Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro

Author:Dani Shapiro [Shapiro, Dani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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My car pulled away and I walked up the front steps to my cousin Joanne’s home, where Shirley now lived. Another car would pick me up in four hours. Four hours, in which I would tell my aunt—who had once described herself to me as a weaver’s daughter—that she and I were not threads in the same tapestry; that we were not related by blood; that her much-adored older brother was not my father.

Joanne opened the door and ushered me inside warmly. I was still holding a Starbucks cup from the airport. Was Starbucks kosher enough? I wasn’t sure.

“Is this okay?” I gestured to the cup.

If it wasn’t, she didn’t embarrass me.

“Of course. Mom’s been expecting you.”

Joanne led me into a sitting room. There, in the corner, was a framed photograph of Joseph Soloveitchik, the same rabbi whose portrait graced Lookstein’s office at Ramaz. A desk was surrounded by bookcases filled with leather-bound Hebrew volumes. On several long polished tables—just as had been the case in Shirley’s home near Boston and in my grandmother’s apartment in New York City—there were literally hundreds of family photographs. Perhaps as the eldest daughter, Joanne had inherited them. Being a part of this vast array had always comforted me, even as it had confused me. I was the lone pale, blond child in the sea of dark-haired, dark-eyed grandchildren and great-grandchildren—my otherness and difference glaringly evident. Yet I had never had any doubt that I was part of the chain that reached back and back through the generations, unbroken. As I stood in my cousin Joanne’s sitting room, now knowing better, it felt as if the links of that chain were in pieces on the floor all around me.

Shirley emerged from her living quarters behind the sitting room, and we held each other close. She wore a dark skirt and a gray silk blouse, her silver hair pulled back into a low bun. She was unadorned. No makeup. No necklace, no earrings. Her plain gold wedding ring the only decoration on her elegant, supple hands. A Juilliard-trained pianist, she had still been able to sit at the keyboard and play Brahms ballades well into her eighties.

She had become smaller with each passing year. As I hugged her, the top of her head rested beneath my chin.

“Come into my room, sweetheart, before we sit down. There’s something I want to show you.”

I followed Shirley into her bedroom. She had managed to distill the contents of her seven-bedroom home near Boston into a simple, almost monastic space that still contained the essence of her life. Black-and-white portraits of her four children were arranged on a wall opposite her small, well-made bed. A photograph of her late husband, my uncle Moe, was crowded onto a bookshelf along with those of her two brothers, my dad and Uncle Harvey. All of them, gone. She was the last of her generation. A pair of ancient baby shoes sat atop a pile of Shakespeare plays. All of my books—five novels, three memoirs—were nestled among volumes of Judaica.

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