A Passage To India

New York Jewish Week, The, August, 2008 by Brawarsky, Sandee

Sadia Shepard pieces together the exotic story of her grandmother's Jewish roots in the Bene Israel community.

Sadia Shepard grew up in a white clapboard house outside of Boston with three parents - her Pakistani Muslim mother, her Midwestern Protestant father, and her Nana, her mother's mother, who came from Pakistan to help raise Shepard and her younger brother.

Shepard knew that her much-beloved Nana, a widow named Rahat Siddiqi, had been the third wife of her husband, and raised her children alongside those of his other wives. And she knew that her grandmother was born in India and left Bombay for Karachi during the Partition of India in 1947. But it was only when she was 13, and ruffling through the drawers of her grandmother's bureau, that she came across a pin...

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