Spit Identity vs Split Identities
My DNA results came to me in an email alert two years ago. I was locked away in a rehab center after surgery at the height of Covid. The place was unbelievably lonely and depressing. My neighbor a room away was recovering from a stroke. In the middle of the night, in the middle of the day, she would yell. She had lost her vocabulary and her screams were an amalgam of words and phrases without meaning. The aides doted on her, seeing her as their granny or as the dear teacher from primary school. Despite her inability to communicate, they had communication. For me, in a room separated by walls, her wailing was an inchoate pain that I could feel deep in my bones. Every day, every scream, I felt her horror.
In that milieu, I received the results of my spit tests. I was not prepared for the findings.
As an adopted person, I often imagined my ethnicity. I knew that ethnicity and identity were not synonymous. Ethnicity is my neighbor saying: “We’re a bunch of Germans.”
Identity is the whole kit and kaboodle, kith and kin. It's nature and nurture. It's what came before and what comes after. For most adopted people, identity is what comes after.
One of my first boyfriends told me that I looked Native American, so I imagined that for years, growing my dark hair down the center of my back. Before that, I was thoroughly convinced that I was Greek. That belief came through a dream peopled with hearty Greek women carrying trays of plump vegetables grown in the sunny Greek hillside. Dreams are meaningful to me, verdant with symbols. I deciphered the Greek women with tomatoes dream as a key to my identity. It was comforting and real.
As a kid, my adoptive mother told me that the thick keloid tissue covering my severest scars was genetically inspired, occuring among people of color. So I half expected to discover African or Asian or Latin ancestors in my spit.
All of these - the Native American, the Greek, the person of color - were projected or imagined identities. Not one was a genetic match. Not according to my DNA.
My saliva declared me otherwise: 27% European Jew, 25% Irish and the remaining a sprinkling percentage among the Brits, Scots, Welsh, Swedes, Danes and Norse. Caucasians all.
To say these results were unsettling is an understatement. I’d done the spit test with Ancestry and as a cushion, completed the same genetic test with MyHeritage, another established company. The calculations with it were slightly different but there it was again: 24.7% Ashkenazi Jew.
Two years later, my Spit Identity has barely merged with my multitude of Split Identities.
I have geography. Regions of the world. I have exclusions. I'm not this, even though the Greek costume filled me with pleasure; the ouzo and falafel and olives are my diet of delight; and matriarchal culture is our salvation. I am not Greek. My blood is not Greek. My ancestors are not Greek.
I am now full of bewilderment at this thing called Ashkanazi Jew.
This fickle thing we call identity remains just that: capricious, ever-changing, more like poetry than prose.
NEXT: The Ashkanazi Identity