JEWISHNESS was the strength and vulnerability of Andre Aciman's family during their prosperous and precarious sojourn in Alexandria during the regimes of King Farouk and President Nasser. Under laissez faire capitalism, foreign entrepreneurs were able to flourish in Egypt. Nasser expropriated foreign assets and forced many foreigners to leave the country.
In this sympathetically sentimental, sardonically humorous yet realistic memoir, Aciman recalls the chameleonic expediency necessary for the survival of wanderers from one exile to another.
The case history of his Uncle Vili was only marginally more extreme than the rest. After his family migrated from Turkey to Egypt in 1905, he studied in Germany, served in the Prussian army, changed sides when the Italians intervened in the war in 1915, left them after their defeat at Caporetto in 1917, and returned to Egypt by way of Cyprus.
When the British interned Italians in Egypt during World War Two, he became less Italian and more Jewish. He was so successful spying against the Italians for the British that he was rewarded with an estate in England. The author quotes his uncle in old age:
"Scratch the surface and you'll find everyone's a Jew," jeered the octogenarian Turco Italian Anglophile gentrified Fascist Jew who had started his professional life peddling Turkish fezzes in Vienna and Berlin and was to end it as the sole auctioneer of deposed King Farouk's property.
Another Italianate relative, who temporarily called himself Signor Ugo, distressed by Egyptian anti Semitism, applied to a Greek Orthodox priest "in half Turkish, half Greek" for conversion to Christianity. The worldly Father Papanastasiou recognised that the applicant wished to be only half converted, to be "a halfbreed" a Greek Orthodox Jew.
Well aware of the occasional need for religious disguises in a modern Islamic state, the priest invited "Signor Ugo" into his study for consultation and lemonade, and said: "Poor Jews, you're citizens nowhere and traitors everywhere, even to yourselves. And don't make that face, Ugo, your own prophets said it, not me."
Aciman was born in Alexandria in 1951, two years before the end of Farouk's reign, and was brought up there in middle class comfort until 1965, when his father's textile mill was nationalised and the family was deported.
In the fourteen years of his childhood, Andre lived in happy intimacy with his parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. He now seems to have total recall of their domestic and communal life in what was the most cosmopolitan city on the North African littoral. With admirable exactitude and stylishness, he evokes the atmosphere of the place - the trams, the Corniche, the cafes, the beach at that perilous time of political, economic and social change.
He describes events and their effects as he saw them, looking out from the illusory security of his home. His accounts of family loyalties, affections and tempestuous and witty bickerings would fit naturally into the novels of Philip Roth. Not since Joyce's Dublin schooldays have there been incidents of magisterial cruelty such as those suffered by Andre in his Arabic classroom.
Having been in Israel and Egypt during the Suez Crisis of 1956, I was somewhat embarrassed to read about the Acimans, huddled together in a blacked out flat in Alexandria, afraid of bombs.
There is a happy ending. An Italian tutor who taught Andre Greek for five years gave him this advice: "Never become a teacher; for then you'll eat others bread and tread others stairs." But long after the family's enforced dispersal, Andre Aciman teaches French literature at Princeton, where the jam and accommodation are excellent.
