Dream Homes
From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile's Journey
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The American daughter of Egyptian Jewish immigrants journeys in search of belonging from Brazil to New Orleans and beyond—includes recipes and photos!
Born to Egyptian Sephardic Jews who fled to the United States after the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Joyce Zonana spent her childhood in Brooklyn. But her experience of Jewish culture was very different from that of the other children she knew, from the foods they ate to the language they spoke. As she struggled to find a sense of inclusion, never feeling completely American or completely Egyptian, a childhood trip to Brazil became the basis for a lifelong quest to find her place in the world.
Meeting members of her extended family who had migrated to Brazil was one step in discovering the kind of life she might have lived in Egypt, and exploring the woman she was becoming. Through travels that ranged from Cairo to Oklahoma and finally New Orleans in the shadow of Katrina, and including an evocative exploration of the way food varies from culture to culture, this is a “frank, spirited memoir of identity from a Brooklyn-raised, Egyptian-born Jewish feminist.” (Kirkus Reviews)
“Zonana makes every human encounter lively” —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The debut memoir from veteran academic Zonana, currently an associate professor at CUNY, Manhattan, is thick with family angst and restless spirits, documenting Zonana's protracted quest for belonging among numerous locales and people. Born in Cairo, Egypt, Zonana's family emigrated to Brooklyn after the Egyptian-Israeli War of 1948, when she was a small girl. There, she grew up a misfit among the European-dominated New York Jewish community; for much of her life, she was "overwhelmed by the conviction that I had in fact been exiled... whenever I moved I experienced the same confusion: Had I chosen to leave, or had I been forced?" An epiphany about her "one true home" (the Earth) comes by way of a Native American moon lodge ceremony, but it's built on her love affair with ethnic food (recipes are included), her discovery of resettled family in Brazil, her father's illnesses and her own debilitating fears of independence; eventually, it leads her to New Orleans, academic success and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Zonana's memoir is a somewhat disjointed affair, but captures with honesty and beauty the suffering and uncertainty of migration and assimilation, whether forced or formulated.
