Black (Jewish) History Month Is Off and Running
By Dan Friedman for the Jewish Forward
Published February 03, 2010, issue of February 12, 2010.
Angelina Jolie may have changed the public face of adoption, but she hasn’t changed the nature of adoption itself. Growing up knowing that the people who biologically made you gave you away is inescapably haunting.
Every Lining Has a Little Cloud: Avery Klein-Cloud takes flight from her growing pains. For many adoptees, this strange dislocation remains deep in the background. Few outward signs of adoption, the love of a good family, the general trials and tribulations of growing up, and traumas unrelated to adoption - all these can push the question of genetic parentage into the realm of irrelevance.
To be the black adoptive daughter of white Jewish lesbians in Brooklyn, however, allows no such anonymity. To be a champion runner whose older brother, Rafi (also adopted, also of African-American parentage), has just gotten into Princeton allows little respite. This is the enviable and unenviable lot of Avery Klein-Cloud, the subject of Nicole Opper’s thoughtful and compelling documentary, “Off and Running.”