Books

World Books Review: Chased out of Paradise

“Light of My Eye” is a superbly written, heart-wrenching novel chronicling the dissolution of Egyptian Jewish life, the tale of people displaced ten years after World War II.

Light of My Eye, by Paula Jacques. Translated from the French by Susan Cohen-Nicole, Holmes & Meier, 260 pages, $24.

Reviewed by Roberta Silman

In an Op-Ed piece in “The New York Times” in June of this year, Andre Aciman chided President Obama for forgetting the 800,000 Jews who either fled or were “summarily expelled” from the Arab and Muslim world in the 20th century. Aciman is one of the approximately 80,000 Jews who lived in Egypt in communities that had prospered for hundreds of years, primarily since the British arrived in 1881 until the fall of King Farouk in the early 50s.

Even during the short term of Egypt’s first president, General Naguib, life continued almost as before. It was with the election of its second President, Gamel Abdel Nasser, that Egypt entered the modern age of industrialization and also became a prime example of what Aciman calls “the rampant nationalism that swept over the Arab world” after the war between Israel and Palestine and the declaration of the Jewish state in 1948.

By 1956 many Egyptian Jews had been forced from their homes, often with little more than a suitcase; businesses, houses, and other assets were confiscated, and those who remained until the end were deprived of their rights as well as possessions. “Looted” is the word used by Aciman who came to New York by way of Italy and is the author of a terrific memoir, “Out of Egypt” (1994). For a long time his book became the archetype about Egyptian Jews; then, two years ago Lucette Lagnado recounted her family’s plight in her moving memoir, “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit.”

But there was an earlier book that explored the same material in fictional form and was published in French in 1980. Entitled “Lumiere de l’oeil,” by Paula Jacques, born Paula Abadi in 1947 in Cairo, it is a beauty, its lyricism preserved by Susan Cohen-Nicole’s wonderful English translation. With remarkable prowess Jacques draws the reader into the life of the Castro family whose middle child and only girl, Mona, is coming of age just at the time when the old Egypt is giving way to the new.

Although Mona is the principal narrator, Jacques moves with great ease from various points of view to give us a devastating portrait of a large extended family struggling to maintain its equilibrium during the catastrophic events of 1952 and 1956. Indeed, as the book unfolds the Castro family trajectory becomes a metaphor for the dissolution of Egyptian Jewish life.

Unlike Aciman and Lagnado who came to the United States, Abadi went first to Israel in 1957, then to Paris where she became a radio talk show host. As Paula Jacques, she is well known in France, with several novels to her credit. “Light of My Eye” is her first to be translated into English and it has the unique exuberance and honesty of many first, largely autobiographical novels. All this background material is noted by the book’s translator, Susan Cohen-Nicole, whose excellent introduction sets the stage for this accomplished novel.

Narrated mostly in the third person to reveal Mona in all her loneliness and resentment at being a girl in a male-centered culture, it is a colorful mix of scenes of family life and Mona’s reactions and delusions and fantasies as she observes their foibles with the eagle eye of a precocious preadolescent.

Soon we are swept up into the lives of the others: the family’s maid, Sayeda, who really runs the household, Mona’s beloved grandmother, Mona’s beautiful self indulgent mother, Becky, the family’s eccentric uncles and communist-leaning cousin, her fiercely independent aunts, and the father whom she adores and whom, she is convinced, will never love her as much as he does his much younger wife.

Customs and conversations are peppered with legends and jokes and many scenes begin in a light-hearted way, but hovering over everything is the fear endemic to those whose existence is threatened. Early on we read:

The frenzied fanatics took their destruction elsewhere – to the luxury stores, the cinemas, the synagogues. Until evening, acrid wreaths of smoke hovered over the city. When the wind dispersed them, on the walls still standing in Suleiman Pasha Square you could read the threats to the English, the insults to the King, and the invocations for death to the Jews.

When Jacques’ novel was published in France, it was criticized as a bit chaotic. Of course it is chaotic, that is the nature of Jewish family life, especially a family on the brink of the abyss. So in an effort to tell the whole story – not only the events of the 50s but what happened afterwards and what came before – Jacques also destroys time with an skill rarely found in a first novelist. Without warning there are monologues from other family members about their pasts or short reports on their fates.

Here is Becky as an older woman telling Mona about her life: “All you have to write is a single sentence: they were chased out of paradise – and you’ve said it all.”

Paula Jacques: Her novel is a heartbreaking chronicle of the dissolution of Egyptian Jewish life.

Of course, Becky is describing the privileged lives of the Castro women who are funny and smart and vain, and as elegant as the Levantine French which they speak. While they focus on their bodies and pleasures and card games, their highly intelligent maids bring up their children and, literally, keep these families going despite the shocking and inexorable loss of status and money.

Like many of us who look backwards, Becky remembers only the good and the easy, but Jacques does not spare the reader. There are also evocative, often gritty descriptions of Cairo in all its filth and chicanery, and when she brings her book to a climax, she plunges a desperate Mona into a relationship with an older refugee from Europe, a man so pathetic and broken that this rebellious child has finally stepped into waters too deep, even for her, and perhaps not quite believable to the reader.

Still, that is a minor caveat. What sticks in the mind is Jacques’ insistence on bearing witness to the maze of emotions and connections that make the Castro family unique. We learn about its pretensions and vulgarity and pettiness, but binding them all together is an enormous love and loyalty for each other, which mirrors their love for their lost Egypt. Here, at last, we have her superb story of a people displaced ten years after World War II, another story of exile during that troubled, heart-wrenching time we call the 20th century.

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Roberta Silman is the author of three novels (“Boundaries,” “The Dream Dredger,” and “Beginning the World Again”), a story collection (“Blood Relations”), and a children’s book (“Somebody Else’s Child”). Her stories have been published in “The New Yorker,” “The Atlantic” and many other magazines here and abroad. She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net.