|  |
| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 39 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 The past is never gone Oct 11, 2009
By Mary Luddy
I've never been to Egypt or even read much about it, but I feel as if I just returned from a guided tour of a fascinating place in a fascinating time. The combination of page-turning narrative and lovely writing made it difficult to put the book down. The descriptions and the sense of place are truly lessons in the craft of writing. Jean Naggar skillfully connects me to her world, dropping me into a foreign country and immediately making me feel at home. Her specific memories connect me to my own past: as she learns to swim, I relive my own swimming lessons on a Southern California beach far from her beach. She often elicits such memories, subtly revealing that despite how different our physical worlds might be, people are alike on many basic levels, especially as children discovering life. The combination of bringing us into both the writer's world and the reader's own seems to me to one of the main purposes of writing, and one of the most difficult, even though Jean Naggar makes it look easy. Surely one day the world will understand how connected we all are; narratives such as this are a step in that direction.
The title comes from the tradition that if you sip from the Nile before leaving, you will one day return. I love the final two lines: "The past is never gone. It is the foundation on which we build the present, every day of our lives." How perfectly they tie into those first words, the title, since being transported into that time is indeed sipping from the Nile. Jean Naggar leaves us with the hope that we will always be able to revisit the past through memory, enriching our present with each sip.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Snake Charmers and Jewish Exodus from Egypt, Again Aug 19, 2009
By Vanessa R. Schwartz
With an easy and honest style, Jean Naggar recounts her early life of privilege in her multi-generational home on the banks on the Nile. A house full of servants from different nations does not belie the need for the occasional arrival of the snake charmer to seduce the reptiles into a basket and out of their hiding places all over the sumptuous mansion. Naggar, the child of two of Egypt's most prominent Jewish families, chronicles what would be the childhood of the last generation to be raised in the part of the world that for one side of the family dated back to Biblical times and on the other, hundreds of years. A wonderful memoir in and of itself and an important reminder of the displacement of Jews from all over the Middle East during the course of the twentieth century.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
a lavish memoir Aug 11, 2009
By NYC Reader
To read SIPPING FROM THE NILE, Jean Naggar's lavish memoir of her Cairo childhood, is to be transported to another world, another time. This book is a document of the gorgeous, elaborate rituals of Naggar's Sephardic upbringing. It is series of exquisitely-remembered portraits of the people whose have lives braided into hers-- among them her father, whom she movingly memorializes for imparting to her a novelistic sense of the human world:
"I listened, spellbound, to my father's rich store of anecdotes...I began to understand that adults had faults and foibles and were multidimensional, having relationships to each other and to the world that went far beyond their peripheral impact on my own life. I began to sense the existence of a glowing tapestry of humanity stretching out into the far distance behind me..."
Most of all, SIPPING FROM THE NILE tells the story of a life marked by deep loss, but one marked so much the more by the continuity its author has created in her lived and written present, despite formidable obstacles. A beautiful book!
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
A Wonderful Family History Mar 21, 2009
By Wendy F. Weltz
Some fifteen years ago our son married the daughter of Jean Naggar and so began a wonderful friendship and some knowledge of the Sephardic Jewish religion. Now with the publishing of Jean's book detailing the wanderings and history of many Sephardic people and in particular her family I have learned all about her family as it survived the many years in colonial Egypt, an era that is so fascinating. It was both wonderful and a privilege to learn all the intimate details of my son's wonderful family. We had a wonderful time reading Jean's memoir.
At the time I wrote the above review the crisis in Egypt and surrounding countries had not yet exploded. Now that there is renewed eruptions in Jean's homeland with an uncertain outcome we can more fully appreciate her story of anxiety and exodus as she was forced to leave all behind her and start anew in the United States, a country that provided a safe and opportunistic haven. As in all good literature, a plot is more interesting when it ties in and parallels with current events of the world.
I found this book a must read and a wonderful gift for all my friends and family. It is an interesting story to be compared with the flight of Jews world over and throughout the centuries and is relevant particularly at this time of Passover!
3 of 4 found the following review helpful:
A Lost World Comes to Life Dec 04, 2008
By Paul Preuss
"Sipping from the Nile" is a richly evocative memoir of a young girl's upbringing in what now seems a setting as exotic as the long-gone (and never quite real) Alexandria of Durrell's "Alexandrian Quartet." A favored child who grew up speaking Italian, French, English, and Arabic, a budding poet, a gifted (if reluctant) violinist, Jean Naggar's youth was shaped as much by danger and loss as by privilege. But her book is much more than a memoir. It brings to life an astonishing cast of real-life characters and a centuries-old culture, just as real but now as lost as King Solomon's Mines. Naggar's parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, were among the most influential figures in the Jewish communities of Cairo and Alexandria. The elders built sumptuous mansions on the banks of the Nile and the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, were sponsors of the arts and civic works, and leading figures in international trade and finance. They summered in Europe, and their children attended private schools in England. Then, in a few short months, this world was lost. In 1956 Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt in a ill-fated attempt to regain it. The Jewish families living in Egypt, rich and poor, were soon persecuted, broken up, or driven out, their property confiscated or sold worthlessly. Naggar tells of these events from a perspective not only personal but deeply empathetic, involving the reader in the changed fortunes of her parents, the fates of her indomitable grandmother and fierce aunt, and the wanderings of her scattered siblings and cousins, all people we have come to know and admire in the course of this almost novel-like story. I've long known Jean Naggar as a superb judge of writing and the business of literature; reading "Sipping From the Nile," her own skills as a writer - funny, powerfully descriptive, able to recreate a setting or a character in a few precisely chosen details - were a revelation. Illustrated with vivid photographs, this is a memoir, and a historical record, unlike any other.
See all 39 customer reviews on Amazon.com
|
| | |
|
|
