HALF-JEW―FULL LIFE

Bennett, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author for Crimewarps: The Future of Crime in America (1987), explores the life of an eclectic relative and Holocaust survivor in this biography.

The subject of this book, who was born in 1922 and died in 2015, went by many names throughout his life, reflecting his quest for identity—Gerd Phillipsohn, Gerald Phillips, Gary, and Pips (the name preferred by the author). He was raised in Berlin’s Bavarian Quarter; his mother was a German Lutheran, and his father was Jewish. As he entered his teenage years in 1935, writes Bennett, he was struck by the “pintele yid,” or “Jewish spark” within him that was “kindled by the rising antisemitism that engulfed his world.” The same week that the Nazis enacted the antisemitic and racist Nuremberg Laws, Pips would embrace the faith of his father and have a bar mitzvah. Most of his teenage and young adult years were spent hiding in Berlin, “in the belly of the Nazi beast.” This biography’s first part, “Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide” centers on Pips' life during World War II. Over nine chapters, Bennett chronicles her subject’s wartime experiences in detail: He was captured by the Gestapo four times and escaped three German prisons, and he had an uncanny ability to charm his captors, which saved his life. The book’s second half, “From a Nightmare to a Dream and Back,” focuses on his later life in New York City with his wife, Olga, whom he met in a displaced persons camp. Pips went from working as a waiter and bicycle messenger to eventually co-owning Globe Photos, one of the world’s largest photo agencies.

It would be easy for Bennett’s deeply personal work to lean into hagiography, celebrating a Holocaust survivor’s postwar connections to some of Hollywood’s brightest stars, but what makes this book special is its honest portrayal of Pips’ life, “warts and all.” Bennett and Pips were distantly related as third cousins-in-law, but they considered each other close family, given that so many of their relatives had been killed in the Holocaust: “He thought of himself variously as my father and uncle,” she writes. Built partially on a lifetime of memories, the book also draws on dozens of audiotapes that Pips recorded with his psychiatrist, which he left to her. Although the work often focuses on Pips’ perspective, Bennett doesn’t shy away from parts of his story that made her uncomfortable; for example, he was a “serial kisser” of women without their consent (“For Pips, sneaking a peck on the cheek was akin to being a big game hunter bagging his prey”). He also regularly visited sex workers at strip clubs. Bennett, an author and TED Talk speaker and the founding president of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, is an empathetic writer who highlights notable aspects of a major figure in her life while still addressing his personal flaws and his psychological struggle with his self-identification as a “half-Jew” who “spent his life trying to shed his ‘goyishe’ side.”

A revealing portrait of an uncommon and troubled life.