Trigger Warning: this story contains quotations of racial slurs and anti-Semitic language.
I was at work a few months ago, answering customer emails. I worked in a position that was a hybrid of sales and customer service, and my job involved routinely replying to their emails or calling them on the phone. Most of the time people were pleasant to deal with: we weren’t a telemarketing company, so all of our customers were expecting to hear from us. Of course you get the odd person who gets angry or frustrated and lashes out at you, but that was fairly uncommon; even rarer was someone resorting to profanity. As a white male, bigotry and racial slurs simply didn’t happen.
Not to us, anyway. There was the rare (though not rare enough) time when a customer would become openly racist or sexist, and our participation usually involved taking over the call to tell the customer, politely but firmly, that their behavior towards our staff was unacceptable and their business was no longer welcome.
On this day, I replied to a customer email to explain to him that we could not accommodate his request. We refinanced car loans, and I tried to gently explain that we simply couldn’t provide the terms he wanted, though we could provide better terms than he had currently. Usually these efforts end in either the customer deciding to take the offer or leave it; we either get a reply saying they want to move forward, or silence as they write us off and move on to the next company.
This time, though, I got something different. This time I got called a “kike”.
I was born to a predominately German family: my maternal great-grandparents emigrated from Bavaria, and my grandparents, born in the U.S., grew up bilingual in German and English. My father’s family came here earlier, and though his family was a more typically “American” mishmash of different cultures intermingling and intermarrying (his family tree included Scots, English, even some African-American freedmen according to family lore), he still was mostly German courtesy of his father, my paternal grandfather, who was German-Jewish. Of course, by the time I came around, the “Jewish” part had been mostly excised: my grandfather left the faith and converted to a protestant denomination, and my father spent most of his life as a non-practicing agnostic before a late in life conversion to Lutheranism (the religion of my mother and her family).
I didn’t think much about my Jewish heritage growing up, even though I knew from a young age about it. It wasn’t much to consider: we learned a bit about Jewish holidays from my mother (as my father wasn’t interested in religion until I was a grown man), and she even held a Passover Seder meal one year. My parents both loved Yiddish’s linguistic wealth, delighting in the many perfect words and phrases that it had birthed, but nobody in our family spoke it. Even so, I hadn’t made any sort of personal connection to Judiasm.
Despite all this, there was one part of me indelibly marked as Jewish: my name. My grandfather’s last name was passed to my father, and though he and my paternal grandmother divorced, he refused to ever let another man adopt my father. My father thus carried this name, and passed it to his children. So it was I grew up with a Jewish name without even realizing it. As I got older, I got more and more curious about my name: nobody could ever pronounce it correctly, for starters. When I heard about family crests and coats-of-arms, I was confused why none existed for us. As the internet became more and more ubiquitous, I remember searching for our last name and finding...nothing. We were the only family in existence with this name?
The email I got from that irate customer had more than just slurs in it (though he made sure to repeat “kike” over and over again, just in case I hadn’t picked up on it the first half-dozen times I suppose). He referenced a composer I’d never heard of with my last name, sneering about how the man had ruined classical music and the Germans had been right to deal with us. As I was processing this rant, I was struck by the fact that this man knew my last name, he KNEW it was Jewish. To him, a rabid anti-Semite, it was plain as day. I finally replied to him to simply advise him that we were finished speaking. He sent four more emails, mocking me, deriding my Jewish control over finance, assuring me the Germans had the right idea about us, all liberally peppered with the slur that started his first email (well, technically the word “fucking” had started it, but I digress).
The hate from this man was more baffling than anything to me. It was the first time in my life I’d had hate speech hurled at me, and I was more curious about how he knew my name than anything else. I had a very rough childhood with plenty of bullying and mistreatment, so by now I’d long learned how to simply shrug off and ignore hostility from others; anti-Semitism was just the latest form of verbal abuse I would have to apply those skills to. Instead, I wanted to know just how “Jewish” I really was. I talked about it with a friend of mine, a Haitian-American woman who wanted to make sure I was okay after she heard about what happened. I told her I was fine, but that I was curious about the composer whose name I shared that the bigot had mentioned. We looked him up together, and were both impressed to find a handful of German intellectuals and artists from the early 20th century who bore my name.
She looked at the monitor for a long moment after we finished reading. “I wonder if there’s any way to find anyone else with your name. Have you Googled it?”
“Yes, but nothing comes up.” She tried herself, and noted how the entire first page had nothing related to my name. I paused for a moment. “All those people are from Germany before World War II. I wonder if any of them went through the Holocaust.”
“Is there a way to check that?”
“There is.” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an online database of names of victims and survivors, based on historical documents and archives. I told her my intent to check it once we got off work. “If this guy’s hate for me being Jewish leads me to actually get in touch with my Jewish heritage, I’m going to laugh so hard,” I told her. The irony of it seemed funny, mainly because I didn’t expect to find anything there, either.
Later that day, I went home and pulled up the USHMM database, and plugged in my name. I expected maybe a handful of entries at best. When the results page loaded, my jaw dropped. Hundreds and hundreds of matches. For the first time in my life, my name was common: among victims. I found a few images of documents tied to prisoners, and as I saw my family’s name typed or written neatly on cards that bore stamps and markings of the Third Reich, the repeated usage of the word “Juden”, it dawned on me why my name was now such a rarity. “So, that’s where we went” I finally managed. Suddenly, there was nothing funny about this, irony or no. Instead, I was angry: angry that this man was celebrating, gloating to me about our near annihilation, our shift from ubiquity to oblivion.
If you were hoping from the title about a tearful and emotional meeting with a distant relative who survived the Holocaust, I’m sorry to say you’ll leave disappointed. I simply haven’t found any yet. I went from someone uninterested in those DNA tests to immediately signing up for one, and got my results around Christmas last year. The results: about one fourth of my DNA was tied to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry (with about 1-2% African, confirming the family legends). I’ve been looking into my relatives online, both through the database and my DNA results, but so far no real connections (though I do have a few distant cousins they located through DNA matches, including one in Israel). What I have found, in large number, are relatives who never made it past 1945.
I never really had a “community” to call my own growing up: in Utah, where I was raised, I was shunned for being non-Mormon, and I’ve never really felt at home anywhere since. Between that and my own personal religious beliefs being in turmoil (a crisis of faith that still hasn’t resolved after nearly a decade), I thought about embracing my roots, seeing if perhaps the Jewish community might finally be such a community for me. I wanted to defiantly show the world that our family hadn’t been exterminated, that we were still here, still living, and we weren’t afraid of anyone who wished it otherwise. Unfortunately, with the pandemic coming so soon on the heels of all this, I haven’t had a chance to go meeting relatives or trying to find a rabbi to help me sort through the questions I have, but that will come. It took me 35 years to find out just how Jewish I was, how Jewish some people will always see me even if I never saw it myself. I can wait a bit longer to figure out what comes next.
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