My Strange and Fascinating Travels Around My Far-Reaching Family Tree
In a bid to find out about my Sephardic roots, I am uncovering new relations and tying together surprising stories
In 2015, a year before the disastrous referendum in the UK that would eventually rip our European citizenship from us come the end of 2020, the Portuguese government made an announcement.
I wasn’t aware of the announcement they had made until a couple of years ago, and then only stored it in a special compartment in my brain marked “for later.” But now, I have dug it out to revisit.
You see, as many Brits who opposed leaving the EU felt, taking away our European rights was not only a disaster for the economy of Britain, but it also stripped us of the freedoms I had grown up with and enjoyed to the max — freedom of movement throughout EU member nations and the ability to live, work, and buy property in Europe. Freedoms and rights my own children were now being denied for their lifetimes.
Many Brits who didn’t want to lose these freedoms looked for opportunities to become citizens of European countries. We learnt that my dad was automatically considered a citizen of Ireland since his mother was born in Dublin. And thus, both my sister and I could apply for Irish…
