Surviving the Holocaust in Sepharad: Trudi Alexy's Story

This article examines the symbolic uses of the past-in this case, the mass conversions of Jews in fourteenth-century Spain and their consequences, the establishment of the Inquisition, the 1492 expulsion-in narratives of Jewish exiles in Spain during World War II. It focuses on Trudi Alexy's memoir, The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot, in which the author draws a spiritual connection between her exile in Spain in the 1940s and the struggles of crypto-Jews in earlier centuries, providing her narrative with a desired coherence in the face of the contradictory circumstances that led to deliverance from the Holocaust in Francoist Spain. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]