I have a childhood memory of him sitting at the kitchen table in front of a lazy Susan filled with prescription bottles, checking his pulse, two fingers pressed against the side of his neck, his face contorted with fear. Exploring her responses to events both profound and mundane, Shapiro has written the best-selling memoirs Still Writing, Devotion and Slow Motion. Susie looked like him, whereas she looked like no one in their family. And yet, as she soon confesses, she had to ditch her writerly compass to break the longest dry spell of her career at least in fiction. Did Dani Shapiro meet her biological father? But they're bored; it's the end of summer; school will resume next week. How did you feel when you were done writing? But how could this be? Im interested in the ways we dont experience time in a linear fashion, Shapiro says. My father postponed his wedding to Dorothy for ten days. The one time I asked him about her, I glimpsed pain in his eyes so intense I never asked again. Nor did her discovery, ultimately, change her feelings for the man she grew up with. "I was pulled back. Her book, Shapiro thinks, speaks to this epidemic, the literature around donor insemination being surprisingly scant and though Inheritance is a highly personal book, one that seeks to tell only her story, in the months since she finished writing it, she has grown ever more focused on what she regards as the long-ignored ethical issues involved in donor insemination. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Now, in a return to her roots, she's publishing her first work of fiction since 2007, with Signal Fires, which the celebrated memoirist says is like an "imprint" of her "soul. Ever since they first met, Shapiro says, M has reassured her with the phrase, "I'll take care of it" whether the pesky "it" be a woodpecker or an electric bill. He also wants another cigarette. And he said to me, Did you think that was going to upset me? I said I didnt know. His newest feature film, A Little White Lie, is due to be released in March 2023. An American Poet. "I'm looking out my window right now as I'm talking to you," she explains, "and the branches are just starting to redden in that very early spring awakening. But when I visited her, almost a year into my new marriage, she seemed entirely unfazed that her late sisters husbands daughter would have come looking for her. His foot on the gas. The task was easier said than done although she has done it. As Dani shares the secrets that cause that "useless" shame, she also builds a community of people who were ultimately liberated by the discovery of their secret, like she was. Pills make me think of my father. Just as she watched that woodpecker ceaselessly rat-tat-tatting on the side of her house, Shapiro is attentive to the ways time steadily hammers away at the 18-year bond between her and her. This is my 10th book, she says. That's his sister, Sarah, from the back seat. Perhaps if she gazed at herself for long enough, a new face would emerge from behind her own: a truer one, a face that would better reflect her sense of herself. Shapiro learned that the man she had always known as . Now I followed her down a hall and into her bedroom. But down the years (shes in her 50s now), shed also come to accept that there was a mystery at the centre of her life: something on which she couldnt put her finger. A wire gets tripped. Having found him online, she watched a video on his website in which he appeared before her: a man with her colouring, her jaw, her eyes, her voice and her hand gestures. I realized I was really writing about marriage, which was scary to me. "Even though it's a novel after all these memoirs and it's not on the surface of things autobiographical it feels deeply like a kind of imprint of my soul.". ", "Grant, Shapiro and Jacobson make Wingate Prize longlist | The Bookseller", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dani_Shapiro&oldid=1139427053, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, 2023: National Jewish Book Award winner in the JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction category for, This page was last edited on 15 February 2023, at 02:22. DANI SHAPIRO's new book, Still Writing, contains a chapter toward the end titled "Envy." She says envy's a terrible, destructive force for writers, and I agree. Susie, I cant go to shul, Dorothy told her. One night, Shapiro's husband unwraps the containers and nonchalantly tells his wife to spit in one. This is complex. When the writer Dani Shapiro was a little girl, she would sneak down the hall late at night once her parents were asleep, the better to stare at herself uninterrupted in the bathroom mirror. And it's nothing, really, or might be nothing, or ought to be nothing, as he leans his head forward to press the tip of his cigarette to the car's lighter. It had a great deal to do, I see now, with my father becoming a shadowy figure and with my mothers rage and contempt for him., Shapiro was closer by far to her father, who was not biologically related to her, than to her mother, who never stopped reminding her daughter that it was to her that she owed her existence. DNA tests can be conducted without the father knowing, but the results are strictly for personal information and cannot be used in a court of law. What if Theo had succumbed to his usual way of being, and fixed himself a salami sandwich with lots of mustard and taken it with him to bed? The latest fashion news, beauty coverage, celebrity style, fashion week updates, culture reviews, and videos on Vogue.com. Instead Shapiro was dealing with the whims of fortune, good and ill: the bounty that came with Inheritance, which led to a podcast about Family Secrets, followed by the calamity of the cancer that afflicted her husband, filmmaker Michael Maren. After this night, she will become unknowable to him. The guests shouted Mazel tov! and applauded as he and Dorothy kissed. The second lightning bolt came from a friend, a novelist who knew a few things about fragmentation: Jennifer Egan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, time-jumping novel-in-stories A Visit From the Goon Squad., Id written myself into a corner because I was married to the big idea, Shapiro says the backward timeline. As soon as I met Michael, I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with him. In the 1980s and 1990s, she lived in three of the Upper West Side's most storied landmark buildings: the. After the wedding, Dorothy said she wanted to start a family as soon as she felt better, but late that summer she was hospitalized. And he continued sliding away. Her short fiction, essays, and journalistic pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of The . He is a lovely human being and I recognise aspects of myself in him. I was giving up at the age of twenty-eight. It was once ivory silk, with ivory silk-covered buttons. The life of memoirist and novelist Dani Shapiro is pretty much an open book. Ive always tried to make meaning out of things that are difficult, she says. A window opens. All rights reserved. Patrick is a freelance critic who tweets @TheBookMaven. American journalist, screenwriter, and director, School of International and Public Affairs, United States Agency for International Development, "Biographical Summaries of Notable Peoples", "The Bittersweet Life: Episode 210: Correspondent (with Michael Maren)", "No.1472: Relief Food Workers Dying of Starvation", "The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid International Charity by Michael Maren", "Michael Maren, Bryan Greenberg, and Linda Lavin: Meet the Filmmaker", "A Depressed Writer, Distracted by His Ailing Parents", "Michael Shannon, Kate Hudson, Don Johnson, Da'Vine Joy Randolph to Star in Comedy 'Shriver', "Kate Hudson Gushes Over Shriver Costar Michael Shannon in First Look at Their Upcoming Comedy", "Bethlehem author/director couple collaborate on 'Inheritance' movie", "Dani Shapiro Shares Excerpt From Her Upcoming Novel Signal Fires, Her 'Most Personal Book' Yet", "Dani Shapiro's 'Hourglass' Explores A Marriage Over Time Litchfield County resident and bestselling memoirist Dani Shapiro discusses her latest book, Hourglass", "Dani Shapiro's Provident Move to the Country", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Maren&oldid=1133917258, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University alumni, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 16 January 2023, at 03:25. By Dani Shapiro . In 1954, decades before he was thought of as the Messiah by many in the Lubavitcher community, Rabbi Schneerson was already a mythic figure. [13], Angela Haupt writes: "On a cold night in 2010, a retired doctor sits underneath an ancient oak tree with the unusual little boy who lives across the street. He was curious. Anyone can read what you share. My son also read it and texted me saying that its helped him fall asleep at night. She was drawn and terribly thin, and her eyes were sunken. Dani Shapiro: On a winter night three years ago, my husband told me that he had decided to take a DNA test. And hed say, Where do you think I am? And Id say, The hospital. And then Id ask how Dorothy was, and hed tell me she was resting. Together we shuffled through the photographs. It was an apartment big enough for a family, and it had views of Grand Army Plaza and the Brooklyn Museum. He wasnt happy about it at all. I wondered if my mother knew that my father stayed in touch with Dorothys sister. Jan. 4, 2019 1:29 pm ET. The Secret Wife | Dani Shapiro August 28, 2013 The Secret Wife In 1953, nine years before I was born, my father fell in love with a young woman named Dorothy Gribetz. Years later, the past comes back with painful force when a young boy, Waldo Shenkman, and his parents move across the street and he strikes up a friendship with Ben Wilf, a retired doctor. The result of that questioning is Signal Fires. Whatever he needed in the way of money he had to petition for. At the same time, I think everything that lead him to that moment and that particular room and vice versa was necessary in order to have that feeling. Ben Wilf stares down at the scene below for a fraction of a second. Then she unbuttoned her blouse with shaking fingers. And thats perhaps the biggest compliment, that my son read it and thought to himself: There they are.. In Dani Shapiro's new book, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage, we find these questions and their answers, as the author hones her lens on her own marriage for the first time. But a nephew of his had and so I found him. Signal Fires follows two neighboring families in Westchester County, N.Y., over the course of two decades, showing how an early tragedy ramifies into the future toward a later cataclysm. And while the discovery of family secrets can initially . running a podcast, the author seems to move with frictionless grace between worlds and mediums while the rest of us squint at our creative lives and wonder where were going. [15] Inheritance debuted at #11 on the New York Times Best Seller list[16] and Ruth Franklin called it "beautifully written and deeply moving. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/08/style/dani-shapiro-michael-p-maren.html. And then he said, Tell your brother to postpone and postpone. . Shirley and my father knew that their parents had met Schneerson and respected him, but in turning to him they were moving outside their social circle. It captured something about the ways we are all interconnected.. Dear Adam, We weren't supposed to meet like this. But I knew my parents would never divorce. We need to ask if the guarantee of anonymity made by sperm banks is still valid when the world has changed and the science has changed., In recent weeks, Shapiro has spoken at the bio-ethics departments of both Harvard and Stanford universities. Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love Dani Shapiro Knopf, $24.95 272 pages. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, where she also received a master's of fine arts degree. Orthodoxy was its own universe-a universe as suspicious of her as she was of it. ", On Tuesday, Shapiro is sharing an exclusive first look at the book cover with PEOPLE, as well as a gripping excerpt from its pages. In Dani Shapiros new book, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage, we find these questions and their answers, as the author hones her lens on her own marriage for the first time. That day, I took a taxi to Crown Heights, Shirley told me. Why was the phrase Ill take care of it repeated so often between you and M?Ms use of that phrase to comfort me during tough times ended up becoming a leitmotif throughout the story until the scene where Im watching him sleep as hes going through something difficult, and I think, Ill take care of it. It was a breakthrough moment, in which I understood that the shape of relationships is like a game of hot potato played over a lifetime, in which strength is tossed back and forth. Only his clothes remained, folded neatly on the top shelves of the closets. I think time moves around inside of us, when we have memories. As a young Jewish girl, Dani Shapiro always felt different. My fathers first wedding, to Susies mother, had been a gala, candlelit affair in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, marking the union of two powerful Orthodox clans. Memory isnt linear, imagination isnt linear, says Dani Shapiro. Now it was yellow and stained, and much too big for her small frame. Oil portraits of the Shapiro ancestors men with white double beards and black skullcaps hung on the walls. Not looking Jewish was somehow perceived as flattering, and that felt uncomfortable to me.. When the layers are stripped back, what remains? Subscribe to the live your best life newsletter Get more stories like this delivered to your inbox Please accept the Oprah.com terms and conditions and privacy policy That summer, her husband, Michael, curious about his origins, had sent away for one of the DNA-testing kits that are now the USs most popular holiday gift (last year, 12m were sold; in total, some 26m people have taken a test, adding their DNA to the four leading commercial ancestry databases), and one night the two of them spat into two vials. He wants to go home. Who do you think you are? On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. The life she has: the children, the grandchildren, the hamantaschen in the oventhat was the life my father was supposed to have had with Dorothy. "[17] The San Francisco Chronicle described Inheritance as "as compulsively readable as a mystery novel, while exploring the deeper mysteries of identity and family and truth itself a story told with great insight and honesty and heart. ), She also supported her husband Michael Maren, a screenwriter, during his battle with cancer three years ago. The wheel spins. Grace, will you wear this to shul for me? Inheritance will be adapted forfilm by Killer Films! [39] The podcast's seventh season premiered on September 1, 2022[40] the podcast has over 30 million downloads. Weaving deftly between novels and memoirs, publishing essays on craft, teaching at home and abroad and even why not? It was a terrible thing they did. For my mother, it was as if my fathers second wife had barely existed. While Dorothy was having tea at the Waldorf-Astoria, the winter before her wedding, my fathers younger sister, Shirley, noticed her carefully examining her cup before taking a sip. 18. What does that look like? My father was handsome in a morning coat and silk ascot. He told me that he eventually felt I would write about him, which is something I definitely didnt know. You look like your father, she said, ushering me in. Dani and her husband M. (she doesn't name him in the book) have been married 18 years. But then. That night, Danny went to see my father, who was camping out in his parents study, a black-and-gold book-lined room twenty-seven floors above Central Park West. I grew up in a house full of fear. I had a much more complicated relationship with that than I acknowledged, she says. Theo looks for a good spot to stop. And then every once in a while there would be the booming sound of my fathers voice, or the loud slam of the back door as my mother went outside to sit on the cold aluminum of the milk can and smoke a cigarette. The furniture was gone. He didnt even receive a salary. What My May-December Relationship Taught Me About Love. Louis Gribetz was a short, wiry man, a respected attorney who had written a book about Mayor Jimmy Walker and made an unsuccessful run for City Council. When she looks at M's face, Shapiro says, she sometimes feels as though "he has fled the premises." It shattered in the street . Take a look at your reflection. "Why. It was as if I had been digging for . He blushes easily. He was exactly the man Id been brought up to marry: Jewish, stable, financially secure, with a life planned down to the last millisecond. She wanted to meet her biological father and, after some hesitation, he agreed. This was maybe a bad idea. Sam Gillette is a books Writer/Reporter for People.com and People Magazine. She had died a week before. The boy points out the constellations, and what they represent. I used to meet your father for lunch every once in a while, Grace said. Kwaku Alston /Random House. While my family were considered Orthodox by most standards, Hasidim would have considered them assimilated. Who Is Dani Shapiro's Husband? These fights didnt seem to have beginnings or ends. I spend my honeymoon certain that Im about to die. Much of this work centered on war and famine and the culpability of aid organizations (Private Voluntary Organizations, or PVOs); he wrote in Harper's Magazine: Because reporters are as dependent on aid organizations as the organizations are on them. In my parents time, there was no regulation. He asked me if I wanted him to order me one too. She had been a serious pianist before getting married and wanted to continue to perform and even, perhaps, to pursue a doctorate. And there, I caught a flash of myself in the mirror in the hotel ballroom, and saw myself the way other people see me for the first time. When the writer Dani Shapiro was a little girl, she would sneak down the hall late at night once her parents were asleep, the better to stare at herself uninterrupted in the bathroom mirror.. The creator of The Donor of Sibling Registry. Misty's riding shotgun. Signal Fires, Dani Shapiros first novel in 15 years, follows the man and his family, and the boy and his parents, across decades, lyrically examining the ways a single event can alter many lives forever." There was a truth between us, she says. Her previous marriage ended in divorce. The paperback edition ofInheritance is an LA Times,Washington Post, Boston Globe, and San Francisco Chronicle, and National Indie bestseller! Within a year, he had injured his back and became addicted to painkillers and tranquillizers. Author Dani Shapiro discusses her latest memoir, a searing look at life, love and marriage. On Rosh Hashanah morning, Dorothy and her sister, Grace, were dressing for shul in their old girlhood bedroom. He can feel his cheeks redden as he holds the lighter and inhales, hears the sizzle, draws smoke deep into his lungs. Occasionally, playing ball with him in the back yard on a beautiful summer morning, I would catch a glimpse of the young man he must once have been a deep belly laugh, a crushing hug, a sudden sparkle in his eyes and I would want to reach out and hold onto him and to make things better for him, without ever knowing what had gone wrong. Join Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of the memoir Inheritance, and her guests as they explore astonishing family secrets and uncover the extraordinary lessons the truth can teach us. Shapiro inadvertently made a discovery, at which point her otherness, and her blonde hair, suddenly made sense though everything else she thought she knew now crumbled to dust. My father was fresh out of a miserable marriage, stinging from a custody battle for his six-year-old daughter, Susie. [6] She is the daughter of Paul Shapiro, from an Orthodox Jewish family (who, she later learned through a recreational DNA test, was not her biological father[7]), and Irene Shapiro, from South Jersey. When I got to 770 Eastern Parkway, I was shown straight into the Rebbes study. They got on well and their relationship a warm friendship is ongoing. And while the discovery of family secrets can initially be terrifying or traumatic, often these discoveries have the power to liberate, heal, and even uplift us. How were you able to employ such pared-down language to describe them? One day in the late 1960s, a family friend, Mrs Kushner the future grandmother of Jared, husband of Ivanka Trump pulled her to one side. Maybe she's trying to helpto get him to act, goddamnit. It was simply: There you are. And I felt it all the way through me and not in an overstimulated, super-excited way. Initially, I was writing an essay about the inheritance of objects and I was weaving in all of these anecdotes about family. And then there was talk that she had been having an affair with Susies pediatrician. Author Dani Shapiro's DNA ancestry test results shook her to her core. That needs to change, partly because of the consequences for their biological children my book is instructive about what its like to discover youre the child of an anonymous donor but also because they will be found. Dorothy was only one of them. The past decade, in which social media has become front and center in many fields, has been particularly tricky for writers. Inheritance by Dani Shapiro is published by Daunt Books at 9.99. I was a teen-ager, unprepared for marriage or solitude. But, still, it made deep, emotional sense to me. [14], In Inheritance, Shapiro writes about her experience of learning through a recreational DNA test that her biological father was not Paul Shapiro; rather, she had been conceived by the primitive practice of mixing Paul's sperm with that of an anonymous donor, whom she later was able to identify. My parents created a myth. She wasnt feeling well. Inheritancenamed a best book of 2019 by Vanity Fair! Timely and unforgettable, Dani Shapiro's memoir is a gripping, gut-wrenching exploration of genealogy, paternity . (The book was so popular it led to her podcast Family Secrets. Text. His best friend and best man, Danny Schacter, stood behind him. But what they went through to conceive me and what they then did to pack away the knowledge of it that just poured gasoline over the whole thing. It was open to an article about Hodgkins lymphoma. Shapiro describes the sensuousness of her courtship with M and their honeymoon (in Paris no less); she recalls the relief of ordinary parenthood after their son's medical emergency had passed when, as Shapiro reflects, she and her husband were "still young enough to believe that life holds only one close call per customer. I had never seen this expression of pure, unadulterated joy on my fathers face. That would also have been difficult. Meeting Ben has helped her to feel, at last, like a complete person. Daunt Books in the UK has won an auction to publish Inheritance! By the time he's made it to the front door, his daughter, Sarah, is standing before himthank god thank god thank godher tee shirt and her face splattered with blood. Ad Choices, Actor Graham McTavish Planned a Scottish Castle Wedding for His Bride, Garance Dor, 70 Incredible Forgotten Photos From Vintage Oscar Nights, Phil Ohs Best Street Style Photos From the Fall 2023 Shows in Paris. April 6, 2019 / 1:51 PM / CBS News Through five memoirs and five novels, best-selling author Dani Shapiro has excavated and examined her family's Orthodox Jewish history and her own place in. During that time, she'd published Inheritance, in which Shapiro delves into her shocking discovery that the man who raised her was not her biological father. [4], Shapiro was born Daneile Shapiro[5] on April 10, 1962, In New York City. Entertainment Weekly announces Danis forthcoming novel the first in 15 years! This knowledge has led to an evolution of something I already felt: the sense that who we love, and feel connected to, sometimes has to do with biology, and sometimes not. Dorothy and my father would have lived in Brooklyn, or on Central Park West, or on the beach at Rockaway Park. Imagination isnt linear. In Hourglass (Knopf), out tomorrow, beloved novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro presents a sharp look at the realities of marriage. Change one thing and everything changes. He married Dorothy in the living room of her parents modest Brooklyn apartment on April 11, 1954. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. My fathers family became concerned. Dani Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion and five novels including Black and White and Family History. Her voice was sweet and sorrowful. I took off my fancy hat and tied the tichel under my chin. The rabbi was emphatic: Danny had to tell my father what he knew. Shapiro wrote about 120 pages and then shelved them. He stole a peek at her medical records, and saw page after page of scrawled blood-test results: she had Hodgkins lymphoma, at the time a uniformly fatal illness. Dolly Parton and James Patterson's Thriller Features a Singer with a 'Dangerous' Past Read an Excerpt! In Inheritance, Shapiro describes all that her Judaism means to her: the Hebrew prayers that constantly play in her head; the portraits of her relatives that hang on the walls in her hall; above all, the strange shame she felt when people were apt to insist she did not look Jewish. Different types of NPE experiences include late-discovery adoptions, the revelation of an extra-marital affair, and more. Shapiro has been married since 1997 to screenwriter Michael Maren, [43] and they have a son, Jacob. He had retreated behind a wall of pills and prayer. By the time I was born, my father had movedor perhaps was pushedaway from the Orthodox fold as Shirley and her family became even more deeply involved in it. He didnt get in touch with Dorothy to let her know, and once it was sundown on Friday, the Sabbath, he wouldnt be able to call her until at least sundown on Saturday. She had no idea that becoming Orthodox meant more than keeping a kosher home and going to shul on holidays. He seems to be in one piece. That's a beautiful line of poetry and also not bad advice from Shapiro about how to pace oneself in a relationship that's hoping to go the distance. I cant do that to Dorothy, he said. Shapiro attended a Solomon Schechter Jewish day school through 6th grade, after which she attended the Pingry School in New Jersey. It sizzles on contact, a sound particular to its brief moment in history, in which cars have lighters and otherwise sensible fifteen-year-olds choke down Marlboro Reds and drive their mothers' Buicks without so much as a learner's permit. But, for my father, being near Dorothys parents probably meant that hed have more help with Dorothy when the time came. So I had the taxi stop at a store on Delancey, and I ran inside and bought a tichel, a black rag. Until recently . She is now sixty-nine, with silver hair. . As a consequence, the couple's income is unpredictable. When I knew, I knew. My father was determined that his parents shouldnt be told about Dorothys illness. In front of us, the rabbi recites a blessing. "I've always wanted to write a novel that spans a significant amount of time with the same characters and really look at the way that a family or more than one family grows and changes over time," says Shapiro. She also co-founded Sirenland Writers Conference[38] which takes place annually in Positano, Italy. His head was bowed, and he was stroking the inside of Dorothys wrist, tracing the map of pale-blue veins. Bestselling author Dani Shapiro became even more widely known after she released her memoir Inheritance in 2019. [10][11] He remained in Kenya, running the food-for-work program with the Catholic Relief Services; later he worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Somalia, serving as a food assessment specialist on the Somali border with Ethiopia.[12]. If 12m kits were sold in the US last year, then around 240,000 people have discovered their parent is not their parent and theyre only the ones whove taken a test.. Why had her parents gone to their graves carrying so huge a secret? [44] In the early 2000s, Dani and her family moved from Brooklyn, NY to Litchfield County, Connecticut.[45]. It is a bit of a national obsession. Dani Shapiro, a beloved author and host of the popular iHeartRadio podcast "Family Secrets," is back with a new show to help her listeners navigate these unprecedented and challenging times. Suddenly she sat down on the bed, her face white, the black circles appearing. But, of course, no one can always "take care of it." Well, they were certainly struck by her appearance. That's where M comes in: He's a bit older and, as Shapiro presents him, somewhat depressed. The Shapiros and their crowd kept their religious practices private. My father sent Susie outside to roller-skate. The word cancer was never uttered. Early life and education [ edit] Maren grew up in Andover, Massachusetts and graduated from Northfield Mt. I threw dinner parties, cooked the one dish I knew, and pretended to be a grownup. Dani Shapiro's income source is mostly from being a successful Author.
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