Home and Counter-home in André Aciman’s Out of Egypt

Abstract

This paper attempts to examine the interrelationship between self-identity, home and (Jewish) diaspora as portrayed by André Aciman in Out of Egypt: A Memoir (1994). Further, the paper shows why such concepts are easily expressed in the genre of life-writing, especially the memoir, and finally concludes that Aciman’s Diaspora, which is communal, Jewish and historical, instead of unmooring his anchors, steeps him in his Jewry. In other words, his identity is exclusively Jewish and Jewry is diasporic in essence and that might make Aciman multi-lingual and multi-national but unchangingly Jewish and diasporic. This conclusion, thus, throws light on the essentially clannish nature of Aciman’s experience related in his memoir, in spite of the narrative’s representation of diaspora in postmodernist terms.