Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt [Paperback]

Jean Naggar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2, 2008

Childhood is a magical time. Jean Naggar spent hers in Cairo and England in an enchanted world, protected by her large and loving family, unaware that the harsh reality of the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 would infiltrate life within her garden walls to change the lives of the Jews of Egypt forever. SIPPING FROM THE NILE brings to vibrant life the many rich facets of an opulent multicultural society in a post-colonial world. It is an unforgettable story of love and loss, a lyrical evocation of a time and place engulfed in the turbulence of politics, war and religion, illuminated with lush descriptions of food, clothes, customs, houses, landscapes, and the unique individuals that peopled a vast extended family. Expelled from their homes and their lives, Sephardic Jews from Arab lands have inserted a different immigrant experience into the American legend.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jean Naggar was born in Alexandria, Egypt. She grew up in Cairo and attended the Gezira Preparatory School and the English School in Heliopolis before going to boarding school at Roedean School in Brighton, England. After her family left Egypt following the international Suez crisis, she attended Westfield College at London University and was awarded an honors degree from London University. She later married Serge Naggar and moved to New York City where she established the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, Inc. in 1978.

Her poetry has been featured in The Listener and Athanor. She has been published in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Publishers Weekly, The Huffington Post, and Writers Digest. Jean is a member of the International Women's Forum, the Women's Media Group, PEN, and the AAR. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, Serge Naggar, and is the mother of three and grandmother of seven. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 380 pages
• Publisher: Stony Creek Press; First Edition edition (October 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0981807909
• ISBN-13: 978-0981807904
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #861,538 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jean Naggar was born in Alexandria, Egypt where her mother's parents lived. She grew up in Cairo, attended the Gezira Preparatory School and then The English School in Heliopolis before going to Roedean School in England, for her high school years. The magical world of her childhood as daughter of two prominent Sephardic Jewish families came to a dramatic end in 1956 when Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and brought about the Suez Crisis that scattered the Jewish population of Egypt. She has recorded this lost world in her memoir, Sipping From the Nile: My Exodus From Egypt.

After graduating from London University Jean (Mosseri) Naggar met and married Serge Naggar, the "boy next door" and followed him to New York City where she has lived ever since. A voracious reader all her life, she wrote poetry which was published in The Listener and Athanor, translated books, and her work was published in the New York Times, the Village Voice and Publishers Weekly.

In 1978 she founded the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency (see www.JVNLA.com)and was responsible for bringing many iconic writers to the attention of the reading public, happily sharing her reading passions with the world. She is a former president of AAR and has been sought after as a speaker at events around the US. Mother of three adult children and grandmother of seven, she is at last exploring her childhood dream: to write.

Visit her at http://www.jeannaggar.com/.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The past is never gone, October 11, 2009

By 

Mary Luddy (SF Bay Area) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt (Paperback)

I've never been to Egypt or even read much about it, but I feel as if I just returned from a guided tour of a fascinating place in a fascinating time. The combination of page-turning narrative and lovely writing made it difficult to put the book down. The descriptions and the sense of place are truly lessons in the craft of writing. Jean Naggar skillfully connects me to her world, dropping me into a foreign country and immediately making me feel at home. Her specific memories connect me to my own past: as she learns to swim, I relive my own swimming lessons on a Southern California beach far from her beach. She often elicits such memories, subtly revealing that despite how different our physical worlds might be, people are alike on many basic levels, especially as children discovering life. The combination of bringing us into both the writer's world and the reader's own seems to me to one of the main purposes of writing, and one of the most difficult, even though Jean Naggar makes it look easy. Surely one day the world will understand how connected we all are; narratives such as this are a step in that direction.

The title comes from the tradition that if you sip from the Nile before leaving, you will one day return. I love the final two lines: "The past is never gone. It is the foundation on which we build the present, every day of our lives." How perfectly they tie into those first words, the title, since being transported into that time is indeed sipping from the Nile. Jean Naggar leaves us with the hope that we will always be able to revisit the past through memory, enriching our present with each sip.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Snake Charmers and Jewish Exodus from Egypt, Again, August 19, 2009

By 

Vanessa R. Schwartz (Santa Monica, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt (Paperback)

With an easy and honest style, Jean Naggar recounts her early life of privilege in her multi-generational home on the banks on the Nile. A house full of servants from different nations does not belie the need for the occasional arrival of the snake charmer to seduce the reptiles into a basket and out of their hiding places all over the sumptuous mansion. Naggar, the child of two of Egypt's most prominent Jewish families, chronicles what would be the childhood of the last generation to be raised in the part of the world that for one side of the family dated back to Biblical times and on the other, hundreds of years. A wonderful memoir in and of itself and an important reminder of the displacement of Jews from all over the Middle East during the course of the twentieth century.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a lavish memoir, August 10, 2009

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NYC Reader (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt (Paperback)

To read SIPPING FROM THE NILE, Jean Naggar's lavish memoir of her Cairo childhood, is to be transported to another world, another time. This book is a document of the gorgeous, elaborate rituals of Naggar's Sephardic upbringing. It is series of exquisitely-remembered portraits of the people whose have lives braided into hers-- among them her father, whom she movingly memorializes for imparting to her a novelistic sense of the human world:

"I listened, spellbound, to my father's rich store of anecdotes...I began to understand that adults had faults and foibles and were multidimensional, having relationships to each other and to the world that went far beyond their peripheral impact on my own life. I began to sense the existence of a glowing tapestry of humanity stretching out into the far distance behind me..."

Most of all, SIPPING FROM THE NILE tells the story of a life marked by deep loss, but one marked so much the more by the continuity its author has created in her lived and written present, despite formidable obstacles. A beautiful book!