Al-Mawluda: The Story of Naela Kamel, née Marie Elie Rosenthal is a tour-de-force of twentieth-century Egyptian history from the marginal yet engaged perspectives of Kamel’s mother, born in 1931 Cairo to an Egyptian-born Jewish father and an Italian Christian mother. Instead of leaving Egypt with most of the other khawaga in the political aftermath of 1948’s reverberations, Marie stayed. She eventually married a fellow leftist activist and over their lifetime, the whole of Egypt’s cultural and political elite seems to have worked with them, been imprisoned with them, or passed through their living room for a drink. She writes in her mother’s voice and achieves a distinct oral tone through nontraditional syntax, almost cinematic imagery, and extensive use of ‘amiyya – the book is written almost entirely in Egyptian spoken Arabic, with a liberal smattering of Italian, French, and English loan words. Before Marie’s death, Kamel recorded her mother recounting her life stories, interviewed family and friends, drew upon her own memory, and searched through articles, letters, books, and photographs to assemble the events of her mother’s life and create her distinct narrative voice. Thus, she blurs the boundaries of authorship and genre, producing something between biography and memoir. Kamel’s book is an intimate take on the twentieth-century political movements that shaped Egypt and the region: decolonization, Zionism, Arab Nationalism, communism, Sadat’s infitah, and feminism. Despite politics and popular culture permeating the air Marie breathed, family relationships drive the narrative. Therefore, I focus my analysis on the way political commitments and the looming question of the nation are domesticated in al-Mawluda. I use ‘domesticated’ here to mean cut down to the scale and concerns of the family, but also to express how political commitments are inscribed into the family and create a sense of belonging. The way Kamel domesticates the communist anticolonial politics that marked her mother’s life brings politics into the home, into the family story. Thus, Kamel’s domesticated narrative frame gets at a core tension – even dialectic – between politics and family, between her mother’s political commitments and how those commitments are conveyed intergenerationally in an era where national liberation and communism are largely passé and defeated. Kamel’s narrative domestication mourns her mother’s political ideals, offering them up to be reimagined and reformulated to meet Egypt’s post-revolution future.