Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots

by Barbara Kessel

Overview

One woman learned on the eve of her Roman Catholic wedding. One man as he was studying for the priesthood. Madeleine Albright famously learned from the Washington Post when she was named Secretary of State. "What is it like to find out you are not who you thought you were?" asks Barbara Kessel in this compelling volume, based on interviews with over 160 people who were raised as non-Jews only to learn at some point in their lives that they are of Jewish descent. With humor, candor, and deep emotion, Kessel's subjects discuss the emotional upheaval of refashioning their self-image and, for many, coming to terms with deliberate deception on the part of parents and family. Responses to the discovery of a Jewish heritage ranged from outright rejection to wholehearted embrace. For many, Kessel reports, the discovery of Jewish roots confirmed long-held suspicions or even, more mysteriously, conformed to a long-felt attraction toward Judaism. For some crypto-Jews in the southwest United States (descendants of Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition), the only clues to their heritage are certain practices and traditions handed down through the generations, whose significance may be long since lost. In Poland and other parts of eastern Europe, many Jews who were adopted as infants to save them from the Holocaust are now learning of their heritage through the deathbed confessions of their adoptive parents. The varied responses of these disparate people to a similar experience, presented in their own words, offer compelling insights into the nature of self-knowledge. Whether they had always suspected or were taken by surprise, Kessel's respondents report that confirmation of their Jewish heritage affected their sense of self and of their place in the world in profound ways. Fascinating, poignant, and often very funny, Suddenly Jewish speaks to crucial issues of identity, selfhood, and spiritual community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781584656203
Publisher:	Brandeis University Press
Publication date:	02/01/2007
Series:	Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

BARBARA KESSEL is Director of Administration of the Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York. A freelance writer of nonfiction and poetry for 25 years, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Hadassah Magazine, and Midstream.

Read an Excerpt

We walked into the day room at the hospital, and there was a man who looked exactly like Grandma. And also looked unmistakably Jewish. After a long conversation that mostly centered on his 'remarkable' life story, I asked the obvious: Uncle Abraham, are you Jewish? 'Aren't you?' he answered with a puzzled look. It's so trite that I hate to say it, but it's absolutely true: in that moment huge inexplicable parts of my life made complete and overwhelming sense.

When we got to the partisans, I was weak with tuberculosis. They shaved my head because I had lice. They took away my crucifixes and told me I was Jewish. That was the lowest point in my life. I grabbed the scissors and didn't know who to kill -- myself because I was bald, sick and Jewish, or my mother because she was the cause of it all.

The following February, I went to Minneapolis to meet Grandma Maggie. She showed me more family pictures. We found Great-grandmother Stern's photo. My mom offhandedly remarked, 'Shelley thinks we look Jewish.' Grandma said, 'Well, we are. We're a bunch of German Jews!' My mother's jaw dropped. 'Yeah,' Grandma said, 'we used to be Jewish. Now we're Catholic. It's part of the past. So be it. It's not big deal.' My ears perked up. I was Jewish . . . all the pieces clicked together all of a sudden, like 'k'ting!' Everything made sense. I can't even say exactly what it explained but it did. It felt like a kind of completion.

Well, in 1945, when I was six, my father found me. He showed my photo to my Polish grandfather, who demanded money. My father paid him and that was that. My father put me in a cab and we moved right away to the city. I was terrified. What does this Jew want with me? I didn't understand his language. I didn't understand why he was kidnapping me. All I could think was that it was almost Passover and he needed a Gentile child's blood to make matzo. That's what we had been taught.

When we entered Berlin, our father got so excited. 'I lived here during the War,' he said. And then, two blocks later, he said, 'And here . . . And here.' 'How could you live in so many places?' we asked him. 'Well,' he said, 'I only stayed a few days in each place.' A light bulb went off in my head. 'Oh, so . . . you mean . . . you're Jewish? We're Jewish?' And my father looked at me and said, 'Kind of . . . sure . . . of course.' My feeling was 'Of course? wait a minute . . . '

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements • Prologue • Introduction • Crypto-Jews • Hidden Children • Children of Survivors • Adoptees • Conclusions • Notes

Editorial Reviews

Kessel, the director of the administration of the Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York, interviewed over 160 people who were raised as non-Jews and later learned that they were of Jewish descent. These included Crypto-Jews (descendents of the 15th-century Jews of Spain and Portugal who were forced to convert to Catholicism or be killed), "hidden children" (primarily children of the Holocaust who had been placed in non-Jewish foster homes during World War II), children of Holocaust survivors whose survivor-parents understandably denied their own Jewish heritage, and Jews adopted by non-Jewish parents. While their reactions ranged from shock to disinterest to an enthusiastic embrace of Jewish culture and religion, each gained a fuller sense of self from the discovery. Readers of the diverse first-person narrative accounts in this unique volume will not only come to a deeper understanding of a little-recognized situation that is more common than we may have thought but will themselves breathe a sigh of recognition and relief. A valuable addition to public and academic library collections.--Marcia Welsh, Guilford Free Lib., CT Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

In the latest entry in the excellent Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture and Life, Kessel (Director of Administration/Board of Jewish Education) talks to over 160 men and women who uncovered a family secret of identity-shaking proportions. In recent years, the stories of children hidden during the Holocaust and families that submerged their Judaism under a welter of subterfuges have become as common as self-help books (albeit considerably more interesting reading). Kessel attempts to find some larger perspective on this phenomenon by surveying the experiences of a large sampling of adults who discovered at some point that their ostensibly non-Jewish families were, in fact, Jewish. For some, this revelation came as a shattering blow to their self-image and identity; for others, it served to confirm suspicions long held in private, allowing them fully to embrace a world to which they had always been drawn. Kessel divides her subjects into three groups: the all-too-familiar categories of hidden children of Holocaust survivors, Jewish children who were adopted by non-Jews, and the crypto-Jews who descended from the victims of the Inquisition and forcible conversion. Although the chapter on the crypto-Jews is fascinating, this group sticks out from the rest of her narrative uneasily, with a distinct identity and set of problems that seems shoe-horned into this slender volume to fill it out to book length. Much of the story consists of transcripts of Kessel's interviews, and she is fortunate in her subjects: they are uniformly thoughtful, articulate, and sensitive. So is the author herself, with the result that this is a compelling account to read even when it seemsa bitunfocussed in its larger perspectives. Despite a certain fuzziness in its conclusions, a powerful collection of personal testimonies.

Kirkus Reviews