André Aciman is an Egyptian American author who has written several novels, including “Enigma Variations,” “Eight White Nights” and, famously, “Call Me By Your Name.” While many readers know him for his fiction, his 1994 memoir “Out of Egypt” is absolutely worth your time. Aciman is a prominent figure in contemporary Jewish fiction; to know and celebrate his uniquely Jewish origins is to further honor his body of work and his place in Jewish literature. After all, passing stories down from generation to generation is what Judaism is all about.
The Lighthouse of Alexandria, an ancient symbol of the city's rich history.
A Chronicle of Sephardic Life in Alexandria
“Out of Egypt” chronicles Aciman’s Sephardic family and their time in Alexandria, Egypt. From the 1800s to the 1960s, Alexandria was Egypt’s most cosmopolitan city, home to various languages and cultures. Aciman writes of relatives and family friends from France, Italy, Turkey and countless other places all living in Egypt, speaking French, Spanish, Italian and Ladino. You may not recognize André Aciman’s name on its own, and that is certainly reason enough to read “Out of Egypt.” Though Aciman is mostly known for his fiction, “Out of Egypt” is the first book he ever published. He shares the story of his Sephardic family in Alexandria and his early childhood before the family fled the country due to increasing antisemitism.
It’s also filled with descriptions of traditional Sephardic dishes, quarrels between uncles and grandparents that invoke any typical Shabbat dinner around the world, and the kinds of old-school Jewish proverbs that make you want to call your grandparents. For example, Aciman begins the memoir by introducing his great-uncle Vili, who lives by the mantra “Siamo o non siamo?”, which translates to “Are we or aren’t we?” in Italian. Vili used the phrase whenever he needed to prove himself or keep his word, or when he or his family needed to remember who they were and what they’ve gone through.
“Out of Egypt” is a love letter to the Jewish diaspora in its portrayal of a Jewish society that has now practically disappeared.
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Departure and the Bittersweetness of Leaving
Aciman begins the book by detailing how his relatives got to Alexandria and ends the book with the family’s last Passover seder in Egypt. There is something so hopeful yet so melancholic about Aciman and his family being forced to call a new city home at a moment’s notice over and over. It is particularly poignant when thinking of the story of Exodus: The Biblical story resonates when Aciman’s own Jewish family must escape from Egypt practically overnight. The fact that the story of “Out of Egypt” includes generations of Jews points to the universality of the Jewish experience and how our history goes in circles.
When reflecting on his family’s practically overnight departure from Alexandria, Aciman writes, “I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved.” In one sentence, he so perfectly encapsulates the Jewish bittersweetness of leaving: loving and hating a place all at once.
A map illustrating the historical Jewish diaspora.
The Universality of the Jewish Experience
Aciman’s story also resonates with me as a product of constant fleeing. My own great-grandparents were Holocaust survivors who fled three countries in 12 years before finally settling in Mexico City in the 1950s. My parents then left Mexico in the ‘90s to move to Miami, where my siblings and I were born. Most of my family members - including myself - have multiple nationalities, and we still have distant relatives in the countries my great-grandparents left behind. Like Aciman, I understand firsthand what it’s like to simultaneously belong everywhere and nowhere. I feel his hesitancy about planting your roots in the ground because you might have to pull them back out at any moment.
I’ve spent my whole life hearing about “the old country” or “the old city” from relatives all referring to a different place - at this rate, who knows where my future children will grow up. Like Aciman, leaving is in my family’s blood, and I’m sure the same goes for so many Jewish bloodlines around the world.
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A Book for Modern Readers
It’s been almost 30 years since “Out of Egypt” was published, and it’s time for younger generations of readers to give it a go. Aciman has had a surge in popularity with “Call Me By Your Name,” and the themes in “Out of Egypt” - growing up, belonging, and navigating your feelings for the city you call home - are just as relevant today as they were three decades ago. Plus, it’s just a beautiful book, with vibrant characters and descriptions so visceral I could almost feel the breeze on the Alexandria beaches Aciman so clearly loved. “Out of Egypt” showcases a Jewish writer at the top of his craft, telling a Jewish story that deserves to be a classic.
Key Characters and Their Significance
Aciman writes of a dazzling time and place populated by lavish and theatrical characters. His book is written, in fact, like a musical variety act. Each of its six chapters tends to single one or two characters out of the ensemble; when they appear in other scenes, they drop back and rejoin the chorus. Time skitters wildly from page to page.
The first chapter, allegro con brio , depicts the family’s most flamboyantly picaresque figure, Great-Uncle Vili. It was a nickname bestowed on him, as a young Prussian officer before World War I, by one of his many conquests who thought he looked like Kaiser Wilhelm. On a visit, Aciman recounts Vili’s life. Deeply attached to Italy, he left the German Army in 1914 and fought with the Italians on the Allied side. He became a fervent admirer of Mussolini, helped raise money for the campaign in Ethiopia and was sent each year to Germany to lecture the Hitler Youth on Fascism. He was an enthusiast; with perhaps a touch less enthusiasm--except perhaps for his own foresight--he worked as a British spy. Hence his postwar reward of a Surrey estate and a new name. His motto, which managed to express his alarming appetite for life, women, excitement and the double track, was Siamo o non siamo . It is a suitably ambiguous phrase, meaning We are or we aren’t , or perhaps Are we or aren’t we?
Aciman writes of the intimate friendship and rivalry between his two grandmothers, who lived across the street from each other. Between their husbands it was pure rivalry. Albert, who came from Turkey, despised Jacques, who was socially less distinguished and came from Syria. Alexandria was a place where four aristocracies--British, Greek, Egyptian, Sephardic--could live side by side, each entirely assured of its own distinction.
Themes of Identity and Belonging
“Out of Egypt” is a scintillating portrait of a family and a world that were narrowly clannish and exuberantly cosmopolitan. There is pain and harshness; for example, young Aciman’s misery at a school invaded by a wave of Egyptian nationalism and anti-Semitism. There is the scene in which Great-Uncle Isaac, a man of courtly elegance, loses control of his bowels when the police arrive to take him for questioning. It is tragic in its own way, though not in the way of a holocaust; not-quite-dead connections are invoked, money--though by no means all of it--changes hands, and Isaac is soon living comfortably in France.
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Beneath the histrionics and the pain is the remembered sweetness. There is the near-paradise of summers spent at a seaside villa, and the figure of an endearingly ungainly Italian who instills in the boy a love of poetry and Greek.
Aciman, today a professor of French literature at Princeton, has written a book that is both a memoir and a chronicle of his family’s four generations in Egypt. Exile serves as a frame for memory; a moon from which you glimpse the earth that you lost.
The cover of André Aciman's "Out of Egypt."
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