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.
House GOP reveals: We were for the White House’s detainee treatment bill before we voted against it. Before we re-voted in favor of it. What’s your problem? That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
TPM Reader JL on George Allen …
I think that you’re getting at something in your reading of the WaPost article about Etty Allen, but you’re still a bit off.
Yes, this is a story about a lie, but the most important lie is not the one George Allen may have told the public, but the one that his mother told for years and years. What comes through most clearly to me is her deep shame at being Jewish. Why else would she fear that once she revealed the truth to her son that he wouldn’t love her anymore? Why would she insist that he not tell his siblings? Reading between the lines, she married into a deeply anti-semitic family and decided at that point that she had to hide her origins. Family secrets like these are toxic. I would expect that George Felix Allen both knew and not-knew, the way a child will know and not-know about any family secret, because it’s something that no one in the family will ever talk about directly. The story here isn’t so much what did GFA know about his mother and when did he know it so much as it is the family’s shame at being Jewish. I mean, this is not, “Hey mom, you never told me that you were a championship tennis player when you were young!” This is something that all of them were ashamed of. Think of poor old Felix Lumbroso, coming to the U.S. for his daughter’s wedding, and having to hide that he was Jewish. Think of Etty’s fear that he, or some other family member or friend, might spill the beans. Think of little George Felix, growing up in such a household and what he internalized. There is nothing in his behavior or speech, now or in the past, that suggests that he’s not ashamed that his mother is Jewish.
Amen.
AG Gonzales: We don’t send people abroad to be tortured. DHS handles that now.
Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) discusses his definitions of torture (and choice of social clubs) …
Pressed on whether that means he supports torture, he said, “What’s torture? Torture is many things to many people … people have different breaking points.”
Asked whether he would support using electric shocks, he said, “Electric shocks are given to people during initiations to different clubs … Is that torture? I don’t know.”
Asked about beatings, he said, “Are you talking about tying his hands behind his back and beating him in the head? No, I’m not for that.”
See the rest here.
Sigh. It’s a dirty business but somebody’s got to do it. You’ve probably seen that picture of George Allen hanging out with his friends at the white supremacist group, the CCC. Well, Justin Rood caught up with Gordon Baum of the CCC to find out what he thinks of the latest antics in the Virginia senate campaign.
Well, get ready for it. Word coming off the wires is that the White House and those GOP senators are about to announce a torture/trial ‘compromise’.
Apparently CNN just taped a lengthy interview with Sen. Allen on the whole Jewish mother mishigas. I hear they’re running it next hour.
House Ethics committee clears Rep. Lewis aide Shockey on $2 million ‘buyout’ deal.