Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames
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"Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames offers a personal and social history of the author's great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother - Baghdadi Jews who lived most of their lives in the Jewish community in Calcutta. Silliman begins with a portrait of Farha, her maternal great-grandmother, who dwelled almost entirely within the Baghdadi Jewish community no matter where she and her husband travelled on business (Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore).
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Next is her maternal grandmother, Miriam (Mary), who was much more Anglicized than Farha and deeply influenced by British colonial practices. The third portrait, of Silliman's mother, Flower, reveals a woman in a double transition: her own and India's. Flower grew up in colonial India, witnessed India's struggle for independence, and lived her middle years in an independent India. The final sketch is of Silliman herself. Born in Calcutta in 1955 within the waning Jewish community, Silliman grew up in a cosmopolitan and Indian world, rather than a Baghdadi Jewish one.
Silliman's own travels took her to the USA, where, as a teacher and scholar, her primary identification is with the 'South Asian intellectual and professional diaspora in the US'.".
"These family portraits convey a sense of the singular roles women played in building and sustaining a complex diaspora in what Silliman calls 'Jewish Asia' over the past 150 years.
Her sketches of the everyday lives of her foremothers - from the social and political relationships they forged to the food they ate and the clothes they wore - brings to life a community and a culture, even as they disclose the unexpected and subtle complexities of the colonial encounter as experienced by Jewish women."—BOOK JACKET.
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