ROOTS & BRANCHES

A surgeon recalls his family history and remembers growing up in Egypt, Germany, and England in this debut memoir.

Meguid begins his story in 2009 by describing a fraught airport transfer in New York City when he suffered a cardiac episode while riding in a taxi. The prospect of dying compelled him to recount his ancestral past for the benefit of his children. The autobiography steps back in time to 1905 to recall his paternal grandfather in the village of Beni Harem, Upper Egypt, and relate how his father was sold into bondage. The author swiftly goes on to tell how his father later won a scholarship to a teacher training school in England, where he met Meguid’s mother, a German au pair. They married, and the author was born in Cairo in 1944, to the distaste of his jealous older sister. The siblings were then sent to postwar Hamburg to live with their maternal grandparents before reuniting with their parents in Manchester, then returning to Cairo. Meguid recalls coping with the death of his father at age 11 and attending school in England again at 16 to avoid conscription. The second installment of his memoir, Mastering the Knife(2021), about the author’s medical student years, is narrated in a cold, detached matter. This volume, which includes family photographs, begins in a similar vein, highlighting Meguid’s often tedious obsession with precision: “We have 175 minutes to get from Newark to JFK.” But when he begins to describe his childhood in Egypt, his writing becomes supple and evocative: “I could see the white ibises noisily nesting in the neighboring eucalyptus trees. When they ignored my hoots, I would throw a shoe at them and a few flew away.” He also keenly pinpoints and explains his emotions, offering moving commentary on his father’s absence: “I wanted my father’s touch, the once familiar scent of his skin, his mere presence to hold my hand.” One criticism would be that the author glosses over the period when his father was sold as a child—events readers would be eager to learn more about. Yet mapped against the political turbulence of the era, the expressive memoir powerfully captures Meguid’s shift from a childhood punctuated with uncertainty to the bolstered confidence of adolescence.

A frank and richly described account of a surgeon’s childhood.