inheritance a memoir of genealogy paternity and love summary

While the DNA results profoundly destabilize Shapiro, they also confirm the “otherness” she had always felt, and launch her on a journey that takes her both inward, toward an interrogation of self, and outward, investigating her own story as a detective would. Did your mother have an affair with the Swedish milkman? She grew up bombarded with questions like You sure you’re Jewish? There’s no way you’re Jewish. Shapiro didn’t look like her parents - she is blond, blue-eyed, so gentile looking she was featured in a Kodak Christmas ad when she was three years old. She would spend hours in front of the mirror as a young girl “I was looking for something I couldn’t possibly have articulated,” she writes, “but I always knew it when I saw it. When she learns she shares no biological connection with these ancestors who’ve shaped her inner world, she enters a state of free fall.Īs grounded as she had been in her family, however, Shapiro has always been a seeker. In my writing, they have been my territory - my obsession, you might even say.” “I have dreamt of them, wrestled with them, longed for them. The ancestors on her father’s side of the family, who fled Eastern Europe and became leaders of modern Orthodoxy, “are the foundation upon which I have built my life,” she writes. Shapiro grew up in a prominent observant Jewish family, a family and faith she has mined deeply in her earlier memoirs and novels.

I’ve watched her navigate the flurry of shock and wonder, confusion and relief, that has come with this revelation, a discombobulation that Dani Shapiro unpacks in her gripping new book, “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love,” written after she, too, received DNA results that shook her to the core. A little more than a year ago, one of my closest friends learned through a genealogy website’s DNA test that the father who raised her was not her biological father.

Inheritance a memoir of genealogy paternity and love summary