Look who's talking http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/apr/14/politics
Excerpt:
Surprisingly - given how much he writes - Christopher Hitchens has written only one autobiographical piece, the title essay of Prepared for the Worst (1988). It is self-revealing as far as it goes, but it covers only one small aspect of his life, the discovery of his Jewishness when he was 38. It happened when his brother Peter took his new bride to meet their maternal grandmother, Dodo, who was then in her nineties, and Dodo said, 'She's Jewish, isn't she?' and then announced: 'Well, I've got something to tell you. So are you.' She said that her real surname was Levin, not Lynn, and that her ancestors were Blumenthals from Poland.
Christopher was thrilled when Peter told him. By then he was living in Washington and most of his friends were Jewish. Moreover, he felt that he had somehow known all along. He remembers an odd dream in which he was on the deck of a ship and a group of men approached him and said they needed a 10th man to make up a minyan (Jewish prayer group) and he calmly strolled across the deck and joined them. He insists that he is Jewish - because Jewish descent goes through the mother - though Peter Hitchens, who has traced the family tree, says they are only one 32nd Jewish. But wasn't it odd of his mother not to tell him - or even tell his father? 'I'm practically certain I know her motivation. Dodo had had quite a thin time in the hat business and encountered some prejudice. She looked Jewish, whereas my mother didn't. And I'm sure she didn't want me to go through any of that - her plan for me was that I was to be an English gentleman - you can judge for yourself how well that worked out!'
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