My body freezes, and I stifle the urge to check if they have mixed in with the others who have gathered around.
“We sent our children elsewhere,” Isaac says. “We are going by sea, and our prospects are uncertain. They will live with family in”—he hesitates for a moment—“in Navarre.” Navarre. The opposite direction from where baby Isaac is traveling. I marvel again at the dignity of my son-in-law. “When we are settled, we will bring them to us,” Isaac goes on in a voice so authoritative it would be difficult not to believe him, even though the story is preposterous.
“Really!” The count arches his brows as he casts his eyes over the crowd. I tremble with dread, but Samra has already drawn herself up and taken a step toward him.
“I know who you are looking for,” she says in the strong, clear voice I remember. “My baby is not here. The king and queen you serve forced me to send him away.” She gestures to the front of her dress. “Do you see I am wet with milk? Would that be so if he were here to nurse?” She has bound her breasts to ease the pain of their engorgement, but every time Hadassah’s baby cries, milk seeps through her bodice. It’s been soaked and dried so often since she was separated from baby Isaac that the stains have made twin haloes on her bosom.
“Come! Walk with me,” she tells the count. “You will not find one baby here who reaches out for me.” Her voice quavers, and her face flushes with the onset of tears she is too proud to shed. The count seems unnerved by the talk of leaking breasts, but Samra’s tone is so demanding, he follows in her wake.
She steers a path through the group, keeping her eyes straight ahead as she passes her nieces and nephews. She goes up to one small child and then another, plucking this one’s chin and pinching that one’s cheek, and the count sees how each child shrinks away deeper into its mother’s embrace.
Samra turns to the count. “Are you satisfied?”
“Well then,” he says, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot as he clears his throat. “I will tell their majesties I found you all safe and well and making good progress.” He remounts and stares coldly first at Judah and then at Isaac. “Without your children.” He touches his horse’s flank and is off, kicking up dust that swirls around us as they disappear from view.
Perhaps he pitied the fate that Ferdinand and Isabella’s loveless and calculated piety has ordained for us. Perhaps he saw bedraggled people who had done him no harm and decided to do none in return. He didn’t believe us about leaving without our children, but whatever the reason, we are safe.
***
Every day, the road becomes more clogged with refugees heading for the ports of Alicante and Valencia. One group merges with another until we are a ribbon of bodies pressing forward across the plains of Andalusia. Villagers sell us food at high prices, while the local priests move among us offering baptism. Those who can go no farther accept and stay behind.
Women bang on tambourines and boys beat drums to keep our spirits from flagging. People die, babies are born, muscles cramp, bones creak. Still we press on, singing hymns and chanting psalms.
We stop several times during the day for the men to pray. The women in our family form our own group and honor the Holy One as well. “Ashrei, yoshvei veitecha,” we call out to the huge sky above us. “I will extol Thee, my God, O King. The will of those who fear him he will do, and their cry he will hear.”
So many have already left Spain, so many are following behind us, so many are on other roads. Is Isaac right, that perhaps we are going home? I wish I could believe that, but all I can do is wonder if God knows or cares, or is listening to our cries at all.
We follow the path of the Júcar river until it turns sharply east. There, the people going to Alicante will head south, while we continue along the river, which is now flowing in the direction of Valencia. We mill together where the roads diverge, saying good-bye and praying for each other’s safety.
“When I first knew we would be exiled, I was so full of despair I wanted to die,” Isaac says as the two of us stand watching clouds of dust rise up from the group on the road to Alicante. “I even wondered whether the prophets had been wrong to put such faith in God. But I see now that there never was such a people in beauty and in pleasantness and that God is with us.”
I cast a glance at him. Once a great courtier, he stands in torn shoes, ragged stockings, and a soiled cloak. He is not wearing his usual skullcap but a larger hat to shield his eyes, and it is limp from days of sweat. Only a man with the deepest store of goodness could have such thoughts now.
We fall in with a smaller party headed our direction, among whom are two of Abraham Seneor’s nephews leaving Spain with their families. “Please don’t speak of him,” one of their wives tells me.
I wonder what Fernando Nuñez Colonel is thinking, as he rides between his new houses, orchards, vineyards, and mansions, bought for nothing from departing Jews. Will he be like Midas, thrilled to have everything he touches turn to gold until his greed destroys him, body and soul? I wonder whether, after realizing no one remains to keep him company but Christians who despise and suspect him, he may realize he is still Abraham Seneor and follow us out of Spain. Not today or tomorrow, perhaps, but someday, unless the grave claims him first.
Perhaps it’s not greed though, but exhaustion. I understand that well enough. Perhaps he felt as I did about going to Madrigal—that my bones ached too much to serve any cause. And after all, my effort changed nothing.
Sone-or. The old man now alone with his riches is not a Hater of Light; he is a sad, lost soul, more bereft than anyone on this road. I will not judge another, and I say a silent prayer that Isaac’s old friend will find peace.
***
We travel for several more weeks, parting from the rest of the group only when we near Valencia. We head north to Sagunto to stay with friends of Isaac’s until the deadline to leave Spain. It’s a short distance from there to Valencia, where our ship awaits.
Leah’s husband and Samuel travel ahead to let our hosts know we are coming. When they come back, they bring no news of baby Isaac. I imagine a ship bearing a letter from Lisbon heading into port just as we are sailing out. I picture it gathering dust in Sagunto until we can write to say where to send it.
It is not proper to pray for what has already been decided. A letter will arrive before we leave, or it will not. Our beloved Isaac is either safe, or he is not. Prayer cannot change the facts.
Despite being at our journey’s end, a heaviness settles over us as we enter Sagunto. We walk between whitewashed houses, up steep streets, and through the arched gate of the aljama, as close to dead as people can be while still on their feet. A bed, a table, and a comfortable place to sit await us, but our hearts are too burdened with sorrow and apprehension to care.
The women take a short walk to the ocean to wash off the dirt before going to the mikveh, which many need after weeks on the road. We set up a tent in minutes after all the practice we’ve had, and after undressing inside, we emerge with only a cloth draped around our bodies.
As we walk across the sand, a gray horse gallops at the water’s edge, and for a moment I am confused. “Chuva?” I whisper. A sudden puff of sea breeze blows back my loose hair. The horse slows and makes a wide circle, watching me the whole time, before heading off again.
I am not the young girl I was at Sagres, and the ache in my feet is only slightly soothed by the lapping water as we go out through the gentle surf. The swells caress our legs and rise up around our breasts, but we go no farther, for none of us can swim.
I’m not sure who has the idea first. Perhaps it is the touch of living water on all of us at once. Nita had her first blood on the road from Alcalá, and though she does not require a mikveh until she is married, we decide she has earned the right to be seen as a woman after all the courage she has shown. Who needs the mikveh in the aljama when here, under God’s sky, we can honor her and ourselves for making it this far?
We all gather around Nita and offer the blessings as she i
mmerses. When she comes up the third time, our women’s voices mingle with the sounds of shore birds and the gentle pounding of waves on the sand. “Blessed art thou, Lord God, king of the universe, who has created us, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this day.”
Turning my back to the shore, I take away the cloth and let it float on the water. I say a prayer on my first immersion for my mother, on the second for Simona, and on the third for my daughter, the greatest joy of my life.
Under my toes, the land of my birth is disappearing. I am buoyed up by the swells, but still rooted here, sustained by so many things—people, places, memory. I say a prayer for myself as well as I pull the cloth back around me, acknowledging that I am in the hands of the one who made the sea, the journey, and the life I have lived.
The mikveh has worked its magic again and granted me peace. The little girl we saved on that horrible day in Toledo is a woman now, part of us forever. I am part of her too. Perhaps she will carry on my Eliana’s legacy, marrying Samuel, who loves her, and bringing more beautiful babies, more leaders of our people, into the world.
I don’t know how many more of these moments I will share, but I will be watching even when they and their families can no longer see me, and when they need strength, I will give them mine.
On the beach, the gray horse is coming back, stretching its long limbs as it strides along. It stops and looks out at me. “Are you coming?” I feel it saying, and in my mind, I climb on its bare back and ride away.
VALENCIA 1492
“Do you ever wonder why you still have the atlas?” Judah asks me again. “Why, despite all your journeys, it has never been lost?”
“I am saving it for your children, for their children,” I tell him. “For those long after we have been forgotten.”
“You have been caring for more than a book.” The voice is a new one.
“Grandmother?” I ask.
“The atlas will not leave this room with you. It will be found, and lost, and found again, and each time, people will be astonished that there was a time and place where people who made things of such beauty could be exiled.”
“My son and I made this atlas,” my great-grandfather Abraham Cresques tells me. “It was always for more than our family. Though we didn’t know it at the time, it has its own reasons for being.”
“And you have done your part by keeping it safe and leaving it here,” my mother says.
A lifetime of journeys with my daughter, my grandchildren, and great-grandchildren flood my mind. “Kaminos di leche i miel,” I think to myself. “Kaminos buenos.” Paths of milk and honey. Good paths.
I hear footsteps on the stairs and the creak of the door. Judah and Samuel look confused, as if they were expecting to find me in the dark instead of this glow of love and light.
“Were you all right here alone?” Judah asks me.
I smile. “I wasn’t alone. I have never been alone.”
I put the atlas on the chair and close my trunk. “I’m ready,” I say, feeling the souls of my people as they follow me down the stairs and out into the dying light toward the ship that will take me somewhere.
Reading Group Guide
1. The Jewish community depicted in The Mapmaker’s Daughter is divided between those who have given up Judaism for Christianity, those who pretend to be Christians but secretly practice Judaism, and those who live openly as Jews. What are their reasons for what they have chosen, and how do they view the choices of the others?
2. In her first musings while she waits in Valencia, Amalia says, “There’s a knowledge deep in our bones that some lines cannot be crossed without becoming unrecognizable to ourselves—the only death truly to be feared.” Does this resonate in your own life?
3. As Amalia matures, how does the meaning of the atlas evolve emotionally and philosophically for her?
4. Have your relationships with your own mother and father and/or your children’s relationships with you been as different as Amalia’s are with each of her parents? What does Amalia want from her mother? From her father? Does she get it?
5. The Mapmaker’s Daughter is set among people who think very differently about many things than people today do. What has changed the most? The least?
6. Amalia’s naïveté in her early years sometimes makes it difficult to see people for what they really are. What clues enable you to see what she fails to understand about Diogo? What other characters do you think you see more clearly than she does?
7. Both Judah and Simona function as friend and counselor to Amalia. What advice do they offer that makes the most sense in your own life? Have you had someone who filled the same role for you?
8. Amalia is uncertain whether her father would want her to perform Jewish rituals to prepare his body for burial. What do you think he would have wanted?
9. Judah explains that love and power must be in balance to reach the highest form of compassion. What does this mean? Do you agree?
10. “Anywhere you can be a Jew is home…and exile is anywhere you cannot.” Does this apply to any aspect of one’s identity?
11. Amalia’s reaction to Jamil is immediate and powerful. Have you ever had an encounter like that?
12. How does poetry, both their own and that of famous poets, help Amalia and Jamil build their relationship?
13. Though having different religions ultimately divides Amalia and Jamil, are there are ways in which their religious identities strengthen their relationship?
14. The ritual of the mikveh occurs numerous times in The Mapmaker’s Daughter. What does it mean for the women who practice it?
15. When Amalia can’t decide if she should stay in Queluz or go to Granada with Jamil, Simona tells her, “Living here in Queluz should be your choice, not just something where you say, ‘Oh, look where I ended up,’ without knowing how it happened.” Is there anything about your life that illustrates what Simona means?
16. What does Amalia offer her daughter that was missing in her own childhood? How does that influence the kind of adult Eliana becomes?
17. What does Amalia find most surprising about Granada? Was the Muslim culture also surprising to you? How?
18. Did Amalia do the right thing ending her relationship with Jamil? Is there any way they might have been able to salvage it?
19. Elizabeth’s husband, King Juan, has been quoted as saying it was “better to be born to a journeyman than to the King of Castile.” After reading about the Castilian court, do you agree?
20. Amalia wonders, “How can it be that I can say in great detail what happened when I was eight or twelve, but now shake my head in bewilderment when I try to remember year by year what has happened since? Decades of my life are swallowed whole, and it doesn’t seem possible that I have filled each day with one thing or another.” Do you see your life the same way?
21. Amalia and Eliana cope with the loss of their world in Queluz by cleaning house. Have you found ritual ways to console yourself in times of great turmoil and grief? Were you surprised by what gave you comfort?
22. “The success of old age is to die while you still wish to live,” Judah says. “To take your last breath still wanting more.” Do you agree?
23. When Nita’s parents are killed, Amalia describes “Torquemada’s stark vision of divine retribution ris[ing] in smoke above the crowd in the square, while in this dark and narrow street, every wall, every cobblestone, every doorway is charged with the sacredness of God’s presence in this moment.” Why does she view the moment of Nita’s rescue as being so sacred?
24. Based on what you learned by reading The Mapmaker’s Daughter and what you already know about Ferdinand and Isabella, Torquemada, and the Inquisition, what do you think Ferdinand and Isabella were trying to accomplish by expelling the Jews from Spain?
25. The Mapmaker’s Daughter is intended as a showcase of the frequently unsung strength and courage of women. At what points in the novel did you feel that most profoundly? Do any of the characters stand out in particular for
you in this respect?
26. The ghost of Amalia’s grandfather, mapmaker Abraham Cresques, says of the atlas at the end of the novel, “Though we didn’t know it at the time, it has its own reasons for being.” What reasons for the atlas’ existence are revealed during the novel? What future reasons might there be?
Suggestions for Book Club Activities
1. Look up online images of the Catalan Atlas and discuss its characteristics and how these are brought into the novel.
2. Look up the rituals and blessings involved in the mikveh and/or Shabbat, and discuss how these might reflect and shape the world view of people who observe these practices.
3. Read the poems in the book aloud.
4. Get a CD or download of medieval Sephardic music and discuss how it influences the way you view the culture described in the book.
5. Look up “Judah Abravanel, Poem to His Son” to read online what Judah Abravanel wrote after sending his infant son to Portugal to foil the kidnapping plot.
A Conversation with the Author
Q: Why did you choose to write a novel on this subject?
A: Like everyone, I wonder how the human race is going to figure out a way to move beyond the ignorance and hatred that so polarizes our world. When I was first exposed to the term “Convivencia,” or “living together,” the label given to medieval Iberia during the centuries it was populated by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, I naively thought I would find a shining example of a diverse, multicultural society that had created a community of tolerance and mutual gain.
After months of study, I began seeing the Convivencia as containing more warnings than answers for our time. I hope readers will benefit from reading about people long ago who encountered some of the same issues we face, whose behavior holds up a mirror by which we can confront the awful results of religious and other forms of prejudice, as well as look with new appreciation at our incredibly diverse society and affirm that it represents the kind of world we want to live in.
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