Author of the week: Madeleine Albright

last updated 8 January 2015

Madeleine Albright has been a lot of things in her 75 years, said MJ Lee in Politico.com. The first female secretary of state. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Mother and grandmother. None of this took her entirely by surprise. What did, she writes in her new memoir, Prague Winter, was learning, some 15 years ago, that she was Jewish. Born in Prague in 1937, Albright was 2 when her parents fled to England following the Nazi invasion. Because they soon converted to Catholicism, she didn’t know they had been Jewish until Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs unearthed proof, in 1997. “I thought I knew everything about myself. But I obviously didn’t,” Albright says. “According to his research, three of my grandparents and numerous other family members had died in the Holocaust.”

A decade and a half later, Albright is still adjusting to her new identity, said Manuel Roig-Franzia in The Washington Post. Since both of her parents had died before she learned the news, some questions will always be unanswered. But she says she “could never be angry” with her parents for the decisions they made. “I expect that my parents thought life would be easier for us if we were raised as Christians instead of Jews,” she writes. “The reasons for such a conclusion, in the Europe of 1941, need little explanation.” Each year, Albright now celebrates both Christmas and Hanukkah with her grandchildren. “I have been a Catholic and an Episcopalian and found out I was Jewish,” she says. “Like America, I am indivisible.”