A Bittersweet Love Song to Jewish Alexandria

By André Aciman for Tablet 

Lost Egypt comes alive in Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s 1978 Hebrew idyll ‘Alexandrian Summer,’ in a first English translation

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.

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