Aimée Israel-Pelletier examines the lives of Middle Eastern Jews living in Islamic societies in this political and cultural history of the Jews of Egypt. By looking at the work of five Egyptian Jewish writers, Israel-Pelletier confronts issues of identity, exile, language, immigration, Arab nationalism, European colonialism, and discourse on the Holocaust. She illustrates that the Jews of Egypt were a fluid community connected by deep roots to the Mediterranean and the Nile. They had an unshakable sense of being Egyptian until the country turned toward the Arab East. With Israel-Pelletier's deft handling, Jewish Egyptian writing offers an insider's view in the unique character of Egyptian Jewry and the Jewish presence across the Mediterranean region and North Africa.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Jacques Hassoun: Return to Egypt
2. Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff's Egypt: A View from the Nile
3. Edmond Jabès: Egypt Recovered
4. Paula Jacques, Resistance and Transmission: Transplanting Egypt on the Soil of France
5. André Aciman and the Mediterranean: The Staging of Egypt as Elsewhere
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Aimée Israel-Pelletier is Professor and Head of French at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is author of Rimbaud's Impressionist Poetics: Vision and Visuality.
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With On the Mediterranean and the Nile, Israel-Pelletier has paid homage to a bygone—but never entirely forgotten—Egypt, and to at least two generations of writers, whose literary works on the one hand reveal a little-known side of the Egyptian past, and on the other help us understand the fascinating web of feelings and images that continues to bind together memory, nationhood, and Jewishness in and beyond the Mediterranean.
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~Reading Religion
"Israel-Pelletier's close readings, her vivid descriptions of characters and predicaments, her analyses of writer's positions and intentions, bring us invaluable glimpses into Egyptian Jewish writers' creative impulses."
