Almost the Truth; Stories and Lies by Aaron Zevy

The Jewish community in Arab countries was nearly 1 million strong before the second world war. The war and the creation of the State of Israel resulted in mass deportation and emigration between the years of 1948-1960 in a movement of people sometimes referred to as The Second Exodus. Now in Egypt, there are fewer than a dozen Jews remaining.

Stories and memoirs from that community are underrepresented in Jewish literature—with Lucette Lagnado’s Man in the White Sharkskin Suit and Andre Aciman’s Out of Egypt being the seminal works in a very slim field.

Aaron Zevy’s Almost the Truth: Stories and Lies adds a new, unique, and very funny voice to the mix.

Zevy, a Toronto-based writer and book publisher, is the son of an Ashkenazi father and Sephardic mother who both left Egypt in 1960. This parental hybrid is put to good use, because the stories and recollections of his parents' life in Egypt and of growing up in Canada as a child of immigrants are told with a passing tip of the hat to Larry David’s curmudgeonry and Woody Allen’s self-deprecation. Zevy’s Ashkenazi half is the wry, bemused and slightly embarrassed observer of his other half’s journey and escapades.

In Crossing the Nile, the young Zevy begs his mother to make a Lipton Cup-a-Soup and grilled cheese sandwich instead of an Egyptian concoction for a Canadian friend coming for lunch. In Shesh Besh, the grown-up Zevy is terrified that the backgammon style taught to him by his uncles—one which treated it as war and not a game—would derail his blind date. In Speaking Arabic, Zevy explains that Arabic, not Yiddish, was the language of his youth and he takes particular pleasure when an Ashkenazi friend uses one of his Arabic expressions to insult a woman at a nearby table.

These recollections and his other present day stories, whether about quirky characters which inhabit his life and imagination, or travel and blind date misadventures, all return to Zevy’s central theme: of a man just slightly out of sorts and out of place in his world.

Almost the Truth: Stories and Lies is available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats. https://amzn.to/2WFyKLS