Reluctantly, Joel Stein Discovers His Roots

No one is more interested in himself than I am. And yet even I don’t care about my genealogy. What my great-great-great-grandfather did isn’t any more interesting to me than what your great-great-great-grandfather did, especially since in both cases it was farming.

I come from a long line of people who don’t care about our long line of people. Whenever I asked my grandparents where their parents were from, they’d all launch into the same speech about how Poland and Russia switched borders a lot. The only thing I got from that speech was that people do not want to admit they’re Polish. Also, that making a big deal about your genealogy isn’t for Jews; it’s for Wasps and Southerners and Democrats and other groups whose past is brighter than their future.

But genealogy fascinates everyone who is not in my family. PBS’s new show Faces of America, hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., traces the lineage of Dr. Oz and Meryl Streep, while NBC’s upcoming Who Do You Think You Are?, executive-produced by Friends actress Lisa Kudrow, seeks out the dead relatives of Sarah Jessica Parker and Spike Lee. In an episode of the NBC show, Kudrow goes to Belarus to find the grave of her great-grandmother who was killed in the Holocaust and meets a family member who survived. It’s fascinating, but probably only because she’s a celebrity. Even ballroom dancing is interesting if there are celebrities involved.

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Kudrow, though, tried to convince me to care about my own past. “We always forget how important history is. It informs everything that happens after,” she said. But my ancestors didn’t seem to have those kinds of big, important stories. “What if you found out that one of them was a writer for the Yiddish newspaper?” she asked, in what might have been the worst sales pitch ever.

Nonetheless, I played along when Kudrow had Ancestry.com look up my family history. I found out through the 1930 Census that my father’s father’s parents paid $45 a month for a one-room New York City apartment for six people and they were the only ones on the block without a radio. My great-grandmother, when asked what country she grew up in, wrote “Poland,” crossed it out and then wrote “Austria.” These are countries that don’t even border each other. I come from stupid people. You know how I know that? Because I had to look up whether those countries border each other.

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This is when I mentioned to Kudrow that I’ve met one family member who is into genealogy: my cousin Carol. It was at my mom’s second wedding, and Carol wanted birthplaces and dates for this giant book she’d brought. Let’s just say that you shouldn’t ask someone to fill out a survey when they’re at their mom’s second wedding unless it’s about how many vodka sodas they want.

But Kudrow really wanted me to call my cousin, at which point I admitted that I think people like her and Carol are massive dorks.

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“I get it,” Kudrow said. “You think that people who do genealogy are like Dungeons & Dragons people. It’s like a personal hang-up you have.”

“No,” I explained. “I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons. I fear they’re far worse.”

“They like knowing the day-to-day life of people who went through important events in history,” she said.

“Like killing a dragon.”

“Like the Holocaust.” This, as you can imagine, ended the conversation and meant I had to call cousin Carol.

Carol was very excited that I was interested in our family’s history, even if it was just because a former sitcom actress told me to be. And to my shock, she told me a fascinating story. My great-grandfather Reuben and his brother left Russia instead of serving in the army. This, it seems, is where I get my bravery from. But later, when Reuben’s dad was looking to get the rest of the family out of Russia, he sent family members to scout out New York, Brazil and Argentina and wound up ditching my great-grandfather and taking his eight other kids to Argentina, where they made a lot more money than their American siblings. All my cousins there are rich artists. Which means, according to everything I know about family histories, my son will become a rich artist, and his baby Argentine cousins will grow up to be drug-addict slackers.

I thanked Carol, and she asked me how my son, whom she knew about, was doing, and I felt just a little connected to her. Then she asked me to e-mail his birthplace and -date, as well as my wife’s and her parents’. And I was happy to do it. Because even though I may never look at Carol’s giant book, whoever does should get to see the most interesting page in it.

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