Kendall’s Quest:

I’m going to write about race again, and I will get back to Rev. Wright and Barack Obama, but first, this hot news flash. While I was fiddling around on the internet yesterday, I found out who my father was, who his parents were, and that they were Jewish. I had suspected this, but until now I wasn’t sure. My mother told me my father was Jewish, but she wasn’t always a reliable source, and she only mentioned this, often calling me a “Kyke,” when she was angry. I’ve never seen a picture of my father or seen any other proof of his existence. So last night I stumbled upon a couple of websites that have all kinds of documents (passport applications, military draft records, border crossings, ship passengers, death records), and I got completely caught up in detective work. What a love story I discovered!

This could be a movie. Jacob Paul Linn, Sr. (I’m casting Ralph Fiennes in this role, because he did such a great job of playing the three Jewish guys in Sunshine ) was born in 1889 in Riga, in a German-speaking region then called Livonia and part of Russia, but now Latvia. He arrived in the USA via Montreal in 1908, at which time his race was listed as “Hebrew.” He lived in a boarding house in Chicago for a few years with people named Siegel, Rosen, and Magas. (I think of scenes from Hester Street.) He joined the Merchant Marine as soon as he could, starting off as a “wheelman”. He had problems with his knees. (Both my sons have problems with their knees.) Jacob Linn applied for US citizenship in 1916 and was denied, but apparently he got his citizenship in 1917, because he was called up by the Draft for service in WWI. He didn’t serve, however, maybe because of those knees. Around 1920 he married a woman named Hildegarde, from Virginia. Jewish? German ancestry maybe? (I’m casting Toni Collette, who starred in Muriel’s Wedding, or maybe Joan Cusack, both of whom have wonderful neurotic qualities, the sort I imagine my other grandmother must have had.)

In 1920 it would have been earth-shaking for a Gentile girl to marry a Jewish man–and while I imagine she was capable of wildness, I’m betting Hildegarde was also Jewish. She was born in 1892, in the Tidewater region of Virginia, in a town called Heathsville, and there were plenty of Jews in that region.  In 1921, Hildegarde Linn applied for a passport so she could sail to Monterrey, Mexico to join her husband. I picture her wonderfully costumed as a flapper, meeting him at the dock, both of them full of raging hormones, wild with passion, drinking Ramos Gin Fizzes in Mexico in palm leaf palapas that catch the ocean breezes. There’s a picture of Hildegarde on her passport application, and that’s the first and only picture I’ve ever seen of anyone from that side of my family. She wears glasses, and she looks pent up and passionate, like the “Before” in one of those movies about deceptively staid school teachers who rip off their glasses, shake out their hair, and turn into Anna Magnani.

In May, 1922, Hildegarde and Jacob sailed together back home to the USA from Port Lobos, Mexico as passengers, and three months later she gave birth to my father, Jacob Paul Linn, Jr.  I picture him looking like my son Seth, who’s a ringer for James Dean . Seriously. This picture looks so much like Seth it’s eerie. Hildegarde must have had to rear her son pretty much as a single mom, because her husband kept on sailing the seven seas. My Jewish grandfather is on twenty or more records of arrival at this or that port, mostly New York. He worked his way up in the Merchant Marine till he was the First Officer on the S.S. Leslie. Soon after his son was born, my grandfather moved the family to St. Petersburg, Florida, but there’s no sign that he spent much time there himself.

The last time Jake Linn the elder entered the USA onboard the Leslie was December 24, 1941. I hope he and Hildegarde were still in love and treated each other very well during that Christmas/Channukah together, because it was their last. He died at sea when the Leslie was torpedoed by the Germans on April 12, 1942 and sank–just a few days after his fifty-third birthday. I actually wept when I found this. I just found him, and then I lost him. Being the ship’s first officer, I’m sure he went down with the ship.  I saw horrible scenes in my imagination of fire and drowning, gasping for breath.

My father doesn’t seem to have caught the wanderlust his father had. I can’t find any records of what he did with himself. Maybe he stayed at home in reaction against his absentee father. Maybe he was a mama’s boy. Apparently he spent most of his life in Pinellas County, Florida. He never applied for a passport, or if he did, it doesn’t show up in records now on the internet. He served in the Marine Corps Reserves the year after his father died at sea, in 1943-44. The Marines sent him to Duke University for some kind of special training (medical training? my mother was a nursing student at Duke), but there’s no record of his serving in combat. So he met my mother, sort of a Greer Garson type. They had sex. They didn’t marry. She went home, and I was born in North Carolina in 1945. She listed him as my father on my birth record, and then she left me with her parents and went to work at the V.A. Hospital in Fayetteville.

Jake Linn married a woman named Mildred in 1947, and they were divorced in 1960. I have a hunch he never told her about me. As far as I know he never saw me, never wondered how I turned out. I wonder if they had children, and if so, if they raised them Jewish. Do I have half-siblings? Was my father really gay? That would make him more interesting. He died in 1991, still in Pinellas County, Florida. I spent the whole day today scouring the internet, searching for documents–alternatively crying, whooping with excitement, muttering to myself, and exchanging emails with Devorah, who caught this enthusiasm with me and kept sending me supplementary websites. All my life, I’ve felt like an outcast/oddball/weirdo. I didn’t belong. Not only was I illegitimate, but I looked different from my mother’s people and my stepfather’s people. They’re squarely built, dark haired, and heavy-set. Their women are voluptuous. I’m long, lanky, flat-chested and blondish. My sons have the same general build and coloring as I do. So over the last two days, I’ve found my people. I’ve discovered that I’m half-Jewish. Kind of Nordic/Slavic Jewish. Livonian/Latvian. And I’m smiling with pleasure.  The first thing I’m going to do, to celebrate my new identity, is read Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai. I sent her an email today, telling her my news and asking for a reading list, and she very modestly didn’t mention her own book, but that’s where I’m going to start.

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