The Forgetting River: A Modern Tale of Survival, Identity, and the Inquisition

by Doreen Carvajal

Overview

The unexpected and moving story of an American journalist who works to uncover her family’s long-buried Jewish ancestry in Spain.

Raised a Catholic in California, New York Times journalist Doreen Carvajal is shocked when she discovers that her background may actually be connected to conversos from Inquisition-era Spain: Jews who were forced to renounce their faith and convert to Christianity or face torture and death. With vivid childhood memories of Sunday sermons, catechism, and the rosary, Carvajal travels to the centuries-old Andalucian town of Arcos de la Frontera, to investigate her lineage and recover her family’s original religious heritage.

In Arcos, Carvajal comes to realize that fear remains a legacy of the Inquisition along with the cryptic messages left by its victims. Back at her childhood home in California, she uncovers papers documenting a family of Carvajals who were burned at the stake in the 16th-century territory of Mexico. Could the author’s family history be linked to the hidden history of Arcos? And could the unfortunate Carvajals have been her ancestors?

As she strives to find proof that her family had been forced to convert to Christianity six hundred years ago, Carvajal comes to understand that the past flows like a river through time—and that while the truth might be submerged, it is never truly lost.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594631528
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/06/2013
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Doreen Carvajal is a Paris-based reporter for the The New York Times and a senior writer for the International Herald Tribune covering European issues. She has more than 25 years of journalism experience covering a broad range of subjects, from politics and immigration to book publishing and the media. She lives with her family near Paris.

Table of Contents

1 Ancient Voices 1

2 Living on the Brink 15

3 First Impressions 31

4 La Crisis 43

5 The Quest 57

6 The Enchantment of Fear 77

7 A Faithful Andalusian 85

8 An Unfaithful Catholic 97

9 Sharp Notes 109

10 Clues in the Blood 121

11 Forbidden Tastes 137

12 Pruning the Tree 157

13 There Is a Season 163

14 EI Call 181

15 Saving Voice 193

16 Return to the Ottoman Empire 201

17 A Time to Speak 213

18 Decoding Defiance 227

19 Below the Roses 241

20 Synagogue de Notre Dame 255

21 Between the Voices 263

22 River's End 271

23 Cry of the Stones 279

24 Final Card 295

Epilogue 305

Acknowledgments 315

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Doreen Carvajal has undertaken an extrordinary journey, and the story she tells is both personal and universal."
- Anne Lamott

"[A] compelling mix of memoir and reporting."
- O, The Oprah Magazine

“Unforgettable…Carvajal immerses herself and her readers in the ringing of Arcos’ ancient bells, the stories of its town historian, or cronista, and, most of all, the performance of haunting religious songs known as ‘saetas’ that may have originated as Jewish laments.”
– Chicago Tribune

“Darkly poetic.”
- Christian Science Monitor

“This book is an important addition to the record of Jewish history, not because it describes what history books already can tell us but because it evokes a personal sense of both loss and redemption growing out of that brutal history.”
– Kansas City Star

“Carvajal is a journalist who understands the nuance and beauty of travel writing. Combining this gift with this highly personal story, she creates a book that shimmers with enchantment, pulling the reader into her life with gentle tugs on the heartstrings. What she calls ‘hunting family ghosts’ will resonate with anyone who has ever felt out of place where they were and dreamed of finding another heritage just one layer beneath the one they had always accepted as the bedrock of their self-definition.”
- The Jewish Book Council

“A mesmerizing journey through time, across cultures and into one woman's rich personal history.”
- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Carvajal’s powerful prose is strong enough to hold these divergent story lines in a cohesive and engaging narrative of self-discovery and historical investigation.”
- Publishers Weekly

“Such an intriguing topic, and Carvajal…certainly knows how to write.”
- Library Journal

“[Carvajal’s] exploration reveals the fascinating legacy of the Jewish conversos…Her experiences not only reflect a heartfelt attempt to recapture a lost identity but also serve as a launching point for a wider exploration of the repercussions of the Inquisition.”
- Booklist

Editorial Reviews

"Doreen Carvajal has undertaken an extrordinary journey, and the story she tells is both personal and universal."
- Anne Lamott

"[A] compelling mix of memoir and reporting."
- O, The Oprah Magazine

“Unforgettable…Carvajal immerses herself and her readers in the ringing of Arcos’ ancient bells, the stories of its town historian, or cronista, and, most of all, the performance of haunting religious songs known as ‘saetas’ that may have originated as Jewish laments.”

– Chicago Tribune

“Darkly poetic.”
- Christian Science Monitor

“This book is an important addition to the record of Jewish history, not because it describes what history books already can tell us but because it evokes a personal sense of both loss and redemption growing out of that brutal history.”

– Kansas City Star

“Carvajal is a journalist who understands the nuance and beauty of travel writing. Combining this gift with this highly personal story, she creates a book that shimmers with enchantment, pulling the reader into her life with gentle tugs on the heartstrings. What she calls ‘hunting family ghosts’ will resonate with anyone who has ever felt out of place where they were and dreamed of finding another heritage just one layer beneath the one they had always accepted as the bedrock of their self-definition.”

- The Jewish Book Council

“A mesmerizing journey through time, across cultures and into one woman's rich personal history.”
- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Carvajal’s powerful prose is strong enough to hold these divergent story lines in a cohesive and engaging narrative of self-discovery and historical investigation.”
- Publishers Weekly 

“Such an intriguing topic, and Carvajal…certainly knows how to write.”
- Library Journal

“[Carvajal’s] exploration reveals the fascinating legacy of the Jewish conversos…Her experiences not only reflect a heartfelt attempt to recapture a lost identity but also serve as a launching point for a wider exploration of the repercussions of the Inquisition.”
- Booklist

From the Publisher

Despite growing up Catholic, Carvajal never sensed the familial connection with the religion she believed she should have felt. Unable to shake that feeling, Carvajal, a Paris-based reporter for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune, moved to the old Spanish town of Arcos de la Frontera in search of her family’s “discarded identity,” believing the family was connected to the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion of Jews from Spain in the 15th and 16th centuries. As an outsider, she is slow to crack the secretive and ritualistic community, but her skills as a reporter and passion for knowledge eventually allow her to find clues hidden in plain sight in the local music, food, and architecture that point to the region’s concealed Jewish history as well as her own relationship to her new hometown. Just like her ancestors, her tale wanders the globe from the dusty archives at a California university, a DNA lab in Texas, a lawyer in Costa Rica, and a nearly 200-year-old Paris synagogue, but Carvajal’s powerful prose is strong enough to hold these divergent story lines in a cohesive and engaging narrative of self-discovery and historical investigation. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Though raised Catholic in America, Carvajal discovered that her ancestors might have been Spanish Jews forced to convert during the Inquisition. So she traveled to the Andalucian town of Arcos de la Frontera to try to dig up her roots, then investigated documents about a Carvajal family burned at the stake in 1500s Mexico. What she discovers, above all else, is that the past is a river running very, very deep.

Library Journal

The haunting account of an investigative journalist's efforts to uncover her family's hidden Sephardic Jewish past. In the aftermath of 9/11, Paris-based New York Times journalist Carvajal began to experience "a strange yearning for something indefinable--a sense of refuge, of belonging." She also wanted to "fill in the deep, black holes" of memory that persisted in her Catholic family's history. Eventually, the author moved to Arcos de la Frontera, a town located in the same Spanish province where her father's family had originated. From this vantage point, she began to explore the fascinating, fraught history of the Sephardic Jews, who had been forced to become Catholic converts or exiles. She learned about the double lives of many of the conversos and the secret, often ingenious ways they developed to pay tribute to their true heritage. Carvajal also began to understand the ways in which Judaism had infused such time-honored and apparently Catholic traditions as the saeta, a song performed during Holy Week to pay homage to life-sized images of Christ or the Virgin Mary. Her quest for knowledge about los sefarditas soon evolved alongside a parallel quest for information about her family's past. Dissatisfied with the vague responses she received from relatives about family history, she pursued DNA testing, which offered tantalizing hints rather than conclusive answers to her questions. Carvajal finally found the "defining clue that resolved all doubts." As was the case with so much else they and other Sephardic Jews had left behind, the answers, though encrypted, were in plain sight, awaiting eyes that could decipher the truth. A mesmerizing journey through time, across cultures and into one woman's rich personal history.

Kirkus Reviews