Alexandrian Summer

(Paperback)

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Alexandrian Summer is the story of two Jewish families living their frenzied last days in the doomed cosmopolitan social whirl of Alexandria just before fleeing Egypt for Israel in 1951. The conventions of the Egyptian upper-middle class are laid bare in this dazzling novel, which exposes startling sexual hypocrisies and portrays a now vanished polyglot world of horse-racing, seaside promenades, and elegant night clubs.

Reviews

"Helps show why postwar Alexandria inspires nostalgia and avidity in seemingly everyone who knew it ... The result is what summer reading should be: fast, carefree, visceral, and incipiently lubricious." -- The New Yorker "Engaging and varied ... a refreshing and nuanced portrayal of the Jewish diaspora in Egypt."--The Times Literary Supplement "Luminous ... One of the great triumphs of Alexandrian Summer is the richness of the evocation of this city and the multiple cultures pressed within it ... A sultry eroticism pervades." -- The Forward "Alexandria, a lush paradise by the sea, comes to antic, full-bodied life ... Gormezano Goren's characters are vividly depicted as they grow up or grow older in a city of conflicting loyalties, riven by resentment, ready to revolt. Readers will be transported."--Publishers Weekly "This novel recalls one gloriously golden summer in a cosmopolitan city on the verge of upheaval ... Fluidly written and soberly enticing."--Library Journal "Densely layered ... a love letter to the lush paradise of Alexandria."--Moment Magazine "A gifted writer ... Gormezano Goren defines the city and its ambiance in lush, sensuous terms ... He also describes so well the Diaspora Jew's knack for downplaying the danger of gathering storms of hatred, a tendency not limited to Alexandria or to any particular era of exile."--The Jerusalem Post "A powerful novel of tensions--sexual, familial, religious, and political--and an affecting but unsparing portrait of the petit bourgeois world of Egyptian Jews standing obliviously on the edge of a precipice. Alexandria---sensual and enchanting---shimmers in these pages." --Dalia Sofer, author of The Septembers of Shiraz "A fine work of art ... riveting from the first page to the last." --Zo Haderekh "A reason to rejoice ... A mature, well-defined, engrossing first novel. An author with superb power of expression ... You can't help but keep on smiling with great pleasure." --Maariv "The sensual and multi-colored texture, the uniqueness of a place and time is the best thing about this singular novel, conjuring up an exceptional and remote world ... daring and ... at the same time refined and cultivated." -- Haaretz " A profound literary experience." -- Ahshav

Author Bio

Yitzhak Gormezano Goren was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1941 and immigrated to Israel as a child. He is a playwright and novelist. Gormezano Goren studied English and French literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University and has an MFA in theater directing from Brooklyn College. He cofounded the Kedem Stage Theater in Tel Aviv in 1982 and directed it for 30 years. Gormezano Goren received the Israeli Prime Minister's Prize for Literature in 2001. Yardenne Greenspan (translator) is a fiction writer and translator, born in Tel Aviv to a bilingual family. Her translation projects include works by Israeli authors Shemi Zarhin, Rana Werbin, Yaakov Shabtai and Gon Ben Ari. Andre Aciman (introduction) is the author of Out of Egypt, Call Me by Your Name and Harvard Square.