My father-in-law often expressed a particular worry: that his sons would marry shiksas and that his grandchildren would, as he put it, laugh at him. And two of them did marry gentiles. The shy Catholic bride of the youngest brother was actually barred from their house for some months. The eldest married me, a half-Jew of the wrong kind. My mother was a Gentile, and so, according to the law of matrilineal descent, am I. Or was, before I converted, though the efficacy of that conversion was thrown into doubt in a curious way.