Arts a Entertainment
Remembrances Of Things Past
For author Andre Aciman, the enduring images of a childhood in
Alexandria, Egypt, forever cast their shadow.
SANDEE BRAWARSKY
Special to the Jewish News
1111 emory is my passageway
into writing," says
Andre Aciman. "I don't
write about Memory. I
like -to pretend I'm writing from mem-
ory. I remember I have lost. That's
how I begin."
In prose that is lush and lyrical, he
draws connections between memory,
geography, identity and language,
evoking the richness and complexities
of a life full of remembering. His latest
book, False Papers: Essays on Exile and
Memory (Farrar, Straus Giroux; $23),
is a collection of linked essays.
False Papers grew out of the strong
reaction to his first book, Out of Egypt, a
beguiling, highly acclaimed memoir of
growing up in and leaving Alexandria.
Soon after its 1994 publication, he was
asked by Conde Nast Traveler to return
to Egypt and report on it.
He also received lots of "amazing
fan mail" from people of European
backgrounds whc; had also lived in
Alexandria, who said that he represent-
ed a life almost-identical to their own.
Out Of Egypt
Metro Detroiter shares
his memories of a life
in Alexandria.
O
ut of Egypt and False Papers:
Essays on Exile and Memory
hit home with Bloomfield
Hills resident Toby Hazan.
- Before settling into a new life in
America as a college student in the
1960s, Hazan, 54, grew up in
Alexandria, Egypt, experienced the
antisemitic policies of Gamal Abdel
Nasser and stopped feeling safe in the
country of his birth.
8/25
2000
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Over a period of five years, he gave
many talks related to the book and
later turned them into essays, which
are as much about writing as about his
themes of exile, place, rootlessness,_
memory, longing and love.
Aciman describes himself as "totally
Jewish" and "totally unlearned." Like
many Jews, he seems to live in the
questions. The name Aciman comes
from Jimenez, Spain, the town of the
family's Sephardic roots. They traveled
from Spain to Italy to Turkey, with
some family members going back to
Italy and others going to Egypt, begin-
ning in 1905.
He and his family left Alexandria in
1965 and moved to Italy, where they
"could claim a kind of mythic citizen-
ship." From Italy, they moved to
France and then New York City in
1968.
In the lead essay, "Alexandria: The
Capital of Memory," he writes of
returning and finding a city, as he
expected, with all the Europeans and
Jews gone. The Alexandria he knew,
"the mock-reliquary of bygone splen-
dor and colonial opulence where my
grandmother could still walk with an
Unlike Andre Aciman, whose book
took him back to Egypt, Hazan has not
returned. "Egypt had been a nice place
to grow up in, but there is no one to go
back to," says Hazan, who traces his
ancestral roots to Turkey, Morocco and
Palestine. "Jews had managed to settle
in businesses and were successful and
happy, but we started worrying about
our future in 1956."
The only Jew in the medical school
at the University of Alexandria, which
he entered at age 16, Hazan looked
for transfer opportunities at medical
schools in France, due.to the uncer-
tain environment of the Mideast.
"I grew up in a Jewish environ-
ment, and after a while the only safe
place to be was shul," Hazan says.
"Synagogues were surrounded by
umbrella on sunny days and not real-
ize she looked quite ridiculous," no
longer existed.
By 1960, his family was among the
"last European Jews in a city where
anti-Western nationalism and anti-
semitism had managed to reduce the
Jewish population from at least 50,000
to 2,500 ... and put us at the very tail
end of those whom history shrugs
aside when it changes its mind."
He adds, "I've come back to Egypt
the way only Jews yearn to go back to
places they couldn't wait to flee."
Revisiting Alexandria, he spends his
few days anxious to leave, roaming the
streets. He overhears conversations and
to his ear, mundane talk sounds surre-
al. At the main synagogue, he notices
"more skullcaps than Jews to wear
them in all of Egypt," and at the
cemetery, he finds the grave of his
grandfather where, after the urgings of
the warden and with some reluctance,
he washes the stone clean.
He wants to whisper something to his
grandfather but is embarrassed and
would say a prayer, but knows none. "All
I know is that I cannot take him with
me — but I don't want to
brick walls and metal
gates that could be closed.
I went every day in the
morning and on
Saturdays, morning,
noon and evening."
Hazan had a few non-
Jewish friends, but they
were Christians who
shared feelings of being
ostracized, and many left
the country. Forty years
ago, he explains, the
Moslems were very nationalistic and not
accepting of people of other faiths.
. "My whole immediate family left in
1962," says Hazan, who hid witnessed
waves of expulsions and suffered
through difficult times after his father's
assets were nationalized by the
leave him here. ...In a hundred years, no
one will even know my grandfather had
lived or died, here or elsewhere. It's the
difference between death and extinc-
tion."
For Aciman, remembering is always
a complicated matter; his moments
seem to be many moments, reverberat-
ing back and forward in time. Poised
to leave Egypt again, he is aware of his
childhood and of the fact that in the
years ahead, he would look back to
this last evening.
"I had finally hoped to let go of this
city, knowing all the while that the
longing would start again soon
enough, that one never washes any-
thing away."
He quotes the Alexandrian poet
Constantine Cavafy: "I'll always end
up, even if I never come back."
In the essay "In A Double Exile,"
he's at a Passover seder in America,
recalling "another Egypt, the one I was
born in and knew and got to love and
would never have left had not a mod-
em pharaoh named Gamal Abdel
Nasser forced me out for being Jewish."
He recalls his last seder in
Alexandria in 1965, held in haste,
Toby Hazan, at age 14, attending
weekday morning services in Alexandria,
at the Eliahou Hazan Synagogue.
Egyptian government. Allowed to leave
Egypt with only $5 per person, his
family obtained dollars on the black