Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile's Journey (Jewish Women Writers) [Paperback]

Joyce Zonana (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2008 | Series: Jewish Women Writers

An Egyptian-Jewish Under the Tuscan Sun, Dream Homes chronicles Joyce Zonana’s quest to find a sense of home among people, foods, and places as far from her native Cairo as Oklahoma and Katrina-stricken New Orleans.

After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, newlyweds Felix and Nellie Zonana flee Cairo with their infant daughter Joyce, ending up in Brooklyn. Growing up, Joyce swiftly realizes that her Jewish family and their Egyptian culture are neither typically American nor typically American-Jewish; they eat kobeba instead of kugel and speak French instead of Yiddish. Struggling with her feelings of isolation from other Americans and frustrated by never getting full access to Egyptian-Jewish culture, Zonana strikes out on a life-long journey to find her place in the world.

She meets her extended family living in Colombia and Brazil and travels to Cairo to get a glimpse of her parents’ past. After she and her mother survive the devastation of Katrina, Zonana comes to see that “home” is not a location, but a spiritual state of mind. Zonana’s heritage and quest are also evoked in numerous photos and family recipes.

Joyce Zonana earned her PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an associate professor of English and women’s studies at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. Before coming to BMCC, she taught for fifteen years at the University of New Orleans, where she was also the director of women’s studies.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The debut memoir from veteran academic Zonana, currently an associate professor at CUNY, Manhattan, is thick with family angst and restless spirits, documenting Zonana's protracted quest for belonging among numerous locales and people. Born in Cairo, Egypt, Zonana's family emigrated to Brooklyn after the Egyptian-Israeli War of 1948, when she was a small girl. There, she grew up a misfit among the European-dominated New York Jewish community; for much of her life, she was "overwhelmed by the conviction that I had in fact been exiled... whenever I moved I experienced the same confusion: Had I chosen to leave, or had I been forced?" An epiphany about her "one true home" (the Earth) comes by way of a Native American moon lodge ceremony, but it's built on her love affair with ethnic food (recipes are included), her discovery of resettled family in Brazil, her father's illnesses and her own debilitating fears of independence; eventually, it leads her to New Orleans, academic success and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Zonana's memoir is a somewhat disjointed affair, but captures with honesty and beauty the suffering and uncertainty of migration and assimilation, whether forced or formulated.
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From Booklist

Leaving Cairo’s familiar, if chaotic, streets in 1951 for the uncharted territories of America, Zonana finds herself a distinct minority. Even her fellow Brooklyn Jews know nothing about the traditions of Egyptian Jews, a community nearly obliterated in the aftermath of 1948’s Arab-Israeli conflict. Zonana grows up speaking French and English and doting on foods found only in Arab-owned stores. Her father prays daily, but the family neither keeps a kosher home nor observes the Sabbath. A parade of relatives passes through their Brooklyn home, including a grandmother devoted to Arab music unintelligible to the rest of the family. Zonana visits another beloved grandmother in Brazil, a journey that leaves her with indelible memories of the continent and a sense of a large and far-flung family. Eventually, Zonana’s academic gifts yield a professorship in New Orleans in time to endure the rigors of Katrina’s devastations. Zonana makes every human encounter lively. --Mark Knoblauch

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Product Details

• Paperback: 223 pages
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY (August 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558615733
• ISBN-13: 978-1558615731
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,209,809 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone's Story..., October 10, 2008

By 

JPinNYC (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile's Journey (Jewish Women Writers) (Paperback)

This is a beautiful book. Some sentences are so evocative that I returned to them again and again to inhale them, to plumb them for more meaning, to enjoy the beauty of the words, wording, and thought. At the same time, the words impelled me on and on--I could not put the book down until I was finished with it, and was then sorry I was--into Zonana's story of loss, her feeling of geographical and personal exile and search for home. As I read, her story, it became my story, even though the outlines of my life have been completely different. Zonana taps into a universal loneliness, estrangement, need for answers, and desire to find a place that makes us feel complete, like we belong and are at home.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stirring memoir searching for the lost worlds of generations past, July 31, 2009

By 

Jean Naggar (New York City) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile's Journey (Jewish Women Writers) (Paperback)

Joyce Zonana's memoir, beautifully written, lyrical, searching, evokes a personal world of poignant seemingly inexplicable loss, exploring the uncomfortable reality of sitting between two dominant cultures, not quite belonging to either and yet belonging to both. DREAM HOMES brings to vivid life a world experienced through a different prism from other published memoirs about the Jewish experience in Egypt. The many dispossessed Jews exiled from their life in Egypt who went about reinventing themselves in other lands never lost the nostalgia of their vibrant past. Along with the wrenching exile her parents experienced, Joyce Zonana explores the exile of the heart that overwhelmed her family and shaped her life. She examines the miasma of dispossession that haunts the next generation, the generation with no specific memories. It adds a valuable dimension to the literature of Jewish exile from Arab lands.
Universal in its broadest themes, it is about a woman in search of the lost identity she senses lies at her core. This lingering, invisible, almost subliminal feeling of lost worlds that surround her but with which she has lost contact, causes Joyce Zonana to embark on a lonely search to find meaning in the spaces between the world her parents knew and seldom revealed, and the world of America which is her own reality.
Because DREAM HOMES is redolent with the delightful fragrance and taste of exotic foods and of the memories of a "home" she never knew (she left when she was 18 months old) it has a wistful elegiac charm along with its sensual evocations of foods and their place in cultural identity. It is a delightful, thoughtful, eloquent read.
Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Untangle family history--find thyself, March 2, 2009

By 

Talia Carner "Author, Jerusalem Maiden, Puppe... (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile's Journey (Jewish Women Writers) (Paperback)

When does one write history, and when does history write one's self? In Joyce Zonana's memoir, the main theme is her quest to uncover family history while unfurling the strings that attach her to that same history in most tangibles ways. It is the quest of a Jewish girl brought by her parents to Brooklyn, New York from Egypt at a young age, yet, as her parents maintained their outwardly Jewish-Egyptian traditions--from food and home décor to language, (French was the choice among Cairo's middle- and upper-class)--they denied Joyce information about this past. Although the exile from Egypt was still shaping Joyce in so many ways, all her attempts to learn about the world her parents and their friends had left behind when life for Jews became unbearable met a wall: her mother forever claimed not to remember anything.

The quest of a child to diffuse her sense of detachment and "foreignness," which began with her darker skin-color, led the growing-up Joyce to seek a place that would give her a sense of belonging. Each such place was a home, sometimes in a metaphoric way, sometimes in physical walls she nurtured and embraced. Joyce's rebellion against her parents hurled her first just a couple of blocks away, but eventually, due to career opportunities, to a world devoid of people with her skin color--the Midwest. There, she made her adult home, only to be forced out again, this time by nature with Katerina disaster.

Written in fluid prose and given to candid introspection, this memoir encompasses both the universal tale of immigration and assimilation and the personal search for acceptance and roots.

Talia Carner, author,
Puppet Child and China Doll