Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on February 23, 2020

Richard Branson is proud to discover he is of Indian descent, but empowerment coach Remy Blumenfeld ... [+] says family secrets can be harmful

After I wrote here aboutfamily mappingI received a lot of messages from people asking how to map your family's history when there are important facts you dont know. It can be hard, for instance, if you don't know the identity of one or both of your birth parents. Yet, these 'known unknowns' are often much less pernicious than the 'unknown unknowns' brought about by secrets and lies. Its one thing to know that you do not know who your father is. Its another thing altogether to grow up, as Richard Branson did, thinking you knew who your ancestors were, only to discover in later life that your bloodlines were very different from what youd been told.

Often, family secrets stem from our ancestors desire to conceal their ethnicity. This was surely the case for the Billionaire, Richard Branson's forebears, whom he discovered had never spoken about their Indian bloodlines. The Madras archives combined with analysis of my DNA uncovered a very surprising family secret, Branson writes on his blog, The baptismal record of my second great-grandmother Eliza Reddy strangely didn't list her mother. Analysis of my DNA revealed that the reason for this was because my third great-grandmother was Indian. Yes, it turns out I'm part Indian. I couldn't wipe the smile off my face when I found this out. I'm honoured. I wish that my father had got to see these records; he would have been fascinated too.

A woman who we shall call Marianne wrote to me with a similar tale. She had always been told that her paternal grandfather was a hospital registrar who died of TB around 1929. Her father was brought up by the man his mother re-married.

Recent DNA test results revealing that 26.7% of her DNA was Ashkenazi Jewish, came as a complete surprise to Marianne. Up to then, she had identified as a Catholic Pole and she says her personality traits and behavior were honed accordingly. All through her childhood, Marianne felt she did not completely fit in and in adult life, before the secret of her DNA was discovered, she surprised her family by working for a Jewish firm.

Marianne writes 'Of course, the pressing question is why was this secret kept about my paternal heritage? My working assumption is that my paternal grandfather had Jewish ancestry. Was my grandmother protecting her only son? On the outbreak of WW2, my dad was at real risk of being sent to a concentration camp as the Germans thought he had Jewish features. He was put into forced labour instead. A wall went up when we asked dad about our unknown grandfather.'

In his book East West Street, Philippe Sands quotes the psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham who wrote of the relationship between a grandchild and a grandparent. 'What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others.' Family mapping can often motivate us to explore these gaps which can haunt us, even when we do not know they exist.

Two years ago Patrick discovered that his husband, Donald (not their real names) had kept their relationship a secret from his work colleagues. When Patrick returned home a day early from a retreat, he found that all trace of him had been removed from view. Instead, there were photographs of Donald with his sister and other female friends. Even Patrick's clothes were no longer hanging in the bedroom closets. When Patrick confronted him, Donald explained that he had a heterosexual identity at his workplace. Colleagues had come over for drinks, and so Donald had tidied Patrick away. Many people would have felt that this breach of trust marked a point of no return. Not Patrick. For some reason, he chose to remain unquestioningly in the marriage.

Cut to December 2019. Patrick was reading an article about a celebrity doctor who he'd always followed, not least because they were a similar age and had grown up in the same part of rural Canada. The article detailed how this doctor had recently discovered that his father (who was still alive) had a secret family in a neighboring town. The description of the doctor's dad left no doubt in Patrick's mind that this man was his father too. The 'secret family' in the story was Patricks own family. Although his dad's double life had been kept secret from him, on some level, Patrick had grown up understanding that keeping secrets from your family was normal. This was surely part of the reason he'd been attracted to Donald and a big part of why he quickly 'forgave' Donald for pretending he did not exist.

Dr. Anne Coxon, now an eminent neurologist, grew up with two very different memories of her father. In her earliest set of memories, her dad was warm and kind. In the other, later set of memories her father was cold and distant. Through her childhood and adolescence, she blamed herself for having somehow turned this warm, loving dad into a cold one. This event colored her relationships with men, however, after her father died, by which time Anne was middle-aged, she discovered the family secret that had caused her confusion. "I was never told until my father died, that in Los Angeles during the war my mother had developed a relationship with a warm open guy, who adored me. Of course I assumed both men were the same and that I had done something to turn the warm, nice guy into a rather cold and reserved shy person who did not relate easily.'

Like many families, mine too has secrets, only some of which I had a chance to discover as a result of interviewing family members for the BBC4 film I produced about my grandfather, the photographer, Erwin Blumenfeld. When I interviewed my father on camera about the great loves of Erwin's life, my dad said: 'Well, of course the greatest love of his life, from when he met her in the 1940s to when he died in 1969, was Kathleen.' I was shocked. I knew Kathleen had been the manager of my grandfather's studio at 222 Central Park South, but I had no idea she had been his mistress. You see, Kathleen Blumenfeld was also my aunt, the wife of my father's brother and my grandfather's eldest son, Henry. She was the mother of my cousins.

The secret fact that Kathleen had been the greatest love of my grandfather's life explained many of the tensions and animosities between family members that until then I had never understood.

Dr. Anne Coxon puts it this way: 'Family lies are there for a reason, but they still distort and make psychological growth difficult because you are searching for truth. We may not have a memory for the first five years of life but by then have established learned patterns some of which are false, and yet form the basis of future perception. Psychoanalysis is a search for the real truth without which we are living through a glass darkly, in the prism of our own self-deception, compounding mistakes because we dont see clearly.'

As a coach, my focus, of course, is on the present and the future. Yet when there are strong, hidden forces at work, as with Patrick or Anne, the past often repeats itself. Just another reason why it's a good idea for you to sit down, if you can, with parents or grandparents and ask them to shed light on anything unclear to you about your family's past. If in doubt, simply ask, 'Is there anything in our family's history that I may not know everything about?'

Continued here:

Richard Branson Knows His Familys Secrets - Heres How To Discover Yours, Before They Haunt You - Forbes

Category: Ashkenazi
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