The Blind Eye,  by Marcia Fine
- Chapter One

 “Hermando, no. Please. Hanna’s still a girl. She made a mistake.” My mother appealed to my father even as she, too, made preparations for our long journey. The air in the front room of our home that served as our place of trade reeked with anger and frustration. Despair replaced hope. Three months had passed since the Edict of Expulsion on the thirty-first of Adar. Originally we were to leave on the first day of Ab but the monarchs in their cruel contempt gave us one more day.

“No!” my father shouted, gathering stacks of Byzantine silks and flax linen. Furious, he stuffed them into large hemp bags. A swath of crimson tapestry fell to the floor.

“But Hanna’s only fourteen.”

“Old enough not to be a fool. Pregnant by a common Marrano who believes in their Holy Ghost? What kind of a Jew is that?”

More....

Spending her formative years in South Florida, the only child of New York expatriates with a penchant for the Bohemian lifestyle, Marcia’s best friend was a good book.
  
At Florida State University she majored in English and then taught high school for five years while working toward a Masters degree in English Education and a Certificate of Concentration in Women’s Studies. Marcia also taught freshman composition at Arizona State University.
  
During the Eighties, as a wife and mother, she opened a model and talent center, the Southwest’s largest. As an agent, the newly minted entrepreneur marketed and managed over three hundred people. After ten years Marcia sold her self-created circus to become a corporate trainer and motivational speaker for an international jewelry company with membership in National Speaker’s Association from 1980-2000.
  
In 2000 Marcia began to pursue her dream of writing. Having written two satires about the upscale Scottsdale crowd, she then took a different direction and completed two more books. The third, Paper Children, is a family saga based on her grandmother’s letters from her family in Poland before and after World War Two. Through translations and personal recollections Marcia has crafted a powerful immigrant’s story of determination and passion.
  
The fourth novel, The Blind Eye, is a sweeping historical novel set in the 15th and 20th centuries. It is, at times, a heart-wrenching story dealing with the survival of the Sephardic Jews during the Spanish Inquisition. Both Paper Children and The Blind Eye required extensive research and travel to Poland, Spain and Portugal.
 
Marcia states her motivation quite simply...

"I love the written word.  I have stories to tell.".