Out of Egypt (1994) By Andre Aciman

 

Odd that I find a memoir by an author to be his best work. But why not, after all who knows the subject matter better? Out of Egypt by Andre Aciman is a family history, as well as an autobiography of his childhood years. He is widely known as the author of Call Me By Your Name.

Aciman is part of a large Jewish family that had to emigrate frequently over the centuries from one country to the next. The remembered family history goes as far back as their expulsion from Spain, resultant of the Spanish Inquisition. Their next stops were in France, the Italian port city of Livorno (Leghorn), enroute to Solonika Greece, then Constantinople Turkey. Then, as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling at the beginning of the 1900s, it became apparent they would need to flee once again.

In 1905, Aciman’s grandparents and their extended families bypassed Palestine, settling in Alexandria, Egypt because one of his great uncles was a college classmate and good friend of the man destined to become Egypt’s next King. For fifty years they would live comfortably in Egypt.

Because of the family’s business connections with the monarchy – his father ran a textile mill -- they were able to survive the beginnings of Arab nationalism – this despite the fact that the Egyptian army was a partner in the attempt to drive the modern-day State of Israel into the sea (the First Arab Israeli War, 1948). By 1952 however, the monarchy had been overthrown and Arab nationalists led by Gamal Abdel Nasser were in control of Egypt. Near the end of 1956, Israel, Britain, and France unsuccessfully attempted to wrest control of the Suez Canal away from Nasser, marking the beginning of the end of tolerance for Jews and Europeans in the country.

Into this history, Andre Aciman was born in Alexandria in 1951. As a young boy who did not particularly understand world events, it seemed a normal, privileged childhood. They had servants, went to shopping districts, movie theaters, restaurants, parties at the various consulates, and even owned a summer house on the coastline. The family was well-educated and as fascinatingly multi-cultural as could be – first languages spoken included Spanish, Ladino, Italian, French, Turkish, Greek and most members had enough knowledge of Hebrew to follow religious ceremony. Some family members had a working understanding of Arabic, Andre learned it primarily by hanging out in the kitchen with the household servants. Shortly after he began formal schooling, the country mandated that all students learn Arabic – it was taught via rote memory by reading the Koran – Andre’s parents eventually hired a private tutor for him. They also pulled him out of the “elite” British School over its questionable (read: should be criminal) corporal punishment practices.

The final chapters of the book are gripping, as the boy who has lived all his life in Alexandria is discovering that he is not welcome – and although he was born in Alexandria, is not recognized as an Egyptian citizen.

In 1965 the Arab nationalists confiscated his father’s business and gave the family two weeks to leave the country, they were not allowed to take anything other than what they could carry, nor transfer funds out of the country. For Andre, living this is a coming-of-age event. His grandmother mourns it perfectly. “This was the ninth time she had seen the men in her life lose everything, first her grandfather, then her father, her husband, five brothers, and now her son.”

Andre spends his final night in Alexandria at the beach where he has spent so much of his childhood. “And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade and watched the children head toward the shore in a winding, lambent procession.  I want to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never eat soggy cake along the coast road in the evening, not this year or any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden beauty of the moment when if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved."

The family would move to Italy, and later to other parts of the diaspora. Today, Andre and his family live in New York.