Unlike features of a landscape like trees and mountains, people have feet. They move to places where the opportunities are best, and they soon invite their friends and relatives to join them. This demographic mixing turns the landscape into a fractal, with minorities inside minorities inside minorities.--Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature, p. 241First read in 2008; given a thumbnail review in May, 2013:Although I read this book in the past, I know the exact date for once, because in 2008 the local library conducted a five-book series on Jewish literature that I participated in. The book is a memoir of the author's family, whose life in Egypt came to an end in the 1960s (I think). It differed from my then-typical reading and therefore was a little hard to get into, but was evocative and memorable. It must be of the same genre as The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss, one of my current books. It's also said to be Proust-like, so related (it can seem) to what half of Goodreads is reading. But the reason I'm thinking of Out of Egypt today is that I just read a review of the author's new novel, Harvard Square. Although I had just been thinking that some book reviews are much worse than Goodreads reviews because they make me not want to read the reviewed book, this one resulted in my adding the book post-haste.Second reading, completed October 2, 2014I'm supposed to lead a discussion of the author's recent novel Harvard Square, which made me think it would be a good idea to reread Out of Egypt. I remembered so little of it and found it tough going, but some of what I did remember has proved important to me. The memoir seems to me to be on the order of recording a dream--quick, before it melts away and is gone forever. It is about the motley crew of relatives with whom he grew up in Alexandria, their quirks and personalities, their lives and surroundings. His first ancestor showed up there in 1905, and by the time that fact surfaced near the end of the book I'm damned if I can remember which relative that might have been. It's hard to keep them straight. He often refers to them by their nicknames, or maybe sometimes by their main characteristic in his sight--"the Saint," and "the Princess," for example, for his two grandmothers, whom later he would devilishly call "my grandmother," leaving me trying to discern which one is intended. So obviously I was bestirring myself to read analytically and pin things down, while sometimes it's better to just let the impressions wash over one--yet at the same time I did want to pin things down a little more on this second reading!And to add to the fun he can skip around in time. Now we're in his life as a boy growing up in Alexandria, and now we're in Paris visiting those relatives in their diminished and separate old age, afterward. But mostly we're in Alexandria. His parents were born there. His grandparents--three of them, anyway, were Sephardic Jews from what was still Constantinople when they left. I cannot remember specifically what sort of upset at the first of the twentieth century led to their leaving. Those grandparents spoke five or six languages, with Ladino the comfortable old clothes they slipped into when the corset of French got too tight. They could look toward the west and look down on the east, styling themselves "Italian." One of the grandfathers was from Aleppo, and he definitely held a lower status among that generation, being an "Arab Jew." And one of the languages they learned was not Arabic. Theirs was a Eurocentric mentality. They lived among the Italian, Greek, French and English business class. They weren't exactly wealthy. The grandfather from Turkey had a billiard hall--I think! The Aleppo grandfather, he had a bicycle shop. But maybe it ended up being a factory. The Arab native population that we meet through their eyes are often the servant class. The grandmothers were out and about, making purchases, haggling, not cut off from street life, but they all had cooks and housekeepers. The author's father, though--he became rich in the wool industry. He did have a factory.In the years leading up to the Second World War, more Jews from Europe showed up in the extended family there--"the Schwab," from Swabia in Germany who married into the family, and his sister Flora, pianist and love-magnet.... But the family remained a variety of Mediterranean people, emotional and effusive, demonstrative and superstitious. For example, the colorful curses: "May a curse fall on the orifice that spawned you and your mother's religion", and the relatively mild "May you rot in sixty hells." The author's father, and his father before him, had wandering eyes and various infidelities. There was the Greek governess who was outraged at the scurrilous lie about Jesus being a Jew. The family members had internalized negativity about Jews. When they argued, their anti-Jewish stereotypes could come out in the name calling. There was also the belief that "(i)t's because of Jews like them that they hate Jews like us" (that being a view from inside a stigmatized minority, but not the essence of racism). There was nothing about synagogues in their life, that I remember, anyway, their religious life seeming to be more nearly in the realm of table fellowship and centered in the home. One of the few parts I did remember was the charming scoundrel of an uncle, Vili, who ended up with an anglicized name and a manor in England, but could still be heard under his door at night murmuring Hebrew prayers before bed.Wikipedia says most Jews left Egypt after the formation of the state of Israel in '48, but, in this picture of Alexandria, the big blow was the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. Some of the last times the whole family was together were during the black-outs when attack by Britain and France was thought imminent. After that, their status changed, and that of the other expatriates, too, given the circumstances, but the Jews were singled out for some special opprobrium. They began to be called "dirty Zionists." Most of the family left then, but the woolens manufacturer was determined to remain if he could. They moved for a while to a different suburb. The author as an adolescent attended a school where he was beaten, until his mother flew off the handle, slapped the teacher, and removed him. The father's notion had been that the boy should adapt so that the family would pass under the radar. Of course ultimately that was not to be.There was no mass persecution but rather a sort of rolling expulsion. Families kept suitcases at the ready, leather, in those days, and the leather odor became associated in the author's mind with the stigma of the fallen, those who had lost everything. The calls to the author's family began in the fall of 1964, the time of Ramadan and Passover coinciding, and finally the call announcing the nationalization of the wool factory, so that the father has "lost her" (the factory); and the call saying they had a week to leave, under which circumstance the last Seder took place with the family remnants together in one place for the final time, amid a sense of the exodus.I'll just throw in that around that time and perhaps confirming that sense of exodus, quail really did fall from the sky, the idea being that after their long migration from as far away as Siberia they would literally fall exhausted to earth, whereupon the locals could catch them and feast. Who knew?People who grew up near warm coasts, not only those born-and-bred Mediterraneans who were having to leave Alexandria, seem to have it in their blood. One of my sisters-in-law is deeply rooted in the Orlando area, and now her children, too, are rooted there. One of my husband's nieces moved with her husband to a part of North Carolina where the winters and the snow far outstrip ours here, but after a couple of years they were drawn back. My husband, in contrast, left Orlando and never looked back, but his parents were not originally from there. It doesn't look like I'm going to leave Atlanta nor have I had to be uprooted. For me it's the trees....I've left out the whole saga of the author's mother, a beautiful and intelligent woman who was deaf and who came up in an era of forced integration into the hearing community via lipreading, leading to further challenges. Signing wasn't yet accepted. He wrote about her and her influence on him in this March, 2014 piece in The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...
A beautifully written memoir, particularly relevant and poignant given recent events in the Middle East.Lawrence Durrell wrote in his Alexandria Quartet that Alexandria was shared by "five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar. But there are more than five sexes." But as Paul Theroux wrote in his travelogue of the Mediterranean (The Pillars of Hercules), "Alexandria is [now] a monoglot city of one race, Arabic-speaking Arabs; and one creed, Islam; and no sex. The foreigners had gone - the last had been expelled by General Nasser in 1960 - and the money was gone, too...". Aciman's book is in many ways a telling of how this came about, but it's much more than that. It's also a rich family history populated by a marvelous set of characters, including Aciman's great-uncle Vili, by turns a soldier, womanizer, wheeler-dealer and ultimately, a spy; Aciman's Italian tutor Signor Dall'Abaco, a gentle man who loved Italian opera and "who was born to stay out of everyone's way"; a beautiful governess; a tyrannical headmistress; and many, many more. It was an almost magical world and its loss is all the more felt when one sees the Alexandria of today. Indeed, despite recent events in Egypt, the country seems to be becoming more monoglot than ever - just ask the Copts.I leave the last word to Aciman's grandfather: "All this sky and all this water - what do you do with so much blue once you've seen it?" Indeed.
What do You think about Out Of Egypt: A Memoir (1996)?
The book out of Egypt is about the life of André Aciman with his family in Egypt. This book is a good book because it tells us about his life as a kid and as he grows up. Throughout the book,we are told of the family and worldwide problems that are faced. It's intersting to see how a family in Egypt has the same family problems that a family here would have. From this book we learn that no matter where your family is in the world, families still have family problems. Which means that if your family has family problems chances are other families probably have the same ones. This is a good book because it is relatable.
—Brenda EVHS Perez
A beautifully evocative description of his childhood in Alexandria that centered around the personalities of the people around him -- family, servants, street vendors. He captured the confusions he felt as a child about the impact of being displaced Jews (from Turkey) in a society that was "nationalizing" the assets of Jews and failing his Arabic class that maligned Jews. Yet, the poignancy is that they loved their home and life in Egypt, not wanting to leave, but accepting that exile happened to every generation of his family.
—Jennifer
There seems to be a whole genre of Jewish literature, memoirs by people forced to leave their adopted homeland. If I could teach such a class I'd teach this memoir along side Farewell Babylon, Tales of Love and Darkness, No Exilio, and the fictional but seemingly auto-biographical Young Turk (I wonder what other ones are out there similar in nature to this.) Aciman paints a nostalgic portrait of a large family of Sephardic Jews who had immigrated to Egypt from Turkey. The men are businessmen, swindlers, lovers and womanizers; the women are colorful in their own way but outside of the roles of mother, cook, keeper of the heart, and liver there's less depth to them. After Nasser's ascent the family members businesses are slowly nationalized and they are expelled from Egypt. I only wish that I had a better sense of the physical makeup of the city, there's very little landscape description in the work.
—anna
