Book Review: ‘ Alexandrian Summer’

New Vessel Press and the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature have done the English-speaking public a service by bringing this 36-yearold book to our attention.

By ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN
Bat Mitzva girls in Alexandria, date unknown. (photo credit: NEBI DANIEL ASSOCIATION PUBLIC PHOTO COLLECTION/MAURICE STUDIO/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)
Bat Mitzva girls in Alexandria, date unknown.
(photo credit: NEBI DANIEL ASSOCIATION PUBLIC PHOTO COLLECTION/MAURICE STUDIO/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)
Robby seems like a sweet little boy. Growing up in the cosmopolitan social whirl of Alexandria’s soon-to-be-extinct Jewish subculture, the 10-year-old manages to maintain a likable innocence despite the decadence, depravity and depression that engulf him and his extended family during the summer of 1951.
We know that Robby is autobiographical from the first words of this dark novel, originally published in Hebrew in 1978 by award-winning playwright and author Yitzhak Gormezano Goren.
“Alexandrian Summer is a nostalgic, farewell portrait of a world that was fast expiring but still refused to see that history had written it off,” André Aciman writes in his introduction. Aciman, born in Alexandria during the same year in which the book is set – at the end of which the Gormezanos presciently fled to Israel – set his own Out of Egypt in the period when the Egyptian city’s Jews were in freefall from the precipice of their mythical paradise.
Perhaps not unlike privileged German or Austrian Jewish children of the 1930s, Robby is growing up in an illusionary cocoon of a highly assimilated upper-middle class more likely to be crab-fishing, club-hopping or card-playing than in the synagogue praying. However, this assimilation is starkly different from that of prewar Western European Jews.
In 1950s Egypt as portrayed by Gormezano Goren, Jews shun the indigenous population, employing Egyptian servants for pennies and conversing among themselves in French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, English and Ladino. One could put on continental airs in Alexandria for much less than such a lifestyle cost in Vienna.
Gormezano Goren, a gifted writer, describes his parents’ generation’s disdain for things Egyptian: “The pyramids? Yes, they’re all right… But going all the way to Luxor? Just to see some stones? With all due respect to the temples of Karnak, spending the night there, at the end of the world, among the Arabs, away from civilization? Please.”
Nevertheless, Robby’s parents are aware of their subculture’s dangerous undercurrents and the need to secure a foothold in newborn Israel. Not so their summer guests, the dysfunctional Hamdi-Ali family from Cairo.
Joseph Hamdi-Ali, whose conversion from Islam to Judaism in order to marry the much younger Emilie is a guarded but known secret, has never recovered from the death of his beloved racehorse and concurrent career as a jockey. He has heaped all of his unrealized hopes on the shoulders of his handsome blond firstborn, David, while ignoring his 11-yearold, Victor – a disturbed boy with razor- sharp powers of observation who will introduce Robby and his friends to forbidden homosexual pleasures on the hot, boring afternoons when their elders have forsaken them for the track. (We learn in the author’s dedication that his own brother was named Victor.) In that final summer of “normal” life in Alexandria, David Hamdi-Ali is pitted against a Beduin jockey in a series of horse races that will tear the peaceful veneer from the ugliness brewing among Alexandria’s multiethnic citizenry.
Joseph comes to understand that the competition between the two young athletes is no less than a competition between the Jewish and Muslim deities. The community’s rabbi, impotent in the face of his flock’s religious indifference, ironically does not grasp this truth until tragedy strikes.
Alexandria itself is an intrinsic part of the story. Gormezano Goren defines the city and its ambiance in lush, sensuous terms – even when describing as ordinary a sight as the itinerant copper polisher making his rounds in the heat of the day: “The sun invaded the house, sweeping up its dark corners and almost reaching the depths of the hall with its frantic, curious rummaging. The rattle of copper sounded from the street. An old Arab man, wearing a skullcap, dragging loose britches between his legs like a sort of forgotten placenta, carried a plump sack on his shoulder that rang like the bells of 10 churches.”
He also describes so well the Diaspora Jew’s knack for downplaying the danger of gathering storms of hatred, a tendency not limited to Alexandria or to any particular era of exile. Robby’s much older sister tells him that after a win by the Beduin jockey over David, “The crowd went mad with excitement, especially the other Arabs.
Some of them even started shouting ‘Maut al yahud! Death to the Jews!’ We were a little scared, but thank God, the voices were few, just a handful of hotheaded young guys, maybe some students from the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The book is not without flaws. For example, we read on page 124 that Emilie had approached her estranged father for money to buy a racehorse for 17-year-old David. Yet on page 160, we are told that Emilie’s father died soon after Emilie and Joseph were married.
That said, New Vessel Press and the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature have done the English-speaking public a service by bringing this 36-year-old book to our attention.