Highlighting: “The Girl with the Secret Name: The Incredible Life of Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi” by Yael Zoldan. Green Bean Books. 2025. 152 pages. ISBN-10: 1805000985.

“The Girl With the Secret Name: The Incredible Life of Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi,” is an inspiring and uplifting story of Jewish female perseverance and courage. The novel, written by Yael Zoldan, is Zoldan’s first middle-grade novel and first novel marketed toward a secular audience.

Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi was born in Portugal in the early 1500s. She was a Converso, a hidden Jew descended from those forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition. Nasi’s family had escaped Spain and arrived in Portugal, living as Catholics; in her youth, Doña Gracia was called by the less Jewish name of Beatriz de Luna. Nasi didn’t even know she was Jewish until the night before her bat mitzvah. “And, she was horrified. She did not want to be a Jew,” explained Zoldan. “It was a very complicated world that she was born into.”

However, upon learning of her history and of the identity of other hidden Jews within her circle, Nasi became proud of her heritage and vowed to help other Jews escape persecution.

When Nasi married her mother’s wealthy cousin — Conversos rarely married outside their families for their own safety — she discovered that her husband and his brother used their wealth to save Jews by “influencing geopolitics around the world with their money and their loans,” Zoldan explained. When Nasi’s husband died and left her his money, she became one of the wealthiest women in the world, a situation nearly unheard of in the 16th century.

With her wealth and connections, Nasi organized an escape route for Jews facing persecution. When Nasi moved to a place where it was safe for Jews to live freely, she funded and developed many Jewish projects and organizations, including the first ever Judeo-Spanish translation of the Torah. She also funded a community and a yeshiva in Teveria, Israel, despite never living there herself.

After her death in 1569, “Her story was forgotten for the next 400 years,” said Zoldan. Her legacy disappeared from history books until the 1960s, when interest in her story was revived and books were published about her. However, her story was still relatively unknown. Zoldan initially heard about Dona Gracia when taking her daughter to a bat mitzvah class in which they learned about Jewish heroines, including Nasi. Zoldan immediately thought, “This is fascinating. What kind of woman in those days had that kind of power and that kind of courage and that kind of mind? Someone needs to write about this.” And so she did. “She lived an astonishing life. She was a feminist woman in the years before that existed, in the years when women were meek, submissive, poor and illiterate.”

The process of writing this novel was a long one. While the actual writing only took about a year, many long nights were spent researching Nasi’s story. Additionally, in order to ensure that the novel was age appropriate, some editing was needed to pare down the scary and violent parts of Nasi’s persecution story. PJ Library, a distributor of the book, has both adult and child reviewers. Zoldan responded to suggestions to remove some details from the Inquisition scenes. With editing, the book captured Nasi’s story without portraying too much violence. Once the manuscript for the novel was ready, it was in the hands of the publisher, Green Bean Books in England, which Zoldan called “extremely lovely to work with.”

This is Zoldan’s first book not geared toward an Orthodox market, which comes with its challenges and unique rewards. PJ Library, a nonprofit organization offering free Jewish books to Jewish children of all denominations, “welcomes the incredible diversity of Jewish experience, serving families whether they have a lot of previous Jewish knowledge or very little, are religiously observant or not, and are made up of all Jewish members or a beautiful blend,” according to its website. PJ Library offered “The Girl With the Secret Name” as one of their December 2024 selections. Zoldan described the story as “a reflection of Jewish pride, Jewish community, Jewish values, and Jewish identity, rather than Jewish practice.”

For Zoldan, the key takeaway from this novel is the core Jewish value of chesed, of loving-kindness and generosity. “That’s what she was doing. Every place she went, she was helping the downtrodden. She had a very strong moral code, which is a hard thing to hold onto. Especially in our world now, just like it was then. We ask, how did persecution of a people become commonplace and right? This is a woman who knew what was right, did not change her mind about it, and kept trying in every community that she went to, be a giver, be a doer, be a helper.”

Zoldan is the author of six picture books published by Feldheim Publishers and numerous essays in print and online. “The Girl With the Secret Name” will be released in the United States this July.

Eliana Birman is the assistant digital editor for The Jewish Link. She is a rising sophomore at Barnard College and lives in Teaneck.