The Girl from Foreign
A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories, and a Sense of Home
by Sadia Shepard1
Reviewed by Dr. Janna Nadler
It seems that there are so many memoirs/travelogues/creative autobiographies these days. How is a reader to choose? There’s no way to be sure that a particular author’s journey will strike a chord with a particular reader. So, when a story does leave an impression on its reader, as Sadia Shepard’s The Girl from Foreign has for me, I feel that one should “spread the word.”
In her book, Shepard writes about her journey to India on a Fulbright scholarship. Her project is to investigate her ancestry – in particular, to discover more about her late Nana’s history. We learn that when Shepard was thirteen years old, she discovered by chance that her Muslim Nana (and Sadia’s grandfather’s third wife) had in fact been born into a very tiny group of Jews in western India called the Bene Israel.
In an interview, Shepard explains, “I couldn’t quite fathom how my grandmother, who wore a sari and made what I thought of as Pakistani food, was in fact an Indian Jew. And I began to ask her more and more and more about her community and her origins…And this new knowledge was a revelation to me, and became a kind of catalyst in my life.” 2 And it was this revelation, this catalyst that leads her to the writing of the book.
The Girl from Foreign is a hybrid book. In addition to fictionalized characters and dialogue, Shepard includes photographs, maps, letters, and diagrams. Once might call it a creative travelogue, or memoir, or history. What I want to highlight is that the book is authentically complex. It is not a linear narrative which simply takes us from “point A” to “point B.” It is because of this that the reader needs to stay focused. The beautiful connections made between characters, images, and setting can best be recognized and appreciated by a reader who avoids long breaks between chapters.
There is a quiet beauty to this narrative. Shepard’s descriptions of the landscape – especially Mumbai (her Nana’s Bombay) – are wonderfully cluttered with distinctive sounds, smells, and images. A Bombay street in the morning “is lined with the compact parcels of sleeping men, arranged in columns along the stone walls that border the street, cocooned neatly in white cloths, like caterpillars” (133). Underpinning these descriptions of Bombay are the references to the city she’s left behind: New York in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks.
Some of Shepard’s characters offer irony and comic relief, and others offer the possibility for romance. Of all the relationships, however, Shepard’s relationship with her Nana is central. The Girl from Foreign doesn’t just convey the experience of hybrid identities and the message of positive plurality. Carried along with this message, ingrained in Shepard’s imagery and textual detail, is the depiction of a treasured relationship between a granddaughter and her Nana.
If you have experienced that special relationship with an aging parent/grandparent – if you have had the responsibility of sorting through the papers, memorabilia, furniture, clothes, and other items left behind in the wake of a loved one’s death – Shepard’s story will resonate with you.
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Dr. Janna Nadler has a B.Ed. and a Ph.D. in English Literature. She is the Director of BOOK CLUBS BY JANNA and lectures widely for book groups in the GTA. info@bookclubsbyjanna.com * www.bookclubsbyjanna.com
1 Published 2008 by The Penguin Group 2 http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/antisemitism/voices/transcript/?content=20090604
© Dr. Janna Nadler 2010
Tags: book club, Book Clubs by Janna, book picks, book review, India, Janna Nadler, journey, moderator, The Girl From Foreign, travel
