Albright and the Generation that Fled All Labels

The drumbeat of articles about Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright’s recently discovered Jewish past and her apparent reluctance to make it public brought my father to mind. While clearing out my parents’ apartment after my father’s death, I found an old letter my mother had written expressing her surprise and hurt that, before their marriage in 1949, my father had hidden the fact he was Jewish from her. She was upset my father would think it could affect her feelings. My mother had, after all, had a first marriage with another Jewish man.

My mother’s reaction was not unlike that of many in the American public who have expressed shock and even outrage that Albright’s parents would hide their Jewish background from their daughter and that she herself would ignore evidence sent to her from her native Czechoslovakia when her job as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations brought her into the public spotlight. After all, three of her four grandparents had died in Nazi con- centration camps. Surely, many critics have argued, Albright, from the secure position of a powerful job in the U.S. government, should have been able to honor the dead and acknowledge her surviving Czech relatives.

While not necessarily admirable, Albright’s conduct is comprehensible, given the peculiar psychological experience of Jews who came of age between the first and second world wars. I remember my father telling me, at a much later date when he spoke of these things, of his experience of applying for a visa at the U.S. consulate in Rome, when his family was trying to get out of Italy on the eve of World War II. “You could just feel the anti-Semitism among these State Department officials,” he said. “They did not want to let us in.”

There was, as has been amply documented, a State Department policy to exclude the masses of emigrating Jews through tactics of stalling and bureaucratic delay. It took my father’s family three years of anxious hurdle-jumping to make it to the U.S. in 1941. This, of course, is the organization Albright now heads.

The progress of the last 50 years has made people forget how widespread and open the bigotry directed at Jews and other ethnic groups was in this country until only a short while ago. My father and the many other Italian Jews I have interviewed, while grateful for the refuge they received in the U.S., were shocked at finding far more “social” anti-Semitism here than in Mussolini’s Italy. One woman described her astonishment when she was asked, “Jew or Gentile?” as she arranged a vacation at a New York travel agency. Another man recalled his fellow workers routinely referring to Franklin D. Roosevelt as “Jewsavelt.”

Even my father’s brief attempt to hide his Jewishness from my mother was not as irrational as it seems. While my mother had been married to a Jew, her family had objected vehemently and my grandfather even had a private detective investigate the groom, hoping to break up the match.

My father and other highly assimilated European Jews of his generation, “discovered” themselves to be Jews at the time of persecution. Even if, unlike Albright, they knew perfectly well they came from Jewish families, they were not religious Jews and had come to define themselves through some other aspect of their life--their work, family, city or nation. Then one day, these people who thought of themselves as shopkeepers, teachers or writers had the word “Jew” stamped on their passport, and were placed in a separate category that was supposed to define their existence.

When I interviewed the prominent Italian-Jewish writer, Giorgio Bassani, author of the novel, “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” he told me emphatically: “I am not a Jew, I am intellectual.” While this struck someone of my privileged generation as silly, as if there were something contradictory about being both a Jew and an intellectual, Bassani’s remark reflects a deep reaction to having had a label imposed on him that profoundly limited his choices in life.

Albright’s decision to leave her Jewish past unexplored may have sprung from a similar desire--perhaps even unconscious--not to have a lifetime of professional achievement suddenly judged through the lens of a religious affiliation. Given the fuss that has resulted, her fear was not unfounded. In Albright’s case, it must have seemed particularly absurd, since she was raised as a Catholic.

For most people, religious identification is a matter of private choice and conviction. It would never occur to anyone to say, “Aha! stop pretending, you are really a Presbyterian!” on discovering that your grandparents had attended a Presbyterian church, though you and your parents were practicing Methodists. Being Jewish, instead, is treated as a kind of indelible trait--like the mark of Cain.

It is this sense of being automatically guilty that fuels the work of Franz Kafka, who described the emotional universe in which Albright and her parents were born. In some strange, atavistic fashion, Albright, on being confronted with growing evidence of her being Jewish, must have felt a little like the protagonist of Kafka’s “The Trial,” who wakes up one morning to find the police in his bedroom, arresting him on unnamed charges. “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K . . . . “

Given that Albright had to seek Senate confirmation at a time of proliferating far-right conspiracy theories of a Jewish-dominated government, her decision to keep a private family matter private is not hard to understand. Albright wanted to be evaluated on her foreign-policy expertise and diplomatic record and not considered, as she is bound to be from this point on, as a Jew. After all, how many people know the religious background of Warren Christopher’s ancestors?