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The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories, and a Sense of Home | 
 enlarge | Author: Sadia Shepard
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $15.04
You Save: $10.91 (42%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 5823
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.3
ISBN: 159420151X
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.04924054092
EAN: 9781594201516
ASIN: 159420151X
Publication Date: July 31, 2008 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20080817214304T
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Product Description
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 familys 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 Sadias 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 ones place, ones homelands, and ones 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 womans 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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Interesting story, well written August 19, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
At the behest of her dying grandmother, Shepard investigated her family's past in India and Pakistan. Her journey is a combination of revelation and research, with some intellectual discussions about the meaning of religion, family, and nationality, thrown in. Chapters alternate between Shepard's research and travels and accounts of her grandmother (her mother's mother,) who grew up a Jew in India and became the third wife of a Muslim businessman who moved to Pakistan after partition. Shepard's father is an American Christian. Her clear writing is full of insights, with many questions left for the reader to ponder.
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