Qesher Book Club: "Family Declassified"

Why do people keep deep secrets about their lives and ancestry?  In Family Declassified,  Katherine Fennelly applies her expertise as a social science researcher  to answer this question regarding her maternal grandfather, a Jewish  Hungarian immigrant who arrived in the US one hundred years ago. A Google search for 'Francis Kalnay' yields more than 54,000 results—the  vast majority related to the children's book, "Chucaro: Wild Pony of the  Pampa," for which he won a Newbery Honor in 1959.

Buried  deep within the search results are a few references to his years at the  Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the precursor to the CIA. However,  none describes how a foreign-born sailor overcame a childhood marked by  tragedy and became the head of an elite espionage unit for the Allied  Forces during World War II. At the OSS Kalnay was one of the few  foreign-born Americans informed and 'indoctrinated' in what we now…