Abstract
The forces of modernity dislodged the Egyptian Jewish communities’ deep roots in the country, giving rise to dramatic experiences of displacements. This paper seeks to explore the ways in which Jewish women remember their lives in Egypt, experiences of diaspora, homeland, and identities as cosmopolitans and Egyptian. Memoires with cuisine provide the ethnographic framework through which the sense of gendered migration from Egypt is discussed. The works analyzed will include Lucette Lagnato’s “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit”, Claudia Roden’s “The Book of Jewish Food” and Colette Rossant’s “Memory of a Lost Egypt: a Memoir with Recipes”. In each of these works cooking and meals are wedged into the emotional landscape separating their ‘homeland’ from their ‘exile’. Combined, they are an attempt to get at how not only remembered foods but also the want for it offer insight into migrant memories of larger global historical moments.
While both Roden and Rossant are cookbook-memoirs and Lagnato has written a straightforward memoir, food-knowledge transmitted by women in the wake of a painful rupture feature in all three author’s reconstructions of Egypt. For this reason these memoirs also speak to a series of issues that gender studies ceaselessly debate: cultural heritage and change, homeland and nurturing, pristine and fluid lives. Though greatly variant, I will argue how all three memoirs come out in terms of gender, cosmopolitan and minority affiliation that would not have surfaced in these forms if not for the experience of rupture. Attention here is paid to the ways in which memories of the past are activated and shaped by contemporary cultural, political and social engagement. I propose that within ‘minority memoirs’ there is a value in gender for the study of cosmopolitanism and the politics of memory – and vise versa, as along the way there is also certain values of cosmopolitanism and memory for the study of gender.
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