The Post has a follow-up in Thursday’s paper on the Allen ‘I didn’t know I was Jewish’ saga.
Staff writer Michael D. Shear interviews Allen’s mom, Henrietta “Etty” Allen nee Lumbroso.
Not to be overly cynical but it reads as what you might call a sort of feel-good tale of hidden identities and toxic family secrets.
Lumbroso was raised as a Jew in Tunisia. But when she came to the US and married George’s dad she pretended to be a Christian because she didn’t think her husband’s family would accept her and also because she didn’t want her family to experience what she experienced in World War II. So she never told her family, until George confronted her about it last month. She admitted it was true. She said she was afraid he didn’t love her anymore. But no, he said, “Mom, I respect you more than ever.”
Okay, look, I’m doing my best to walk you through the narrative, okay?
Said Allen’s mother: “The fact this is such an issue justifies my actions, and my behavior.”
At the debate a few days ago Allen said “My mother’s French-Italian with a little Spanish blood in her. And I was raised as she was, as far as I know, raised as a Christian.” That wasn’t true of course. She’d already told him she was raised as a Jew. But that’s okay because she’d sworn him to secrecy after the conversation in August.
Some more texturey details come through even in the carmelized narrative. As Shear writes “She said that she and the senator’s father, famed former Redskins coach George Allen, had wanted [keep her Jewish ancestry a secret] to protect their children from living with the fear that she had experienced during World War II.”
Further down, there’s a slightly different explanation, or at least another layer of it. Speaking of Allen’s father, she says, “He didn’t want me to tell his mother. At that time, that was a no-no, to marry outside the church.”
Even with a major helping of charity, I think this sounds like the more plausible explanation, rather than her desire to spare George persecution as a Jew in the United States.
One of my failings as a reporter, when I was doing that as my full time gig, was my lack of sufficient cynicism: I remember back in 2001 sitting in the home of a retired ambassador and having him lie to my face. Of course, I didn’t realize it then. I couldn’t get my head around the idea he was just straight out lying to me. (He’d artfully bamboozled me by refusing to talk on the phone or have of conversation recorded — only to insist that what I was asking about had simply never happened.) I found out a month or so later when a major paper broke the story I’d been working on with most of the same information I’d known months before. That reporter finally got the ambassador to ‘fess up.
That said, I might be willing to believe that Allen’s mother never told him her family was Jewish. I’m not silly enough to believe he didn’t know. I’ve learned a few lessons.
