Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son's Return to His Jewish Family - Review

Commonweal, March 12, 1999 by Paul Elie

No, what is remarkable about this story is the deep religious yearning Stephen brought to his search for his origins - the way he followed the story all the way to its conclusion, and now has refashioned it as a classic conversion story in his book. "Nightline" made Stephen's story look like a search for his lost father; sociology makes it look like a swap of a religion of answers for a religion of questions. Another convert to Judaism, David Klinghoffer, has accused Stephen (on Slate) of being indifferent to the notion of religious truth - and Stephen reports that he gave himself "many a headache" worrying about his motives: "Had I embarked on nothing more than a glorified search for my roots?"

But my own impression, reading the book, is of how driven Stephen was to find a way to know God and know the truth about himself, not merely to choose a religion or fill in the blanks in his family story; and the book conveys a feeling that he is in the grip of something, that "the blood is calling." Yes, but that God is calling, too. On a college road trip, he feels a sharp, abrupt, sexual attraction to a Jewish woman thirty years older than he is. In New York, his girlfriend Abigail, an Episcopalian, introduces him to a drama teacher who makes him feel that his family's Jewish past is unfinished business. "Son, you'd have been plenty Jewish for Hitler," Ivan Kronenfeld says. "Not that you should let the Nazis define you, or anyone else. But you should figure it out. So you're not really Jewish and you're not really being a Christian.... You think your parents did what they did just so you'd walk away from it?" He goes to morning Eucharist with Abigail on Ash Wednesday and then to teach a writing class, worried what the student who is an Orthodox Jew will think of the smudge on his forehead: "I was quite sure he took me to be a Jew. I had certainly encouraged this perception; in what sort of warped flirtation had I trapped myself?"

Just after he gets a coveted job at the Times - when common sense would have told him to keep his desk clear - he takes the side job of writing a synopsis of the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, eighty thousand words in three months, and he feels the Rebbe's teachings work their way into him, and comes to feel that Jewish teaching has been a part of him all along. "Schneerson believed that when the soul is in torment (when isn't it? I thought), it is yearning to be reunited with its divine source...such a soul lay inside me. It always had. Did it come from my parents? From God? What was God anyway? The stern patriarch of my parents' house? A brilliant invention? A fraud? Or perhaps something I hadn't yet considered?"

Practically before he knows it, Stephen is an observant Jew and a "poster boy" for the return-to-Judaism movement, having told his story in the Times Magazine. He is invited to give talks, to share Shabbos dinners, to light the big outdoor menorah at a synagogue on the Lower East Side, although he doesn't know how to say the prayers. "I climbed the ladder, a hundred faces glowing beneath me in the throw of the streetlamps. The opposite side of the street was lined with Indian restaurants, and a dozen waiters watched from the sidewalk, greatly attentive....On the final brucha, I heard a sharp ping: the crooked candle had shattered the glass globe, which fell with a tinkle onto the concrete below. I was not meant, I concluded, to be a light unto the nations."