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Home Address: Nostalgia
Sarah Fulford
Andr� Aciman finds that homelessness is the state of mind that suits him best
Displacement unavoidably leads to heightened awareness. In an unfamiliar environment, even simple things, which, when performed with oblivious ease contribute to our sense of being at home, turn into deliberate, considered operations.
No one is more familiar with this process than Andr� Aciman, now author of three books on exile, including the much praised �Out of Egypt� (1994). The child of prosperous parents, he left Alexandria with his family as a teen in the 60s. By then, the thoroughly integrated Jewish population (its members owned banks, sat in parliament, ran department stores) had shrunk from at least 50,000 to 2,500. Nasser�s fiercely anti-Western regime had triumphed: Arabic shop names had replaced European ones, and the bustling multicultural metropolis of the au-thor�s childhood was nothing but memory.
Aciman never found another home. From Egypt, he moved with his mother to Rome, and traveled often to Paris, where his father had temporarily found work. Still, he longed for a vanished Alexandria. Today, one might expect to find Aciman finally settled, freed from the tug of the past. (He�s married with children, lives in New York and teaches French literature at Princeton.) But he continues to observe the world with the acute consciousness of a stranger. In this slim volume of loosely connected essays, he writes: �An exile is not just someone who has lost his home, he is someone who can�t find another.�
Odd to think of a New Yorker nostalgic for the vibrancy of another city, when for most Americans the word cosmopolitan is practically synonymous with Manhattan. But then, as moments from Aciman�s childhood pop up in almost every one of these delightfully meandering pieces, Alexandria of the 50s emerges as something of an earthly paradise.
Its dominant languages were English and French, though many also spoke Greek and Italian. Ladino was common among Jews, while Arabic more or less held every-thing together. In the book�s first chapter, he travels back to Alexandria and is reminded of his grandmother, who �knew Greek well enough to correct native Greeks, she knew every prayer in Latin, and her written French, when she was vexed, would have made the Duc de Saint-Simon quite nervous.�
It must have felt like God�s limitations on the citizens of Babel had been lifted. Members of Aciman�s family read books in their original tongues and enjoyed movies from all over the world. Plus, all this exuberant cultural swapping took place in a seaside city of great physical beauty. Gradually we begin to understand why Aciman finds himself, in his words, only just accepting New York.
And yet his tone is rarely sorrowful. Aciman�s unease with his surroundings, and his mind�s unpredictable flip-flopping between past and present, appear to enrich his life, rather than impoverish it. (It�s good for his prose too.) There�s a low-grade sense of bittersweet loss throughout the book, most pronounced, perhaps, in his essay about Passover. He is uneasy at Seders, not just because he can�t read Hebrew, or has never learned the songs. It�s that every year, when he is invited to celebrate the Exodus from Egypt, he can think only of his own forced exodus, and his own much-missed Egypt. He finds himself swept up in memories from his idyllic boyhood, alienated from his fellow Jews, for whom Egypt is nothing more than �Mitzrayim.�
More often, though, Aciman displays a quiet determination to reconcile himself with his condition. At one point, he comes right out and claims nostalgia as his true home. �This is how I always travel,� he writes, �not so as to experience anything at the time of my tour, but to plot the itinerary of a possible return trip. This, it occurs to me, is also how I live.�
No wonder he finds solace, as we learn in one of the essays, among a group of Proust-lovers who have made a pilgrimage to their hero�s boyhood home in Illiers-Combray. And in another piece he sympathizes with packs of weary Christian travelers, bused into Bethlehem, only to be disappointed by the mobs of other tourists and the grit of a perfectly ordinary Palestinian town. For if there is any conclusion to be drawn from Aciman�s experience, it�s that the imagination is more sumptuous than real life, or that, as the clich� goes, absence makes the heart grow fonder.
When he is offered a teaching job in Rome for which he had applied, he discovers that he doesn�t want to go after all. He had daydreamed about his old haunts, like the Piazza Navona fountain, near the shop where he used to go weekly to pick up a new Penguin book. But then he realizes that he�d rather long for a place than actually be there. �It finally dawned on me,� he confesses, �that I didn�t very much like Rome, nor did I really want to be in France, or Egypt for that matter.� Instead, he chooses to remain in exile, a place more familiar to him than any spot on the globe.
l
is an associate editor at Toronto Life magazine.
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