Sunday Pages: "Family of Spies"

Dear Reader,

Thanksgiving is over. The supply of leftover turkey and mashed potatoes in the fridge is dwindling. You cannot possibly eat another piece of pumpkin pie. Whatever guests remain from Thursday’s feast are leaving soon. And whatever anxiety the first of “the holidays” elicits can be safely put away until next year, with the turkey decorations and the Dallas Cowboys’ Super Bowl hopes.

“Drunk uncle” is such a stereotype that it became a character on Saturday Night Live. But there is always a grain of truth to comedy. This year, much of the aforementioned anxiety was likely generated by concern that politics might come up at the dinner table. Perhaps you long suspected Relative X of being MAGA…but you don’t really want to have this confirmed when passing around the coffee and the pumpkin pie.

Or maybe it’s even worse than that. Maybe your cousin works for ICE. Maybe your sister is married to Stephen Miller, which is awful enough, but she won’t stop talking about him being a “sexual matador,” and that makes you too queasy to enjoy the yams (which, let’s face it, as delicious as they are, do summon a little bit of gag reflex).

As unpleasant as those scenarios are, it’s not like your grandparents were Nazi operatives spying for the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. It’s not like your uncle worked under Goebbels at the Ministry of Propaganda. And the sweet old aunt who brought the haricots verts amandine? There’s no way she was one of Goebbels’s former flames who was also part of the Third Reich’s Hawaiian espionage op that preceded A Date That Will Live in Infamy.

That sounds like one of my writerly jokes, right? A bit of hyperbole on a Sunday morning? As the reviewer Julia M. Klein writes in The Forward, “Surely this must be historical fiction.”

Not for Christine Kuehn, a former journalist and publicist from South Carolina. For her, that was the God’s-honest truth. And it came as a great shock when she found out, because her father—the son of the married spies and younger brother of the Goebbels-affiliated siblings, but also a veteran of the Second World War who fought the Nazis in Europe—took great pains to hide the secret from the family. Not because he was involved—he adamantly and heroically was not—but because he wanted to protect them.

It was only in 1994,