0:00

Family Secrets is a production of I Heart

0:02

Radio. Lacey Schwartz

0:04

was born into a Jewish family who lived in Woodstock,

0:07

New York. Her twenty sixteen

0:09

documentary, Little White Lye,

0:12

begins with glimpses of home movies Lacy

0:15

as a young child surrounded by her

0:17

family. This is in the late

0:19

nineteen seventies. Her mom

0:22

is fair with big blue eyes. Her

0:24

dad is dark haired, intense looking, brooding.

0:28

Actually, her parents look kind of cool, hippieish,

0:31

like a young James Taylor and Carly Simon,

0:34

which is appropriate since this is Woodstock.

0:38

And then there's Lacy. What

0:40

the viewer notices instantly is that the child

0:42

is black, but no

0:44

one in her family seems to notice or take in

0:46

this fact. I can't

0:49

stress how obvious it would be to anyone

0:51

looking at this family that there is no

0:53

way little Lacy, a beautiful

0:55

girl, was caramel skin, dark eyes,

0:57

kinky hair, and decidedly African

1:00

American features, is the daughter

1:02

of her two very white parents. I

1:05

mean, maybe she's the daughter of one of them, but

1:07

both out of the question. Except

1:11

this is a story in which what people

1:13

wish to believe will themselves to

1:15

believe, becomes what they actually do

1:17

believe the story of a family

1:19

who raises their only child to

1:21

believe that she is something other than who

1:24

she is. I'm

1:34

Danny Shapiro, and this is

1:36

family secrets, secrets

1:38

that are kept from us, secrets we keep

1:40

from others, and secrets we keep

1:43

from ourselves. So

1:46

did you have any sense

1:49

at all growing up that

1:52

something didn't quite make sense? Absolutely?

1:55

I mean I solely because the way

1:57

I loved from the time I was very

1:59

very um. I either have memories

2:02

of being questioned about the way

2:04

I love and why I looked the way I did because

2:06

I did seemed to like fit in with

2:08

my family and surrounding and I

2:10

looked different than other people, And it also

2:12

became almost like a little bit of family lore

2:15

that you know, the first vacation, at least

2:17

I was aware that we went on as a family and we went

2:19

to Puerto Rico, and as an infant,

2:22

you know, people thought I was Puerto Rican. So

2:25

it was always very clear that

2:27

people thought I looked different from my

2:30

parents. I know something

2:32

about growing up with a profound disconnect

2:34

between who I was told I was and

2:37

the truth that stared back at me in the mirror

2:39

every day. A couple

2:41

of years ago. As nothing more than a whim,

2:44

I spit into a plastic file and

2:46

sent a d n A sample to one of those genetic

2:48

testing companies. When

2:50

I got my results, I found

2:53

out that my dad wasn't my dad.

2:56

Half of my family tree was locked off at

2:58

the roots. The person I

3:00

thought I was was not the person I

3:02

actually was, at least not biologically.

3:06

At a time when I was in the midst of my freak out,

3:08

a friend told me about Lacey's film.

3:11

I watched mesmerized as

3:14

a beaming black girl held the Torah

3:16

on her bot mitzvah, her parents proudly

3:18

looking on as she read from

3:20

the Hagada at the pass Over table with her

3:22

family, as she laughed as a toddler

3:25

on her mother's lap. My

3:27

family knew who they were, and they defined

3:30

who I was, the adult, Lacey

3:32

narrates. I

3:37

was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family on

3:40

my father's side. It was a lineage

3:42

that stretched back into the shettles of Lithuania

3:45

and Poland. My cousins

3:47

all look unmistakably Jewish. In

3:49

fact, some of them wear the black hats

3:51

and long beards of Hassad's. I

3:54

grew up in a Kosher home, spoke fluent

3:56

Hebrew, and attended a yeshiva at

3:58

Jewish day school. And every

4:01

day of my life I was told that

4:03

I didn't look Jewish. I was very

4:05

fair and blue eyed. But it wasn't just

4:08

that I didn't look Jewish.

4:10

It was that I did look like something

4:12

else, like I came from another part

4:14

of the world altogether. But

4:17

in my family, we laughed off this strange

4:19

genetic twist of fate that had me

4:21

looking like Swiss miss wandering over from

4:23

the Alps and into the dusty shuttle. It

4:26

was a source of amusement and hilarity.

4:29

I mean, when I was three years old,

4:31

I was the child in the Kodak Christmas poster.

4:34

Literally, I was the little girl

4:36

wishing the entire world a merry Christmas.

4:40

As the end credits rolled in Lacy's film,

4:42

I turned to my husband Michael, so

4:45

I said, the level of denial in

4:47

her family was really extreme, not

4:49

like what happened in mine. Michael

4:52

paused and looked at me. Yeah,

4:54

no, pretty much the same, he

4:57

said. There's

4:59

all different kinds the secrets of families kind of, but a

5:01

lot of times it's because people's existence. They're like

5:03

stigmatized. People don't want to

5:05

talk about having affair, they don't want to

5:07

talk about being inter at all, they don't want

5:09

to talk about the fact that maybe they are partning

5:11

before our marriage. There's all

5:14

different kinds of things that people

5:17

lie about, absolutely, and

5:19

we're also living in a moment in time where a

5:22

lot of those lies or

5:24

very closely kept secrets are tumbling

5:26

out because of the combination

5:29

of the Internet and DNA

5:31

testing, where people find out all sorts of things

5:33

that were meant to be kept secrets

5:36

to the grave. Yeah. No, absolutely

5:38

mean. I have a bunch of friends through through genetic

5:41

testing, the kind of over the kind of generic testing,

5:43

has found out that they are not their

5:45

parents child. There

5:48

was within my family a kind

5:50

of the story that was told was that my

5:52

father had a dark skinned Sicilian grandfather

5:55

who I had never met, had passed

5:57

away about her Warren by looking

5:59

at family photos, that was who

6:01

I looked like. It was darker as

6:04

features and c around, and that it was

6:06

kind of its idea like re set of gene And

6:09

that was a story that was repeated

6:11

and kind of was passed on and

6:13

would come up at various

6:16

moments, so I would say

6:18

that, you know, for me and becau's really worth knowing

6:20

that, in in terms of my own time, I was denial that my denial

6:22

was very much learned, you

6:25

know, it was something that was passed on

6:27

to me. Lazie

6:29

grows up in a self described bubble in

6:31

Woodstock. Despite its fame,

6:34

it's a small town, mostly white.

6:36

No one really challenges her or her parents

6:39

about what is glaringly obvious.

6:41

But then, as bubbles do, hers

6:44

begins to Expand we're

6:48

going to take a quick break. We'll be back in

6:50

a moment. When

6:57

Lazy enters middle school and then high school,

7:00

she's bussed to a much larger town, and

7:02

it's then that she begins to get the questions

7:05

and deep down to question herself.

7:08

There's a moment in your film, if I were

7:10

call it correctly, where there's a sense that

7:13

the African American kids in that school are

7:15

looking at you like you're one of us, Like

7:18

what's up that this isn't making

7:20

you know, like we we recognize you exactly.

7:25

Part of that was understanding how you know, I had

7:27

come to convince myself to believe that

7:29

I would still I kind of push back

7:31

a rationalize against it, but I would say

7:33

that probably around high school

7:35

is when kind of stuff,

7:38

or maybe even middle school was when I realized

7:40

that you dine you the truth but wasn't willing

7:42

to admit it. And I think I went through most of my adolescens

7:44

in that phase. The phase

7:46

Lacy is talking about here has been coined

7:49

by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bolas as

7:51

the unthought known, what

7:54

we know deep down but cannot

7:56

bring ourselves to think. Sometimes

7:58

we spend our whole lives in

8:01

the unthought known, and

8:03

sometimes life intervenes and

8:05

we're confronted with knowledge that we can no longer

8:08

bury from ourselves. When

8:11

Lazy is sixteen, her parents,

8:13

who had been having issues, split up. This

8:16

fissure in the foundation of her family is

8:19

the first step in a fissure inside

8:21

of Lacey. She can't articulate

8:23

it, but she knows that something doesn't

8:26

make sense. The fall of her

8:28

senior year, when she applies to colleges,

8:31

she leaves the box that would identify her

8:33

ethnicity unchecked. Back

8:36

in those days, I don't think college

8:38

is still do this. Lacey would have sent

8:41

a photograph along with her application. So

8:45

Lacey is admitted to Georgetown as

8:47

a black student. Do

8:50

you remember anything about that moment? Was

8:52

that a conscious choice?

8:55

Was that a moment of I really just

8:57

don't even know what to put here? Or you tell

8:59

me, like you know, it almost

9:01

feels like a challenge, like you tell me who who

9:04

am? I? And I've spent to a fair amount

9:06

of time analyzing this and discussing

9:08

it with the people that were close to me. But I think in

9:11

retrospect that what I was,

9:13

even if it was, as you said, the

9:15

the unknown truth or what was that you said,

9:18

what was that crazy? The unsought known,

9:20

the unsought known? And that was really

9:22

so my parents went around was six team a junior

9:25

year in high school, right, So I

9:27

was sending in my applications

9:29

more or less that summer fall afterwards.

9:32

At that point I was really

9:35

my bubble was popped, and so I think seeped down

9:37

at that point. I didn't know the truth, but I was

9:39

very much prioritizing the issues

9:41

I was dealing with my life. But

9:44

at the same time, largely around I wish with one

9:46

person, a guy that I was dating

9:48

at that time, who had already

9:51

gone off to college, who he himself

9:53

was also bi racial black and

9:55

had come from the same sound as me and was just saying,

9:58

like, yo, it's one thing that you think

10:00

walking around in this relatively small community

10:02

that we grew up in and saying

10:04

that you're white or you know, identifying

10:07

as such. But you know, when you go out into

10:09

the bigger world, like people are going to laugh at

10:11

you, like it doesn't add up. And

10:13

so I was conscious enough to know at that point

10:15

that there were things that weren't adding

10:17

up, But I wasn't prepared

10:20

to really do the deep dive at that point under

10:22

my you know, but still the time my

10:25

parents root, I wasn't in the

10:27

proximity of my parents ready to do

10:29

that diving a cigarette like, well, then who am

10:31

I if I am not the daughter

10:33

of both of my parents. Lacy

10:36

goes off to college and begins to try on her

10:38

new identity, living in what she

10:40

describes as a racial closet. She

10:43

doesn't say a word to her mother, she

10:45

doesn't say a word to her father. It

10:48

isn't until she's been away from home for her entire

10:50

freshman year that she broaches the

10:53

subject with her mother for the first

10:55

time. So I went

10:57

to my mother and was life with then I wanted as a truth,

10:59

like why do I the way I did, and my

11:01

mother, as she tends to, kind of comes in haunt

11:04

and took a whisle me pushing her

11:06

for her to finally kind of sit down and really have the conversation

11:08

about what occurred around me being

11:11

conceived and how likely it was that

11:13

my father was not my biological boma.

11:17

So by the time I

11:19

found out and really fundamentally

11:21

again, it was more a confirmation process

11:24

than it was a revelatory

11:26

process, because by the time I went to

11:28

my mother and stop to her, I was ready

11:30

just to have the imformation firm so

11:32

I could confirm my own

11:34

identity and be able to figure out who I

11:36

was. Lacy's mother

11:39

does not want to talk about it. At

11:41

first, she denies it, but eventually

11:44

she tells Lazy the truth her

11:46

mom had had a long affair was an African

11:48

American man named Rodney, a

11:50

friend of the family that Lacy has known

11:52

growing up and who Lacy resembles

11:55

to such a point that friends have pointed it out,

11:57

and so kind of at that point she shared

12:01

the information and shared what is basically

12:03

outline it. It's not that she had had a

12:05

relationship with my biological father, and

12:07

there was a very good chance that I was to his child,

12:10

and for me, I mean again, based on the side

12:12

that I really physically looked

12:14

fairly somewhere at him, it seemed pretty

12:16

obvious what the truth was. Once

12:19

Lazy has the truth of her identity confirmed,

12:22

you'd think she'd pay her dad a visit go

12:24

talk to him. Lazy's

12:26

mom tells her that the two of them have never discussed

12:29

it. My parents never talked

12:31

about the truth to this day. They haven't actually really

12:33

pull out had a conversation about the truth

12:36

for a long time, obviously because my mother. But now

12:38

at this point, my father guys made it clear

12:40

to her that he doesn't want to sit down and talk it

12:42

out, that he just doesn't want to talk to her about it. And

12:44

they had never had a moment with

12:47

each other when you were born

12:49

or in your childhood. There wasn't that

12:52

when when he moved

12:54

out, like when they were pretty much in the processive him

12:56

moving out. One one moment he said, you

12:58

know, I know, Lazy not my biological

13:01

child, and the point her, you know,

13:03

she cried and cried and said I'm sorry, I'm sorry,

13:05

But they didn't actually have a competition like that was

13:08

the expect of the competition. How

13:10

long after the hemming

13:13

and hawing with your mother and then finally her admitting

13:16

to you that it was possible. How

13:18

long before you then ended up speaking

13:20

with your father about it? A decade?

13:24

A decade? We're

13:28

going to pause for a moment. You

13:36

know, Sometimes I wonder what I would have done

13:39

if I had found out the truth about me and my dad

13:41

while he was still alive. Now

13:44

it's easy for me to wish I could talk to him,

13:47

to wish I could ask him what he suspected

13:49

or whether he flat out new and

13:52

if he did know whether it mattered. But

13:55

would I have been able to sit my father down,

13:57

look him in the eye and have that

13:59

moment into saying I am not

14:01

your biological daughter. For

14:04

me, I think it was really about

14:08

living for a long time in fear

14:10

that if I spoke the truth

14:12

about my race, which was directly linked

14:15

to my fraternity, that I

14:17

would be at risk of losing my father,

14:21

And so I always telling my father was my father, and I

14:23

was scared of losing him, And it

14:25

took me a while to come

14:28

to accept that I actually

14:31

only now realized that I probably

14:33

was never really at risk of losing him, But

14:36

I actually had to accept that

14:38

I had to be willing to move

14:40

forward regardless of the potential

14:43

of losing him, because I couldn't live

14:45

my life under these secrets

14:47

and be able to move for with my life in

14:50

a healthy manner. And then

14:52

after I was came to that realization

14:54

and acceptance and actually didn't

14:57

move forward, I came to

14:59

realize that when I kind of sent my own

15:01

boundaries and owned my own truth, that

15:03

in fact, my father was

15:06

fundamentally still going to be there. Like

15:08

I literally thought there one or two things was going to happen.

15:10

Either he and I were going to totally like

15:13

sit down and working all out beyond the same page,

15:16

or we were going to have nothing to do with each other. And

15:18

I didn't realize that there was a middle

15:20

ground between those two, that we could actually have

15:23

live our own separate realities

15:25

but still being in each other's lives, which is what

15:27

exact happened. And

15:30

it also took me a while to really accept

15:32

the fact that nobody except for me was

15:35

going to actually bring up these conversations that

15:37

in and of itself was something I had to

15:39

come to terms with. It's like why won't they

15:42

whether it was like send the family and my father, why don't think

15:45

forward was having the conversation but realizing

15:47

that, you know, this is my life and

15:49

I couldn't be a victim within my own life, and so

15:51

if this was something I needed to do, I needed to take

15:53

responsibility and do it. The

15:57

discovery of such a massive secret

15:59

that was always hiding in plain sight is

16:01

one thing. The work of

16:04

metabolizing it is another. It

16:06

isn't easy to digest a new truth

16:09

about yourself that changes the very

16:11

nature of your identity, and

16:13

in Lacey's case, this is complicated

16:15

by the fact that there's a politicized racial

16:18

identification going on. She

16:20

has to reconcile being black with a

16:22

lifetime of believing she was white. She

16:25

has to come to an understanding of what it means

16:27

to be both black and Jewish.

16:30

If you think about it, identity

16:32

is usually something that we're born with and grow

16:34

into, but what about when

16:37

it isn't so. Lacey

16:39

embarks on making her documentary

16:41

first thinking that she's going to explore

16:43

dual identity, what she calls

16:45

two iconic identities, being

16:48

black and being Jewish, But

16:50

as she begins working on the film, she realizes

16:53

that while it's a good idea. She doesn't quite

16:55

know what the story is until

16:58

she realizes that she and

17:00

her family is the story. And

17:03

one of the things I think is most interesting about

17:05

this is that the art form Lazy chooses

17:08

film is a visual, clear,

17:10

direct medium, one in which Lacey

17:12

would be pointing the camera at her parents who

17:15

never ever wanted to talk about

17:17

this, and essentially pushed them

17:19

to talk. Like,

17:21

you didn't make an opera out of it. You make a

17:23

book out of it. You to make a play out of it, or

17:25

a poem out of it, or a podcast out of

17:28

it. You made a film.

17:30

It's like, in a way, what it feels

17:32

like to me is you were saying, I'm

17:34

going to pin this down as much as it can be pinned

17:36

down, because it wasn't pinned down

17:38

for all of those years.

17:41

It really is like a coming out product. You

17:44

know. I had literally lived in regi Ploset

17:46

where it was out and about in my world

17:48

and kind of you know, identifying a

17:50

certain way that I would come home and I with whitewash

17:52

and my existence and I would tell France, you know, remember

17:54

my we don't talk about me

17:57

being black at home from the just

18:00

I had to live it and therefore capturing

18:03

the living of it. Just made sense

18:05

to me just to go through it and

18:07

just hold myself accountable to really

18:10

not only living through it, but then actually going

18:12

back and processing it. And this just

18:14

felt like the way that made the most soundsels

18:17

I was really living out experience, and

18:19

doing a documentary was really capturing what

18:22

was happening in real time at that moment. Right

18:24

Also, it gives you permission and

18:26

forces you in a certain way to ask

18:29

the tough questions to go there, to

18:31

keep your mother in the chair, to have that conversation,

18:34

to have that conversation with your father um

18:36

which no other art form would afford you. Until

18:38

I uncovered my family's secrets, I was never going

18:41

to learn to live with my joy

18:43

identity being black and Jewish, and I was never going

18:45

to be able to internally integrate my identities

18:48

until I was willing to go through the process

18:50

of moving past my family secrets.

18:56

I suppose that it's core this is a

18:58

story about the extraordinary a capacity

19:00

that we human beings have to believe

19:02

what we want to believe, to bury

19:05

our own secrets, even from ourselves,

19:07

and at the same time the capacity

19:10

we also have to shed those

19:12

secrets to move past them

19:14

and become holy ourselves.

19:17

You now have five year old twins,

19:21

is that right? So in your family

19:23

life, how does being black

19:25

and Jewish play into the

19:27

way that you think about raising your

19:29

kids and dual identity and is

19:31

this kind of an ongoing story in a way

19:34

for you part of what you think about

19:36

as a mom as having kids of your own

19:38

now totally, I mean, I think I'm infertan

19:41

ways. I think I'm very typical, which is that like

19:43

identified with the Jewish, I've always practiced

19:45

in my own way my whole life.

19:48

But now I'm figuring out what that means in my family

19:50

and my husband, who was raised in Baptist Church.

19:52

We are raising the kids Jewish, but we're

19:55

figuring out what that means, you know, my husband is not Jewish.

19:57

But also to know who they are on every piece of it.

19:59

I mean, I think that for us the

20:01

thing that helps us that our world are

20:03

not divided in that space. Like my in law

20:06

is even expressed, you know interest in coming

20:08

to synagogue. We have a church with them on

20:10

some of the big holidays. I think that you

20:12

know, we wanted to know who they are completely and

20:14

totally, but we're still figuring it out. I mean, I

20:16

think everybody is figuring out. Previously,

20:24

when I wasn't like kind of speaking

20:26

my truth and owning and and I hadn't had the conversation

20:28

with my family, I lived with a lot of anxiety

20:31

about things being revealed. And you can

20:33

see some of those moments within the

20:35

film and the tension that I was living with and

20:38

I don't live with them anymore. That is

20:40

actually gone from my life, that

20:42

that anxiety has been relieved, And

20:44

so there are a very physical difference

20:46

in terms of how I lived my life now and how I

20:48

was putting it before, Like the apprehension

20:51

and anxiety around this

20:54

secret being will be able to talk about

20:56

our reference is now gone,

20:59

and I feel that physical difference.

21:10

I'd like to thank my guest Lacey Schwartz

21:13

for sharing her story with us today. You

21:15

can find out more about her documentary at

21:18

Little White Lie. The film dot com.

21:22

Family Secrets is an I Heart Media production.

21:24

Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer,

21:27

Andrew Howard and Tristan McNeil are the audio

21:29

engineers, and Julie Douglas is

21:31

the executive producer. If

21:33

you have a family Secret, you'd like to share. You

21:36

can get in touch with us at listener

21:38

mail at Family Secrets Podcast dot

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com, and you can also find us

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on Instagram at Danny Writer, and

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Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and

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Twitter at fam Secrets Pod. That's

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FAMI Secret Spot. For more about

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my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro

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dot com