Having your DNA tested can lead to unexpected results. I discovered this when I wanted to find out whether a family rumor about Jewish roots was true. Five tests and many hours spent working on my family tree later, I did indeed find a surprise. But it was a different family secret than the one I had expected to find.
I wrote a book about that quest, DNA Doesn’t Lie. People do, in which I also recount the stories of others about the changes in their lives after taking a DNA test. Some, because they discovered that their father wasn’t their biological father. Others, because they found they had been adopted. That led to reunions and happiness, but also to frustration and sadness because the discovered parent(s) or relatives didn’t want to connect.
For on the other side, there are sometimes people who had thought they could keep a secret hidden. Or who had no idea they had a child somewhere else. People who don’t want their peaceful lives to be disrupted, let alone for a new daughter or sister.
My search for Jewish genes is not unique, but what occurs more frequently is that people discover, to their surprise, that they are Jewish. That they have a certain percentage of Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jewish genes. After the Second World War, many parents had concealed the fact that they were Jewish from their children. Furthermore, adoptive parents did not always tell their children the truth about their origins.
Such discoveries lead to family reunions, and sometimes also to conversion to Judaism. Often, this way, the feeling that something is missing suddenly becomes understandable; there is the sensation of coming home.
That homecoming was a theme of the novel I was working on at the same time, which was intended as a sequel to my novel about the lost Jewish community of Iraq, The Jewish Bride. In that book, a young Kurdish woman discovers her grandmother’s diary, and with it her Jewish background. In the sequel, Rahila’s Secrets, she flees to Israel to escape Muslim extremists. And soon finds herself in conflict: where does she feel at home?
The inspiration for Rahila’s Secrets came from conversations with Kurdish Jews in Israel; the last survivors of the generation that left Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1950s. In the course of this, I came across a remarkable story: how Kurdish Muslims had, for years, stolen Jewish girls to raise them as Muslims or marry them off to their sons.
That became a key theme in the book, along with the fact that such secrets can no longer remain hidden thanks to DNA testing. And so, whilst writing, I found myself constantly adding to Rahila’s family tree hanging on the wall in front of me.
The two books are therefore interconnected. For DNA does indeed not lie, and research into it lifts a veil from the past and reveals long-hidden secrets.
DNA Does Not Lie. People Do is available as paperback and e-book, and the same goes for Rahila’s Secrets.