Product Description

Set in Alexandria, this classic and much-loved memoir chronicles the exploits of Andre Aciman's colourful Sephardic Jewish family from its arrival in Egypt at the turn of the century to its forced departure three generations later. Aciman tells a story of childhood innocence, of intricate family life and the pain of exile from a place one loves. His memories are adorned with eccentric characters: mysterious Uncle Vili - soldier, salesman, Italian Fascist and British spy; the two grandmothers, the Princess and the Saint, who gossip in six different languages; his melancholy Aunt Flora who warns that Jews lose everything 'at least twice in their lives'; and his father, who considers converting to Islam in order to stay in Alexandria. Elegant, beautifully-written, moving and witty, "Out of Egypt" bridges cultures and generations and provides a moving portrait of a by-gone world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #262052 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
"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 "Out of Egypt is beautifully remembered and even more beautifully written. Aciman writes of a dazzling time and place populated by lavish and theatrical characters." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "A wonderful book...The sense of ceremony and magic in this memoir is as much from literature--Proust, Dante, Homer, the Alexandrian poet Cavafy--as from the narrator's actual world...Out of Egypt gives much pleasure." --Chicago Tribune "Andre Aciman has written a book of genuine grandeur. An extraordinary union of love and intelligence, Out of Egypt saves a time and a place from oblivion and fixes it forever, with unforgettable vividness. Happy is the writer who has suce a tale to tell, and tells it so beautifully; and happy is the reader."--Leon Wieseltier "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 "The past recaptured in [Aciman's] elegant memoir is full of cucumber lotion and Schubert melodies, Parmesan cheese and the clatter of backgammon chips--all the smells and the sounds of Alexandria that he knew before [leaving]."--The New Republic "A beautifully crafted memoir. [Out of Egypt] is the rare book you'll want to read again as soon as you reach the end."--The Jewish Week "This is not only the marvelous saga of a genuinely Levantine family but also the tale of a vanished and multicultural world from the Istanbul of the sultans to the Alexandria of Egypt up to Nasser and of the life of a young man doomed to say goodbye to its charms. A touching and highly amusing, masterfully written book." -Gregor von Rezzori "Out of Egypt is at once an elegy to a lost culture and a satire of one singularly cosmopolitan Sephardic family...Mr. Aciman paints an unflinching portrait of his picaresque clan."--Forward "Lovely...Mixes memory and imagination in seamless and beguiling ways...He may gave 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 "Rich and moving...Aciman's pungent prose is filled with telling detail."--The Seattle Times "Andre Aciman calls this book a memoir, though it is richer than that, a chronicle of three generations of a family leading a cosmopolitan life in an Egypt that no longer exists."--The Boston Sunday Globe "Sand has obliterated a 60-year Alexandrian garden; or would have if Aciman had not restored it in the grace of language and memory."--Newsday "A marvelous memento of a place, time, and a people that have all disappeared." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Rich and captivating...this is not simply another nostalgic account but a well-written and touching depiction of life in a community that has almost ceased to be. Highly recommended."--Library Journal (starred review) "It is Mr. Aciman's great achievement that he has re-created a world gone forever now, and given us an ironical and affectionate portrait of those who were exiled from it." --The New York Times Book Review "remarkable...a mesmerising portrait of a now vanished world." --The New York Times Jewish Chronicle, 8 September 2006 'Out of Egypt is [Andre Aciman's] romantic, nostalgic, joyous memoir...the characters have a mythic quality and are fascinating to read about. Aciman brings them all back to clamorous life.' - Kate Saunders GEOGRAPHICAL 'It's a touching, vivid recollection and properly asks the unanswerable questions about memories that can't be shaken.'

About the Author
Andre Aciman was born in Alexandria and raised in Egypt, Italy and France. He is Professor of Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City and is the author of False Papers as well as the editor and contributor to The Proust Project and Letters of Transit.

Customer Reviews

A rich elegaic description of a vanished world
Aciman's memoir starts with the shock of icy water. It's an elegaic description of a vanished world--that of the Jews of Alexandria. His descriptions of his deaf mother mix exasperations with stubborn fondess; his struggles with Arabic strike a chord too. It made me think of another vanished world in a memoir I recently read, that of Mangalorean Catholics in India, Wandering Between Two Worlds by Anita Mathias.

A hymn of love
A beautifully moving memoir of the life of a young boy from a Jewish family that lived in Alexandria throughout the 20th century and until his family was driven out by the new regime in Egypt (essentially a military dictatorship) that took over the country from 1952 onwards. The author traces a map of his early life with tenderness, humor and enchantment.

The first part of the book recounts the history of his family and draws delightful portraits of its members from the time they immigrated to Egypt from Turkey at the turn of the 20th century. The story then moves to capture scenes from his daily life as a young boy, populated with memorable characters, whether family, friends, servants, shopkeepers, as well as disconcerting profiles of particularly mean school teachers.

Gradually, the story shows how events in Egypt's history at that moment in time started to impact his family, especially the 1956 attack on it by the British, French and Israelis, and how that began an escalation of tension towards the Jewish community (as well as towards nationals of Britain and France), who were becoming a target of suspicion of the regime. The mounting tension led to the harassment of his family from the secret police in the mid-sixties, which conducted a perverse form of daily-stalking-by-phone-ritual, and monitored the family's every move.

Despite his father's sincere efforts to do everything possible to safeguard his family's position and avoid expulsion, the ultimate betrayal took place, and like thousands of Jewish Egyptians (as well as many non-Jewish Europeans) then living in Alexandria, they were given an ultimatum to leave.

The reader familiar with events in the Middle East cannot help but be left with many questions about the population that was driven out of Egypt. One such is: how come we never heard the story of Egyptian Jews? How come we don't know that, on the other side as well, thousands upon thousands of people had to pay the price for the mistakes of someone else, taken for guilty by association, unjustly, since most of them had nothing to do with the state of Israel back then (and until many of them had to seek refuge in it after having been driven out of what were their home countries in the Arab Middle East)? The equivalent of such an act in the present would have been the US government eventually expelling every single person of Arab descent or Muslim religion from the US after the attack on the twin towers. To add insult to injury, their loss was relegated to near total oblivion as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict took center stage.

While such and similar questions well up in the mind of any reader who's been following Middle Eastern events in the last decades, the book is not about them, as it was not written in the tone of a lament about loss, but rather in one of loving celebration. It is a hymn of love from the author to the city of his childhood, the city he was uprooted from, it is a hymn of love of the author for his home.

Disappointing
According to the dust jacket, 'Andre Aciman tells a story of childhood innocence', but to me this was simply a series of trivial observations concerning elderly ladies and gentlemen whose lives were sheltered from the realities of their time. I abandoned it in disappointment, because I had expected a portrait of the boy, rather than of his affluent elders.