Doreen Carvajal

I was not I impressed by this Early Reviewers book. I guess it's kind of a family history memoir. The author suspects that her family is descended from conversos, Spanish Jews who converted to Catholicism to escape persecution during the Inquisition. The problem with the book is that Carvajal meanders through travels and side stories, sometimes focusing on her genealogy research and sometimes exploring a side story of a person she runs across or tradition that interest her. Sometimes I was interested too, and sometimes I wasn't. The book lacks focus and depth.… (mehr)

I marked a few passages, and made a few notes in the margins of the ARC of this book as I read it, but when it came to drawing my thoughts together I found there was not all that much to say about The Forgetting River. It is ostensibly the story of one woman’s search for evidence that her ancestors were Sephardic Jews who converted to Christianity to avoid expulsion or death during the Spanish Inquisition. I think the problem is there wasn’t enough material here for a book based on that search. After all, before she began it in earnest, Doreen Carvajal already knew the answer to the fundamental question: a cousin had told her definitively that her family’s origins were “sefarditas”. Although Carvajal actually moved temporarily to a small town in Spain where ancient records of the Inquisition reposed, her research, or at least her reporting of it here, seemed to lack focus. What, exactly, was she looking for? Historical evidence? A spiritual regeneration? A substitute for the rituals of Catholicism that had stopped working for her years ago? What story did she mean to tell…that of her quest for the truth about her ancestry? The history of the conversos who were forced to practice their own religion in secret and continued to hide their true identities no matter where they emigrated until they had ‘protected their secrets so zealously that they lost them'? Her own spiritual odyssey? Without resolving that issue for herself, it seemed that Ms. Carvajal was a victim of her own journalistic instincts in that she gathered so much material that she didn’t know what to leave out. The Christian inquisitions went on for centuries, and the so-called Spanish Inquisition initiated by the "enlightened" monarchs who sent Cristobal Colon out to find the New World was only one part of that larger Catholic crusade against heresy, apostasy and witchcraft. Even at that, the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Spain was not formally disbanded until the 19th century, and the Alhambra Decree, which expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492 was not formally rescinded until 1968. I can appreciate the difficulty of attempting to write about any one aspect of that phenomenon without nodding to its long and torture-filled history. It is a subject fraught with emotion, guilt, horror and controversy, which is best taken in small, manageable bits. But like The Forgetting River of her title, I fear Doreen Carvajal meandered too far and wide, with no clear destination in mind, resulting in a book that should have been a shorter and better organized personal memoir, or a longer and better organized scholarly work. For a more engaging treatment of the search for Jewish identity, I recommend Paul Cowan’s An Orphan in History. And although it also suffers from some of the same overabundance of historical fact in a personal narrative, The Mezuzah in the Madonna’s Foot is a better read on the subject of conversos, Marranos and Crypto-Jews.… (mehr)

Well, this was a disappointing read on a variety of levels, and I confess I only skimmed it. I have long been interested in the so-called "crypto-Jews," people in the US southwest, and also elsewhere, who have been raised as Catholics but who have "family traditions" that are Jewish customs; these are people descended from conversos, Jews who ostensibly converted to Catholicism because of the Spanish Inquisition and its aftermath but who secretly retained their Jewish faith. In this book, Carvajal, whose family came to the US from Costa Rica, comes to believe her family has converso, and therefore Jewish, roots, and tries to explore this and find out if it's true.

Alas, the book is mostly the story of her thoughts and the people she talks to as she moves her family from France to a little town in Andalusia. Every now and then, she discusses conversos, the history of the Inquisition, symbolism in art, and genetic testing to determine family origins -- but when she does, I wish she cited sources. She is a journalist by profession, and writes in a breezy style, but there are places where the information is crying out for footnotes or endnotes so the reader can have a sense of where it comes from. And, although this book is partly about Carvajal, the reader, or this one anyway, doesn't get a real sense of her, or of the people she describes. Additonally, it definitely could have used an editor -- Carvajal repeats the same information in different parts of the book in several places..

So, this book, partly the story of her exploration, partly a portrait of a little Spanish town, partly a little bit of history, didn't work for me.… (mehr)

I’ve been reading a wide variety of books on my vacation: a book on the etymology of flower names, very appropriate since every day has its gardening component; a YA book on friendship; a poetic book on the history of a river and The Forgetting River: A Modern Tale of Survival, Identity, and the Inquisition by Doreen Carvajal. I’ve always had a passing interest on Conversos, those Jews during the Inquisition who outwardly adopted Catholicism while secretly practicing their faith. There appear articles every now and then about people, including priests, who uncover their unknown Jewish pasts.

Unlike the people in the articles, Carvajal, a New York Times reporter, seemed to know that her ancestors were Jewish but had a hard time proving it. Carvajal recounts her efforts to determine whether her ancestors, of Spanish descent who moved to Cuba, Costa Rica, and the United States, were indeed Conversos. These efforts included obtaining family histories, DNA testing, looking at Inquisition records and talking to everyone who might be able to help.

While the biological result was inconclusive, Carvajal’s spiritual result seems to lie in the Jewish direction. Along her journey, Carvajal recounts the torture perpetrated on one human by another because of religion, the long lasting impacts in Spain (some reaching into the twentieth century) of the Inquisition, her feelings towards the possibility of being Jewish having been brought up Catholic and her thoughts about what this might mean to her teenage daughter.

In the books and articles I have read, it seems that even in the twentieth century, there is some unexplained ritual practiced by Conversos that has its root in Judaiism and it is this, more than anything, that finally convinces Carvajal of her religious ancestry.

If you are looking for a satisfying conclusion to a spiritual search, The Forgetting River may not be your cup of tea. If you enjoy learning little tidbits of history or the historical root of some contemporary saying or action, The Forgetting River should interest you. Carvajal’s writing style is easy to read. Her journey was long and frustrating.

Two books of note on the subject: Incantation by Alice Hoffman is a personal favorite of mine. It is a wonderful, poetic book about Jews during the Inquisition and is in my personal library. Blood Secret by Kathryn Lasky, is mentioned in The Forgetting River as a book Carvajal gave to her daughter, talks about a young girl who discovers her family’s secret past. Both books are worth reading.… (mehr)