My mother’s family was Jewish, with roots in Poland and Germany. Those who didn’t emigrate to the United States were killed in the Holocaust. They didn’t leave, my mother always said, because they thought they were more German than Jewish. That decision always haunted me, in part because I understood it: I was raised outside the Jewish faith—in my father’s casual churchgoing Episcopalianism—but aware of my Jewish identity, which was most acutely present through the family that I didn’t have.
