32 March 7 • 2019
jn

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

