![]() When Schwartz left Woodstock, those questions of paternity and identity, lingered. "When you put it all together, though, which happened later in my teens, that's when it didn't really add up." So when you take all of the individual features separately, it was easier to say 'well, I could be from that family,'" she says. "Are there other people who are white and Jewish and have hair like mine? There are. The story of a dark, Sicilian grandfather, she said, never made sense. So I didn't want this all to come out."Įven before she learned the secret, Lacey Schwartz wondered why she looked so different. In some ways, I was being considerate of him. "I was afraid of what it would do to my husband. "I was afraid of having the life as we know it end, the family life," she says. Schwartz's mother Peggy says fear is what kept her from revealing the truth for so long. He was actually Schwartz's biological father. That family secret: her mother had carried on an longstanding affair that began before she was even married, an affair with a black man. ![]() Little White Lie, a documentary airing tonight on PBS, explores Schwartz's family secrets, and how learning she wasn't white shaped her cultural identity. As Schwartz later discovered, the man she thought was her father actually wasn't. ![]() I actually grew up believing I was white." So it never occurred to me that I was passing. "My family knew who they were and they defined who I was. "I grew up in a world of synagogue, Hebrew school, bar mitzvahs," she says. Her parents, who are white and Jewish, explained that her inherited looks came from a Sicilian grandfather with darker features and coarse hair. But even as a child she sometimes questioned why her deeper skin tone and curly hair didn't look like every one else in her family. Lacey Schwartz grew up in Woodstock, N.Y., a mostly white, middle-class community. ![]()
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