The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories, and a Sense of Home - Rilegato

“A beautifully written memoir about finding home, from an author who is multiply exiled. Told from the heart, The Girl from Foreign performs the unique feat of making the foreign feel familiar.”
—Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

“The Girl From Foreign unfolds like a series of miniatures or dreams—a synagogue in the heart of Bombay so bereft of Jews that its caretaker is a Muslim, a sixteen year old Pakistani girl welcomed to Kansas by a marching band playing "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow," secrets from another generation which have migrated from a Jewish to a Muslim household, locked and forgotten until a key arrives from America to free them. Intricately plotted, deeply moving, and beautifully written, the story of Sadia Shepard's journey into her grandmother's past proves that faith and memory and love will always be inextricable.”
—Deborah Baker, author of A Blue Hand: The Beats in India

"A deeply moving journey across boundaries that most others find uncrossable, and into depths of human meaning that are rarely plumbed. An important and timely book."
—James Carroll, author of Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews—A History

"Sadia Shepard writes with compassion and humility about her journey to discover the disparate forces—cultural, ethnic, and religious—that make up her identity. On the way, we learn about the diversity and plurality of a rapidly transforming Indian subcontinent; we discover the love story that brought Sadia’s grandparents together, and finally, we are reminded, though the intimate and touching portrait of her family, of all of the mysteries that shape who we are."
—Tahmima Anam, author of A Golden Age

"Part travelogue, part elegy to a beloved grandmother, and part love affair, The Girl From Foreign is a remarkable, moving and refreshingly honest account of a young woman's search for roots, for belief and a place to belong."
—Alice Greenway, author of White Ghost Girls

“From Boston to Karachi to the Jewish community of Bombay and its remnants on the Konkan coast, Sadia Shepard takes us on an elegant journey of both self- discovery and tribute to her Bene Israel grandmother, Rachel Jacobs, her beloved Nana. The Girl from Foreign is a beautiful story about the enigma of belonging and the complexities we all carry within us.”
—Devyani Saltzman, author of Shooting Water

Sadia Shepard is a documentary filmmaker and writer who lives in New York City. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 1997, from the Graduate Program in Documentary Film and Video at Stanford University in 2000, and began her work with the Bene Israel community of India while on a Fulbright Scholarship. This is her first book.