Reviewed by Brendan Hughes
8.20.07

Near the end of Andre Aciman’s evocative and lambent memoir Out of Egypt, as the narrator’s family of Saphardic Jews sits down to a final seder before they are expelled from Alexandria, his father remarks, in response to a story told by another family member, “Se non e vero, e ben trovato, if it isn’t true, you’ve made it up well.” He might have uttered the same words to his son when Out of Egypt was published thirty years later. Aciman has strung together charming and wonderful tales of his family’s fifty years in the lost city of Alexandria, then a polyglot city in a part of the world that was not yet saddled with the now-menacing prefix “Arab.” They are tales so wonderful that we may at times doubt their veracity, but so charming that we don’t mind very much.

Aciman traces his family’s history from 1905, when they arrived in Alexandria from Turkey (and before that Italy and France), to their expulsion under Nasser in 1964. The book’s first section, “Soldier, Salesman, Swindler, Spy,” introduces us to Uncle Vili, who is easily the family’s most interesting member. Vili fought in the Italian army at Capporetto in 1917, went to spy for the Italian government during World War II, then switched to spying for the British halfway through. His blustery overuse of the phrase, “are we or aren’t we?” is the mask of a true survivor, a chameleon for whom all alliances are fungible. “Scratch the surface and you’ll find everyone’s a Jew,” he says to Aciman years after the family has left Egypt. “Are we or aren’t we all peddlers in the end?”

Uncle Vili himself could sustain an entire volume, but that would be a fact-checker’s nightmare, and Aciman still has a menagerie of people and places, smells and textures to lie before the reader. There’s his mother--deaf, but taught to speak and dependent on her son to make her phone calls and check to be sure that she hasn’t left a faucet running. There are Aciman’s grandmothers, matriarchs of the old school who scold and cajole their children and grandchildren to get their way, and who stubbornly hold onto the past as it slips away. Then there is Aciman himself, playful and self-deprecating, a young writer-to-be with just the right amount precociousness (he slacks in his studies, but falls in love with Homer and the language of ancient Greece) to be endearing.

Aciman offers a thoughtful reflection on the rise of Arab nationalism and the conflicts between European exiles, like his family, and native Egyptians. Aciman’s wealthy family often mistreated Arabs, who lived almost universally in poverty and were viewed as inferior. For instance, the family dismisses the awful pain their Arab maid experiences in her abdomen, later diagnosed as inoperable cancer. At another point, the family moves to a new neighborhood because the old one had “too many vagrants, too much dust, so few Europeans.” At the same time, young Aciman is enrolled in Victory College, formerly a British institution, which, after the 1952 coup, was run by Nasser’s Arab-nationalist government. Aciman is forced to take classes in Islam and Arabic culture, which would doesn’t sound like a bad idea on its face, except that it often means reading long poems, essays and tracts on the perfidy of the Jews. When a teacher beats him and calls him “Kalb al Arab, dog of the Arabs,” it is hard not to feel the creeping extremism.

The best memoirs--and Out of Egypt is among the best--recreate not only the events of a life, but also time and place. Alexandria at mid-century is as much a character as Vili or anyone else, and Aciman reserves his most lyrical prose for the city, like this passage, describing the coast on the night before the family is to leave Egypt: “As I neared the seafront, the night air grew cooler, saltier, freed from the din of lights and the milling crowd. Traffic became sparse and whenever cars stopped for the traffic signal, everything grew still: then, only the waves could be heard, thudding in the dark, spraying the air along the darkened Corniche with a thin mist than hung upon the night, dousing the streetlights and the signposts and the distant floodlights by the guns of Petrou, spreading a light clammy film upon the pebbled stone wall overlooking the city’s coastline.” Is it possible to miss a place you never really knew? A reader would be hard pressed not to pine for the Alexandria of old after a few passages like that. “Your home’s in the rubblehouse of time now,” says Aciman’s Greek tutor, quoting Homer, “and you’re made thus, to yearn for what you lose.”