Customer Reviews

Out of Egypt

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From the very first sentence, Andre Aciman's "Out of Egypt" sucks the reader into the maelstrom of personalities that made up his family--and, more broadly, the city that gave them rise: the whirlwind of peoples, languages, creeds, and nationalities that made up old Alexandria, once the most cosmopolitan city on the Mediterranean.

Aciman's family--Jews from Spain via Italy and, most recently, Turkey, who intermarry with Jews from Syria and Germany--are, in and of themselves, a microcosm of bustling, polyglot Alexandria, and what a magnificently sketched crew they all are: Swaggering Uncle Vili, acid Uncle Isaac, calculating Uncle Nessim, melancholy Aunt Flora, bankers, salesmen, auctioneers, musicians, the idle rich, billiard hall proprietors and bicycle shop owners, and, most memorably, his two grandmothers, the Saint and the Princess, who, as the back blurb informs us, "gossip in seven languages." They comprise as flamboyant and eccentric a family as one can imagine--a joy to read about, with a tale as rich a family saga as any in literature. Theirs is a world scented by the tang of the sea blowing over white-sand beaches; sprawling apartments full of objets d'art tended to by generations of Arab servants; balmy Mediterranean evenings spent on spacious balconies nibbling dips, olives, artichokes, and cheeses and sipping raki, and hobnobbing with the city's European elite, whom they simultaneously despise and try desperately to emulate.

But that world begins to die in the book's second part, which begins with the chapter entitled "Taffi Al-Nur," (Arabic for "Turn off the lights"): not merely what was screamed in the streets during air-raids, but an apt description of what happened to Egypt under Nasser's Nationalist government, which, slowly at first, but then more and more quickly, chased out all the foreigners that gave Alexandria its cosmopolitan character. Once again, Aciman's family serves as a metaphor for the city as, one by one, they either die off or leave their home for points north and west: Italy, France, England, the United States.

It's too trite and cliched to call "Out of Egypt" an evocation of a vanished world. It's a love song, a paean, to the kind of world that both produced, and allowed to flourish, Aciman's family. Their like will not again be seen, because the world that created them is no more. And even if it's gone forever, the fact that it was captured by as skillful a chronicler as Aciman is reason to celebrate.

Out of Egypt, is a very special memoir about growing up in Alexandria before the author and his family were forced to move from Egypt in 1965 . It's a fascinating memoir of a time and place that no longer exists, and a wonderfully written account .

I read these memoirs with strict concentration on all features of the environment that provided the interesting material to this book.

From childhood of elderly relatives that was somewhat unhappy and bordering on deprivation, the family living off charity, in areas where the primary social groups' life revealed a pattern of neglect, moral [...] , and disregard for law.

I watched a collection of things making people of the same feather sharing a common attribute. Perhaps I should say that a small part of these features I lived myself (1952-56). The message Andre Aciman is giving me is also addressed to every member of a clan feeling alien in the environment in which one was found, and resisted to share.

You are taken back in time to the beginning of the twentieth century until the mid fifties. I never felt strange to uncle Vili, Aunt Clara, or Tante Lotte, like these people exist in the annals of many families' chronological account of events in any successive years.

How much true it is when one had become a success story and thus an object of intense jealousy on the part of his less fortunate confreres. One would definitely feel better off to keep ones apart from ones fellows.
Walking on tight ropes during WWII to keep balance between complete annihilation and survival is not impossible, or unethical, though the uncomplimentary remarks Uncle Vili used to make about the warring parties - about them both - in private, now remained no secret. We all tend to do the same thing when cornered; won't we? This is legitimate quest for survival amid a world run in madness, Uncle Vili appeared uncomplicated enough.

Those were the people we came to know in Egypt in the mid-fifties, their private life, their intimate charm, their gentleness, their direct and affectionate manner, their kindness and modesty which remained unchanged even at the very height of their predicaments.

We knew people like Uncle Vili, their sense of humor, coupled with caustic wit with their servants - Egyptians and/or Sudanese - that their good nature forsook them and their tongue became capable of mordant, wounding remarks. In the company of their intimate friends, they would throw off the habitual reserve they displayed on public occasions and behave like the big boy scouts which they remained in one corner of their personality - Pashas attitudes.

Andre Aciman: I salute you.

Aciman's book reads like a dream. Every word exudes love and with it a sad sense of loss and nostalgia. Unlike any other such biography I have read, it does not have "Poor Us' as a main theme, rather a description of how the actions of the few on both sides, had shattered a beautiful world, which existed, with no regards to the difference between the individuals involved. It is a classic account of loss of a home due to changes taking place around us, which are bigger than us and outside of our control, regardless of what we try to do; just a new tide that can't be stopped.
The book is such a tender account, which touched me deeply and which I recommend to anyone who wants to learn about this aspect of Egyptian history and this phase of Alexandria's story.

The story of a Sephardic clan having to leave Egypt, having earlier left Turkey, sounds exotic, but actually it is little different from stories about Jews in Austria, Poland, Russia or Romania. Never really integrated into the native culture, despite economic activities deemed important, they were always on the verge of being deported or forced to leave. Whatever cultural differences, all Jews, whether in Europe or the Middle East, were always on the edge of disaster.