Too, there were odd incidents that had not made sense at the time, including when her mother, upon meeting a friend of Shapiro’s at a literary event, asked where she was from.

Shapiro, who is the author of four novels, numerous stories and articles, and five memoirs (including this one) once attended a writing conference where a famous Jewish poet, despite hearing her recite her bona fides (raised kosher, went to yeshiva, speaks fluent Hebrew), insisted repeatedly, “There’s no possibility you’re Jewish.” Describing herself as “fair, pale-skinned, blue eyes,” Shapiro says that, “It really was the story of my life - that literally every day someone or another would say, ‘You don't look Jewish,’ or ‘You can't possibly be Jewish.’” The stories of her paternal bloodline tracing back to the shtetl seemed to resonate with her on an almost daily basis.Īt the same time, she told Block, there had been small fissures all along, especially because she bore little resemblance to her relatives. It was clear that her strong ties to her ancestry amplified the shock she felt. I first heard Dani Shapiro’s tale on an NPR segment with Melissa Block. I was struck by Shapiro’s circumstance. To address the thorniest of the issues raised by the use of anonymous donor sperm, some countries have enacted policies that ban it altogether or limit the number of times a single anonymous donor’s sperm may be used. Often shrouded in secrecy, the practice, known in the trade as artificial insemination by donor (AID), has spawned bioethical debate for decades. Since the 1800s, when physicians in Europe, the UK, and the US first began using artificial insemination to address issues of male infertility, millions of children have been conceived with so-called donor sperm. That meant Paul Shapiro - the man who had raised her and shared his Orthodox Jewish faith with her who had taken her to weekly temple services and helped her learn Hebrew whose family portraits covered her walls, including relatives who had perished in the Holocaust and those who had survived to help build thriving communities of Orthodox Jews in the American Northeast - was not her biological father.ĭani Shapiro, whose life was thrown into emotional and cognitive turmoil for the next few years, is, of course, not alone. Thus was Dani Shapiro’s sense of her own identity forever altered.īecause when the results came back, Dani’s report led to the inescapable conclusion that she had no immediate genetic relationship to her older half-sister, the child of her father and his first wife. Michael Maren was curious about his genetic heritage, so he sent away for an ancestry testing kit while he was at it, he got one for his wife.

Dani shapiro inheritance