Drowning in the Gene Pool

Why don't I feel bad about not marrying a Jewish man? Well, let me tell you about the family medical history. First of all, I am a nice Jewish doctor, so I don't have to marry one. So is my father, and so was his father, so ever since there were telephones everybody else in the family has been calling the doctor in the family (us) with every medical problem that arises. That's how I know that my aunt has produced an entire litter of double-jointed children with some kind of collagen disorder that's been wreaking mayhem in an autosomal dominant fashion for at least three generations. I don't have that gene to pass on, though, or I'd be six feet tall and bending my knuckles the wrong way, too. It's the recessives I'm worried about: my brother's adrenal hyperplasia gives me nightmares about bearing baby girls with no vaginas.

Then there are all those multifactorial diseases. Half my great-grandparents had late-onset diabetes. I don't know anyone with my maiden name who has normal blood pressure. My grandfather keeled over at fifty from a heart attack, and all that keeps his surviving male relatives from kicking the bucket in the same grand family tradition is a profusion of replacement gaskets and hoses that keep their tickers ticking. Did you know that disparate malfunctions of the immune system tend to cluster in a kindred? My aunt and grandmother both made Graves-ly mistaken antibodies to their own thyroid stimulating hormone receptors, my great-uncle died at thirty-two of lupus, and everybody is allergic to everything.

How do I account for the walking Merck Manual of disorders I meet at all our weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs? Centuries of inbreeding. The only new genes this clan has seen since the Diaspora were sown there by the occasional raping Cossack and come under the heading of “paternity not as stated in pedigree.” Ten generations of rabbis stuck in one miserable Latvian town, big fish in a small gene pool, nurturing an elitism that led each to marry his own cousin until my grandparents escaped to New York—is this not explanation enough for the piss-poor protoplasm I find myself inheriting?

I am the first of that dynasty to practice exogamy since the dawn of recorded history. I married a shaygets. My lineage and that of my husband probably diverged just about when Man got up off his knuckles, so I expect our children to be glorious examples of hybrid vigor. And if I ever experience a tiny shudder at the possibility of looking into my child's face someday and seeing there a blond, blue-eyed Eagle Scout telling me he wants to become an army chaplain, I need only close my eyes, click my heels and recall the ten-fold higher frequency of non-classic 21-hydroxylase deficiency among the Ashkenazi Jews to breathe a sigh of relief and look forward to breeding a race of gods.