Reluctantly, Joel Stein Discovers His Roots

Thanks to Lisa Kudrow's genealogy prowess, I now know my roots are in Russia. Or Poland

John Ueland for TIME

No one is more interested in himself than I am. And yet even I don't care about my genealogy. What my great-great-great-grandfather did isn't any more interesting to me than what your great-great-great-grandfather did, especially since in both cases it was farming.

I come from a long line of people who don't care about our long line of people. Whenever I asked my grandparents where their parents were from, they'd all launch into the same speech about how Poland and Russia switched borders a lot. The only thing I got from that speech was that people do not want to admit...

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