Family secrets: Becoming the Jew I always was

Raised by a Catholic mother, with knowledge of his well-known paternal family’s Jewish background, ROD MYER discovered a more complicated heritage in his mother's secret past.

In my 40s, I began to feel an enormous frustration about my Jewish status. It was all very well reconnecting with my Jewish background, but without the formal acceptance to the community I was trapped in a kind of netherworld.

I could enjoy the rituals and my personal connection to the community, but in order to take a more active role in both, I needed to have full Jewish status.

When I explained things to him, Rabbi Shimshon at Malvern suggested I write to the Lubavitcher Rebbe. It seemed like there would be nothing to be lost by taking that path. I remember feeling strongly that I would get a response when I faxed the letter off, but it seemed to shock the Malvern rabbi when a reply came in.

 I got a very excited call from him asking me to come and see it. It was a spare answer sent back by fax from his Brooklyn headquarters to Chabad Malvern’s office. Scrawled in Hebrew, the message read that I should “check with an expert rabbi to determine whether in fact you are really not Jewish.”

While at first I did not share Rabbi Shimshon’s enthusiasm about receiving a response, I did notice one thing. He had not answered the question I had asked. That was basically: “What should I do – Orthodox conversion seemed too difficult and Reform a meaningless cultural statement.” He had only replied, “Check if you really aren’t Jewish.”

His response forced me to stop and think. There was a family story that Mum was born to her paternal aunt Amy, who was Jewish, and given over to her Catholic sister-in-law Grace. Mum had brought it up once back in the 1980s when we lived together in Sydney but then I had dismissed it, saying that people would have seen that Grace wasn’t pregnant so the presence of a new baby would have been questioned.

 I asked if she had mentioned it to her father when he was dying and she said no. She also said she couldn’t talk about it to her brother and sister as, I now assume, she felt incredibly disempowered by her situation. I asked her if she had ever gone to Amy to ask about it. She responded that she had wanted to while Amy was in care before her death but Dad had refused to go with her and she said she didn’t have the strength to go alone.

Around that time, we talked about a trip she had made to Lebanon in the mid-1970s while Beirut was still the Paris of the Middle East, before it descended into the terrible civil war that destroyed its social fabric. I asked Mum why she had not taken the opportunity to travel to Israel while she was in the region. “It would be too painful,” she replied.

That told me that her struggle with her sense of belonging, her origins and her Jewish status was very real and difficult for her. Years later, a man who had been her lover for a time after Dad died and lived part of the year in Jerusalem told me when I visited Israel that my mother’s status of not being recognised as Jewish was a deep pain from which she suffered.

Once I opened the Pandora’s box of Mum’s identity, I started to talk to people, ask difficult questions and search for documents. First stop was Mum’s birth certificate, which confirmed some things she had told me in the past. She had seen it for the first time after Grace had died and she had needed to get a passport. Until then, Grace had said, “I’ll organise that” if she needed it for anything, so she had not seen the actual document.

Mum had said on seeing it for the first time that she was surprised to discover that the birthday on the birth certificate was 31 August and not 30 August like she had celebrated since childhood. From making that discovery onwards, Mum had celebrated on 31 August, which seems to have been the only overt thing she ever did about claiming her identity.

There was another seeming discrepancy on the birth certificate. It showed her as being born in a hospital in Holmes Road in Moonee Ponds. Mum had said Grace told her she was born in a hospital in North Melbourne and she would duly point it out as they drove by. Interestingly, her elder sister Joan and her younger brother Kevin were both born at home.

So if Mum was born in a hospital, it appears likely that would have been there because there were medical issues the doctors were worried about. What seems likely to me now is that Grace had a stillbirth at the time Amy had a child that she didn’t feel she could manage, so she gave the child – Mum – to Grace.

Mum told me that just before her mother Grace died, she had resolved to confront her over her origins. She called to say she was coming, so Grace invited the neighbour in for a cup of tea to deflect her. Mum ran out of time … a week or so on Grace was killed by a car.

There is an enormous shame about the issue that seems to be carried through the family. From Amy over giving up a child, from Grace over the loss of a child and not being able to talk about it, from Mum for feeling she didn’t fit in, knowing something was wrong inside and not having the safe space to talk about it.

There is shame also for me. A shame of not being able to connect with myself and feel what my truths and realities are. A shame built on realising my background had given me a number of advantages but not the ability to enjoy them. There was an inability to find my personal ground and a feeling that I had to take on the thoughts and feelings of others, as my reality stood for nothing. It can feel like my whole life is built on a lie, giving me no foundation or sense of truth. The whole experience feels like being what today is termed gaslighted. All your personal truths are denied and your reality questioned.

Circumstance left me no option but to push the Orthodox rabbinate on allowing me to convert.

This article is an edited extract from Rod Myer’s memoir Memory, Love and its Discontents, published by  Hybrid.

Photo: Rod Myer is called to the Torah at East Melbourne synagogue (supplied)