It was rumored that J.D. Salinger's mother Miriam was born in County Cork, Ireland, likely fueled by an erroneous assertion in a 1963 "Life Magazine" article that she was Scotch-Irish. This led to a further rumor that Miriam's Irish Catholic parents shunned her and refused to speak to her after marrying the Jew Solomon Salinger. Salinger's sister Doris actually believed that their mother had been born in Ireland. In actuality, Miriam's parents were dead by the time she married. She was born Marie Jillich (she took the name Miriam when she converted to Judaism upon her marriage) in Atlantic, Iowa on May 11, 1891. Miriam's paternal grandfather George Lester Jillich, Sr. was the son of German immigrants, and her paternal grandmother Mary Jane Bennett was Anglo-Saxon. George, Sr. was a successful grain merchant whose son George, Jr. (Miriam's father) worked in the family business. Miriam's mother, Nellie McMahon, a Kansas City native, was the daughter of immigrants from Ireland. Miriam's father died in 1909, the year before she met Solomon Salinger (a Chicago movie theater manager). Miriam's mother Nellie died before J.D. Salinger was born in 1919. Solomon Salinger's parents thought that the fair-skinned, red-haired Marie (as she was then known before her conversion) resembled a "little Irisher".
