A Land Like You (The Africa List)
Egyptian-born Tobie Nathan orchestrates a love-song to his native land between 1925 and the mid-Sixties in Rushdie-Mafouz-Durrell strokes. The world begins for our lead character Zohar when his mother must resort to the mystical Muslim zar cult in order to conceive her son. Then, unable to breastfeed her infant, she must put him to a Muslim wet nurse whose daughter was born at nearly the same time, creating the forbidden but unavoidable connection.
When Jews invite a Muslim friend to celebrate with them, he insists on tea—but looks the other way when shots of liquor are poured into his cup. And Zohar and two Jewish friends make their living brewing alcohol, which they peddle as Blue Water to Muslim compatriots and British officers alike. Such is the live-and-let-live world before—
“We Jews of Egypt,” the narrator tells us, “we were there with the Pharaohs.” And some of them, he suggests, did not feel the need to flee over the parted Red Sea. It is only British colonization followed by Rommel the Desert Fox and his tanks and then the creation of the state of Israel and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood that were able to destroy millennial stasis in the streets of the common people along the Nile.
Some journalistic pages covering the big names and events not so familiar to western audiences are helpful if not exactly novelistic. Otherwise, the book opens a door to a world different from what we expect but fundamental to the modern predicament, nonetheless.
