The Beloved: The Egypt I knew

By Fernand S Cohen

THE BELOVED is a coming-of-age story tracing the life of a Jewish family in Egypt during the 1960s and 1970s - a time of profound political and social change. The narrator - Jewish by birth, Muslim by family, and Catholic by schooling - constantly fights to belong in a world of rigid identities against the backdrop of Nasser's idealism, the 1967 Naksa (defeat in the 1967 war), and Sadat's uneasy infitah (openness policy). This book offers a rare and deeply personal human window into the lived experience of Egypt's Jewish community during the transformative decades of the 1960s and 1970s - an era central to Middle Eastern political and social history. Drawing on firsthand experience, the narrative blends intimate storytelling with rich historical texture refracted through one life moving in parallel with a nation's tides. As Egypt's Jewish community shrank from 12,000 before 1967 to only a few dozen afterward, his vantage point offers a rare, authentic perspective on an era that has been under explored.
The book's first part stands as both elegy and celebration. Set before the 1967 Neksa, it revives a childhood world filtered through the haze of remembrance. The narrator recalls his Jewish schooling, where lessons were not merely academic but existential, shaping his early awareness of belonging and difference. Within this nostalgia, family becomes a constellation of presences: a mother whose life reflects the fate of her country; a grandmother whose memories weave another version of Egypt; and a father, distant yet enduring, whose shadow deepens as years pass.
The second part, spanning 1967 to 1973, bears the tremor of history. The Neksa shatters the illusions of an entire generation. For the narrator, the national catastrophe becomes deeply personal: his older brother is interned after the war, his youthful ambitions abruptly halted. Egypt's defeat fractures not only the state but the family itself, as Nasser's once-vibrant promise turns to despair. In this new world, the narrator's sense of 'otherness' deepens. At his Catholic school, rituals that once seemed innocent - saluting the flag, singing hymns - now feel charged with estrangement. Neighbors, once friendly, turn suspicious. The familiar streets of Cairo grow foreign, and the narrator, now an adolescent, begins to recognize the subtle tyranny of belonging to no single place or creed. By the early seventies, he entered a new phase: senior school, adolescence, desire. Each friendship and awakening bears the invisible weight of class - an inheritance that clings despite his yearning to escape it. The stirrings of romance, too, come tinged with both curiosity and dread, as if every encounter were a trespass against boundaries older than himself. Meanwhile, Egypt itself drifts from Nasser's fiery nationalism to Sadat's calculated openness. The middle class - once the moral center of the nation - begins to erode.
The third section traces his university years - a time of awakening, self-questioning, and exile in the making. At the University he confronts his difference with new clarity. His sister's decision to leave Egypt becomes emblematic - a private act of defiance that foreshadows the family's gradual scattering. One by one, siblings depart, seeking lives beyond the nation's confines. Then comes love - not the innocent affection of youth, but a consuming force that reshapes everything. The woman who enters his life stands as both lover and rebel, her defiance of societal constraints echoing his own inward struggle. Their union becomes a crucible - an attempt to bridge the unbridgeable: religion, class, history itself.
In the book's closing pages, the narrator leaves Egypt - not triumphantly, but in elegy. His departure is a ritual of both liberation and loss, a severing that never fully breaks. For though he crosses borders, the BELOVED remains within him.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H9JJWSP8
• ISBN13: 9798186603061
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 364 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"