An Egyptian Novel

Her father's line goes back to seven brothers from Castile who reached the beach at Gaza after Spain expelled its Jews; her mother's, absurdly, to the Israelites who declined to leave Egypt with Moses. This is the heritage of the 'eldest daughter', whose relatives were brought to Israel in the 1950s by a socialist youth movement, settled with the Egyptian contingent at Kibbutz Ein Shemer and were soon thrown out as Stalinists. The narrator recounts the clan's saga from the outside, moving through shared dinners, burials, coincidences repeated across generations, family sayings, unspoken shames and petty resentments, and blending archive and memory with fable and exaggeration. Deaths become comic sketches, yet the book is finally about ruined ideals and dreams, and about an innocence that present-day Israel has no use for.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

180 pages in the original

Genres

Family, Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

Egypt, Israel

First published

2015 by Hakibbutz Hameuchad / Siman Kriah

Author's age

55 when first published

ISBN

9781943150229 (Dalkey Archive Press, United States)