We practiced nostalgia, looking for things and places that would unavoidably remind us of the Alexandria we were about to lose. Those of us who still lived in Alexandria expected to be afflicted with nostalgia, and if we spoke about our anticipated nostalgia frequently enough, it was perhaps because evoking this looming nostalgia was our way of immunizing ourselves against it before it sprang on us in Europe. Ironically, however, letters from friends and relatives who had already settled abroad kept reminding those of us who continued to expect to leave Alexandria in the near future that the worst thing about France or Italy or England or Switzerland was that everyone who had left Egypt suffered terrible pangs of nostalgia for their birthplace, which had been their home once but was clearly no longer their homeland.
The trouble is that as an adolescent living in Egypt in what had become an anti-Semitic police state, I grew to hate Egypt and couldn’t wait to leave and land in Europe, preferably in France, since my mother tongue was French and our family was strongly attached to what we believed was our French culture. Because I was born in Egypt and, like so many Jews living in Egypt, was expelled, at the age of fourteen, it seemed natural that my nostalgia should have roots in Egypt. I wrote them when attempting to understand what lay at the source of that strange strain of nostalgia hovering over almost everything I’ve written. I gave them the words, but their meaning doesn’t belong to me. It’s almost as though these four sentences don’t want me, their author, to know what I was trying to say with them. Part of me wants to nail them down, while another fears that by doing so I will snuff out a meaning that can’t be told in words-or, worse yet, that the very attempt to fathom their meaning might allow it to go into deeper hiding still. I am still not certain that I understand these sentences. Four sentences that I wrote years ago keep coming back to me.
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