Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-181).

"Before he was twenty years old, Louisiana-born Victor Sejour expatriated himself to Paris, where his acclaimed dramas would appear alongside those of Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. His mother a free woman of color, his father of Haitian descent, Sejour grew up a free Creole of color in antebellum New Orleans, but was deeply affected by the alienation and discrimination he encountered as a person of mixed descent." "The Fortune-Teller was first performed in French in 1859, just one year after six-year-old Edgardo Mortara was removed from his Jewish home by the Bologna inquisitor after being baptized by a maid. The inquisitor, supported by Pope Pius IX, vowed not to return the boy until his parents converted to Catholicism."

"In Sejour's touching rendering of the Mortara case, the infant girl Noemi is taken from her Jewish family after being baptized by a wet nurse. Seventeen years later, Noemi's widowed and wealthy mother Gemea masquerades as a poor fortune-teller in search of Noemi, who, she suspects, is living with the Catholic Lomellini family, under the name Paola." "In exchange for money to pay her husband's ransom, Bianca Lomellini reveals to Gemea that Paola is indeed the long-lost Noemi. Neither Jew nor Christian, torn between mothers, names, and homes, the young woman grapples with an anomalous identity, testing the bonds of both nature and nurture."--Jacket.

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