The Marrano Legacy

This book chronicles the astounding, intensely personal correspondence between two strangers from different countries who shared the unusual experience of discovering in their teens that they were Jews: 'Simon', a descendant of Spain's medieval Marranos who submitted to baptism to escape the Inquisition, and Trudi Alexy who survived the Holocaust when her family fled from Prague to Paris and hid in Fascist Spain as hastily baptised Catholics. Fifty years later, when she set out to recapture her lost Jewish identity, she discovered a spiritual kinship with the medieval Marranos who, though they were forced to hide their Jewishness, held to their ancient traditions in secret. Simon has lived the hazardous life of a Crypto-Jewish Catholic priest, providing protection to a large community of secret Jews living as Catholics in a Latin American country. In their correspondence, Alexy shares her own inner conflicts as she struggles to understand why Simon continues to live in constant danger of discovery by both Catholics and mainstream Jews, wrestling with doubts and coping with personal tragedies that almost cause him to abandon his faith in God and his Jewish identity.