An edition of The Girl from Foreign (2008)

Girl from Foreign

A Memoir

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Girl from Foreign
Sadia Shepard, Sadia Shepard
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Last edited by MARC Bot
December 21, 2022 | History
An edition of The Girl from Foreign (2008)

Girl from Foreign

A Memoir

  • 3 Want to read

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.

Publish Date
Language
English

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Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: Girl from Foreign
Girl from Foreign: A Memoir
2009, Penguin Publishing Group
in English
Cover of: The Girl from Foreign
Cover of: The Girl from Foreign
Cover of: Girl from foreign
Girl from foreign
2008, The Penguin Press
in English
Cover of: The Girl from Foreign
The Girl from Foreign: A Memoir
July 31, 2008, Penguin Press HC, The
Hardcover in English
Cover of: The Girl from Foreign
The Girl from Foreign
2008, Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Electronic resource in English

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Book Details


Classifications

Library of Congress
E184.36.E84 S54 2009

The Physical Object

Pagination
384
Weight
0.369

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL39572662M
ISBN 13
9780143115779
OCLC/WorldCat
557662334

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December 21, 2022 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
November 18, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
September 17, 2022 Created by ImportBot Imported from Better World Books record