The Jewish lotus-eaters of Alexandria

 A novel by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren harks back to the paradise of cosmopolitan Alexandria, where Jews raced horses, gambled and hopped from cafe to cafe. Review by Gerald Sorin in Haaretz (with thanks: Lily):

Stanley Beach, Alexandria
 
In the late 1970s, when Yitzhak Gormezano Goren was working on “Alexandrian Summer,” his first novel, he was young and daring enough to omit allusions to the Holocaust, Palestine and the kibbutz – themes that suffused the novels of great Israeli writers including A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz and Aharon Appelfeld. He did not refuse to engage with these prevailing literary motifs or “Zionist questions,” as he has recently called them; he simply chose to write about the world in which he spent the first 10 years of his life – the opulent and glamorous Egyptian city of Alexandria.

By using alternating points of view Goren delivers an arresting story shaped by the same individual, during two periods in his life, 20 years apart. We see, and, through the author’s narrative magic, almost hear the voice of Robby, a 10-year-old boy growing up in an insular, illusory cocoon of upper-middle class Sephardic Jews, and the reminiscences and reflections of Robby as an adult.
Some critics have incorrectly labeled “Alexandrian Summer” as fictionalized autobiography. The novel is certainly self-referential in that the author, like Robby, grew up in Alexandria in a well-to-do family, which – also like Robby’s – fled Egypt in 1951 to transplant itself in Israel. But there is much more in this story that is the product of the author’s imagination.

Readers will be quickly drawn into a city the author describes in lush, voluptuous terms as a “paradise by the sea” where sensuality is pervasive. One could argue that Alexandria itself – and not a thinly disguised Goren, or Robby – is the essential character of this book. Though a boy of sweetly attractive innocence, Robby is simply not the most important figure in the story. The Sephardic Hamdi-Ali clan, including two sons and a daughter, is for the most part the focus of Goren’s rich invention. They, along with Robby’s parents, Salem, an Arab servant, and several gossipy neighbors provide the narrative and the meaning of “Alexandrian Summer.”

We meet the Hamdi-Ali family in 1951 as new summer tenants in Robby’s parents’ spacious house, walking distance from the beach. Joseph Hamdi-Ali, handsome and patriarchal, is a respected famous former jockey. His name and Turkish background, however, are a matter of both wonder and doubt in the minds of other cosmopolitan Jewish vacationers from Cairo, who converse in French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, English and Ladino. Note the absence of Arabic.
Joseph has never recovered from the death of his horse, which he appears to have loved even more than his wife. His thoroughbred gone, his career as a jockey collapsed, he now counts on his eldest son, David, a good-looking, obsessive and arrogant hotshot jockey, to fulfill his hopes. At the same time, Joseph ignores his 11-year-old-son Victor. Often humiliated and sometimes beaten by his distressingly impatient older brother, Victor, suffering and apparently “disturbed,” seduces Robby and his friends into potentially harmful homosexual activities, while several sets of absent parents are busy playing cards or betting on the ponies.

These Alexandria Jews are cosmopolitan, and while not entirely secular, they are more likely to be found gambling, café-hopping and touring, than attending to their children or in the synagogue, even on the Sabbath.

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