THE MANY LIVES OF MADELEINE

By the time Madeleine Albright sinks into a wicker chair at a corner table in a quiet Georgetown restaurant, the circles under her eyes are dark and deep. She's running an hour late; she's skipped a reception at the Czech embassy. Her ambassador in Paris is dying. It has been a long day. The Merlot comes in a big glass.

When she is tired, she can slide, invisibly and gracefully, into auto-pilot, so she can keep on thinking even as she tells her stories. Her voice is at once warm and precise--her transitions seamless as she knits together bits of speeches, sweet childhood memories, op-ed arguments, motherly advice--so that even a recitation feels like a personal confidence, shared over dinner with a stranger and a tape recorder.

Here in the middle of her Star Is Born debut as Secretary of State, when the lights are brightest, Albright is the first to say that, yes, it's because she is a woman, but, she adds, it's also because of her story. She wears her biography like a brooch, a shiny tale of a refugee--first from Hitler, then Stalin--who fell in love with the country that saved her and fulfilled its promise of unlimited promise. But she has had reason to suspect for some years now that even she didn't know the whole story. And if she is distracted tonight, it may be because the story she has told and retold, the story that makes people cry when she is introduced at speeches, will by morning have been rewritten.

It was Albright's daughter Anne who told her that the Washington Post confirmed the rumors that have been spreading since Albright's name hit the headlines: that her parents were not raised as Catholics, celebrating family rituals of Easter and Christmas, as Albright had been told growing up. They were born Jews and converted. And her grandparents did not die of natural causes during the war. They died in the concentration camps.

It is fitting that her family secret is not about abuse or betrayal but about world history and diplomacy. And it is fitting too that the woman who grew up in four countries and speaks five languages now has an even more complicated identity. But for many Holocaust survivors who learn their family history as adults, the trauma lies not so much in the facts but in the fact that they were hidden. Albright, says her sister Kathy Silva, is the reincarnation of their father Josef Korbel. Albright studied what he studied. He set her standards for excellence, integrity and discipline. "A great deal of what I did," she says, "I did because I wanted to be like my father."

If it was hard to wrestle in private with his decision to rewrite the family history, it was harder to have to explain it in public, to defend her parents against the charge that their heroic story had been somehow airbrushed. Albright would tell a friend the night after the Post story broke that she felt shaken and somehow violated. The implications of the questioning--What did she know and when did she know it?--made it sound as though the story she was so proud of was somehow false, rather than incomplete. By the next day, she would be defending her parents to the New York Times, saying they "were the bravest people alive."