Go Ask Your Father
One Man's Obsession with Finding His Origins Through DNA Testing
Chapter One
A Phone Call and Its Consequences
It was June 2, 1981, and I was in my apartment on Morningside Drive in New York City working on a new book. A professor in the Columbia University Department of English, married, with a one-year-old son, I had a life that seemed pretty steady. At that particular moment, however, I was grieving. My father, Morris Davis, had died a week earlier, just before his eighty-third birthday, after a long, slow decline caused by prostate cancer.
Born in 1949, I was the son of Morris and Eva, and I had grown up in the Bronx with my brother, Gerald. Aside from the fact that my parents were both deaf and we spoke sign language at home, ours was a typical, ordinary family. I felt sure that I understood the basic contours of my life as well as anyone else did.
But this was a difficult time. I was still feeling the strangeness of being an orphan. My mother had died ten years before, having been hit by a truck while crossing the street when I was twenty-two years old. And now my father, too, was dead, a m ...
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