The Girl From Foreign

Loyal Readers,

I don't shill for literary causes beyond my own very often, but I wanted to take a moment and make you aware of a book written by my friend Sadia Shepard which has just hit bookstores everywhere.

The Girl From Foreign is about Shepard's journey to India on a Fulbright scholarship in September 2001 to research the lives and rituals of the Jews of India. For two years, Shepard immerses herself in the tiny Jewish community known as the Bene Israel who consider themselves to be a lost tribe of Israel and heirs to a religious tradition that started with displacement and shipwreck over 2000 years before.

This exploration serves as more than an academic exercise for Shepard; her grandmother grew up in the Bene Israel community before moving to Pakistan following the Partition of India. Her grandmother's dying wish was that Shepard (raised outside of Boston by a white Protestant father and a Muslim mother from Pakistan) learn about the customs of her grandmother's Jewish youth in India, a youth that she had to leave behind. Shepard's story is a cross-cultural family memoir with soft small moments that deliver elucidating big ideas, a delicate untangling of the haunting webs of religion and identity, and a greater search for home and homeland.

The book's really good, see her when she comes to your town, tell her I sent you, grab a drink with her, and have a better life because of it.

Thanks,

Adam