Book Club: Family Declassified

About Family Declassified: Uncovering My Grandfather's Journey from Spy to Children's Book Author

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 know as the ULTRA decrypts, the German Enigma messages that were used to capture or thwart almost all German offensive intelligence activity during the Second World War.

It took several years of reviewing previously unexamined government records and conducting personal interviews and genealogical searches to piece together the life of a man who hid his Jewish identity, the nature of his work as a spy, and the murder of his sister and nephew by Hungarian Nazis. The result is a manuscript that examines the nature of family myths and presents the gripping story of a man whose life was shaped by some of the most extraordinary events of the 20th century. (Amazon)

Our Guest and the Author: Katherine Fennelly

Trained as a social scientist, Katherine Fennelly is an immigration policy expert whose work has taken her to many of the countries where her late grandfather lived out his adventures. She has studied and worked in Iran, Spain, and Ecuador and done consulting work and academic residencies across Latin America and Europe. Katherine is a voracious reader and a life-long student of languages. She discovered her family’s Jewish roots as an adult, something her Hungarian-American mother preferred not to discuss. When not tracking down classified documents and delving into family history, she volunteers for refugee service organizations, serves as a Spanish-English interpreter, and enjoys biking in Prospect Park and spending time with her daughters and granddaughters who live nearby in Brooklyn.

Finding the Book:

Katherine Fennelly on her website has a number of sources for procuring the book. We have copied the links and present them here:

Community Bookstore in Brooklyn

Amazon, both in print and for Kindle

Directly from the publisher

The Book Group Special on Fennelly's website

Please note that the Book Group Special is done directly through Katherine....the LBI will not be organizing the procuring and distributing of books. But if you have other friends interested, this might be a good option.