The reviews on Amazon and in the Washington Post of The Girl from Foreign, Sadia Shepard's journey into the past to resurrect her Jewish Indian grandmother's lost identity, has left me curious enough to put the book in my Amazon shopping cart. I plan to check it out in the near future. The story is common enough - a member of an obscure and tiny religious minority community getting absorbed into a larger religious group on account of marriage and in the midst of great political upheaval losing touch with the home on whose shores she believed her shipwrecked ancestors had landed two thousand years ago. Shepard's book recounts a family story which is a patchwork of all three Abrahamic faiths and hopscotches across three nations in search of roots.
From the Washington Post:
Besides being a personal memoir and a portrait of a family that includes the world's three major monotheistic religions, "The Girl From Foreign" is a meditation on how our individual memories inevitably slip away, either into oblivion or into that dull collective consciousness we call history.
The main, organizing event here occurred in 1947, when India at once gained its independence from Britain and split into two countries -- Hindus remaining primarily in the main body of the subcontinent; Muslims peeling off to the west and east, to form Pakistan. (Decades later, East Pakistan became Bangladesh.) The average American, if there is such a thing, might remember 1947 as part of the beginning of the Cold War. But Indians have the nerve to be fascinated by the events that occurred in their own country that year, the public history that overlaps, vividly, with their personal memories.
Little Sadia Shepard and her younger brother, Cassim, grew up first in Denver, then Chestnut Hill, Mass., in what she considered to be a wonderful and normal life with three terrific adults: her American dad, a tall, rangy, white Protestant; her beautiful Muslim mother, who was born and raised in an affluent home in Karachi, the first capital of Pakistan; and her sweet maternal grandmother, who raised the kids and kept the house while the adult couple ran an architectural firm. This grandma has a set of slightly dissonant memories: "A very long time ago," she tells young Sadia, "your ancestors left Israel in a ship . . . and they were shipwrecked, in India. They were Jews, but they settled in India. In the shipwreck they lost their Torahs, and they forgot their religion." Sadia's nana had spent her early adult years as a Muslim wife in a beautiful beach house in Bombay. But she was neither Hindu nor Muslim. Her prayers, years later, are Muslim, but in her childhood she was a Jew.
For those who are curious about the history of Judaism in India, please see my review of Who Are the Jews of India? by Nathan Katz.
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