Mixing his sperm with those of any stranger would have been unthinkable. But a non-Jewish stranger would have been impossible—I was sure of that. His religion was the deepest and most abiding part of his identity—and Judaism wasn’t only a religion, it was an ethnicity. His child would have been other. Set apart from the very lineage he came from. “You knew your father,” my mother went on. In my memory, she is looking directly at me. “Can you imagine such a thing?”
