High Noon : THE SUN AT MIDDAY: Tales of a Mediterranean Family.<i> By Gini Alhadeff</i> .<i> Pantheon: 226 pp., $23</i>
The question of who we are, if we can fashion our own identity, independent of our families, is one that many of us attempt to answer. We answer it best in the way we live our lives.
Gini Alhadeff has a tangled knot to untie in fashioning her own identity. If, as she is, you are brought up in Alexandria, Cairo, Khartoum, Italy, Tokyo, London and New York, then what is your nationality? If, as she is, you are a Sephardic Jew with parents who converted and an uncle who is a priest and you were baptized as a child, then what religion can you truly call your own?
Until she was 22 years old and living in New York, Alhadeff remained ignorant of her Sephardic Jewish heritage. When asked, for the first time, if she was a Sephardic Jew, she considered the possibility. All the questions about her grandparents--why they never went to church, etc.--jelled. I find it hard to believe that Alhadeff didn’t know, on some level, that she was Jewish until she was in her 20s.
I can, however, understand her confusion about her relationship to Judaism. Both my parents were Jewish, but at home in New York City, my family celebrated Christmas and Easter. (I never went to temple until I was on a package tour of Russia, age 16. When I asked my father if anyone in his family knew Yiddish, he asked, “What’s that?” Discussing his funeral arrangements, my father said that he would have a rabbi speak, but he didn’t want it to be too Jewish an affair, with a language that people didn’t understand. “You mean Hebrew?” I asked.)
If you are stamped by society as belonging to a particular ethnic group but have no knowledge of the group’s ancient, esteemed, distinct culture, then how can you truly belong to it? That seems to be the question that Alhadeff poses in her memoir. Struggling with who she is, separate from her rich heritage, is a large part of this unexpectedly complicated, abundant family memoir. I say abundant because it spills over with the aromas of exotic places and foods, arresting characters, anecdotes and stories.
Although Alhadeff would like to think that she can define herself apart from her family, shed their skin, form her own, she immediately adds that her looks give the lie to her attempt to create herself anew. She has a “Mediterranean face,” long and oval, with dark eyes and a long nose.
In this memoir, “The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family,” about identity, the author sometimes pushes too hard to define what it means to be a Sephardic, “Mediterranean” Jew. Her Mediterranean looks may be the one inescapable aspect of her identity. Pinning down the way her family communicates, defining it as “Sephardic and Jewish,” is a riskier proposition.
Alhadeff ascribes her family’s ability to speak allusively, to never ask directly “for what one has one’s heart lightly set on,” to their being Sephardic. It is, she writes, “The one communication aside from all the French, Italian, Greek, Egyptian, Spanish, English that the Sephardim know. Most people speak the silent voice of the subconscious--whether it is by the movement of their body or by the spaces between words as they utter them--but very few understand it. I don’t want to glorify this skill--it is one that Sephardim share with certain hotel concierges, waiters and diplomats in general: being able to see what sort of weather is coming over the people around them.”
As a Western European Jew, I can attest to this reading “the weather” trait as one that also belongs to other Jews--it is not simply the province of the Sephardic. Nora Ephron describes it as the Jewish prince syndrome. This is how it goes: A man, perhaps even your husband, sits down at your table, commences to eat his corn and then he says, as if he were just speculating, “You know what? This corn would be great with some butter.” Not being a moron, you know you’re supposed to get up and get the man some butter. That way he doesn’t have to move and he has never actually asked you for anything. Of course, non-Jewish men, and even women, know this trick as well.
It is in the particularities of Alhadeff’s memoir that one paradoxically gets the clearest sense of what it was like to grow up in her chameleon-like family. Since they lived in many different countries, her relatives each speak many languages. The author’s own accent is evidently impossible to pin down. In Alexandria, before Nasser, her family wereprominent bankers, financiers, cotton merchants. Her family did more than survive, they prospered, ranking among the biggest cotton merchants in the Middle East.
“Snobbism is an animal that always has something to feed on,” writes Alhadeff in another chapter. Her relatives, friends of kings and queens, premiers, knighted and internationally respected, have more to feed on than most. “Most families think that they are endowed with extraordinary powers or gifts, or long for proof of this, that others are common while they are extraordinary.” But as her memoir illustrates, Alhadeff’s family was extraordinarily malleable and able (able, among other things, to survive).
Although Alhadeff cannot, she claims, relate to the martyrs, the victims of her “race,” her own stories contradict that conviction. It is the harrowing experience of an uncle in Buchenwald that influences her father to convert to Catholicism. One suspects that her uncle’s story is the one that teaches Alhadeff how wonderful it is “to find joy in trifles.”
The Inquisition, which drove her ancestors to convert or to cling to their religion in exile, was reversed by the will of their tenacious descendants to survive. Irony becomes part of her heritage. Brought up as she was, what other defense does she have? Amusing anecdotes, rich in irony, abound. Although her family was punished for being Jewish, their religion was also the source of their prosperity. There is no injunction, in Jewish law, against going into commerce. “The Mohammedan code strictly forbids usury and pious Mohammedans followed the injunction to the strict letter of the law.” Her foreign grandfather made a fortune in Egypt as a cotton merchant, something Mohammedan Egyptians were loath to do. Along with money, “another fortune” the author inherited is “his stone-producing kidneys.” In a household where feelings are reined in like wild horses, people lavish their love on dogs. When her father leaves after more than two decades of marriage, his place on his wife’s bed is taken by a dachshund.
In language itself, the author suggests, the legacy of her family survives. Her identity lies not just in her bones but in the way she takes the many languages she was given and creates a coherent history of her family’s travels and her own. Like relatives she admires, she shows her self-determination in the way that she is able to transform her life and that of her many relations into anecdote, and “anecdote into language that precisely recalls the atmosphere of all that surrounds it.” The truth this memoir teaches is that we are prisoners of our past yet contain in ourselves the ability to walk out of the house we were born into, or at least into another room.