Alexandrian Paradoxes

Abstract

This article analyzes two literary renderings of Jewish life in Alexandria: the novels Kaitz Alexandroni, by Itzhak Gormezano-Goren, and Out of Egypt, by André Aciman. It investigates the different meanings attributed to Jewish identity withinh the context of a cosmopolitan society, in which the hegemonic presence of a class of foreign colonizers of European origin makes the arabs foreigners in their own land. Gormezano-Goren’s and Aciman’s narrative focus the bourgeois life of Alexandrian Jews, who seem to live outside time and space, dreaming with the big European metropolis while being marked, at the same time, by provincialism in disguise. Nasser’s ascension to power and the expulsion of Egyptian Jews will lead this population to realize how artificial their abstract homeland was, leading them to a new exile.