Probably there isn’t any such thing as a typical adoption story, but if there were to be one, it certainly wouldn’t be Yael Schusterman Adler’s.
Yael, who grew up in Fort Lee and now lives in Randolph, always knew that she was adopted. Her parents, Marcy and Herb Schusterman, never kept that truth from her. But none of them talked about it much, and Yael wasn’t very interested in it. She grew up as a happy only child, close to her family, cherished by her parents and secure in their love. She didn’t particularly look like her parents, but not all children do, and she didn’t stand out as not possibly theirs by DNA. But just about two years ago, after her father died, she was helping her mother clean up their apartment when she came across paperwork about her adoption. “It was a treasure trove,” Yael said. “It was gold. It was things that I’d never seen before; it was exciting and intriguing. And I’d just turned 30 — a big milestone birthday. So it made me think — now I have all this information in front of me. What do I do? Do I ignore it? Just go on with my life? Or do I pay attention to it.”
