Limmud Bay Area 2016

In my recent interviews with 25 family members, direct descendants of my parents, German Jewish refugees who converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1930s, I seek to ascertain the impact of a contested Jewish identity on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the Jewish self. I begin with a few family documents: poems by a paternal grandfather written just before his conversion to German Protestantism; a brief autobiographical sketch by my aging mother recounting her terrifying escape from Nazi Europe some sixty years earlier; an email from a brother's trip to Theresienstadt in homage to our maternal great-grandmother's death there. I follow with excerpts from recent interviews with 25 family members, all attesting in one way or another to the remarkable impact of my mother's role in preserving the family mythos of flight, escape,and survival. Taken together, these texts present an overwhelmingly Jewish story -- however tenuously held or understood.