This article considers Antonio Muñoz Molina's debt to Marcel Proust in his use of literature as a means of exploring alterity in the novel Sefarad (2001). Adapting Proust's model for the recovery of the self through fiction, Muñoz Molina demonstrates how to engage empathetically with the victims of mid-twentieth century history. Sefarad thus posits a search for lost time through the forgotten testimonies of suffering at the hands of totalitarian regimes as a means of constructing identity, of comprehending the self in relation to the other.