Blood Matters

by Masha Gessen

  DNAPrint drafted Shriver and used his samples and some of its own to create a test called AncestrybyDNA. In the first couple of years of its commercial availability, about twenty thousand people paid two hundred dollars apiece to learn which ethnic groups were represented in their genome. People who tested as Europeans could pay roughly the same amount again for EuroDNA, which would tell them in which Indo-European region their DNA likely originated. Another upgrade was offered for those who wanted to explore their partial Native American–ness.

  DNAPrint was probably the first of several companies that started offering DNA-ancestry tests at around the same time (though this was apparently the only publicly traded company among them). Prices ranged up to nine hundred dollars, the price of the “Male Genealogy Package” from a company called Genelex. The difference in their approaches was that most of the companies used Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA tests to determine haplotype while DNAPrint used markers on autosomal chromosomes. Both approaches had proponents who argued that their way was more accurate or informative. Some companies had an apparent area of specialization: Family Tree DNA focused on Jews, offering a test for the Cohen marker, among others; DNA Tribes concentrated on Native Americans. DNAPrint also seemed to attract a disproportionate number of people seeking to confirm a family legend of having a Native American ancestor. Many were disappointed, even enraged, by a negative result, a reaction Tony Frudakis diagnosed as American Indian Princess Syndrome.

  Aside from informing people that they did not have a Cherokee (for some reason, Matt told me, it always seemed to be Cherokee) grandmother, DNAPrint’s technology proved useful in forensics. If the scientists had indeed been able to find genes responsible for eye color or other features, crime-scene DNA samples could be used to create portrait descriptions of suspects. As it was, DNAPrint could offer only very rough suppositions about appearance, based on the suspect’s apparent ethnic roots—but even rough suppositions could prove very useful when the police knew nothing.

  The Baton Rouge Killer used a different murder method every time, but he had a signature: removing the phone from the victim’s belongings. That made him a serial killer, and all American police officers are taught that serial killers are white. The task force formed to catch the killer was looking for a white man, and as part of its search it sent samples of his DNA—tissue left at the crime scene following apparent struggles with the victims—to DNAPrint. The AncestrybyDNA test said the killer was of African or African American provenance. The task force changed the focus of its search and, in 2003, captured Derrick Todd Lee, who was black. He was later convicted of five murders, based largely on DNA evidence.

  In another case, in a rural community in California, the fairly decayed body of a female murder victim was found. The forensic pathologist judged the remains “probably Vietnamese,” which suggested to the investigators she might have been a mail-order bride. DNAPrint’s test, however, showed she was Native American. That, in turn, changed the way the pathologists reconstructed the woman’s skull to obtain a picture of what she might have looked like. That murder still had not been solved, though, at the time I visited Sarasota.

  ***

  Matt Thomas was thirty-five, stocky, with light hair and a round face of the sort that always looks boyish. He looked like the kind of person whose genetic ancestry test could yield no surprises.

  “I’m 99 percent European and 1 percent African,” he confirmed. “The 1 percent African is probably noise in the test.”

  European: That is one broad category. “Being Dutch and Finnish are pretty different things,” I said, choosing my examples deliberately. Both populations are North European, but the Finns are a closed population that is quite genetically distinct.

  “Right,” said Matt. “But part of that Dutch and Finnish definition is a social construct.”

  This was silliness. Here, wearing a white lab coat, sat a biochemist turned geneticist who made his living by telling people what their genes told him about their identity—and he was telling me that ethnic, national, and geographic identities were a social construct. In another minute he went even further, telling me that closed groups based on ethnoreligious identity—such as Ashkenazi Jews—were a social construct. And in another few minutes I learned why.

  “Let me say this,” said Matt. “My mother converted to Judaism. I practice. But there is no way I’m going to have any genetic markers. So it goes back to the definition of groups. And because you do not share genetic heritage, does that make you any less a member of that group?”

  Most people convert to Judaism because they are planning to marry a Jewish person. Matt’s mother converted for a different reason: She liked Judaism best of all the religions around. Matt’s father was Catholic, and Matt and his brother were raised with both faiths and allowed to choose once they became adults. Matt chose Judaism. He later married a Lutheran, and now, if they had children, they planned to give them their choice of religions, as his own parents had done. The only problem was, right before their eyes—and, really, with Matt’s active participation—Jewishness was reverting to being an ethnic rather than a religious category.

  Five years earlier, when I adopted my son, Vova, my partner and I devoted all of maybe an hour to discussing whether to perform a conversion ceremony for him. He was officially declared a Jew by a court of three Reform rabbis gathered around a mikva—a ritual pool—in Providence, Rhode Island, in October 2001. Now, if he was asked who he was—as he would be, for his gorgeous swarthy looks were a relative rarity in Russia, where we lived—he would tell people he was Jewish, I thought. I had no idea that it was a matter of months before the first companies would offer him the opportunity of asking them who he was, for a small fee. At this point these tests were too imprecise for our purposes—he would probably have found out only that he was of mostly European and perhaps partly Middle Eastern descent—but by the time he becomes an adult he will likely be able to find out just what ethnic groups his biological parents represented.

  ***

  “So I can tell you that your mother was Jewish, or of Jewish ancestry,” Bennett Greenspan told me when I called him for comment on my DNA. Bennett Greenspan was president and chief executive officer of Family Tree DNA, a company that grew out of his lifelong interest in genealogy. Greenspan, who was of Ashkenazi extraction, started the company in 1999, drafting Mike Hammer and Doron Behar, among others, to serve on his scientific advisory board. Now the company offered a variety of ethnicity tests, including specific mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome DNA tests for people who believed themselves to be Ashkenazi Jews. I did, so I asked my brother Keith, who, unlike me, possessed a Y chromosome, to do a cheek swab and send it to Family Tree DNA.

  A few weeks later, I could log on to a page that said, “Keith Gessen, Kit Number 65289,” and featured a little square with two hands, palms out, thumbs touching, and the words “Cohen match.” That is right: My brother had the Cohen haplotype. “Do you have an oral tradition of that?” asked Greenspan.

  “No,” I answered honestly. “But we are Soviet-raised, so we don’t have much of a Jewish oral tradition of anything.” This was especially true of our—that is, my brother’s—Y chromosome. The earliest known source of that, my great-great-grandfather Ilya Gessen, was drafted into the czar’s army in the mid-nineteenth century.

  “Oh, I know!” exclaimed Greenspan, exhibiting a knowledge of history characteristic of true genealogy enthusiasts. “The twenty-five-year death sentence.” The standard term of service in the czar’s army was indeed twenty-five years, and for Jewish males, it officially kicked in at the age of twelve. Many were drafted even earlier, some as young as eight, and served even longer. Few survived. But those who did, and were ultimately released from service, received the right to live outside the Pale of Settlement. This was a reasonable and perhaps necessary measure: Over the decades of service, the soldiers had lost touch with their families, their culture, their language, and, usually, their religion.

 
My great-great-grandfather was one of the very, very few who not only survived but also managed to resist conversion to Christianity. He settled in a village in the south of Russia, married a Jewish woman, and had nine children. It seems he did not remember much about the Jewish tradition—just that he was Jewish. Was he a Cohen? If he was, was this something he remembered? No such information reached my generation. At the same time, he named his firstborn Aaron.

  In 1899 Aaron finished high school and took off for St. Petersburg, where he would go to university. This was a period of strict quotas and state-mandated anti-Semitic discrimination in Russia, and it was the year of the Dreyfus affair. My great-grandfather would never have been able to hide his Jewishness, but he did what he could to make it stand out less: He changed his name to Arnold, thereby perhaps obliterating the last remnant of the Cohen oral tradition in my family—until, that is, my brother was tested.

  Strictly speaking, the fact that Keith was a match for the haplotype did not prove that we came from a Cohen lineage. First, this was the philosophy behind Skorecki’s original study: The DNA testing was there to illustrate the oral tradition, not to be used to prove or disprove anything. And there was another consideration. “Remember,” said Greenspan, “Aaron and Moses’s first cousins would have left Egypt alongside them—I mean, you’ve got these famous first cousins. Their sons would have had the same Y-chromosome markers but would not have been Cohanim.”

  Greenspan talked about Moses and Aaron, and especially their cousins, as though they lived practically next door, or at least yesterday. He was only slightly more distant when talking about my fore-mother: She turned out to be one of the four. K1a1b1a was her name. Family Tree DNA had 181 of my presumed relatives on file: A number of their e-mail addresses were supplied along with my brother’s test results.

  ***

  The Family Tree results reached too far back to tell me anything useful—or anything at all, really, about the origins of my mutation. That information came while I was in Israel doing research for this chapter. I sat drinking tea with my cousin Natasha and an elderly friend of the family. Conversation turned to one of my maternal great-grandmothers, Bat-Sheva, an extraordinary woman by all accounts. She had been a rebellious shtetl girl who forced her way into a cheder—a religious school that never admitted girls. When she was still young, but already married and no longer studying, her hobby was translating Pushkin into Hebrew. I remembered her well: She died in her late eighties, when I was twenty years old.

  The family friend asked about Bat-Sheva’s parents. I did not remember any family conversation that had reached so far back.

  “Her mother’s surname was Magidina,” said Natasha. “She married a much older man and had several children, Bat-Sheva being the oldest. When Bat-Sheva was pregnant with her first child, her mother was already very ill and she knew it. But she traveled to where Bat-Sheva was living, put in place everything for the baby, then went home, had surgery, and died either during the operation or soon after.”

  “What did she die of?” I asked.

  “Some sort of cancer.”

  Here was the story, then. My great-great-grandmother had a mutation that led to cancer that killed her when she was still in her thirties. She had passed the mutation on to her daughter Bat-Sheva. As my great-great-grandmother lay dying, Bat-Sheva had a son who also inherited the mutation. The son, my grandfather, passed it on to my mother, who died at forty-nine. She passed it on to me. And there was no way to tell what it was that allowed Bat-Sheva to live into her late eighties without developing cancer, and whether, whatever it was, I had it, too.

  Chapter 3

  The Post-Nazi Era

  AT A BREAKFAST TABLE at a Viennese hotel, I was telling my companions about this book.

  “But you cannot test for race!” one of them objected, horrified. She was German.

  True, I said, unless the person tested wants to interpret the test that way. And many do, because today’s racial characteristics are still the most useful shorthand for the information genetic testing gives us about ourselves. The third person at the table, an Ashkenazi Jewish woman from the United States, pointed out that Ashkenazi Jews carry certain mutations for which genetic testing is available and useful.

  The first woman cringed. “You are constructing biological identity out of anxiety!” she shouted. “Have you even read Foucault?”

  We had read Foucault, but we both felt, at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, that the facts were too bad for Foucault. The German woman tried to withdraw from the conversation altogether, noting resignedly that she was a postmodernist.

  “This is the post-Nazi era,” the American Jewish woman quipped, eliciting a joyous laugh from me and a frightened one from our German colleague.

  But here we were. The German woman felt she had no right to move into the post-Nazi era. The other woman and I, both being Jewish, could use the privilege of historical victimhood to make that decision for ourselves. There were two of us and only one of her, and we could laugh and tell her that this was the reason Israel would lead the world in the science and application of medical genetics.

  We were in Vienna because each of us had at one point received a journalism fellowship from the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen—literally, “the institute for the study of man,” located here in Vienna, where man had historically been studied to excess. This was the geographic heart of Europe and the home of the twentieth century: the city where Hitler spent his formative years; home of Sigmund Freud and birthplace of psychoanalysis; home of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; and, not coincidentally, a site of one of that century’s creepiest experiments in the application of genetics.

  After breakfast I took the tram to an outlying neighborhood, where I searched the plain 1960s apartment buildings for the home of an old man who had lived to tell the tale. He had lived long enough, that is, and he had also made a life out of telling his story.

  ***

  Johann Gross was short and portly, dressed in black trousers and a white undershirt, and he could not breathe. An oxygen tank nearly as big as the man himself sat puffing in the middle of his tiny apartment, and a white plastic cord stretching from it delivered oxygen directly to his nose. His mouth was occupied alternately by a foul, raw-smelling cigarette and a salad-green plastic inhaler. Wheezing constantly and halting occasionally, he told me his story. He had lived in the United States for four years some forty years earlier, and he could tell his well-honed story in English, so I came without an interpreter. It seemed, though, that Johann Gross could not understand anything I said. So his speech was a monologue.

  When Johann Gross was eight years old, he had been living with a foster family for four or five years. He had no memory of his biological family: His mother had abandoned them when he was a year old, his father was a drunk, and little Johann lived in an orphanage before he was placed with his foster parents. As he remembered now, it was a good foster family: He was fed, schooled, and perhaps even loved there. But then Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and this meant that Johann Gross had to go home to a father he did not remember. His father was a very poor man: He was born missing an arm and had never really worked. State care for the children of the poor and the infirm contradicted some basic tenets of Nazi public health policies. Most important, using state funds to raise someone like Johann Gross meant engaging in what eugenicists called “counterselection”: increasing the chances for survival, success, and procreation for the progeny of those less fit—and, in Gross’s case, apparently genetically damaged.

  “We had not much to eat. I slept in a little bed with my sister. I was hungry all the time.” Johann Gross was inducted into Hitler-Jugend, which obligated him to spend his days going door-to-door with a tin cup, collecting funds for the Nazi cause. After about six months, eight-year-old Johann Gross ran away, tin cup in hand, back to his foster home. His foster mother called the child welfare service, which sent not a social worker but a Nazi Party officer, who expell
ed Johann from the children’s organization on the spot and assigned him to an orphanage. After three or four escape attempts from the orphanage, the little boy was deemed “asocial” and placed in a psychiatric institution, on a children’s ward called Spiegelgrund, or “mirror reason.” The old man opened his book for me: He had published a memoir called Spiegelgrund. It was illustrated with his own drawings. He pointed at one of a wheelbarrow loaded with children’s naked bodies, a mess of arms and legs with a little girl’s body lying awkwardly on top. “I saw this,” he said.

  Most of the children at Spiegelgrund suffered from psychiatric conditions or mental retardation. From 1940 to 1945 they were studied, then starved or medicated to death and studied some more in the process. After they died, their brains were excised and placed in formaldehyde jars for further study.

  Johann Gross watched the murders of the sick children from a short distance. He himself was considered problematic but not sick, so he was not killed. “I had a normal body. I think what saved my life was I was always very good in school,” said this old man, who had had perhaps four years total of formal education. “They were not so quick to kill. When people were psychopathic, they were killed.” Johann was not sufficiently disturbed to warrant a researcher’s interest, so his brain was allowed to remain, functioning, in his body. He was, however, medicated systematically, excessively, and painfully after each of his ten escape attempts. “They gave me injections on my arms and legs,” he remembered, visibly cringing sixty-five years later. “The injections on my arms—I would be on the toilet for twenty-four hours. The injections on my legs, I would be walking on the floor on my hands, I couldn’t get up, and then it hurt for three weeks, and then I would run away again.” While most of the children at Spiegelgrund received injections as part of a study, the treatment of Johann Gross may have been simple punishment: pure torture.