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Terra Incognita
A NovelLibi Astaire
Terra Incognita
“Papa, why is Grandpa so against strangers?” Vidal asked.
“Sant Joan Januz is a small village, a nice place to live. If people with different customs started moving in, our traditions would eventually disappear.”
When Vidal Bonet returns to Sant Joan Januz after getting a business degree in New York, he comes with grandiose plans for building an upscale resort and breathing new life into the sleepy Catalan village. But he faces fierce opposition from the traditional villagers, including his beloved grandfather.
When Chaim Green, an Jewish anthropology student from Kansas, arrives in Sant Joan Januz it’s with a dream of discovering the distant relatives his Nona Anna wrote about in her five-hundred-year-old diary. He hopes to uncover descendants of Anusim, Jews who pretended to be Christian while clinging to their Jewish customs. Instead he finds a wall of silence, false leads, and thinly veiled hostility.
Vidal and Chaim are both determined to fulfill their dreams, but the two visions soon collide. Only one can win, and the result will change them, and the people of Sant Joan Januz, forever.
This breathtaking novel seamlessly weaves the tortured past with the conflicted present. Originally offered as a popular serialization in Mishpacha Magazine, talented author Libi Astaire has expanded the story to create a beautifully crafted, intriguing novel about familial connections, ancient traditions, and the endurance of the Jewish people.
Book Excerpt from Terra Incognita
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Terra Incognita
From Mishpacha Magazine writer & popular author Libi Astaire, this contemporary Jewish novel seamlessly weaves a tortured past with a conflicted present, in an intriguing tale of family, tradition & the endurance of the Jewish people.
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The sun beat down on the car’s roof as Vidal drove down yet another dusty back road. It had been a long and frustrating week. After meeting with almost half of the village’s families, and talking about his vision of the village’s future until his voice was hoarse, he realized that the picture that was emerging was not encouraging. A third of the families were solidly behind him. A third of them were just as solidly against. The rest were solidly committed to sitting on the fence.
A person didn’t have to be a clairvoyant to know where the opposition was coming from. Overnight Miquel had emerged from the cocoon of his close family and turned into a social butterfly; flitting from one farmhouse to another, he was gaily spreading ominous rumors wherever he went. And apparently what Ferran Rodriguez had said about no one taking seriously his grandfather’s talk about casinos and other social ills wasn’t completely true. Vidal was learning that even if people weren’t accepting all the details, many of them seemed to have accepted the underlying, cautionary message: the planned resort spelled disaster for the village. It had to be voted down.
And so, if at the beginning of the week Vidal had hoped to be received in people’s homes as the savior of Sant Joan Januz, he had grown used to being greeted with all the enthusiasm that a skeptical farmer reserves for the traveling salesman touting a bottle of snake oil. Still, he was determined to keep on fighting. If he couldn’t entirely undo his grandfather’s work, at least he could poke a few holes in the colorful yarns his grandfather was busy weaving — and fill those holes with a few cautionary doubts of his own.
“Voting against Peaceland means voting for the death of Sant Joan Januz,” Vidal reminded those who were still undecided.
And it was true. Despite the opposition, so far no one had come up with a better idea. If his plan was voted down, where would they be the morning after the vote?
Vidal instinctively glanced down at his watch to check the LED display. It was something he did whenever a troubling “where” question bubbled up in his mind. And as he did so, he couldn’t help but note that where he was now was a different place entirely than where he had been when he had first seen the watch.
He had bought the watch in New York in a spirit of optimism, after his grandfather had insisted that he buy himself a nice graduation present. From the moment he saw it, he knew that the watch had been designed for someone just like him. Not only did the watch show the time, but it also came with all sorts of features that enabled a person who was going places to keep track of that journey. Should he ever decide to go on a sea voyage, for instance, the watch had a tide graph to tell him if it was high tide or low. The watch’s barometer could warn him of any approaching storm. Once the storm broke, the thermometer would let him know how hot or cold the winds were blowing. And if a gust of wind should send him tumbling overboard, the watch’s depth log would record his path, while its depth gauge would tell him just how deeply he had fallen into the sea’s dark waters. That same depth gauge would, of course, chart his eventual rise back up to the top.
Admirable as the seafaring features were, they weren’t particularly helpful in Sant Joan Januz, which sat contentedly moored in its landlocked valley. The watch’s digital compass was another matter. The more he felt alone and at sea due to his grandfather’s unexpected and roundabout opposition, the more he found the compass to be oddly comforting. He wasn’t a lost speck traveling blindly and unnoticed through the world. He was traveling somewhere, at least according to the solar-powered LED display of his watch, which faithfully charted the changing directions of his zigzagging path.
It was a pity, though, that the compass didn’t come with a directional point marked ’’grandfather.’’ For the past week Vidal had been trying to locate Miquel so that he could talk to him. What should have been a simple task had turned into a frustrating game of cat and mouse. Vidal was supposed to be the cat, of course. Instead, as he traveled through the maze of back roads that connected one farm to another — always far too many steps behind his grandfather’s weather-beaten blue pickup truck — Vidal had the strange feeling that someone was purposefully leading him off course and laughing at his bungled attempts to track down his prey. And who could that someone be, if not his Grandfather Miquel?
If his hunch was correct, it meant that his grandfather’s mind was still as sharp as ever. That was comforting. But it didn’t explain why his grandfather refused to talk to him. It also didn’t make his work any easier.
Vidal reached for his water bottle and took a drink of cold water. He had one more meeting scheduled for that day, and he hoped his voice would hold out. After taking another drink, he turned the car onto the dirt road that led to the home of Joanna’s parents, Luis and Regina Adarra. His watch told him that the atmospheric pressure was normal, the temperature was hot, and he was traveling southeast. As for the time, he didn’t need a watch to tell him that it was running out for him, and for Peaceland.
Buy Terra Incognita by Libi Astaire at an online discount at www.targum.com.