DNA test sparks emotional memoir
Dani Shapiro has built a career writing about the perplexing corners of her life — the mysteries of her marriage; the discomfort she felt as a child who never quite fit in; the quandary of growing up in a strict Orthodox Jewish home but never connecting with her faith.
In memoir after memoir, she has sifted through her memories, questioning everything.
Could the answers have been in her DNA all along?
In her fascinating new memoir, “Inheritance,” Shapiro sends off a sample of DNA to be analyzed, mainly as a lark. After all, she knew who she was: the daughter of the very difficult Irene Shapiro and the beloved sadsack Paul Shapiro, both Ashkenazi Jews from New York. Her father, in particular, defined her — she grew up with his legends and stories; his well-worn prayer shawl, which she gave to her own son; and framed photographs of his ancestors, “small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands.”
There had been hints that things were not quite what they seemed, but she had never paid them any mind. It’s easy, she notes, to ignore clues when you think you already know the truth.
“I was the lone pale, blond child in the sea of dark-haired, dark-eyed grandchildren,” she writes. “Yet I never had any doubt that I was part of the chain that reached back and back through the generations, unbroken.”
Her mother had once dropped the odd fact that Dani — an only child — was conceived in Philadelphia, but when pressed said only, “Oh, you don’t want to know. It’s not a pretty story.”
So when the DNA test results came back telling Shapiro that she was only 52 percent Ashkenazi Jew, and the other 48 percent was a mix of French, Irish, English and German, it was a bombshell. It had never occurred to her that her parents, now dead, weren’t who she had always believed them to be.
And so begins a remarkable, dogged, emotional journey as Shapiro digs into the past to find the truth.
Shapiro and her husband, journalist Michael Maren, are a formidable team as together they figure out who the biological father was.
Shapiro wrestles with unanswerable questions (What did her mother know? What did her father know? Did they lie to her? Did they lie to each other?) as well as philosophical ones (What is paternity? What is family? What is legacy?). She also deals with more practical issues — should she contact her biological father, who almost certainly doesn’t know she exists? Should she tell her own son that his grandfather is not really his grandfather?
She juggles all of these threads and all of this overwhelming emotion quite deftly while spinning the story out smoothly. Shapiro’s book is a wise and thorough examination of how this news affected her. Her story is a good guide for the bombshells that are yet to explode for so many families.