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The Girl from Foreign |
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| Book: Hardcover | 6.14 x 9.25in | 384 pages | ISBN 9781594201516 | 31 Jul 2008 | The Penguin Press | 18 - AND UP |
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In this beautifully crafted memoir, a young half-Muslim, half-Christian woman travels to India to connect with a tiny Jewish community and unlock her family’s secret history.
Sadia Shepard grew up in a joyful, chaotic home just outside of Boston, Massachusetts, where cultures intertwined, her father a white Protestant from Colorado and her mother a Muslim from Pakistan. Her childhood was spent in a house full of stories and storytellers, where the customs and religions of both of her parents were celebrated and cherished with equal enthusiasm. But Sadia’s cultural legacy grew more complex when she discovered that there was one story she had never been told. Her beloved maternal grandmother was not a Muslim like the rest of her Pakistani family, but in fact had begun her life as Rachel Jacobs, a descendant of the Bene Israel, a tiny Jewish community whose members believe that they are one of the lost tribes of Israel, shipwrecked in India two thousand years ago. This new knowledge complicated Sadia's cultural inheritance even further, intimately linking her to the faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and to the customs of India, the United States, and Pakistan.
At her grandmother's deathbed, Sadia makes a promise to begin the process of filling in the missing pieces of her family's fractured mosaic. With the help of a Fulbright Scholarship and armed with a suitcase of camera equipment, she arrives in Bombay, where she finds herself struggling to document a community in transition. Her search to connect with the Bene Israel community and understand its unique traditions brings her into contact with a cast of remarkable characters, tests her sense of self, and forces her to examine what it means to lose and seek one’s place, one’s homelands, and one’s history. In the process, she unearths long-lost family secrets, confronts her fears of failure, and finds love in places that surprise her. Sadia beautifully weaves together the story of her grandparents’ secret marriage and the haunting legacy of Partition with an evocative account of a little-known Jewish community and a young woman’s search for self. The Girl from Foreign is her poetic and touching attempt to reconcile with her family's past and help determine her future. When offered the choice, will she be able to choose among the religious and cultural identities that have shaped her? It is an unforgettable story of family secrets, buried identities, lost histories, forbidden love, and, above all, eye-opening self- discovery.
“A beautifully written memoir about finding home, from an author who is multiply exiled. Told from the heart, The Girl from Foreign performs the unique feat of making the foreign feel familiar.”
—Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
“The Girl From Foreign unfolds like a series of miniatures or dreams—a synagogue in the heart of Bombay so bereft of Jews that its caretaker is a Muslim, a sixteen year old Pakistani girl welcomed to Kansas by a marching band playing "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow," secrets from another generation which have migrated from a Jewish to a Muslim household, locked and forgotten until a key arrives from America to free them. Intricately plotted, deeply moving, and beautifully written, the story of Sadia Shepard's journey into her grandmother's past proves that faith and memory and love will always be inextricable.”
—Deborah Baker, author of A Blue Hand: The Beats in India
"A deeply moving journey across boundaries that most others find uncrossable, and into depths of human meaning that are rarely plumbed. An important and timely book."
—James Carroll, author of Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews—A History
"Sadia Shepard writes with compassion and humility about her journey to discover the disparate forces—cultural, ethnic, and religious—that make up her identity. On the way, we learn about the diversity and plurality of a rapidly transforming Indian subcontinent; we discover the love story that brought Sadia’s grandparents together, and finally, we are reminded, though the intimate and touching portrait of her family, of all of the mysteries that shape who we are."
—Tahmima Anam, author of A Golden Age
"Part travelogue, part elegy to a beloved grandmother, and part love affair, The Girl From Foreign is a remarkable, moving and refreshingly honest account of a young woman's search for roots, for belief and a place to belong."
—Alice Greenway, author of White Ghost Girls
“From Boston to Karachi to the Jewish community of Bombay and its remnants on the Konkan coast, Sadia Shepard takes us on an elegant journey of both self- discovery and tribute to her Bene Israel grandmother, Rachel Jacobs, her beloved Nana. The Girl from Foreign is a beautiful story about the enigma of belonging and the complexities we all carry within us.”
—Devyani Saltzman, author of Shooting Water
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