It wasn’t until Nandita Godbole began researching her family’s history that she realized how little she knew about her past.
“We used to visit my father’s parents a couple of times a year when I was a kid in India… “[My grandmother’s] ethnicity was never truly discussed,” Godbole, a cuisine writer who has published two cookbooks, told NBC News. “Because I didn’t know anything about her, I began to think about her. [I] was probably around ten years old when she died, and you don’t think about life and death and everything at that age.”
Godbole would eventually learn that her grandmother was born into the Bene Israel, one of India’s oldest Jewish communities, and converted to Hinduism in the 1930s when she married her grandfather.
