808: The Rest of the Story

Ira Glass

For over 30 years, five days a week, there was this thing on the radio called The Rest of the Story, just 3 and 1/2, 4 minutes long.

It ran all over the country. Paul Harvey was the announcer. He did two other daily broadcasts that, if you ever heard them, you will never forget them-- the way he wrote, the way he sounded.

Ira Glass

My first job in Chicago, making stories for NPR, my windows at the NPR Chicago bureau looked out over a section of East Wacker Drive that was called Paul Harvey Drive, which I loved, thinking that somewhere not far from where I was sitting Paul Harvey had been up since 3:30 in the morning, pounding out his scripts on an electric typewriter. At his height, he was on over 1,200 radio stations, which, by the way, is more stations than NPR has-- just a massive audience, 24 million.

His daily show, Paul Harvey News and Comment, was the day's news delivered like brisk radio poetry with some folksy humor or some conservative opinion. But his show The Rest of the Story is what I want to talk about today. Typical episode, just jumps into the action.

Ira Glass

I have to say, listening to Paul Harvey makes me feel like I need to go back to radio school. He just has this incredibly musical sense of timing, of when to pause, when to take the pitch of his voice up and down, which he would do like a singer climbing up and down the scales. Listen to the way he performs the next few sentences as just one long sentence, including dialogue.

Ira Glass

Who sounds like that?

Ira Glass

Ted learned his lesson. He decided he's going to go home and had a plan for his manuscript.

Ira Glass

Nice tip of the hat there to the title of a Tom Wolfe novel, or possibly to 15th-century church history. Then Ted runs into a guy he knew from school, Mike McClintock, there in Madison Avenue. And Mike invites him up to his office.

Ira Glass

Lots of episodes of The Rest of the Story are like this one, about somebody who fails at something for a long time, and then there's a lucky break, and everything changes. So for example, there's this skinny, shy, lonely kid who gets beat up till a fireman teaches him to stand and fight. And they became--

Ira Glass

There's the 14-year-old boy who writes to Franklin Delano Roosevelt asking for $10, who turns out to be--

Ira Glass

Fidel Castro is actually unusual. Most of the rest of the story episodes are about white guys. We sent away for this MP3 archive of 663 episodes. 34 were women.

Sometimes Paul Harvey would go historical, like when he tells the story of a practice that was banned in England and colonial America because it led to disorder in the streets, unruly mobs spilling into churches, profanity. But people would not stop doing this thing. It went underground and continues to this day.

Ira Glass

I went back and listened to a bunch of these in preparing this week's show. And I've wondered if you could tell the story of The Rest of the Story in the style of The Rest of the Story. OK, here's my best shot at that.

Mr. Aurandt was 28 years old-- a concert pianist, doing great, performed with orchestras all over the world. But then he decided to make a change, something that would be less nerve-racking than waking up to perform. His new gig? Writing radio scripts, five a week, for somebody else to read. They made thousands this way together.

The guy on the radio got all the credit. People thought of it as his show. The person who got all the credit was Paul Harvey. Mr. Aurandt was in the background. And who was Mr. Aurandt? Well, I should tell you his full name-- Paul Aurandt, Jr.

His father? Well, some people once knew him as Paul Aurandt, but you know him by a different name-- Paul Harvey. That's right. Every episode of the rest of the story was written for Paul Harvey by his own son. And now you know the rest of the story.

What's so enjoyable about these stories is they just put you into this world where it seems like, OK, everything is going one way, and then there's a twist at the end that changes everything. It all looks different. And here at our show this week, we thought, we wanna do that. That seems fun.

So today, we have three real-life stories where things are going along one path, and then things turn, and the meaning of everything changes. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act one, "Burning Down the Couch." OK, so at any point in the last four decades if you've felt depressed or anxious, or for any other reason you decided to see a psychiatrist, there's a Rest of the Story story behind the treatment they offer. It's the story of a man named Ray Osheroff. He was a psychiatry patient in 1979 whose case was part of turning the entire field of psychiatry into what it is today. He became famous, or maybe I should say notorious, among psychiatrists.

Ray died over a decade ago, but one of our producers, Chris Benderev, has been digging into what happened. Here he is.

Chris Benderev

Let's begin with how a lot of psychiatrists would tell you the story of Ray Osheroff. It starts in the mid-1970s when life was good for Ray. He was a doctor, a kidney doctor, with a successful pair of dialysis clinics in the DC area. He lived in a gorgeous house in a swanky part of northern Virginia with his new wife. They had a baby on the way.

But then he descended into what we'd call today a mental health crisis. What set this off were two decisions Ray made. First, Ray sold off his ownership stake in his clinics. He'd continue to be the top doctor there, but he didn't want the stress of running them anymore.

And second, Ray had an ex-wife. And this ex-wife asked him if she could take their two boys to Europe for a year. Her new husband's job was sending him there. And Ray said OK. But Ray came to regret both decisions, felt he'd thrown away his business and felt he'd abandoned his two boys. He spiraled into a deep depression.

Chris Benderev

This is Rachel Aviv. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker. There's a chapter in her latest book about Ray.

Chris Benderev

Ray picked one of the most esteemed psychiatric hospitals in the country, Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, Maryland. Ray didn't know much about the Lodge. But he'd heard of it because it'd became famous as the basis of a best-selling novel called I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. The book uses different names for the main character and the location, but it basically tells the story of the author's own experience as a patient at Chestnut Lodge.

Chris Benderev

The Lodge believed you could fix even serious issues by taking time to really talk them out and dissect them.

Chris Benderev

It's kind of a beautiful idea. It's like you take this respite to understand yourself.

Chris Benderev

This is Eric Caplan, a historian of psychiatry who's writing a book about Ray. Eric says Ray checked himself into the Lodge expecting to be there two, maybe three months at the most. But winter turned to spring, and Ray was still inside. Eric spoke with a friend of Ray's who went to visit him around that time.

Chris Benderev

Ray had lost his dexterity and so much weight because he was in a constant state of agitation, couldn't stop pacing around the ward, ruminating about his failures as a father and a businessman.

Chris Benderev

Clearly, whatever they were doing at this premier psychiatric hospital was not working for Ray. And Chestnut Lodge's failure here is what this story is about, how professionals should treat mental illness. The Lodge believed fervently in old-fashioned psychoanalysis. They were fans of Sigmund Freud. When a patient arrived, they'd take an extremely detailed history. They interviewed Ray's mother extensively, learned about his tumultuous childhood, how his father mostly wasn't around, and how when he was he'd explode at Ray and belittle him mercilessly.

The Lodge believed so strongly in classical psychoanalysis that it usually wouldn't pair it with psychiatric medications. Whether a patient had depression or schizophrenia, the Lodge used drugs sparingly. So when Ray asked for antidepressants, which by 1979 would have been common in a psychiatric hospital--

Chris Benderev

And so the Lodge continued with its treatment-- lots of psychoanalysis, no antidepressants. And Ray continued to unravel. Sometimes he'd hit himself. Other times, he'd pick fights with the other patients. And of course, he kept pacing. The Lodge did get Ray to calm down somewhat when they threatened to strap him down in ice-cold bed sheets for hours, something they were known to do with unruly patients.

In the Lodge's own internal notes, Ray's doctor admitted that Ray's symptoms weren't improving. But no matter. Their approach would be slow and steady. At one meeting, Ray's doctor said, quote, "If he does stay in treatment for five or 10 years, he may get a good result out of it." Another doctor said maybe Ray could switch to being an outpatient after three years. As best I can tell, the Lodge did not inform Ray about this timeline. Again, here's Rachel Aviv.

Chris Benderev

Ray's mother, who was horrified at her son's deterioration inside the lodge, eventually checked Ray out and transferred him to a treatment center in Connecticut. There, he was finally prescribed antidepressants and other psychiatric medications. Once that happened, Ray's pacing lessened and eventually stopped altogether. By his 10th day, his depression and numbness began to lift. Here's an archival recording of Ray.

Chris Benderev

Within three months, Ray was back to his old self-- well groomed, cracking jokes. He went home to Virginia. But it had been almost a year, and a lot had changed.

For one thing, Ray's ex-wife had gone to court to change their custody agreement. And because Ray was locked up at the Lodge, he'd lost his visitation rights with his kids. Meanwhile, Ray's new wife, who'd already moved out with the baby, was now divorcing him. And finally, when Ray returned to the dialysis practice that he'd helped build, the doctor he'd left in charge decided to open a competing office in the same building.

Chris Benderev

And this is the part of the story that Ray's known for because he leapt into action to get back what he'd lost, like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill or Liam Neeson in Taken, if those revenge movies had taken place in Virginia and Maryland civil court proceedings. First, Ray petitioned to get back his visitation rights with his kids and got them. Then he sued his former colleague for undermining the business and won. And finally--

Chris Benderev

He sued Chestnut Lodge for malpractice. Ray's legal team argued that the Lodge had harmed him professionally and personally by withholding antidepressants and instead trying to break him down during countless therapy sessions. Here's one of Ray's lawyers describing how unusually harsh the Lodge doctors were.

Chris Benderev

Chestnut Lodge defended itself by saying they believed Ray's depression was secondary to deeper underlying issues which they had to fix first. The lawsuit dragged on for years. And as one professor put it, Ray's case was, quote, "discussed in every academic department of psychiatry in North America." Because on one side you had doctors like the ones at Chestnut Lodge. And on the other side, rooting for Ray, were a lot of psychiatrists who felt places like the Lodge had made their profession look reckless and out of touch, who worried their fellow doctors had basically forgotten the M in MD.

And in 1987, Chestnut Lodge settled and paid Ray an undisclosed amount of money. He later said it was around $350,000, nearly a million dollars in today's money. In essence, Ray won. Afterwards, psychiatrists everywhere were put on notice. Now, if they didn't at least offer medication when the evidence showed it could help, they might get sued too.

Ray's case is not the only reason that when you walk into a psychiatrist's office today you are far more likely to be offered pills than a Rorschach test, but it contributed to that shift. In the late '80s and early '90s, Ray's case was written about in big academic journals. He spoke at psychiatry's biggest annual conference. The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times wrote about the case.

Then in 1989, The Washington Post wrote a long feature about Chestnut Lodge and Ray. It ended by saying he'd found love again and reestablished relationships with his three sons. The reporter wrote that Ray, quote, "feels lucky that he's been able to work his way back to normalcy." And Ray basically became lore.

Chris Benderev

The truth is it was not happily ever after. The simple story that the meds made him better, it wasn't that simple. Here's the rest of the story.

By the time Ray died in 2012, in terms of family at least, Ray was largely alone. He'd been divorced four times, and he'd been estranged from all three of his children. So what happened? What went wrong?

Obviously, I couldn't ask Ray directly. But in a memoir he later wrote, he made it pretty clear who he thought was responsible-- Chestnut Lodge. Quote, "By destroying every facet of my personhood, they deprived me forever of love and any possible measure of security and satisfaction that I could ever gain thereafter. They amputated my past, deprived me of a future."

In that memoir, which was never published, Ray writes that he'd had an idyllic relationship with his sons. They'd bond during car rides. He'd give them baths and gently tuck them into bed at night.

Then came the move to Europe, his depression, and, most importantly, Chestnut Lodge. After all that, he wrote, it was too late to salvage a relationship. The thing is, Ray's kids don't see it that way. Here's Sam Osheroff, Ray's oldest son.

Chris Benderev

Sam says his dad wound up cut off from so much of the family because of problems with his behavior that predate his time at Chestnut Lodge and his spiral into depression, and even his kids moving to Europe. They were there from as early as Sam can remember.

Chris Benderev

Sam and others say that Ray was always quick to anger and just aggressive. Sam's stepdad told me that Ray once threatened to have him killed by a hit man, said Ray told him he'd figured out exactly how much the job would cost. And the thing is, even after Ray got out of Chestnut Lodge, got on meds, won his visitation rights back, and became semi-famous for his miracle cure, his sons say that he kept doing the same kinds of disturbing things that he'd done before he'd been hospitalized.

Like this one time in 1987, Ray was trying to rebuild his relationship with Sam and his younger brother Joe. The boys had developed an interest in theater, so Ray took them to a show at the Kennedy Center in DC. Joe says his dad was sometimes really generous in that way.

But then during the show, Ray's beeper started going off over and over. Remember, he's a doctor. Multiple times, Ray got up, shuffled down the aisle, and took the calls. Here's Joe.

Chris Benderev

For his sons, Ray was still just as uncomfortable to live with as he had been before the Chestnut Lodge saga. They did notice one thing had changed about their dad though. He began talking often about how because of what he'd gone through at the Lodge, he was on his way to becoming a household name.

Chris Benderev

Ray gave Sam and Joe the latest draft of his memoir. As time went on, their relationship with their dad became more strained. And they say Ray started directing more of his anger at them. For Sam, this all came to a head a bit after he'd graduated from college.

Chris Benderev

Joe cut off contact with Ray around the same time. Joe and Sam say Ray's third son, who they haven't heard from in 30 years, cut off contact with their dad even earlier. I reached out to him, but did not hear back.

These parts of Ray's personality that persisted after getting out of Chestnut Lodge and getting on meds, they actually came up in the lawsuit because the Lodge had a theory to explain them.

Chris Benderev

This is Ray's former doctor at the Lodge, Manuel Ross.

Chris Benderev

Now, I should say over a dozen psychiatrists were deposed for the lawsuit. And there was disagreement over whether Ray would have met the clinical criteria for narcissistic personality disorder when he was at the Lodge. Some said no. Some weren't sure. Some thought he had some kind of personality disorder. Some said the depression made it hard to tell. But some, like Dr. Ross, were sure.

Chris Benderev

Was Dr. Ross' diagnosis correct? I've tried to answer that question definitively, and I'm still not sure. But for whatever it's worth, I did read Ray's memoir, and here's what I can say.

It does not read like a memoir. It reads like a disorganized, 500-page screed against a lot of the people he worked and lived with. He retraces his downfall over and over, each time with new conspirators working against him. And the tone is grandiose.

Ray writes unironically that he'd been a, quote, "king on a very shaky throne," whose success had drawn a host of predators. He'd been duped by, in his words, "vengeful wives" who'd introduced "avowed enemies" and "Trojan horses" into his dialysis practice in order to destroy it. Ray also rails against the lawyer who won him his settlement money against Chestnut Lodge because Ray felt he deserved millions more. In the book, Ray's greatest ire is saved for Chestnut Lodge though, who subjected him to a, quote, "one-man holocaust."

In 2010, Ray reached out to Sam on Facebook after years apart. He wanted to meet up. Sam's first child had just been born.

Chris Benderev

Sam says his dad looked older and seemed gentler. He didn't raise his voice at all. But once they got their food--

Chris Benderev

I want to clarify that not everyone experienced Ray this way. For instance, a couple long-time friends of Ray's told me that he was definitely not a narcissist devoid of empathy. For one thing, as a doctor he cared deeply about his patients, sometimes helped pay their rent or fund funerals. And one of Ray's friends told me he was a good listener, someone that she could vent to for an hour uninterrupted. This friend believed Ray had other kinds of mental disorders though and admitted that he could get, quote, "obsessional," especially about the Chestnut Lodge ordeal, which colored the rest of his life. He was a great friend, she said, but probably somebody who was very difficult to live with.

Whatever ailed him, Ray did seem to know that there was something wrong with him. All his life, he kept receiving psychotherapy and various medications. He even did electroshock therapy. But it never seemed to help with his closest relationships. I put all this to Rachel Aviv.

Chris Benderev

If Ray did have a personality disorder, it's worth noting that they are, as the American Psychological Association put it, notoriously hard to treat. It's funny. The story that Ray's best known for is a hopeful one. The moral is meds can help us. Psychiatry can help us.

But when you look at the whole arc of Ray's life and see what his family saw, and how he ended up, that story falls apart. Yes, meds can help. But if anything, Ray's life shows the limits of what psychiatry can do for us, how some of us have problems that psychiatry still has a hard time defining and an even harder time trying to fix.

Ira Glass

Chris Benderev is a producer on our show. Rachel Aviv's book that features a chapter on Ray is called Strangers to Ourselves. Eric Caplan is looking for a publisher for his book about Ray's case. It's called Do No Harm.

Coming up, you get to a certain age with your parents and what could they ever do to surprise you? What cards could they still hold up their sleeve? One man finds out in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, "The Rest of the Story." I loved Paul Harvey's old radio show, which had that name, and we are shamelessly knocking it off today. We have stories where things seem to be all heading one way, meaning one thing, and then there's a twist.

We have arrived at act two of our program. Act two, "Oh, Mother, Where Art Thou?" Samuel James has actually lived through a rest of the story kind of experience in his own life. Here he is.

Samuel James

My mother died three times, each more surprising than the last. The first time she died, I was 12 years old. No one wants to tell a child their mother is dead, let alone how it happened. I was also in foster homes at the time, and I was told about her death in the shortest, most emotionally convenient way possible for them. "Your mother took prescription pills," they said. "It says on the bottle not to take pills with alcohol, but she did."

And so I decided to never drink alcohol. It's an easy decision for a 12-year-old, and somehow it never got any more difficult. Peer pressure only made me dig in harder.

My parents had been together for more than 20 years when my mother died. Mourning was especially difficult for my father. But time healed as many wounds as it could. Surviving became managing became thriving.

He developed a relationship with her memory. And anyone who came to the house would have to join in because he'd put the brass urn containing my mother's ashes on top of the entertainment center right above the TV, like a shrine. Sometimes there was incense beside it. Sometimes the urn was in a blue velvet bag. Sometimes it was just there by itself.

One day-- I was an adult at this point-- my father and I were watching TV together. My eyes drifted up to my mother's urn, and I started thinking back to being told how she died. I learned years earlier that the pills she'd taken with alcohol were for bipolar disorder. As an adult, I've seen what that can be like. And so as we were sitting there, I just started thinking out loud.

"You know," I said, "I always thought there was a chance that Mom took her own life." "What?" my father replied, confused. "I don't know," I said. "I've known some people over the years who also suffer with bipolar disorder. I thought there was a chance."

My father asked, "Wait. What the hell are you talking about?" "I just thought there was a chance she committed suicide. We don't have to talk about it. I'm not trying to start a fight." My father, more confused than ever and more than a little annoyed, "Of course she committed suicide!"

She had died from taking pills with alcohol, like my caseworker told me at the time, leaving out one very important part. It's not as though my father and I never talked about my mother. We talked about her all the time, just never about the circumstances of her death. We'd both avoided the topic out of respect for each other, similarly and mistakenly thinking we had a common understanding. This was the second time my mother died.

We talked for a long time, both incredulous. The light and funny mood of our usual conversations came and went, going through the details, wondering how we'd both missed this for decades. To me, his life as a widower was suddenly so much heavier than I'd realized. He was suddenly so much stronger than I'd realized. And I became aware of a war inside my mother that I'd never realized.

Learning how your parent died decades later, you feel like you're supposed to do something with that, but you don't know what. There's a remourning, and certain memories begin to look very different. The main reason I'm a musician is because of my parents' love of music, my mother especially. She was a trained dancer from a young age, and so I was taking dance lessons at age five.

Dance parties would spring up in the house all the time, and I loved joining the old people doing the old dances, even though they sometimes came with unnecessary tutorials. I remember a long lecture once on the difference between the Twist and the Peppermint Twist. Dancing in the house was normalized to the point that I've had dance parties throughout my life even now.

But what I didn't see at the time was how manic my mother's dance parties were. I didn't notice that sometimes they lasted so long my parents weren't able to do that day's errands. Sometimes the dance parties happened instead of important appointments. I never noticed how tired all of this made my father. I did notice that the dance parties didn't happen when she got sad.

But not everything shifted. Some memories didn't change at all. By the time I was five years old, I asked my mother for a drum kit, and she says yes. And a few months go by, and I ask her if she wants to hear me play Gene Krupa's legendary drum solo from "Sing, Sing, Sing." And she says yes.

I started playing music at five, but I'm not a prodigy by any means. I'm a regular five-year-old kid thrashing around on the drums, and I can't keep a beat. And so I finished playing this solo terribly. And she applauds. And I ask if she wants to hear it again. And she says yes. So I play it again.

I was too tired to try a third time, but if I had asked she would have said yes again. She would have said yes all day. There's no mania in that, just love.

My father's will stated his wish to be cremated. He wanted his ashes buried at the veterans' cemetery about an hour from my home, and he wanted my mother's ashes to be mixed in with his. I had him cremated, but I stopped his wishes there. Putting his ashes that far from me felt like throwing him away, so I kept him at my apartment.

But shortly after my father died, I spoke to his friend, Fred, who I've never liked. He asked me about my father's ashes and when they might be at the cemetery. I had told them I was figuring that out, but all the figuring had been done. My father was where he was going to stay.

But then came the guilt. It felt like my father was sending a passive-aggressive message from beyond the grave through Fred. And so I made a deal with my dead father. I would mix my mother's ashes in with his if he would just make Fred leave me alone.

Back then, I was still going through my father's house. My mother's urn was right there on top of the entertainment center where it had always been. This time no incense, no blue velvet bag.

Now, if you're unfamiliar, metal urns are heavy. Their tops screw off, and the grinding sound of metal on metal is louder than you think it's going to be. And it reverberates through your hands.

In the movies, the ashes are all loose inside. My mother's ashes had come in a plastic bag clamped together with a metal tag. But after the sound of metal on metal echoed around me and the reverberations rattle my knuckles, I discovered my mother's urn contained no bag and no ashes. The urn was completely empty.

I don't know if you've ever had ashes suddenly go missing, but it's impossible to search for them in a way that makes sense. At first, it felt a little like looking for my keys. I tried remembering where I saw them last. But they'd only ever been in the one place.

I remembered what a prankster my father had been, often for his own entertainment. So I looked in all the drawers. I even looked in the fridge, places, honestly, I definitely would have seen a bag of ashes that had been there.

Then the panic set in, and I was looking under the couch between the cushions. Then it was coat pockets and any container I could find. I was digging through the pantry because maybe there's another urn that accidentally got mixed in with the cans. Maybe they fell into one of these shoes in the closet. Maybe one of the books on the shelf is hollowed out. She had to be here somewhere.

I searched the house obsessively for weeks, but I never found her ashes. That's the third time my mother died. Years have gone by, and the truth is I never stopped looking really. There's no urgency anymore, and it's been a long time since I panicked about it. But every so often, I'll reach all the way in the back of a drawer or feel around on top of a cabinet just in case.

Ira Glass

Samuel James in Portland, Maine. Samuel is a musician and does these great performances where he tells stories and plays guitar. And you can see those at therealsamueljames.com. He did most of the music for this story.

By the way, if you or anybody you know is in crisis or needs help, the suicide and crisis lifeline is available all day and night. Just dial 988. Again, that's 988.

Ira Glass

Act three, "Righteous Gemstone." This next story starts with a move, an apartment search, and a mystery. Bim Adewunmi has the rest of the story.

Bim Adewunmi

When she was 31, Jean got the opportunity to move to Berlin. In a way, she had been preparing for this since she was in middle school in upstate New York. Back then, she'd made a choice.

Bim Adewunmi

Many years later, she got to make use of that choice. She was living in London at the time, working as a copywriter and wanting to shake things up. I knew Jean a little back then. We lived in different corners of London with mutual friends in common. And randomly, months after she moved to Berlin, so did I.

I was there on a journalism fellowship for only a few months, and we only managed to hang out a couple of times. One of those times was at her apartment. And I remember thinking how amazing it was-- huge windows, solid wood floors, luxuriously large. No one else I knew had an apartment like it.

Bim Adewunmi

Before I go any further with the story, a little context. At the time that we were living in Berlin, it was almost comically hard to find an apartment, especially for foreigners like us. I'd been lucky to find my apartment share in Kreuzberg, thanks to a friend and lucky timing. But Jean lived alone and had somehow found this unicorn of an apartment. And I always wondered, the way so many of us obsess over our friends' apartments, how did she land this?

The story of how she found her apartment started the usual way. She saw a listing online, and then went along at a set time on a specific day to view the apartment. Also typical, she was there with about 30 other people, and all of them were her competition for the lease.

Bim Adewunmi

This disdainful realtor, he tells Jean to write down her information. And if by some miracle one of the many German-speaking and German-writing applicants doesn't get the apartment, he'll call her. So she takes an application form and dutifully writes down her number and her name on his notepad. And without a lot of hope, she walks away.

Bim Adewunmi

Edelstein is her last name. And as for why he was fixated on it, well, his next question cleared it up.

Bim Adewunmi

Oh. [LAUGHS] A loaded question.

Bim Adewunmi

Whether implicitly or explicitly asked, "are you Jewish?" has been historically a notably heavy question. For one thing, it's difficult to discern the intentions of the asker.

That's a pretty impressive mix of tones. For the past several years before she'd moved to Berlin, Jean had been living in the UK. And while living in London, she'd been the victim of overt anti-Semitic harassment, having slurs thrown at her in person on the street, but also the covert kind-- in her inbox in response to some of her writing. So naturally, she was always listening for vocal inflections.

Bim Adewunmi

Jean did not get that apartment. But the next day, Claudia, her friend who had helped her fill out the application, heard from the realtor.

Bim Adewunmi

The special Edelstein.

And that was only the first time Fraulein Edelstein would get a little something extra for her troubles. When it came time to open a bank account in order to get paid at her new job, she went in and spoke to a bank employee.

Bim Adewunmi

She got an appointment for the next day. And the bank worker made a point to introduce Jean to the bank manager, who shook her hand solemnly, like she was a visiting dignitary or something. But there was more.

Bim Adewunmi

This kept happening, and it led to some odd analogies.

Bim Adewunmi

The other thing she'd compare it to, being a B-list celebrity. Getting a smoother experience at the immigration desk at the airport, a sudden discount on a couch-- all things that happened to Jean.

Bim Adewunmi

So what was it about her name that unlocked this very specific door? In direct translation, Edelstein means noble stone or precious stone, sometimes used as a synonym for diamond. This made sense to Jean. Some of her ancestors had been jewelers.

But none of that explained the innate delight it brought out in people. There was just some ineffable cuteness her name held to the average German ear, she was told. It was like being named Jean Adorable. Like some people would giggle with joy when they saw her name.

Bim Adewunmi

But then they would return to the specific sweetness of the name. Jean had this distinct feeling every time someone made a big deal out of her name, like they had been presented with an opportunity. It made her remember a story her older brother, who'd also studied German at school, had told her about a thing he'd noticed while on exchange in Germany when he was 15. Several adults seemed to make a point of mentioning their age to him. Like they'd slip it into conversation in a way that seemed strange. And while he didn't know for sure why, he had a theory.

The truth of that reality lingered in her mind as she would receive these upticks in customer service, reconciling the extreme pleasantness of these interactions with the uncomfortable possibility of why, never knowing how much of it was the cuteness of her name versus something darker.

The larger story surrounding having this name, of course, is that there was a crime against humanity perpetrated against bearers of this name and other people with names like Jean's. Some of those people had lived in the very same neighborhood Jean was now living in.

Bim Adewunmi

Jean returned to the US just over a year after moving to Berlin. Back in Brooklyn, she went to a bookstore, where she was asked for her name to sign up to the mailing list.

Bim Adewunmi

Jean doesn't miss that old frisson that passed through her when she said her name in Berlin. She stopped pronouncing her name the German way, Edelstein, within weeks of returning home. The lack of reaction was her welcome home sign. And everybody knows the big reason why home is special is that nobody treats you like you're special.

Ira Glass

Bim Adewunmi is a producer on our program. Jean Hannah Edelstein tells this story and others in her memoir. It's called This Really Isn't About You.

Our program was produced today by Ike Sriskandarajah. The people who put together today's program include James Bennett the Second, Phia Bennin, Jendayi Bonds, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Bethel Habte, Kyla Jones, Tobin Low, Miki Meek, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Alix Spiegel, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks to Eric Winkler, Brett Wean, Barbara Sangreto, Henry Kellerman, Jonathan Otto, Robert Greenspan, and Bob White at WYPR in Baltimore. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free. Free, do you hear me? Also, you'll find new merch, including the colorful and wonderful Torey Malat-shirt. Again, thisamericanlife.org.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, theater casting is just amazing these days. And he got the role of Maria in West Side Story, the one who sings "I feel pretty, oh, so pretty." Torey has a great voice, but after a couple of rehearsals he told the director it wasn't for him.

Ira Glass

Back next week with more stories of This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Good day.