num_pages: 200
description: Alexandrian Summer is the story of two Jewish families living their frenzied last days in the doomed cosmopolitan social whirl of Alexandria just before fleeing Egypt for Israel in 1951. The conventions of the Egyptian upper-middle class are laid bare in this dazzling novel which exposes startling sexual hypocrisies and portrays a now vanished polyglot world of horse-racing seaside promenades and elegant night clubs. Hamdi-Ali senior is an old-time patriarch with more than a dash of strong Turkish blood. His handsome elder son a promising horse jockey can't afford sexual frustration as it leads him to overeat and imperil his career but the woman he lusts after won't let him get beyond undoing a few buttons. Victor the younger son takes his pleasure with other boys. But the true heroine of the storyrichly evoked in a pungent upstairs/downstairs mixis the raucous seductive city of Alexandria itself. Published in Hebrew in 1978 Alexandrian Summer appears now in translation for the first time.Yitzhak Gormezano Goren was born in Alexandria Egypt in 1941 and immigrated to Israel as a child. A playwright and novelist Goren studied English and French literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University. In 1982 he cofounded the Bimat Kedem Theater.Helps show why postwar Alexandria inspires nostalgia and avidity in seemingly everyone who knew it  The result is what summer reading should be: fast carefree visceral and incipiently lubricious. The New YorkerLuminous  One of the great triumphs of Alexandrian Summer is the richness of the evocation of this city and the multiple cultures pressed within it  A sultry eroticism pervades. The ForwardAlexandria a lush paradise by the sea comes to antic full-bodied life ... Gormezano Gorens characters are vividly depicted as they grow up or grow older in a city of conflicting loyalties riven by resentment ready to revolt. Readers will be transported.Publishers WeeklyThis novel recalls one gloriously golden summer in a cosmopolitan city on the verge of upheaval ... Fluidly written and soberly enticing.Library JournalA gifted writer ... Gormezano Goren defines the city and its ambiance in lush sensuous terms ... He also describes so well the Diaspora Jews knack for downplaying the danger of gathering storms of hatred a tendency not limited to Alexandria or to any particular era of exile.The Jerusalem PostA powerful novel of tensionssexual familial religious and politicaland an affecting but unsparing portrait of the petit bourgeois world of Egyptian Jews standing obliviously on the edge of a precipice. Alexandria-sensual and enchanting-shimmers in these pages. Dalia Sofer author of The Septembers of ShirazA fine work of art . . . riveting from the first page to the last.Zo HaderekhA reason to rejoice. . . . You can't help but keep on smiling with great pleasure.MaarivA profound literary experience.Ahshav
language: English
title: Alexandrian Summer
publisher: New Vessel Press