Books: 'Foreign' Relations

Sadia Shepard can't help but see the world through a complicated lens. The documentary filmmaker turned memoirist has spent the past few years documenting her family’s intricate international history, and this week will release the book, titled The Girl from Foreign, that chronicles her experiences.

Raised in Massachusetts by a Muslim-Indian mother and a Christian-American father, Shepard discovered at an early age that her maternal grandmother—a Muslim woman from Karachi— had been born into the Bene Israel, a small tribe in and around Bombay that believes it was shipwrecked in India after escaping persecution by a Syrian-Greek ruler in Galilee two thousand years ago.

Now living in Manhattan, Shepard is about to embark on a nationwide tour speaking and reading from her book; recounting the story of her family and of her experience of going to India to make a documentary about the Bene Israel.

“When my grandmother asked me to return to her birthplace, to her ancestors, I don't think she or I knew what that actually meant. Or did she,” asked Shepard, over an Arnold Palmer at Think on the Bowery. Before Shepard's grandmother passed away in 2000, she told her to go to India, to find the Bene Israel and to learn about them. Shepard received a Fulbright Scholarship on the basis of making a film about the shipwrecked tribe and, in 2001, just days after September 11th, began her journey.

What began as a search for the story of the people of Bene Israel and how her grandmother, Rahat, had been born Rachel Jacobs, quickly unfurled into a soul-searching sojourn.

The book alternates between Shepard's own journey from New York to India and the journeys of her mother and grandmother as they moved from India to Pakistan to America. These juxtaposed experiences show the tidal movements of a family flowing from the old world of the east to the new world of the west and back again.

Shepard finds this last movement, that of the descendants of immigrants returning in search of some idea of an ancestral home, to be a popular one in the United States. “In a country like ours, with so many different cultures, the idea of going outside of our country to seek some greater authenticity is a very American idea.”

However, the discovery of some core identity or explanation did not come as easily as she thought. Shepard, who has an easy laugh and warm, effusive demeanor, looks off to the side quietly when considering a deeper point, a movement that echoes the difficulty of pinpointing a single straight ahead truth. “Once I got there, I struggled with the central idea. What I was looking for.” Before she knew it, one year turned into two and while the material piled up, the truth eluded her.

Upon returning to New York, Shepard began to sort through her material and work on her documentary, In Search of Bene Israel. She never intended to write a book, but after telling her story at an Upper East Side dinner party, a literary agent in the crowd sought her out. For the filmmaker, hearing someone was interested in having her write a book was met with “complete disbelief.”

It took Shepard a few years to put the book proposal together. And once that was accepted, all she had to do was actually write the book—something she had no experience doing. Fortunately, her training as a filmmaker came in handy.

“Documentary film making is like making a quilt. You shoot as much material as possible and then patch it together,” she said. Shepard, luckily, had boxes of notes and journals and taped interviews to string together into an overall structure for her memoir.

Now at work on a second book examining how modern technology has improved travel and communication between the United States and South Asia, Shepard said her experiences have taught her the importance of cross-cultural interaction. “It's urgent that Americans, in this historical moment, are able to travel and study in other countries,” she said. “And that students from other countries are able to travel and study in the United States.”

And even now, while she misses Bombay, Shepard finds many similarities between the Indian city and her home in New York. “Bombay is a place where people come from all over the country seeking something. Like New York, Bombay is the city of dreams. I was just one small seeker among many.”

While she may not have found that one essential truth she was seeking, Shepard has discovered a greater appreciation of her immediate family and “a renewed interest in the seemingly mundane rituals of the five of us together.”

Reflecting warmly on her childhood—when, along with her mother, father and brother, she celebrated Christmas, Ramadan and Hanukkah—she recalled traveling to visit family in Pakistan at an early age, and the impact of her grandmother, who would live with them for part of the year between trips abroad. “One thing I learned growing up with my grandmother is that we're able to learn when we make time and room for older generations.”

Sadia Shepard reads, and screens her documentary, Aug. 7, Barnes & Noble 97 Warren St. (at Greenwich St.), 212-589-5389, 7, free.