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A sepia photograph of my father as a little boy hangs just outside our living room, where I pass it dozens of times a day. He poses in a herringbone coat and bowler hat, white kneesocks and shoes, playfully holding a cane. His eyes are round, his smile impish. He was the oldest son born into a family obsessed with recording itself—a family conscious of its own legacy. Grandparents, great-uncles, great-aunts, even distant cousins from the old country are scattered throughout my house. But it is the portrait of my father that is my favorite. Who is that? friends will ask. My dad, I will answer. He has been dead more than half my life and still the feeling is the same: a warm, quiet pride, a sense of connection, of tethering, of belonging.
The portraits and sepia photographs can be traced to the Eastern Europe of my forebears. My ninety-three-year-old aunt Shirley—my father’s younger sister—has been the family archivist. Years ago, she entrusted Michael and me with the task of digitizing the contents of a massive leather-bound family album. Jagged-edged photographs traced an evolution from the dusty shtetl to prosperous turn-of-the-century America. Michael took each one from the album and created an online version to share with the grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren, now numbering in the hundreds. There’s Grammy and Grampy about to set sail for Europe. My grandparents were regal and glamorous next to a trolley piled high with their steamer trunks. There’s Rabbi Soloveitchik and Uncle Moe with Lyndon Johnson. There’s Moe with John Kennedy. Men in yarmulkes next to presidents, their faces proud and lit with purpose.
These ancestors are the foundation upon which I have built my life. I have dreamt of them, wrestled with them, longed for them. I have tried to understand them. In my writing, they have been my territory—my obsession, you might even say. They are the tangled roots—thick, rich, and dark—that bind me to the turning earth. During younger years when I was lost—particularly after my dad’s death—I used them as my inner compass. I would ask what to do, which way to turn. I would listen intently, and hear them answer. I don’t mean this metaphysically—not exactly. I’m not sure what I believe about where we go when we die, but I can say with certainty that I’ve felt the presence of this long-gone crowd whenever I’ve sought them. My dad, in particular, would come to me in an electric tingle running the length of my body. I was convinced that my father was able to reach me through time and space because of the thousands of people who connected us.
L’dor vador. These Hebrew words, one of most fundamental tenets of Judaism, translate into from generation to generation. I am the tenth and youngest grandchild of Joseph Shapiro, self-made industrialist, philanthropist, a leader of modern Orthodoxy: chairman of the presidium of the Mesifta Tifereth Jerusalem, treasurer of Torah Umesorah, vice president of the Lubavitcher Yeshiva, member of the national board of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations. I am the tenth and youngest grandchild of Beatrice Shapiro, his beautiful, gracious wife, who was admired and emulated by religious women of her generation the world over. I am the daughter of their oldest son, Paul. Everything I am, everything I know to be true, begins with these facts.
I woke up one morning and life was as I had always known it to be. There were certain things I thought I could count on. I looked at my hand, for example, and I knew it was my hand. My foot was my foot. My face, my face. My history, my history. After all, it’s impossible to know the future, but we can be reasonably sure about the past. By the time I went to bed that night, my entire history—the life I had lived—had crumbled beneath me, like the buried ruins of an ancient forgotten city.
A Zen meditation made popular by the twentieth-century Indian sage Ramana Maharshi goes like this: the student begins by asking and answering the question Who am I?
I am a woman. I am a mother. I am a wife. I am a writer. I am a daughter. I am a granddaughter. I am a niece. I am a cousin. I am, I am, I am.
The idea is that eventually, the sense of I am will dissolve. Once we’re past all our many labels and notions of what makes us who we think we are, we will discover that there is no I—no us. This will lead us to a greater understanding of the true nature of impermanence. The exercise is meant to go on long past the most obvious pillars of our identity, the ones beyond question—until we run out of all the ways we think of ourselves. But what does it mean when the I am breaks down at the very beginning of the list?