HIDDEN HERITAGE by Lionel Ross

.978-0-9552404-1-6.                                                                      £8.50

Hidden Heritage spans five hundred years of European and Middle Eastern history. It is the story of two Spanish Jewish families, the wealthy Alvaros & their cousins the Mendozas, forced to flee their homeland in 1492.   After many adventures on the high seas, including an attempted rape where the intended victim kills her assailant, a mutiny and wild and stormy weather they are shipwrecked on the coast of South Western Ireland (Co. Kerry.) They are marooned there and forced to build some kind of a life in their new bleak environment.  The story then leaps forward to the late twentieth century as it becomes the tale of two families of Southern Irish shepherds, the Allbarrows and the Meadows. Hidden Heritage then describes the defining moments of how and when they lost their Jewish identity and became the fanatical Roman Catholics that you meet in the two families in the present day. You will learn how Jose Alvaro, the Spanish-Jewish Grandee came to be an ancestor of Joseph Allbarrow who deserted his simple stone cottage in 1992 to join the Irish Army and found himself in modern day Israel, as a member of UNIFIL.  You will then discover how he became a hero in a skirmish with Hizbullah that nearly cost him his life and of his romance with Israeli diplomat Dalia Mendoza. You will also learn of the priceless holy scroll that miraculously survives the centuries and accompanies the families on their journey through history.