A genetic test uncovers a family secret
Memoir tells two surprising stories in one
Take a look at a photo of the writer Dani Shapiro and you will likely agree: She doesn’t look Jewish. But she certainly is – she’s the daughter of Orthodox Jews and remains deeply involved with this aspect of her identity – and she’s been getting that reaction all her life.
“We could have used you in the ghetto, little blondie,” said a family friend at a Shabbos lunch in the 1960s. “You could have gotten us bread from the Nazis.”
Years later, the poet Mark Strand, whom she met as a young writer at the Bread Loaf conference, took one look at her and said, “You’re not Jewish. There’s no possibility you’re Jewish.”
As she explains in her new memoir “Inheritance” (Knopf, 250 pp., ★★★g), it turns out there is a reason she doesn’t look like any of her relatives. When she receives the results of her genetic testing from Ancestry.com – done more or less on a lark – she learns she is only half Ashkenazi Jew; the rest a mix of French, Irish, English and German. And when she compares her results with those of her half-sister Susie, it turns out they’re not even related. And since Susie looks exactly like their father ... well, Dani’s father has to be someone else.
Both of Shapiro’s parents are long dead, but she is able to piece together from a few clues and shards of memory that she was a donor-conceived baby. That her parents concealed this from her creates a second seismic shock. And while she’s playing detective on that front, she also is able to solve another mystery: She tracks down her birth father.
There is both no worse person yet no better person for this to happen to than Dani Shapiro.
On the “worse” side – she adored her father and couldn’t stand her mother, and now her lifelong conviction that she was more his daughter than hers is shot to hell. Furthermore, she puts tremendous stock in her understanding of who she is. In fact, as a memoirist, she makes her living from it. But now, “it turns out that is possible to live an entire life – even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine – and still not know the truth of myself.”
And this is also why she is the best person for it to happen to, because Dani Shapiro can tell this story like no one else could, the author of memoirs including “Hourglass,” “Still Writing,” “Devotion,” and “Slow Motion.” She’s an excellent writer, and though the book is at times a little melodramatic, it’s smart, psychologically astute and not afraid to tell it like it is. If she’s just as happy not to be related to her half-sister Susie, if her mom is a “pathological narcissist with a borderline personality disorder,” she has no problem saying so.
As distressed and shaken as she was when this episode began, one of the first things she did was buy index cards and start taking notes. She knew she had a great story on her hands. And she was right.