Alexandra and Edith made their way to Malaka Nazli for the first crucial family get-together. Mother and daughter tried their best to get their bearings in this house where the matriarch dressed and behaved like an old Arab woman, so that even in the heart of Cairo, it was as if they had wandered into another culture, another era. Lending them moral support was a man they worshipfully called Oncle Edouard, though he was in fact Alexandra’s stepson, and Edith’s half brother. Edouard was older, richer, and formidable looking—the closest Edith had to a father figure since her own father had abandoned them. He also cared deeply about her and came prepared to do what only a man could do, offer his protection and negotiate any financial details of the impending union.
In truth there wasn’t much to negotiate: Edith had nothing, no financial assets whatever.
My mother didn’t have a clue, of course, about Leon’s lifestyle. She didn’t know of his habit of leaving Malaka Nazli early each morning and not returning till after midnight, and the whirlwind courtship and family get-together didn’t give her the opportunity to learn. The moment they walked in, Zarifa praised her son’s fiancée for her beauty, calling her “heloua, heloua”—lovely, lovely—and patting her gently on the head. She disappeared into the kitchen and emerged with platter after platter of elegant handmade pastries and cookies, fruits and nuts, more pastries, and large carafes of freshly squeezed lemonade.
The wedding would take place almost immediately.
Of course, the ceremony would be at the Gates of Heaven, the large synagogue downtown. It was the only temple that could possibly accommodate all the aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces on Leon’s side.
Edith shyly showed off her engagement ring, and her future mother-in-law bent down to peer at it, almost as if she were at the famous old souk in Aleppo inspecting a lemon or an apricot, and pronounced it satisfactory.
Watching on the sidelines was Salomone. He didn’t say a word beyond the initial introductions, but he was struck by Edith’s youth and vulnerability—she couldn’t have been much older than him, yet there she was, marrying his uncle. Salomone would have to give up the spacious master bedroom he had enjoyed in the back. It was the room Edith and Leon would be occupying after their honeymoon.
When the newlyweds returned from Ras-el-Bar, the seaside resort whose charming bamboo huts overlooked the Mediterranean, my father seemed to have turned over a new leaf and to have abandoned most of his old habits. He still left early in the morning to go to synagogue and then to work, but instead of staying out all hours as before, he made it a point to come home for lunch and again at dinnertime.
He’d flick on the large wooden radio. He seemed content to while away the evening reading the paper and listening to the broadcast of Om Kalsoum singing at a downtown club, a reminder of the life he had left behind.
My grandmother immediately lauded her new daughter-in-law as lovely and refined. Zarifa appreciated the fact that Edith was learned—teaching was a very prestigious occupation—yet in truth, education mattered little to the elderly Syrian woman who could barely sign her own name. What counted were Edith’s attributes as a wife, whether she was a capable mate for Leon and would—Inshallah—bear him many children.
It was obvious within weeks of moving in that Edith lacked many of the necessary qualities, except youth and beauty.
To my grandmother’s dismay, Edith showed little interest in the affairs of the house, and even less interest in cooking. She seemed nervous and uneasy in the one room that consumed and preoccupied Zarifa—the ancient little kitchen. My mother tiptoed curiously by the Primus, with its small sputtering sounds and heady scent of petrol, approaching it as if it were a foreign object. Alexandra, Edith’s mother, was a different breed entirely than her new mother-in-law, and it wasn’t only that she spoke French and Italian and disdained Arabic. She had an aristocratic outlook and demeanor, the product of a privileged upbringing in a wealthy Alexandrian Jewish family, and she had raised Edith to regard housework as beneath them even when there was no longer a hint of privilege in their lives. She encouraged her daughter to read books or go to the cinema, not waste her time in the kitchen.
After her father had left them, Edith had assumed most household duties and tried to care for all three of them—Alexandra, her brother, Félix, and herself. Yet she had inherited Alexandra’s disdain for “women’s work.” Besides, Edith assumed that since she had married into a family of wealth and stature, servants would do all the work.
This was the mind-set, fanciful and disastrous, that my twenty-year-old mother brought to her marriage to my forty-two-year-old father. If not for the maid and Zarifa’s intense personal involvement in the affairs of the house, the beds would be left undone, the cupboards would be bare, the floors would accumulate dust, the Primus burner would remain shut, and no guests would join the family because there would be little to serve them.
Edith wasn’t lazy or incompetent; she was simply terrified of the autocratic old woman who was the true ruler of Malaka Nazli. She was only too willing to cede control of the kitchen to her mother-in-law. She preferred to stay in the quiet master bedroom devouring her latest novel, and she missed her job at the École Cattaoui, which she’d given up—regretfully—because no self-respecting bride in 1940s Cairo continued working when she had a husband who could support her.
Zarifa issued her verdict about my mother: she is not a good homemaker. It was like a death sentence in a community where a woman is judged first and foremost by her appearance, and second, by how she runs her house. News of my mother’s shortcomings spread beyond Malaka Nazli, to the homes of Zarifa’s daughters and daughters-in-law.
The family was curious and by nature gregarious. They would drop in—my father’s sisters, Leila, Marie, Rebekah, and his older brothers, Raphael and Shalom. The only ones who didn’t come were Joseph, the oldest, and the richest, who lived in a mansion in Zamalek and was estranged from the family, and Salomon, the priest, who lived in Jerusalem and wasn’t welcome on Malaka Nazli in any event.
All were somewhat puzzled by their brother’s choice of bride—Edith was very pretty, certainly, but so slight and unassuming. After all these years, they had expected someone more prepossessing, not this poor humble girl from Sakakini.
Maybe they could tell she was no match for the Captain. In a society where men ruled, a woman had to have a strong character to hold her own in a marriage. It was clear to everyone that for all her attributes—her beauty, her charm, her education, her sense of humor—my mother would never be able to stand up to Leon.
Edith, for her part, liked most of her in-laws, particularly Rebekah, who had a good heart and seemed anxious to make her feel welcome, and Oncle Shalom, the poorest member of the family, who limped terribly in his elevated shoes, but made up for his infirmity by being exceedingly kind. But she was surprised by the women’s custom of wearing robes or dressing gowns when they sat down at the dinner table. She was too shy to ask them why—was this some sort of quaint Syrian tradition brought over from Old Aleppo? She didn’t feel comfortable imitating them. She wore a dress at dinner, whether there were guests at the table or not.
Then, there was the food itself. Lavish meals were served at Malaka Nazli almost every day, and every single dish seemed to be cooked with fruit, mostly apricots. It was all so different from the foods Edith was used to eating, made with onions and leeks, drenched in lemon, and fragrant with garlic. The tastes and smells from Zarifa’s kitchen added to Edith’s sense of herself as a stranger who had wandered into a foreign country named Malaka Nazli.
MY GRANDMOTHER ZARIFA BELIEVED that certain foods possessed magical powers.
Bananas and raw eggs were at the top of her list, along with almonds, sour cherries, olives, and, above all, mesh-mesh, ripe, luscious apricots. Zarifa would slip them into virtually any dish that was simmering on her Primus, and she was such a gifted cook that every course she prepared, from simple grilled meats to elaborate stews and roasts, emitted a mysterious, vaguely fruity aroma.
Anyone who came to dine at Malaka Nazli could count on a transcendent experience. What was in there? they’d wonder, amazed at their sense of absolute well-being.
They’d press their diminutive hostess, but she only smiled and refused to answer. But over coffee, she would drop a hint or two about a charmed and distant past.
“Once upon a time, we dined with kings,” my grandmother would exclaim in Arabic. Her soft voice rose as she stirred her coffee with a rapid encircling gesture, using the small gold spoon that no one else was allowed to touch.
In the summer there was news that brought a smile to the old matriarch: Edith was expecting. At last, Leon would have an heir.
But there was also tension at Malaka Nazli. The joy and excitement over the baby was overshadowed by a sudden turn in the marriage. Without warning, my father had gone back to his routine of going out night after night and never telling anyone—not even his new wife—where he was going. His old lifestyle resumed.
They had barely been married a few weeks, yet it was as if nothing had changed.
He moved out of the master bedroom he shared with Edith and reclaimed his old room, steps away from the front door. My mother was bewildered. She had a young woman’s pride: Hadn’t she been the only woman able to snare the elusive boulevardier? It didn’t help that she was now pregnant, frightened and anxious about giving birth. Worst of all was that she had no one to confide in, certainly not in her mother-in-law. Even Alexandra, who’d had her own disastrous experiences with a husband, had encouraged this union, seeing an opportunity for her daughter to marry a man of means and stature, and disregarding the obvious danger signs—the large age difference, the immense cultural chasm between an older, worldly gentleman and a meek, inexperienced young woman.
281-Malaka Nazli.
And while there was Salomone, she could hardly speak to him about her marital woes. Thrown together in close quarters, they were genuinely compatible. Both were intellectual, and Salomone shared Edith’s passion for books. She was comfortable conversing in Italian, which was a relief to the young man, who missed the language and ways of his native country. Yet she couldn’t tell him what was paining her.
In a way, she didn’t have to: there were no secrets on Malaka Nazli.
Salomone had watched the entire drama unfold—the hopeful engagement, the refined young fiancée, so different from the other women in the Syrian clan, the promising start of the marriage, followed almost immediately by my father’s return to his old ways, and my mother’s despair about being abandoned night after night.
Leon never took my mother along when he left, and he never answered her questions as to where he was going.
With her Proustian imagination, her knowledge of the seamier side of life that came only through literature, Edith feared the worst. The bon vivant qualities that had attracted her took on a darker cast. Surely my father had a mistress, she thought, or more than one. What else does a man do, far from his family, at 1:00 a.m., in Cairo?
Her vast readings couldn’t provide her with the insight a more worldly woman would have had, and because she was fundamentally timid, in no way a match for this man who was answerable to no one, she found herself trapped in an unhappy union only months after it had been consummated.
There was no point in complaining to Zarifa. No self-respecting Aleppo matriarch would ever take the side of a daughter-in-law against her own son, at least not publicly.
In fact, though she defended Leon, my grandmother was deeply saddened by the turn of events. She, more than anyone, had hoped that her son’s restless nature would be quieted once he was married. Yet even a beautiful, desirable young wife and the prospect of a child seemed not to have altered my father’s ways in the least, and he insisted on coming and going as he pleased from Malaka Nazli.
NINETEEN FORTY-FOUR BEGAN WITH some promise. The showdown at El Alamein two years earlier had proved a watershed, halting the German army’s relentless advance into North Africa.
“The Battle of Egypt,” as Churchill affectionately dubbed it, marked a turning point in the Allies’ fortunes. In one fell swoop, the British had dashed Germany’s dreams of seizing Cairo and controlling Egypt and the Suez Canal.
A jubilant Churchill, who visited Cairo several times during the war, declared, “Before Alamein, we never had a victory, and after Alamein, we never had a defeat.” Egypt, the land of miraculous unfoldings, had brought the Allies luck.
But the war wasn’t over, and the war against the Jews had only intensified. It was always jarring to speak to the refugees who passed through Cairo. They were so breathless, on their way to the southernmost reaches of Africa, because anyone who had managed to flee Europe couldn’t get far enough away and felt they had to keep running to the ends of the earth.
There had been no news about Salomone’s family in Milan for months. The heavily censored postcards from his parents that had arrived early by courtesy of the Red Cross, and offered some reassurance, had stopped coming altogether sometime in 1943. Despite the dearth of information, Salomone tried to keep his fears in check.
He went about his business as if all were well in the world. After finishing the lycée, he had landed an excellent job as an accountant. Each morning, a chauffeured car would arrive to take him to his office, and would drop him off in the evening in time to dine with Zarifa and Edith and, if he was around, Oncle Leon. On weekends, he kept busy with an active social life. Tall, slender, and impeccably groomed, Salomone was proving to be popular with women. He had my father’s boulevardier tendencies, including a love for fine clothes, good food, and attractive women. Matchmakers began approaching him the way they once had his uncle.
Young Salomone, Alexandria, 1939
If only there were news about his parents and his sister.
A portrait of Salomone’s mother surrounded by her four children when they were toddlers, smiling and exquisitely dressed, occupied a place of honor in the dining room for all visitors to see—a young woman so intrepid that when she became engaged to his father, a man twenty-five years her senior, she seemed undaunted by the prospect of leaving her family and comfortable life in Egypt to settle in Italy.
After eight years in her house, Salomone had adopted many of my grandmother’s belief systems, especially concerning the importance of food. Salomone learned that apricots were the fruit of God, while almonds and other nuts had medicinal powers. For everyday ills, coffee was the all-purpose cure.
That is why, when he woke up feverish and under the weather a day or two after celebrating the New Year, my cousin decided to head by trolley directly to À l’Américaine, the jaunty Groppi annex whose frothy cappuccino was the best in all of Cairo. But on this January morning, his teeth were chattering and he was sweating profusely, and even the comforting Italian coffee that reminded him of home failed to have its intended healing effect.
He staggered out and hailed a taxi back to Malaka Nazli. He was greeted at the door by my father, who had chosen that afternoon to stay close to his bride, who was nearly eight months pregnant. When he saw his nephew, feverish and pale, wheezing, at times unable to breathe, Leon ordered him to go to bed immediately.
The family doctor, who made house calls any hour of the day or night, came immediately, examined Salomone, and expressed alarm at his fever. But he was unable to make a diagnosis. My father summoned another doctor, and then another; none could say for sure what was the matter.
It was time for Salomone to consult un spécialiste. In Cairo’s pantheon of professionals, doctors were revered but specialists occupied an exalted place at the top. Unlike their colleagues, they never made house calls but expected their patients to make their way to their private offices in the tonier sections of the city. None was more renowned than Dr. Grossi, an Italian pulmonologist who had made Cairo his home, and was considered the finest lung specialist in Egypt.
My father bundled his nephew in a warm coat and ordered the porter to summon a taxi. With Leon’s arm around him, Salomone made the painful journey over to Emad-Eldin, the fashionable district where Dr. Grossi maintained his private practice.
Calmly, methodically, Dr. Grossi examined my cousin. After administering multiple tests, including a crude chest X-ray, he was confident in his diagnosis: Salomone had la pleurésie, an inflammation of the heart that was sometimes fatal, he decreed. In this era before antibiotics were widely available, pleurisy was especially difficult to treat. Still, Dr. Grossi was certain that he could devise a course of treatment that would work.
First and foremost, he ordered complete bed rest. Salomone had to stay in his room, as motionless as possible.
The second aspect of the treatment involved food. My cousin was ordered to eat—to eat constantly, as much as he could handle. There were no medicines or potions Dr. Grossi could offer in a country that hadn’t even seen penicillin yet. If my cousin had any hope of surviving this deadly infection, he had to consume a high-calorie diet rich in calcium and minerals.
Though they didn’t meet, Dr. Grossi managed to endear himself to my grandmother as few men of science ever would. He confirmed what Zarifa believed with every fiber of her being: that food was the weapon of choice in combating even the most complex ailments.
“Once you get home, don’t move,” Dr. Grossi reminded my cousin as he painfully sat up on the examining table.
Zarifa was waiting for them in the living room, sipping a cup of Turkish coffee flavored with a hint of orange water. She stirred the cup anxiously, round and round, with her gold spoon. After Leon, Salomone was her favorite person in the world, dearer even than her other sons and daughters.
Then and there, my father decided to move out of his bedroom and grandly offered it to my cousin. It was the most pleasant room in the house, with two beds and a large window that faced Malaka Nazli. He could rest even when his bed was being changed: he could merely roll over to the other bed.
Salomone had never felt so sick as in those first weeks of 1944. He slept a great deal, and when he didn’t, he read obsessively. As it happened, in a number of the novels the hero or heroine died of pleurisy, which depressed him immeasurably. My mother would tiptoe into his room and lend him a book she had finished. Every once in a while, Salomone woke up to find my father or Zarifa standing over the bed, peering at him.
Dr. Grossi’s diagnosis had left him bewildered. All his life he had been exceptionally healthy. He stood at over six feet, nearly as tall as Oncle Leon. It was incomprehensible that he could feel so sick and beaten down.
It was surely a coincidence that at exactly the same time his parents and older sister were rounded up for deportation, Salomone was felled by this awful malady. He had no idea, that terrible January when his life hung in the balance, that his parents and sister were also prisoners, albeit in a far more sordid kind of jail, in Milan, and confronting a deadlier and more ruthless enemy than pleurisy. Arrested in December as they prepared to flee across the Swiss border, Bahia, his mother, along with his father, Lelio, and sister, Violetta, found themselves among the thousands of Jews who had waited too long to leave their beloved Italy.
NEVER HAD A DOCTOR’S orders been taken so literally or implemented so zealously.
Healing Salomone became my grandmother’s sole endeavor.
Other women would have felt overwhelmed and resentful at having to care for a desperately ill grandson as well as a pregnant daughter-in-law. But Zarifa, with her profound sense of familial duty, embraced the responsibility.
Her blue eyes gleamed at the challenge.
My grandmother viewed cooking as a kind of black art—part skill and part magic. She was surprisingly lithe in the kitchen, considering her advanced age, able to maneuver from pot to pot, stirring a bit here, adding a spice or condiment there. Then there were the pieces of apricot that she inserted anywhere she could—inside a chicken breast, beneath a steak, alongside a pot of stuffed grape leaves, or in the massive fish from the Nile, the bouri, that both her son and grandson loved above all foods. She would use dry apricots because it was so hard to obtain the fresh juicy ones except during the brief apricot season.
She would have liked to impart some of the secrets of her cooking to Edith, to share with her recipes of old Aleppo. Alas, even after she became pregnant, Leon’s bride continued to show no interest in Zarifa’s bubbling pots and pans.
At 6:00 a.m. each morning, my grandmother would appear by Salomone’s bedside. Lightly tapping him on the shoulder, she’d hand him a tray with half a dozen raw eggs. He was always surprised at how hungrily he ate them.
An hour later it was time for breakfast. The rest of the house was awake by then. Leon, already back from synagogue, sat in the dining room enjoying tea with milk, while Edith sipped sweet black coffee. Zarifa would break away to prepare a special tray for her grandson. She loaded it with fresh milk, purchased that morning from the man who came each day with his cow and goat to the back of the house and asked her to choose which milk she preferred. She often chose cow’s milk, which was tastier and costlier than the thin, inexpensive, slightly discolored goat’s milk. She poured it into a special outsize bowl for her grandson, along with bread and cheese and a tub of fresh butter, then sat down near the bed and watched to make sure he ate.
By ten, the house was silent again. Leon had left to attend to his business, and Edith had returned to her room and her books. Zarifa went back to her grandson’s bedside to offer him his mid-morning snack: six bananas.
Shortly before noon, she was back in her kitchen, grilling him a steak. He’d find apricots tucked under the meat, giving it a piquant flavor.
By one, the family gathered again for lunch. In his bedroom, Salomone was offered a plate that overflowed with whatever Zarifa and Edith were eating in the dining room. Typically, that meant rice and vegetables, along with chunks of stewed meat or chicken.
After having consumed the equivalent of four meals, Salomone was allowed to rest. Zarifa gave the maid strict orders not to make up the room as he slept, though only for a couple of hours, because she believed that to defeat the pleurisy, he had to be eating at all times.
By three, she was back at his side, carrying a tray laden with four or five more bananas, which brought the day’s total to almost a dozen. The doctor had stressed the importance of calcium, but it wasn’t readily available because of the war. Eating twelve bananas a day helped give my cousin the needed vitamins even as my father arranged to buy black-market calcium tablets.
Afternoon tea was a ritual Zarifa relished, though she substituted strong black Turkish coffee for tea. When Salomone became ill, she used the coffee he adored as an inducement for him to eat the fresh cakes and rolls she had purchased.
She was delighted to see how, without prodding, he polished off the milk and coffee, along with the pastries, jam, fresh rolls, and butter.
The family, with the exception of my father, came together again at dinner, which was served at eight o’clock. It was the meal in which Zarifa truly outdid herself. It didn’t matter that Salomone had already eaten six times when evening rolled around. My cousin was fully expected to consume multiple courses.
That afternoon, my grandmother would have dispatched the maid to Zamalek, the most upscale neighborhood, to buy a kilo of cherries, which were a great delicacy, and hard to come by. They were needed to make meatballs with sour cherries, a dish that took hours to prepare, and that she had learned in her mother’s kitchen in nineteenth-century Aleppo. Zarifa would knead half a dozen spices into the chopped meat—cinnamon, of course, along with salt, black pepper, and baharat, a kind of allspice. She’d add tamarind and a large spoonful of sugar into the sauce she made with the stewed cherries, then, remembering how sick her grandson was, and the baby that Leon and Edith were expecting, she’d throw in another spoonful of sugar. The effort was worthwhile; how wonderful to see Salomone devour the dozens of miniature meatballs, which were sweet and tangy at the same time, like nothing he had ever tasted before or would ever taste again.
The high point of dinner was also its finale. Zarifa would arrive bearing her signature dish, an immense platter of rice topped with mesh-mesh, juicy apricots that had been cooked for so many hours they had melted into a kind of syrupy marmalade. No matter what else she had made, lamb stew, steak, okra, or chicken, it was considered a must to end the meal with a plate of rice topped by mesh-mesh. Salomone gleefully helped himself to plate after plate of apricot-laden rice. He loved whatever his grandmother loved and was convinced, as was she, that the apricots would single-handedly vanquish the pleurisy.
Edith was the only one who showed little enthusiasm.
Zarifa tried to ignore the fact that her daughter-in-law ate only the fluffy grains of white rice, pushing aside the stewed fruit she had so lovingly prepared.
Two months and hundreds of Zarifa’s meals later, it was time to return to Dr. Grossi.
When Salomone got up from bed to get dressed, he found that none of his clothes fit. He had gained more than fifty pounds. Leon instructed his nephew to put on a pair of loose cotton pajamas. He took Salomone’s arm while the porter ran to summon a taxi.
Salomone looked nervously up and down the street to see if anyone would notice that a grown man was wearing pajamas in broad daylight.
“Seulement les fous s’habillent comme ça,” he grumbled; Only crazy people dress like this. But my father ignored him, and the taxi raced through the bustling streets.
Upstairs, Dr. Grossi had to contain a laugh. His “cure” had worked beyond his wildest imaginings. He couldn’t find a hint of pleurisy.
MALAKA NAZLI WAS BEGINNING to feel too small to accommodate Leon, his young bride, the baby on the way, my grandmother, and Salomone. My cousin was twenty-two, no longer the skinny, nervous youth that he’d been when he joined the household seven years earlier. He had a good job, friends, even girlfriends, and he knew that he should think of living on his own. Yet even he was stunned when, not long after his recovery, and without even giving him notice, my father informed Salomone that he would have to move out immediately.
My cousin couldn’t help wondering if his friendship with Edith was to blame. The two had grown close in the past year. Was Oncle Leon resentful or even jealous?
It was no secret that Edith adored her husband’s urbane Milanese nephew, and considered him the only real friend she had in the house. She viewed her mother-in-law with a gimlet eye and found her judgmental and oppressive, despite her kindly airs and solicitous manners.
Edith assumed her life would change once she gave birth. Her husband, who took his familial duties so seriously, would surely recognize the need to stay close to home. She pinned her hopes on the child she was carrying, who would validate her worth, redeem her in the eyes of the mother-in-law who seemed to find her inadequate and the husband who didn’t care enough to stay with her through the night.
Her more cynical side knew this was probably wishful thinking, as elusive and intangible as the apricot season, which is so brief and fleeting as to seem illusory.
“Fil mesh-mesh,” goes a popular Arabic saying; When the apricot season comes.
What it really means is: Don’t bet on it. It will never happen.
On March 6, 1944, the midwife was summoned to Malaka Nazli.
My father, Leon, planned a major celebration to mark the birth of his son. He set out early in the morning to the Congregation of Love and Friendship, bearing a double portion of coffee and sugar and other treats and delicacies.
“Une fille?” he said in disbelief when he returned and the midwife handed him the pretty dark-haired infant.
“Ce n’est pas possible.”
He was so disappointed that he left my mother and his newborn daughter and, hailing a taxi, went to the café where a year earlier he had fallen in love with Edith. Seated at his favorite table at the bar, he ordered an arak, and then another, and another. He stayed out all night, unable to hide his dismay, unwilling to face my grandmother, who had wanted a boy almost as much as he. It seemed not to matter that the infant was to be called Zarifa in her honor. That was the way of Old Aleppo, where a father has the privilege of choosing the name of his firstborn.
Years later, after my mother had told her the bitter story of her birth, my sister would steadfastly refuse to be known by that name. Though she was called Suzette from an early age, for that was the way of modern Cairo, where families conferred European names on their youngsters to help ease their way into colonial society, official documents still listed her as Zarifa. From the time she was a young girl, my sister demanded that all traces of her Arabic name be expunged from the records. As she raged and raged at my father, it was as if she were seeking a way to punish him for that original sin, for the fact that he’d had to drown his sorrows over the news of her birth.