Robbed of my heritage.

I have written about my genealogy before, but something very peculiar has now happened. The mystery surrounding my Italian grandfather has been a strong driving force behind why I started researching in the first place. Therefore, it was so overwhelming and frustrating that my DNA test showed I only had 2.8% Italian ancestry. That’s the alcohol content in a weak lager! How is that even possible if my grandfather was 100% hard liquor? Suddenly, all my summers in Italy, all my language studies in Italian, all my passion for Italian cuisine felt like a lie. The only consolation was that the test also revealed I was 5.6% Ashkenazi Jewish, which was excellent news considering how extremely overrepresented they are among Nobel laureates. And perhaps it meant that my grandfather was more Jewish than Italian in his genetic makeup, which would explain a lot.

I therefore carried my Jewish heritage high and proud. Tempelman—anyone can tell there’s a strong Jewish identity there. However, I never spoke about the fact that the absolute majority of my DNA confirmed I was Scandinavian. That brought me no pride whatsoever; rather, it instilled a feeling of troubling ordinariness. No one digs into their ancestry to confirm that they come from 20 generations of potato farmers in Småland, do they? So, the disappointment of being so insignificantly Italian was compensated by my newfound Jewish identity.

Religion has never interested me, but the fashion aspect is, to say the least, fascinating. I embraced the Orthodox style: black suit, oversized shirt, and a hat that looks like a beaver curled up to sleep. A fur cylinder that I wore with pride when the ceiling allowed it. Since I couldn’t be bothered to wait for my sideburns to grow half a metre long, I clipped on two fly strips that completed the transformation. A positive side effect was that we reduced the number of fruit flies at home. I also started throwing in a bit of Yiddish into my daily speech and affectionately referred to my wife as “shiksa,” which she thought meant “whore” and therefore didn’t go down too well.

Then one day, I received an email from the genealogy site informing me that they had updated their system to make it even more precise. They encouraged everyone to update their ethnicity estimate. One click and a few hours later, I was staring at the screen. At first, I was pleased that I had now been upgraded to 12.5% Italian, which felt like a more reasonable figure. But then came the enormous disappointment: I had 0% Jewish DNA left! It was like being robbed of my identity once again—albeit one I had only had for a short time—but nonetheless, one that I had liked and embraced. Not even the increase in my Italian heritage could lift my spirits again. The shifts had been too abrupt, and the only constant was that I remained nearly 80% Scandinavian.

Now, I can’t be bothered to update my self-image any further and wander disillusioned through the streets of Stockholm in my fur hat, a Dolce & Gabbana jacket in garish colours, and a pair of tracksuit bottoms in blue and yellow. I am a bastard and a witch’s brew, and I have to learn to live with that.