The Girl From Foreign

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Overview

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 ...

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More About This Book

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Carolyn See
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…what a rich tapestry of theology, art, emotions and forgotten lore she's uncovered! As our personal memories turn into history, all too often the colors are leached from them. But Sadia Shepard tints the colors back in. We see lavish Muslim weddings, Jewish villages hidden in Indian jungles, earnest lovers reaching across religion and culture. The author's laudable accomplishment is that she yanks her grandmother's story from the coffin of forgetfulness and breathes it back into life.
—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly

"Who is Rachel Jacobs?" the 13-year-old asks her Muslim grandmother Rahat Siddiqi; "that," Nana tells her, "was my name before I was married." Thus does a grandmother's stunning reply and a granddaughter's promise "to learn about her ancestors" set Shepard's three voyages of discovery in motion: her grandmother's history; the story of the Bene Israel (one of the lost tribes of Israel that, having sailed from Israel two millennia ago, crashed on the Konkan coast in India; and her own self-discovery (her mother was Muslim, her father Christian, and her grand mother Jewish). Shepard balances all three journeys with dexterity as she spends her Fulbright year, with an old hand-drawn map and her grandmother's family tree, unraveling the mysteries of Nana's past while visiting and photographing the grand and minuscule synagogues in Bombay and on the Konkan Coast. A filmmaker, Shepard writes with a lively sense of pacing (her year proceeds chronologically, interspersed with well-placed flashbacks) and a keen sense of character (getting to know her friend, escort and fellow filmmaker Rekhev as gradually as she does, or capturing the Muslim baker who makes the "only authentic challah in Bombay" in a few strokes). Shepard's story is entertaining and instructive, inquiring and visionary. (Aug.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
Documentary filmmaker Shepard searches for her history deep in the heart of India's tiny Jewish community. Growing up in Boston, the author knew that her mother was a Muslim from Pakistan, her father a Christian from Colorado. When she was 13, in 1988, she learned that her grandmother had been born in Bombay, a member of the Bene Israel community, which believes it is one of the lost tribes of Israel. Shortly before Nana's death in 2000, Shepard promised she would go to India and study her ancestors. Her debut memoir begins 15 months later as she arrived in muggy Bombay to fulfill that promise. The ensuing trip was full of meetings with colorful characters and pensive reflections on identity, community and family. Shepard's journey through India took place as the world was rocked by the 9/11 attacks, which provided a recurring backdrop to her travels. In the nonlinear narrative of Part One, "Storytelling," the author dips back in time to recall how her parents met, to talk about her childhood and to examine her grandmother's influence on the family. Then she settles into "Fieldwork," a more conventional, chronological documentation of her journey. It throws up a number of intriguing revelations. One member of the Bene Israel community talked openly about the dwindling job opportunities for young Jews in Bombay, partly rectified in recent times by the booming call-center industry. Others seized on Shepard's ambivalence about religion and advised her to study a faith, preferably Judaism, and pick a partner from that denomination to marry. The author also traveled to Pakistan, where her grandmother and millions of other Indian Muslims moved after Partition in 1948. At Nana's old flat inKarachi, Shepard discovered a sheaf of her letters; these, together with the stories she told her granddaughter about her past, constitute the book's most interesting parts. A readable account that gives a vivid taste of life in present-day India as well as a poignant glimpse of complicated family relations. Agent: Fredrica Friedman/Fredrica S. Friedman and Company

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781594201516
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
  • Publication date: 7/31/2008
  • Pages: 384
  • Product dimensions: 9.48 (w) x 9.88 (h) x 1.20 (d)

Meet the Author

Sadia Shepard is a documentary filmmaker and writer who lives in New York City. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 1997, from the Graduate Program in Documentary Film and Video at Stanford University in 2000, and began her work with the Bene Israel community of India while on a Fulbright Scholarship. This is her first book.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Arrival 1

Pt. 1 Storytelling

1 The Painted City 7

2 Shipwrecked Ancestors 14

3 The Girl from Foreign 21

4 Lucky Child 35

5 M. Ibrahim, Professional Photographer 43

6 Three Parents 52

7 Influences 71

8 Siddiqi House 81

9 Shantaram's Pond 97

10 Richard and Samina 109

11 Anxious-Type Nature 122

Pt. 2 Fieldwork

12 The Dirt Collectors 133

13 Hindi Lessons 149

14 Native Places 154

15 Second-Class Car 179

16 Omens 182

17 Jews and Indians 203

18 Which Caste 214

Pt. 3 Departures

19 People of the Book 235

20 Nana's Papers 273

21 Travel Advisory 286

22 High Holidays 293

23 Leah and Daniel 316

24 Which Way Is East 328

25 Departures 345

Epilogue: Return 355

Author's Note 359

List of Illustrations 363

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4
( 8 )

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Sort by: Showing all of 8 Customer Reviews

  • Posted May 10, 2012

    An interesting, if somewhat dry, memoir of Sadia Shephard's year

    An interesting, if somewhat dry, memoir of Sadia Shephard's year in India and Pakistan tracking down the Bene Israel community to which her grandmother belonged.

    I found the details of the Bene Israel community informative and intriguing -- this is a community of which I wasn't aware. Ms. Shepard narrative voice, however, is oddly detached and I found much of the pacing far too slow.

    I never had a sense of precisely what it was Shepard hoped to discover -- facts of her family's past? Certainly. But what is that great 'something more' that lifts a book like this from a tepid graduate thesis to a universal symbol? I never found it, and although the back of the book declares her journey to be
    'life-changing' I was not aware of any great transformation in the narrator. If the central narrative arc of a memoir is how the events contained therein contributed to the memoirist becoming who she ultimately became, then this work is thin gruel, no matter how exotic and colorful (to Westerners) the locale may be.

    The most interesting passages, for me came towards the end of the book -- a section wherein she discovered her grandmother's recipes is particularly poignant, and perhaps that's due to the specificity of the moment. It's a lovely metaphor. I would have liked to see it, or something similar, used to greater effect throughout the work.

    Still, as I said in the beginning -- although the book drags in sections, the premise is interesting, as are the facts of the Bene Israel community.

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  • Posted March 5, 2012

    A very interesting memoir.

    This is an intriguing memoir. Sadia was raised by a Moslem mother a Protestant father and a Muslim grandmother. But as she grew, she found out that her Grandmother was born Jewish in India and later moved to Pakistan. After graduate school, Sadia began a journey to learn her Grandmother's heritage. Clearly written and beutifully structured, this story leaves the reader begging for more. A wonderful read.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 4, 2009

    Inspirational

    It was an absorbing story of a search for identity.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted May 23, 2009

    A wonderful journey of discovery of self, family and culture by an articulate young woman

    A mesmerizing read as Shepherd recounts her adventure in India using a Fulbright scholarship to explore that country's very small Jewish community, and her own recently discovered connection to it. The organization of the book is a little awkward, but the journey is so compelling one is willing to overlook it.

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    Posted November 30, 2010

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    Posted August 5, 2011

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    Posted December 26, 2008

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