Libi Astaire, renowned author of the jewish ebook novel, Terra Incognita, and several other fictional works, never dreamed the life she is living, nor the life she portrays in her books that she gets to share with some of her favorite characters. As a child growing up in Kansas with an affection for Shakespeare and Chekhov, she imagined acting and living in London, but she figures, “I must have had some righteous ancestor in my family who prayed very, very hard to one day live in Israel – and that unfulfilled prayer somehow landed on me.”  When Libi first visited Israel in her mid-twenties, it was to sign on for the adventure of working and studying Hebrew on a kibbutz for six months. Kibbutz life was not for her as a permanent way of life, but Israel was now in her blood. When she returned to the states to get her MBA at New York University, which she parlayed into doing marketing and public relations for nonprofit organizations, she was already asking herself, “How can I return to Israel?”

While in New York, Libi became a baalas teshuvah and returned to Israel in the 1990’s. She’s been living in Jerusalem ever since and except for her ventures into foreign lands for her writings, this is where she wishes to spend her days and nights. Her voracious appetite for learning about the rich, vibrant Jewish life of Chassidus shows itself in her books, as does her love of travel. When she wrote the novel,

Terra Incognita, she welcomed the opportunity to combine two favorite loves – exploring different cultures and researching about places and eras of history she knows little about, and writing. She acknowledges, she didn’t know what she was getting into when her Terra Incognita adventure began:

“I was woefully uninformed about the whole topic of the Anusim – the Jews of Spain who were forced to convert to Christianity during the 1300s and 1400s and who were hunted down during the Spanish Inquisition. Besides many hours of historical research through the volumes of material now available on the Internet, I felt it was also important to have face-to-face encounters in Catalonia to get a sense of the “lay of the land” and to scout out locations for various scenes in the novel. I also did some interviews with both descendents of Anusim and people who were familiar with Anusim and Anusim culture before I began writing. Mishpacha magazine gave me a dream assignment, to write a serialized story for the magazine, and Terra Incognita developed from there. I began with a simple question, as do most novels: What would happen if a sleepy village in Spain woke up one day and discovered that they are all descended from Jews?”

Mishpacha was as excited as Libi was about exploring this part of history more fully, and they agreed she would write a multi-part article about the history of the Jews of Catalonia – Catalonia is a province in northern Spain – and while she was doing the research for those articles she could also do research for Terra Incognita. Libi was fascinated by this area of the world and you might be too if you realize that the Ramban and Rabbeinu Yonah both lived in Girona, a Catalan city that has the best preserved Jewish Quarter in all of Spain; the Ramban’s famous Disputation took place in Barcelona, Catalonia’s capital city, which was also the home of the Rashba, and the Catalan town of Besalu is home to a mikvah dating back to the thirteenth century!

Libi spent ten days in Catalonia, and that’s when she learned how important it is for a novelist to go to a place they are writing about. She reflects:  “You can read and read and read about a location, and look at tons of pictures, but it’s not the same as being there. You don’t get the sensory details – the sounds and smells – or the other little nuances that have an impact on daily life. To give just one example, although the main story of Terra Incognita is set in the present, there is a section that takes place in Girona during the time of the Inquisition. In this section, one of the Jewish characters talks about the bells of the city’s cathedral and how those bells are both a menacing presence and a seductive lure for Jews who were wavering in their faith. I wouldn’t have been able to write that scene if I hadn’t stood in Girona’s Jewish Quarter, which is only a few steps from the cathedral – that’s how small the medieval city was – and heard those bells booming in my ears every quarter of an hour. You really can’t escape their oppressive presence. If I felt that way, with my Israeli passport in my purse, how must a medieval Jew have felt about them during those final few years of persecution, before the entire Jewish community was expelled from Spain?”

Terra Incognita answers that question, and many more. This author is not incognita anymore in the Jewish world. We can’t wait to see what other area of the Jewish world she uncovers for us all to learn about.