Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

It had taken 0.04538 seconds—a fraction of a second—to upend my life.

He was the oldest son born into a family obsessed with recording itself—a family conscious of its own legacy.

I was a stranger to myself, adrift in the world.

If my father wasn’t my father, who was my father? If my father wasn’t my father, who was I?

What makes a person a person?

The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.

WHEREVER I AM, I AM WHAT IS MISSING

Confirmation bias—a psychological term I had never heard before but one with which I will become intimately familiar—is the process by which the mind seeks to confirm what it already believes. When in the throes of confirmation bias, we seek and interpret information that will allow us to continue to hold on to our beliefs, even when presented with contradictory evidence.

“This was shot as a Christmas ad,”

It was not a portrait commissioned by a Jewish mother from New Jersey. It was a portrait deliberately shot as a Christmas

How could it have been that I felt so close to my father but not at home in his world?

My new knowledge changed both everything and nothing.

I may only have one, but I hit the jackpot, she would say.

“I’m not giving you up,” she said.

“And you’d better not be giving me up,” she said.

“I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me,” she said. “And you are my brother’s daughter.”

When you’re offered an easy moral out and you don’t take it, that’s malchus

I had been so afraid that blood would be all that mattered.

“Do you know the three great spiritual questions?”

“Who am I?”

“Why am I here?”

“And how shall I live?”