Michael David Lukas has written an enchanting historical novel of Muslim and Jewish communities and forbidden love stories.
By ELAINE MARGOLINCAIRO IN the late 19th century (photo credit: ANTONIO BEATO/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)Writers sometimes reveal their unconscious longings whether they intend to or not. In Michael David Lukas’s brilliant historical novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, we sense he is looking to find some spark of God’s presence, but is unsure where to look – or even precisely what he is looking for.The 38-year-old Lukas – whose mother’s relatives were murdered in Auschwitz, and whose father barely survived the Second World War in Budapest living under false papers – is clearly enamored with the mysteries that enshroud the Middle East and its turbulent history, finding particular resonance in the stories of the past.His protagonist, Joseph al-Raqb, is a melancholy literature student at Berkeley; the son of a Jewish mother and a recently deceased Muslim father, whom he visited infrequently in Cairo during his otherwise ordinary childhood.He remembers little about his father other than the astounding stories his father would tell him on their weekly phone calls. Stories about his paternal family, the al-Raqb men, who have spent the last 1,000 years guarding the Ibn Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo; his own father being the last among them (the family’s last name means “he who watches”). The synagogue has always been thought to be a special place; perhaps the spot where Moses was taken from the Nile. It was also believed to have once possessed the Ezra Scroll, thought to be the actual writings of the prophet, written thousands of years ago.Joseph grew up in California and got along well enough with his mother and stepdad Bill, but there was always the sense something was missing.“For most of my childhood, my father occupied that sector of my imagination otherwise reserved for myths and legends,” Lukas wrote. “Somewhere between King Arthur and Zeus, he was that distant and usually benevolent demigod who oversaw the realm of air mail and phone calls, provider of pharaoh statues, pyramid paperweights, and, for my ninth birthday, a real Egyptian scarab.”Joseph clung to his father’s stories and began to believe they contained the essence of what was missing from his life in California. Most of the tales stressed the heroism and loyalty of the al-Raqb men. He loved the story about one of his paternal ancestors who faced down angry crowds ready to attack the Jews because the mobs believed them to be immune from the ravages of the Black Plague.He remembered with fondness another story that told of an al-Raqb watchman from long ago, who managed to convince the ruthless Mameluke ruler Baybars to accept a fine instead of destroying the synagogue, which was his original intent. As to why the Jews were always targeted and in need of such protection, Joseph never really gave it too much thought. It seemed that’s how it always was and always would be.Joseph’s mother was born in Egypt but fled to Paris as a young girl with her family when Nasser evicted the Jews. She stayed in touch with Joseph’s father, her unlikely but cherished childhood friend; their letters soon became romantic in tone. Joseph’s father visited her in Paris in 1973 and Joseph was accidentally conceived.At first, his mother thought she could make it work – that a life together was within their reach. But the pressures bearing down upon her from her family combined with the young couple’s confusion and doubts overwhelmed her, and she soon fled to California where she met Bill, who agreed to marry her and raise her still-unborn child. Whenever she would speak to Joseph about his father, she would emphasize what a gentle and good man he was – but her voice had a faraway quality that told him she had moved on.But Joseph hadn’t. And when a package arrives for him shortly after his father’s death with a cryptic and mysterious note from him and an old piece of parchment with faded Hebrew letters, his curiosity is piqued. He impulsively decides to go to Cairo to look for something – even though he still doesn’t know precisely what he is looking for. Just as we are beginning to sink into Joseph’s story, the author Lukas leaves Joseph and plunges us back in time to the ancient past, a time he describes elegantly for us as “before Mubarak and the revolution, before Sadat and Begin, before Nasser, the Free Officers and the Suez Crisis, before the Suez Canal, before Herzl, before Dreyfus, before Solomon Schechter and the Cambridge University Library, before Ismail Pasha and Muhammad Ali Pasha, before the British, the French, the Ottomans, the Mamluks, and the Ayyubids, before the Great Plague and Saladin, before Maimonides the great sage – may his memory be a blessing – our story begins before all this, in the reign of al-Mustansit, when Cairo was still two cities and the Jews but a tribe among them.”Lukas’s writing explodes with imaginative force and splendor when he delves into the ancient past and describes for us the life of a Muslim orphan named Ali who has won the trust of the Jews. But Ali gets into trouble when he falls in love with a Jewish girl, the daughter of one of the Jewish elders. He engages the assistance of a dealer in magic to help him put a spell on the girl to ensure she would return his love. When they discover his crime, they are furious but forgive him. They give him 60 days to find a Muslim wife, which he does.Things slowly get better between Ali and the Jews. They learn to trust one another again and believe he is a good man. They are happy to have him, since they are always worried about what might happen. Most of them still remembered the horrific reign of al-Hakim the Horrible, who had destroyed over a dozen synagogues. The current caliph has been friendly to the Jews, but one never could be certain; these type of alliances frequently shifted.Lukas interweaves a third narrative into his book – a charming one about two wealthy Protestant widows who travel to Cairo in 1897 with Dr. Solomon Schechter in search of treasures rumored to be still up in the attic of the synagogue. There were worrisome stories circulating about someone stealing some of its precious contents. Mrs. Margaret Gibson, one of the widows, can hardly contain her enthusiasm about what they might uncover – hoping secretly it might be the precious Ezra Scroll, which would be the find of the millennium.“If it truly existed, if they found it, if they were able to bring it back to Cambridge, the implications would not be greater,” Lukas wrote. “It was an idea almost too delicious to ponder. An indisputable source text for the Old Testament, without hint or error or innovation, the Ezra Scroll would be the greatest archeological discovery.”When the author finally returns us to Joseph’s life in our own contemporary time, we learn about his grand adventures in Cairo. He has reconnected with his father’s family and found an unlikely lover in the most unexpected of places. He sits quietly in the room where his father once slept and reads the love letters his father kept from his mother, saddened about what might have been.He traces the crumbs of Jewish life left in Cairo; even finding a dilapidated synagogue where he sings and dances and prays ecstatically with a few scattered Jews who have remained. But the religious feelings of that special night don’t last – they are only the genesis of what is to come. He begins to find himself almost obsessively drawn to researching relics of the Jewish past in Egypt, with the same seriousness of purpose Mrs. Margaret Gibson exhibited over a hundred years ago in 1897.Joseph still isn’t certain what he is looking for, but thinks the answers to his malaise are nestled in his exhausting search, in the hours and days and months he spends plumbing the scraps of paper and other artifacts that are still left in the graveyards and storage bins of crumbling synagogues in Egypt. We start to feel that Joseph senses there might have been a moment in time that slipped by us – when history might have traveled in a completely different and wondrous direction, creating a world that might have allowed his parents to stay together.Joseph’s father is dead and he misses him, but the younger watchman feels more alive than he ever has. The mysteries he is uncovering fascinate him, as does everything about the ancient past. The same could be said for Lukas, who demonstrates in this novel his sublime ability to enchant us with unforgettable characters and moving stories that linger with us long after we have finished his magical book.
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