Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

Part 1 introduces key themes that run through Shapiro’s memoir, the most important being identity and ancestry. The DNA testing kits Michael uses promises a fuller understanding of identify: “ANCESTRY: THE DNA TEST THAT TELLS A MORE COMPLETE STORY OF YOU” the kits announce in capital letters (7). In contrast to Michael, whose parents’ poor health sparked a genuine curiosity about his lineage, Shapiro is confident in her identity. Indeed, she is so certain about who she is and where she came from that the results showing she is only 52% Jewish are only mildly puzzling: “I wasn’t disturbed. I wasn’t confused […] I put the results aside and figured there must be a reasonable explanation tied up in migrations and conflicts many generations before me. Such was my certainty that I knew exactly where I came from” (8). It isn’t until she compares her test results to Susie’s that alarm bells start ringing. The comparison shows that they are not half-sisters, as they believed their entire lives. Rather, their most recent common ancestor is four and a half generations old. Shapiro assumes Ancestry.com made a mistake, but the company quickly dispels that notion. Susie and Paul’s shared physical traits force Shapiro to accept the truth: Paul is not her biological father.

Shapiro’s realization leads her to see the past in a new light. Her physical appearance, for example, was a topic of conversation her entire life: “All my life, I’d fielded and deflected comments about not looking Jewish” (16). With her blond hair, blue eyes, fine features, and pale skin, Shapiro looked nothing like her father or anyone else on his side of the family. The DNA test result finally explained why. Shapiro was always aware that she was different, but that did not prevent her from identifying with her Jewish ancestors. She took pride in her illustrious forebears, including her grandfather (the founder of the Lincoln Square Synagogue), her uncle (the president of the Orthodox Union), and her grandparents (pillars of the observant Jewish community in the US and Israel). Indeed, her connection to her Jewish forebears was so powerful it permeated all aspects of her life:

These ancestors are the foundation upon which I have built my life. I have dreamt of them, wrestled with them, longed for them. I have tried to understand them. In my writing, they have been my territory—my obsession, you might even say. They are the tangled roots—thick, rich, and dark—that bind me to the turning earth. During younger years when I was lost—particularly after my dad’s death—I used them as my inner compass. I would ask what to do, which way to turn. I would listen intently, and hear them answer. I don’t mean this metaphysically—not exactly. I’m not sure what I believe about where we go when we die, but I can say with certainty that I’ve felt the presence of this long-gone crowd whenever I’ve sought them (12).

Shapiro grew up attending synagogue and speaking Hebrew. Her parents’ home was kosher. She even studied at a yeshiva. As an adult, she continued to identify strongly with her Jewish heritage, despite no longer being observant: “Though as a grown woman I was not remotely religious, I had a powerful, nearly romantic sense of my family and its past” (6). These links include relatives she never knew. Noteworthy in this regard is Shapiro’s grandfather, who made a documentary film about life in Poland before the Second World War. Footage shows him and his father praying at the grave of Shapiro’s great-great-grandfather: “I can almost make out the cadence of their voices—voices I have never heard but that are the music of my bones—as they recite the Mourner’s Kaddish” (8). These ancestors were so important to Shapiro that she showed the film to her son, Jacob, before his bar mitzvah, the Jewish coming of age ceremony. Shapiro wanted Jacob to understand where he came from: “It felt urgently important to me, to make Jacob aware of his ancestral lineage, the patch of earth from which he sprang, the source of a spirit passed down, a connection” (8). She questions her identity in the wake of her DNA test result: “Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?” (27).

Throughout the memoir, Shapiro uses excerpts of literary works to shed light on her thoughts and feelings. For example, in Chapter 7, she quotes the writings of Thomas Reid, an early nineteenth-century philosopher, as she grapples with her torn sense of self: “‘The identity of a person is a perfect identity: wherever it is real it admits of no degrees; and it is impossible that a person should be in part the same, and in part different; because a person…is not divisible into parts’” (27). She uses biblical quotes to similar ends, as evidenced in Chapter 6: “Tohu va’vohu. The Hebrew words—from the second sentence of Genesis—arose in me the way the Hebrew language tended to: like bits of sediment shaken loose from some subterranean place. Tohu va’vohu meant chaos” (23).

Shapiro employs vivid imagery to convey her emotions and thoughts. In Chapter, 3, for example, she describes learning the truth about her parentage as a seismic event: “I woke up one morning and life was as I had always known it to be. There were certain things I thought I could count on […] By the time I went to bed that night, my entire history—the life I had lived—had crumbled beneath me, like the buried ruins of an ancient forgotten city” (13). Similarly, In Chapter 4, Shapiro describes her newfound cousin, A.T., as a stranger and an “emissary from some foreign world” (17).

Despite Shapiro’s strong connections to her family, she spent much of her life feeling like an outsider. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her description of her father’s funeral: “The rituals of mourning were foreign to me—though I had been raised Orthodox, there were striations of Orthodoxy—and at my own father’s funeral I felt like an interloper, out of place amidst my family” (20). Shapiro also grappled with feelings of not belonging in a 1998 New Yorker article, which focused on her father. In it, she sought to uncover the source of his unhappiness, concluding that it was not just the failure of his first marriage, the death of his second wife, and his inability to conceive with Irene that fueled his depression, but also the depth of his secrets: “There had been something more—something I could never quite fathom. An invisible live wire stretched between my parents and me. Touch it, and we all might go up in smoke. I knew this, too, though I couldn’t have articulated it” (35). The DNA test brought these secrets to the surface: “All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn’t known: the secret was me” (35).