It’s an original number 4 from 1960 which she bought for herself when she was eight years old, and she’s kept it ever since. The first time I saw her, I was struck by her look - mysterious, Germanic, with bright blue eyes and blonde curls on her forehead. She clearly belonged to a different era, and it bewildered me to think of her in the hands of my mom as a young, Jewish girl in the suburbs of Philadelphia, decades before I was born. I wasn’t raised Jewish, and have never looked anything like my mom, but my Anglo-Saxon features inherited from my Dad’s side mirrored those I found in my mom’s beloved doll. Somehow, her Barbie materialized our mother-daughter link.

That link grew deeper as I got older and dug into Barbie’s past. She had, in fact, been very closely modeled after a German comic strip character called Bild Lilli, but it was difficult to find out much about her - I couldn’t read the panels written in Lilli’s native tongue, and it seemed most information was tucked away in archives in the Fatherland. What’s more, the woman who found Lilli and became Barbie’s inventor/de facto “mom”, Ruth Handler, was Jewish. Following the tradition of matrilineal inheritance…did this make Barbie a German-Jewish immigrant, akin to my ancestry?

I grew up in a very secular, very nuclear family with little-to-no contact with extended relatives or understanding of their pasts. And in this near-absence of my own family history, I became obsessed with researching Barbie’s - maybe uncovering her identity could help me make sense of mine.

This project is a decade-long impulse in the making to learn more about my Jewish roots, to study German, and to make my way to Europe to see what I can uncover about Barbie’s doll predecessor. It’s a heritage project, but I also intend it to become a love letter of sorts to the importance of dolls in our lives, as well as a personal challenge to write about my research and experience, with the intention to publish a book.