One Generation to the Next.

Eugene Pogany. In My Brother's Image: Twin Brothers Separated by Faith after the Holocaust. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000. 327pp. $25.95 (cloth).

In March 1998, the Vatican released the document, We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, an examination of the Church's record in relation to the Holocaust. Expressing the Church's sorrow for its failures during this period of unspeakable tragedies, the document represents "an act of repentance (teshuva), since, as members of the Church, we are linked to the sins as well as the merits of all her children." This was followed in December 1999 by Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past, reiterating that "the hostility or diffidence of numerous Christians toward Jews in the course of time is a sad historical fact and is the cause of profound remorse for Christians.... "Soon after, Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, added to his apology a visit to the Western Wall.

While We Remember asserts that Pius XII personally or through his representatives saved "hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives," a number of recent books debate this assertion and other representations of the Church that its leadership did the best it could under the circumstances. They tell us how much the Church has to apologize for, and how much its teachings over the centuries may have helped to perpetuate the Nazi cause.

Eugene Pogany presents us with yet another book on this topic, but far from being duplicative, this story of tragedy and love, alienation and insight, provides a dimension that conventional scholarship cannot supply. Light on footnotes and long on personal reminiscence, Pogany's haunting memoir of his Jewish father and Catholic priest uncle, the twins of the title, presents an intimate perspective on Jewish-Catholic relations over nearly a century in his family's native Hungary. His dedication to bringing to life a story that some of its principal characters were reluctant to relate or refused to acknowledge, cost the author years of soul-searching, doubt and sometimes strained family interaction. His courage and perseverance help to make this moving family drama a superlative work.

Young Eugene, raised in the Jewish faith of his father and mother, met his uncle, his father Miklos's twin brother, Gyurgi, when the author was five years old. Meeting in America after a nineteen year separation that spanned the Holocaust, the twins displayed a palpable tension from the beginning of their reunion. It was the effect of this tension that led Pogany as a young and middle-aged man, to begin his dogged attempt to untangle the knot of repressed pain and mutual reproach that continued to keep the brothers at an emotional distance across the chasm of their religious differences.

Pogany collected much of the early family background from his uncle George, who stayed near his twin brother in New Jersey for the rest of his life, serving as pastor to a parish of Hungarian refugees. But his father, now Nicholas, was reluctant to delve very deeply into the past. Pogany's mother, Margit, had been much more forthcoming throughout Pogany's childhood about the appalling details of her struggle for survival as a Jew, but this was not enough to give the son the key to the issue that troubled him most -- the brothers' continued inability to reach beyond their faith-based impasse.

By the time of his uncle's death in 1993, Pogany, now a practicing psychologist, had become an expert at listening. To Pogany's relief, his father now found himself able to share his story with his son, and his memory for details was fresh, abundant, and impressive. This, and the two trips they made together to Hungary, made it possible for Pogany to combine his audio, video, and notepad records to produce a compelling memoir filled with psychological insights and a growing compassionate comprehension of the brothers' essential conflict.

When grandfather Bela and his wife, Gabriella, converted to Catholicism in the early 1990s in Hungary, they did so largely for practical purposes, knowing that Bela would have a better chance advancing in the civil service as a Christian. His wife took her new Catholicism more seriously, and when her twins were baptized at the age of seven, she instilled such devotion in them that both considered the priesthood. Twenty-three-year-old Gyurgi celebrated his first Mass before his exultant parents in 1935, but shortly afterwards was transferred to Italy for health reasons. There he stayed for over fifteen years, as an assistant to the revered Padre Pio, insulated against the Holocaust and the fate that awaited the rest of his family.

Miklos, along with and his sister and parents, and thousands of other Jewish converts, faced a Church very different from what harbored his twin in rural Italy. Although many had been Christian from their earliest memories, Christians of Jewish descent were persecuted regardless of their personal faith, the SS basing its selection of exterminatees on the Nazi theory of race over religion. People who had worshipped Jesus as their Savior throughout their lives, were now derided as Christ-killers by their co-religionists. Yet in the death camps they were sometimes shunned by other Jews who saw them as part of the Christian-based power structure that was sending them to their deaths.

Miklos's story is one of terrible fear, helpless confusion, and nearly paralyzing indecision. As he hears of his mother's deportation and death as she clutches her crucifix, watches his wife agonize over her decision to be baptized by a self-righteous local priest, and is himself taken to Bergen-Belsen, he loses faith in all but his Jewish fellow sufferers. Throughout this period of unspeakable atrocities, Father Pogany never leaves his Catholic sanctuary, even when he hears that his father, who died before the war, was disinterred so as not to desecrate the Catholic cemetery where his remains lay buried. Nor does he ever, in the thirty-seven years between the twins reunion and his death, inquire into his brother's experiences during the Holocaust.

In the single conversation that the twins ever permit to occur between them on the topic, George insists that the Shoah was perpetrated by the Nazis, not by "Catholics." Reminded by Nicholas that the countries where Nazism flourished were largely Christian countries, George castigated his brother as an apostate who turned his back on the religion on their martyred mother. Attributing George's attitudes to ignorance and naivete, and tortured by his brother's indifference to his personal suffering, Nicholas never speaks of the subject again.

Father George, with his adamantine character, and stiff self-assurance, is perhaps too generously cast by his nephew as a "benevolent if temperamental priest." It is hard for any one raised Catholic, as George was, not to realize that the Church's teachings vis-a-vis the Jews contributed to the hatred that fueled the Holocaust. Even as a child in Catholic schools in the fifties, I was taught to meditate on the crucifix with the understanding that it was "His own people" who killed Him. The portrait of George's unbending self-righteousness is a microcosm of much of the Church's altitude toward the Jews both before and after the Shoah. Never forced to come to terms with his own Jewishness, George, like the Church, failed to appreciate the very foundation of his Christian faith.

Pogany tells his family's difficult chronicle in painstaking detail. The book is replete with dialogue which Pogany acknowledges is his own creation, and some conversation at times strains to reveal incidents that might more convincingly be conveyed in narrative. The device however, enables the reader to experience more intimately the inner turmoil as well as the outward chaos wrought by Christian Europe's persecution of its Jewish population. And Pogany's skills as a psychologist help us understand the conclusions that he reaches concerning the unexpressed grief over their mother's death that prevents the brothers from being a consolation to each other.

"Unmourned grief gels passed from one generation to the next," writes Pogany, who says Kaddish for his Catholic grandmother for his father's sake as well as his own. And in so doing, like the Pope at the Western Wall, he honors the inextricable link between Jews and Christians across lime.

Sally Walters is an attorney in Cleveland.