By 1954, Naguib—the kinder, gentler face of the revolution, the one who had tried so hard to reassure the Jewish community that all would be well—found himself on the outs. The firebrand colonel who had masterminded the revolution, Gamal Abdel Nasser, emerged as the true power; and he made it clear he had no use for Naguib’s conciliatory moves, including toward the Jews. Nasser moved swiftly to unseat Naguib even though the general held the titles of president and prime minister and chairman of the Revolution Command Council.
Lest anyone had any lingering doubt about the brutal nature of the new regime, Nasser placed the fifty-five-year-old general under house arrest.
Naguib—who had helped eliminate the monarchy and its trappings—was confined to a palace that had belonged to a pasha.
People still carried on, went out, left Cairo to enjoy the summer holidays, but it was with a heavy heart, a sense of foreboding.
My family couldn’t bear to vacation in Ras el-Bar after the summer of 1951. Instead, we opted for Alexandria, which Dad actually preferred because it was such a lively city with so much for us to do and for him to do. He rented several rooms in a pretty yellow villa at Sporting, one of the most popular beaches in this city of beaches, and where the bulk of Cairo’s Jewish community congregated.
Villa Lalouche was owned by a widow, Madame Lalouche, who depended on summer tenants to support herself and her disabled son. The house was old and spacious and elegant in a ramshackle way. It had the advantage of being near the racetrack, my father’s great love besides poker. He could go off to the track to bet on the horses during the day and leave my mom and siblings behind to entertain themselves in the relative splendor of Villa Lalouche with its many parlors and lush garden and strange assorted guests, including a beautiful and mysterious Romanian émigré who vacationed there with her little boy and always insisted on wearing white.
Come late afternoon, my siblings counted on my father to return from the track and take them to any one of the delightful patisseries that were all over Alexandria—Délices, which some said surpassed Groppi’s, its archrival in Cairo, and whose windows always had the most magnificent displays of cakes, or popular, smaller establishments such as Athineos or Trianon or Pastroudis that were Greek owned yet specialized in French pastries. Because Dad liked to dine well, he was expansive about going to lovely places with my siblings, treating them to whatever they wanted. There were restaurants all along the Corniche, cafés that overlooked the Mediterranean and served tasty grilled fish and other delicacies. They were invariably thronged.
Sporting Beach was only a block or two away from the Villa Lalouche, and Suzette was thrilled—as long as we were near the sea, she was happy. Back at the villa, she and my brother loved to go down to the garden. It had a jasmine bush, and my sister could spend hours gathering jasmine and then making necklaces out of the flowers. A few feet away, there was a small guava tree César favored. He would reach for a guava and eat it there in the garden, and nothing ever tasted as delicious as the fruit he had picked himself.
My sister was also reunited with her friends from school and would join them in their fancier enclaves. Alexandria was divided into a series of beaches, and some were snazzier than others. Sporting was great fun and lovely, but the cool crowd gathered at San Stefano and Sidi Bishr and whenever Suzette had an invitation, she’d find a way to go.
Even as my sister tried to flee—to the beach, to be with other families, to the garden—she was summoned back to deal with the dramas at home.
Dramas that now flared up even on vacation.
My mother had sunk into a hopeless mode, and every few days she had another outburst—une crise de nerfs. Her usual coping mechanisms—the edifice of rituals and superstitions that she had built to protect herself, to give herself some measure of stability—were crumbling. The prayers and fasts and incense burning she relied on to chase away her demons and ward off the evil eye were no longer enough. She was spiraling out of control—feeling abandoned by her husband on the one hand and, on the other, overwhelmed by three young demanding children and the searing memory of the death of a fourth.
The last couple of years had taken their toll, I suppose. It was hard to predict what would ignite her rages and bouts of hysteria, but they were getting more frequent and more frightening. It was odd because by day, she could be the most dutiful of wives and mothers, rounding up the children to go to the beach, making sure everyone had enough to eat “et plein de distractions”—lots of fun diversions. But then they’d come home, and the darkness would set in even in the light-filled Villa Lalouche.
César and Suzette were the main witnesses to her boundless grief; Isaac was too young to understand, and my father was usually out or would leave at the slightest hint of a scene. Mom could work herself up into a frenzy, begin to scream, pull at her hair, slap herself again and again, her hand beating her cheek in wild, hysterical motions.
My siblings would watch petrified, then one or the other would take action. César would run and get cold water and throw some on her face simply to shock her into calming down. Suzette tried to soothe and reassure her simply by talking to her.
Mom’s pain reached a crescendo that summer at the villa, and one day when she was especially distraught, she threatened to kill herself.
No one knew exactly what had unhinged her. Had Dad stayed out too late? Had the children been unruly?
My sister watched horrified as Mom grabbed a bottle of tincture of iodine that she used to disinfect our cuts and bruises and lifted it to her lips, as if she were going to drink it. Suzette rushed over to stop her. But even as my mother seemed to be going over the edge, she retreated, and it was never clear whether the scene with the bottle of tincture d’iode was a sign of the depths of her sadness or a cry for help or merely a show of histrionics.
Later my mother appeared subdued but fine. She said only that someone must have given her the mauvais oeil, the evil eye.
That was the only explanation tendered for her despair. There was really no one to help a depressed housewife except her immediate family. In this case it meant that my siblings found themselves playing the same watchful role my mother had as a little girl when Alexandra was falling apart.
Even as young children, they became adept at calming her and bringing her around; what choice did they have? In this culture where rabbis served as marriage counselors and there were no psychologists or social workers, there were few options; anyone too far gone was sent to the Yellow Palace, the insane asylum. There wasn’t even a medicine man like the bonesetter of Mouski who could have helped Mom, who could have applied a soothing cream to her fragile soul and set her straight and made her strong again.
· 5 ·
The Porcelain Dolls of Malaka Nazli Street
On the morning of November 14, 1956, Dr. Baroukh Kodsi reported to work as usual at L’Hôpital Israélite. Cairo’s only Jewish hospital, which was located by Malaka Nazli Street, not too far from our house, was filled with patients that day. Many of them were quite poor. They crowded the wards of the troisième classe—the “third class” as the indigent service was called, as if the medical center were some great ocean liner offering different cabin sizes and meals depending on your budget and social rank. The tall, soft-spoken internist who had pulled Mom from the brink a couple of years earlier when she’d battled typhoid fever was much in demand, rushing from patient to patient.
He was in the midst of doing rounds when the news reached him. The Egyptian army had taken over the hospital. Soldiers had encircled the building and were about to enter. The doctors—nearly all of them Jewish—were ordered to leave the premises immediately.
Some of the nurses started crying. Patients looked on bewildered from their beds.
All the physicians lined up and dutifully made their way to the door. They were warned to take nothing with them except their stethoscopes—not their patient charts, not their little black bags or their medicines or syringes. As Dr. Kodsi walked out, a soldier order
ed him to raise his arms in the air, peered at the silver stethoscope he was carrying around his neck, and waved him out the door.
Then it was over. The Jews of Egypt were no longer in control of their own hospital. Dr. Kodsi was told he could not reenter the premises again. What will happen to my patients? he wondered as he stepped outside.
The fall of 1956 was a season of terrible endings and one small beginning—mine. I was born in September; one month later Egypt was engulfed in a war with Israel, France, and Britain over control of the Suez Canal.
The Jewish community was on tenterhooks. How were they going to cope in an increasingly hostile atmosphere—a country where it was clear they were no longer welcome? Many didn’t wait to find out. Within weeks of Suez, they started leaving in droves—faster even than after Farouk’s overthrow four years earlier when the siren song of the revolutionary council and General Naguib kept people vaguely calm and hopeful that the charmed life they had known all these years in the Levant would somehow continue.
But Naguib was languishing under house arrest, and as Nasser consolidated his power and deepened his bonds with the Soviets and Eastern Europeans, any illusion that all would be well disappeared.
It was all a matter of how long you could hold out. Those families who held European passports left immediately: They had no choice and were given a couple of weeks and at times a couple of days to get out. Others lost businesses, jobs, livelihoods, and they, too, were forced to flee.
Dr. Kodsi found that after the expulsion from L’Hôpital Israélite his practice dwindled. Most of his wealthy Jewish patients had left, and his Muslim and Christian patients were avoiding him now. Going to a Jewish doctor was suddenly taboo in this society where once upon a time, it had been perfectly natural for a Muslim to see a Jewish physician, or a Jew to consult a Coptic Christian specialist, while followers of all faiths sought help from their local barsoumi—the bonesetters who were native Egyptian Muslims.
Families who had never ventured far beyond Sakakini or Suleiman Pasha found themselves headed to the ends of the earth. When Australia let it be known it would take in Egyptian Jews, lines formed day and night around the Australian Embassy in Cairo as Jews anxious to secure visas for themselves and their loved ones vied for immigration papers. Then came the rumor that Brazil would also welcome Egyptian-Jewish refugees, and there was a mad rush to its mission as talk in the community focused on what life would be like in Rio and São Paulo.
Cairo turned into one big yard sale as families placed their favorite belongings in the street and invited strangers to come purchase their precious furnishings at bargain basement prices or simply gave them away.
Dr. Kodsi and his fellow doctors decided not to stick around. Offered positions in America, they fled, and the community was left with only a handful of physicians and specialists to take care of emergencies.
It was into this chaos and confusion that I came along. Our friends and relatives were also leaving, but it was as if I were holding my family hostage. Impossible, my father would say ruefully when asked when we were planning to depart: I was too small to travel, too fragile. My mother echoed him and began referring to me as pauvre Loulou, poor Loulou, and the nickname stuck.
Our relatives left one by one. These were wrenching goodbyes because no one really wanted to go and no one felt they had any choice. One after another would make it safely to Israel—the favored destination—and we’d feel so relieved. But then, within a few weeks or months, the sad news would reach us: this uncle had suffered a heart attack and died; that aunt had succumbed to a vicious cancer. And, no, of course, these disastrous, unhappy endings couldn’t all be blamed on their displacement; and yet that is what we felt in our innermost beings—that leaving Egypt and finding themselves stranded in a strange land had been ruinous for our loved ones.
My grandmother Alexandra mournfully took off for Israel to join Oncle Félix. She had never been separated from Mom for more than a few days. How would she possibly survive? Even now that Edith was a grown woman, when she walked with my grandmother through the streets of Cairo, she still held Alexandra’s arm tightly, as she had as a young girl. Alexandra was a regular visitor to our house, and she would happily have lived with us if Dad would only have allowed it.
Away from Edith, my grandmother was barely coping. In the veiled communications that reached us—we weren’t allowed to get direct letters from her since Egypt and Israel were technically at war—we gathered that she was desperately unhappy and longed to be reunited with us again.
We concluded that no matter how dangerous and unpleasant Cairo had become, the world beyond it was much worse. And so we lingered, hoping against hope that the turmoil brought about by Nasser and the revolution would pass.
In those early years, I was often in the care of my father, a wondrous babysitter even after suffering a terrible accident. Dad had fallen in the street a year or two after I was born, and his hip was shattered. Because he was so tall, his injuries were particularly severe.
Alexandra around the time she left Egypt and all that she loved to emigrate to Israel, circa 1957.
Of course, L’Hôpital Israélite was no longer an option. The military controlled it now, and all the Jewish patients had been transferred to other facilities. Dad landed in a small careworn public hospital known as the Demerdash. He spent months and months there, often in a state of excruciating pain. After being discharged, he was essentially homebound, confined to his room overlooking Malaka Nazli Street.
Though he was in constant pain, he could still keep an eye on me, entertain me, share with me the little snacks he ate continuously. He relished the fresh figs and tangerines he bought from the vendors who came directly to our balcony, or plates of feta cheese and olives, along with his favorite, cans of sardines steeped in olive oil that he feasted on every day.
Pouspous, our cat, hovered nearby, and my father tended to include her in all our activities. When we ate lunch, she ate lunch, settling on his knee and delicately reaching with her paw to the table for whatever goody he offered her.
When we sat on the balcony, she made herself at home in his arms or mine. Dad taught me the simple pleasures of taking in the street life in all its splendor. Mom had no patience for that but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and Pouspous also seemed riveted by the rushing crowds and the whirl of traffic. Strangers liked to stop and speak with us because Cairo was a friendly effusive city, and I could have sworn Pouspous was following the conversation and would have joined in with a choice comment or two if only she could.
As the oldest sibling, Suzette was a fallback babysitter. Her idea of taking care of me was simply to take me along whenever she went off to see her friends. Fleeing the turbulence at home, the tensions that still flared between my parents even now that Dad was incapacitated, my sister found refuge with the Wahbas, a family of three sisters—one prettier than the next—and two brothers. Their parents emblemized the ideal of a happy marriage and a proper home life. The Wahbas lived not far from us on Malaka Nazli though they were already looking to move en ville—downtown—where the fashionable set lived. It was a defiant gesture, of course, because Jews were leaving, not finding themselves nicer homes. The Wahbas embraced my sister, showered her with love and understanding, and gave her the peace of mind she lacked at home with us.
Loulou as a toddler at a party, Cairo.
The Wahbas had a nickname for me: la petite poupée en porcelaine, they called me, the little porcelain doll. Suzette had a different take; she dubbed me “The Assassin,” because of a particularly dark look I would get when left on my own. It wasn’t at all that of a doll—I was an anxious, resentful child, both fearsome and fearful at the same time.
Mom wasn’t so much a part of my world those early years. I’d constantly see her running out of the house on her mysterious errands, a whirling dervish of activity, seemingly incapable of stopping. And even when she was back at home, usually by the late afternoon, she would be tutoring Maggy Wahba. Maggy was a whiz
at math but struggled with her literature and composition classes. She’d come after school and settle by the kitchen, and as my mother cooked, Maggy would wail about her latest bewildering assignment from the Lycée Français. Mom would buck her up, remind her of the wonderful grades she received in all her other subjects, and then, as she prepared dinner, she’d dictate the requisite essay. That is how she kept her hand in teaching so many years after she had left L’École Cattaui.
There were four children now, each one of us demanding in our own way. Suzette as a teenager was always angry and clashed constantly with Dad—both were very stubborn. Suzette found my father far too authoritarian, and his efforts to control her invariably backfired: My sister only became more alientated, rejecting whatever he valued, especially religion. Mom was caught in the middle, unable to placate either. My sister was her biggest challenge, always seething and rebellious and on the verge of running away, except that there were no runaways in Cairo, so all Suzette could manage were her escapes to the Wahbas and her other constellation of friends. César was more docile, more malleable, and Mom tended to view him as a godsend from the start, the honest broker who even as a child seemed capable of getting along with everyone. Isaac, like my older sister, was moody from the start.
Loulou being held by Suzette, with Edith standing nearby, at a children’s party thrown by her cousins, Cairo.
Then I came along and Mom, who had always bitterly resented the endless dreary household duties brought on by motherhood, found that she could pawn me off to my father or sister and go on about her business, though I was never exactly sure what that business was.
The Arrogant Years Page 8