Ghosts of the past

I have been in primarily in a writing mode but having read this book recently, after posting it on Goodreads, I thought of sharing for my readers to learn something new. 

The Forgetting River is well written and no doubt historically accurate.  The author takes us on a personal genealogy trip to determine her own background and in the process turns up the horrors of the persecution of Jews by the Catholic Church and their subsequent loss of identity.

With a search for identity that includes Catholic and Jewish rituals and practices, Carvajal follows the trail of stories, symbols, and other handed-down clues to unearth the secret most of her family didn't want to confront directly—whether or not they were descended from Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity during the Inquisition.

Her curious journey takes her to Arcos de la Frontera in southern Spain where the river serves as the title of the book, and a metaphor— to the passage of time that has swept away the flow between Spanish Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity by the Spanish Inquisition and their modern-day survivors.  Many of the conversos (converts) are not aware of their former Jewish roots, since the tradition was not passed orally, and records were either destroyed or altered to protect the identity of Jewish families.

In Arcos de la Frontera, she uncovers many threads of the story, as well as some resistance to telling it; and gives beautiful evocative descriptions of the town and its people.  But despite the town’s medieval charm, it's appalling to read about the vicious ways Jews were treated during the Inquisition, and the discrimination that followed the coverts; that could either be tortured or face death.  She uncovers and illustrates how anti-Semitism has played out in family histories, and its brutality. She looks at the victims of the evil—from centuries ago down to the present day—and tries to forge a connection with them to find her own identity.

Despite it being a daunting task to go back 600 years; I believed that she would turn up “concrete evidence” to prove her convictions, but in the end all she has are symbols and an inner knowing—her own truth: instinct over logic, which must have been hard for her since she was trained as a hard news reporter, and it becomes a woman’s account of family.  An investigative process within a personal story that includes all the emotional satisfaction that comes with it; an engrossing read, one in which I rooted for her all the way.