“Guarda, guarda questo giardino. Senti, senti questi fiori d’arancio,” Alexandra sang, a small angelic figure hovering over my crib—“Look, look at this garden, inhale, inhale the orange flowers.” She sang to me years before I would learn to appreciate Italian gardens, and the heady scent of orange flowers, and the Sea of Sorrento and my hopelessly romantic and ill-fated grandmother, winding her way through the streets of old Cairo.
I LINGERED FOR DAYS—a child without a name.
Legend had it that hundreds of years back, my ancestor, Rabbi Laniado of Aleppo, stricken with a fatal malady, had glimpsed the Angel of Death lurking by his bedside. Since the doctors were powerless to save him, he took matters into his own hands—he changed his name and instructed his family to proclaim he was no longer Rabbi Laniado. The stratagem worked like a charm. He tricked the Angel of Death into leaving his room, and survived to a ripe old age.
Yes, a name could do that—it could quite literally mean the difference between life and death.
As they pondered and debated, my family passed on a host of perfectly fine choices. My sister’s refusal to be known as Zarifa had put the fear of God into my parents about Arabic names. This meant that my legion of aunts and cousins, any of whose names could have been worthy choices—Bahia, Ensol, and my favorite, Leila, which meant “night”—weren’t considered. My father, recalling the tearful scenes and wrenching arguments with my sister, who insisted on being called Suzette, didn’t push any of them.
Yet tradition dictated that I be named after a relative. My sister was still identified as Zarifa on official documents. César was Ezra, after my paternal grandfather, who had died decades earlier. My other brother was named Isaac, after my maternal grandfather, who had betrayed and abandoned the family, yet was so beloved by my mom she chose to ignore the inherent risks.
Finally, César broke the impasse. He had a crush on a teacher at school, Mademoiselle Lucette, and when he told her of my birth, she embraced him and gave him a kiss. Flush from the show of affection, César ran home and told my startled family that I should be named after his pretty Parisian institutrice. My parents looked at each other, then at my sister and at Nonna Alexandra, lingering by my crib, softly crooning her Italian ballads.
My father nodded yes, and my mother lit up, and my sister offered no objections, and Alexandra continued singing, and that was that.
“Ça lui portera bonheur, Inshallah,” my mother remarked; It will bring her good luck.
BARELY A MONTH LATER, the world seemed about to explode: on October 29, 1956, war broke out in Suez. I screamed when planes flew overhead and air-raid sirens warned of an imminent attack. My mother said that my cries were so shrill and piercing, they left everyone in the house feeling rattled and unsure about what to fear most, another incursion by the British, French, and Israelis, or another outburst from Loulou.
That was how I was known—Loulou. It was so much more than a nickname, it was also my persona, the youngest of several siblings, doted on and feted by all. My father deftly took my Parisian moniker and made it sound Arabic simply by emphasizing the first syllable—LOUlou, not LouLOU, as the French would have said it.
I was a frost blossom, the infant daughter of a man in his late fifties. I came at a time in his life when he was feeling discouraged, and the world seemed to have lost much of its promise and possibilities, so that he greeted my arrival in the way a patch of winter shrubbery embraces a small flower that manages to sprout in its midst. He was still shaken by my mother’s demands for a divorce, her refusal to tolerate the freedom he found so necessary to survive, and befuddled by all the disputes at home, where Suzette, now twelve, kept sparring with him at every turn, challenging his authority and mocking his faith.
Loulou as an infant in Cairo.
What he did—perhaps by way of revenge—was to lavish on me all the tenderness and affection he was thought incapable of giving. And I, left in the care of the Captain, basked and reveled in his love, found his quiet smile more comforting than my mother’s elegant phrases, and experienced none of the harshness and imperious manner that had so alienated my older siblings, in particular, my sister.
I was barely six weeks old when the British and the French and the Israelis pounded Egypt with their rockets. César was placed in charge of securing both the house and me. He made sure all the wooden shutters were bolted shut, and then carried the crib to the middle of the cool, dark bedroom at the back. Loud, jarring air-raid sirens were frequently sounded, a signal to turn out all the lights and lie low. The explosions were only a few kilometers away, yet we could still occasionally see planes in the sky, and César, from his perch by the window, watched the clouds of thick black smoke in the distance. The sirens were sounded again once a raid was over, and my family huddled for safety in the back room of Malaka Nazli.
I could not stop crying.
The turmoil in Egypt cast an enormous shadow over my arrival. A few months before my birth, Nasser defied the world by nationalizing the Suez Canal, an act that enraged the British and the French. Nasser’s rhetoric against Israel grew ever more belligerent, and he sent fedayeen guerrillas to launch attacks inside the country. The Israelis, convinced he was planning to invade, decided to strike preemptively. They found a willing ally in Britain’s prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, who had compared Nasser to Mussolini and even Hitler, and was passionate about the need to overthrow him. In a secret meeting, Sir Anthony, the French prime minister, Guy Mollet, and Israel’s David Ben-Gurion agreed to send their armies into Egypt, take back the canal, and topple Nasser.
The world seemed to be coming to an end. Within a week of the assault on Egypt, Soviet troops moved into Hungary, using a massive show of tanks and soldiers to crush a revolt against Communist rule. Despite their own brutal invasion of another country, the Soviets deftly drew attention to the Western show of force in the Suez, loudly condemned it, and threatened to attack London and Paris. They were prepared to use “modern weapons of destruction” if there wasn’t an immediate pullback.
President Eisenhower abandoned his traditional allies and joined the Soviets in demanding an immediate cease-fire in the Middle East.
Prime Minister Eden, shocked and profoundly humiliated, withdrew his troops within days, as did the French. But it was Eden’s capitulation in Suez that had the most profound historical significance, for it meant both the end of the British prime minister and the end of the British Empire.
The Suez war, which ended on November 6, led to convulsive changes inside Egypt. Anyone holding British or French passports was given as little as forty-eight or seventy-two hours to leave the country. Families who had lived in Egypt for generations, whose children were born there and knew no other way of life, were escorted to the airport and, as squads of rifle-toting soldiers watched, put on planes bound for Europe.
Nasser’s speeches brimmed with venom. He vowed to rid Egypt of all “foreigners,” to eliminate the Jewish state, and stamp out the last vestiges of colonialism and the monarchy. People lost their jobs and livelihood overnight when the regime sequestered a business, placing Nasser’s officers and loyalists in charge, and insisting that most employees be Egyptian nationals. Entire industries were nationalized as Nasser moved closer and closer to the Soviets.
At the movies, during intermission, theaters showed reels of Nasser and Om Kalsoum toasting the defeat of the European and Israeli marauders. The singer was one relic of the Farouk monarchy who was thriving. Because of her overwhelming popularity with the Egyptian people, Nasser courted her and even professed to be among her biggest fans. These days, the woman my father had adored, and who was said to have been his mistress, delivered fiery anti-Israel tirades and positioned herself as a true daughter of the revolution.
The Jews of Egypt followed the swirl of events with a sense of profound foreboding. The charmed life they had known under Farouk and his late father, King Fouad—the sense of being one of the most cosseted and most privileged Jewish communities in the world
—was coming to an end.
The repercussions were felt in every household, including mine. My siblings all attended French schools that found themselves suddenly bereft of much of their staff. At the Lycée Français de Bab-el-Louk, where my sister was a student, Suzette had taken gym classes where she learned to dance the quadrille, a graceful eighteenth-century French square dance. In the aftermath of Suez, the school instituted special military training courses for its girls to teach them to fight against the Western—and Jewish—invaders. My sister and her schoolmates were handed cumbersome old rifles, some dating back to World War I, and taught how to aim and shoot. At the Collège Français, my eleven-year-old brother César was mastering the same military skills, practicing on a rifle he could barely lift.
There was also a strong new emphasis on learning Arabic. In prior years, Egyptian girls, if they were members of the privileged class, disdained their native language and showed off their wealth and refinement by conversing only in French or English or Italian—any language but their own. But now at the lycée, Suzette found that she had a heavy Arabic courseload, in keeping with the ethos of the revolution.
My sister embraced the fitness program and learned to sing the new Egyptian national anthem with gusto. Contrarian to her innermost core, she sided with Nasser and told anyone who would listen, including my startled family, that the British and the French were wrong to have invaded and that the canal belonged to the Egyptians.
But even she wanted to leave: all the young people realized that they had no future in Egypt.
The grand synagogue on Adly Street became a hub of frenetic activity, the scene every day of hurried weddings. As families prepared to flee to any country that would have them, as they plotted their escape literally to the ends of the earth—Australia, Venezuela, Canada, South Africa, Brazil—young lovers chose to tie the knot lest they be separated forever. Engagements that would have lasted months were now barely a couple of days, while weddings that usually took a whole evening were performed in an hour.
Rabbi Chaim Nahum Effendi, Egypt’s venerable chief rabbi, found himself officiating at multiple ceremonies in a single day. These were assembly-line weddings, with little of the pomp and ceremony that had marked a traditional affair at the Gates of Heaven.
Young brides hugged their parents good-bye and took the first boat out.
There wasn’t even time to cry—there was only a feeling that one had to get out at any cost.
Egypt had witnessed this kind of hysteria before, in 1948, during the first Arab-Israeli war, and then in January 1952, after the Day of the Four Hundred Fires. Somehow, the sense of hopelessness and finality seemed more intense in the aftermath of Suez.
It was no longer a question of whether to leave Egypt, but when.
MY FATHER URGED EACH one of his brothers and sisters to go immediately to Israel, the one country that would take them, no questions asked.
But at home on Malaka Nazli, my father made no move to travel anywhere. “C’est à cause de Loulou,” he’d say if anyone asked. We would leave too, but for concerns about my welfare, he explained. After what happened to Baby Alexandra, he wasn’t prepared to put his delicate infant daughter in a perilous situation, taking her on a long sea voyage she might not be able to survive, not to mention resettlement in a primitive country like Israel where it was whispered that new arrivals were put up in tents or metal barracks that were as hot as ovens when the sun shone. Still, he was committed to abandoning Egypt “quand Loulou est un peu plus grande”—when I was a bit older.
It would be only a matter of months, he vowed.
The patriarch had spoken. Members of my extended family prepared to embark on what was, in effect, a second Exodus. One by one, all my aunts and uncles—Marie and her six children, Oncle Raphael, his two beautiful daughters and lone son, Oncle Shalom, Tante Rebekah, her husband and one of her sons, were set to leave for the Promised Land.
“On va se revoir bientôt—Inshallah,” my dad vowed.
Then it was Alexandra’s turn to leave.
Alexandra’s support systems were vanishing one after the other, like the cigarettes she chain-smoked. The cousins and second cousins who had kept her out of abject poverty—or allowed her to survive in spite of it—were departing in droves. The communauté juive, with its chaotic but fairly generous charitable network, on whom she could count for the occasional handout or a meal, was also being dismantled. All the major donors, as well as the minor donors, were disappearing. The Hôpital Israélite was shut down in 1956, and it was all the community could do to ensure that the Jewish home for the aged in Heliopolis remained open, and to donate money to the Yellow Palace, the state insane asylum, so that Jewish patients would continue to receive care.
Alexandra’s only real option seemed to be her son Félix in Israel, who sent word she could join him. But no one had any illusions about Oncle Félix, the charming huckster and ne’er-do-well who had stolen my mother’s engagement ring and pawned the precious stones on the eve of her wedding, who had shown himself unable to keep a promise or commitment his entire life.
No one had any illusions, that is, except Alexandra. She would have loved to move in with us, of course, but she was so timid and unassuming she wouldn’t have proposed it on her own, and my father wouldn’t have stood for it, and my mother was too weak to insist on it, and my sister was too young and too frazzled, her anger too diffuse, to demand it, the way that she alone seemed capable of standing up to my father.
Alexandra gave up her small room and her favorite coffeepot and moved in with us while her papers were finalized.
Since all the beds were occupied, she was offered a trunk in a corner of the living room, cushioned with blankets and pillows. And there Alexandra slept in her final days with us, a small frightened woman on the eve of a journey she had no wish to undertake, lying on top of a large old-fashioned black trunk made up to look like a bed.
A few weeks later, she left for Alexandria, where she was met by relatives—the wealthy branch of the once-grand and noble famille Dana. They, too, were hurriedly planning their escapes, but in one final act of charity—for they were renowned as great benefactors of the city—they prepared a small suitcase for my grandmother, and stuffed it with whatever they could gather: bits of clothing and lingerie, a couple of books she would never read because of her cataracts, several packs of cigarettes, biscuits, hard-boiled eggs and tins of cookies lest she go hungry on the boat.
My family went to see Alexandra as she prepared to depart. Suzette was shocked—my grandmother’s shiny black hair had turned white. It had changed color in the time it had taken for her to travel from Cairo to the city she had abandoned in her youth. Alexandra was assured we’d be joining her any day.
Perhaps she believed it—perhaps we all did. It seemed unthinkable that we would never see each other again, that families would go off in a thousand different directions, like the ships setting off from the port of Alexandria.
The dock was impossibly crowded, as if all the remaining Jews of Egypt had chosen that moment to go. The thin old woman with the white hair tied neatly back in a bun was allowed on board without a fuss. Nobody offered to help her, or to carry her luggage. Chivalry, once an essential ingredient of life in Egypt, had also disappeared, as if it too were a relic of colonialism that had to be eradicated.
Alexandra of Alexandria was gone, an old woman, nearly blind, trying to hold on to her heavy valise on a crowded boat.
My sister, who would grow up to marry a man named Alex and would name her only child Alexander, was inconsolable. She left us and wandered off to a local cinema, where she bought a ticket for a couple of piasters. The theater was playing Love Me Tender, which starred the new American heartthrob Elvis Presley. Suzette cried from the first scene to the last. Seated alone in that cool darkened theater, as Alexandra had always done, my sister cried and cried watching Elvis and listened to him sing the lyrics to the song that she would forever associate with that awful day in the summer
of 1957.
“Love me tender, love me dear, tell me you are mine. I’ll be yours through all the years, till the end of time,” Elvis sang, as my sister thought longingly of our grandmother, and wondered how she was faring on her choppy and hopelessly solitary journey.
CHAPTER 7
Alexandra in the Promised Land
Once in Israel, my relatives’ worst fears were realized. Some were placed in rugged settlements in the middle of the desert or in remote agricultural areas where home was a tent, an armylike barrack, or a flimsy structure made of aluminum. Tante Marie, appalled by the squalor of their new life, wondered why on earth she had listened to my father. Even in their diminished circumstances and with the convulsive political situation, Egypt had been better than this.
And where was Leon? Why had he sent them to this wilderness?—which is what she considered Kibbutz Givat Brenner.
My dad’s letters to them were both reassuring and noncommittal. My cousins were living in a primitive prefab dwelling made of aluminum siding; the rooms were unbearably hot. Their diet was spartan, the opulent dinners of chicken and meat they had enjoyed in Cairo a wistful memory.
The only solace came from the person my father most hated, my lost uncle, Salomon the priest. Shortly after arriving, there was Père Jean-Marie, come to comfort his family from his monastery in Jerusalem. He was like a vision, striding through the fields in his long black priestly garb, and the residents of Kibbutz Givat Brenner could only watch with amazement as the stocky, well-built man with a full beard, a large cross around his neck, and one dangling at his waist, made his way through their commune.
The kibbutzniks were even more astonished when the object of his visit turned out to be the desperately poor family of refugees from Egypt, in particular, a small, pudgy woman who couldn’t speak a word of Hebrew and who hadn’t stopped crying from the moment she’d reached Givat Brenner.
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit Page 10