My 15 Grandmothers by Genie Milgrom

Author:Genie Milgrom [Milgrom, Genie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-06T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

I had never been to Fermoselle, but had spent my whole life listening to the stories of my grandfather. Although I had been reading and poring over books and manuals that mentioned Fermoselle, I was apprehensive about going there. I was concerned that the emotions would overwhelm me. I did not know what I would find. My husband kept pushing and pushing for us to go. He insisted it would be cathartic, given all the work I had done. I could not. Frozen in time, I continued to search and kept postponing the trip.

I had spent years on blogs and groups from the Zamora-Fermoselle region, and by now Facebook had reared its head. I ventured into these social media communities asking about the Marranos or Jewish past of the town and its people. One after another, blog after blog, people would mention that they had been told by the family elders that they descended from Jews. Yet no one knew anything else. I met a close cousin in Chile through the internet. He was fascinated that I had done a lot of the genealogy. He told me that he had been told we descended from Jews and send me a comprehensive history on how his branch of the family had lived in Fermoselle before they moved to Chile. And again, in his writings I found the phrase “Nos decian los Bollicos” They called us los Bollicos. How odd. Now I had the same information from two very separate sources. Once from my grandfather and another time from my cousin in Chile. However, this search was not working out like I thought. If, in fact, there had been Jews in the town at all, where were the vestiges of this population? Surely, someone, somewhere, had left something besides the oral information that I was getting from all corners of the earth. I was getting more and more frustrated as time passed.

One day, I learned that my synagogue had booked a speaker from Israel—a dynamic historian who was an authority on the Marranos and, in fact, had spent her life researching Converso Jews. I was so excited! Here was the opportunity for me to get answers to my questions, and I immediately offered her and her husband to stay in my home while they were in town.

She gave a wildly popular lecture at shul. Then, sitting at my kitchen table, I showed her what I had collected so far: my snippets of paper, my family tree and a roughly drawn Coat of Arms of the village of Fermoselle. It was a simple gray crest with a huge cross on a red background. I will never forget how she took it in her hands, gazing into the photocopy as if its secrets would bounce off the paper. I could see nothing unusual. To me, it was just a red background with a large grey cross surrounded by several smaller grey crosses with the word Fermoselle written in a banner across the bottom in squiggly, old style English letters.

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