The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten…

Borrowed by a friend before I could finish it. Good thing I sneaked a peek at the ending first. I guess I don't really need to read the 75 pages in the middle that I missed. ( )

The Girl from Foreign chronicles Sadia Shepard's journey of discovery to explore her heritage. She is the daughter of a Pakistani woman of Islamic faith and a white, Protestant from Colorado. Living with the family during Sadia's childhood and young adult-hood, was her cherished maternal grandmother. At age 13, Sadia discovers a pin that had belonged to a nurse named Rachel Jacobs. It turns out that Rachel was Sadia's grandmother's name before she married. Even more surprising was that her grandmother was not Muslim originally, but had been born, in India, into a Jewish family, one of the Bene Israel, a small group of Jews, shipwrecked in India two thousand years ago, who some believe may have been part of the lost tribes of Israel.

Sadia's story revolves around her year in India as a Fulbright scholar, as she explores, documents, and tries to discover her grandmother's story, and uncover her own.

One of the pieces I enjoyed the most was Sadia's time in Pune and Bombay, both places I have been. I also really liked learning more about the Bene Israel, as group of people I knew nothing about. ( )

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. ( )

A bit of a disappointment, this book describes Sadiya's daily work as she attempts to locate the Bene Israel, Jews living in India, her grandmother's family. While many of the historical bits about her forefathers and their struggles to adapt to life in India prove quite interesting, Sadiya's own story left me wanting more revelation and more drama. I would recommend this for people specifically interested in the Bene Israel community in India. ( )

Poignant. I really enjoyed the exploration of her family roots that the author made. I have aspirations to do a similar thing for my family. She writes well, most evocative of India and as she discovers more about her family inevitably it becomes a journey of self-exploration. It also speaks to the grief of losing family members and re-creating oneself in another culture. ( )