Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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

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

An Egyptian Jewish family escapes the Arab-Israeli War, setting in motion for their 3-year-old daughter what will become a lifelong quest to find location, identity, and belonging. This poignant, honest memoir spans continents, languages, and miles of inner space as the author journeys through her persistent sense of displacement, foreignness, and estrangement. The prose is beautiful, reflective, and seductive, mirroring her relentless search for personal truth, meaning, and integrity in the midst of difficult and often chaotic circumstances. Anyone who reads this fascinating, moving book will be touched to the core.

In this eloquent, beautifully written, moving memoir -- at once a collage of fragments from an "unscripted life" and a celebration of the author's Jewish heritage, especially food (she includes family recipes for stuffed grape leaves and Passover nut cake)--Cairo-born academic Joyce Zonana, whose parents fled Egypt in 1951 when she was 18 months old, with the family jewels sewn into her clothing, recounts her quest for roots, a sense of belonging, and a physical and spiritual home(her true one, she decides, is earth itself). In her poignant account of familial and personal dislocation, separation, heartbreak and loss, as well as survival and triumph, Zonana connects herself to her once close-knit family's past in Cairo, making an adult pilgrimage to the fabled but neglected Rambam, an ancient synagogue and center of healing where her mother prayed for and was granted the miracle of a baby. Throughout her absorbing and frank narrative, Zonana struggles to integrate disparate elements of her family's diaspora to Brazil and the U.S. with her ongoing search for her own evolving identity in terms of family, nationality, gender, sexuality, religion, profession and geography. An engaging, worthwhile and memmorable read.

DREAM HOMES: FROM CAIRO TO KATRINA, AN EXILE'S JOURNEY tells of the daughter of immigrant Egyptian Jews who details her quest for roots and belonging around the world after the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Their struggles in new country America after fleeing Cairo, their frustrations and Zonana's journey to find her place in the world and meet with extended family in South America makes for a vivid journal of experiences especially recommended for any Jewish collection.