In Search of the Religion His Parents Gave Up

The Dubner family farmhouse in upstate New York was choked with Catholic artifacts and strict observance. A porcelain statue of the Infant of Prague held court in the living room, and crucifixes dotted the walls. The eight Dubner children dutifully said the rosary on the front lawn, used felt markers to color in anti-abortion posters and named their cat Doxology.

Stephen Dubner spent his childhood under the cloak of Catholicism. However, he early on noticed anomalies within the claustrophobic Catholic confines of his upbringing, such as when Dubner’s father surreptitiously snacked on chunks of gefilte fish from the pantry or sang “My Yiddishe Mama” while dancing around the kitchen.

Dubner’s parents independently abandoned their Jewish roots as young adults and married after discovering a shared, ardent love for Catholicism and each other.

“By the time I was a child, my parents’ reinvention of themselves was essentially complete,” writes Dubner. “We were such a full-throttle Catholic family, living in such a Jewless land, that only a crackpot would have thought to challenge our provenance.”

But, as he writes, “the stirrings of a soul . . . are unbound by logic.” Dubner set out to reverse the path his parents followed. His book, “Turbulent Souls,” is a compelling memoir of the tangle of family, faith and estrangement that resulted.

Solly Dubner and Florence Greengrass both grew up in Brooklyn in strict Jewish families. She was wooed by Catholicism while studying ballet with a strict Russian teacher who had herself converted to Catholicism. He was baptized while stationed in remote South Pacific outposts during the Second World War.

They reincarnated as Paul and Veronica Dubner after meeting at a church dance and taking Christian names for their new life. At their 1946 wedding, there were no relatives and no Jews.

Deftly weaving his parents’ history of conversion with his own first-person musings, Dubner’s book is a lyrical exploration of his spiritual journey back to Judaism. The memoir genre, which can stray into tiresome and maudlin meandering, serves Dubner well. More than an anemic journal of a religious mongrel, his book combines rich history, careful research and measured vulnerability.

“For whatever reason, the idea of Jesus as the Messiah had never lodged itself inside my heart,” he writes. “I could not believe what I did not believe.”

Dubner, now 35 and an editor at the New York Times Magazine, realized while growing up that his parents were Jewish in origin, but he was ignorant about his roots and isolated from his Jewish relatives.

His mother and father were estranged from their families after renouncing Judaism. Dubner’s grandfather, Shepsel, even sat shiva--the traditional Jewish mourning ritual--for Solly after he saw a rosary fall out of his son’s pants pocket one day.

“There were no words, in any language, to describe Shepsel’s grief,” he writes. “. . . Millions of Jews dead in Europe, the newspapers were reporting. And now this one from their own blood, turning his back on all of them.”

After completing college in North Carolina, Dubner moved to New York City to work as a journalist and, through a bossy girlfriend, was catapulted into an exploration of his heritage.

He started his conversion to Judaism in tandem with an exhaustive climb through his family tree. He recalls his first reckoning with a bulky Torah scroll: “A resonance--a gratefulness, a relief--blistered its way inside me: It is the book they are venerating here. They are not eating the Body and drinking the Blood of the Christ, that sad-faced messenger and martyr of my youth.”

But the book is hardly a glorified nostalgia trip. Rich descriptions cobbled from Dubner’s many interviews with relatives pack the prose. His detailed consultations with religious experts about the Judeo-Christian rift illuminate Dubner’s ultimate conflict with his mother, a devout Catholic who doesn’t understand her son’s need to “revert” to Judaism.

In the end, Dubner’s quest is the linchpin for a family reunion in 1996 that brought together the Catholic and Jewish members of his family for “speeches, songs, a few tear-choked reminiscences.”

“For me,” he writes, “the day floated by as if behind a gauzy scrim, the past and present locked in a lovers’ kiss.”

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Elaine Gale covers religion for The Times.