was still a half-decade away). But I also knew that no newspaper was ever going to hire me without a college degree, and I feared that if I went to a rigorous institution, like Radcliffe, that would force me to spend four years earning a B.A., I would become a dropout and ruin my future. My father’s disappointment in my college choice went deeper than I realized at the time, for I had deprived him of the chance to give me what he had been denied—a first-rate higher education, free of financial worry.
Still, I found a variety of brilliant mentors at Michigan State. They were all men; like so many women of my generation who attended coeducational universities, I never had a female professor. The late Alfred G. Meyer, a Slavist, professor of political science, and refugee from Nazi Germany who would become a lifelong friend, stimulated my lasting interest in both communist and fascist governments. Al, who made it out of Hitler’s Germany at the last minute—in 1939, at age nineteen—was the first person I had ever known who grew up under the Nazis. Fluent in German and Russian, he was assigned by the army to interrogate suspected Nazi war criminals in 1945. He told me how he had imagined, literally thousands of times, the vindictive triumph he would feel when he returned to Germany, with the U.S. troops, as a conqueror rather than a victim. And he talked about how the long-anticipated sense of triumph quickly metamorphosed into “a futile sense of sorrow and waste”—a recognition that even if just punishment should be meted out to individual Nazis, there could be no recompense adequate to the scale of the crimes. What I recall most vividly from these conversations is my sense of relief at being able, for the first time, to ask direct questions about subjects that had troubled me for so long. Here was a man who would not be upset to know that I had been reading Night. Here was a father figure I did not have to protect (though I suspect Al’s children might have held quite a different view of him). In those almost involuntary flashes of comparison, the knowledge of who my own father really was—and why so much remained unspoken between us—began to seep into my conscious heart.
A mentor of a very different kind was George Hough III, my favorite journalism teacher. A nephew of Henry Beetle Hough, the longtime owner of the Vineyard Gazette on Martha’s Vineyard, George himself had owned a small-town newspaper in Wisconsin. To his students at Michigan State, he passed on not only his practical experience as a reporter and editor but his deep civil libertarian convictions, honed during the McCarthy era in the senator’s home state.
Above all, I was indebted to George for his shrewd advice on how to get a job. He was the first person to point out to me that my being a woman would make it tougher to land the newspaper reporting job I wanted so badly. In the prefeminist era, the reality of sex discrimination had not yet dawned on me: my parents had always told me I could do and become anything I wanted, and I am not certain that I knew, at eighteen, about the reluctance of newspapers to assign women to anything other than the society beat. It was George who told me that I would have to prove myself far more thoroughly than any man, George who recommended me for a part-time job as a campus stringer for The Detroit Free Press. He felt it would make a great difference, when I began interviewing for jobs, to have a collection of articles printed not in a student publication but in a professional newspaper. And he was right. Although my clippings did me no good at the Free Press itself (where the managing editor told me I would never be assigned to general news because the paper couldn’t guarantee my safety at night), they did impress The Washington Post. Within a week of receiving my clips, a Post editor called and asked me to fly to Washington for an interview.
Eager to prove my self-sufficiency, I had held down not one but two newspaper jobs in addition to my college course load. I had also found the time to enter a marriage (following in Mom’s footsteps) that never had a chance in view of the ages of the bride and groom—nineteen and twenty-three, respectively. Looking back on this frantic period, I wonder how I ever found time to go to class. My husband and I, behaving like the ill-matched and immature college roommates we were, split up after fifteen months of fighting and chasing cockroaches in our filthy off-campus apartment. Receiving my degree at twenty, in 1965, I realized my first professional dream when the Post hired me as a cub reporter assigned to the city desk. I was a young woman in a hurry, far too much of a hurry for a backward glance at Okemos or my immediate family—much less the generations that had gone before. I assumed that there was still plenty of time for me to address the foremost unsolved riddle of my youth—my father and his family’s real identity. My dad, at fifty-one, looked and acted like a much younger man, and his older brother and sister, who knew a great deal more than he did about the family history, were in equally robust health.
In Washington, the few remaining scales fell from my eyes (to borrow another metaphor from the conversion of Saul) quickly and painlessly. Surrounded by people who generally assumed I was Jewish because of my last name, I acknowledged my father’s origins—so that’s the deep dark secret!—with a sense of genuine pleasure and release. Dad’s Jewishness explained all of the inconsistencies and half-truths, as well as the powerful mixed signals he had been sending, and I had been receiving, throughout my teenage years. The late Alan Barth, a fervent civil libertarian and an eminent editorial writer for the Post when I began working there, was the first person who suggested to me that I might someday want to find out what had happened in previous generations to produce such a radical rejection of both Judaism and Jewishness by my father’s generation. Alan, a man of great kindness, formidable erudition, and fierce principles, was one of the older journalists who took the twenty-year-old hotshot under their wings at the Post and forced her to expand her utilitarian view of knowledge and education. To understand what had happened to the Jacobys in America, he admonished me, I would have to acquaint myself with the history of German Jewry. But that would first require me to fill in what Alan charitably described as the “gaps” in my general knowledge of European history before the twentieth century. Only then, he told me, could I hope to unpack the baggage my father’s ancestors had undoubtedly brought with them to the New World.
X
Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust
I left Judaism in 1911. I know that this is in fact impossible.
—Kurt Tucholsky to Arnold Z
weig, 1935
I AM CERTAIN THAT IT was a relief to my father, though he initially responded by becoming extremely upset, to know that he no longer had to hide his Jewish origins from his children. My eighteen-year-old brother, in spite of his general lack of interest in the subject, was neither upset nor particularly surprised to learn that Dad was a Jew. He did suggest that I might be smart to refrain from pressing our father for more details about a part of his life that was obviously a source of great pain.
Of course, I couldn’t stop. In my early twenties, I did not know how to ask Dad questions about his boyhood without distressing and angering him, and he was not quite ready to talk. I still had no real comprehension of the nature of American anti-Semitism in the first four decades of the century, so I could not possibly understand how my father’s view of himself had been affected, and distorted, by attitudes like those expressed in the Dartmouth administrators’ correspondence on the subject of Jewish enrollment. That this ignorance was due, in large measure, to my father’s own omissions and fabrications did not make it easier to talk; on the contrary, the long history of silence and evasion heightened both my combativeness and my father’s defensiveness. Nevertheless, Dad’s attitude began to shift subtly in the late sixties, and only in part because he had already been found out and found blameless by the people who mattered most to him—his children. Of considerable, albeit lesser, importance were the cultural changes taking place in every area of American society, among them the ascendancy of Jewish writers and intellectuals who did not feel obliged to conceal their origins. Even my father could see that a Jew no longer had to put down a phony Washington Square address to increase his chances of being admitted to an Ivy League college—that Jews were beginning to be in charge of college admissions offices. And he knew that I regarded my “Jewish” byline as an asset rather than a liability, that by the late sixties, being a Jew made you more rather than less a member of the journalistic club. One of his most insightful observations during this period—and how I resented my dad for saying it!—was that identifying oneself as a Jew simply because Jewishness had acquired a certain social and professional cachet was just as opportunistic as denying one’s Jewishness to escape social or professional stigmatization.
This dialogue was interrupted in 1969, when I married Anthony Astrachan, who had just become the Moscow correspondent of The Washington Post. I took a leave of absence from the paper to accompany him to the Soviet Union and began writing my first book, which focused on everyday Russian life. I did, however, make a careful record of my conversation with Felix Frankfurter’s sister during my honeymoon in Florence, with notes to myself to follow up on the leads she had given me concerning my paternal grandfather. But that would have to wait until I returned to the United States.
My Moscow experience—we lived there from mid-1969 until the end of 1971—left a permanent imprint on me, as it did on every western journalist who worked there during the repressive era following the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Thanks to Al Meyer, who had encouraged me to study Russian in college, I soon felt at ease speaking the language. Without the ability to speak and understand Russian, I doubt that I would have learned anything about the country in an era when the political climate inhibited all contacts between Russians and foreigners. The Brezhnev gerontocracy was cracking down on all political dissidents, including the first wave of Jews who wished to emigrate, and it was impossible for anyone living in the Soviet Union at the time, whether Russian or foreigner, to imagine that, only fifteen years later, a Soviet leader would embrace many of the basic principles espoused by the dissidents of the sixties—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the freedom to leave.
An eye-opener for me was my first exposure to good old-fashioned Eastern European and Russian anti-Semitism. Whether a foreign correspondent was a Jew or not mattered greatly to Russians of widely varying political views. If you ran afoul of the press department of the Foreign Ministry, which monitored all articles by western correspondents, you could often expect some allusion to your Jewish origins. My husband was actually called a “cosmopolitan”—a code word for Jews that had heralded anti-Semitic campaigns throughout the Stalin era—in an article in the newspaper Trud.
Nonofficial Russians would question me endlessly about my family background when they learned that my maiden name, which I always used professionally, was Jacoby (Yakobi, in Russian, is invariably a Jewish name). What “nationality” (the word Soviets used for what Americans call ethnicity) was my mother? Why had my father converted to Christianity? Was it true that in America there were no barriers to the practice of the Jewish religion? Did a Yakobi have any trouble getting into a university? Quotas in higher education were not a memory but a living reality, and a major impediment to their ambitions, for young Soviet Jews. Sometimes, Russians who did not know I was a Yakobi—who assumed, because of my blond hair (only my hairdresser knew for sure) and blue-gray eyes, that I was a full-blooded gentile—would express their conviction that the American press, banks, and political establishment were controlled by Jews. More important than these stereotypes was what I came to think of as the Flicker—an expression that said “gotcha”—when I would dispute the assertions and add, “I’d be telling you this even if my father weren’t Jewish.” The Flicker said, “Ah, so that explains why you care so much about dissidents and Jews who want to leave their motherland. Of course. You’re one too. And you’re all troublemakers.” Jewishness mattered as much to the Russian philo-Semites we knew (and we knew many in Moscow) as it did to the anti-Semites. The difference between living in Moscow and living in Washington was that nothing to do with Jews was ever treated matter-of-factly in Russia, as a subject requiring neither defense nor attack. Russian Jews, including those who were party members with good jobs and a secure place in the old Soviet system, also behaved differently toward western journalists who were known to be Jews. I remember one long interview with a school principal, Isak Borisovich Piratsky, a creative educator who demonstrated that it was possible, even within a centralized bureaucratic system, to work with initiative and integrity. Piratsky made a point of walking Tony and me out to our car, so that no one could possibly overhear (or record) what we were talking about. “Nu, tovarishchi,” he said (giving the word for “comrades” a meaning very different from its usual political connotation), “you should know that not all Russian Jews want to leave their country. What I would wish is to change my country so Jews wouldn’t want to leave it.” Then he suggested that we go to Moscow’s central synagogue to observe the celebration of Simchat Torah, the Jewish holiday that marks the end of one annual cycle of reading the Torah and the beginning of the next. On that day, secular Jews (joined by the tiny community of observant Jews remaining in Moscow at that time) gathered in the street outside to sing, dance, and proclaim their cultural, if not religious, affiliation. Piratsky’s mention of the celebration was in itself a significant statement of his political orientation, signifying that he was what Russians then called an inakomysliaschii (one who thinks differently). On Simchat Torah, the street outside the synagogue would be filled with people who, though few of them had crossed the dangerous line into open political dissent, were willing to let their presence register their alienation from the official system. The crowds, which grew larger every year, also included many non-Jews with dissident political views. During this period, there was a great deal of overlap between the emerging Jewish emigration movement and the dissidents who were committed to remaining in and changing their native land; both groups agreed that the freedom to emigrate (and to return without penalty) was a crucial right that all Soviet citizens had long been denied by their government. Outside the synagogue on Archipov Street, the number of KGB agents observing the crowd also increased every year. It was on Simchat Torah that Tony and I first heard a song lampooning the folk belief that Jews control everything. “The Jews, the Jews, the Jews encircle us everywhere” was the refrain of the song written by Vladimir Vysotsky, whose satirical
verses were known to everyone even though they were never officially published or recorded. My favorite verse, which scans both in English and Russian, went, “Even Khrushchev, glory to God, used to run to the synagogue.” Had he not been a party member and a school principal, Piratsky undoubtedly would have been among those celebrating a Jewish holiday they had never observed in a religious sense. “Shalom,” he said as he waved good-bye to us in front of his school.
In Moscow, I also met Jews born in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia, who had survived the Holocaust because they managed to flee eastward just ahead of the invading Nazi armies in June 1941. After the war, they remained in Moscow because most of them had married Russians—and because they had nothing to go back to: The once-vibrant Jewish communities of Lvov, Riga, Vilna, Minsk, Bialystok, Lodz, and Warsaw had been reduced to human ashes. These Jews were, on the one hand, grateful to the Soviet Union for saving their lives, but they were also bitter because the Soviet government had never acknowledged the special nature of Jewish suffering under the Nazis. At the time, the official Soviet posture was not to distinguish between the Jewish victims of the Nazis and the other Soviet citizens who perished. The result of this policy was the imposition of a public silence about the Holocaust: In a country filled with conspicuous memorials in tribute to the immense sacrifices and suffering of the Soviet people during World War II, there were no monuments, as the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote in his famous poem, at places like Babi Yar. In that infamous ravine outside Kiev, more than 100,000 Soviet citizens, most of them Jews, were shot, their corpses falling over the edge and piling atop one another until the earth could hold no more. At the beginning of the massacre, more than 33,000 Jews were marched out of Kiev and murdered in just two days. Germans did the shooting, and Ukrainian collaborators (according to many firsthand accounts) helped keep the Jews in line while they awaited their fate. During my years in the Soviet Union, it was nearly impossible to persuade an official guide to stop at Babi Yar. Visiting Kiev, we had to elude our official chaperones, who reported to the KGB, in order to drive out to the ravine with a dissident friend. (Babi Yar does have a memorial today; Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost put an end to the long official silence concerning the fate of Jews in Nazi-occupied portions of the Soviet Union.)
