Whenever I asked my father, if we had Jewish roots, he would explain that Wechsler with a "ch" was Christian and Wexler with "x" was Jewish. This was no issue until we moved to the US. All of a sudden, I was asked if I was Jewish. Growing up with the "ch" story, I had no reason to question his story and so I used his exact words, whenever I was asked.  I overlooked raised eye brows and overheard "ooooo-kay"s when uttering my answers.

When I entered college and decided to join a sorority, I was rushed out of my comfort zone. We had three Jewish sororities on Campus and visited them during the first round of Sorority Rush. They seemed very interested in my membership,  even though I was catholic. Whenever I retold my father's "ch" story, the sorority members looked at me, like a mother patiently listening to her child's exagerated account of a field trip. And invited me back. And slowly it dawned on me, that there was a hook to the story.

In my course "Fundamental of Psychology" I first heard about the  Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and the man who developed it: David Wechsler. David Wechsler was a Romanian-American psychologist, was born into a Jewish family in Lespezi, Romania and emigrated to the USA with his parents as a child. After hearing that, my "ch-bubble" finally burst.

I stopped using the "ch story" to explain my roots and began wondering myself. As the years went buy, I met more Wechslers with a "ch" who had Jewish roots. I reasoned, that my family may have had Jewish roots, however, going all the way back to the middle ages. As a lot of time lapsed between the Middle Ages and the present, I assumed, that this was why my father had no knowledge of a possible Jewish heritage. A comfortable way of explaining the inexplainable at the time without having to question my father's story any further.

The older I got, the more unconfortable I got. I began questioning my roots, my nationality and most important of all, the "ch" story. A talk show on German TV was the actual turning point. I tuned in to a show in which literature experts were discussing the latest publications. One of the experts was Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a German-Polish author and publisher with Jewish roots, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. Hearing him speak, watching his gestures, I felt I was watching my father's look alike. And my comfortable "middle ages explanation" began to tweak, like a dress from slender years gone by.

After my father's death and my first successful genealogical journey into the past of my great grandmother's family, I was ready to tackle the Jewish question. After a few day's of online research, I came  across the website www.genteam.eu and discovered a transcript of the marriage between Hermann Wechsler and Eugene Engelhardt, my great grandparents. With the help of some Austrian family historians, I was able to get a hold of the original marriage registry entry as well as birth records of their first two children. And with these documents I finally had the confirmation, that my Wechsler's with a "ch" had a Jewish background. Hermann's confession was listed as "mosaisch", meaning Jewish. His parents were Israel Wechsler and Rosina Camerini. Further research uncovered, that Hermann's parents, had met and married in Trieste in 1864 at the Synagogue of the Jewish Community of Trieste.