Tracing the old tram stops of Alexandria– whose names form one of the many backdrops to the coming of age story of André Aciman in his 1994 memoir Out of Egypt– with my fingers on an old map felt like going through an old china cupboard. The names of the tram stops are ordered like tea cups of another era. Too frail to use them. Too precious to throw  away. 

My finger lingered on Ramleh (oh what a sight on those old postcards in the online archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France), the often mentioned tram stop which by way of personal association attached itself to the little remaining details of my own Egyptian grandfather’s settling in Palestine’s ma’aboret of Ramleh, sometime in the early or mid-1940’s. Here in the book it was but a stop on the young boys' way home. I thought to myself, did my grandfather take that tram line back in the days? And would he get homesick for it in his new Ramleh?

These geographies of memory, such as the tram stops of Alexandria, the summerhouse on the beach in Mandara and the movie theaters wherever they were needed, set the tone for experiencing this revelation of a book which on the corner of every page turned beams with a long lost rhythm. A rhythm of ritualistic superstition, everyday spells and the way the old traditions would fold into the narrative, unaware they were forming biblical vistas larger than life. These are the rhythms of movement — be it by carriage, car or tram. Of blessed repetition — be it by quarrel, family gatherings on mattresses on the living room floor or Ladino sayings and pidgin expressions. And of telling the seasons— be it by beach visits and quail rains. The rhythms Aciman drums up speak to an embodied memory in my Egyptian heritage, which is an emotional experience of joy of remembrance and pangs of acute loss.   

With Out of Egypt, Aciman gifts us Jewish Sephardic oral tradition as ever there was one, transfixed on paper. He both peels back the layers of Jewish life in Alexandria like one peels off paint from an enamel object painted over every year to hide its wear and tear, showing all that was lived in the years, as well as craftily adding more layers and thus depth to the imagining of a world that feels long gone. There are the layers of homesickness (mostly to Constantinople), the layers of an understanding of what it means to be Jewish (losing all your belongings at least twice in your life and arguing over the recipe for haroset) and the layers of exile (in vistas of emptied out homes) as they ripple through the family. 

The arc of the book is a collection of Aciman’s families’ stories spanning the decades after world war one until his  family’s leaving Egypt in 1965. They are everyday moments that, put together over these many years, give the reader a comfortable feeling of familiarity, having a sense of each character’s constitution and particularities. And they are all as seen through the eyes of Aciman-the-child as well as Aciman-the-writer, who started writing his memoir at the age of 41. Throughout the book Aciman frequently and almost inaudibly shifts gears between times and locations, which causes the story to swell up with gentle melancholy of knowing its endings many years from now, halfway in any given vignette. It all adds to this distance that is created between then, in Egypt, and now, in (a new) Exile. 

This exile is as much Aciman’s, who ended up in America via Rome, as it is the reader’s. As it is mine. Because in reality, the world he is describing is not that long gone. As I read the meanderings of three generations of Italian/Turkish Jews from Constantinople who are finding their ways through the changing geopolitical landscape of French and British colonizers, a mixed bag of pastries, languages and frankly, luck, it feels like we get to peek into the lives of our Jewish Egyptian grandparents. Some of whom, as is in my case, remained deafeningly silent about this old world of theirs. 

As I play backgammon— the only leftover physical object of my grandfather— in the sunny garden of my exile and try to digest Out of Egypt,  I cannot help but to feel grateful for the details of the old world Aciman weaves into the book, making it tactile and tangible. From the hard boiled eggs for Passover which were dyed in tea— because everything else was dyed in tea— to the faire boukhour incense ritual his grandmother initiates to ward off misfortune. 

And to the complicated embrace of religious Jewishness, which was both rebelled against with grandeur and wit and  at times deeply moved family members against their will. The scene perhaps most profoundly capturing the latter is when Aciman visits his old uncle Vili in the English countryside. On his way to the shower he is stopped by his cousin and his wife who tell him to go listen at uncle Vili’s door just after his listening to the French-language shortwave broadcast and before going to bed. There he hears ‘an eerie marble of familiar words murmured to a cadence I too had learned long ago, whispered as if in stealth and shame. ‘He’ll deny it if you ask him.’ said my cousin.’ 

In these vivid pockets of memory— like Uncle Vili praying the bedtime Shema in far away English exile— it is okay to get homesick. ◦

Lievnath Faber-Cohen is a Jewish educator and ritualist. She is a trained mikveh guide and grief ceremony facilitator, (co) founder of Oy Vey in Amsterdam and teachesTalmud at Ze Kollel. Currently a rabbinical student with ALEPH - the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, she works towards rewilding Jewish life in Europe, while connecting with her Sephardic ancestral (be)longing.