Abraham’s Child

In every generation of every family there is a story keeper. The story keepers diligently document what is known, preserving the stories that have come down to us from our ancestors. Families love the story keeper because it means they do not have to do the tedious work themselves. They even love occasionally to hear these stories, if they are bored enough, or nostalgic enough after a few too many glasses of wine over a holiday meal.

Less universally beloved is the story finder. The story finder is not content to record what the past has left us but seeks to dig up what the past has hidden. What is the story behind the strange term of that old probate record? Why did this ancestor have a second wife when his first was still living? Feelings toward the story finder run from cautious ambivalence to outright hostility. What the past has buried, they argue, it buried for a reason. Why dredge up old skeletons?

I am a story seeker, although I did not always know that I was. I had done genealogy for years, dutifully filling out family group sheets and citing census records and deeds and wills. I traced my paternal grandmother’s ancestry back to a Revolutionary War soldier, and my paternal grandfather’s ancestry through the minefield that is southern genealogy in the United States. But even as I did it, my father always told me that he suspected, deep down, that he was adopted. “Why don’t I look like either of my parents?” he would ask. “And why did I always feel different?”

One year on his birthday, I bought him an Ancestry DNA test. I pegged the chance that he was adopted at approximately zero percent, but I figured if he were, the test would tell us something that would point us in the right direction.

He stalled taking the test. I don’t know if there was part of him that didn’t want to know, or if he just cared so little in comparison to me that it didn’t cross his mind. Finally, when I visited him in our home state of New York, I had him take it and mail it. The results were linked to my email, so it was just a waiting game after that.

When the results came in, I checked with interest. Was he mostly English, as he had always suspected? Maybe some Irish? German? French? All those things were there, but what caught my eye was the ethnic group with the highest percentage in his DNA. Clocking in at about 50% were the words, “European Jewish.”

It was like the answer to a question I never knew I was asking. I knew at that moment that we had uncovered a secret. And I knew I would not rest until I knew what the secret was.

After looking at the ethnicity breakdown, I clicked over to the DNA matches. Here, Ancestry presents you with a list of other people who have tested whose DNA is a match to yours. The first thing I noticed was that my paternal grandmother’s only living sibling had already tested, and came up as a match, likely an aunt. This meant that my father was not adopted. That opened another can of worms. My grandmother was a sweet, mild-mannered, religious woman. Could she have had an affair? I remembered my grandparents holding hands when I was a small child. I wanted a love like they had. It couldn’t have been a lie. But DNA doesn’t lie.

The second thing I noticed was that my father had no paternal matches that connected to the father who raised him. The majority of his matches had Jewish last names and ancestors in Central and Eastern Europe. These were my relatives. But how?

Every week or so I checked for new matches. By this time, I had done my own DNA test to see if the results were similar. I came back at about a third European Jewish, or Ashkenazi. This made sense. Apparently, I had one Jewish grandparent, and a smattering of Jewish DNA I inherited from my mother who was of Puerto Rican ancestry. One day I noticed a new match, someone Ancestry labeled “Close Match — 1st Cousin” to my father. But the amount of shared DNA surpassed that normally found in a first cousin match. This was not a cousin — this was a sibling.

The woman was not accepting messages through Ancestry, so I did a quick Google search of her username. I found several social media pages, including one that gave her first and last name. This led me to her Facebook page. I knew I had to contact her; that I would not be able to rest knowing this person was out there and might have answers. Maybe she would not reply. Maybe she would be annoyed that I tracked her down. But I had to try.

Good afternoon. This may sound strange, but my father took an Ancestry DNA test, and it shows that you are very closely related, possibly as close as half-siblings. I would not blame you for ignoring this message, but I am trying to figure out how my father, who was raised by Southern Christians, is half-Jewish. I am open to any information you might be willing to share.

A few days later, I received a response. This woman, who I will call Ruth to maintain her privacy, told me that she is of 100% Jewish ancestry and was raised in western Long Island, near the border with Queens. Queens is the borough of NYC where my father was born and raised, and where I myself was born. Her father, she said, was a Romanian Jew who immigrated to New York and died in the 1980s. She also told me that, after his death, her mother had revealed to her that in the 1950s, before it was a common procedure, her father had been a sperm donor for infertile couples in the area. He was a handsome man, tall, with light hair and eyes, and these were features many couples were seeking. It was very possible, she said, that my father was one of these donor children.

Ruth sent me his name, and photos of him. I studied the photos intently, looking for myself in this man who was a quarter of me. While I did not really see myself, I did see my dad in the furrow of the brow, the long arms, the confident stance, the strained smile that told me he was rather put out to be photographed at all.

There was more, Ruth told me. She was a two-time cancer survivor. She had an inherited genetic mutation that greatly increased the risk of cancer in carriers, particularly women.

A few months later, I had the test results in hand, confirmed by cancer geneticists at Inova hospital. I was the carrier of a BRCA1 mutation, specifically 185delAG, an ancient founder mutation that had appeared in the Jewish population before the Babylonian exile, a deadly legacy that has woven its way through the diaspora to Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Persian and Iraqi Jews ever since. A small deletion in my DNA that marked me as a child of Abraham long before I had any cognizance that such a thing was even a possibility.

I will not dwell on what followed — the anxiety of cancer screening, the agonizing decision-making process followed by two painful and in some ways devastating preventative surgeries. I had two lovely adoptive daughters, children who would not share in this genetic legacy. But having my ovaries and fallopian tubes removed was a painful reminder that, had I wanted to have biological children, that path was now foreclosed. To make sure my daughters would have a mother, I had closed the door on biological children. I was the opposite of the fruitful vine from the Psalms, and there would be no olive plants around my table, planting roots for the future. I was barren as the desert my ancestors had wandered in, a genetic dead end.

In my darkest days, I asked myself if it would have been better if I had never been born. What was the point of being born, after all, to face the choice of either a painful cancer diagnosis and likely an early death, or a series of surgeries leaving me an empty vessel of a woman? Why was I here? I had been raised Catholic and been a religious Catholic most of my life, with a brief hiatus in college when I stopped practicing. But I was angry at God. Angry that He had given me this affliction, and that the remedy was in some ways as bad as the cure. I was in no way suicidal, but I took on a sort of nihilistic approach to my existence. There was no reason, I concluded, for me to be here.

And yet. Here I am.

I thought of my grandfather. Not the one whose blood flows in my veins, but the one who lovingly raised my father, the one who used to cut me slices of juicy watermelon in our backyard and cringe when I got to close to the rind. The one who gave me $5 bills when he won a horse race and made me feel rich. He and my grandmother wanted children so badly that after ten years of marriage they went through a stigmatized and likely expensive procedure to have them, and then loved them enough to want to keep that secret hidden. If I am a dead end, was my grandfather a dead end? The love pouring out from him was still flowing to this day in myself, my sisters, and the love we have for our own children regardless of their biology.

“For I know the plans that I have for you,” God said to the prophet Jeremiah, “Plans for prosperity, and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.”

God and these surgeries had given me a future. But only I could give myself a present.

I began to counsel women who were newly aware of their BRCA mutation status. I gave them the advice I wished I had received when I first learned the news. I listened as they cried. I agreed with them when they raged against the unfairness of it.

“It is unfair. It is horribly unfair. Every decision is terrible. But here we are, and we have to make the best terrible decision we can live with.”

I also dove into my Jewish heritage. My years of wrestling with God in my dark night of the soul had bonded me even more closely with my forefathers and foremothers, descendants of the same Jacob who had wrestled with God along the riverbanks.

I started learning Yiddish, the language my grandfather would have spoken. My lessons brought the beautiful words of Scripture off the page in a way that can only be described as an awakening. I pored over the lyricism of the secular Yiddish poetry, and admired the fact that even the most atheistic, jaded Jewish writer could not quite leave God out of his poetry. God crept in. They were wrestling, too, I realized. We all are.

Learning Yiddish entails learning a bit of Hebrew. I learned to say, Baruch HaShem. This literally means “Blessed be the Name”, but is often used in practice to mean, “Thank God.” I find saying this in Hebrew so much more satisfying. When I get good news, the words Baruch HaShem come to my lips unbidden, invoking God without invoking him, referring to him with reverential distance but with the intimacy of the language of his sacred text.

I am still Catholic. That part of me is sacred, too. But it is imbued with a devotion to my Jewish heritage that I could not deny even if I wanted to. It is there in me, the part of me that never accepts the simple answer, that drills into the meaning behind every syllable. The part of me for which love and worry are always inextricably intertwined. The part of me that wears my emotions on my sleeve.

Once I stood at the aft of a ship in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. It was dark and the stars shone brightly in a way you rarely see in a suburban town near a major metropolitan area. I thought of how the night sky must have looked even brighter to Abraham, as God told him that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars.

God was right. He always is. But Abraham could not have envisioned how it would come to be, how his children would turn up in the most unexpected places.

“Now look toward the heavens and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He said to him, “So shall your descendants be.”

And one of those stars is me.

In the scheme of things, my life is miniscule. But even the faintest star in the heavens burns with an unimaginable brightness. I struggle with a lot of things. But I no longer struggle with the question of my existence.

Baruch HaShem. Here I am.