Alexandrian Summer Read online

  ALEXANDRIAN SUMMER

  www.newvesselpress.com

  First published in Hebrew in 1978 as Kayits Alexandroni

  Copyright © 2015 Yitzhak Gormezano Goren

  Translation Copyright © 2015 New Vessel Press

  Introduction Copyright © 2015 André Aciman

  Published by arrangement with

  The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  The author would like to express gratitude to Charline Spektor.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goren, Yitzhak Gormezano

  [Kayits Alexandroni. English]

  Alexandrian Summer/ Yitzhak Gormezano Goren; translation by Yardenne Greenspan.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-939931-20-7

  Library of Congress Control Number 2014921051

  I. Israel -- Fiction

  “And to every people after their language”

  Book of Esther I : 22

  Published with the support of the

  Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, Israel

  and the Cultural Department of the Consulate

  of Israel, New York

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. FROM TWENTY YEARS AWAY

  2. A FAMILY FROM CAIRO

  3. THE ROYAL FAMILY

  4. SERVANTS

  5. EMILIE

  6. DAVID

  7. VICTORICO

  8. KUDJOOCOME

  9. ANOTHER BABA AU RHUM

  10. I’LL MAKE YOU A QUEEN

  11. NEFERTITI

  12. A VERY NICE GAME

  13. HE SEES YOU!

  14. MARCELINO

  15. LEILA

  16. THE TURK IS ALL MAN

  17. IT’S EITHER ME OR …

  18. A LETTER TO CAIRO

  19. LILLY MON AMOUR

  20. A GREAT, RARE BLESSING

  21. YALLA, YA IBNI, LET’S GO, MY SON!

  22. UNE P.

  23. IVANHOE

  24. BABA AU RHUM

  25. BECAUSE OF A GAME

  26. A CHANGE

  27. I WILL

  28. DON’T WORRY, YA BABA

  29. IN THE ACT

  30. ARABESQUE

  31. IN A FOREIGN LAND

  32. EYEWITNESS

  33. STAIN

  34. INVESTIGATING JUDGE

  35. NO ES A LA MODA HOY

  36. TEARS

  37. BLANCHE

  38. TO DIE

  39. I’LL PRAY FOR YOU

  40. HAKHAM FERRERA

  41. A SPECIAL PRAYER

  42. THE STREET LAMPLIGHTER

  43. OO HALASNA! AND THAT’S THAT!

  44. RAIN

  Introduction

  ON DECEMBER 21, 1951, YITZHAK GORMEZANO GOREN, aged ten and accompanied by his parents, left his home on Rue Delta in Alexandria to rejoin his two brothers who had already moved to Israel. That the whole family decided to leave Egypt as early as 1951 shows that they had the uncanny prescience to read the writing on the wall long before most Egyptian Jews realized that their days in the country were numbered.

  The military coup that was to overthrow King Farouk in 1952 and, with his ouster, eventually dissolve all remnants of multi-national life in Egypt, can only confirm the Gormezano Gorens’ sense that life as they’d known it in Alexandria was fast coming to an end. Surging anti-Western and anti-Semitic rhetoric on the streets and in radio broadcasts had turned Egypt into a tinderbox that was to explode with the Suez Canal War of 1956, a war that proved disastrous to Egypt’s European community. French and British nationals were instantly expelled, their exodus immediately followed by the expulsion of the majority of Egypt’s 85,000 Jews, most of whose ancestors had been living along the Nile and its Delta for more than a millennium and long before the advent of Islam.

  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. The outward signs were deceptive enough to placate everyone’s worst fears: money, beaches, tennis, races, gambling, servants, friends, visits, outings, sugary delights; the whole fabric of day-to-day life smoothed over by that invigorating source of nattering called gossip, guile, and more gossip.

  This, after all, was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-sexual, multi-everything society where Copt, Jew, Muslim, Catholic, and Greek Orthodox lived tolerably well together and where multilingualism was the order of the day. Everyone was part Levantine, part European, part Egyptian, and one hundred percent hodgepodge, just as everyone’s sentences were spiced with words and expressions lifted from French, Italian, Arabic, Ladino, Turkish, Greek, English, and whatever else came by. Tart-to-toxic bons mots in a mix of six to eight languages could singe you just enough to shake you up but without causing any damage. Similarly, the mix of populations was never perfect, and cultures and creeds jostled one another without scruple. There again, the tussling was amicable enough and never deadly. But no one was fooled for long. The peaceful coexistence of so many creeds and nationalities may have been asking too much of mankind and in the end was too good to be true. It never lasts; it never did.

  But this is still summer, and as happens every year, hordes of Cairenes would descend upon Alexandria to summer there. The host family and their guest family go back years together. The son of one family is a jockey who hopes to win on the racetrack, while the daughter of the other family asks him to choose between her and horses. She tempts him at the beach with her body, but the young man resists, only to end up being taken to a brothel by his father. Meanwhile, his younger brother is a compulsive sex machine who’ll undress for any boy who so much as cuddles up to him. There are many more characters, each one, in the end, destined to spar with the other, even when there’s something like love or not quite love between them. Nothing is ever perfect. In the end nothing could patch up the billowy screen that unbeknownst to everyone was fast being ripped apart.

  Things could get worse. When a Jewish jockey wins the summer’s race against a Muslim, a virulent fever of anti-Semitism erupts upon the city, and Alexandria is almost ready to burst into flames. Anti-Semitism is brutal and ugly, but Gormezano Goren is by no means unaware that the contemptuous treatment of Arabs, particularly of Arab servants in Jewish and European households, is no less disquieting a harbinger of Muslim unrest and rage. A servant should never stop to think that a Jewish boy’s toy train could cost seven times what he earns to feed his kids each month.

  This striking example highlights Gormezano Goren’s light touch whenever seeking to convey the resentment and bitterness forever brewing beneath the surface in Muslim-Jewish relations. In another passage, he nimbly demonstrates how combustible were the dealings between both groups by showing what happens when an Egyptian jockey accuses his Jewish competitor of drugging his racehorse. Mass hysteria could easily erupt. These are small, incidental observations but they speak volumes. Ultimately, in a world being scuttled far too quickly for anyone to gauge the extent of the damaged relations between Arabs and Jews, Gormezano Goren’s words are as prophetic as they are disturbing: “Times have changed, and Jews have changed.”

  Alexandrian Summer is not so much the story of a peculiar culture or of a particular class or even of a specific moment in history. It is the story of what could only be called a “way of life”—an altogether unquantifiable and elusive term that conveys only a
fraction of what life was like for the Jews of Egypt. Every day was lived as if it were the last. What came after Egypt was fantasy and fear.

  I knew that way of life well. I was born into it on the very year Yitzhak left Alexandria. That way of life lasted another fifteen years until my Jewish family too was expelled from Egypt. I knew the beaches, I knew the taste of special foods, I knew the scent of clothes drying in the sun. And I knew Rue Delta, since I too lived on that street. It is on Rue Delta that I spent my last night in Alexandria. Our house, like the Gormezano Gorens’, was located midway between the beach and the racetrack. I too have watched the races and walked from the races to the beach and from the beach to the races.

  In my long years away, I have met others who had lived on Rue Delta. I have even met someone whom I did not know in Alexandria but with whom it came as a total surprise to discover that the two of us had grown up in the identical building. At first, I found it hard to believe, and in the café where we met that first time, I asked her to map out the layout of her parents’ apartment on a paper napkin. Hers seemed totally wrong. It couldn’t possibly have been the same building. But then it suddenly hit me that she was not wrong at all; her apartment was identical to ours except that hers had the exact, but reverse layout. What luck, I thought. Everything seemed settled … except for a round room. I asked her if her apartment had a round room in the back. No, theirs didn’t have such a room. But then she thought about it, gave out a sudden cry, and had an epiphany. Yes, theirs did have a round room and she knew its precise spot. It was just that she hadn’t thought of that room in over sixty years! No one used that room, no one lived in it. In both our cases it had become a storage, bric-a-brac space. And as we described that room to each other, we could almost make out the moldy, woody smell of the space, which in her family’s, as in ours, was the last stop for dead chairs and defunct cabinets and chests of drawers.

  Alexandrian Summer is a return to a mythical past, to a lost paradise that was not really a paradise but that, being lost, has, over the years, acquired all the makings of one. One’s childhood is always yearned for, and this is young Yitzhak’s—or Robert, as he is called in the book—paradise.

  I still remember our last year in Alexandria. By then, our assets had been frozen and my father’s factory nationalized, and even our cars were no longer ours, though we were allowed to drive them. Our days were numbered, and we knew it.

  Or did we? My father claimed that he would have remained in Egypt even without an income. Come to think of it I myself could not even conceive of a life outside Egypt. Our living room and in the end even the round room in the back were packed with suitcases, and still all of us were convinced this was all for show, as if by going through the motions of packing and pretending we were indeed leaving, we were merely placating a hostile deity who would, at the last instant, spare us the final leave taking and tell us it was all a test, just a test. We were never going away.

  Ironically, that final year is the one I remember best, because it was the most tumultuous. I remember my grandmother and her sister, my great aunt, and I remember the bickering with neighbors and the tussles with my brother and the fights between my parents, and the loud screams when our servants fought with those of our neighbors; everyone’s temper was volcanic that year, because it was clear that things were falling apart and that we were on our last legs and still couldn’t believe that the end was near.

  But I remember Saturdays. We weren’t religious, though I recall my great aunt turning on the radio loud on Saturday mornings to hear songs in both Yiddish and Ladino. She preferred the Ashkenazi songs and prayers, and to the sound of these songs I remember she would start preparing for Saturday’s lunch, because there were always guests on Saturdays. And even if we didn’t exaggerate the Sabbath spirit, still there was a festive air about the household, and our cook Abdou, who spoke Ladino, would put on his cleanest outfit and utter those few words in Hebrew that he knew far better than I did. In Gormezano Goren’s own words, “A pleasant breeze blew from the sea. The tumult of bathers sounded from afar: Muslims, Christians, and Jews desecrating the Sabbath. On the street, cars honked hysterically. The entire city rumbled and roared, and nevertheless a Sabbath serenity was felt all around.”

  Every Alexandrian remembers this way of life and knows it is forever lost. At the very least, Alexandrian Summer gives us one final, splendid season in this mythical metropolis.

  André Aciman

  To my brother Haim-Victor

  who was born in Alexandria,

  immigrated to Israel,

  lived most of his life in the United States

  and considered himself a citizen of the world

  ALEXANDRIAN SUMMER

  1. FROM TWENTY YEARS AWAY

  The Sporting Club neighborhood, the horse racing tracks beyond the tramlines. At the intersection of Rue Delta and the Corniche, by the sea, stands house number twenty-four, all seven of its stories (we used to climb up to the flat roof and shoot paper arrows down at the industrious ants running around on the sidewalk, back and forth, as if there were purpose to all this frenzy).

  An Arab doorman, Badri, stands guard, squinting at the sun. His face is tan and emaciated. His little boy, Abdu, loiters at his side, helping him watch the shadows stretching over the sidewalk and the passing cars, headed toward the sea. Badri and his son welcome anyone approaching the building with an alert greeting, “Ahalan, ya sidi,” full of expectation: Will the guest give bakshish or not? If the guest does tip them, they escort him with bows all the way to the elevator door. If he doesn’t—they point lazily in the direction of the moldy duskiness.

  The elevator is ancient, barred with black metal and faded gold openwork and bitten by reddish rust. The door slams with a metallic shake, and … a miracle! The elevator rises with a buzz, dragging with effort a looping tail that grows longer as the elevator ascends. Chilling stories have been told about power outages between the fourth and fifth floors; fights between neighbors, beginning in the stairwell, intensified in the gloom of the elevator, later to dissipate outside, in the subtropical sun that ridicules all human endeavors.

  Second floor, that’s as far as I go. If you aren’t lazy, you could climb it by foot. A copper plate bearing the name of a Jewish family, descendants of Sephardic Jews from the era of the Spanish Expulsion (their last name is the name of their hometown with the suffix “ano”). The doorbell rings. A dark-haired and skinny servant opens the door and addresses you in lilting Mediterranean French: “Oui, missier, quisqui voulez?” and you stutter and ask: “Is this where Robert … Robby lives?”

  The servant is surprised that a thirty-year-old man is interested in a ten-year-old boy, but he does not voice his opinion as long as he isn’t asked to. “Robby—there!” He signals toward the balcony, at the far end of the apartment. “Should I call him?”

  “No, no! Please, there’s no need.”

  The Arab servant looks at you with a hint of suspicion. “Who you, missier?” and you give him your name, Hebraized to fit Israel of the 1950s, which rejected all foreign sounds. The servant does not decipher any connection between the two names. To him the strange name could be Greek or Turkish or Italian or Maltese or Armenian or French or British or even American. Alexandria is the center of the world, a cosmopolitan city. You want to add: yes, I used to be Robert, too. Twenty years ago. I’m coming from twenty years away. I won’t interrupt, I just want to watch. I won’t interfere, God forbid. No one will notice me. I just want to tell the story of one summer, a Mediterranean summer, an Alexandrian summer.

  2. A FAMILY FROM CAIRO

  Waves of memories of that city—Alexandria—rise and recede. The story of the Alexandrian summer does not present itself easily. It is wrapped in layers of nostalgia, of oblivion, of generalizations. I search for the objective, the distinguishing. Should I tell it in first or third person? Should I use real names or give my characters aliases, adding a note along the lines of “any resemblance to real persons is purely inci
dental”? These may be small details, but they are the ones holding back my pen.

  I want to tell you about the Hamdi-Ali family. What is it like, really, this family? The Hamdi-Ali family embodies joie de vivre, the unending Mediterranean energy. Yes, Mediterranean. And maybe it’s because of this Mediterranean-ness that I’m sitting here, telling this story. Here, in Israel, which feels much more like Eastern Europe to me. I might as well be sitting on the shore of the Baltic Sea, for all the distance I feel from the Mediterranean, which can be seen from my window in Tel Aviv. That’s why I am eager to tell the story of the Hamdi-Alis, and the story of Alexandria. A Jewish family from Cairo that came to Alexandria to spend a summer of joy. Alexandria of the days of King Farouk, with his hook-mustache and his dark glasses, the Alexandria I knew as a child, this Alexandria, which has been feeding my imagination for over twenty years, from the day I left it on December 21st, 1951, when I was ten years old.

  A storm brewed as we sailed from the port toward the lighthouse, and didn’t stop until we reached the shores of Italy. There, we were welcomed by Christmas snow. Winter was at its peak, but me, I wish to tell the story of a summer, a summer in Alexandria, an Alexandrian summer: vacation, horse races, sailboats, fishing for sea urchins, swallowing crabs, platonic (and not so platonic) romances, traffic jams, traffic jams, traffic jams, honking, honking, honking of cars and cars and more cars. All rushing toward the Corniche, the busy road overlooking the sea, where vacationers at the beach rented shacks so they wouldn’t be forced to undress in the public dressing rooms with “all those Arabs.”

  3. THE ROYAL FAMILY

  Car. Car. Truck. Motorcycle. Another car. Yes, he made it! He got it down. Next: no point in listing a bicycle. Another motorcycle. Yes … it’s hard to see the license plate number from the balcony—but he has it down! What a beauty— there’s a luxury car. Quick, write down the number. DeSoto, Chrysler, Lincoln Continental. When they approach the intersection they are forced to slow down and then he can write down their numbers. And if there’s a traffic jam he can even rest for a few seconds. What a festival of sounds!