23 and me

I've had some interest in genealogy going back a while. I knew that my father's parents came from Belchatow (at least that's how we spell it) in Central Poland, and that their town was under the government of Russia when they came to America, although previously it was under Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and even Napolean for a few years.

I attended a Jewish genealogy convention in Washington in 2003. I met some cousins I had never heard about. A woman I met there with ancestry in Belchatow found her and my greatgrandfather's burial sites next to each other in New York City. I found that my father's family had been traced back to the early eighteenth century, when they first took last names. I also learned that my grandparents were not the first set of cousins to marry in that family, explaining our good looks and intelligence, but also our tendency to have bad hearts and immune system problems like asthma and psoriasis.

On my mother's side, I couldn't find much. I knew that my granfather's family was well-known in Europe, that great-grandpa was not born in Kamenetz in Ukraine, where he came from to New York. It's possible that their family had the rare privilege in Czarist Russia to live in St.Petersburg before the czar's assassination in 1881. I haven't verified that. And my grandmother's mother, the only great-grandparent I knew, although from "Russia," her papers from Ellis Island say "Austria-Hungary."

At Osher Life-Long Learning, or OLLI, where both Joe and I taught last quarter, a geneticist from WVU taught a class about DNA testing at what one might find. I signed up for the class and sent a vial of spit and some money to "23 and me" to find out more.

Jews in Baltimore in the 1950s and '60s had a peculiar status. We were restricted to certain neighborhoods, both wealthy (suburban Stevenson) and poor (Lower Park Heights Avenue in Baltimore City). I  went to junior high with kids from parts of Stevenson, and joined B'nai B'rith Youth at that time, where many of the kids lived in Lower Park Heights. Both were great places to grow up.  We lived in a new neighborhood in the early fifties, one that had excluded Jews until the builder of our house decided to advertise in The Baltimore Jewish Times.

We were clearly not African-Americans, who could not buy new houses in the suburbs or go anyplace outside of their neighborhoods. Still, we were excluded from the private neighborhood swim club near us.

I did have a sense that we were not exactly white people. I thought Pat Boone and Tab Hunter were handsome enough in the movies, but it was not until suave and gorgeous George Chakiris in West Side Story showed up (Greek from Ohio, playing a Puerto Rican) that I saw someone I might grow up to look like, except for the tall with long legs and a full head of hair part. My friends in seventh grade. Michael, Lenny and Alan, were all dark like me.

In Los Angeles and Miami, the two places I lived longest as an adult, I fit in better. I spoke good Spanish and could pass for Cuban. They were a majority in the city. In Los Angeles, I could be Mexican, Filipino, Armenian, or more correctly, Russian Jewish. The neighborhood where I lived with Joe from 2006-2010 was a homeland-in-exile for Russian Jews, many of them elderly and almost all of them of Jewish background. I saw them as different, but they spotted me, and I learned a few words of Russian to engage.

23 and me gives you a wealth of data, much of it just incomprehensible numbers, and lists of possible cousins with whom you share DNA. The first two of these, my closet relatives in this system, are my first cousins' sons, one on my mother's side and one on my father's. After that there is a lot of "Anonymous" and people whose names I don't recognize. A few have contacted me, but I can't find a connection by name.

They also can tell you your likely eye and hair color, which I already know, and if you are a carrier for a certain disease or condition, which might be helpful if is one is planning to reproduce.

They can tell you what ethnic group you are from. In my case, I am 97% Ashkenazic, or Jewish from Germany, Austria, Poland or Russia. Not shocking.

The most interesting thing was the haplogroups, data they can get from your parents' chromosomes. These show the branch of the family tree of our whole species that one is on. My father's haplogroup is most likely from Southern Europe, the Near East and North Africa. These people are typically  Bedouins, Ashkenazic Jews and Algerians. My mother's group is from the Near East, North Africa and Western Eurasia. These people include  Saudi Arabs, Yemeni Jews, and Bedouins.

So maybe we do go back to Bible times in Israel. And maybe the Arabs are not different from some of us at all. Perhaps my affinity to people from Iran is more genetic than I think it is.

Race is still an issue. I am perhaps overly sensitive to how I am treated, even by restaurant servers and hotel managers. I've heard from African- and Asian-Americans and from Middle Eastern people that they are looked at differently and with distrust here. It's happened to me, and I think how fortunate I am to not be African-American, and to be able to speak like an Appalachian person (my native Baltimore is not far from here, linguistically). I can pass for white, straight and local if I want my experiences to be easier.

This has become a longer and more complex rant than I intended. What I've gotten from 23 and me is a better sense of where I am from in the deep past. I am still, of course, American by birth and by choice, and Jewish for the time that that has existed, but I get now why I look as I do, and I guess i find comfort in that.

If you are on 23 and me, look me up. Maybe you are one of the thousands of cousins they listed for me.