Billy Jenkins (nee Irving Rosenthal)

Billy Jenkins was born in 1885, he was a German stage performer who, dubbed “Der Koenig der Cowboys” — “The King of the Cowboys” — was the prewar toast of Germany. He 'supposedly' had a Wild West show featuring trick ropin’, sharp shootin’ and trained birds of prey.

Self Hating Jew And Nazi Lover

He autographed his pictures with “Heil Hitler.” Jenkins was born Irving Rosenthal and that his father was a Jew — a Berlin café owner and variety-show artist who performed under the stage name Georg Süssmilch. 

Suppressing His Jewishness

It’s easy, perhaps, to dismiss Jenkins as a classic self-hating Jew (or half-Jew) who rejected his origins in order to survive. But he became “Billy Jenkins” more than two decades before the Nazis came to power, and his experience of personal reinvention fits well within the framework of how people create “real imaginary” spaces and identities, built on dense layers of yearning and desire; how they seek and sometimes find what Italians call the “patria dell’ anima,” or “homeland of the soul,” and how they may adopt the trappings of a myth to create something that to them becomes real.
 

Mother Rosenthal

'Billy Jenkins' claimed his father was Jewish, but not his momma. He hated his poppa because of  pre-teen abuse, and blamed it on the father's racial inbreeding.

Billy Gets Savaged By Nazis

Jenkins, in fact, remained active as a Berlin performer during the first years of World War II. In 1943, he was assaulted by Nazi thugs.

Billy And His Girl Go Underground

In 1943, however, Jenkins and his Jewish companion and stage partner, Frieda Schoenmann, seem to have had to go into hiding. They survived the last years of the war in Nuremberg, concealed by friends.

Hiding From Nazis Is Cathartic And Transforms Billy

These experiences apparently wrought a turnaround in Jenkins’s attitude toward his identity, forcing him to reconnect with his Jewish roots — and even with his original name.

Billy Goes To Eretz Israel

It is telling, perhaps, that his first professional appearance after the war was at a Purim party for the Jewish community in the town of Hof, in 1946 — under the name Jenkins Rosenthal.