Belonging Nowhere : Exile as a frame for memory : OUT OF EGYPT: A Memoir, <i> By Andre Aciman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $20; 340 pp.)</i>

Few people have had as much occasion to use the Latin term for the Mediterranean as the Sephardim. For them, almost uniquely, it was destined to become the Mare Nostrum. Expelled from Spain in 1492, the Jews carried their high civilization all the way east to Turkey, while Sephardic communities sprouted on the shorelines in between: Italy, Greece, Egypt, Morocco and more. They flourished, but in a precarious shadow.

A few years ago, Andre Aciman visited the tiny Venetian apartment occupied by his Great-Aunt Flora and her two grand pianos. Before playing for him, she recalled the nights in Egypt when her in-laws’ large and wealthy family waited in his great-grandmother’s house for Rommel’s Panzers to smash through the British lines:

“You’ll hear Schubert the way I played him when the Germans stood outside Alexandria and everyone in the house thought the world had come to an end. I played it every night. It annoyed them at first, for they didn’t know the first thing about music. But they got to love it--and then me--after a while, I think, because Schubert stood like the last beacon in the storm, tranquil and pensive, an echo of an old world we believed we belonged to because we belonged nowhere else.

“At times it felt like the only thing standing between us and Rommel was a sheet of music, nothing more. Ten years later they took that sheet of music away. Eventually they took away everything else as well. And we let it happen, as Jews always let these things happen, because, deep inside, we know we’ll lose everything we own at least twice in our lives.”

In 1905, Aciman’s great-uncle Isaac moved from Constantinople to Alexandria and persuaded his brothers and parents to follow. Isaac had been at the University of Turin--the family prided itself on its Italian connections--where his best friend was Fouad. Fouad left to become King of Egypt, and soon there would be golden opportunities for a best friend. Four generations of Isaac’s family--bankers, traders, businessmen, loungers and lotus-eaters--were to live in the honeyed light of a city whose sinuous history has made it one of the capitals of our literary imagination: Cavafy, Durrell, Flaubert on a visit and many others.

Rommel was defeated and the family survived, but Nasser’s overthrow of King Farouk, Fouad’s son, undermined its position (though one uncle did well as Farouk’s appointed auctioneer). The Suez War, and the subsequent pressure on Egyptian Jews, undermined it further. Aunts and uncles departed painfully for France, England and Italy. In 1964 Aciman’s father, who had founded a flourishing textile factory and was temporarily spared, had his business seized, and he and his family were ordered out.

Aciman, today a professor of French literature at Princeton, has written a book that is both a memoir and a chronicle of his family’s four generations in Egypt. It has brief, piercing portraits of a 90-year-old uncle in England, of a grandmother and great-aunt, also in their 90s, continuing their lifelong bicker in a garret apartment in Paris. Exile serves as a frame for memory; a moon from which you glimpse the earth that you lost.

“Out of Egypt” is beautifully remembered and even more beautifully written. Aciman writes of a dazzling time and place populated by lavish and theatrical characters. His book is written, in fact, like a musical variety act. Each of its six chapters tends to single one or two characters out of the ensemble; when they appear in other scenes, they drop back and rejoin the chorus. Time skitters wildly from page to page.

We see Flora in her aged exile and, 40 years earlier, as a beautiful and unattached in-law keeping up the general family spirits and several of its particular male spirits, as well. One of these belonged to Aciman’s father, a young man who managed to out-spirit his uncles.

The first chapter, allegro con brio , depicts the family’s most flamboyantly picaresque figure, Great-Uncle Vili. It was a nickname bestowed on him, as a young Prussian officer before World War I, by one of his many conquests who thought he looked like Kaiser Wilhelm. We meet Vili at 90, living in comfort under the name of Spingarn on his estate in Surrey. He does the English gentleman down to the last frayed snip of expensive tweed; the shopkeepers defer to him, and the wife of the local squire runs errands for him and practices her French.

On a visit, Aciman recounts Vili’s life. Deeply attached to Italy, he left the German Army in 1914 and fought with the Italians on the Allied side. He became a fervent admirer of Mussolini, helped raise money for the campaign in Ethiopia and was sent each year to Germany to lecture the Hitler Youth on Fascism. He was an enthusiast; with perhaps a touch less enthusiasm--except perhaps for his own foresight--he worked as a British spy. Hence his postwar reward of a Surrey estate and a new name. His motto, which managed to express his alarming appetite for life, women, excitement and the double track, was Siamo o non siamo . It is a suitably ambiguous phrase, meaning We are or we aren’t , or perhaps Are we or aren’t we?

Before the chapter ends, allegro changes to andante . Vili’s Surrey is a cold substitute for his golden Alexandria. The English, he complains, are “slower than the Arabs and twice as stupid.” At night a cousin beckons to Aciman to listen at the bedroom door. After the French radio program is switched off, they hear the nonagenarian rumble of a Hebrew prayer.

Aciman writes of the intimate friendship and rivalry between his two grandmothers, who lived across the street from each other. Between their husbands it was pure rivalry. Albert, who came from Turkey, despised Jacques, who was socially less distinguished and came from Syria. Alexandria was a place where four aristocracies--British, Greek, Egyptian, Sephardic--could live side by side, each entirely assured of its own distinction.

“Out of Egypt” is a scintillating portrait of a family and a world that were narrowly clannish and exuberantly cosmopolitan. The quarrels are Wagnerian. Aciman’s paternal grandmother grows so enraged with her daughter-in-law that she slaps and curses, not the daughter-in-law but herself, for being so stupid as to let her son marry and worse, for urging him to be faithful. No curse like an Alexandrian curse.

There is pain and harshness; for example, young Aciman’s misery at a school invaded by a wave of Egyptian nationalism and anti-Semitism. There is the scene in which Great-Uncle Isaac, a man of courtly elegance, loses control of his bowels when the police arrive to take him for questioning. It is tragic in its own way, though not in the way of a holocaust; not-quite-dead connections are invoked, money--though by no means all of it--changes hands, and Isaac is soon living comfortably in France.

Beneath the histrionics and the pain is the remembered sweetness. The courtship of Aciman’s father and his mother, who live across the street from each other, has the shivering delicacy of a Mozart duet. There is the near-paradise of summers spent at a seaside villa, and the figure of an endearingly ungainly Italian who instills in the boy a love of poetry and Greek.

When the family had gathered to wait for Rommel’s tanks and listen to Flora play, Vili had remained infuriatingly optimistic. How could he know that they wouldn’t break through? “Let them attack Egypt, let them venture as deeply into Egypt as they want. Sand always wins in the end,” he replied.

Sand has obliterated a 60-year Alexandrian garden; or would have if Aciman had not restored it in the grace of language and memory.