To Drink from the Source: Tobie Nathan’s A Land like You and Jewish-Egyptian Identity

Abstract

: A Land Like You, Tobie Nathan’s scrupulously researched yet wildly imaginative historical novel of early twentieth-century Cairo offers an extended exploration of what it means to be both Jewish and Egyptian, even as it chronicles the rise of the competing nationalisms that led to the dispersal of Egypt’s Jews. Unlike most Egyptian Jewish novelists and memoirists, Nathan claims Cairo’s Haret al-Yahud, where the city’s poorest, indigenous Jews lived from time immemorial, as his ‘source,’ and indeed the source for all of Egypt’s Jews—the ‘spring one drinks at every day.’ This source arises from the Egyptian land and the ancient spirits that govern it, to which the exiled writer remains inextricably bound, symbolized in the novel through the irresistible love that links the Jewish narrator to his Muslim ‘milk-sister.’ For Nathan’s French-to-English translator, herself an Egyptian Jew, the novel offers a return to her own Arab-Jewish source, which, like Nathan, she seeks to cultivate so that it may nurture others.