32 March 7 • 2019
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SANDEE BRAWARSKY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS
The Family
Dani Shapiro’
s memoir Inheritance raises big
questions about identity, nature and nurture.
D
ani Shapiro’
s Connecticut home
has sepia portraits of her late
father as a child and members of
his distinguished Orthodox family on the
walls, photographs she has known all her
life. These faces have, in silence, supported
her, spoken to her, even comforted her. Her
identity is stamped by theirs.
Two years ago, after sending her DNA to
a website for analysis, she learned shocking
news
she didn’
t think possible: Her beloved
father was not her biological father. His
line of kinfolks weren’
t blood relatives. And
after 36 hours of detective work with her
husband’
s help on the internet, she learned
her biological father wasn’
t Jewish.
In Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy,
Paternity and Love (Knopf) — which
debuted on the New York Times Best Sellers
list in late January — Shapiro unfolds the
story of her discovery and its intellectual
and emotional impact. She is a writer who
has mined her experience and inner land-
scape in four previous memoirs, Hourglass,
Still Writing, Devotion and Slow Motion,
and she has written five novels that also
touch on her history and identity.
“This is the story that makes sense of all
the others,
” she says. “It’
s not that those sto-
ries weren’
t true. They all are true. They’
re
just not the whole truth.
”
“On the one hand,
” she continues, “I
have spent my entire life grappling with
identity, trying to piece the puzzle of my
father together. I think there’
s a reason why
in my work, the fiction and memoirs, I
kept gravitating to family secrets. I thought
I knew why, that there were secrets in my
house. I never dreamt that I was the secret.
“My whole writing life has been about
trying to understand,
” she adds.
Shapiro’
s grandfather, Joseph Shapiro,
was a founder of Lincoln Square
Synagogue, a philanthropist and leader of
several Orthodox organizations. Her father,
Paul Shapiro, a Wall Street stockbroker, was
killed in a car crash when she was 23; her
mother, Irene, was badly injured and sur-
vived. Her parents had an uneasy marriage,
and Dani, their only child, felt more her
father’
s daughter than her mother’
s, and
she was proud of his lineage.
Some of her clearest childhood memo-
ries involve her father — she would go with
him to synagogue, where he seemed most
at home, and prayer was a kind of secret
language they shared.
Through an older half-sister (her father
had been previously married) who also
had her DNA tested, she confirmed that
the results of her own test were true, for
she and her half-sister turned out not to be
related biologically. Shapiro, who is blonde
and pale-skinned with an easy elegance
about her, has been told throughout her
life, by Jews and non-Jews, that she doesn’
t
look Jewish. “Story of my life,
” she would
say with a shrug.
In fact, as a little girl, Shapiro — who
was once selected as the Kodak poster
child for Christmas — was pulled aside by
a friend of her parents, who is the grand-
mother of Jared Kushner, and told, “We
could have used you in the ghetto, little
blondie. You could have gotten us bread
from the Nazis.
” That comment and others
stayed with her.
Even during Shapiro extended family
occasions, she felt a sense of otherness.
Dani now says there was something she
couldn’
t quite articulate.
ROAD TO DISCOVERY
For the reader, there’
s a sense of suspense
in Shapiro’
s unraveling of details, even as
she is thrown by her discovery and plagued
by urgent questions about why her parents
didn’
t tell her — and how much they actu-
ally understood or how much they buried
the truth in their own ways.
Shapiro’
s mother had told her about
traveling to a fertility clinic in Philadelphia,
but not much more than that. Dani learns
that a practice in those days was to mix
donor sperm with the father’
s sperm, to
keep alive the possibility that the baby was
biologically his. Through dogged research,
interviews with older family friends and
relatives, medical experts and others with
some connection to that clinic (closed long
ago) and genealogists, Shapiro recreates
events surrounding her birth.
Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, a friend of her
father’
s, has a cameo in the narrative, try-
ing to offer comfort. A cherished aunt and
others reassure her about love, and that, no
matter what, Paul is still her father.
Suddenly though, she has a different
medical history, and her son has a different
grandfather. While she doesn’
t look at all
like her mother or the Shapiros, she dis-
covers she closely resembles her biological
father. She keeps a promise of guarding his
privacy. About their relationship going for-
ward, she admits there’
s “no playbook.
”
A teacher of memoir writing who is
co-founder of a writers conference in
Positano, Italy, Shapiro skillfully creates a
narrative that ties together the mysteries
and facts she assembles and the deeper lev-
els of her emotional life.
For her, writing is not catharsis, but a
way of containing, ordering and under-
standing the truth. She says she doesn’
t
view a memoir as “the sweep of life,
” but
rather as the telling of what she knew when
she wrote it.
Shapiro, who left Orthodoxy long
ago, meditates every morning and says
it is a ritual that grew out of being her
father’
s daughter, a different take on his
daily prayers. These days, after all she has
learned, she says she feels, paradoxically,
less conflicted about her Jewish identity.
While she understands that halachically,
her Jewish identity is transmitted through
her Jewish mother, she always identified
her Judaism with her father. In fact, she
feels “more Jewish. I understand.
”
“So much of this feels like a spiritual
journey for me,
” she says. “The deepest
kind.
” Shapiro is also committed to discuss-
ing the issues she raises in the book about
secrecy; she wrote a recent piece in Time
magazine advocating for transparency and
regulation concerning donor conception,
and the rights of children to know their
origins.
“I spent 54 years being wrong about my
identity,
” she says, noting she will be think-
ing about “questions of nature and culture,
what makes a parent a parent, what secrets
do, how we are formed by what we don’
t
know and what is unsaid” for a very long
time. ■
Shapiro recently launched a podcast, “Family
Secrets” (apple.co/2X3O5Uw), in which she talks
to others about family secrets they have discov-
ered and the power of truth.
book/life
arts&life
Secret
Dani Shapiro with her beloved father,
Paul. DNA testing showed he wasn’
t her
biological father.
COURTESY OF DANI SHAPIRO
Dani Shapiro
MICHAEL MAREN