Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile's Journey

An Egyptian-Jewish Under the Tuscan Sun, Dream Homes chronicles Joyce Zonana's quest to find a sense of home among people, foods, and places as far from her native Cairo as Oklahoma and Katrina-stricken New Orleans.

After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, newlyweds Felix and Nellie Zonana flee Cairo with their infant daughter Joyce, ending up in Brooklyn. Growing up, Joyce swiftly realizes that her Jewish family and their Egyptian culture are neither typically American nor typically American-Jewish; they eat kobeba instead of kugel and speak French instead of Yiddish. Struggling with her feelings of isolation from other Americans and frustrated by never getting full access to Egyptian-Jewish culture, Zonana strikes out on a life-long journey to find her place in the world.

She meets her extended family living in Colombia and Brazil and travels to Cairo to get a glimpse of her parents' past. After she and her mother survive the devastation of Katrina, Zonana comes to see that "home" is not a location, but a spiritual state of mind. Zonana's heritage and quest are also evoked in numerous photos and family recipes.

Joyce Zonana earned her PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an associate professor of English and women's studies at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. Before coming to BMCC, she taught for fifteen years at the University of New Orleans, where she was also the director of women's studies.

|||This book is sold in the US by Sony Electronics Inc. |||This book is sold in Canada by Sony Electronics Inc.

The debut memoir from veteran academic Zonana, currently an associate professor at CUNY, Manhattan, is thick with family angst and restless spirits, documenting Zonana's protracted quest for belonging among numerous locales and people. Born in Cairo, Egypt, Zonana's family emigrated to Brooklyn after the Egyptian-Israeli War of 1948, when she was a small girl. There, she grew up a misfit among the European-dominated New York Jewish community; for much of her life, she was "overwhelmed by the conviction that I had in fact been exiled... whenever I moved I experienced the same confusion: Had I chosen to leave, or had I been forced?" An epiphany about her "one true home" (the Earth) comes by way of a Native American moon lodge ceremony, but it's built on her love affair with ethnic food (recipes are included), her discovery of resettled family in Brazil, her father's illnesses and her own debilitating fears of independence; eventually, it leads her to New Orleans, academic success and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Zonana's memoir is a somewhat disjointed affair, but captures with honesty and beauty the suffering and uncertainty of migration and assimilation, whether forced or formulated.
Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

• Published by

  The Feminist Press

• Publish Date

  July 31, 2008 

• Print ISBN

  1558615733

• eBook ISBN

  9781558616264

• Imprint

  The Feminist Press

• Filesize

  2.93 MB

• Number of Print Pages*

  160

* Number of eBook pages may differ. Click here for more information.