Resisting
Exile
Wednesday 3
March 2004 8.30pm
André Aciman, Naïm Kattan
Chair: Valerie Monchi
In association with the B'nai
B'rith Leo Baeck London
Lodges
Out of Egypt
(1994) is André Aciman’s richly coloured
memoir chronicling the exploits of his flamboyant Jewish family from their bold
arrival in Alexandria in
1905 to their defeated exodus three generations later. Farewell, Babylon
(1980) is Naïm Kattan’s
acclaimed narrative of his childhood in Baghdad in
the 1930s and 1940s.
In this session, André Aciman and Naïm Kattan, the
authors of these two outstanding memoirs, explored ideas of exile, loss and
identity with writer, Valerie Monchi.
They discussed what makes it possible to create a new life in another culture
and how the quest for memory can help us choose who we want to be.
André Aciman was
born in Alexandria, Egypt in
1950 and now lives in the USA.
His book False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (2000) led one critic
to call him ‘our contemporary Proust’.
Naïm Kattan was
born in Baghdad in
1928 and emigrated to Montreal in
1954. Novelist, essayist and critic, he is the author of more than 30 books,
translated into several languages.
Valerie Monchi was
born in Paris and
has embraced Iraqi, Jewish, French and British cultures, not necessarily in
that order. She is a writer and on the board of Prospect magazine.
