Am I a Hidden Jew?

Some years ago my sister and I revisited Coamo, Puerto Rico, the town where most of the Bernier, including us, were born. We stopped cold at a building my grandfather had built. "Do you see what I see?" I asked my sister. Both of us had been interested in Sephardic music and the history of the Spanish Jews. And up there in that building was the Star of David! Could it be that we had Jewish ancestors and we didn't know it?

My grandfather was a Freemason, so we always thought that was the reason his casket wasn't allowed in the Catholic Church. The Church had announced that any parishioner who went to his funeral would be excommunicated. Later they dropped that because the whole town went to his funeral.

I hear the Satr of David is a Freemason's symbol as well as others. Still, I prefer to write a story in which a devout Catholic girl named Margaret finds out that her grandfather, who pretends to be Catholic, is really a Jew. So, I have been collecting information, not so much about Margaret, because I know what it's like to be a ten-year-old Catholic, but about her grandfather, Salomon Archuleta (Chuleta is the Spanish for pork chop).

I have a board with my Jewish neighbor's photo. His looks, beard and all, will be Archuleta's. The board also has photos of a spiral stairway to a Catholic pulpit which Margaret will learn to hate and a Catholic New Mexico cemetery that has a tomb with a stone on top--a Jewish tradition. At the center of the Easter lily there is Star of David.

Margaret, begins to suspect that something is wrong when on a Friday evening she and her girlfriends (who have done this for a while) peek by his ajar window and see Archuleta, towel on head, lighting candles and bowing.

She suspects but denies that her grandfather is a Jew, after all they tell her that the Archuleta's are not Jews. Oh! But his mother, Miriam Trujillo was! Women carry the Jewish tradition.