You may be separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles, but DNA testing is making it possible for far-flung family members to reconnect
“Are you my mother?” asks the little bird in the eponymous P.D. Eastman children’s classic. The baby bird wanders from one animal and contraption to the next, trying to find his way back to his family.
The book became popular because children fear separation from their parents, and because everyone wants to know where they belong. The craving for family runs deep, especially in people who don’t have many relatives.
Moment editor Nadine Epstein is one of them. She writes eloquently of “familial loneliness syndrome” in an article entitled, “Jewish Genes as Time Machines.” “All family members in Europe on both sides were assumed dead at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators,” she says. “My grandparents were young when they fled poverty, conscription and anti-Semitism… they carried with them few heirlooms or photographs, and what family history they knew they kept to themselves.”
Jewish people have pulled up their stakes every few hundred years or so, each exile cutting us off from the previous one. Yet despite these discontinuities, we’ve always attached tremendous importance to yichus and mesorah. We’re the most ancient of peoples, with a tribal past and a long memory, and an inborn sense of history and family. Is it any wonder many of us feel a tug to unearth our family histories and trace those geographical meanderings?
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