The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family [Hardcover]

Gini Alhadeff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 21, 1997

With a brilliant flair for narrative and language, Alhadeff spins a tale--both wildly humorous and deeply affecting--of her beguilingly uncommon family. 272 pp. 12,500 print.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Alhadeff's prose is so wittily precise and casually elegant it's hard to believe she didn't learn English until she was 10--in Tokyo, of all places. Born in Egypt in 1951, educated in Italy, Japan, England, and America, the author comes from a family of cosmopolitan, multilingual Sephardic Jews who "considered ourselves primarily free to be anything we wished"--including Catholic. (Her parents, whose difficult marriage is unsentimentally portrayed, converted.) Lovingly acerbic tales about various wildly individualist relatives combine with personal history in a colorful narrative that trenchantly declares independence from the constraints of "ready-made identity."

From Publishers Weekly

These engaging portraits of Alhadeff's large, wealthy family of Sephardic Jews sometimes seem to have been snatched from free associations. Yet despite their free-floating quality, Alhadeff's humor and keen sense of place and character re-create the ambiance of her youth in exotic settings peopled with intriguing eccentrics. Her forbears migrated from Spain in the 15th century and, via stops in Italy and Turkey, settled in Egypt. In Alexandria, they established one of the country's wealthiest trading houses and were part of an elite community of Sephardim whose lifestyles imitated those of Parisian high society. For convenience's sake, her irreligious parents converted and sent their children to Catholic schools: Alhadeff was 20 before she knew she was a Jew. More confusing, although her name was Arabic and her parents spoke the language fluently, albeit with a slight accent?as they did with all five or six other languages they spoke?she never quite knew where they all belonged. Sojourns in Italy convinced her she was Italian, and no one contradicted her. The entire family were snobs; one relative's address book listed, under Q., the private phone numbers of all the queens she knew. Another, with an avocation for the priesthood, never quite relinquished his taste for the high life and cultivated rich friends who could provide him with off-duty clothes, cars and hospitality. Throughout the jumble of her recollections, Alhadeff, now a New Yorker who founded two literary magazines, Norman and XXI Century?searches with integrity and wit for a clear understanding of her own nature.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 226 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st edition (January 21, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067941763X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679417637
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,412,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars History as Gossip, April 27, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family (Hardcover)

'The Sun at Midday' reviewed by Samir Raafat for the "Cairo Times" Thursday, April 17, 1997 IN HER BOOK, The Sun at Midday, the Alexandria-born Gini Alhadeff runs us through the different members of her family which means flashbacks from Tokyo, Northern Italy, Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Auschwitz, Rhodes, Greenville (Mississippi) and back. The habitats range from palatial villas in Alexandria to a two-room flat in Manhattan with a reference to the Italian fashion house of Krizia founded by the author's aunt, Mrs. Aldo Pinto née Mariuccia Mandelli. Gardens are everywhere, all of them heavenly, the scent changing with each season and every repatriation. With the help of a desk top computer and a `Family Tree Maker' software, genealogy buffs will love this book as they eagerly enter a collection of Byronic Mediterranean names belonging to the author's relations: Pinto, Piha, Menashe, Aghion, Tilche, Riches, Alhadeffs, etc., discovering in the process that most middle class Jewish families in Alexandria were connected and that they made good wherever destiny took them. And how, through marriage, they were also related to Lawrence Durrell! Undoubtedly, these colorful relations is what makes Alhadeff's family worth writing about. Of all her ethnic and national identities, the reader senses that Alhadeff is taken in mostly by her Jewish ancestry. Not unlike US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, Alhadeff discovered her rabbinical roots - in this case Sephardi - in her adulthood. A consequence of this revelation is the Judaica which is palpable throughout `The Sun at Midday.' And just in case anyone overlooks the plight of her relations this century thinking it was simply a matter of colorful trips across five continents, Alhadeff gives extensive coverage of her Uncle Nissim's sojourn in several German-run WWII concentration camps. Nissim's story is the longest recit allocated to any single member of the author's family. This lengthy chapter would have been five times as interesting had one not repeatedly stumbled on analogous passages in any of the thousands of books, novels, thrillers, articles, films and CD-ROMS that deal with the subject. And with Alhadeff's book appearing soon after Daniel Goldhagen's encyclopedic work on the subject (`Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust'), Uncle Nissim's episodes seems somewhat parochial. In her character portrayals, which takes up a good part of her book, Alhadeff is both amusing and direct. Yet, when it comes to describing geographic locations, facts and some of the zeitgeist surrounding the events, beware with a capital B. Alhadeff could have made sterling use of a beginner's Atlas and an Almanac. Some elementary cross-checking with regards her family's oral testimonials would have also helped. On the other hand, if Alhadeff's representations of her relations are as spot on as her description of Father Pierre Riches, the Jewish dandy turned Catholic priest, then, Bravo Gini! I met Riches three Springs ago, once at the Jesuit school in Fagalla and again for a beer at my Maadi garden and he is exactly as the author describes him, a man "who drops names the way certain women put on too many jewels." While we accept that history is informed gossip, Alhadeff should have ascertained the accuracy of some of the statements made by her relations. The book is full of what would at first seem as irrelevant misrepresentations, yet looked at collectively, they could be misinterpreted as an attempt to dramatize, especially if the reader is Egyptian, a Japanese Samurai or a member of the Catholic deity. For instance, Alhadeff's places the Egyptian coastal town of al-Alamein at 15 kilometers from Alexandria. While this - some would say extraneous - proximity lends credence to "panic in the city" of Alexandria or "Alexandria being bombarded" making it sound like Normandy or Dunkirk, it is of-course factually incorrect, for Alamein is over 120 kilometers away and the little bombardment that Alexandria sustained during WWII pales next to that received by the remotest European hamlet. Stating that one of the leading cotton experts of Alexandria was German and thus by implication hostile to Alhadeff's Jewish cotton-trading grandfather, invariably projects that certain `je ne sais quoi' salable German-Jewish drama which became so literary delectable whenever discussing the 1930s and `40s. Sorry again Ms. Alhadeff, but Mr. Rheinhardt was Swiss, not German. When Alhadeff's mother "finished school there was no question of her going to university, because there was none in Egypt, because she was a woman, and because of the war." There again, the contrived effects for drama. Yet, a cursory leafing through any contemporary Almanac could have enlightened Alhadeff on the existence of several universities including the co-ed American University in Cairo which closed for only a few months during WWII. Saad Zaghloul (in this instance Alhadeff got his name right) was prime minister once and not five times. And as for old insignias and decorations being returned to the government when receiving new ones... funny yes, but incorrect. Those seeking entertainment will find that `The Sun at Midday' abounds with it. Alhadeff has an engaging style and her stories are punctuated with anecdotes. As oral history goes, her book is informative and her continuous play with fast-back and fast-forward makes it even more compelling. If you've read André Aciman's Out of Egypt and liked it, then I most certainly recommend Gini Alhadeff's book.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating family history, April 29, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family (Hardcover)

Fascinating history of a sephardic family from Inquisition days to modern times. Well told, if a bit self indulgent