Jean Naggar Introduces the E-Book Edition of Sipping from the Nile

I left Egypt and the world of my childhood as I stood at the brink of adulthood at the age of 19. Decades later I looked into the eyes of small grandchildren and realized that I needed and wanted to give them answers to questions they had not asked and might never think to ask until too late.

Gingerly, I began to open heavy doors of memory that I had carefully kept sealed for years, and I set out to record the moment in my young life when a footnote of history, the Suez crisis of 1956, changed the direction of my future and that of the Jews of Egypt, forever.

As I entered the past, I found a magical childhood world safely ensconced behind those doors, the love and joy that had filled exuberant family gatherings, the idiosyncratic individuals who peopled my childhood, the mouth-watering feasts and cherished Sephardic rituals that punctuated it. I worked long and hard to bring back to life a way of life that has vanished forever, and to record my family's forced departure from Egypt and the events that shattered and scattered a large close-knit extended family.

My lost world had a child at its center. In writing SIPPING FROM THE NILE I attempted to reconcile that child's world with the world I now inhabit, and I learned with wonder that “the past is never gone. It is the foundation on which we build the present every day of our lives.”

Jean Naggar
September 2009