Thrilling encounters in pursuit of my hidden religious heritage

JANE CARO began exploring the missing links in her family’s Jewish history and discovered a genetic thread that raised questions about her entire ancestral lineage

WHEN I WAS a kid, I thought my family was normal. I think this is a pretty common delusion and perhaps growing up is about recognising how essentially peculiar most families actually are. Outwardly, however, we Caros were pretty standard in the Australia of the 1960s and 70s. We lived in a modest weatherboard in the burbs, my father was climbing the corporate ladder, my mother was a stay-at-home housewife and my two sisters, one brother and I all went to the local public school.

It took me much longer than it should have to realise that one of our profound peculiarities was the stark absence of any religious tradition or belief, particularly in my father’s background. My mother was raised as a Methodist. Her parents met when they both worked as Sunday School teachers in Manchester.

My father, Andrew Caro, met my mother, Catherine Booth, at a dance in that same city, when he was down for the weekend from Cambridge. He quoted from Jane Austen’s Emma to impress my mother. Typically, he got the quote wrong and my mother corrected him. From that intellectual and literary (and pretentious) moment a lifetime’s love story was born, not to mention me and my siblings.

The Caros were posher than the lower middle-class Booths; my maternal grandfather was a draper who’d left school at 13, my paternal grandfather was a public servant who – like his son – had graduated from Cambridge via Manchester Grammar School. During the General Strike of 1926, my maternal grandfather had manned the pickets, while my paternal one had driven a bus as a strike-breaker.

The fact that they both ended their lives at the exact opposite end of the political spectrum from where they’d started is stuff for another article. Nevertheless, posh and conventional or not, there was literally no religion in my father’s family. Nada. Zip. Nothing. And no memory of one, either. No one was rejecting or lapsing from anything as far as we knew. Belief in a supernatural being of any kind was just irrelevant, almost peculiar, a mystery to the rational, pragmatic Caro clan.