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Out of Egypt: A Memoir Kindle Edition
This richly colored memoir chronicles the exploits of a flamboyant Jewish family, from its bold arrival in cosmopolitan Alexandria to its defeated exodus three generations later.
In elegant and witty prose, André Aciman introduces us to the marvelous eccentrics who shaped his life--Uncle Vili, the strutting daredevil, soldier, salesman, and spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six languages; Aunt Flora, the German refugee who warns that Jews lose everything "at least twice in their lives." And through it all, we come to know a boy who, even as he longs for a wider world, does not want to be led, forever, out of Egypt.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateJanuary 23, 2007
- File size1219 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Aciman may have gone out of Egypt but, as this evocative and imaginative book makes plain, he has never left it, nor it him."--The Washington Post
"With beguiling simplicity, Aciman recalls the life of Alexandria as [his family] knew it, and the seductiveness of that beautiful, polyglot city permeates his book."--The New Yorker
"Beautifully remembered and even more beautifully written."--Los Angeles Times Book Review "The past recaptured in [Aciman's] elegant memoir is full of cucumber lotion and Schubert melodies, Parmesan cheese and the chatter of backgammon chips--all the smells and sounds of Alexandria that he knew before [leaving]."--The New Republic
"To find Alexandria in these pages, all rosy and clear-eyed from the tonic of Aciman's telling, is the greatest imaginable gift."--James Merrill
"An extraordinary memoir of an eccentric family, a fascinating milieu, and a complex cosmopolitan culture. This beautifully written book combines the sensuousness of Lawrence Durrell, the magic of Garcia Marquez, and the realism of intimate observation. A rich portrait of a surprising and now-vanished world."--Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Out of Egypt
A Memoir
By André AcimanPicador
Copyright © 1994 André AcimanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-312-42655-2
Contents
Title Page,Acknowledgements,
1 - Soldier, Salesman, Swindler, Spy,
2 - Rue Memphis,
3 - A Centennial Ball,
4 - Taffi Al-Nur!,
5 - The Lotus-Eaters,
6 - The Last Seder,
ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR - Out of Egypt,
Also by André Aciman,
About the Author,
Copyright Page,
CHAPTER 1
Soldier, Salesman, Swindler, Spy
"So, are we or aren't we, siamo o non siamo," boasted my Great-uncle Vili when the two of us finally sat down late that summer afternoon in a garden overlooking his sprawling estate in Surrey.
"Just look at this," he pointed to a vast expanse of green. "Isn't it splendid?" he asked, as if he had invented the very notion of an afternoon stroll in the English countryside. "Just before sundown and minutes after tea, it always comes: a sense of plenitude, of bliss almost. You know — everything I wanted, I got. Not bad for a man in his eighties." Arrogant self-satisfaction beamed on his features.
I tried to speak to him of Alexandria, of time lost and lost worlds, of the end when the end came, of Monsieur Costa and Montefeltro and Aldo Kohn, of Lotte and Aunt Flora and lives so faraway now. He cut me short and made a disparaging motion with his hand, as if to dismiss a bad odor. "That was rubbish. I live in the present," he said almost vexed by my nostalgia. "Siamo o non siamo?" he asked, standing up to stretch his muscles, then pointing to the first owl of the evening.
It was never exactly clear what one was or wasn't, but to everyone in the family, including those who don't speak a word of Italian today, this elliptical phrase still captures the strutting, daredevil, cocksure, soldier-braggart who had pulled himself out of an Italian trench during the Great War and then, hidden between rows of trees with his rifle held tightly in both hands, would have mowed down the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire had he not run out of bullets. The phrase expressed the hectoring self-confidence of a drill sergeant surrounded by sissies in need of daily jostling. "Are we man enough or aren't we?" he seemed to say. "Are we going ahead with it or aren't we?" "Are we worth our salt or what?" It was his way of whistling in the dark, of shrugging off defeat, of picking up the pieces and calling it a victory. This, after all, was how he barged in on the affairs of fate and held out for more, taking credit for everything, down to the unforeseen brilliance of his most hapless schemes. He mistook overdrawn luck for foresight, just as he misread courage for what was little more than the gumption of a street urchin. He had pluck. He knew it, and he flaunted it.
Impervious to the humiliating Italian defeat at the Battle of Caporetto in 1917, Uncle Vili remained forever proud of his service to the Italian army, flaunting that as well, with the spirited Florentine lilt he had picked up in Italian Jesuit schools in Constantinople. Like most young Jewish men born in Turkey toward the end of the century, Vili disparaged anything having to do with Ottoman culture and thirsted for the West, finally becoming "Italian" the way most Jews in Turkey did: by claiming ancestral ties with Leghorn, a port city near Pisa where escaped Jews from Spain had settled in the sixteenth century. A very distant Italian relative bearing the Spanish name of Pardo-Roques was conveniently dug up in Leghorn — Vili was half Pardo-Roques himself — whereupon all living "cousins" in Turkey immediately became Italian. They were all, of course, staunch nationalists, monarchists.
When told the Italian army had never been valiant, Uncle Vili had immediately challenged an Alexandrian Greek to a duel, especially after the latter had reminded him that all those Italian medals and trinkets hardly altered the fact that Vili was still a Turkish rascal, and a Jewish one to boot. This infuriated Uncle Vili, not because someone had impugned his Jewishness — he would have been the first to do so — but because he hated to be reminded that many Jews had become Italian through shady means. The weapons their seconds had chosen for the occasion were so obsolete that neither of the two duelists knew how to wield them. No one was hurt, apologies were made, one of them even giggled, and, to foster a spirit of fellowship, Vili suggested a quiet restaurant overlooking the sea, where on this clear Alexandrian day in June everyone ate his heartiest luncheon in years. When it came time for the bill, both the Greek and the Italian insisted on paying, and the tug-of-war would have gone on forever, each alleging his honor and his pleasure, had not Uncle Vili, like a conjurer finally compelled to use magic when all else failed, pulled out his choicest little phrase, in this case meaning, "Now am I or aren't I a man of honor?" The Greek, who was the more gracious of the two, conceded.
Uncle Vili knew how to convey that intangible though unmistakable feeling that he had lineage — a provenance so ancient and so distinguished that it transcended such petty distinctions as birthplace, nationality, or religion. And with the suggestion of lineage came the suggestion of wealth — if always with the vague hint that this wealth was inconveniently tied up elsewhere, in land, for example, foreign land, something no one in the family ever had much of except when it came in clay flowerpots. But lineage earned him credit. And this is what mattered to him most, for this was how he and all the men in the family made, borrowed, lost, and married into fortunes: on credit.
Lineage came naturally to Vili, not because he had it, nor because he mimicked it, nor even because he aspired to it with the leisured polish of lapsed aristocrats. In his case, it was simply the conviction that he was born better. He had the imposing bearing of the wealthy, the reluctant smile that immediately sweetens in the company of equals. He was patrician in thrift, politics, and debauchery, intolerant of poor posture more than of bad taste, of bad taste more than of cruelty, and of bad table manners more than of bad eating habits. Above all, he detested what he called the "atavisms" by which Jews gave themselves away, especially when impersonating goyim. He derided all in-laws and acquaintances who looked typically Jewish, not because he did not look so himself, or because he hated Jews, but because he knew how much others did. It's because of Jews like them that they hate Jews like us. When snubbed by an observant Jew proud of his heritage, Vili's answer trickled down his tongue like a pit he had been twiddling about his mouth for forty years: "Proud of what? Are we or aren't we all peddlers in the end?"
And peddle is what he knew and did best. He even peddled fascism to the British in Egypt and, later, on behalf of the Italians, in Europe as well. He was as devoted to Il Duce as he was to the Pope. His annual addresses to the Hitler Youth in Germany were highly applauded and became a notorious source of strife within the family. "Don't meddle, I know what I'm doing," he would say. Years later, when the British began threatening to round up all adult Italian males living in Alexandria, Uncle Vili suddenly rummaged through his closets and began hawking old certificates from the rabbinate of Constantinople to remind his friends at the British Consulate that, as an Italian Jew, he couldn't possibly be considered a threat to British interests. Would they like him to spy on the Italians? The British could not have asked for better.
He performed so brilliantly that after the war he was rewarded with a Georgian estate in Surrey, where he lived in lordly penury for the remainder of his days under the assumed name of Dr. H. M. Spingarn. Herbert Michael Spingarn was an Englishman whom Vili had met as a child in Constantinople and who had stirred in him two lifelong passions: the Levantine desire to emulate anything British, and the Ottoman contempt for British anything. Uncle Vili, who had given up his distinctly Jewish name for an Anglo-Saxon one, cringed with half-concealed embarrassment when I told him that this fellow Spingarn had himself been a Jew. "Yes, I recall something like that," he said vaguely. "We're everywhere, then, aren't we? Scratch the surface and you'll find everyone's a Jew," jeered the octogenarian Turco-Italian-Anglophile-gentrified-Fascist Jew who had started his professional life peddling Turkish fezzes in Vienna and Berlin and was to end it as the sole auctioneer of deposed King Farouk's property. "The Sotheby's of Egypt; but a peddler nonetheless," he added, reclining in his chair as we both watched a flight of birds descend upon the murky, stagnant waters of what must have once been a splendid pond. "Still, a great people, these Jews," he would say in broken English, affecting a tone of detached condescension so purposefully shallow and so clearly aware of its own fatuousness as to suggest that, when it came to his co-religionists, he always meant the opposite of what he said. Following praise, he would always vilify these admirable yet "scoundrel Jews," only then to change his tune once more. "After all, Einstein, Schnabel, Freud, Disraeli," he would declaim with a glint in his eyes and a half-suppressed smile. "Were they or weren't they?"
He had left Egypt — to which the family had moved from Constantinople in 1905 — a would-be cadet with fire in his gut and quicksilver in his eyes. He had studied in Germany, served in the Prussian army, changed sides when the Italians joined the war in 1915, and after Caporetto sat out the rest of the war in Cyprus as an interpreter, returning to Egypt four years after his discharge, a polished rake in his late twenties whose insolent good looks betrayed a history of shady deals and ruthless sieges in the battle of the sexes. Impressed by his conquests, his sisters judged him decidedly masculine, what with the roguish tilt of his fedora, the impatient Come, come now in his voice, and that patronizing swagger with which he would come up and grab a bottle of champagne you were trying to uncork and say, Let me — never overbearing, but just enough to signal there was more, much more. He had fought in all sorts of battles, on all sorts of sides, with all sorts of weapons. He was a consummate marksman, a remarkable athlete, a shrewd businessman, a relentless womanizer — and yes, decidedly masculine.
"Are we or aren't we," he would brag after a conquest, or a killing in the stock market, or on suddenly recovering from a hopeless bout of malaria, or when he saw through a shrewd woman, or knocked down a street ruffian, or when he simply wanted to show the world that he was not easily hoodwinked. It meant: Did I show them or didn't I? He would use this phrase after negotiating a difficult transaction: Didn't I promise they'd come begging for my price? Or when he had a blackmailer thrown in jail: Didn't I warn him not to take me for a pushover? Or when his beloved sister, Aunt Marta, came crying to him hysterically after she had been jilted by yet another fiancé, in which case his phrase meant: Any man worthy of the name could have seen it coming! Didn't I warn you? And then, to remind her she was made of stronger stuff than tears, he would sit her on his lap and, holding both her hands in his, rock her ever so gently, swearing she'd get over her sorrow sooner than she thought, for such was the way with lovesickness, and besides, was she or wasn't she?
Later, he would buy her roses and placate her for a few hours, maybe a few days. But she was not always easily swayed and, sometimes, scarcely would he have let go of her and gone to his study than he would suddenly hear her shrieking hysterically at the other end of the apartment: "But who'll marry me, who?" she kept asking her sisters as she sobbed and blew her nose on the first rag that fell her way.
"Who'll marry me at my age, tell me, who, who?" she would ask, shrieking her way back into his study.
"Someone will, you mark my words," he would say.
"No one will," she insisted. "Can't you see why? Can't you see I'm ugly? Even I know it!"
"Ugly you're not!"
"Just say the truth: ugly!"
"You may not be the most beautiful —"
"But no one in the street will ever turn around to look at me."
"You should be thinking of a home, Marta, not the street."
"You just don't understand, do you? All you do is twist my words and make me sound stupid!" She began raising her voice.
"Look, if you want me to say you're ugly, then all right, you're ugly."
"No one understands, no one."
And she would drift away again like an ailing specter come to seek comfort among the living only to be shooed away.
Aunt Marta's crises de mariage, as they were called, were known to last for hours. Afterward she had such pounding headaches that she would put herself to sleep early in the afternoon and not dare show her face until the next morning, and even then, the storm was not necessarily quelled, for as soon as she got out of bed she would ask whoever crossed her path to look at her eyes. "They are puffy," she would say, "aren't they? Look at them. Just look at this," she would insist, nearly poking her eyes out. "No, they're fine," someone would respond. "You're lying. I can even feel how puffy they are. Now everyone will know I cried over him. They'll tell him, I know they will. I'm so humiliated, so humiliated." Her voice quavered until it broke into a sob, and down came the tears again.
For the rest of the day, her mother, her three sisters, five brothers, and sisters- and brothers-in-law would take turns peeking in her door, carrying pieces of ice in a small bowl for her eyes while she lay in the dark with a compress of her own devising. "I'm suffering. If only you knew how I'm suffering," she would groan, in exactly the same words I heard her whisper more than fifty years later in a hospital room in Paris as she lay dying of cancer. Outside, sitting with his other siblings in the crowded living room, Uncle Vili could no longer control himself. "Enough is enough! What Marta really needs — we all know what it is." "Don't be vulgar now," his sister Clara interrupted, unable to stifle a giggle as she stood at her easel, painting yet another version of Tolstoy's grizzled features. "See?" Uncle Vili retaliated. "You may not like the truth, but everyone agrees with me," he continued with increased exasperation in his voice. "All these years, and the poor girl still doesn't know a man's fore from his aft." Their older brother Isaac burst out laughing. "Can you really imagine her with anyone?" "Enough is enough," snapped their mother, a matriarch nearing her seventies. "We must find her a good Jewish man. Rich, poor, doesn't matter." "But who, who, who, tell me who?" Aunt Marta interrupted, overhearing the tail end of their conversation on her way to the bathroom. "It's hopeless. Hopeless. Why did you make me come to Egypt, why?" she said, turning to her elder sister Esther. "It's hot and muggy, I'm always sweating, and the men are so dreadful."
Uncle Vili stood up, curled his hand around her hip, and said, "Calm yourself, Marta, and don't worry. We'll find you someone. I promise. Leave it to me."
"But you always say that, always, and you don't ever mean it. And besides, who do we know here?"
This was Vili's long-awaited cue. And he rose to the occasion with the studied nonchalance of a man driven to use exactly the words he has been dying to say. In this instance, they meant: Can anyone really doubt that we are well connected?
This was an oblique reference to Uncle Isaac, who, while studying at the University of Turin, had managed to become a very close friend of a fellow student named Fouad, the future king of Egypt. Both men spoke Turkish, Italian, German, some Albanian, and, between them, had concocted a pidgin tongue, rich in obscenities and double entendres, that they called Turkitalbanisch and which they continued to speak into their old age. It was because Uncle Isaac staked all of his hopes on this undying friendship that he had eventually persuaded his parents and siblings to sell everything in Constantinople and move to Alexandria.
Uncle Vili was fond of boasting that his brother — and, by implication, himself as well — "owned" the king. "He has the king in his breast pocket," he would say, pointing to his own breast pocket, in which a silver cigarette case bearing the king's seal was permanently lodged. In the end, it was the king who introduced Isaac to the man who was to play such a significant role in his sister's life.
Aunt Marta, who was nearing forty at the time, was eventually married to this man, a rich Swabian Jew whom everyone in the family called "the Schwab" — his real name was Aldo Kohn — and who did little else but play golf all day, bridge at night, and in between smoked Turkish cigarettes on which his name and family crest had been meticulously inscribed in gold filigree. He was a balding, corpulent man whom Marta had turned down ten years earlier but who was determined to pursue her again and, better yet, without demanding a dowry, which suited everyone. At one of the family gatherings, it was arranged to leave the would-be's alone for a while, and before Marta knew what the Schwab was about, or even had time to turn around and pull herself away, he had grabbed hold of her wrist and fastened around it a lavish bracelet on the back of which his jeweler had inscribed M'appari, after the famous aria from von Flotow's Martha. Aunt Marta was so flustered she did not realize she had broken into tears, which so moved the poor Schwab that he too started to weep, begging as he sobbed, "Don't say no, don't say no." Arrangements were made, and soon enough everyone noticed an unusually serene and restful glow settle upon Aunt Marta's rosy features. "She'll kill him at this rate," her brothers snickered.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Out of Egypt by André Aciman. Copyright © 1994 André Aciman. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B004UND9FQ
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First edition (January 23, 2007)
- Publication date : January 23, 2007
- Language : English
- File size : 1219 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 332 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #361,140 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #25 in History of Egypt
- #73 in Jewish Biographies & Memoirs
- #119 in Egyptian History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
André Aciman is an American memoirist, essayist, and New York Times bestselling novelist originally from Alexandria, Egypt. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler, The Paris Review, Granta as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays.
Aciman grew up in a multilingual and multinational family and attended English-language schools, first in Alexandria and later, after his family moved to Italy in 1965, in Rome. In 1968, Aciman's family moved again, this time to New York City, where he graduated in 1973 from Lehman College. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and, after teaching at Princeton University and Bard College, is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. He has also taught creative writing at New York University, Cooper Union, and and Yeshiva University. In 2009, Aciman was also Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.
Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. His books and essays have been translated in many languages. In addition to Out of Egypt (1995), Aciman has published False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001) and Alibis: Essays on Elswhere (2011), and four novels, Enigma Variations (2017), Harvard Square (2013), Eight White Nights (2010) and Call Me By Your Name (2007), for which he won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). He also edited Letters of Transit (1999) and The Proust Project (2004) and prefaced Monsieur Proust (2003), The Light of New York (2007), Condé Nast Traveler's Room With a View (2010) and Stefan Zweig's Journey to the Past (2010). His novel Call Me by Your Name has been turned into a film (2017), directed by Luca Guadagnino, with a screenplay by James Ivory, and starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet.
He is currently working on his fifth novel and a collection of essays.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers praise the writing style as eloquent and lyrical, with a plaintive yet celebratory tone. They find the story fascinating and interesting, evoking a unique time and place. The book is described as heartwarming, inspiring, and compassionate at deep levels. Readers describe the family as charming, eccentric, and colorful. They appreciate the humor and humor in the book.
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Customers enjoy the book's writing style. They find it lyrical and poignant, with a Proustian love of detail and texture. The tone is both plaintive and celebratory. Readers appreciate the accurate and intimate descriptions of the city that capture a vivid sense of place.
"...Alexandria beyond recognition; hence Aciman's beautiful writing of Alexandria, its beaches and its tram will bring floods of memories for anyone who..." Read more
"...It gives a very clear and vivid picture of what it was to live under such, at times, very stressful conditions while not actually being involved in..." Read more
"...There is something Proust-like in the writing, a love of detail for the texture it creates, and something Nabokov-like as well, in the hooded humor..." Read more
"...existed. This is an eloquent and elegiac account of that love and absurdity known as a family." Read more
Customers enjoyed the story. They found it interesting, beautifully written, and evocative of a unique time and place. The narrative skillfully skips back and forth in time, making it an engaging read about people, politics, and times.
"...sensitivity to the people and events around him and his wonderful story telling skills has produced beautifully written and very touching book that..." Read more
"This is a true story about one, rather large, Jewish family living in Egypt thru WWII, thru the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, and up until..." Read more
"...section dating roughly from age 5 or 6, the narrative skillfully skips back and forth in time...." Read more
"A fascinating story about a very charming but eccentric Jewish family that seems to have no solid or permanent roots...." Read more
Customers find the book inspiring and compassionate. They appreciate the author's childhood memories of growing up with an extended family. The tone is both poignant and celebratory, making it a rewarding read.
"...At a time of increased hostility in the middle east it is heartwarming to read of a time when Jews lived in peace with their Muslim and Christian..." Read more
"...existed. This is an eloquent and elegiac account of that love and absurdity known as a family." Read more
"...Some words are not correct Arabic. What I liked are his feelings as a young boy growing up with an extended family...." Read more
"A superb memoir that shares with us a loving and idiosyncratic family caught up with historical changes. loved it" Read more
Customers enjoy the family history. They find it charming and moving, with a colorful family chronicle. The book captures the essence of time and place, as well as the boy's exotic world and dysfunctional extended family.
"...The descriptions of the boy's exotic world and his dysfunctional extended family are priceless, as are the re-invented conversations and arguments..." Read more
"A superb memoir that shares with us a loving and idiosyncratic family caught up with historical changes. loved it" Read more
"...Aciman writes well and captures the essence of time, place and family that is powerful and moving. Well done." Read more
"Charming, funny. beautifully written. Colorful family, interesting story." Read more
Customers enjoy the humor in the book. They find it funny and well-written, with a good dose of Jewish humor.
"...the texture it creates, and something Nabokov-like as well, in the hooded humor and artful language...." Read more
"...Fun and humor and smart, Andre is a young boy then and he relates his grandfathers story and all the relatives as it was then...." Read more
"...The writing is good, the characters memorable, and it has very funny moments, proving that life, no matter how convoluted or dysfunctional, is..." Read more
"A great memoir of an Egypt no longer exists told with a good dose of Jewish humour. I couldn't put this memoir down." Read more
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Out of Alexandria
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2006Andre Aciman's Out of Egypt is an amazing book, I found it very hard to put down. At a time of increased hostility in the middle east it is heartwarming to read of a time when Jews lived in peace with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in Alexandria. Not a whiff of anti Jewish sentiments was reported by Aciman until after the Suez War. Aciman and his family left Egypt in the sixties.
Aciman, like many "Egyptian" Jews preferred to hold European nationalities and in some cases some were French or Italian without ever setting foot in these countries. Europeans had their own courts in Egypt and did not fall under Egyptian Laws. For Aciman, born and raised in Egypt and in many ways no different than many affluent Alexandrians life became unbearable after the waves of Nationalization in the early 60's.
Aciman writes of an Alexandria that no longer exists not just for Egyptian Jews. The population explosion in Egypt has transformed Alexandria beyond recognition; hence Aciman's beautiful writing of Alexandria, its beaches and its tram will bring floods of memories for anyone who's known Alexandria.
Affluent Egyptian Jews who left Egypt in the fifties and sixties are not immediately thought of as refugees and there is little discussion on their issues of identity and affiliation in Egypt and elsewhere. Aciman through his acute sensitivity to the people and events around him and his wonderful story telling skills has produced beautifully written and very touching book that subtly challenges many assumptions on all sides.
Readers will see the very same Alexandria in Leila Ahmed's Border Passage and in parts of Ahdaf Souief's In the Eye of the Sun. Enjoy
- Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2013This is a true story about one, rather large, Jewish family living in Egypt thru WWII, thru the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, and up until Nasser's defeat in the Sinai Campaign of about 1957. The book details the various characters in the family, their social lives, and how they blended with the general, Arab population of Egypt for decades. The book is a very good history, from the particular perspective of this, perhaps typical, Jewish family. It details how their lives changed because of the Israel-Egypt wars of the 40s and 50s. It gives a very clear and vivid picture of what it was to live under such, at times, very stressful conditions while not actually being involved in the wars. I would recommend the book to others who may have wondered about the lives and times of Jews living in Arab countries at war with Israel, both before and after it became a legitimate State of Israel. The book is somewhat similar to- The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, which also covers about the same time frame in Egypt of a different, Jewish family in Cairo, who then emigrated to America when they too could no longer live, safely in Egypt in the 40s and 50s.
- Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2007This memoir is the very best I've read. It takes the author from his earliest years as part of a large Jewish family which moved from Turkey to Alexandria (he was born in 1951), through the air raid sirens during Suez war with France and England, to the expulsion of the Jews by Nasser in the late 1950s, and then on to his adulthood in America and his return to Egypt following his marriage. After a lengthy opening section dating roughly from age 5 or 6, the narrative skillfully skips back and forth in time. The descriptions of the boy's exotic world and his dysfunctional extended family are priceless, as are the re-invented conversations and arguments among the adults who surround him. There is something Proust-like in the writing, a love of detail for the texture it creates, and something Nabokov-like as well, in the hooded humor and artful language. I found it utterly captivating and written with love, especially for his mother, who was born deaf. I heartily recommend it to anyone who contemplates or is writing a memoir.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2018A fascinating story about a very charming but eccentric Jewish family that seems to have no solid or permanent roots. They hail from turkey, Italy, France and England and speak all these languages simultaneously avoiding learning arabic regarding it the language of the servants and the illiterate populace. Egypt seems to be their new temporary home in which the enjoy an upper class life style but they can't escape the ascent of Nasser and his push to nationalize all businesses , deport all foreigners, especially Jews, from Egypt. The young narrator and his family are ultimately forced to leave what to them has been an interlude of happiness in slander described as a paradise: suffused with sunshine, surrounded by the blue Mediterranean waters and yellow sand. Their relationships and lives will be pulled apart never to be resumed again . One gets the sad feeling that they are being exiled from a paradise never to return again.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2024Same over and over again
Top reviews from other countries
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Ferran AguileraReviewed in Spain on January 2, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Magnífico libro
Magnífico libro y magnífica història, excelentemente narrada.
- allanbReviewed in Canada on September 17, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars Very engaging memoir
I really enjoyed reading this memoir. Being a memoir, the author would go back and forth in time and it was sometimes difficult to keep track of the time period of some anecdotes. But it was well worth the effort. This would make a great movie.
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Hans BenderReviewed in Germany on March 3, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Eine bittersüße Familiengeschichte aus einer untergegangenen Welt
Die Familien-Geschichte aus der Sicht eines in einer sephardisch jüdischen Familie heranwachsenden Jungen, die aus Istanbul vertrieben wurde.
Es wird beschrieben, wie die faszinierende Umgebung Alexandrias in den 50 er und 60er Jahren zur Heimat und zum späteren Sehnsuchtsort wurde, erzählt mit einen milden ironischen Blick auf die große Familie mit der ewig in Hassliebe einander verbundenen Großmutter und ihrer Schwester, zum Schluss wieder in die gemeinsame Emigration nach Paris gezwungen. Der Rest der Familie wird über ganz Europa und nach Amerika vertrieben.
Eine typische Geschichte des 20ten Jahrhunderts, erzählt ohne Bitterkeit und Hass.
- DavidReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 28, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars A lost childhood paradise in Alexandria
In the teeth of adversity, or perhaps because of it, as in Bassani's "Garden at the Finzi-Contini's", there can be a kind of enchanted space. So it is with Aciman's childhood Alexandria where he was born and with his parents and grandparents, who settled there having fled various corners of the Levant, enjoys a privileged but increasingly precarious existence, until, less than 50 years ago, the established order of Jewish life in Egypt comes to an end. Books written by Jews often contain the sadness of a lost paradise: Naïm Kattan, Paula Jacques, Violette Shamash are others. Young Aciman mostly speaks French to his family, his grandmothers speak Ladino to him, while his schooling is in English, friends and neighbours speak Greek, Armenian or Italian while very little of the servants ' Arabic impinges on their world. The tram routes, Les Délices, the Athineos, the street names &c were all as I was to discover them 30 years after Aciman and his family's departure, when their goods and livlihoods were seized, so I felt (by what right?) that these finely crafted memoirs were a little bit mine...
- DaphneReviewed in Italy on November 3, 2014
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful
This wonderful book pulls you into the life of a young boy, Jewish, living in an Egypt that no longer exists. The memories are so evocative that seem to be your own. Highly recommended to all readers.