Zikrayat: Eight Jewish Women Remember Egypt

Jewish women exiled from Egypt to New York share glimpses of a lost world, by the author of Khul-Khaal: Five Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories

Between 1948 and 1957, a period that witnessed two wars between Egypt and Israel, 60,000 members of Egypt’s 75,000-strong Jewish population left the country, compelled by growing hostility to them because of their presumed links to Zionism, economic insecurity, and after 1956, overt expulsion. Decades later, during the 1980s and 1990s, the personal reminiscences of eight Egyptian Jewish women, presently residents of New York who had left Egypt, were meticulously collected by Nayra Atiya.

While Atiya’s sample of eight narrators represents only a tiny percentage of the Jews who left Egypt,...