Award-winning author and international speaker, Marcia Fine has advanced academic degrees in English and Women’s Studies from Florida State University and Arizona State University.

She has written seven novels, including:

• The Blind Eye—A Sephardic Journey, chosen by the state of Arizona for ONEBOOKAZ 2015 to be read statewide.
• Paper Children—An Immigrant’s Legacy, based on family history and research has been a finalist for three national prizes.
• Paris Lamb, published in 2015 and a first prize winner, examines Jewish identity in the 1950s.

Her next novel, Hidden Ones, is about the Inquisition in Mexico.

Visit her website at: http://www.marciafine.com/

“Hidden Ones: Sephardim and Trauma” (Mon-116), 12:30-1:15 P.M.

Did the Sephardim expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492/1497 carry trauma in their genes to the New World? How are memory and identity shaped by our experiences and our individual or collective histories? What is the relationship between memory and identity?

My two novels, The Blind Eye—A Sephardic Journey, about displaced Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and Hidden Ones—A Veil of Memories focuses on conversos and their survival.

Melancholia, depression, and anger are all symptoms Sephardim dealt with as a result of the expulsion for the almost four hundred years they were persecuted around the world. The ordeal explains their mental state for centuries after the fact. The pain these people suffered because of the Inquisition cannot be minimized. It was in every area of their lives from forced conversions to abandoned possessions and the threat of death.

Epigenetics is a new science that has answers for us.

Topic: Sephardic research