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But I started to get this overwhelmingly powerful desire to explore conversion. Initially, I chose to engage only in Humanistic Jewish spaces, where the question of who is a Jew is never asked and conversion is never required.
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It was hard to explain to my Catholic family that there was no such thing as half-Jewish. The discovery that I wasn’t halachically Jewish confused me. When had he left Judaism, and why? Were his parents practicing Jews? Was he named after a cherished family member? There were so many questions that I knew I would never have answers to. I also resented him for leaving me to wonder about him. I would never get a chance to tell him how deeply he hurt me and how I thought he should have been much more responsible. This left me with a strange sense of loss, but also anger. The first photo I found in reference to him was of his tombstone. He was in the navy, and 23 years old when we were born. There was only one Jewish man that fit the time frame and locations for mine and my sister’s births. Because it wasn’t common where I was born (Pittsburgh) and was also Polish, it was easy to figure out my father’s identity by searching the Ancestry database. While I was waiting and hoping for her response, my brother traced my DNA relatives on my father’s side back to one common male ancestor who had arrived in the United States in the 1850s. I spent several months operating under the hypothesis that she was raised by my father, but ultimately learned that she had been adopted by an Ashkenazi Jewish family. She was born six months prior to me, in California. I felt ready to learn my father’s last name, and took a second test through with the hopes of discovering relatives. It was a way for me to explore my roots and, in doing so, I connected to something greater and began to heal. I was very curious about all of it: the culture, the religion, the history, and started learning everything I could. When I discovered I was ethnically Jewish, I felt like I had been cheated out of a rich, beautiful heritage. Traditional Ashkenazi foods like kugel, rugelach and bagels had even made it into my family’s culturally Catholic celebrations. I had never heard the term “Ashkenazi” before, even though I’d often found myself in Jewish spaces, attending close friends’ Passover seders, bat mitzvahs and Hanukkah parties as a child.
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The results indicated that my father was Ashkenazi Jewish. My brother, Sam, however, after tracing our entire family tree, started digging into my background. When my mother died, I thought any hope I had of finding out his identity died with her.
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Eventually, I just stopped including him in the conversation. “Italian, Lithuanian and … well … I never knew my biological father.” I would try to overcompensate with “but I was raised by my stepfather almost my whole life so it’s fine,” which was too much information for a casual acquaintance. When people asked me what it was, I stuttered out a response. I studied the map of my face for clues to my paternal heritage. I was sure my writing skills were from his DNA, as well as my love of books and meeting people from other countries. As a child, I imagined him as a superhero from whom I inherited my abilities and interests. She was very good at keeping secrets, especially her own. I never knew the man, and my mother refused to discuss him while she was alive. My biological father is buried in a small private cemetery in Irwin, a few miles outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.