HALF-JEW

The memoir of a Catholic-trained atheist whose (ex-Catholic) Episcopalian father turns out to have been Jewish.

This memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jacoby (Wild Justice, 1983) competently traces an inquisitive child's defiant search for her father's hidden background. The identity issue remains on the surface, largely a matter of culture and race—although there are some forays into history, examining the social restrictions of being a Jew in 19th-century America, for example, or the deadlier repercussions of being even a Mischling (a partial Jew) in Europe under the Nazi regime. There are precious few philosophical or theological elements present to give the story much in the way of depth, however, or to position it much higher than the average “should-I-celebrate-Christmas” stocking stuffer. Jacoby's major attraction to her father's buried past, outside of the usual adolescent obsession with questions of identity, appears to be a sincere identification with outsiders and victims. Many African-American friends attend her second marriage, for instance—a non-Catholic church wedding to a man with two atheist Jewish parents. As a talented young journalist, this small-town Midwestern girl meets many Jews and discovers for the first time that Jacoby is a Jewish surname. Jacoby (and her father to some extent) can, by the late 1960s, see their Jewish ancestry as an asset as well as a liability. Her father eventually admits the truth and turns the tables on his daughter by declaring 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.” The gambling addiction of her Jewish ancestors adds some pathos to Jacoby’s memoir, but her identity problems lack the drama of others she mentions: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Catholic novelist Mary Gordon.

Lacking a stronger, schizophrenic conflict, Jacoby’s memoir tastes rather half-baked.