About the Author

Bala Menon is a journalist/artist/historian and storyteller. He began his career with India's premier English-language newspaper The Times of India, in Mumbai, and then took up an assignment as Deputy Editor with Times of Oman, the national daily of the Sultanate of Oman in Muscat. He was later Deputy Night Editor at Gulf news, the largest circulated English-language newspaper in the Middle East, published from Dubai. He has travelled widely in the Middle East and Europe and is currently Editor-in-Chief at The Voice Media Group in Toronto, Canada. He has a popular blog http: jewsofcochin.ca. He lives in the City of Brampton, in the Greater Toronto Area. Dr Essie Sassoon retired as Deputy Head of Department at Barzilai Medical Centre in Ashkelon, Israel. Born in the erstwhile Kingdom of Cochin, she attended St Teresa's Convent School and later Maharaja's College in Ernakulam. She graduated in medicine from the Trivandrum Medical College and specialized in obstetrics and gynaecology in Madras (now Chennai). After a stint at Calicut (now Kozhikode) Medical College as Specialist Associate Professor, she volunteered for duty in Israel during the Yom Kippur War and worked at Telashomer Hospital in Ramat Gan, staying on in Israel after the war. Twice honoured for meritorious service, she now devotes her time to her hobbies -cooking, sport and folk dancing.

Reviews

'A.B. Salem was fully Jewish and fully Indian. He was a religious Jew and pioneering Zionist as well as an ardent transformational local and nationalist political figure as documented in his Cochin Assembly speeches. This "Jewish Gandhi" is most deserving of the meticulous rendering of his story by Bala Menon and Dr. Essie Sassoon'. - Dr. Kenneth Robbins/ Washington D.C