What does it Mean to be Half Jewish?
My dad was a fifteen-year-old Jew, who got out of Germany before WWII and was sponsored by a family friend in England to go to boarding school there. His eleven-year-old sister was on one of the last Kindertransport trains and was taken in by a foster family in another past of England. They were lucky. Their parents were not so lucky. So, I call my dad a Holocaust survivor, even though technically he was never in a concentration camp. I think that losing your parents is trauma enough to be included in that group.
How does all this affect me? This has always been a bit of a puzzle. Certainly, I was affected by my dad’s infinite sadness that came out as anger much if the time. The only time I saw him cry was at the symphony, because his father was a cellist who played in three different ensembles, so he grew up surrounded my music. Unfortunately, his generation did not share much or seek therapy. Most of the veteran dads I knew in our neighborhood just drank to push down the pain. My dad never turned to the drink, thank god.
Do I identify as half Jewish? Most days no, but when I lived in Montreal with three Jewish roommates, I definitely felt a kinship. When I look in the mirror, I have my dad’s Jewish schnoz and I grew up hearing enough Yiddish and German expressions to qualify perhaps, but my dad always said, “Nobody in my family has practiced Judaism for at least two hundred years.” Apparently, his mother attended the Unitarian church for a while. I’m not sure how all this worked, because they definitely lived in the Jewish quarter in Frankfurt. They were all bankers, lawyers, doctors and musicians. They were even friends with the Rothschilds.
I felt more Jewish when I went to visit my cousin there in 2006 with my fourteen-year-old daughter. My cousin gave us headscarves to wear at the Jewish cemetery and showed us all the family gravestones. We even went inside the massive house my dad grew up in, thanks to some mutual connection of hers. She explained that the collective national guilt is still very real and palpable there.
I am left wondering. I was born in England to an English mother, so I do not qualify to be a Jew, which is determined by matriarchal lineage. I grew up in Vancouver, with no Jewish connections. So, the only time I feel Jewish is when I visit my cousins in Europe once every ten years or when I talk about my family history. Otherwise, I’m just a regular Canadian girl.
We are all a complex mixture of our ancestors. How have you been shaped by your parents’ past lives? What ethnicity do you identify as? Please share a comment.
