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Was bankruptcy in the site’s DNA?

By Ed Goldman

I‘ll always remember where I was when I heard that 23andMe was declaring bankruptcy. In fact, I’ll also remember where my parents, grandparents, daughter and grandson were.

Actually, I’ve never signed onto the site. Didn’t really need to because my cousin Julia Antopol Hirsch—who wrote a wonderful book about the filming of “The Sound of Music” a few years ago—has researched a good deal of our shared family background. My dad and her mom, who died 18 years apart (he at 60, she at 33) were siblings. 

As for my mom, I’d look into it more diligently (as opposed to barely at all, which I’ve done) if she hadn’t told me almost every detail of her life before she died at 88 in 2006. This list included every meal she made, every restaurant she’d been to and every person she shared her wisdom with, whether requested or not. My mom was one of those people-loving talkative sorts who thought everyone was entitled to her opinion.

Yet even though I didn’t consult 23andMe, I’ve admired, from far, its two-services: “consumer and therapeutics.” As CBS News delineates it, “The former provides people with information on their ancestry and genetic health profile, including the risk of passing on certain conditions to their children… . The therapeutics unit works to develop treatments and conducts research into cancer, immune diseases and other conditions.”

I understand the desire to have both of those data sets at our fingertips. Almost everyone wonders at some point, “Where did I come from?”, and not all of them will be satisfied with the answer, “Schenectady. Now go finish drying the dishes.” 

It helps that many of us grew up at a time when the oral tradition was still alive and well. But as we know, memoirists are often unreliable narrators. My grandpa Max Goldman, who was a hat maker and tailor in New York City’s garment district, told me less about his life as a young immigrant from Russia than how, when he was riding his bicycle as a kid, his front tire got stuck on a railroad tie as a train was approaching. 

“How did you save yourself?” the eight-year-old me asked, leaving aside a couple of unsolved mysteries in his tale (how does a bicycle get “stuck” and why didn’t he just jump off and get off the track?). 

Apparently, he’d had all the time in the world to effect his self-rescue. “I took off the belt I was wearing, knotted it and made stirrups, which I tied to the pedals, then galloped off,” he said. I’m sure I said, “Wow!” or “Well, I’ll be!” for this is what young boys said to their elders then instead of “WTF?!”  Then Grandpa Max lit a fresh unfiltered Camel with the one he’d smoked down to its last ash, grinned and walked with me down a long hill into town for an ice cream cone. 

This was in Lake Elsinore, California, where we were staying with him and my Grandma Molly for a few months. My dad had just retired (at 42) after 20 years with the New York Fire Department and soon we’d be moving into a rental, then our own home, in Lakewood, California, about an hour away by car, or a few days by a bicycle with stirrups.

My mom’s background was similar to my dad’s only in that both had fathers who worked in the garment district  (in fact, it was her stepdad, Mike Mirsky, a tailor who’d married her divorced mom and adopted my mom when she was 13). The hook of the story was that my step-Grandpa Mike and Grandpa Max knew each other—they took dance lessons together so they could better assimilate in their new country since everyone back then danced—and semi-arranged for my mom and dad to meet, at a relative’s wedding.