Jews always want to know: is he Jewish? So when Lou Reed died this week everything was in place and all the usual suspects gave us the lowdown on his Jewish creds. Once his Jewishness was established, the discussion took a predictable turn: did Lou (RIP) embrace or disavow his Jewish roots?

At this point, the conversation split into two camps, one claiming he’d proven his attachment to his people by way of his lyrics, the other saying he’d written damned good music but hadn’t given a fig for tradition.

Me? I thought that none of us really knew what was in Lou’s heart—what was/is in anyone’s heart. Not my place to judge, I decided and listened to the colored girls sing a song that could never have been written or sung today.

But then I came across an interesting piece in Hollywood Reporter about a documentary Lou Reed had co-directed with Ralph Gibson, an art photographer. The documentary, entitled Red Shirley, featured Lou’s elderly cousin Shirley Novick, a Holocaust survivor, union upstart, and civil rights activist.  In a 2011 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lou explained why he made this documentary, “I realized if I didn’t do this, a connection to a lot of things would be lost forever. So there was great impetus to do this.”

As far as I was concerned, that sealed the deal for me as to just how far Lou Reed was into his Judaism. He was in deep all right, just as much as this writer, who as a matter of fact (ahem) volunteered for www.jewishgen.org/ for a decade and traced one branch of her family back to circa 1736.

I traced my family tree because I became religious and I hungered to know more about the Jewishness of my family roots. I wanted to know the Jewish customs that were particular to my family. I wanted to know everything.

I went on to become a writer at a nonprofit that underwrites mentoring programs for children, Kars for Kids, where children are encouraged to explore their family histories. It’s important. In researching the family tree, a child has a chance to deepen his commitment to the values of his parents and community, to sink deep and thirsty roots into terra firma.

By the same token, I wanted to feel grounded like that and felt I could do this by tracking down the details of my personal family history, as much as I could learn. I largely succeeded.

Lou Reed's high school graduation picture, 1959.
Lou Reed’s high school graduation picture, 1959.

Lou went on his own quest, and after watching Red Shirley, I feel certain he succeeded, too.

Just as I had my famous family rabbis, engineers, bankers, and geneticists to uncover, so too, the famous Lou Reed had to discover his cousin’s rich history as an important personage in her own right.

Shirley Novick was not just some little old Jewish lady, but was highly accomplished at her profession as well as an activist to be reckoned with. Lou’s history via his cousin may not be the history he meant to uncover, or the history I sought to uncover in my own family, but it was authentically his history, which is all that mattered.

Here is a small part of what Lou sought and found:

All of Shirley’s family perished in the Holocaust except for her two sisters, who went to live in Palestine. After the Second World War, Shirley put an ad in an Israeli newspaper and the newspaper, in conjunction with the Red Cross, located her sisters, Rosa and Rachel.

Shirley went to Palestine, by boat, to see them. She was sitting in the back and heard her sister shouting her name. She looked and said, “Who are you? Rachel or Rosa?”

The sisters had been separated for 25 years. She didn’t know which sister was which. “That’s how I found them. That’s how we became family again.”

Shirley explained to Lou that Rachel and Rosa belonged to an organization that trained them to work and live in Palestine. They were “pioneers,” she said.

Why Not Palestine?

Lou asks, “So why didn’t you go there?”

Shirley laughs dismissively. “I didn’t want to go to Palestine.”

Lou states as though it were fact, taking a reasonable stab, “The weather.”

(screenshot from Red Shirley)
(screenshot from Red Shirley)

She shrugs.

“How come?”

“Because I wasn’t a Zionist. I don’t believe in their theory. You know what they were talking about at that time?”

“What were they talking about?”

“To conquer the land and to conquer the WORK from the Arabs,” she says, disapproving.

Black Sheep?

Later on she talks about how, as a dressmaker, she helped organize the workers against corruption in the union. She mentions that one Israeli leader said to her (as though it were no big deal that she had such an intimate discussion with an Israeli leader!), “You must be the black sheep in the family.”

“No,” she told him. “I was the red sheep in the family.”

Lou’s Jewish story was not my Jewish story. It was particular to him and his cousin Shirley, who married Paul Novick, editor of the communist Morgen Freiheit and then the Forward. But it was authentically Lou’s own story and it was as Jewish as Jewish can be.

Rest in peace, Lou.

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