A striking historical account by an Egyptian Jew forced to leave his homeland.
A debut memoir chronicles one man’s experiences in Egypt, including his turbulent departure.
Sardas begins his book with his youth in Ibrahimieh, a suburb of Alexandria. Ibrahimieh, the author explains, was home to many people of Greek origin and “visitors might think they were in Athens” walking its streets. The author’s “ancestors were Sephardic Jews, originally from Spain,” though during the Inquisition they immigrated to places like Turkey, where his mother was born. His father was raised in Crete and wound up meeting his wife in France. Such a mixture of nationalities permeates the volume as Sardas goes on to explain his life in Egypt until his eventual emigration. Portions of the book are full of childhood memories, such as the author’s valiant attempts to organize a basketball team at his school and his father’s views on maintaining good health. Such tales illustrate a lost time, though the main thrust of the account comes with the need to leave Egypt. Events following the Suez Crisis in the 1950s led to the expulsion of many foreigners. In addition, as the author explains, President “Nasser unleashed an avalanche of xenophobic speeches.…He ordered Jews suspected of being Zionists to be imprisoned in detention camps.” In 1957, Sardas would find himself leaving Egypt for good with his pregnant wife. He was only allowed to carry 20 Egyptian pounds, “minus 10 percent tax.” The young family would eventually build a life in Brazil, though the sting of Egypt’s goodbye would be lasting. While early sections of the account—which features an assortment of family photographs—will likely appeal only to the author’s relatives, Sardas’ painful and taxing departure from the country in which he was born is vividly rendered. How does it feel to be unwanted in your homeland? What is it like to be forced to a faraway place with very little money in your pocket and no hope of return? The book deftly answers such stirring questions in the way that only someone who was there can fully describe. The reader is made aware in a strong, sobering fashion just how fickle popular opinion and governments can be.
A striking historical account by an Egyptian Jew forced to leave his homeland.Pub Date: May 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9980849-0-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Thebes Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
