This is only about baseball insofar as it involves a baseball player, but it’s a pretty interesting story anyway.
The New York Times’ Joshua Prager has a story about retired Dodgers’ pitcher Ralph Branca’s family. Seems that even though Branca was baptized and raised Catholic to Catholic parents and remains Catholic to this day, his mother was Jewish and, unbeknownst to Branca until very recently, most of his mother’s family remained in Europe after she emigrated and they were killed in the Holocaust.
It’s neat on the surface for the “hey, he didn’t know it” perspective, but I find it pretty interesting from the “what makes us who we are; how does one define one’s identity” point of view. I come from a hodgepodge of a background with all manner of wackiness in the branches of my family tree, so it’s the kind of thing I think about often.
Does it matter where we came from? I often think not, because absent a trust fund or a congenital disease, life is what me make it. But the fact that we spend so much time thinking about it makes me think that there’s more to it than I typically care to admit.
