Prologue Brooklyn, New York, 1963

I honestly don't know why she didn't take the test. I don't think I'll ever know. It's not the kind of information you find out through 23andMe or private investigators or ancestry specialists — nobody but Barbara Fleischman knows why she decided to bypass a test that would, if she had taken it, change the course of the next nine months of her life. 

Barbara was 15 years old and the second youngest of four girls; Norma and Rosalie often acted as interim parents while their mom and dad were attending to the busiest fruit stand in Brooklyn, New York, and Arlene, the baby of the family, provided easy friendship and occupied the majority of the attention (as babies of families tend to do — I would know). 

From what I’ve been told — and I’m not quite sure what to make of it — Barbara has always been a bit off. Different people have used different vernacular and different degrees of hushed whispers: so Barbara, depending on how you look at it and who you listen to, is “unwell” or “off” or “not all there.”

Whatever the situation may be, I think of her as a fairly typical young teenager doing whatever normal teenagers did in 1963. I picture Norma and Rosalie waving to her and Arlene as they boarded the school bus and creaky wooden desks with glasses-clad teachers. 

When I first learned that Paul Noveshansky was in a band, it all started to come together. The pieces began to come together — I could imagine, not only why a young, slightly unaware teenage girl would instantly find herself falling for a boy who played the guitar, but how it all connected with my dad. But more on that later. 

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Paul and Barbara would walk hand in hand through Williamsburg. It was easier, more stable, and more concise to wake up and brush her hair into a day filled with mundane predictability in her own controlled environment. I’d like to think this is why she chose not to take the test. I’d like to think she clung to this version of life that underscored the simplicity of it all; I think she was a blissfully ignored teenage girl who wanted to complain about school and go roller skating on the weekends. 

Whatever it may have been, the unknown, the uncertain, and the unavoidable cataclysmically collided nine months later, just one day after she and Paul had been rollerskating hand in hand. The naiveté was whisked away and on August 15th, 1964, Barbara gave birth to a healthy baby boy and to the horror, dismay, and confusion of everyone around her, made her very first concrete, completely uncomplicated decision: the baby was to be put up for adoption. 

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