On page 43, Shapiro quotes a Delmore Schwartz poem: “What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day / Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.” What does this mean? Why is it significant to Shapiro?ġ0. What I hadn’t known: the secret was me.” What might have changed if Shapiro had known her origins growing up?ĩ. On page 35, Shapiro writes, “All my life I had known there was a secret. Another is the corrosive power of secrets. Shapiro follows that passage with another provocative question: “Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?” What’s your opinion?Ĩ. “What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are?” Shapiro writes on page 27. Chapter 7 opens with a discussion of the nature of identity. So why does Shapiro’s sense of her own Jewishness rely so much on her father?Ħ. Judaism is passed on from mother to child-the father’s religion holds no importance. Would Shapiro feel so strongly if her father’s ancestors weren’t so illustrious? How does Shapiro’s understanding of lineage change over the course of the book?ĥ. “These ancestors are the foundation upon which I have built my life,” she says on page 12. Much of Shapiro’s understanding of herself comes from what she believes to be her lineage. “You’re still you,” Shapiro reminds herself.

What do they mean individually, and how does each affect your understanding of the other?ģ. Shapiro chose two quotes for her epigraph, one from Sylvia Plath and the other from George Orwell. What does it mean, in the context of the memoir?Ģ.

Inheritance shapiro