Inheritance A memoir of genealogy, paternity, and love

Review by New York Times Review

THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE: Native America From 1890 to the Present, by David Treuer. (Riverhead, $28.) This response to Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" highlights the numerous achievements of Native Americans over the past century, and celebrates their resilience and adaptability in the face of prejudice, violence and the many other obstacles placed in their way. HARK, by Sam Lipsyte. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) The attraction and repulsion between a would-be messiah and his apostle anchors this madcap skewering of contemporary culture packed with fake gurus, cheating spouses, junk-food obsessions and yoga. INHERITANCE: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, by Dani Shapiro. (Knopf, $24.95.) A DNA test submitted on a whim upends Shapiro's assumptions about her family history and forms the basis for her new book, a searching exploration of the power of blood ties to shape our sense of who we are. AN ORCHESTRA OF MINORITIES, by Chigozie Obioma. (Little, Brown, $28.) A sweeping epic centered on a fraught romance between a humble poultry farmer and the daughter of a prosperous chief, Obioma's new novel travels from rural Nigeria to Cyprus and to the cosmic domain of the Igbo guardian spirit who watches over and recounts the proceedings. ARISTOTLE'S WAY: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, by Edith Hall. (Penguin Press, $27.) Aristotle was concerned with how to achieve a virtuous, happy life. Hall sees his answer as a source of great comfort, his most important insight being that people need to find their own purpose and search out a middle way - "nothing in excess," the philosopher said. THE WORLD ACCORDING TO FANNIE DAVIS: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers, by Bridgett M. Davis. (Little, Brown, $28.) Davis's heartwarming memoir honors her remarkable mother, who made a good life for her family in the '60s and '70s. THE FALCONER, by Dana Czapnik. (Atria, $25.) In this electric debut novel, 17-year-old Lucy's coming-of-age is powerfully shaped by her encounters with basketball and New York City itself, even as she constantly brushes up against the constrictions society places on her sex. IN MY MIND'S EYE: A Thought Diary, by Jan Morris. (Liveright, $24.95.) The beloved nonagenarian writer shares a year of observations - of herself and of the changes she's observed. TO NIGHT OWL FROM DOGFISH, by Holly Goldberg Sloan and Meg Wolitzer. (Dial, $17.99; ages 9 to 12.) Told in a series of frantic emails and other correspondence, this hilarious novel follows two girls who have never met - one in California, one in New York - who learn that their single dads plan to marry each other. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 11, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Imagine finding out, after 54 years, that your father is not your father. He may be the man who raised you and helped forge your identity by immersing you in his culture in Shapiro's case, that of an Orthodox Jewish heritage that can be traced back for generations. He may be the one you turned to for emotional support through a confusing adolescence and confounding adulthood. But, as the modern technology of DNA tests confirm, he is not the man who actually sired you. For Shapiro, who adored her father and embraced her Jewish heritage proudly, the results were psychologically devastating and, as an acclaimed memoirist, too astonishing not to pursue. If I'm not my father's daughter, then who am I? With lightning speed and relentless determination, Shapiro tracks down the sperm donor who was her biological father and navigates an emotional and ethical minefield to create a relationship. The notion of identity, once so defined, suddenly becomes amorphous and untrustworthy. Shapiro's anguish over a flawed past is palpable; her anxiety regarding an indeterminate future is paralyzing. Page after page, Shapiro displays a disarming honesty and an acute desire to know the unknowable.--Carol Haggas Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this fascinating memoir, Shapiro (Hourglass) writes of how she questioned her identity when a DNA test revealed that she was not, as she believed she was, 100% Jewish. Shapiro grew up in an Orthodox family in suburban New Jersey; blonde-haired and blue-eyed, she often felt out of place in a family of dark-haired Ashkenazi Jews, yet she had shrugged off the physical differences. But when she got the DNA test results, the then-54-year-old began researching her family history, and within months she unraveled a narrative leading back to the 1960s and the early days of artificial insemination. Her own parents had died, but now, with the support of her husband and son, she discovered her biological father, a doctor from Portland. Shapiro realized that her childhood, her ancestral lineage, and the foundation of her world were based on deception. "What potent combination of lawlessness, secrecy, desire, shame, greed, and confusion had led to my conception?" Shapiro writes. With thoughtful candor, she explores the ethical questions surrounding sperm donation, the consequences of DNA testing, and the emotional impact of having an uprooted religious and ethnic identity. This beautifully written, thought-provoking genealogical mystery will captivate readers from the very first pages. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Memoirist (Hourglass) and novelist (Family History) Shapiro was told her entire life that she was an Orthodox Jew and had no reason to think otherwise. Except the author didn't look like anyone else in her family and also felt that she didn't exactly belong. So when she takes a DNA test on a whim and learns that her father is not her biological father, it makes sense but also turns her world upside down. It's revealed that her parents sought help conceiving at a less-than-reputable fertility clinic in the 1960s, when little was known about artificial insemination. Shapiro meets with relatives, rabbis, her biological father, and anyone else who might help her understand this. But what she really wants to know is how her parents could let this happen and if they realized how it would impact her life. Shapiro has written several memoirs on family (Still Writing, Devotion), and this latest is fast-paced, easy to read, and ultimately seeks answers to the questions of, who am I, why am I here, and how shall I live? All have something to do with love. VERDICT A fascinating read for memoir fans and anyone curious about how DNA tests could impact one's life.-Kristin Joy Anderson, Lewis Univ. Lib., Romeoville, IL © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Before focusing on memoirs, Shapiro (Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage, 2017, etc.) drew from her family life in her fiction. In her latest, she delves into an origin story that puts everything she previously believed and wrote about herself in fresh perspective.The author's relationship with her mother was difficult. "My single best defense had always been that I was my father's daughter," she writes. "I was more my father's daughter. I had somehow convinced myself that I was only my father's daughter." Eventually, she learned that she wasn't her father's daughter at all, at least not in the way that she had initially understood. Through DNA testing to which she had only submitted because her husband had done so, Shapiro discovered that she shares none of hers with her father's side of the family and that the sperm that impregnated her mother had come from someone else. But who? The first half of the book trudges through a bit too much day-by-day detail, as the author becomes convinced that there's no way these results could have been mistaken. It is after she discovers who her real father is, or at least the sperm donor, that the narrative deepens and enriches our deeper understanding of paternity, genetics, and what were then called "test tube tots." Sperm donors had been guaranteed anonymity, and the man she contacted was initially resistant to upset the balance of his family dynamic because of his participation in the procedure decades earlier. Equally upsetting Shapiro was the issue of what her parents had believed, separately or together, about her parentage. Had they spent their lives as a family deceiving her, or had they also been deceived? Then there was the doctor whom they had consulted when they were having fertility issues, "an outlaw" whose credentials were shaky but whose results were impressive.For all the trauma that the discovery put her through, Shapiro recognizes that what she had experienced was "a great story"one that has inspired her best book. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Excerpted from Inheritance Chapter 1 When I was a girl I would sneak down the hall late at night once my parents were asleep. I would lock myself in the bathroom, climb onto the Formica counter, and get as close as possible to the mirror until I was nose to nose with my own reflection. This wasn't an exercise in the simple self-absorption of child­hood. The stakes felt high. Who knows how long I kneeled there, staring into my own eyes. I was looking for something I couldn't possibly have articulated--but I always knew it when I saw it. If I waited long enough, my face would begin to morph. I was eight, ten, thirteen. Cheeks, eyes, chin, and forehead--my features softened and shape-shifted until finally I was able to see another face, a different face, what seemed to me a truer face just beneath my own. Now it is early morning and I'm in a small hotel bathroom three thousand miles from home. I'm fifty-four years old, and it's a long time since I was that girl. But here I am again, staring and staring at my reflection. A stranger stares back at me. The coordinates: I'm in San Francisco--Japantown, to be precise--just off a long flight. The facts: I'm a woman, a wife, a mother, a writer, a teacher. I'm a daughter. I blink. The stranger in the mirror blinks too. A daughter. Over the course of a single day and night, the familiar has vanished. Familiar: belonging to a family. On the other side of the thin wall I hear my husband crack open a newspaper. The floor seems to sway. Or perhaps it's my body trembling. I don't know what a nervous break­down would feel like, but I wonder if I'm having one. I trace my fingers across the planes of my cheekbones, down my neck, across my clavicle, as if to be certain I still exist. I'm hit by a wave of dizziness and grip the bathroom counter. In the weeks and months to come, I will become well acquainted with this sensation. It will come over me on street corners and curbs, in airports, train stations. I'll take it as a sign to slow down. Take a breath. Feel the fact of my own body. You're still you, I tell myself, again and again and again. Chapter 2 Twenty-four hours earlier, I was in my home office trying to get organized for a trip to the West Coast when I heard Michael's feet pounding up the stairs. It was ten-thirty in the evening, and we had to leave before dawn to get to the Hartford airport for an early flight. I had made a packing list. I'm a list maker, and there were a million things to do. Bras. Panties. Jeans skirt. Striped top. Sweater/jacket? (Check weather in SF.) I was good at reading the sound of my husband's footsteps. These sounded urgent, though I couldn't tell whether they were good urgent or bad urgent. Whatever it was, we didn't have time for it. Skin stuff. Brush/comb. Headphones. He burst through my office door, open laptop in hand. "Susie sent her results," he said. Susie was my much-older half sister, my father's daughter from an early marriage. We weren't close, and hadn't spoken in a couple of years, but I had recently written to ask if she had ever done genetic testing. It was the kind of thing I had never even considered, but I had recalled Susie once mentioning that she wanted to know if she was at risk for any hereditary dis­eases. A New York City psychoanalyst, she had always been on the cutting edge of all things medical. My email had reached her at the TED conference in Banff. She had written back right away that she had indeed done genetic testing and would look to see if she had her results with her on her computer. Our father had died in a car accident many years earlier, when I was twenty-three, and Susie thirty-eight. Through him, we were part of a large Orthodox Jewish clan. It was a family history I was proud of and I loved. Our grandfather had been a founder of Lincoln Square Synagogue, one of the country's most respected Orthodox institutions. Our uncle had been president of the Orthodox Union. Our grandparents had been pillars of the observant Jewish community both in America and in Israel. Though as a grown woman I was not remotely religious, I had a powerful, nearly romantic sense of my family and its past. The previous winter, Michael had become curious about his own origins. He knew far less about the generations preceding him than I did about mine. His mother had Alzheimer's and recently had fallen and broken her hip. The combination of her injury and memory loss had precipitated a steep and rapid decline. His father was frail but mentally sharp. Michael's sudden interest in genealogy was surprising to me, but I understood it. He was hoping to learn more about his ancestral roots while his dad was still around. Perhaps he'd even enlarge his sense of family by connecting to third or fourth cousins. Do you want to do it too? he might have asked. I'm sending away for a kit. It's only like a hundred bucks. Though I no longer remember the exact moment, it is in fact the small, the undramatic, the banal--the yeah, sure that could just as easily have been a shrug and a no thanks. The kits arrived and sat on our kitchen counter for days, perhaps weeks, unopened. They became part of the scenery, like the books and magazines that pile up until we cart them off to our local library. We made coffee in the mornings, poured juice, scrambled eggs. We ate dinner at the kitchen table. We fed the dog, wrote notes and grocery shopping lists on the blackboard. We sorted mail, took out the recycling. All the while the kits remained sealed in their green and white boxes decorated with a whimsical line drawing of a three-leaf clo­ver. ANCESTRY: THE DNA TEST THAT TELLS A MORE COMPLETE STORY OF YOU. Finally one night, Michael opened the two packages and handed me a small plastic vial. "Spit," he said. I felt vaguely ridiculous and undignified as I bent over the vial. Why was I even doing this? I idly wondered if my results would be affected by the lamb chops I had just eaten, or the glass of wine, or residue from my lipstick. Once I had reached the line demarking the proper amount of saliva, I went back to clearing the dinner dishes. Michael wrapped a label around each of our vials and placed them in the packaging sent by Ancestry.com. Two months passed, and I gave little thought to my DNA test. I was deep into revisions of my new book. Our son had just begun looking at colleges. Michael was working on a film project. I had all but forgotten about it until one day an email containing my results appeared. We were puzzled by some of the findings. I say puzzled --a gentle word--because this is how it felt to me. According to Ancestry, my DNA was 52 percent Eastern European Ashkenazi. The rest was a smattering of French, Irish, English, and German. Odd, but I had nothing to compare it with. I wasn't disturbed. I wasn't confused, even though that percentage seemed very low considering that all my ancestors were Jews from Eastern Europe. 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. In a cabinet beneath our television, I keep several copies of a documentary about prewar shtetl life in Poland, called Image Before My Eyes . The film includes archival footage taken by my grandfather during a 1931 visit to Horodok, the family village. By then the owner of a successful fabric mill, he brought my great-grandfather with him. The film is all the more powerful for the present-day viewer's knowledge of what will soon befall the men with their double beards, the women in modest black, the children crowding the American visitors. Someone--my grandfather?--holds the shaky camera as the doomed villagers dance around him in a widening circle. Then we cut to a quieter moment: in grainy black and white, my grandfather and great- grandfather pray at the grave of my 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. My grandfather wipes tears from his eyes. In the year before my son's bar mitzvah, I played him that part of the documentary. Do you see? I paused on the image of the rough old stone carved in Hebrew. This is where we come from. That's the spot where your great-great-great grandfather-is buried. 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. Of course, that tombstone would have been plowed under just a few years later. But in that moment--my people captured for all time--I was linking them to my own boy, and him to them. He hadn't known my father, but at least I was able to give Jacob some­thing formative that I myself had grown up with: a sense of grounding in coming from this family. He is the only child of an only child, but this--this was a vast and abundant part of his heritage that could never be taken away from him. We watched as the men on the screen swayed back and forth in a familiar rhythm, a dance I have known all my life. So that 52 percent breakdown was just kind of weird, that's all, as bland and innocuous as those sealed green and white boxes had been. I thought I'd clear it up by comparing my DNA results with Susie's. Now, on the eve of our trip to the West Coast, Michael was sitting next to me on the small, tapestry-covered chaise in the corner of my office. I felt his leg pressed against mine as, side by side, we looked down at his laptop screen. Later he will tell me he already knew what I couldn't allow myself even to begin to consider. On the wall directly behind us hung a black-and-white portrait of my paternal grandmother, her hair parted in the center, pulled back tightly, her gaze direct and serene. Comparing Kit M440247 and A765211:   Largest segment = 14.9 cM Total of segments > 7cM = 29.6 cM Estimated number of generations to MRCA = 4.5 653629 SNP's used for this comparison Comparison took 0.04538 seconds. "What does it mean?" My voice sounded strange to my own ears. "You're not sisters." "Not half sisters?" "No kind of sisters." "How do you know?" Michael traced the line estimating the number of generations to our most recent common ancestor. "Here." The numbers, symbols, unfamiliar terms on the screen were a language I didn't understand. It had taken 0.04538 seconds--a fraction of a second--to upend my life. There would now forever be a before. The innocence of a packing list. The preparation for a simple trip. The portrait of my grandmother in its gilded frame. My mind began to spin with calculations. If Susie was not my half sister-- no kind of sister --it could mean only one of two things: either my father was not her father or my father was not my father. Excerpted from Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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