Deportation, from 1492 to 2025

After years of trying to imagine what the expulsion from Spain was like for my ancestors, I sat down to write a middle-grade novel, Across So Many Seas, focusing on four Sephardic girls, Benvenida, Reina, Alegra, and Paloma, growing up in Spain, 1492, Turkey, 1923, Cuba, 1961, and Miami, 2003. Benvenida doesn’t know what the word “expulsion” means when she first hears the Edict of Expulsion read aloud in the town plaza of Toledo in 1492. Her older brothers explain, but it isn’t until she lives through the arduous journey to the port and eventually to the sea and a new home that she really comes to know what it means. Centuries later, Benvenida’s story resonates in the later generations, as Reina, Alegra, and Paloma, grandmother, mother, and granddaughter each find a connection to their heritage as Sephardic Jews while composing their lives anew in an ever-changing present. Together, they visit the Sephardic Museum in Toledo and in that magical space Benvenida’s words touch their hearts.

Across So Many Seas also shines a light on the larger emotional drama of the immigrant story, as families separate, some leaving, some staying, abandoning beloved homes for the uncertain promise of a new life. I am part of this history that flows from Spain to Turkey to Cuba to the United States, a melancholy history that is preserved in the many Sephardic songs about lost loves, departures, and goodbyes.

In this vehemently anti-immigrant moment, as deportations continue, I remember my ancestors expelled from Spain over 500 years ago, an event so traumatic that the memory of how it hurt to be forced into homelessness is still vivid today.

I shudder to think how shocked they’d be to know that expulsions haven’t ended.