The Baby Scoop Era of American Adoption

You’ve been hoping for this thing for most of your life, and now’s the time. Your deepest wish, your biggest want, it’s all yours. Just know that, as in the new book “American Baby: A Mother, a Child and the Shadow History of Adoption” by journalist Gabrielle Glaser, some things are never really relinquished.

David Rosenberg was dying.

He’d always been a big man, physically and personality-wise, beloved by everyone and cherished by his family – but that family was somewhat of a question mark, as he told Glaser early in their friendship. Rosenberg was adopted as a baby, and he sometimes wondered if the diseases that were killing him were hereditary.

A gift of a DNA test kit gave him the beginning of an answer and opened a door: he found his birth mother, but he was too ill to fly to her. He begged Glaser to meet her.

In the years after World War II, when good girls didn’t “fool around,” Margaret Erle and George Katz got carried away once, and she denied the subsequent pregnancy until she couldn’t. She and George were too young to marry, but they were in love and hopeful that things would work out. Margaret’s Orthodox Jewish parents, who had survived the Holocaust, had other ideas. They insisted that Margaret give birth in a maternity home in Staten Island, relinquish her baby and then forget the whole thing ever happened.

But how could Margaret forget? She sang German lullabies to her unborn child, dreaming of the family she and George (whom she eventually married) would have. Instead of a happy future, though, Margaret was pressured to sign away the rights to her child because, as Glaser learned, adoption was big business – and Margaret was holding things up.

Under duress and frightened, Margaret signed, and then she wondered for the rest of her life if her son was one of the dark-eyed boys she occasionally spotted, never knowing that for a while, the child she gave up lived just 10 blocks from her home.

A DNA test kit can tell you all kinds of interesting things about yourself that you never knew. That goes double for users who are adoptees, and for their newfound siblings. Flush with new information, read “American Baby” for the rest of one story.

First, though, know that this tale tugs at the heartstrings – and it will kick the rest of your ticker into the next county. Glaser writes with barely concealed outrage of a sad, multilayered love story that goes unrequited for decades, filled with near-misses and packed with lies and secrets that can read like a whodunit set in a maternity home. And the latter? It’s a relic that readers will, ultimately and at the end of this story, be glad is mostly gone.

Read this book, absolutely, but be prepared to be unsatisfyingly satisfied in a breathless sort of way, especially if you’re a parent or adoptee. Bring tissues and know that once you start “American Baby,” you’ll never want to let it go.

“American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption” by Gabrielle Glaser. 352 pages. Viking. $28.

For more on the subject of mothers and children, look for “Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood” by Christa Perravani. It’s the story of health care, the difficulty of finding resources in some places in our country, beloved children and a pregnancy that was unplanned.