REACTION to the revelation that the new US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, is Jewish is raising questions about when she herself learned about her family's tragic history. Three of her grandparents and other relatives perished in the Holocaust.
Ms Albright was raised as a Catholic by her parents who fled the Communist takeover in Czechslovakia in 1948 to political asylum in the US. She was 10.
Her father, Josef Korbel, never told his children about his Jewish origins or the fate of his own parents and relatives, but over the past three years Ms Albright has been receiving letters from the Czech Republic giving details of their deaths.
In an interview published last week in the Washington Post she expressed surprise when told of the researches of the reporter, Michael Dobbs, which also uncovered these details. She said she found the new evidence "fairly compelling" but wanted to conduct her own research.
Several days later, the New York Times reported that her Czech cousin, Ms Dagmar Sima, who had helped to look after her during the war years in London, had tried unsuccessfully to make contact with Ms Albright when she visited Prague in 1994 and through letters to tell her the truth about what happened to her Jewish relatives. "Obviously she does not want a relationship with me. It did hurt but I got over it," Ms Sima said.
From the time Ms Albright was nominated as Secretary of State last December 5th, there were reports that she was really Jewish. Her background was raised by several Arab newspapers which attacked her nomination.
When asked about these reports, State Department officials said that Ms Albright had been raised a Catholic and had converted to Episcopalianism after her marriage in 1959 to Mr Joseph Albright, heir to a wealthy newspaper chain. They divorced in 1982.
Her spokesman, Mr James' Rubin, said last week that questions that Ms Albright might have Jewish origins had come up for some time, and he had asked her about them. She had always replied she was raised a Catholic and later became an Episcopalian (Anglican) when she married.
At the end of last year, however, she had advised him to be "less categorical" in denying her Jewish origins because letters and other accounts were becoming more persuasive. During the White House vetting process when she was being considered for the Secretary of State post, Ms Albright volunteered the information that she might be of Jewish descent.
The mayor of the town off Letohrad in the Czech Republics told the New York Times that he had sent three letters in 1994 and one last year to Ms Albright giving details of her Jewish origins and of her father who was born in the town. Two of the letters were sent through the US embassy and another through the Czech foreign ministry to Ms Albright while she was US ambassador to the United Nations, but he never got a reply.
Mr Rubin said that Ms Albright had "a lot of mail, some obviously not true and some interesting" while she was at the UN. She did not recall receiving this mail.
Ms Albright said last week that "there was nothing that systematically made sense" in the letters.
Jewish commentators have been discussing Ms Albright's situation, usually sympathetically. Under the heading, "Holocaust's Child", the director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Mr Walter Reich, writes this week in the Post that "the report of Albright's late discovery resembles reports of many other late discoveries that have been experienced in recent years by Jews around the world. What makes her experience different is not its poignancy but its extreme publicity."
Mr Reich, who is also a psychiatrist, says that speculation that Ms Albright's "knowledge that she was born a Jew will affect her public policies seems unfounded". She has formulated and expressed her views about the world over several decades. Now "her private identity should be allowed its zone of dignity, integration and peace".
Another Jewish commentator, Mr Philip Taubman, writing in the New York Times, wonders "how could someone as worldly and intelligent as Ms Albright never have inquired about her background". Asking why she did not respond to the letters about her background, assuming they reached her, Mr Taubman says that "running beneath these questions is the suspicion that she did know, or made a conscious effort not to know, because she did not want to be seen as a Jew in a world still uncomfortable with Jews."