Join us for a Virtual Evening with New York Times Bestselling Author Dani Shapiro, in Conversation with Dr. Miriam Klein Kassenoff on her memoir, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love, a National Jewish Book Award Winner.
Inheritance, Shapiro's tenth book and fifth memoir, is a quest to uncover a family mystery involving her identity. This time around, the catalyst is a genetic spit test taken out of idle curiosity in 2016. At age 54, Shapiro is shocked to learn that the devout Orthodox Jewish stockbroker she thought was her biological father — who taught her about the Jewish people, who inspired her to study about the Holocaust, Paul Shapiro, the man who died in that car accident — wasn't a blood relative!
Shapiro is shaken to her core by this discovery. If Paul wasn't her real father and she isn't who she thinks she is, then who is she? Where did the non-Ashkenazi French, Irish, English, and German 48 percent of her DNA come from? And, even more upsetting: Did her parents know this and deliberately hide it from her?