Doreen Car­va­jal​’s first book, The For­get­ting Riv­er, is about her search to recov­er her Catholic fam­i­ly’s hid­den Sephardic Jew­ish roots in a mys­ti­cal white pueblo on Spain’s south­ern fron­tier in Andalu­sia. She will be blog­ging here all week for Jew­ish Book Coun­cil and MyJew­ish­Learn­ing.

The moment the card­board box from New York arrived, I felt a strange mix­ture of ela­tion and melan­choly. The pack­age was stacked with copies of my first book, a mem­oir, The For­get­ting Riv­er.

I exam­ined the hard­cov­er like check­ing a new baby, count­ing the pages, smooth­ing the cov­er, read­ing the trib­ute and reread­ing my first sen­tences that I think I must have rewrit­ten more than 100 times since I start­ed my quest. It’s a uni­ver­sal sto­ry of per­son­al dis­cov­ery, my jour­ney to reclaim the secret Sephardic Jew­ish iden­ti­ty of my Catholic Car­va­jal fam­i­ly in a white pueblo on a high ridge in the south­ern fron­tier of Spain.

Every­one has a mys­tery in the fam­i­ly tree and this was mine. Now I feel wist­ful as a I look over the last chap­ter because I long to keep adding new infor­ma­tion. Unbe­knownst to me, my old­er cousin, Rosie, revealed a few days ago that she had ques­tioned my great aunt Luz in San Jose, Cos­ta Rica at a fam­i­ly gath­er­ing before she died in 1998. Aunt Luz, which lit­er­al­ly means the light, was the care­ful his­to­ri­an of fam­i­ly lore, typ­i­cal of Anusim – Hebrew for forced Chris­t­ian con­verts dat­ing back to the Span­ish Inqui­si­tion. The Anusim or Mar­ra­nos – which in Span­ish lit­er­al­ly means pigs – typ­i­cal­ly relied on elder women to pass on their secrets.

“Luz told me that our fam­i­ly came from Spain,” Rosie wrote to me. ​“She asked me: ​‘Has your moth­er ever told you that we are Sefardi­tos?’ Of course when I brought it up to my moth­er, she refused to talk. Come to think of it, I actu­al­ly took a small tape recorder and with­out their knowl­edge record­ed our conversation.”

When I read those words, I felt chills. One of my biggest regrets about try­ing to recov­er my family’s secret iden­ti­ty is that for years I missed numer­ous oppor­tu­ni­ties to gath­er infor­ma­tion from old­er gen­er­a­tions because I was sim­ply not curi­ous about our past. To bring life to a chart of a fam­i­ly tree, I real­ized belat­ed­ly that con­ver­sa­tions have to hap­pen to tell a vivid sto­ry to pass on to new gen­er­a­tions. Indi­rect approach­es need to be pur­sued to tack­le del­i­cate sub­jects. I dis­cov­ered all this by mak­ing many mistakes.

Rosie’s late moth­er – my aunt and god­moth­er – had always been inter­est­ed in my book research. I had asked her sev­er­al times about our fam­i­ly his­to­ry and secret Jew­ish back­ground, but she told me polite­ly that she knew noth­ing. ​“My moth­er knew, but was too diplo­mat­ic with you to say she didn’t want to talk,” Rosie said. ​“When I brought it up, she absolute­ly refused to com­ment. I knew that she knew something.”

Today I’m prepar­ing to mail copies of my new book to rel­a­tives in Cal­i­for­nia and Cos­ta Rica – too late to write anoth­er chap­ter with tape record­ed quotes of a voice from the grave.

Vis­it Doreen Car­va­jal’s offi­cial web­site here.