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Out of Egypt : A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Author: Andre Aciman
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $11.56
You Save: $2.44 (17%)
New (6) Used (6) from $5.74
Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 1054553
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Edition: lst Riverhead ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
ASIN: B000ELJ3M6
Publication Date: April 1, 1996
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The son of a flamboyant Jewish clan recounts his family's move to turn-of-the-century Alexandria, its many colorful members, its pursuit of wealth and happiness, and its struggles with anti-Semitic and anti-Western nationalism.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Out of Alexandria December 26, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a well written memoir about the Aciman clan, the reader gradually become familiar with each one of the family members of the Aciman family. The book relates the easy and good life in Alexandria before the Suez war in 1956 and afterwards the oppression of Jews until they were forced to leave the country. It's amazing to know that Andre Aciman's father spoke many languages like Ladino , Greek, Turkish, French, English, and probably Italian besides the languge of prayers Hebrew. I woul like to recommend another moving and poignant memoir about the life in Cairo, written by Henry Mourad Exodus II The Promised Land
 Growing up Jewish in Alexandria July 12, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
REVIEW OF "OUT OF EGYPT" for Amazon.com July 12, 2007
Andre Aciman describes his colorful and complicated life (and family)in
Alexandria in the 1960s. Childhoods like that are often the preparation
for a life of writing. The child absorbs all the peculiarities as part of
normal life without knowing they are peculiar until much later. Then they
need to make sense of it all.
All this is heightened by the fact that the Acimans are Jewish, in a
Muslim country still resonating with the after effects of British rule.His
experiences in the theoretically best school in Alexandria, run by
British teachers, would be funny if they weren't so awful. For complete
cognitive dissonance,his parents force him to learn Arabic to survive.
Reading about those lessons alone is worth the price of this book. At
home they speak Ladino, the Sephardic Yiddish, among themselves.
His beautful mother was born deaf. When provoked she can produce a
high-pitched scream. used to good effect at the butcher's. Once she has
made her point they are all quite happy. The butcher has to give the package
to her Arab servant. She never touches an Arab's hand.
The Acimans and Andre's maternal relatives live in a state of mutual
scorn, but when faced with the threats of Pan-Arab nationalism pull together very
efficiently. Eventually they all flee, the sedate Sephardic merchants
and the shady international adventurers too.
Two other writers come to mind when reading this book. Laurence Durrell
evokes something of the same atmosphere in his Alexandria Quartet and Elias
Canetti grew up in a large Sephardic family in Bulgaria. That society has
completely disappeared. Without Canetti's memoirs one would not know it had ever
existed.
This is an eloquent and elegiac account of that love and absurdity
known as a family.
lovely childhood memoir July 6, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Aciman wrote this book not only being 'Out of Egypt' like Blixen was 'Out of Africa', but as well being "Out of Childhood'. So the grown-up is looking back and remembers his extended family with live-in servants and longtime friends. Whoever loves family stories will enjoy this well-written book.
Having myself spent some summers in Egypt I would say that his kind of Egypt isn't gone completely - there is still, beneath the noise of the traffic and industries, the chit-chat of the doorkeepers, sharellas and nannies. Or the difference of daily lives in regular, in summer, during the ramadan. Egypt still works as a time machine.
Wonderful writing, wonderful memoir January 30, 2007
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
This memoir is the very best I've read. It takes the author from his earliest years as part of a large Jewish family which moved from Turkey to Alexandria (he was born in 1951), through the air raid sirens during Suez war with France and England, to the expulsion of the Jews by Nasser in the late 1950s, and then on to his adulthood in America and his return to Egypt following his marriage. After a lengthy opening section dating roughly from age 5 or 6, the narrative skillfully skips back and forth in time. The descriptions of the boy's exotic world and his dysfunctional extended family are priceless, as are the re-invented conversations and arguments among the adults who surround him. There is something Proust-like in the writing, a love of detail for the texture it creates, and something Nabokov-like as well, in the hooded humor and artful language. I found it utterly captivating and written with love, especially for his mother, who was born deaf. I heartily recommend it to anyone who contemplates or is writing a memoir.
Nostalgia for the Alexandria tram and beaches August 14, 2006
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
Andre Aciman's Out of Egypt is an amazing book, I found it very hard to put down. At a time of increased hostility in the middle east it is heartwarming to read of a time when Jews lived in peace with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in Alexandria. Not a whiff of anti Jewish sentiments was reported by Aciman until after the Suez War. Aciman and his family left Egypt in the sixties.
Aciman, like many "Egyptian" Jews preferred to hold European nationalities and in some cases some were French or Italian without ever setting foot in these countries. Europeans had their own courts in Egypt and did not fall under Egyptian Laws. For Aciman, born and raised in Egypt and in many ways no different than many affluent Alexandrians life became unbearable after the waves of Nationalization in the early 60's.
Aciman writes of an Alexandria that no longer exists not just for Egyptian Jews. The population explosion in Egypt has transformed Alexandria beyond recognition; hence Aciman's beautiful writing of Alexandria, its beaches and its tram will bring floods of memories for anyone who's known Alexandria.
Affluent Egyptian Jews who left Egypt in the fifties and sixties are not immediately thought of as refugees and there is little discussion on their issues of identity and affiliation in Egypt and elsewhere. Aciman through his acute sensitivity to the people and events around him and his wonderful story telling skills has produced beautifully written and very touching book that subtly challenges many assumptions on all sides.
Readers will see the very same Alexandria in Leila Ahmed's Border Passage and in parts of Ahdaf Souief's In the Eye of the Sun. Enjoy
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