![]() ![]() This beautifully written, thought-provoking genealogical mystery will captivate readers from the very first pages. 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. She then allows her readers to be a fly on the wall, as she dissects the situation and her feelings about it. On a lark, she does a DNA test and unexpectedly discovers that her dad isn’t her biological father. “What potent combination of lawlessness, secrecy, desire, shame, greed, and confusion had led to my conception?” Shapiro writes. Dani Shapiro tells the true story of her DNA test journey in Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love. Shapiro realized that her childhood, her ancestral lineage, and the foundation of her world were based on deception. Her own parents had died, but now, with the support of her husband and son, she discovered her biological father, a doctor from Portland. ![]() 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. 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. 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. ![]()
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