Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
un time the Middle East, unlike what Fossati sang, was enjoying a lot of fortune. He went to Egypt to interview Mubarak or to talk about his troubles.
Now I’m back on vacation. With a book in the suitcase. A memoir addressed to the past but also an inspiration to the future. The house on the Nile (Neri Pozza) of Denise Pardoin her first novel, is a fictionalized biography of her family who lived in Cairo where she herself was born.
The book contains many transversal readings and many fascinations. The story of a capital and a cosmopolitan society, with its rites, cafes, grand hotels, houses on the Nile, and its myths: spies, courtiers, legendary pianists, Indian Freemasons, a must for artists and masters of the world. A true model of integration in which different cultures, nationalities and religions coexisted in a peaceful and magical alchemy.
But also the daily story of a family with many roots, Sephardic and Ashkenazi, who will have to leave the light of Cairo to take refuge in Rome inserted in the frame of the great story.
The reign of Faruq, the Free Officers’ Revolution, the Suez crisis, the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser who forever closes the doors of Egypt to foreigners. It is the end of colonialism and the embryo of what the Middle East will become.
“The house on the Nile” by Denise Pardo (Neri Pozza).
In the book the protagonists are above all women who courageously face the earthquakes of their destinies. Fanny, Denise’s mother, beautiful and capable of taking a risk that can prove fatal. Kate, the English friend at the center of a tormented love story with Mohammed Hafez, one of Nasser’s advisers.
Bobe, the cultured, visceral grandmother who speaks to her daughter Fanny in Yiddish, the language of secrets so as not to be understood by anyone.
Mireille Baranes, very rich Lebanese Christian-Maronite, lover of power, the power to affect the lives of others, the only one granted to women at the time although Egypt has had one of the most important feminist movements of the last century.
The house on the Nile it is a beautiful story of a lost and little told but very seductive time of a kaleidoscopic society in the shadow of the pyramids.
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