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February 18, 2009

The Gentile, the Jew and the Astronomer

I've mentioned before that I am Jewish. But it wasn't always so. Which is to say that I didn't know about my Jewish heritage when I was growing up. And since 2009 is also the International Year of Astronomy I thought I'd address my connection to both issues in one post.

I don't remember the exact year but I think it was either 1998 or 1999 when I received a phone call from my mother informing me that she'd just been informed by my maternal grandmother that her mother (my maternal great-grandmother) was a Jew. It was essentially a family secret which my grandmother gave up only grudgingly.

Growing up I'd always identified most strongly with my father's Aryan Germanic heritage. And if you saw my brothers and I in the same room you'd probably readily understand why. We look Germanic, especially my older brother who looks like he stepped right out of one of the Nazi "racially pure" Aryan camps where the supposed master race was allegedly being nurtured.

I can only guess at my grandmother's reasons for not wanting to divulge her mother's ethnicity. But I strongly suspect that it had little to do with her ethnicity. Rather it is the tale of a disfunctional family.

My maternal great-grandfather was the noted amateur (in the sense that he was self-taught) astronomer, comet discoverer and telescope maker John E. Mellish, who is most famous for his claims to have seen craters on Mars back in 1915 when the reigning scientific paradigm flatly denied that there could be craters on Mars or any planet other than the Earth. His claim was scoffed at by most of his astronomy peers and most of those who didn't scoff resisted doing so on the basis of his infamous trait of rigorous honesty rather than because they questioned the dominant scientific theory of the day. It wasn't until the Mariner-4 flyby of Mars in 1965 that he was vindicated and the reigning scientific paradigm was debunked. But by then he was an old man and his observational drawings while at Yerkes Observatory had been destroyed in a fire at his Medford, Oregon shop just months before.

Nevertheless, in 1994 Crater Mellish on Mars was so named in his honor.

The Wisconsin Academy Review published a feature article on Mellish in 1979 and in the November 1999 issue of Sky & Telescope there is another feature article on him.

Interestingly enough, the eminent 20th Century Astronomer Edwin Hubble first gained fame for the discovery of "Hubble's Variable Nebula," an anomaly that was actually discovered by my great-grandfather at Yerkes where they both worked.

Anyway, the Sky & Telescope article, which is unfortunately no longer available online, details the general gist of the highly disfunctional family in which my grandmother was raised in an article titled Telescopes, Marriages, and Mars: The Life of John E. Mellish.

Long story, short... on a dare from two of her friends, a 17 year old Jessie Wood ran an advertisement in a Chicago newspaper announcing that she was seeking "a perfect husband." 2000 men responded to the ad and from them she selected my great-grandfather, who was then an observer at Yerkes Observatory. On their third date they eloped and his fate was sealed. My grandmother was their first child.

In her defense, my Jewish great-grandmother Jessie had born the strain of 13 pregnancies - only 8 of whom survived - before she suffered some sort of psychic and physical breakdown after which she was never the same, physically or mentally. And that's when things got crazy for the family. She falsely accused her husband of having an affair with a teenager girl which led to his being voluntarily committed to a mental insitution in a vain attempt to clear his name on psychiatric grounds. After months of unending chaos they eventually divorced and he was deported from the state of Illinois - yes, he really was deported.

Several years later she reappeared in his life asking for a reconciliation. Their oldest son warned his father to reject her, but he didn't take the advice and they eventually remarried. Shortly thereafter the marriage imploded and a nasty divorce ensued until it was discovered that her interim marriage to someone else had never been terminated and the reconciliatory marriage with my great-grandfather was annulled. Somewhere in there the kids all ended up in the state's foster care system before my great-grandfather eventually secured custody of them all. And my grandmother never forgave her mother. So that, I believe, was the primary reason why my grandmother never divulged her mother's ethnicity. It wasn't about the ethnicity... my grandmother flat out never wanted to even talk about her mother at all and the ethnicity thing just got caught up in the larger disfunction.

So, I am a Jew who once thought he was a Gentile. And as you can see I have the all-important maternal line which is how Jews recon these things. All because of a teenage dare. Yet without it I wouldn't be here.

Posted by Kevin at February 18, 2009 11:10 AM