Wow, that's so, so strange. I wonder if Eli (and other relatives who remember him?) might come up with more about his motivations, even if it's scrappy and incoherent, if you spend more time talking about him.
We're hopeful. Also Eli's wife is the one with the memory for details, he said, and she knew Aaron for 15 years. (He died 30 years ago.) They seemed so nice and warm, I'm sure we'll get to know them over time.
That is one wacky twist to this tale!
Maybe the one-sided secrecy was because the other side was all assholes but in a way that isn't obvious on brief contact. You've ruined all you grandfather worked for.
The obvious answer is that we're the assholes and he was protecting them, the way your love affair knows all about your awful wife, but not the other direction. But I swear we're lovely. I like us a lot.
Unless I've forgotten a contradictory detail, if he's out to your grandmother, and to his family, then it's wife #1 and people connected to her he's hiding from, and feels he has to keep your family isolated from.
Do you know anything about W#1's later life?
There's probably a dead hooker behind all this.
My theory is that it's all about the relationship with W2: A was passing when they met, and so he couldn't tell her the truth at the beginning. Then he never wanted to admit to W2 that everything he'd ever told her (and, presumably, everyone else) was false.
But I thought Heebie had discovered letters from W2 showing that she did know.
9 -- W2 knew about W1, but didn't know the truth about A's background and family.
And 8 is our working theory too, but it still feels surreal and sad.
I misunderstood what the letters showed W2 knew; I assumed the whole thing.
Passing in the sense of pretending to be a rural gentile, was that?
Could this have been about trying to hide his Jewish origins, for reasons of professional advancement? Have you ever watched "Gentleman's Agreement"? Watch it for an idea of what things might have been like for him in the 40's.
15: yes.
16: sure, my other grandfather also changed his last name for that reason. My grandmother, W2, was ethnically Jewish though, so the reasons to hide his family from her must be more along the lines of 8.
This phone call tied the moment when I saw photos of him labelled with his birth name for sheer shocking moments of my life.
And I made bad jokes about it. Sorry.
I laughed, Mobes. It's not like I found out I'm no fun.
This is all going to end up with a reveal that Heebie is Jammies' step-sister.
If somebody did really kill a prostitute, then I'll feel bad.
I remember Gentleman's Agreement; it was shown at a church youth group retreat in the late 60s—liberal protestants. Even then it seemed weirdly dated.
I know it's true, but I have trouble wrapping my head around a world where rural gentile would be a chosen identity, and not a source of embarrassment, at least among the kind of people we are.
My daughter's boyfriend, a brilliant grad student, is pretty embarrassed about it, she tells us, and almost idealizes our family's style. He had the kind of "Christmas with the folks" stories some people shared here, and my daughter passed them on to us.
Being a brilliant grad student isn't that embarrassing, is it?
Holy smokes, heebie. How strange and sad and (now) heartwarming. Good on you for following this trail where it leads, but whew. I hope you are documenting the twists and turns for the youngest generation.
If he kept contact with his first family, I'm inclined to think sunk-cost pressure over shame at assimilation.
17.2: I think a lot of the perceived benefits of assimilation would have persisted even marrying a Jewish woman - given how the woman's identity is sort of obliterated in the "traditional" marriage.
If he told them about your clan, how could he know none of them would initiate contact? Somehow it must've been communicated, whether explicitly or im.
He had internet messenger back then.
This guy gets two wives and don't have any?
You just need to get your head out of the shtetl and adopt a new goyishe identity, dude.
I heard two stories like this last time I was in Wobegon. One guy found out at age 60+ that he had a sister-cousin: while his father had been in WWII, his uncle and his mother had cheated. The two met and it was quite nice. (No Appalachian ethnic connection at all, but it was a very poor, Appalachianlike area).
The other (born about 1940-1950) knew that her mother and grandmother had been abandoned by her grandfather, something that blighted or ruined both of their lives. He was a charismatic pioneer sort who headed off for California and promised to send for them but didn't. Her research found that he had remarried in Colorado and also had an earlier family in Michigan. Basically a late frontier pioneer scumbag.
The part that makes this so sad and weird as a story of passing is that he didn't do it to be able to get into a new cultural group but to end up in one where he'd have belonged anyway. Charley's 8 or something similar is the most likely explanation but it's still weird and so sad. And I think repeated contact with the new cousin should bring out at least what cover story was used to keep his wife from, say, finding your mom on facebook or whatever and probably some other revealing threads you may be able to trace in productive directions.
I'm still not clear about this. Was W1 an actual r/g, or was the cover story that she was, so that W2 can be aware there was a W1, but not who, what she was?
34 -- I unearthed a similar story a couple years ago. One of my gggmother's brothers left Iowa as a young man and went to sea. He jumped ship in Australia, married, and had a kid (well less than 9 mos later). And then split. The wife remarried a few years later, as a widow. The husband went back to Iowa, married again (without disclosing first marriage) and had kids. That marriage failed too after some years.
Together some of the Australian descendants and I figured this out.
So did he use the new identity with W1 as well? I'll have to reread the old post to make sure I'm getting the details, because this is fascinating!
I don't know how reliable the Ancestry DNA tests actually are, but a relative of mine took one and it's called into question his already questionable parentage. It seems that his dad may have been from the British Isles, not the Germanic lands. There are no birth records with his father's name; his mother never married.
Plenty of Germanic ancestry in the British Isles, son.