Blood Matters by Masha Gessen

Author:Masha Gessen [Gessen, Masha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Genetics, Nonfiction, Retail, Science
ISBN: 9780156033312
Amazon: 0156033313
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2009-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

Jewish teenagers’ blogs made it apparent that Dor Yeshorim had become an accepted rite of passage, as banal and momentous as high school graduation. Miriam could not quite recall when Dor Yeshorim became a fact of life. She and her husband had not been tested: The program was younger than her oldest child. In fact, she recalled, they and everyone else in their summer community had given money to Dor Yeshorim in the early days. And now she could not see any of her children marrying without checking “genetic compatibility,” in Dor Yeshorim’s language.

Normally a budding couple in the Orthodox community would go on eight dates before becoming engaged (for the Hasidim, the average number of dates is more like two, and the dates are conversations in the girl’s parents’ home, while the Orthodox would likely go out to a lounge). So a courtship might last a month or so—and Dor Yeshorim would urge the young people to check their numbers against each other earlier rather than later, to avoid bitter disappointment. But Miriam’s eldest daughter was engaged to her husband within a week of meeting him.

“It was a story for the books.” Miriam beamed. “It really was. He had dated for many years. He was dating for seven and a half years. He was very much sought after. He was driving to Baltimore to meet a girl, making like this huge effort—and nothing! He even went out with my daughter-in-law, my oldest son’s wife. It wasn’t what he was looking for.” Miriam’s husband had tried to help to find a match for this young man, who had no family in New York, but nothing worked—until he met Miriam’s daughter at a small recital in their apartment. “Somehow it was so natural and it was so obvious,” said Miriam.

When did they check with Dor Yeshorim? Miriam called to the other room: “Nachum? When did you check with Dor Yeshorim? In your whole dating career? Tell Masha how it happened.” In the other room, a baby screeched and a man’s voice mumbled something unintelligible. Instead of Nachum, Miriam’s daughter, radiant and disheveled in the way of new mothers, emerged from the other room. “We went out on our fourth date,” she said, “and he asked me to marry him. But first he had to check with Dor Yeshorim the next day. So he didn’t really ask me fully, ‘Will you marry me?’ but the next day he found out in the morning and he sent me a text, he messaged me, and that night he asked me to marry him.

“The first time he just like gave me a smile, and it was, like, understood. And the second time—” Mother and daughter laughed, and I never got to hear how precisely Nachum proposed, and what exactly he put in the text message that morning. It was all so well understood by everyone—it seemed it was fate. So, what if Dor Yeshorim had said, “No match”?

“Then they would not have married,” said Miriam.

“No question about it?” I asked.

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