Growing Up Jewish in Alexandria: 

The Story of a Sephardic Family’s Exodus from Egypt

CreateSpace, 2014, ISBN: 978-1500446352

Reviewed by Andre M. Douek¹

There are many similarities between Growing Up Jewish in Alexandria—The Story of a Sephardic Family’s Exodus from Egypt by Lucienne Carasso and my family’s experience in Cairo. I found myself pulled by the memories of a life that will never be replicated. Whether it was reminiscences about the department store, Cicurel, or the legendary Cecil Hotel in Alexandria, these names resonate with me and with other displaced Jews from Egypt, regardless of whether we came from Cairo or Alexandria. These “institutions” defined the life we, and the life Carasso, lived. This was a different epoch, one that came abruptly to an end with the Arab-Israeli conflict, and even though every attempt was made to reconstruct that life in Italy or New York, or elsewhere for other Jews, for all practical purposes that life ended with her family’s departure from Egypt. Carasso’s tale is a teenager’s account of the life and the hardships encountered by her family and, by extension, by the Jewish community as a whole which severed its ties with Egypt to rebuild a life elsewhere.

Carasso’s tale begins on November 2, 1956, when, as a young girl of ten, she witnesses the arrest of her father at a time when the Egyptian government was turning its full attention to the Jews in the country, mainly in response to the war with Israel, Britain, and France and the ensuing Suez Canal Crisis. She walks back the reader to her family’s roots and origins in Alexandria, a cosmopolitan city made up of French, Arabic, Greek, Italian, Spanish, English, or Armenian speakers. In fact, she tells the reader that it was not unusual for people to know several languages and to mix several languages in one sentence. For example a person would start “a sentence in one language, continue it in another language, and finish it in a third language (p. 11).” At the Jewish community school that her father attended, for instance, the curriculum was taught in Hebrew, Arabic, French, and Italian.

The Alexandria she remembers is a sunny, warm place populated by colorful and sophisticated people without any hint of unpleasantness. She recalls her early childhood as being happy and never lonely. Her recollections of being surrounded by a large and extended family are typical of the Jews of Egypt from that period. She learned to rely on them, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and the ever-doting grandmothers, for love and support. They were her moral compass. Living a life of privilege and affluence in Egypt also meant the customary domestics who were considered members of that extended family. Thus, even now when she describes the hired help, she speaks about them “with affection.”

Her family had been in Egypt for nearly 150 years and made a living as importers of coal, fertilizers, industrial chemicals, pharmaceutical, assorted metals, and paints. Eventually, her father found his niche as a shipping agent, trading in chemical products. At first, his company represented seventeen shipping companies who gave him the license to transport Egyptian cotton from Alexandria to Italy and Yugoslavia. Later, the number of companies he represented grew to fifty-one, with contracts to ship to Marseilles, France as well.

Carasso’s account of life as the German Army in World War II closed in on Alexandria and her descriptions of preparations prior to the pivotal battle of El Alamein are testament to how close the war came to the major centers of population in Egypt. As the battle raged in El Alamein, Carasso remembers hearing the canon fire and seeing the brightly-lit sky from the family’s balcony.

After liquidating whatever assets her father had, the family bade a tearful goodbye to Alexandria and Egypt in August, 1961. With about forty leather suitcases, the family packed their personal belongings and other valuables and set out on its final voyage out of Egypt to Italy. But before this could be done, Egypt reserved one final indignity for its departing Jews—a strip-search--to make sure the emigrants were not hiding any valuables on their bodies.

This book is an interesting read for anyone wanting to know the story of the Jews in Egypt and, in particular, those in Alexandria. The Jews are a resilient people, a people of faith and courage determined to persevere despite adversity. This account of the Jews of Egypt and Alexandria confirms these characteristics. Wherever they ended up after this latest exodus, whether in Israel, France, North America, or elsewhere, they persevered and succeeded in rebuilding their lives from the country where they and their ancestors had lived for decades, if not centuries.