(*Originally on Reddit with some edits here, and also a preview of what my next book, Yehovah willing, covers):
I had always heard that we were Polish and Lithuanian. It never really occurred to me that he was very dark for an Ethnic Slav or Balt. Then some things started occurring when it hit me why my father would stereotypically pronounce our name as “Charnetski”—putting the emphasis on “ski”. In our case, “ski” did turn out to be a Jewish suffix, and I also figured out that we were passing as White. Also, the way that my grandfather put it, I had assumed that his father was Polish and his mother was Lithuanian—it turns out that Great-Granddad was the son of a Poylisher Levi and a Litvishe bas kohen, and Great-Grandma (z’l) was also Jewish and had Levite (including kohenic) heritage.
I subsequently also found out that having red hair was a giveaway in Poland as to whether someone was Jewish, and I now understood why my granduncle “Red” (z’l) and my granduncle Tony (“Little Red”; z’l) both had red hair. We also had mostly brown hair, although we had light eyes (although I have seen pictures of ancient Hebrews as portrayed by the Egyptians having blue eyes).
I wish my grandfather had been proud of his olive complexion instead of trying to pass for White. I get that especially his father’s family circumstances made it hard for him to be proud to be a Jew (Long story short, his father came from a Crypto-Jewish family whom escaped Russian Poland after the Farber-Kogan Incident that Anti Semites exploited to perpetuate the BiaÅ‚ystok Pogrom). Still, I missed being able to understand a lot in my early years, including that my family didn’t exactly have white privilege after all—having to pass to avoid Anti Semitism is no privilege—and having to cope with racism and the multigenerational effects of it contributed to family secrecy and other family toxicity. It also helped me understand why, for example, my father (who, I should mention, is also matrilineally Jewish) once literally drew a swastika just to throw it in a fireplace when I was having an OCD flareup – I did not know that we had lost relatives in the Holocaust—I thought that he was just responding to my OCD flareup. I had no clue that I inherited OCD from him, and I had no clue that a lot of that could be traced back to generational trauma.
I’m also still trying to figure out how to navigate in many ways because (and given that my mom is also of Jewish and European** descent) I’m not Jewish enough to some (and that does partly include that I believe in Jesus—although I know that my ethnicity is not contingent on whether I hold traditional beliefs), and I’m obviously not White enough to others. I meanwhile identify more as a Jew than as a White person, and I even think that—for example—some prominent gentile families into which some relatives married (including the Forbes and Johnson families—as one was once married to and had a child by baseball player Billy Johnson’s brother*) are more blessed by us than we are by them (“and in you, all of the families of the nations will be blessed”)—and we’re commoners by comparison!
(*One of her grandchildren ended up being one of the pallbearers at his funeral, by the way).
**The European part is Gaelic (Irish and Scottish), Frankish (German, remote French, and remote Walloonian), English, remote Scandinavian, remote Dutch (Flemish—may be Flemish Jewish, though), and remote Scandinavian (Gaeloscandinavian, including in the surname “Reilly”—which is Scandinavian-Irish in origin).
