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An Exile Revisits the Squalor and Grandeur of 1960s Italy
Recounting the time his family spent in a former Italian brothel, André Aciman’s new memoir, “Roman Year,” picks up where 1994’s “Out of Egypt” left off.
ROMAN YEAR: A Memoir, by André Aciman
About a third of the way through André Aciman’s “Roman Year” — an account of the time his family spent there when he was 16, exiled from his native Egypt for being Jewish — an uncle visits from New York, looks around the former brothel that is the Acimans’ new apartment and immediately urges them to move to America. “I wonder why it had never occurred to me,” Aciman writes, “or for that matter to either of my parents, that ours was not a life.” At its heart, this memoir is a search for that life from the limbo of dislocation.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser set about expelling Jews and confiscating their property, including Aciman’s father’s fabric-dyeing factory. Arriving in Naples by ship in 1966, Aciman, his mother and brother are saved from the refugee camp by the ill-tempered and miserly Uncle Claude, who rents them the space he once ran as a “home for prostitutes.” (Aciman’s father remains in Alexandria, and their already fraught marriage soon dissolves.) The family’s geographical shift comes with a corresponding class one: from wealthy elite to poor refugees.
“Roman Year” picks up where Aciman’s 1994 memoir, “Out of Egypt,” left off: That book chronicled his family’s life in Alexandria before their exile, interweaving personal history with the postwar political climate. Here Aciman, the author of “Call Me by Your Name,” describes the emotional toll of adapting to a new place while having to plan for the future you haven’t begun to imagine: “I knew huge changes had occurred but I couldn’t quantify them, much less fathom their reach.”
Central to this adaptation, and to Aciman’s evolving identity, is language. His family has fled so many wars and pogroms, has rebuilt their lives so many times, that between them they speak French, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, German, Italian and Ladino (the language of Sephardic Jews). His Aunt Flora, who was displaced from Germany first and then from Egypt, and lost her worldly goods each time, “taught me to see that we didn’t have one lifetime, or only one identity; and not only two, but three, four, five simultaneous ones.”
