India, March 20 -- As a half-Palestinian-half-Jewish American, Hannah Lillith Assadi grew up amid intense love and a persistent sense of loss. Her parents' love for each other and their family seemed to suture a gaping historical wound. Religion did not play a large role in the home, and that rift did not come into play.

But she was the daughter of a man who was evicted from his home, with his family, when he was five years old. He had told her stories of how he wandered the world, for decades, looking for and never really finding another place to belong; or, if he did, finding it in people rather than places. So she knew what the wound between her two halves had cost him.

What she didn't realise was the sense of failure he carried. Des...