Out of Egypt by André Aciman

This memoir is so well-written I am almost embarrassed to write about it because I cannot write as well about the book as Aciman has written his story. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1951. The family spoke French, and also Italian, Greek, Ladino, and Arabic. His family were Jews of Turkish and Italian origin who settled in Alexandria, Egypt in 1905. As Italian citizens (who had never lived in Italy), they were not expelled after the 1956 war as were the French and British. They were expelled as Jews in 1964.

Aciman's father owned a factory, an uncle was a close friend of King Fouad (useful until the king was overthrown), his grandmother smuggled money out of the country in preparation for the day when the family would have to leave the country. The book is alive with characters, scenes,  incidents. It is both a moving account of childhood (Aciman's mother was deaf) and the portrayal of a lost world. The Alexandria that was an ex-pat playground for the English, French, and upper class foreign families like Aciman's is gone with the sirocco.

Among the elements that make the book so fascinating is something I didn't realize you could do in a memoir (which reflects my limited imagination). Aciman describes lives and incidents he could not possibly have witnessed: His Uncle Villi's experiences before and during WWII and his parents' courtship and marriage all occurred before Aciman was born. Because he is not limited to what he himself personally witnessed and experienced, he is able to put family stories and relationships into a context that would be confusing—and less interesting—without them.

What he does personally experience is fascinating. For his education, his father enrolls him at age nine in the best private school in Alexandria, Victory College (it had been Victoria College until Egypt beat the English and French in the 1956 war). As part of the curriculum, he has to learn Arabic--a subject he ignores completely until the day before he has to recite an Arabic poem in class. His father hires the son of a servant to teach André the poem:

"He blushed again, perhaps because our reversed roles made him feel awkward, but also perhaps because he suddenly realized that he would have to teach a Jew a poem vilifying Jews. He read the poem once to himself. Then, as my Arabic teacher would do in class, he spoke out the first few words, repeated them, and then waited for me to say them back to him. He did not explain the poem; no one ever explained the poems. They were always about poison, Jews, vengeance, and motherland...."

An extraordinary book. I'm glad I read it.

Lost in Place by Mark Salzman

It sometimes feels as if everyone wants to write a memoir. Libraries and senior centers offer memoir-writing classes. The growing interest in genealogy, aided by TV shows like "Who Do You Think You Are?" and "Finding Your Roots" and by the ability to do research on the internet, also encourages people to record their memories so future generations will have more than raw data. After a certain age, writing a memoir can seem like a way to make sense out of—or at least impose some order on—your life. Heck, even I've tinkered with the memoir.

But while it is one thing to record incidents and experiences for one's family, it is something very different to expect strangers to be interested. Unless one has led an extraordinary life of public activity, most people's experiences are just not that interesting. At the same time, I believe that even the most ordinary life can be made interesting by extraordinary writing. (The ideal, of course, is a memoir of an noteworthy life by a brilliant writer. But there are not many of those.)

Mark Salzman's memoir, Lost in Place, is subtitled "Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia;" he grew up in Ridgefield, Connecticut. It covers his teenage years, from age 13 in 1972 to age 18 or 19 in 1979 or so. He published the memoir in 1995 when he was 36. It was his fourth book. His first, Iron & Silk, a memoir of teaching English and learning martial arts in China was exceptionally well-received in 1986. His third, The Soloist, a novel was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1994. He's no slouch as a writer.

And that's what kept me reading through his adolescent experiences in learning kung fu, the cello, experimenting with pot, applying to Yale to avoid the last year of high school (and getting admitted!), smashing up his mother's car, and star gazing with his father. Of his father, he writes: "Every morning he left the house looking as if someone had tied a hundred-pound sandbag across his shoulders, and every evening he came back looking as if the sand had gotten wet." Of his kung fu teacher's demonstration of control, he writes, "...two of us [got] on our hands and knees while a third, wearing no shirt, lay on his back on top of us with a watermelon on his stomach. Sensei would blindfold himself, do some loud breathing exercises, then split the watermelon with a samurai sword. It became an especially dramatic feat from our point of view if we could smell liquor on his breath as he did his breathing exercises."

Salzman's life is not special except, of course, that every life is special. Reading the memoir stirred up memories of my own adolescent fantasies, dreams, and angst. I think he would like to leave the reader with a message, the answer to the unanswerable questions: "How do we live if we know we must die? Why bother with any of this, since none of it will matter when the sun burns up and the earth turns into a cold cinder? Why bother with anything?"

The best answer is probably still: "Because bothering is still the best game in town." Not, I suspect, an answer Salzman found while still an adolescent searching for enlightenment before he could drive, but a satisfying way to end his book.