True Lies

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For example, I wrote about a certain long-established anxiety that, in the book, is dispelled quite marvelously by the wise words of a rabbi. At the time, this evaluation of my own state of mind was more hopeful than accurate, and indeed I'm still somewhat plagued. (I won't go into more details here, but readers of the book may consult Chapter 8.)

More important, though, when I came to write the conclusion, about a dramatic realization I had after visiting the Stockholm city archive to research my ancestors, I presented as a factual certainty something that has since turned out to be far from certain.

My birth mother, Harriet Lund, who was born in Stockholm and came to the United States as a young woman, was not Jewish, but she believed she had a Jewish great-grandfather, August Edvard Goldkuhl, a physician in a town in southern Sweden. Harriet thought that this man's surname--her mother's maiden name--was Jewish. The family had immigrated to Sweden from Osnabruck, Germany, in 1755. Partly on the basis of this belief, she selected Jewish--albeit secular--adoptive parents for me.

My memoir is about becoming a ba'al teshuvah (literally, a "master of repentance"), a Jew who returned to tradition from secularism. When Harriet first told me about her great-grandfather, I was thrilled, for it meant I had Judaism literally in my veins.

In Stockholm, however, I found records of the family's baptisms and church burials going back a century before my alleged Jewish ancestor was born. My birth mother evidently had her ancestry wrong. As I wrote in "The Lord Will Gather Me In," this disappointed me, but it also led to a revelation about the nature of the Jewish soul. In the book, I presented this reversal as an occasion to draw the enlightened-sounding lesson that Jewish identity is really about belief, not blood-truth, not tribe.

Very nice. However, after the book's publication, I made contact with a Goldkuhl living in northern Germany-the part of the family that never left for Sweden--who told me of an old tradition he received from his father that, long ago, the Goldkuhls were Jews. If he was right, then Harriet was also right, in which case the climax of my book, with its admirable moral-placing truth above tribe-was not supported by the facts of my personal history. I didn't know that at the time, but now I do.

What is the truth? Who knows? But one thing's obvious: Presenting the matter as I see it now, hanging and ambiguous, would have meant giving my book a most unsatisfying conclusion.

The story as told in my memoir ends with what may be a factual error that undermines what I regarded as the whole point of the exercise of telling it. However, I still like the moral about tribe and truth. I'm glad my book ends the way it does even if its climax is based on incomplete and misleading information.

Given the opportunity to amend the book, I would leave it as is. The facts may be wrong, but the moral is true.

"Am I a fibber like James Frey?"
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