Customer Reviews

Out of Egypt: A Memoir

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Andre Aciman's Out of Egypt is an amazing book, I found it very hard to put down. At a time of increased hostility in the middle east it is heartwarming to read of a time when Jews lived in peace with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in Alexandria. Not a whiff of anti Jewish sentiments was reported by Aciman until after the Suez War. Aciman and his family left Egypt in the sixties.

Aciman, like many "Egyptian" Jews preferred to hold European nationalities and in some cases some were French or Italian without ever setting foot in these countries. Europeans had their own courts in Egypt and did not fall under Egyptian Laws. For Aciman, born and raised in Egypt and in many ways no different than many affluent Alexandrians life became unbearable after the waves of Nationalization in the early 60's.

Aciman writes of an Alexandria that no longer exists not just for Egyptian Jews. The population explosion in Egypt has transformed Alexandria beyond recognition; hence Aciman's beautiful writing of Alexandria, its beaches and its tram will bring floods of memories for anyone who's known Alexandria.

Affluent Egyptian Jews who left Egypt in the fifties and sixties are not immediately thought of as refugees and there is little discussion on their issues of identity and affiliation in Egypt and elsewhere. Aciman through his acute sensitivity to the people and events around him and his wonderful story telling skills has produced beautifully written and very touching book that subtly challenges many assumptions on all sides.

Readers will see the very same Alexandria in Leila Ahmed's Border Passage and in parts of Ahdaf Souief's In the Eye of the Sun. Enjoy

A really absorbing memoir, reminiscent in some ways of Nabokov's "Speak, Memory". Neither sentimental nor self indulgent, clear-eyed, humorous, yet moving and truly interesting. Having lived in Egypt myself around the same time (albeit in Cairo, not Alexandria), I was touched by recognition of places and types: a world "gone with the wind". That is of course very personal, but I believe this book should appeal to any one with a little curiosity about other places, people, times.

REVIEW OF "OUT OF EGYPT" for Amazon.com July 12, 2007

Andre Aciman describes his colorful and complicated life (and family)in
Alexandria in the 1960s. Childhoods like that are often the preparation
for a life of writing. The child absorbs all the peculiarities as part of
normal life without knowing they are peculiar until much later. Then they
need to make sense of it all.
All this is heightened by the fact that the Acimans are Jewish, in a
Muslim country still resonating with the after effects of British rule.His
experiences in the theoretically best school in Alexandria, run by
British teachers, would be funny if they weren't so awful. For complete
cognitive dissonance,his parents force him to learn Arabic to survive.
Reading about those lessons alone is worth the price of this book. At
home they speak Ladino, the Sephardic Yiddish, among themselves.
His beautful mother was born deaf. When provoked she can produce a
high-pitched scream. used to good effect at the butcher's. Once she has
made her point they are all quite happy. The butcher has to give the package
to her Arab servant. She never touches an Arab's hand.
The Acimans and Andre's maternal relatives live in a state of mutual
scorn, but when faced with the threats of Pan-Arab nationalism pull together very
efficiently. Eventually they all flee, the sedate Sephardic merchants
and the shady international adventurers too.
Two other writers come to mind when reading this book. Laurence Durrell
evokes something of the same atmosphere in his Alexandria Quartet and Elias
Canetti grew up in a large Sephardic family in Bulgaria. That society has
completely disappeared. Without Canetti's memoirs one would not know it had ever
existed.
This is an eloquent and elegiac account of that love and absurdity
known as a family.

This memoir is the very best I've read. It takes the author from his earliest years as part of a large Jewish family which moved from Turkey to Alexandria (he was born in 1951), through the air raid sirens during Suez war with France and England, to the expulsion of the Jews by Nasser in the late 1950s, and then on to his adulthood in America and his return to Egypt following his marriage. After a lengthy opening section dating roughly from age 5 or 6, the narrative skillfully skips back and forth in time. The descriptions of the boy's exotic world and his dysfunctional extended family are priceless, as are the re-invented conversations and arguments among the adults who surround him. There is something Proust-like in the writing, a love of detail for the texture it creates, and something Nabokov-like as well, in the hooded humor and artful language. I found it utterly captivating and written with love, especially for his mother, who was born deaf. I heartily recommend it to anyone who contemplates or is writing a memoir.

Andre Aciman will transport you through time and space to another world -- a richly remembered and captivating world filled with characters whose complexity and humanity charm and enthrall. Unlike many self-absorbed memoirs, the author is more observer than actor, and his descriptions of a vanished time and place and people will fill you with longing and melancholy. A book to be enjoyed and cherished.

Andre Aciman has written a brillant portrait of a doomed and now vanished world .This memoir is filled with melancholy, energy, feeling and true wit.His style is simple, silken and elegant. The truely amazing thing about the book and the reason I could not put it down were the characters.Rich, vivid ,full fleshed very much like Dickens.Very funny very moving . Buy this book now.

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 degradation, 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 wrote this book not only being 'Out of Egypt' like Blixen was 'Out of Africa', but as well being "Out of Childhood'. So the grown-up is looking back and remembers his extended family with live-in servants and longtime friends. Whoever loves family stories will enjoy this well-written book.

Having myself spent some summers in Egypt I would say that his kind of Egypt isn't gone completely - there is still, beneath the noise of the traffic and industries, the chit-chat of the doorkeepers, sharellas and nannies. Or the difference of daily lives in regular, in summer, during the ramadan. Egypt still works as a time machine.

I ordered this book based on the recommendation of a wise friend, though memoirs are usually not my first choice. This is a wonderful book, fascinating in the history of a particular time in Alexandria, of loyalties and prejudices among members of the Jewish community in the city up to and during the tumultuous 1956 war, and that war's effects on the community.

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.