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FALL 2003 |
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Vol. 32,
No. 1 |
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A JEWISH CZECH IN JOHN KERRY'S COURT
by Jennifer Anne Perez
The saga of a U.S. senator
and presidential contender in search of his roots--and his reaction to the
"revelation."
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even years ago, U.S. Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright was confronted with a genealogical discovery: her
Czech émigré parents were Jewish. They'd hidden their Jewish roots during and
after the Second World War. More than a dozen of her Jewish relatives,
including three grandparents, an aunt, an uncle and a first cousin, had all
perished in the Nazi concentration camps. Albright has been reluctant to
comment on the discovery, telling the Washington Post, "I have to
look into this myself...it's a very personal matter."
A similar revelation
occurred on February 2, 2003, when the Boston Globe reported that
Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, thought
by many to be a "Boston Brahmin" of Irish-Catholic ancestry, was the
grandson of Czech immigrants who also had concealed their Jewish heritage.
The story begins in the
hamlet of Horni Benesov on the tenth of May 1873--the day Benedikt and Mathilde
Kohn had a son they named Fritz.
Like his father, Fritz
became a simple brewer. Yet it was difficult for him to succeed in an area
dominated by German-speaking Catholics. Many Jews hid their religious identity,
posing as Gentiles. "It was easier to do business as a Christian,"
says Prague-based genealogist Julius Miller, who specializes in tracing Jewish
lineage. "Many Jews just stopped practicing Judaism during this period and
had no belief at all."
On March 17, 1902, shortly
before his 30th birthday, Fritz took his wife Ida and infant son Erich to a
government office in Vienna and changed their family name. Fritz Kohn would
henceforth be known as Frederick Kerry.
The Kerry family settled
for three years in Austria before embarking on the steamship Konigen Luise
in Genoa, Italy on May 4, 1905, bound for America. The two-masted, twin-screw
"Barbarosa"-class ship was configured to carry nearly 2,000
passengers in steerage, about 150 in first class, and 140 in second. According
to the ship's manifest, the Kerrys traveled in first class with only
twenty-nine other passengers--French, American, and Swiss families with
decidedly Anglican names like Hale, Walker, and Bridgeman.
Ellis Island records note
that upon boarding the ship, Kerry identified his family as Germans from
Austria, their former place of residence as Vienna. By the time the ship
arrived in New York City on May 18, 1905, Frederick Kerry had left his Jewish
heritage behind.
A New Life
The Kerrys settled in
Chicago, where Frederick quickly set out to stake his claim in the American
dream. On June 21, 1907, he filed his initial citizenship papers with Illinois'
Cook County Circuit Court. By 1908, he was listed in a business directory with
an office on Dearborn Street in Chicago's famous Loop. In 1910, the year his
daughter Mildred was born, he had made it into the Chicago Blue Book, a
catalogue of notable city residents. By February 6, 1911, he had filed his
naturalization petition, which was witnessed by the highly respected State
Street merchant Henry Lytton and by Frank Case, a business manager at Sears
Roebuck. Kerry had assisted in the reorganization of Sears, and by the
following year he was promoting himself as a "business counselor"
under the title "Frederick A. Kerry & Staff."
But for reasons that remain
unclear, Kerry soon left Chicago and settled in Brookline, Massachusetts.
There, in 1915, Ida gave birth to their third child, Richard, the future father
of Senator John Kerry. Frederick would continue the merchant life, now working
in the shoe business and achieving enough success to hire a live-in German
domestic worker, who appears on the 1920 census records of the Kerry household.
The census information also
offers a glimpse into the lengths to which Frederick Kerry had gone to obscure
his Jewish lineage. Both he and his wife listed their native tongues as
German--although the first language of Czech Jews of that era who were born
near the Polish border would almost certainly have been Yiddish. By this point,
however, both Frederick and Ida had been practicing Catholics for nearly twenty
years, and by all accounts were regarded as devout in their faith.
Frederick Kerry's American
dream ended mysteriously on November 21, 1921 at the age of 48. According to
front-page news reports, the now virtually bankrupt husband and father of three
walked into the lobby washroom of Boston's posh Copley Plaza Hotel, put a
loaded revolver to his head, and pulled the trigger. He left behind $25 in
cash, $200 in stocks, and a Cadillac.
The suicide cast a shroud
of silence over the family history for more than fifty years. It would come to
light again with the first stirrings of a U.S. senator's bid for a possible
presidential run in 2004.
A Rising Star
The Kerrys' youngest child,
Richard, would also achieve success, but unlike his father, would sustain it.
He served as an Army pilot during World War II; married Rosemary Forbes, a
descendant of two wealthy Massachusetts families, the Forbes and the Winthrops;
and became a U.S. diplomat, holding posts in Oslo, Berlin, and Paris.
Richard and Rosemary's
first son, John Forbes Kerry, was born on December 11, 1943. Though he attended
exclusive boarding schools in Europe as well as an elite private school in New
Hampshire, John later would tell interviewers that somehow he always felt
disconnected from his peers, like an outsider. He attended Yale at about the
same time as President George W. Bush--both belonged to the elite secret Skull
& Bones society--but while Bush lived the fraternity life, Kerry, an
admirer of John F. Kennedy, found his niche in politics and became president of
the Yale Political Union, a nonpartisan group providing a forum for a wide
range of political debate. Upon graduation in 1966, he joined the Navy to fight
in Vietnam. Returning to the U.S. in 1969 with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star,
and three Purple Hearts, Kerry soon became a vocal critic of the war.
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, he
asked a question that would make him famous: "How do you ask a man to be
the last man to die for a mistake?"
Five years later, Kerry
graduated from Boston College law school and kicked his political career into
high gear. He quickly rose through the ranks of state government, becoming
lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982 under then Governor Michael
Dukakis, and eventually winning a U.S. Senate seat in 1984.
In the late 1980s Kerry
learned from a relative that his grandmother Ida had been born Jewish--a
surprising revelation, as he had remembered her as a zealous Catholic. But he
knew virtually nothing about his paternal grandfather, Frederick.
John Kerry's constituency
assumed that, with his father's name and his mother's lineage, the senator was
a full-blooded Irish Catholic. Even his hometown newspaper, the Boston
Globe, regularly made the mistake, despite Kerry's repeated attempts to set
the record straight. During a 1993 interview with TV host John McLaughlin,
Kerry addressed the incorrect presumption that his father was Irish by stating
that his grandfather was Austrian and that his grandmother had been born
Jewish. He added: "We're still trying to find all the details." And
try he did. Once, while on a visit to Europe, he stopped off in Vienna and
called every Kerry in the phone book. And in 2002, his office contacted the
regional Czech archives, which, he would later discover, actually possessed
information on Fritz Kohn's birth, but the senator never received a reply--two
years earlier the bureau had stopped conducting searches for foreigners.
It was not until the late
1990s, when John's father Richard was suffering from cancer, that he finally
disclosed to John that his grandfather had shot himself to death. "[That]
turned on a light bulb for John Kerry on why his father was so understandably
reticent to talk about it," Kerry spokesman David Wade told the Boston
Globe. "[It] help[ed] him understand his father much more and what his
father went through."
Richard Kerry died in 2000.
He never revealed that his father had been a Jew. Born in the United States and
only 5 years old when Frederick died, it is likely that Richard did not know of
his grandfather's hidden past.
The Mystery Revealed
In late 2002, as rumors
began to circulate that Kerry would seek the Democratic nomination for
president, editors at the Boston Globe began soliciting reporters for
in-depth articles on Kerry's life. Journalist Michael Kranish, a veteran
Washington correspondent who had spent four years piecing together his own
Jewish family history, volunteered for the assignment.
Knowing that Jews had
sometimes altered their names and identities--his own family's name had been
changed at Ellis Island--and that unless he hired an overseas collaborator to
check European records, it would be months before he'd be able to complete an
accurate search, Kranish turned to prominent genealogist Felix Gundacker of the
Institute for Historical Family Research in Vienna. Gundacker had developed a
specialty in tracing the genealogies of Jews in Austria and in parts of what is
now the Czech Republic. Within two weeks, Gundacker discovered the original
document in Vienna that recorded Fritz Kohn's name change to Frederick Kerry.
Ironically, had Kohn's name been changed at Ellis Island, it might have been
impossible to uncover the original name. But because Kohn made the change while
still in Austria, probably to conceal his background before coming to America,
his origins could now be traced.
Gundacker's next step was
to find Kohn's birth records. That search took him to the state archives in the
Czech city of Opava, halfway between Krakow, Poland and Prague. There he met
archivist Jiri Stibor, a traditionalist who refused to use a computer,
preferring to search by hand through the millions of musty files collected in
the cavernous rooms of a former palace.
Stibor told Gundacker that
on June 20, 2002 he had received an unusual inquiry--a letter in English from a
certain "Samuel C" which carried the seal of a high-ranking
Washington, D.C. official. The mysterious letter noted that John Kerry was a
candidate for president (though the senator had yet to publicly announce his
intention to run) and inquired about a man named "Fritz Cohn." Stibor
knew he couldn't be of assistance; the archives had stopped processing foreign
requests several years earlier. In any case, the war and local antisemitism had
left little evidence of a former Jewish presence in the region. "The
Germans didn't want any trace of the Jews left," Stibor says, "even
after so many of them were taken away. So many of the records were simply
destroyed."
Keeping in mind the earlier
request, and now proceeding on the assumption that Frederick Kerry had been
born Jewish, Gundacker and Stibor began scouring the archives. "The
Catholics of the time weren't interested in keeping good records [of the
Jews]," Stibor says. "If there were Jews in the town, they would be
the last entries, at the end of the book." Adds Gundacker: "If there
was no [official] Jewish community, parish priests and other Catholics had to
add birth records to the central record books. They mostly added those records
to the end of the books, not as part of the regular records." Finally,
after hours of pulling volume after volume off the archive shelves, they came
upon a handwritten entry in the last pages of a yellowed book. "In the
year 1873, on May 10th, was born Fritz Kohn, a legal son of Benedikt Kohn,
master brewer in Bennisch (the old German name for Horni Benesov), House 224,
and his wife, Mathilde, daughter of Jakob Frankel, royal dealer in Oberlogau in
Prussia."
This one sentence had put
the last piece of the puzzle into place, solving an 80-year-old mystery.
Gundacker phoned Globe reporter Kranish and told him he was "1,000
percent sure" that Senator John Kerry's grandfather had been born a Jew.
A short time later, Kranish
personally presented the evidence to Kerry in the senator's Washington office.
He let Kerry review the documents: ship manifests, Ellis Island records,
newspaper clippings, and additional materials obtained through genealogists,
Kranish himself, and the Globe's library staff.
"This is
amazing...fascinating to me," Kerry told the reporter. "This is
incredible stuff. I think it is more than interesting; it is a revelation....It
has a big emotional impact, because it obviously raises questions: I want to
know what happened, why did they do this, what were they thinking, what was the
thought process, and why, once they got over here, they never talked about
it."
At one point, Kranish said,
Kerry became emotional, particularly when reviewing the front-page news
accounts of his grandfather's suicide. "God, that's awful, Oh, God, that's
awful. This is kind of heavy," the senator told him. "That explains a
lot. It connects the dots. My dad was sort of painfully remote and shut off,
and angry about the loss of his sister [she had died of cancer] and lack of a
father."
He also shook his head in
wonder at the number of times he had visited the Copley Plaza, never knowing
its significance in his family's history. "How many times have I walked
into that hotel...." he said, his voice trailing off.
No Trace of a Past
Horni Benesov's current
mayor, Josef Klech, says that he has considered extending an invitation to
Senator Kerry to visit his grandfather's birthplace. But, admits Klech, the
unavoidable truth is that there really isn't much to see. Not a single trace
remains of Kerry's ancestors; not a single person in town remembers the Kohn
family.
Over time, the entire
town--except for the Catholic chapel, parish, and church--has been completely
rebuilt. An unremarkable box-shaped apartment building now sits on the lot
where Kohn's house once stood. Gone is the small Jewish cemetery where Kohn's
parents Benedikt and Mathilde were likely buried. In place of the Kohn brewery
there is a public sauna advertising discount rates to local residents.
Reflecting on His Roots
In Kerry's office, half a
world away, the senator chose to say little publicly about the discovery. He
did discuss the matter with Reform Judaism magazine, however. "This
was an incredible illumination," Kerry says. "It really connected the
things I'd talked about for years but now understand more personally. I never
really knew why my grandfather left Austria or why he underwent such personal
transformation, but we do know many of the things that were happening under the
old Hapsburg Empire. We know what life was like for too many of them, and the
ultimate turn for even greater tragedy it would take not much later."
As for why Fritz Kohn chose
the path he did, Prague-based genealogist Julius Miller believes he was a man
who, like many other European Jews, looked to start over and build a better
life for himself and his family. "Thousands of European Jews abandoned
their past," Miller says. "The story of Frederick Kerry, alias Fritz
Kohn, mirrors the histories of many Jewish families who came to America in the
early 1900s."
Postscript
In a twist of irony, John
Kerry's younger brother Cameron converted to Judaism in 1983, shortly before
marrying Kathy Weinman, a Jewish woman raised in a Conservative household in
Michigan. As a member of a Boston Brahmin family, Cameron thought he was
entering uncharted territory. Only later did he realize that he was returning
to his genealogical roots.
When Cameron, now a Boston
litigation attorney, was courting Kathy, they decided that "we were going
to raise any children we had as Jewish," Cameron recalls. After that, he
says, it wasn't difficult for him to become a Jew himself. "Converting
seemed to me a small step--I wanted to be a full participant in their
upbringing. [My decision] was helped along by the warm reception and welcome I
received from the clergy at Temple Israel [in Boston]."
Converting, he says, was
far less traumatic than he had anticipated. There were no objections from the
rest of the Kerry clan, and his new Jewish family at Temple Israel welcomed him
with open arms. Today Kathy is a member of the synagogue board. Their two
daughters have become b'nai mitzvah at the temple, and were delighted when they
found out about their great-grandfather.
"It's been wonderful
for the whole family," Cameron Kerry says. "It's ironic--I guess
things come full circle."
Jennifer Anne Perez, a
former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, is now an international freelance journalist based
in Prague.