Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt

  This book was originally published, in a slightly different form, by Stony Creek Press in October, 2008.

  Text copyright ©2008 Jean V. Naggar

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-61218-141-7

  THESE PAGES ARE DEDICATED TO THE PAST AND TO THE FUTURE

  Thank you!

  To the memory of my father, Guido Mosseri, who always knew I would write.

  To my mother, Joyce Smouha Mosseri, who supported this project throughout and gave me her best stories.

  To my children, Alan, David, and Jennifer, and to my grandchildren, Ari, Justin, Gabriella, Sarah, Anna, Yaniv, and Ben.

  For all of whom this book was written.

  To my husband, Serge Naggar, who is essential to this story.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  My Lost Egypt

  Early Years

  World War II

  My Mother

  Villa Smouha

  My Father

  Of Love and Marriage

  Grandpa Smouha

  Gezira Preparatory School

  After the War

  Roedean School

  Suez

  Beyond Suez

  A Silver Dawn

  The End of the Beginning

  America

  The Last Time

  Return

  Interlude

  EPILOGUE

  Family Tree Charts

  About the Author

  A Readers' Guide

  Historical Timeline

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am deeply grateful for the time and support offered so generously by my family and friends. My profound thanks go to so many that I hardly know where to start.

  My sister Susan read this memoir in all its iterations, steadfast and wise in her counsel and unfailing in her faith in the project.

  My brother Jeff offered insights and anecdotes, lent me books, and read early material.

  My children were always ready to help, commiserate, or rejoice. I deeply appreciate the gift beyond price of their time and valuable expertise. And thank you, Michael, for my title!

  My cousins Dicky, Sylvia, Derrick, Judy, Brian, Hana, Gilly, Michael, Viviane, Gerry, Guy, Sandy, Suzanne, Helen, and Jackie, who shared so many of the experiences I describe, refrained from trying to impose their own memories on mine. All read the manuscript and shared wonderful additional information and anecdotes, some of which I was unfortunately not able to incorporate into this book. Thank you all. I could not have written it without your enthusiastic participation and the knowledge of your eagerness to share this with your children.

  Particular appreciation goes to Viviane Bregman, who, despite an aversion to reading, read every word of several drafts along the way, and to my brother-in-law, Michel Danon, and my cousin Jackie Coen, whose caring and careful readings resulted in the correction of some inaccuracies. Bertie Bregman’s early words of advice helped me to give shape to what I wanted to say. My school friend from the GPS offered invaluable help and connections in my search for early photos.

  My friends Lynne Barasch, Firth Fabend, Benita Somerfield, Vivette Ancona, Betty Prashker, Sybil Steinberg, Wendy Weltz, Anne Engel, and Barbara Grossman had such unshakable faith in the viability of the project that it spurred me on when my spirits flagged and gave me the courage to pursue a readership beyond my family. Vicky Bijur went way beyond the call of friendship and duty in her advocacy and hard work for this book. She and Betty Prashker would not let me give up. No writer could have hoped for more steadfast, generous supporters.

  Gratitude also to my office family for offering kind support at every turn and allowing me, every now and then, to switch roles and express my writerly angst to them; and to Maureen Baron and Susan Schwartz for their excellent suggestions.

  My appreciation for the enthusiastic contribution of Mark Ferguson’s expertise is boundless. I could not have put it all together without his help.

  No words can fully express my deep gratitude to Fabrizio LaRocca for his kindness, creativity, and commitment to the project.

  And thank you, Serge, for everything.

  A falouka on the Nile

  PROLOGUE

  Sheets of rain slashed down the steep sides of apartment buildings, instantly forming rivers that flowed toward the gutters and pooled along the sidewalk. It was a New York rain, violent and complete, pouring with sudden vigor from a leaden sky. The splayed skeletons of dead umbrellas lay beside mounds of garbage bags awaiting removal. The detritus of hundreds of peoples’ lives clustered loosely in the glistening black bags, shifting and shuddering with the weight of the rain. Drenched and desperate I waved my arms at every cab in sight, all of them sporting “Off Duty” lights, the drivers hunched over the wheel, eyes staring straight ahead. I thought I had given myself plenty of time to get to my appointment at a Midtown publishing house, lulled into a false security by the gentle drizzle that had preceded this downpour. Now I was certainly going to be late.

  I stood on the corner of Third Avenue and Seventy-Fifth Street. My office was close by. I glanced back, wondering if I should return and take refuge there, but I knew there was no way I could reach my author by phone to explain my delay. He was in town for the day and was counting on my presence at this meeting. I would have to find a way to get there. I clutched my umbrella, which tugged at my hand as the wind gusted, turning inside out and back, wrenching my arm and adding to my misery. My other arm went on pumping up and down, my sleeve dripping and my hand cold, as I grumbled under my breath. At last, miraculously, a cab stopped right in front of me. I clambered in, trailing water. Heaving a sigh of relief, I gave the Midtown address and sat back.

  “A lot of rain,” said the driver, peering at his streaked windshield. “This is a very bad rainstorm.”

  I agreed, but something about the cadences of his speech snagged my mind away from the moment. A stillness took hold of me. The present had become muted. The distant past stirred. Later, as we drew up in front of my destination, I asked tentatively, “Are you from Egypt?”

  “Yes,” said the driver without turning around, “I am Egyptian,” his accent softening the hard g into a gentle slide of sound.

  “I am from Egypt, too,” I said, gathering my mortally wounded umbrella, my briefcase, and my gloves, and steeling myself for a dive into the protection of the glass-walled building to my right. There was silence as my cold hands fumbled in my briefcase for some change. The driver did not turn his head.

  “Did you celebrate Ramadan?” he asked suddenly. I felt uncomfortable. The events of September 11th, the escalating suicide bombings in Israel, and the relentless rumblings and aftermath of war with Iraq invested the simple question with a weight beyond itself.

  “No, I did not,” I answered cautiously, and then, having been a New Yorker for many years, I added a little defiantly, “I am Jewish.”

  “I did not celebrate Ramadan either,” he said, turning his head to look at me. “I am a Copt, a Christian.” He added wistfully, “It is not a good time for Copts to be in Egypt anymore. So now I am here, in America. My family is in America.”

  I nodded, smiled, gave him a substantial tip, grabbed the receipt he held out to me, and headed for my meeting.

  For the next three hours, the literary agent I have been for the past thirty years took
over my thoughts and my energies. I worked to charm the wary, enhancing and facilitating the encounter between my author and his publisher, his editor, and his publicist. When balance was achieved at last, and smiles and handshakes had seen us on our way, the author and I stopped for a celebratory cup of coffee before he headed back to the bus to make his way to the airport, the edited manuscript weighing down his briefcase and his right arm.

  Later, at home in my Manhattan apartment, I stood on my small sliver of terrace, hands on the metal balustrade, and gazed out at a jagged landscape of rooftops and windows, glancing down at the street gleaming below. All that was left of the rain was a soggy memory. The sky was still gray, but a few inches of clear blue had eased in here and there. I thought about my two small granddaughters, Sarah and Anna, cousins who would be visiting us together the following day, and wondered how I could occupy their busy minds and fingers, smiling to myself as I imagined their chatter and their intent faces. But somehow my thoughts kept returning to my cab driver and our brief conversation. I thought about how he had said “I am Egyptian,” and I had said “I am from Egypt.” I thought of another little girl and another terrace long ago. I remembered a photo. It was a black-and-white photo of a small girl in white pajamas, her dark hair rolled into a high curl on the top of her head above a solemn face with large, questioning, dark eyes. In the photo, she sits on a wooden horse on wheels on the expansive terrace outside her bedroom. How huge the balcony seemed then, bulwarked as it was by a massive stone balustrade, the heavy waters of the Nile glinting and rippling through the spaces between pillars. In the photo, the house, solid and permanent, towers above.

  Memories are strange creatures. They hide in the shadows, lurk in the interstices of life, summoned by a smell, a sound, the expression on someone’s face, the angle of a body, a turn in the road. Phantom passengers as we proceed along our lives, they brush a fleeting touch of the past against our urgent present.

  As I stood and looked down at Seventy-Second Street in Manhattan remembering the little girl I had once been, I put my hand to my face, assaulted by a tactile memory of rubbing my cheek against the grainy stone of that balcony’s wall in 1957. Trapped in the glare of a relentless Egyptian summer sun, I was leaning against the side of the house as if to absorb its solid warmth into my veins, tears blurring my view of the garden gate and the swirling Nile beyond. I could not believe that I would never see any of it again, that I was about to walk out of the red brick mansion my grandfather had built so many years ago to plunge into a future that had no framework, no guidelines, and no boundaries. It was terrifying. I was saying good-bye.

  For two hundred years, my father, his father, and generations before them had spread roots in this ground. They had lived and loved, borne children, built houses and businesses, navigated among kings and princes, and prospered. This was their country.

  My grandfather, Joseph Mosseri, was born in Cairo in 1869, the year when the convoluted politics and finances attending the Suez Canal project culminated at last in the opening of the Suez Canal. Gazing contentedly from his windows at the changing and changeless surface of the great Nile River, he could hardly have imagined that a triumphant international event the year of his birth would disturb the deep roots his family had planted in Egyptian soil. This was his home. Nothing would change.

  But in the summer of 1956 as the year began its descent into autumn, the winds of change gusted strongly, although to a girl sitting on a swing seat in the gardens of a fabled Swiss hotel, their portent was invisible. My mother, father, brother, sister, and I were accustomed to spending several weeks with my mother’s parents and assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins at the Gstaad Palace Hotel to escape the fierce Egyptian heat as soon as the children were freed from school, then leaving for Europe, with three generations settling in for generous weeks of relaxation in mountain resorts, Villars, Crans, Chamonix, Gstaad, Wengen, St. Moritz, Interlaken, and others, where we revived in the indescribably clean, sweet-smelling mountain air and the company of family and friends. Later we would travel to European cities to absorb history and culture from monuments and museums, the rich cultural menu interspersed with the serious frivolity of shopping for change-of-season clothes.

  The summer of 1956 was different.

  A miasma of anxiety seemed to seep into every attempt at pleasure and relaxation. My brother, Jeff, and I still laughed and clowned our way through our tango lessons with the tall, ineffably elegant Mr. de Roy, but my parents and their friends looked more worried every day. They spent long hours reading the papers and huddling in groups around the vast, hushed lobby of the Palace Hotel, the men muttering anxiously over the stock tables in the International Herald Tribune or the Wall Street Journal, leaning back into large velvet armchairs, cups of after-lunch coffee balanced in their hands. I was distantly aware that something was wrong, but no one explained, and the unease I felt quickly disappeared as the tennis lessons and hikes, the dances and dinners, and the lazy mornings by the pool succeeded each other day after day.

  The uneasy August eventually drew to its close. As planned, we left Gstaad and moved on to London, to a red brick building in Victoria, minutes from Buckingham Palace, where my parents rented a “service flat” for a few weeks every year. In 1956, however, our arrival at St. James’s Court did not herald my mother’s and my yearly visit to the venerable Dickens & Jones department store to outfit me for a new year at boarding school. That year we were to see my brother Jeff off to his boarding school at Gresham’s in Norfolk, and then return immediately to Cairo. We knew that my father’s mother, Granny Mosseri, and my Aunt Helen had already settled into their daily routine and were looking forward to our return to the big house we all shared. My mother’s family planned to stay longer in Europe, as they usually did.

  When we left London for home, I was filled with a growing sense of excitement. My boarding school days were over at last. The strange summer that had seemed to float threateningly in a different universe had receded into the past without incident, and my disappointment at not having the possibility of attending Oxford or Cambridge was somewhat muted by the large envelope from the British Council awaiting me at home, in Cairo, containing confirmation of my acceptance into the university BA-abroad program. I had already received an enticing list of books to order for the courses. I had read the list so often that I almost knew it by heart. An addicted reader, I could hardly wait to go to the bookstore and put in my order knowing that the books were not in stock and would have to be sent from England. A few days after our return I attended the orientation and was impatient to start my first class the following week.

  But no one went anywhere the week following our return. Nasser, Egypt’s military dictator, nationalized the Suez Canal, bringing the armed forces of Britain and France posthaste to Egypt to protect international passage through the canal. Israeli forces began their march across the desert to join them. All planes scheduled to leave the country were grounded. Beyond the iron railings that surrounded our garden, we could hear muted gunfire, rifle shots, and the shouts of fierce, dense crowds demonstrating in the streets. Our home became our prison.

  My sister, Susan, was eight. I was eighteen.

  History—our family’s and Egypt’s alike—changed irrevocably that dazzling summer day as I stood on the stone terrace outside my bedroom and watched the world of my childhood ripple away, drowning in the heavy, grey waters of the Nile. Like a submerged Atlantis, it would shimmer faintly under the swell of life, invisible, untouchable, lost.

  Cairo

  MY LOST EGYPT

  I knew from earliest childhood that the world was a dangerous place, even though circumstances and my parents collaborated to shield me from that knowledge.

  The walls of my nursery were painted to a rough finish, covered in a pink-tinged stucco that caught the sunlight pouring in from tall windows and transmuted it into a delicate filtered glow. My bed, snug against the left-hand wall, had a pink painted headboard with fuzzy lambs and bunnies frolic
king in the center. In the next room, within earshot of a squeal, my Yugoslav nanny, Vera, slept among pale-blue furniture, guardian of the bathroom and the toy cupboard, an open door between us.

  Nonetheless, from a young age I was convinced that monsters lurked under my bed at night, and that only by hugging the wall with my back to the room, my cheek and small body pressed up against the wall’s rough cold, could I be safe.

  Moreover it never occurred to me to discuss this with anyone. These were my monsters, and I had devised a way to keep them at bay. It was somehow clear to me, although I never articulated it even to myself, that my mother had many more fears than I, and that if I once opened the door to hers by telling her mine, my perfect world might permanently become a dark and fearsome place.

  At Mena House circa 1940

  Like all children, I accepted the family and circumstances that encompassed my childhood without wonder or question. An only child for close to five years, I thrived on the love and undivided attention of my parents, my grandmother with whom we lived, and my maiden aunt Helen, whose rooms adjoined the nursery wing which was home base for Vera and me. Although I was not aware of being lonely for companionship my own age, I created an imaginary friend I could see from my bedroom window way across the garden, a delicate child’s face that never emerged out of shadow, peering through the dust of a distant window, as eager to establish contact as I was in my palatial home filled with the mysterious lives of many adults. I kept her very much to myself, and often spent time gazing at her from the terrace outside my bedroom, my mind filled with the life I imagined she led and the conversations I imagined us having.