Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

I might have wandered through the world never knowing where I came from. I would have been left with a hole inside me in the shape of a father or, rather, two fathers. The father who raised me, who died too young, too sad, too lost, and the anonymous man I came from but would never be able to identify. Instead of a false narrative, there would be an infinity of narratives.

The following summer there will be a total eclipse of the sun, and Michael, Jacob, and I will take turns looking at it through NASA-approved glasses. But I will not trust the NASA-approved glasses. I will still look at the eclipse for only a fraction of a second at a time. This is the way I watched the YouTube video on that June morning. A glimpse, then away. Another glimpse. As if the old man in the blue button-down shirt and Patagonia vest—who he was and what that meant—might blind me forever.

If my body wasn’t my body and my face wasn’t my face, who was I?

How old was too old for a surprise? He was seventy-eight.

I was being told: You’re one of us. And I was also being told: You’re not one of us.

This is what Jewish looks like, I would think, a kind of internal fuck you. I led with being Jewish wherever I went in the world. It was like a parlor trick, something guaranteed to produce interest, even amazement. You, Jewish? No way. And I would respond by dutifully reciting my family’s yichis, a Yiddish word that translates to wellborn. I would reel off my credentials: went to a yeshiva. Raised Orthodox. Yep, kosher. Two sinks, two dishwashers, the whole deal.

“Mark Strand stared at you across the table and said, You aren’t Jewish. He declared it. Like it was a fact.

It was like he was stripping you of who you were. He just kept repeating it over and over again. He got angrier and angrier, as if he thought you were lying.”

WHEREVER I AM, I AM WHAT IS MISSING.

I wondered what that poise was costing you.”

Story of my life was what I usually said with a shrug and a sigh. A phrase that seemed to cost me nothing. Story of my life.

I kept asking Michael whether there was still some chance that all this was a crazy hallucination, a bunch of coincidences arranged so that they only appeared to be facts. But this was shock talking. This is what shock does. The trapped, frozen mind looks to rearrange the data. In a recursive loop, I kept drifting back to the beginning: the Ancestry.com results, Philadelphia, A.T., Bethany Thomas, University of Pennsylvania, medical student, Ben Walden.

No other explanation was bearable.

It was a good story. A great story. I had pretty much lost sight of the fact that it was my story.

But later, much later, I came to understand that I had presented it as entertainment. So had Michael. It was a default and a defense; if we were

able to shape it into a story, perhaps it would hurt less.

I was not who I thought I had been. But I was who I had always been.

I had included a link to my website in that first letter. This, too, I did for a reason. I may have been in a feral state when I composed it—an animal bent on survival—but within that state I had a survivor’s clarity. I wanted him to see that this woman claiming to be his biological child was not crazy. She wasn’t after his money.

What did my mother know? What did my father know? And again: What did my mother know? What did my father know? In yogic philosophy the concept of samskara—the Sanskrit translates into scar or pattern—is understood as a karmic inheritance, a blueprint we’re born with and cycle through again and again over the course of our lives.

But whenever my unruly mind wasn’t otherwise occupied, it returned to my parents. Everyone involved in the story was either dead or very old. My parents were dead. Most of their friends were dead.

I didn’t have the luxury of emotion recollected in tranquillity. My job now was to amass as much information as quickly as I possibly could. Conveniently, this job also meant I could keep the tidal wave of my feelings at bay as I waited for a reply from Ben Walden.

When he was stricken with a deadly disease as an infant—a seizure disorder so rare that its origins were unknown—I confidently told the doctors that there was no history of seizures in my family.

In every other area of my life I was capable of clear thought. But here, I was back in the thick sludge.

I stumbled upon words I hated: apparently Ben Walden was my bio-dad. Paul Shapiro was my social dad.

What I wanted: confirmation from someone—an expert—that it was possible, no, more than possible, likely, no, more than likely, absolutely the case, that my parents had known nothing. The Farris Institute had hoodwinked them. Gone rogue.

I had begun to learn that telling it didn’t necessarily make me feel better.

People are doing DNA testing just for kicks, and getting the shock of their lives.

“But I’m sure my parents didn’t know,” I said to Kramer. “I think Farris must have used a donor without my parents’ knowledge.” There was a brief pause on her end. “Why do you think that?”

Wouldn’t know the child was Jewish. As opposed to: wouldn’t know the child was his.

“Your parents had to know,” Kramer said.

The very idea was unthinkable. I mean that literally. I was unable to entertain on any level the thought that my parents had known all our shared lives.

I clung to the only story I could tolerate.

Sylvia Boorstein, had told me that my present state reminded her of a particular illustration in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. At first glance, the illustration appears to be of a big green hat. But on closer examination, it becomes clear that a boa constrictor has swallowed an elephant. I was that snake. Choking on the elephant.

“The mother always knew,” Kramer went on. “I’ve spoken to thousands of donor-conceived people. I’ve heard thousands of stories. I’m not saying it’s impossible—but I’ve never heard a story in which the mother didn’t know.”

As I recall, it was a source of great merriment in our home: the fact that an Orthodox child was out there wishing the entire nation a very Merry Christmas. Such a hilarious accident!

Confirmation bias—a psychological term I had never heard before but one with which I will become intimately familiar—is

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. You aren’t Jewish, Mark Strand had flatly said. We could have used you in the ghetto. Mrs. Kushner ran her hand through my hair. Raised kosher, I replied more times than I can count. Went to a yeshiva. Spoke fluent Hebrew. And when faced with the bemusement, the disbelief: I know. It’s crazy. I mean, I was the Kodak Christmas poster child.

“This was shot as a Christmas ad,” he finally said. “What do you mean?” “You’re playing with red and green elves,” Michael said. “Look at them.”

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

But given the opportunity, she could not have resisted the lure, the temptation of the spotlight. Her daughter, her hard-won daughter, her only child—so surprisingly pretty, so shockingly fair—beheld as the classic, iconic American child.

Her unsteady gaze, her wide, practiced smile. Her self-consciousness, the way every word seemed rehearsed. His stooped shoulders, the downward turn of his mouth. The way he was never quite present. Her rage. His sorrow. Her brittleness. His fragility. Their screaming fights. The harsh exchange of whispers behind their closed bedroom door.

My mother is buried in a cemetery near the Jersey shore. My father’s bones lie in the Shapiro family plot in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. And I am straining to listen now.

The hottest summer on record became my season of carefully crafted letters. I stayed indoors in the coolest, darkest room in my house, drafting odd requests and entreaties.

I checked my reflection in my bedroom mirror, turning this way and that, beset by a feeling of not-quite-rightness. It was familiar—this sense of being inappropriate that came upon me whenever I entered observant society.

It was only with my mother that my father left the fold, moved to New Jersey so they could begin anew.

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

A get is a Jewish divorce. The rabbi had thought about this. What other issue could I possibly have been bringing to him? At that moment, I realized that Lookstein knew nothing. There was no memory, no ethical dilemma about whether to be honest about a long-ago conversation. I felt flooded with relief. How desperate I was to believe that my father had been in the dark right alongside me.

I launched into the story I’d learned to tell without feeling the shock of its impact.

After managing to keep my feelings tamped down, suddenly I was crying. “Whether my father knew,” I answered. “The halachah—it seems so unlikely that he would have gone through with it. Whether my mother deceived him, or—” “You’ll never know,” the rabbi said. You don’t know who you’re dealing with, I thought but didn’t say. You’ll never know was unacceptable. You’ll never know simply could not be what I was left with in the end. Who was I without my history?

“No matter what, you’re Jewish,” he said. “Your mother was Jewish. Jewish egg, Jewish woman giving birth, the child would be Jewish. There would have been no need to convert you.” None of this had occurred to me, nor would it have mattered. One of the more minor surprises thus far had been how little I seemed to care about my acceptability as a Jew.