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Avraham Bar-Av (Bentata)

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17 Sheikh Hamza Street, Cairo: A Middle Eastern Historical Fiction (Memories From Egypt Book 1) Kindle Edition

by Avraham Bar-Av (Bentata) (Author), Susann Codish (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition

4.1 132 ratings

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The life of a Jewish family in Cairo is dramatically affected by the rise of Arab nationalism

A fascinating drama based on the biographic memoirs of the author, offering invaluable insight into Jewish history, North African Jewry and the history of the Middle East.

The Jewish Bentata family settles in Cairo, Egypt, at the beginning of the 20th century. After a few decades of leading a respectful bourgeois lifestyle suited for middle-class westerners in the Orient, the illusion of belonging begins to crack. As Rommel’s tanks bear down on the gates of Al Alamein, Arab nationalism raises its head.

In 1948, as the Israeli war of independence breaks out, the harassment reaches its peak: Hosni, a charming yet ruthless criminal, takes advantage of the family’s political weakness. He forces himself on Suzy, the youngest daughter, threatening to harm her family if she refuses him. When he discovers that she has betrayed him by marrying an English soldier and escaping to London, he turns to her older sister, Sophie. Hosni collects evidence about Sophie's husband Zionist activity and threatens to hand it over to the authorities. While Henri is already arrested and sent to an internment camp in the desert, Sophie is given an offer that can't be refused. She may either buy his incriminating documents one by one or buy the whole lot of them together. Hosni is not picky about the payment method: "Payment can take the form of money or gold or jewellery. If you’d rather not part with your belongings, an intimate encounter is also an option."

The family's life in Egypt has hit a dead end. In the face of catastrophe, family members hurry to flee from Egypt. One part of the family escapes to Israel, others spread out to find refuge in France, Italy and Australia.

˃˃˃ A historical novel depicting the fall of a middle-class Jewish family in Egypt.

Through the life of the Bentata family, the reader is exposed to an unperceivable mixture of East and West that existed for a small historic moment, a vivid kaleidoscope of culture, heritage, color, scent, and flavor. Stage by stage we witness the historical realisation of the prophecy given to Avraham, the patriarch of the Jewish nation: “thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs and shall serve the people there who will afflict them... and afterwards they will leave.”

˃˃˃ An adventure story reveals the roots of the Israeli-Arab Conflict and the political situation in the Middle East.

A rare documentation of a surreal, rootless elite that managed to bloom in the fissure between a rotting, corrupt regime and the dying British Empire. Ignoring the domestic and regional shifts that spelled the end of Jewish existence in Egypt, they build their homes on the back of a dormant crocodile. As it woke up, the walls of existence began to crack.

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Print length

387 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publication date

April 17, 2015
File size

5008 KB
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Enhanced typesetting

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Colin Falconer
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Editorial Reviews

Review

17 Sheikh Hamza Street, Cairo is one of the most fascinating novels ever written about the Jews of Egypt in the 20th century. Avraham Bar-Av has succeeded in drawing a precise, empathetic picture of Jewish life in this unusual community... Barav manages at once to describe the macro and micro lives of a typical Jewish family in Egypt... Fabulously well-written, this compelling book has the reader turning the pages for more."Dr. Ruth Kimhi, scholar and author of Zionism in the Pyramids' Shadow, Am Oved 2010
"Avraham Bar-Av has written a historical novel centering on the Passy and Bentata families reflecting the life of the Egyptian Jewish community and the roots of the hostility of the Egyptian nation towards the State of Israel, a hostility whose offshoots are evident to this day."Vered Lee, Ha'aretz book review, September 14, 2011
"I enjoyed your book tremendously. I read it in a single sitting, while vacationing at the Dead Sea. I simply couldn't put it down. It's a fascinating novel presenting an honest, fully fleshed out picture of a family, community and time, in addition to having compelling, complex characters and wonderful dialogue... I am organizing a university seminar on the Egyptian Jewish community and would like to invite you to present the novel. The event will be co-sponsored by the Gaon Center."Prof. Tamar Alexander, The Chair of the Literature Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

From the Author

When fiction sustains reality
Writing my families' biography might have been a tricky thing. As a novelist, my first obligation was to produce a literary work that would tell our true and fair story, without being too kind to my loved ones or too harsh to their adversaries. Oddly enough, it was much less of a problem than I thought it would be. Once I got deeply into the story, my personal choices and preferences became totally irrelevant. The literary characters took the lead and superior forces directed my writing. Each character gave its all, fighting for its fair share of the complex truth that finally emerged.
I often found myself forcefully manipulated by my own characters. Sometimes they even made me create scenes that never, in fact, happened. One of the many examples would be the altogether fictional clashes between my villain (Hosni) and my heroin (Sophie). At first glance, the meetings are pure invention. Yet, on a deeper level, countless meetings of the kind did take place in the terrifying scenarios that plagued Sophie at the time. Thus fiction had contributed to a much deeper and intense understanding of the events that did happen in reality.
We lived our lives in Egypt like a grafted limb. With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that we had no future there. The sense of being at home was a tragic illusion. We were never a part of the amazing entity called Egypt. We were members of surreal, western elites that managed to bloom in the fissure between a rotting, corrupt regime and the dying British empire. We wanted to ignore the domestic and regional changes taking place in front of our eyes, changes that spelled the end of our days in Egypt.
We had built our cozy little homes along the Nile, on the back of a dormant crocodile. The moment it started to show signs of waking up, the walls of our existence in Egypt began to crack. The more the national aspirations intensified both our own and those of Egypt, the more the repelling forces became brutal and unbridgeable until the inevitable separation.
Our expulsion of Egypt concluded one more cycle in the life of the Jewish people, the spiral pattern repeated for three thousand years, the realization of the prophecy perceived by the patriarch Abraham: "Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs... and afterwards shall they come out with great substance" (Genesis 15:13-14).

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00V86LX88
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Avraham Bar-Av (Bentata) (April 17, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 17, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5008 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 387 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,895,293 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #243 in Historical African Biographies (Kindle Store)
- #337 in Historical Middle Eastern Fiction
- #773 in North Africa History

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4.1 132 ratings

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Avraham Bar-Av (Bentata)

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Avraham Bar-Av (Bentata), a native of Egypt, lives in Mitzpeh Adi in the Galilee. Bar-Av studied at Tel Aviv University’s Theater Department. While still a student, he was awarded a monetary prize designed to allow him to write for the theater. As a student, he was also involved in the establishment of a fringe theater-group that put on some short plays he wrote and directed.

Ba-Av wrote and directed plays including The Floating Circus and Hoof and Mouth Enterprise. Both were published by Bimat Kedem Publishers. Concurrently with writing for the theater, he wrote numerous short stories that were published in major literary magazines, such as Moznaym, Gag, Kav-Natuy, and Kivun Mizrah.

Bar-Av devoted seven years (2005-2011) researching and writing his sweeping historical-biographical novel 17 Sheikh Hamza Street, Cairo (Rimonim Publishers, 2011, 446 pp.). While the novel tells the story of the Bentata family, it is also the story of hundreds of thousands of Jews native to the Middle East who experienced the bitter reversal from a friendly, safe and wealthy life to an ugly saga of hatred, harassment and arbitrary arrests, ending either in flight or expulsion.

Readers and critics have raved about Bar-Av’s novel. A few years after appearing in Hebrew it was translated into English and published via Amazon’s Createspace.

The author has been invited to speak about his book at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the University of Haifa and Bar-Ilan University. Segments of these talks were recorded and can be viewed on YouTube.

Bar-Av’s collection of short stories, Moroccan Pushkin, which includes stories about his childhood in Egypt, won the 2013 Writers’ Association Prize.

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4.1 out of 5

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Claudine Vincenti

A flying carpet to a world of magic and adventure.

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2015

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I have just finished reading 17 Sheikh Hamza Street, Cairo.
While writing these lines I can still feel the characters of the novel moving around me in the living room, courageous Sophie, soft and kind Henri alongside with resolute Fortuna, funny old Passy and mischievous little Albert (the author). The novel could not seize me so strongly were it not for Hosni, the charming criminal that speaks excellent French and recites Khalil Gibran while forcing himself on the family in a ruthless attempt to bring it to its knees.

The novel pays much respect to the streets of Cairo which are not only the setting of the saga (1909-1949), they are its heart and soul. I can still smell its oriental scents and hear the sounds and voices of the merchants of sweet cool drink in a summer afternoon. The streets are involved in the plot as they are the first to predict the forth coming catastrophe. For example, this is how Bar-Av describes the nearing of the German army to the gates of Egypt, simply by directing his flashlight to the street.
"…The rumor about the fall of Tobruk caused a heavy silence to descend on Cairo, as if the city was holding its breath waiting for the next blow. No greengrocer hawked his wares, no carter wielded his whip, no sahlab vendor sang the praises of his hot orchid-bulb drink. No tantalizing scents of frying falafel and roasted corn-on-the-cob wafted through the air. The heavy metal shutters were drawn over the tinsmiths and shoemakers’ workshops. Even the military seemed inert. The combat soldiers had long ago left for the front, while less critical personnel had snuck away on unmarked truck convoys to Sudan…"
I liked how the author had used both – the thick solid threads of History, and the silky fragile threads of feelings and intimacy weaving them into a magnificent oriental flying carpet that takes us to a world of magic and adventure.

10 people found this helpful

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Veritas Vincit

Unexpected Insight Into a Fascinating Part of History

Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2015

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I thoroughly enjoyed this peek into the history of Jewish culture in a country where that story is not commonly told. From the early 1910s through the 1920s, we follow a fascinating cast of characters as they move through conflict, freedom, oppression, and confusion in a turbulent time in history. There is a lot to learn from a book that takes us into a first-person view of history; we often think of history as chiseled in stone, but when we look at individual portraits of families, neighborhoods, and experiences, it becomes much more powerful and personally relatable. I think that Passy was an interesting choice as one of the focal characters, and while he wasn't immediately likable, I think his story gave us a very honest perspective on the events of that time period and place. I wasn't as much of a fan as the final section as I was of the first two, but it was just a different take on the same culture a decade later. I didn't find it as exciting or revealing, although it was interesting in certain ways. Overall, this was a wonderful portrait of a complex culture that is often hard to understand. Avraham is a skillful writer that can engage readers and paint a portrait of history that people have rarely seen. An eye-opening and insightful story, to be sure.

One person found this helpful

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Jean Naggar

A Poignant story of a Jewish family wrenched from its moorings in Egypt, following the events of 1948. Highly recommended

Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2016

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17 Sheikh Hamza Street, Cairo: A Middle Eastern Historical Fiction (Memories From Egypt) What a riveting story of the lost world of the Jews of Egypt, Avraham Bar-Av has woven around the tales he heard as a boy and the memories that crowd around him now. Revisiting the stories of his Bentata family, he has infused them with powerful fictional richness and drama. I found myself instantly transported into a sensual world of intrigue and passion, ritual, and multicultural relationships, that would not let me go. This book is fundamentally so true to its reality, it is so deeply felt and so artfully constructed that it creates characters whose voices still resound in my mind. The beauty of the evocative language, the unique rhythm and music of the dialogue resound with reality, wit, and humor. Through the vivid characters and compelling story, this tale succeeded in projecting the immediacy of a world on the cusp of unimaginable change through the evolution of one Jewish family, in an Egypt that failed to recognize the diverse multi-culturalism that had made it unique in the world and in history.
Stories of the lost world of the Egyptian Jews and the Jews from Egypt are each individually important. Taken together, the growing oeuvre of the expelled Jews of Egypt creates a scintillating mosaic of a unique, extraordinary, rich and diverse world . Each writer writes from such a passionate love for all that is lost, creates such an individualistic view of the country that wanted no more of them, records for us all the pain of betrayal and bewilderment, the sights and sounds conjured from memory with so much nostalgia and love. This exceptional novel is a wonderful read and will resound in memory long after it is finished. Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt

One person found this helpful

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L Dickson

An interesting read...

Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2016

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I honestly had very mixed feelings about this book. The storytelling really drew me in, but some of the sexual drama was a little too much for me personally, and I think it would be likely to turn off other readers who would otherwise really enjoy this story. I liked the descriptions of the settings and the characterizations of the people, they kept me interested when the story was preoccupied with drama because there was enough interesting character development going on throughout. If you are looking for a story with people who are clear cut good and bad this may not be for you, every person seems to have some horrible secret that makes them far less likable, but at the same time, this is much closer to reality than many books that look back at the past and see mostly the good side. This is especially true for war time stories where there are often heroes and other characters that fall into tropes. Because this book steers clear of that for the most part, I think that is a good chunk of what makes it so refreshing. So I'm left feeling like the aspects of the book I tend to dislike help it to some extent despite my dislike of them in general. Which in the end is probably a sign of good writing.

4 people found this helpful

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Mrs

Exceptional story of a family in the Middle East in WW2

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 22, 2015

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This is a fascinating account of a family in Cairo in the difficult times of the Second World War and how they thought, their views and their personal values and how they coped with the rapidly changing world in which they lived. In the UK we can easily think of WW2 rather narrowly without truly comprehending the far-reaching effects in the Middle East. This book, by describing personal experience and perceptions of the world as it appeared to the individual members of that family, gives us an insight into the extraordinarily powerful change that those times brought upon the world and why lives of ordinary people would never be the same again.
It is a powerful and compelling story, difficult to put down before the end!

One person found this helpful

MARY JANE CLARK

Excellent telling of a unknown story

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 31, 2017

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This is not a strictly biographical memoir but the story rings so true as it is based in fact. The plight of Egyptian Jews in the twentieth century is rarely studied nor written. The complacency, the ignorance, the disbelief and, finally, the fear and terror are well-developed. Little mention is made of the Jews in Europe, the actual progress of World War 2, but the depiction of Egyptian Jews is so well written that you realize and understand the effects of those on other populations.

Mrs A S Smith

Warm, numerous. Well worth reading. Angela Smith

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 7, 2015

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This is a warm and dramatic story of a Jewish family caught in the Egyptians move to remove them from Cairo. It is full of humour and little details of family life that made me want to read from cover to cover in one go and want to know about their further adventures.

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17 Sheikh Hamza Street, Cairo: A Middle Eastern Historical Fiction (Memories From Egypt Book 1) Kindle Edition

The life of a Jewish family in Cairo is dramatically affected by the rise of Arab nationalism

˃˃˃ A historical novel depicting the fall of a middle-class Jewish family in Egypt.

˃˃˃ An adventure story reveals the roots of the Israeli-Arab Conflict and the political situation in the Middle East.

Scroll up to grab a copy of 17 Sheikh Hamza Street today.

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Avraham Bar-Av (Bentata)

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