Customer Reviews

Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt

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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.

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.

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!

Some fifteen years ago our son married the daughter of Jean Naggar and so began a wonderful friendship and some knowledge of the Sephardic Jewish religion. Now with the publishing of Jean's book detailing the wanderings and history of many Sephardic people and in particular her family I have learned all about her family as it survived the many years in colonial Egypt, an era that is so fascinating. It was both wonderful and a privilege to learn all the intimate details of my son's wonderful family. We had a wonderful time reading Jean's memoir.

At the time I wrote the above review the crisis in Egypt and surrounding countries had not yet exploded. Now that there is renewed eruptions in Jean's homeland with an uncertain outcome we can more fully appreciate her story of anxiety and exodus as she was forced to leave all behind her and start anew in the United States, a country that provided a safe and opportunistic haven. As in all good literature, a plot is more interesting when it ties in and parallels with current events of the world.

I found this book a must read and a wonderful gift for all my friends and family. It is an interesting story to be compared with the flight of Jews world over and throughout the centuries and is relevant particularly at this time of Passover!

"Sipping from the Nile" is a richly evocative memoir of a young girl's upbringing in what now seems a setting as exotic as the long-gone (and never quite real) Alexandria of Durrell's "Alexandrian Quartet." A favored child who grew up speaking Italian, French, English, and Arabic, a budding poet, a gifted (if reluctant) violinist, Jean Naggar's youth was shaped as much by danger and loss as by privilege. But her book is much more than a memoir. It brings to life an astonishing cast of real-life characters and a centuries-old culture, just as real but now as lost as King Solomon's Mines. Naggar's parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, were among the most influential figures in the Jewish communities of Cairo and Alexandria. The elders built sumptuous mansions on the banks of the Nile and the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, were sponsors of the arts and civic works, and leading figures in international trade and finance. They summered in Europe, and their children attended private schools in England. Then, in a few short months, this world was lost. In 1956 Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in a ill-fated attempt to regain it. The Jewish families living in Egypt, rich and poor, were soon persecuted, broken up, or driven out, their property confiscated or sold worthlessly. Naggar tells of these events from a perspective not only personal but deeply empathetic, involving the reader in the changed fortunes of her parents, the fates of her indomitable grandmother and fierce aunt, and the wanderings of her scattered siblings and cousins, all people we have come to know and admire in the course of this almost novel-like story. I've long known Jean Naggar as a superb judge of writing and the business of literature; reading "Sipping From the Nile," her own skills as a writer - funny, powerfully descriptive, able to recreate a setting or a character in a few precisely chosen details - were a revelation. Illustrated with vivid photographs, this is a memoir, and a historical record, unlike any other.

Naggar writes about a part of history I was only peripherally aware of--the Suez Canal Crisis of the late '50s when Jews were persecuted and pushed out of their homes.
Naggar grew up in Egypt in the kind of fairytale existence we only dream of: surrounded by caring extended family, living in a mansion with cooks and servants and dressmakers, constantly hearing a handful of languages and understanding them all, never wanting for anything.
Naggar details her "ivory tower" livelihood, as one of her relatives referred to it. I loved hearing about all the Jewish traditions, as well some of the superstitions of the time. One of those superstitions was whenever Naggar went on a trip--which she often did, and was in fact one of the first to ride in the revolutionary Comets, the first jet-propelled airplanes--she drank water from the place she was leaving from. That would ensure her safe passage back. She often sipped from the Nile.
Unfortunately, this superstition didn't always work. Naggar's "ivory tower" started crumbling in 1956 with the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Jews were suddenly the target of hate. All they wanted now, after centuries of building a successful livelihood in Cairo, were exit visas to someplace safe.
Sipping from the Nile was a fascinating and poignant peek into a past we don't hear much about...

I am so glad that in the serendipity of life, I was made aware of the new novel, Sipping from the Nile. Having a love for history, as it is often the best stories ever written, I was immediately captured and transported to the exotic locale of Egypt near the beginning of the century. A true story of a remarkable family whose trials and tribulations, triumphs and failures truly became my own over a 70 year time span.. I felt like i had lived their lives with them through world wars and the building of the Suez Canal and the political machinations that changed the lives of Egyptians forever.
Jean Navarre's novel, Sipping from the Nile, is a lushly and lovingly written memoir of a time and a place of which I was not familiar. A thriving Jewish community in Egypt, who would have thought this to be in existance post the Exodus. The author paints beautiful pictures with her descriptive style that educated both my heart and my mind. I have heartily recommended this novel to several friends and will continue to do so as it made a significant impression upon me.

Read this book if you want to understand our world! Jean Naggar's Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt achieves the goal of memoir--to illuminate the full context of life by examining one life within that context. By skillfully interweaving the story of her childhood in Cairo, the social and political history of Egypt through all its transformations, and the saga of a Jewish family's international migrations to and away from Egypt, the author gives us a compelling portrait of our history up to the very present. Reading this astonishing memoir during the events at Tahrir Square in Cairo and the fall of Mubarek exposed the full meaning of these world-making events. Naggar's intense focus on the individual life explains what is at stake in the revolution now taking place in the Arab world. The writing is transparent, evocative, and muscular while the events brought to life are consequential for us all. Rita Charon, Columbia University

An engaging and informative book, Jean Naggar's Sipping from the Nile offers the pleasures both of a historical novel and of a mémoire. It presents her life as she remembers it, dense with extraordinarily vivid details of architecture, cuisine, clothes, furnishings, rich interiors redolent with her own childhood memories. But it is also a detailed portrayal of a tempestuous period in the history of the Middle East in general and Egypt in particular. Her personal story covers approximately two decades, the 40s and 50s, with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1956 a landmark and a caesura. But by introducing parents, aunts and uncles, grand parents and great grand parents she traces the family's presence in Cairo back to 1750 and their earlier history back to the 15th century when Spain expelled its Jews in 1492. She has created her own remembrance of things past including the tastes and smells of spices in traditional dishes. The reader can touch and taste and smell what is evoked in these pages and share the author's vivid sense of loss. Read and savor and enjoy!

I learned of Jean Naggar's book when I visited the website of her literary agency. When I noted the title of her book, I immediately logged on to Amazon.com and within minutes, my order was placed and the book was on the way to me. Having dreamed of visiting Egypt, I found Ms. Naggar's book allowed me to visit that historic land without leaving home and in a completely new way. SIPPING FROM THE NILE is not the story of a tourist's visit to Egypt - of which there are many - it is the story of that land and its people from the viewpoint of someone who was born there. While not all the years spanned by the story remain in peaceful times, there are wonderful years of childhood pleasure depicted. The depth and breadth of this book - that includes detailed family histories as well as parallel world events occurring throughout the story - make it a captivating read. I smiled through paragraphs of childhood joys and happy events. I felt hot tears at the loss the writer and so many people have endured when forced to leave their homes and loved ones during times of strife. While the story is remarkable, the quality of Ms. Naggar's telling of the story uniquely sets this book apart and above. She described special foods in such detail I could almost taste them. Scenes, fabrics, colors, smells, temperatures... they are all wonderfully and creatively described for the reader's enjoyment and understanding. This is not one woman's story but rather the stories of many people within and surrounding her life and ancestors. Do not miss this great read! I'm sharing my copy with a "bookish" friend tonight!