The Girl From Foreign: A Search For Shipwrecked

Sadia Shepard grew up just outside of Boston, in a home where cultures intertwined her father a white American Protestant and her mother, a Muslim from Pakistan.

One day, when she was thirteen, she learned that Nana, her beloved maternal grandmother, was not a Muslim like the rest of her Pakistani family but had begun her life as Rachel Jacobs, a member of a tiny Jewish community in India that believes it is descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel, shipwrecked in India over two thousand years ago.

Before Nana died, Sadia promised her grandmother that she would return to her birthplace to learn about the life and the faith that Nana had left behind. Armed with a suitcase of camera equipment, Sadia arrives in Bombay, where she finds herself struggling to document the Bene Israel s unique traditions and make sense of her complicated cultural inheritance.

In the course of her remarkable journey she unearths long-buried family secrets, learns that love is sometimes found in unusual places, and is forced to examine what it means to both lose and seek a homeland.