by Dani Shapiro
Another memory, or perhaps less a memory than something vestigial, now pulled from the ruins of my childhood. Just as I can feel Mrs. Kushner’s hand on my shoulder, just as I can see my mother’s profile illuminated by the lights of the George Washington Bridge, so another moment comes to me whole: I am three years old, and my mother has brought me from our New Jersey home into New York City, where the well-known children’s photographer Josef Schneider is going to take my portrait. It isn’t the first time I’ve been in front of Schneider’s lens, though it is the first time I have any recollection of it. My mother knows him from back when she worked in advertising, before she married my father. His background as a child psychologist makes him uniquely suited to photographing young children. He is adept at eliciting certain moods and expressions from them, and—if all else fails—he bribes them with candy.
Snap! Schneider makes faces at me. He thinks I don’t know that he’s holding a button in his fist that is making the shutter snap. Snap! My mother must be close by, watching. I’ve just looked it up, and Schneider’s studio was on West Fifty-seventh Street. There may be faint city sounds from the busy street below. The sigh of buses, the wail of sirens, honking horns. Smile, Dani! Over here, Dani! Something tells me that this is important to my mother. That I had better perform, and perform well. That’s right, Dani! She would have pronounced my name, as she always did, as if it were slightly foreign and exotic, drawing out the a. Daaah-ni.
I have very few memories of my early life, but this—the shutter, the button in the photographer’s fist, the sound of my mother calling my name—is one of them. Schneider wasn’t just a portrait photographer. He had been responsible for discovering the babies who were in the commercials and ads for everything from Ivory Snow to Pampers. He recruited babies and children from everywhere: agents, managers, proud mothers, even hospitals. I recently dug up a profile of him in a 1977 issue of People. “You’re lucky if you get one good baby out of fifteen,” he sighed to the reporter. “A kid is as individual as a thumbprint.”
The portrait from that day’s shoot became the holiday poster—the Christmas poster—for Kodak that winter. In it, I am set against a pitch-black background, and wearing a black pinafore over a puffy-sleeved white blouse. The pinafore is decorated with a deep red poppy. My hair is cut into Dutch boy bangs, and I am playing with a wooden train that carries a half dozen red and green wooden elves. I appear solemn, quizzical, as I focus on a point just above the camera’s lens.
The way my mother always told the story, the Kodak people—clients of Schneider’s—just happened to be visiting his studio shortly after he had taken my portrait, and had asked if it might be possible to use my image on the poster for their national campaign. My parents agreed, and that winter a massive Colorama billboard dominated the main terminal concourse of Grand Central Terminal. A poster hung on a wall at F.A.O. Schwarz for years. Ads were spotted by family and friends all over America.
As I recall, it was a source of great merriment in our home: the fact that an Orthodox child was out there wishing the entire nation a very Merry Christmas. Such a hilarious accident! My mother loved to tell it: she had brought me to the city for a commissioned portrait and, instead, the executives at Kodak had discovered me. A framed version of the poster had a place of pride in the living room of my childhood home, where anyone visiting would be sure to see it. Beneath my quizzical face is a whimsical illustration of a couple being pulled through a snow-covered field on a horse-drawn sleigh.
Confirmation bias—a psychological term I had never heard before but one with which I will become intimately familiar—is the process by which the mind seeks to confirm what it already believes. When in the throes of confirmation bias, we seek and interpret information that will allow us to continue to hold on to our beliefs, even when presented with contradictory evidence.
You aren’t Jewish, Mark Strand had flatly said.
We could have used you in the ghetto. Mrs. Kushner ran her hand through my hair.
Raised kosher, I replied more times than I can count. Went to a yeshiva. Spoke fluent Hebrew. And when faced with the bemusement, the disbelief: I know. It’s crazy. I mean, I was the Kodak Christmas poster child.
* * *
—
Once back home in Connecticut, one afternoon Michael stood for a long time staring at the Christmas poster, which now hangs in Jacob’s bathroom.
“This was shot as a Christmas ad,” he finally said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re playing with red and green elves,” Michael said. “Look at them.”
I stood next to him, examining the photograph of me that had been a part of my life’s narrative for as long as I could remember, and for the first time registered the truth of what I was seeing. It was unmistakable. The elves’ red and green hats were shaped like Christmas trees. The colors of the portrait were Christmas colors, down to the black and red dress I wore. It was not a portrait commissioned by a Jewish mother from New Jersey. It was a portrait deliberately shot as a Christmas ad.
“Are there any other pictures of you wearing that dress?” Michael asked.
No. No, there were not.
Perhaps Josef Schneider called my mother to suggest she bring me in to audition for the Kodak ad. Or it is also quite possible that my mother proffered me herself. She had disdain for stage mothers, so never could have admitted to such a thing. But given the opportunity, she could not have resisted the lure, the temptation of the spotlight. Her daughter, her hard-won daughter, her only child—so surprisingly pretty, so shockingly fair—beheld as the classic, iconic American child. As she returned home from the city, her mind must have worked overtime to fashion a series of lies my father would believe. My mother was quite convincing when she had set her sights on something she wanted badly. “Paul, you’ll never believe what happened! The Kodak people want to put Dani on their holiday poster! Wouldn’t that be so funny?”
Her unsteady gaze, her wide, practiced smile. Her self-consciousness, the way every word seemed rehearsed. His stooped shoulders, the downward turn of his mouth. The way he was never quite present. Her rage. His sorrow. Her brittleness. His fragility. Their screaming fights. The harsh exchange of whispers behind their closed bedroom door. As a child—not much older than I was when I played with the elves and the red and green train—I pressed my ear to that door. I strained to listen. Your parents had to know, Wendy Kramer said. Your mother had to know. My mother is buried in a cemetery near the Jersey shore. My father’s bones lie in the Shapiro family plot in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. And I am straining to listen now.
25
The hottest summer on record became my season of carefully crafted letters. I stayed indoors in the coolest, darkest room in my house, drafting odd requests and entreaties. The first of these was to Haskel Lookstein, a well-respected New York City rabbi who had known my dad. I let him know in an email that I’d made a stunning discovery about my paternity and was hoping to speak with him about the halachah, an area he was uniquely suited to discuss with me.
The week I wrote Rabbi Lookstein followed on the heels of his involvement in a controversy. He had been invited to deliver the benediction at the Republican National Convention, and his acceptance of the invitation had caused uproar among many members of his Upper East Side synagogue. Though he had changed his mind about offering the benediction, he was probably still dealing with the fallout. As I sent him an email, I wondered if he’d have the energy to meet with me. He was eighty-four years old. But I didn’t have long to wait. I heard back from him that same day, inviting me to visit him in his office at the Ramaz School, the yeshiva founded by his father.
The morning of my meeting with the rabbi, I scoured my closet for my most modest skirt. It was a sweltering day. My longest summer skirt hit me two inches above the knee. My shoulders had to be covered too. I checked my reflection in my bedroom mirror, turning this way
and that, beset by a feeling of not-quite-rightness. It was familiar—this sense of being inappropriate that came upon me whenever I entered observant society.
The city sidewalks outside Rabbi Lookstein’s office shimmered. Two double-parked trucks had created a bottleneck on the corner of Lexington Avenue and Eighty-fifth Street. I was early for my appointment and stood in the shade of an awning across from the entrance to Ramaz. Once again, I was dizzy, light-headed. I jumped at the sound of a jackhammer. I was nervous about meeting with Lookstein. He would have been a young rabbi at the time my parents were making their trips to Philadelphia. Was it possible that my father had consulted with him on the halachah? That the rabbi had direct knowledge about the circumstances of my conception? Or not. Maybe Lookstein knew nothing at all, because my father had known nothing at all.
Part of my father’s history resided within the red-brick building abutting the ornate synagogue across the street. He would have attended services at Kehilath Jeshurun with his first wife, Susie’s mother. I could picture them, a handsome couple, entering the arched doors in their Sabbath finest. Perhaps he would also have gone to services there with his second wife, Dorothy, before her illness took its final turn. It was only with my mother that my father left the fold, moved to New Jersey so they could begin anew.
It had always been true that in synagogues, when I heard the melodies and language of certain prayers and songs, I would hear my father’s voice, close to my ear, as if he hadn’t been gone for decades. Adon olam, asher malach. I would sense his presence in these sanctuaries where he had felt most at home. I could hear him now, as I stood no more than a hundred yards from the closed doors of Kehilath Jeshurun. I could feel the smooth, worn fabric of his tallis, the silky fringes I played with when I was very young. B’terem kol, y’tzir nivra. How could it have been that I felt so close to my father but not at home in his world?
I was buzzed in by the security guard and slowly climbed the steps to Lookstein’s office. The building was hushed, quiet. School wasn’t in session. Seated in the receptionist’s area, I leafed through copies of Eretz magazine. I pulled my phone from my bag and texted Michael. My longest skirt is the shortest skirt in the building.
Rabbi Lookstein was a slight man with a trim white beard. He invited me into his cluttered, book-lined office. On the far wall behind his desk was a portrait of Joseph Soloveitchik, another beloved Orthodox rabbi who had been close to my family. Soloveitchik was considered by many to have been the greatest leader of Modern Orthodoxy in the twentieth century. On the floor near the door was a huge blowup photo of Lookstein wearing a Mets jersey and cap, standing by the dugout at Citi Field. One of the team’s owners was probably a congregant.
He seated himself in a chair facing me.
“I think I know why you’re here,” he began.
He did? All I had told him was that an issue had arisen about my paternity. What could he have gleaned from that? I braced myself for whatever he was about to say.
“Your mother had a first marriage before your father,” he went on. “And you’re worried that she never received a proper get.”
A get is a Jewish divorce. The rabbi had thought about this. What other issue could I possibly have been bringing to him? At that moment, I realized that Lookstein knew nothing. There was no memory, no ethical dilemma about whether to be honest about a long-ago conversation. I felt flooded with relief. How desperate I was to believe that my father had been in the dark right alongside me.
“Um…no,” I replied. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
I launched into the story I’d learned to tell without feeling the shock of its impact. I began with my DNA results.
“I’m not even sure that halachah recognizes DNA results,” he interrupted. But as I proceeded, he grew quiet and listened carefully, his hands folded in his lap.
When I finished—telling him only the salient details, leaving out my correspondence with Ben Walden, which seemed, in that context, like a betrayal of my father—he nodded and stroked his beard.
“What concerns you most?” he finally asked.
After managing to keep my feelings tamped down, suddenly I was crying. “Whether my father knew,” I answered. “The halachah—it seems so unlikely that he would have gone through with it. Whether my mother deceived him, or—”
“You’ll never know,” the rabbi said.
You don’t know who you’re dealing with, I thought but didn’t say. You’ll never know was unacceptable. You’ll never know simply could not be what I was left with in the end. Who was I without my history?
Lookstein gave me a long, searching look.
“Which story would ease your heart?” he asked.
“The true one,” I answered.
“No matter what, you’re Jewish,” he said. “Your mother was Jewish. Jewish egg, Jewish woman giving birth, the child would be Jewish. There would have been no need to convert you.”
None of this had occurred to me, nor would it have mattered. One of the more minor surprises thus far had been how little I seemed to care about my acceptability as a Jew.
“And your son is Jewish. No issue there. Jewish mother, Jewish son.” He said this kindly, as if offering me relief.
“But do you have any sense of whether my father would have sought rabbinic advice?” I asked. “And what you—or another rabbi—would have told him?”
Lookstein had the sad brown eyes of a basset hound, set in an elegant, elfin face. He crossed his legs, touched two fingers to his lips. His eyes traveled to the portrait of Joseph Soloveitchik behind his desk.
“Kol hakavod to your father,” he suddenly said. All the honor. “If, god forbid, I had been in that situation myself, and my wife very badly wanted a child, I would have agreed to it.”
“What are you saying?” My stomach roiled. The room expanded and contracted like an accordion. “Are you saying you think he knew?”
“Yes,” Lookstein said.
“But the halachah—”
“I would give your father the credit that he wanted your mother to bear a child. He would have been fulfilling the mitzvah of pru u’rvu—the first thing God said to Abraham. Be fruitful and multiply.”
I couldn’t keep this version of the story in my head. My mother’s logic, now rendered moot. It couldn’t be true. My father had been many things. He had been fearful, terribly anxious. At times he’d had a temper. He was prone to depression. But he was an honest man. Could an honest man keep the truth of his daughter’s origins from her?
“So you’re telling me that my father would have proceeded with total acceptance?”
“What I’m telling you,” Lookstein said, “is that he would have felt he had done a huge mitzvah.”
* * *
—
I left Ramaz with the rabbi, and we headed west to Park Avenue. His head was covered by a straw fedora, and he clasped his hands behind him as he walked. I was less steady on my feet than a man in his mid-eighties. I didn’t believe this story. I wasn’t even sure Lookstein believed this story. I thought back to his first words to me: You’ll never know.
The bright sun beat down on us. Every few moments a passerby greeted him and he tipped his hat. Hello, Rabbi. Good afternoon, Rabbi. This square block was his fiefdom. Was he just trying to make me feel better? Was it his rabbinic judgment that easing my heart was all that mattered?
“This was a more difficult question than the one I thought you’d have,” he said. “If you send me your phone number, I wish to speak with a friend—the chief rabbi of Jerusalem—who might have further thoughts on the halachah.”
As we rounded the corner of Park Avenue, Lookstein spoke fondly of my father. It was comforting to be in the presence of someone who had known him. There were so few people left. Lookstein and my father had been part of the same circle during all those years before he met my mother.
When I had written my piece for The New Yorker about my father’s ill-fated marriage to Dorothy, I had interviewed Lookstein’s sister, who had been married to my dad’s best friend. That tight-knit group of young people in postwar Manhattan seemed to have lived contented lives shaped by ritual and faith. But my father had been unlucky within all that simple contentment. Divorced. Then widowed. The great Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson himself had counseled my father to postpone the wedding until Dorothy died, but he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her. Instead, he moved forward with an indelible action that carried with it agonizing consequences. He took a short, harsh journey on behalf of the woman he loved.
Lookstein nodded and tipped his hat as we parted on the corner of Eighty-fourth and Park. Was it my imagination, or were his eyes brimming with tears?
“We thought your father was a hero,” he said.
26
I returned again and again with renewed astonishment to the thirty-six hours that had elapsed from the moment I discovered my father wasn’t my biological father until the moment Ben Walden appeared on my computer screen. Thirty-six hours. Like a video I saw of an Australian kid solving a Rubik’s Cube in 7.36 seconds. Impossible, but not. I would never be tempted to get a tattoo of my donor’s number. I would never order a parent-on-a-chain dog tag necklace. I was lucky.
Ben was alive. Healthy. Not very old. And at least for the moment, he was willing to engage with me. But what—exactly—did I want from him? Ben Walden was not the deepest part of the story for me. He was not the end of the mystery but rather, the beginning. My visit with Rabbi Lookstein had not eased my heart. In fact, it had confused me further. I rewrote my own history repeatedly until the contents of my mind resembled a chalkboard, words not entirely erased, all smudged a cloudy white. Had my mother lied? Had the doctor covered it up? Why else would my father have raced to Philadelphia? But then there was Lookstein. Kol hakavod. Everywhere I looked, there seemed another possible set of circumstances. And each set of circumstances painted my past in a different light.