Gabriel Tamman
EXODUS TOO: THE STORY OF AN EGYPTIAN JEWISH FAMILY IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES
London-Chicago: Vallentine Mitchell, 2021, ISBN 13: 978-1912676804
Reviewed by Yolande Cohen1
Here is a life story of a middle-class Egyptian family, told by one of the youngest sons, who became a wealthy business man in Switzerland, where the family finally landed. This well-written book aims at showing both the fate of his family during those daunting years of the exile/expulsion of Jews from Egypt in the 1940s and 1950s, but also of their difficult times finding refuge in Israël, in the United Kingdom, and finally in Geneva, where he now lives.
Based on the memory of his family’s ordeal, Tamman relies also on some of the many important books written on the longer history of Jews in Egypt.2 He discovers that this history is a peculiar one, even though, as a reader familiar with the history of Jews in the Maghreb and Machrek, his way of using this material is general and sketchy at best. The chapters alternate between the description of the grand history of Jews in ancient times and contemporary Egypt (the book ends in the 1960s) with the memory and making of his own family history. Since there are not many written or oral sources to analyze his grandparents’ lives, he writes about reminiscences of what it might have been, with many clichés. Then he goes deeper into the history of his family, his parents’, and siblings’.
We are introduced to his parents’ goals and intentions concerning their children: striving to give them a higher European education, they adopted the education provided by the schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle. They, therefore, kept a distance from the Zionist movement which started its activities in 1897 (p. 31), even though his, father Joseph, had spoken to him about it. His own memories of anti-semitism, anti-Jewish sentiment, as well as the rise of the nationalist movement in the 1930s are scarce (p. 63). As a young boy, the author does not really understand the rise of Nazism nor does he have vivid memories of the war. An entire chapter is devoted rather to the post-war years, when, admittedly, Egyptian Jews were targeted as undesirable; his father stripped of his business, which he managed to liquidate to become its employee (p. 95); and his family had to hastily leave their beloved Egypt to go to their other home in Sudan. It is noteworthy here to understand that Sudan was also in many ways his and his family’s homeland. Their first departure in 1947 was for Khartoum, which was not distant from Cairo but still far enough to feel a bit displaced. The author, as a young independent boy of sixteen, decided to stay in Cairo, where he continued his life as a young bachelor in charge of operating the leather workshop (p. 101).
Gabriel describes how he then became engaged with Zionism in Cairo, with a group of other young boys and girls. We could feel in this chapter how this mostly clandestine activism defined their identity as young adults. He discovered at this moment that, “our familiar world was falling down around us. Our friends were leaving and our parents and their generation were making contingency plans for what to do if the worst came to the worst.” After the Egyptian army was defeated in the 1949Arab-Israeli war, he felt deeply, how the Egyptian Jews became the enemy (p.110).
Then started the big exodus: first the poorest classes left with help from the Joint Distribution Committee to Israel and also to Brazil (primarily Sao Paulo), to the United Kingdom (Manchester), and elsewhere. Because of his Zionist activities, Gabriel went to prison for a short time, and from there to Sudan before leaving for good with the whole family to settle finally in Switzerland. Those Jews still remaining in Egypt in 1950 were stripped of their nationality and declared enemies of the state and, therefore, subject to immediate expulsion.
But then, while recalling these dreadful times, the author states also, that, “one of the great ironies of Egyptian policy towards the Jews in the middle part of the twentieth century is that it effectively forced large numbers of Jews who had been perfectly happy in Egypt to move to Israël” (p. 137). As a sign of the author’s ambivalence and regret for his happy times, he reflects and recalls nostalgically those so-called happy times. He is not quite ready yet to appreciate the policies as riding Egypt of its Jewish population, even when they would have the effect of enriching its enemy’s territory with more people. Becoming refugees, Egyptian Jews made up a new diaspora, primarily in France and in the United Kingdom and in Israël, where their fate was dire. As for the author, he married the daughter of a family friend, who was meant to be his since her birth, and had enjoyed a good life in his new country.
There is something endearing in this book, which is the personal aspect of it; if anything we would have liked more personal recollections and memories, instead of many generalities that are provided as historical background to better appreciate the extent of this sad history. But in fact, what this does is mix two very different types of writing with two very different levels of narratives going on at the same time. On a more general level, the author tries his best to sum up his reading of historical research. I found this part redundant and not as interesting since I prefer reading the original research myself. On the personal level, the author does not dig enough in the family memories to express their deep emotions, how the many events they witnessed/participated in affected their lives in the most profound way, at the most intimate level. I would have liked to know for instance how he finally accepted marrying the woman who was promised to him by his family. It did not strike me that his family was so traditional and that he could accept an arranged marriage?
Yet, considering the scarcity of research on the subject, I find it important that such memoirs are published, for we need them as witness to this yet mostly unknown tragedy.
1 Yolande Cohen is full professor of contemporary history at the University of Quebec in Montreal. Author of eleven books and eighty articles, her work focuses on the history of women in France and Canada in the twentieth century. Knight of the Order of the Legion of Honor of France and Knight of the National Order of Quebec, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Montreal in 2019.
2 J.M. Landau, Jews in nineteenth century Egypt (New York, London: University of London Press, 1969). Dario Miccoli, Histories of the Jews of Egypt An Imagined Bourgeoisie, 1880s-1950s (London: Routledge, 2015).