Kendall’s Quest:

I just went for a long, long walk down 21st Street and back up 23rd Street on a Friday night studded with stars, flower petals, and teenagers with pink hair and nose rings, trying to take in the staggering revelations of this day and to make sense of the existential koan in which I find myself. Who am I? Or more specifically, whose DNA am I carrying around? If Jacob Paul Linn, Jr. was, as my mother said, my father–then in addition to the three children my mother had after me, I have one brother who was profoundly retarded and spent his whole life in a mental institution in Gainesville, Florida; a sister who killed herself; another sister who is severely mentally ill; a brother who is a Ghostwriter and lives in Montreal; and another brother who ran for Governor of Florida a couple of years ago, is still running for public office, and has a picture of himself with Barack Obama on his homepage. I have seen, finally, a whole series of photographs of the man my mother said was my father. All my life I thought if I could just see one photograph, I would know without a doubt whether he is my father or not. But I’m still not certain. I sort of look like him. I have the same wattle and jowls he developed in his sixties, the same high, broad forehead. But he had dark hair like my mother’s. How did I come out blonde? He was sort of tall and rangy in his youth, but he drank and put on weight before he died from a heart attack at sixty-nine. He sort of looks like my sons, but not enough that I can say for sure. He was not raised Jewish, and nobody who is still living knows whether his father was Jewish or not.

My grandmother Hildegarde (if she was my grandmother) was not Jewish; she was the daughter of a Baptist preacher named Adoniram Judson Reamy (formerly Remy, French). She didn’t look like a schoolmarm with glasses who might shake out her hair and turn into Anna Magnani (that was another woman whose passport application precedes hers in the public record). She looked like Anna Magnani’s maid on the morning after a wild binge: glowering, ragged, and fierce. None of us should be judged by our passport pictures, but Hildegarde Reamey Linn’s passport picture  in 1921 is frightening. There may be some wonderful story of romance and hormones in her marriage to Jacob Paul Linn, Sr., the Merchant Mariner from Riga, but it is probably nothing like the story I first imagined.

Jacob may well have been Jewish, but it now appears that he and/or his Gentile wife kept quiet about it. I still don’t know who his parents were, but there were reasons enough to hide his Jewish ancestry (if he had it) during his lifetime, and Hildegarde may have spent her life hiding it from her family. But how did my mother know about it? Why did my mother call me a Kyke and tell me my father was Jewish, if my father himself wasn’t sure? My grandfather is not the Jacob Linn from Russia who entered the USA from Montreal (”Race: Hebrew”) and lived in a boarding house in Chicago with the Rosens and the Siegels. That was a different fellow. My Jacob Paul Linn, Sr. (if he is mine) was born in Livornia (Latvia); came to the USA (alone? with a brother named Karl?) sometime around 1910 and lived in Detroit; got U.S. citizenship in Detroit in 1918; became a merchant seaman; sailed in and out of the USA for many years; and finally died on the S.S. Leslie when the ship was torpedoed by the Germans on April 12, 1942.  

I first sent an email to my “brother” Kurt, the Ghostwriter, hoping that our common interest in writing would get his attention, but either he didn’t get the email or didn’t care. Then I screwed up my courage and called Max. I feared Max would be too busy with politics to respond, but I was wrong. He was warm, friendly, and interested. We had a couple of conversations. Max told me about his father’s unfortunate marriage to a mentally unstable woman named Mildred, who bore his father’s three seriously messed-up children. Max said his father showed much better taste in women after his divorce from Mildred. In about 1956, he met Max’s mother: a well-educated, highly-cultured New Yorker who went to Florida on vacation, met Jake (but preferred to call him Paul), and married him. And then they had Max and Kurt, who turned out very differently from Mildred’s children.

Max was on the way to his mother’s house while we were talking, so he put me on the phone with her, and she was the most amazing discovery of the day. Patricia Linn, who is 83 and sharp-witted, articulate, and gracious, adored her husband. She says he was a warm, good-humored, intelligent, generous man who loved his children and was a terrific husband and her closest friend. Yes, he drank. More than was wise. He never mentioned my mother. Or me, of course. And yet Patricia agrees that it is certainly possible that he was my father. He and my mother were both 20 at Duke University in 1944. Twenty-year-olds often do things they later regret. Various people in the family have wondered if Jacob Linn the elder was Jewish. There have been questions, rumors. But Hildegarde (Patricia’s mother-in-law) was a rather tight-lipped and stern person, and she never let on.

Max and Patricia have invited me to come to St. Petersburg in June, meet them, bring my photographs and documents, look at theirs, and put more pieces of the puzzle together if I can. Max, like me, would be very happy to be Jewish, but he just doesn’t know. Like me, he has always wondered. Most of the Latvians he or I have ever heard of whose names were Lin, Lun, Linn, or Lynn were Jewish. “Jacob” is a pretty strong hint. Max very generously offered to let me stay in a motel he owns not far from his mother’s house.  He put me in touch with his girlfriend, a delightful woman and a Smith grad (so we talked Smith for a while), and I sent her a great mass of photographs and documents by email.

There are two other people who have been part of the jazz I’ve been making over the past week. The first is Barbara Zimmer, a genealogist who answered my query to Jewishgen.org, a wonderful site where Jewish people can search for their relatives, dead and alive. Barbara is an ace detective, an internet wizard, and is the person who sorted out my confusion over the many different Jacob Linns (and Lins and Lynns and Luns) who came to the USA between 1900 and 1920. Barbara found the website that proved my grandmother was a Gentile and the one that proved she was a nurse in Baltimore, and she has kept me laughing all week at the polymorphous perversity of our ancestors and ourselves. The second is (Rev.) Devorah Greenstein, who has been my dear friend since 1997 and is my spiritual director and favorite comedienne. She says “It’s all pickle juice,” meaning it doesn’t matter. She says I embody tikkun olam (healing the world), and that if I keep on obsessing about my genetic makeup she is going to come to Portland and hit me over the head with a menorah. She says, “Kendall, it matters not whether some of your relatives are Baptist ministers from Virginia or Jews from Riga. What matters and ALL that matters is what you are doing with the gift of the spark of life that is currently vibrating in the physical molecules of the being temporarily known as Kendall.” Amen, Devorah. And thank you.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 1:47 am and is filed under What does it mean?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.