In the summer of 2010, I learned about Sephardic Jews and Crypto-Jews all at the same time. In my previous 35 years, I’d never even considered anything other than the European Jew, and the only Jews of color I knew were adoptees who’d been adopted into Jewish families. I know exactly when I learned about these unknown-to-me populations because I was reading a great many texts from the faculty of the MFA program I was about to matriculate into.
Among this faculty was Kathleen Alcalá, whose novel Spirits of the Ordinary draws from her family’s history as Crypto-Jews, Jewish people who practiced their religion in secret for fear of persecution. Through Alcalá, I also learned about Sephardic Jews, who come from the Iberian peninsula. If not for her, it might have been another 30 years before my horizons were expanded, and I understood more about the Jewish population.
Alcalá is the author of six works of fiction and nonfiction; was reissued by Raven Chronicles Press in 2021; , Alcalá’s second novel, will also be reissued by
