BIG LITTLE LIE

Noam Tomaschoff grew up as an only child in a tight-knit family of three. At 31, he discovered that his parents had been keeping a shocking secret-and the surprises just kept coming

- Andrea Yu

NOAM TOMASCHOFF IS AN ACTOR, writer and director who grew up in the Beaches and Bedford Park, the only child of Sylvie and Gideon Tomaschoff. Theirs was a tight-knit family with strong ties to Toronto's Jewish community. Last fall, at age 31, Tomaschoff took a DNA test on a lark-and the story of his life unravelled.

Noam: The idea of taking a 23and Me test came from a conversation on the dating app Hinge, of all places. It was August of 2022, and I had been chatting with Mary, who's now my girlfriend, for a while, but we hadn't met in person. She mentioned that she had taken a DNA test out of curiosity. I was aware of 23and Me, but it wasn't something I'd ever thought about doing. I was confident that I knew everything about my background. My dad is from Israel, and my mom, who is from Montreal, is French Canadian and Italian and had converted to Judaism before she married my dad. But, after Mary mentioned it, I saw online that 23and Me was having a summer sale-a test would cost $120 instead of $150. So I ordered one. I was living in LA but was back home in Toronto, where my parents live. I figured I would do the test when I returned to LA in September.

Sylvie: We were at our cottage on Wolfe Island, near Kingston, when Noam told me he'd ordered the test. It was just Noam and me at the time we were going for a hike on one of the Thousand Islands. I was a few steps behind him on the path, and when he told me, I felt like he had taken the pin out of a grenade and tossed it over his shoulder. I was trying to be very cool, but my brain was going a hundred miles an hour. At first, I said, "Oh, why? Do you think those things are accurate?"