In June 2016, however, the mystery was solved. They worried what people would think’: with her father in New Jersey.īut down the years (she’s in her 50s now), she’d also come to accept that there was a mystery at the centre of her life: something on which she couldn’t put her finger.

“You could have gotten us bread from the Nazis.” “We could have used you in the ghetto, little blondie,” she said, gripping her arm. Mrs Kushner had lived in Poland during the war. One day in the late 1960s, a family friend, Mrs Kushner – the future grandmother of Jared, husband of Ivanka Trump – pulled her to one side. Shapiro has white-blonde hair and blue eyes. Did other people see her as different? Well, they were certainly struck by her appearance. She wonders now if she wasn’t looking for a new family. In the New Jersey neighbourhood where she grew up, the only child in an Orthodox Jewish family, she would wander the streets with her poodle, hoping to be invited in by neighbours. It was, she says, as though she was “trapped on the other side of an invisible wall, separate and cut off” – and yet, she had no idea why. Perhaps if she gazed at herself for long enough, a new face would emerge from behind her own: a truer one, a face that would better reflect her sense of herself.Īs she grew older, this otherness – a disconnect she carried with her all the time – grew more and more powerful.

She felt, though she would not have been able to articulate this at the time, different – a creature apart. What do you see? Who do you think you are? When the writer Dani Shapiro was a little girl, she would sneak down the hall late at night once her parents were asleep, the better to stare at herself uninterrupted in the bathroom mirror.

Dani shapiro inheritance summary