At 50, I Went Looking for my Birth Parents

Heritage, chesed, and Jewish DNA

This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.

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Photo by Jason W on Unsplash

For most of my life, I resisted opening the Pandora’s Box of my birth parents. I was afraid to allow anyone else into this inner sanctum. I didn’t want to risk displacing my parents.

But when she was six, my daughter, Rachel, longed for someone to bring to Grandparents’ Day. My husband and I were both orphans. What to do? At 50 years old, I decided it was finally time to do a genealogy test. As I coughed up enough spit to fill the Ancestry kit plastic vial, I was both exhilarated and scared of the secrets I might learn. I knew enough to know that we never find exactly what we’re looking for.

A few weeks later, my test results came back: I am 75 percent Ashkenazi and—what’s more—my birth father was living in Manhattan’s Theatre District. Unbelievably, when I spoke to him, I learned that, just like my adopted father, he was a Holocaust survivor. I ended up finding a lot of genetic kin: aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews. That summer, I schlepped my family to Minnesota, where Rachel met my birth mother’s sister. On the plane on the way home she asked, “What’s a relative, mommy?”

By the time I met him, my birth father was 86 and ill with dementia. He looked into my green eyes and told me they made him think of my birth mother—a “wild and zaftig” woman with whom he’d had a brief fling in the 1960s. When I told him my daughter’s name was Rachel, he told me I should change it. “Dahling, it’s too Jewish,” he said. He died a few months later. After the initial thrill subsided, my genetic kin and I did not really form lasting relationships.

Who is a Jew? asked Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. He answered: Someone whose great-grandchildren are Jewish. He defined Jewishness not by our past, but by our future. Who knows what the future holds? I think I know, when I hear Rachel sing “Hatikva” along with Taylor Swift, White Christmas, and the Maccabeats.

Two years after the genealogy test, Rachel asked to go to Long Island to see my childhood house. I wished we could enter a wrinkle in time and arrive, oh, circa 1980. A Sunday afternoon. We’d pull up into the driveway to find my engineer dad under his latest mint-green Cadillac, full of grease. He’s listening to his favorite Louis Armstrong 8 track, “What a Wonderful World.”

Inside, the house smells of almond crescent cookies and onions, freshly fried for chopped liver. My mother is cooking and baking, delicacies she learned from my father’s Aunt Esther: sachertorte and schnitzel. My Omama comes downstairs and drinks a cup of kalter kaffee. Everyone speaks German, including me.

Mom hands me a bakery box of warm cookies dusted with confectioner’s sugar. “Leeza, take these to your friend Meryl’s house across the street, and here, bring them some egg salad and challah bread too.” Meryl’s father has cancer, and Mom likes to sweeten things up.

My husband never met my parents, but I tell him and Rachel stories all the time. When I told him about this ordinary Sunday, he said: “Your parents had a spontaneous, effortless chesed. This is your inheritance, more than any DNA could ever give you.”

He was right. And then my Jewish husband told me a Jewish joke: Moshe, a young Jewish man who had never left his Polish shtetl, went to the great city of Warsaw. He was away for several months, and his friend Chaim waited impatiently to hear about his travels. When Moshe finally returned, he told his friend Chaim of the wonders he had seen.

“Chaim, my friend, you’ll never believe it,” he enthused. “In Warsaw, I met a Jew who owned a large factory with many employees. And I met a Jew who was a socialist and organized the unions against the factory and business owners. And I also met a Jew who was a Zionist and argued that all the Jews should unite, leave the exile, and move to Palestine. And I met a Jew who was deeply mystical and who said that trust in Hashem will provide for us wherever we are.” With each meeting he recounted, Moshe's eyes grew wider.

“So, Nu, Moshele," said Chaim, "What’s so strange about all that? Warsaw’s a big city. There must be at least a million Jews there.”

“No, no, Chaimele, you don’t understand!” Moshe exclaimed. “It was the same Jew!”

The same Jew, c’est moi. In college, I was a Jew who cared more about opposing apartheid than I did about lighting Sabbath candles. After college, I was the Jew who never dated clean-cut Jewish lawyers or doctors, but scrappy artists and poets. Visiting my relatives in Israel, I was a Jew who longed to be on the Greek islands with my boyfriend; after my father died, I was a Jewish Buddhist in the Bahamas, chanting “Om Namah Shivaya” to Krishna Das.

Through it all, I was also the Jew who recited the Shema every night before I fell asleep. My mother taught me this prayer on our first flight to Israel, 30,000 feet above sea level.

Now, I’m a middle-aged Jewish mama, married to a Jewish professor, with a daughter at Jewish day school. I’ve been the Jew who would never do a genealogy test and the Jew who brings her birth father chocolate croissants.

I’m the Jew who played “Hallelujah” to my daughter in the womb, and who considers Leonard Cohen to be mishpacha—along with Saul Bellow and Barbra Streisand and all the artists who have imprinted on me with their singular visions and songs.

Am I the daughter of survivors on my nature side? The daughter of survivors on my nurture side? The daughter of refugees and immigrants on both sides? Am I all of the above, none of the above?

I’m both/and, grafted from two Jewish Polish trees. Mostly, I come from Sundays at my parents’: a Jewish home filled with the best Israeli-Hungarian-Austrian food you’ve ever tasted, with jokes, songs, and the joy of Yiddishkeit.

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Pushcart nominee and Temple University English Professor Lisa Grunberger is a first-generation American writer. Her poetry books, I am dirty and Born Knowing are lyrical reflections on life as a woman, a mother, and a daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her most recent poetry book For the Future of Girls was nominated for an Eric Hoffer Independent Press Award. Almost Pregnant, her play about infertility and assisted reproductive technologies, is published by Next Stage Press. Her humor book, Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie’s Adventures in Love, Loss and the Lotus Position (HarperCollins) recounts a Jewish grandmother’s journey through yoga after being widowed. The Jewish Literary Journal recently published “Strangers and Kin,” excerpted from her memoir in progress. She has poems and creative non-fiction in The Southern Review, Of the Book and The Jerry Jazz Musician. Lisa teaches yoga and writing workshops and lives with her family in Philadelphia.

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This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.