The Romance of Belonging Nowhere

“You’re romanticizing,” André Aciman’s brother unfailingly points out to his dreamy, bookish, struggling sibling over the course of the author’s new memoir, Roman Year. The context of the remark is, by turns, both intimate and heartbreaking as the two teenagers, along with their mother, attempt to find their footing in Rome after having been forcefully kicked out of their home in Alexandria, Egypt.

When I asked Aciman in a recent interview what that phrase meant to his brother, he elaborated: “You’re creating a dimension that doesn’t exist ... You’re slipping out of the real world. You’re going out—not to the fantasy world, but you’re just not really here. You’re not with us.” And after a beat, the author added, “Of course, I’m not with you, that’s a given,” with a smirk of a person who relished his brother’s description because he continued to live up to it over the years. Being present while also being a world away became a kind of aesthetic for him—to the point of naming one of his essay collections Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere.

It’s been exactly 30 years since André Aciman’s literary debut: his memoir Out of Egypt, which tells the story of the author’s younger years in Alexandria—years filled with comfort, leisure, discoveries of reading, but ultimately, change of the regime that brought on the dissolution of the Jewish community that surrounded him. Reading Out of Egypt was transformative for me: Because, to my embarrassment, I knew virtually nothing about the North African Jewish communities; because I never imagined that a memoir could be so lyrical, so filled with dreams, scents, and languages; because I have never encountered an author who relished words quite like Aciman does, often repeating the same motif or refrain, cradling a single phrase again and again, till the whole world seemed to unfold from within it.

At the same time, the questions that Aciman explored had personal stakes for me: I grew up in Soviet Ukraine, and left it when I was around the same age as Aciman when he left Egypt. What I learned from reading Out of Egypt was the idea of writing as a way of putting down roots and recreating oneself in a language that is not quite one’s own.

While maintaining a similar voice and sensibility, Aciman’s subsequent books continued to surprise me, alternating essays, fiction, and scholarly work. Reading Aciman, I felt as if, by a stroke of luck, I had joined an exclusive literary club that few were privy to: His were highly literary works that were, at the same time, filled with humor and playfulness. In 2017, when the film adaptation of Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name became an international sensation that garnered four Oscar nominations and launched the career of Timothée Chalamet, the only thing I lamented was the fact that Call Me by Your Name overshadowed Out of Egypt.

Roman Year is not at all a sequel, even as it does seem to pick up where the other memoir left off. What’s different here is not merely the fact that the author presents an older version of himself. It is also the fact that his approach to the genre of memoir itself has changed. “This book,” Aciman told me, “is about coming out and saying things as they were, as opposed to camouflaging them constantly as I did in Out of Egypt … You see what the result of poverty is, and what the threat is ... We’re poor, we’re refugees, and we need money, and we need help to pay the tuition. These are aspects of my life that I had never spoken about.”

Indeed, “romanticizing” may be a clever quip about the author’s natural disposition, but it is also a mode of survival through distinctly difficult, if not crushing, circumstances. The shift from a comfortable life in Egypt into penniless subsistence in a dilapidated neighborhood of Rome entails a dependence on a cantankerous and verbally abusive uncle, living in an apartment once used as a brothel, trading in used bottles in an attempt to save up for a movie, which was the only kind of entertainment available to the author’s family. As is often the case in such circumstances, shame looms large over the family and reverberates for a long time.

It is not surprising, then, that given such circumstances, the 16-year-old protagonist turns deeply inward, and his time in Rome is filled with brooding, reading, and desperately searching for himself. In this search, the city itself became a metaphor for the inward turn: “Underneath each stone lay another stone, and another under that, tiers and layers ever deeper; this city, just like us, is a multilayered labyrinth impossible to chart or resolve.”

The concept of selfhood as an ancient labyrinthine city is an ingenious metaphor. Sixteen or 17 at the time, developmentally, the protagonist is ripe for the coming-of-age angst of the search for one’s identity. His circumstance, however, sharpens the contradictions that make this search nearly impossible. Born to a family of Turkish Jews in Alexandria, Aciman spoke French and Italian at home, and attended an American school. There was Egyptian Arabic, of course, and shadows of occasionally intoned Ladino. He just lost his home and social status in an upheaval that mirrored numerous other upheavals, relived by his Jewish ancestors, again and again over centuries. It became clear to him that Rome was merely a stopover en route to elsewhere—but where? France? Uruguay? The United States (where he does eventually end up)? How does a young person make his way through such a mess with the whole weight of Jewish history on his shoulders?

When I asked Aciman whether he considered himself a refugee or an immigrant, he responded: “I came to America as an immigrant because it is a title that they give you. But I did not consider myself an immigrant. I don’t even think I was a refugee, and I certainly wasn’t an exile because an exile is someone who laments being elsewhere and wants to go back to his home. I was not an exile because I did not want to go back to Egypt. That was the last thing I wanted. I was displaced, uprooted, but those were not my roots anyway. So, I have no definition for what we were.”

Whatever country one has left, it was never quite theirs, because before it there was another, and another. Aciman’s family, as he put it “came from Turkey, but did they consider themselves Turkish? No, because they fought on the Italian side in World War I. Where were we from? I have no idea … Did we belong to Spain? Spain, seriously?” For Sephardic Jews, Spain is the origin of both the Ladino language and important religious and cultural customs, and yet Aciman is here to remind us: Belonging, even there, all those centuries ago, must have been, at best, a question mark.

“Those were not my roots anyway,” can serve as a manifesto for any migrant diaspora Jew.

Born in Soviet Ukraine, I felt neither Soviet, nor Ukrainian, nor Russian. The forms of nationalism of each of these came with a big helping of xenophobia, which often boiled down to antisemitism. Yet, due to systemic repressions, my Jewish knowledge was minimal, even as I reluctantly held on to the frail label I was given. Moreover, Aciman’s story reminded me of the journeys taken by many of my fellow Soviet Jews who spent months or years in Italy as refugees on their way to North America, or Israel, or elsewhere.

What happens to a person suspended in the liminal, transitional space of exile, which is liberating, and yet complicated with the newcomer’s social status and economic dearth? Isn’t that a Jewish story as old as Judaism itself? Or is it a universal story as old as humanity? To write through such experiences is to hold history in one’s own hands, to hold it up to light, and if not to correct it, then to give it the dignity of reflection, of questioning, of rediscovering and reasserting one’s humanity intertwined within shame and pride, uncertainty and intuition, the pain and pleasure of it all.

Against this backdrop, just as “immigration” does not feel like the apt word to describe Aciman’s journey, so too, the word “identity” falters as the memoir’s young protagonist begins to unravel and conceal, invent and reinvent himself. In his writing, here and elsewhere, for Aciman, identity is not a construct but something more fragile and human—maybe desire or a dream, or a dream of desire, or hope, or a clever evasion.

As we conversed about his lifelong obsession with the question of belonging, the author said: “I belong to paper because I could do anything I want on paper. That’s where my home is. And it’s not a good home because it’s made of paper, for God’s sake … It’s the last refuge, and I use the word ‘refuge’ intentionally: that’s where you go to hide. On paper, you can manufacture your identity as you want—for the time being. For the time being, because the paper forgets. You have to write another book, and you write it down, and you make up your identity, and two weeks later, the old one doesn’t hold up. The paper gives you temporary absolution. And even when it’s published, it’s just a draft.”

In Roman Year, Aciman is strikingly direct in his description of the plight of the Egyptian Jews. In Out of Egypt, the Suez Canal crisis is whispered about in the background, as a child’s half-cognizant memory of upheaval. By contrast, Roman Year includes the harrowing testimony of his friend Solomon “Salon” Levi, who was detained in Egypt far longer, living in internment camps after the Six-Day War and enduring brutal beatings. Salon’s story stands out in stark relief against the rest of the memoir. Salon’s story, told at some length, is powerful and disturbing. As it unfolds, the meditative, sensuous tone, as well as the gentle irony that pervades much of the memoir, disappears almost entirely. Salon’s story is a testimony, and it is both a distinct and inalienable part of the author’s own life experience. Literarily, it is something of altogether another caliber: The testimony is the memoir’s only explicit connection to the “real,” historical time, and as such, is perhaps the secret and sacred fulcrum of the book as a whole.

Throughout the memoir, even as Aciman grapples with suffering and hardship, there is a great deal of savoring and relishing, or as he put it, “not just pleasure but the romance of pleasure.” Here, a mere sitting and reading on the stairs, or eating a ham and cheese sandwich can become an epic, sensuous, and unforgettable experience. And that is trademark Aciman: You will find a similar romance all throughout his writing, whether in descriptions of prolonged delicious meals in Out of Egypt or in the now-infamous peach scene in Call Me by Your Name.

“The romance of pleasure” is sensual, yet it exceeds anything that the senses can offer. Time slows down to a crawl, and the awareness heightens dramatically. There is unavoidable pain over the moment’s passing, already sweetened and overlayed with the knowledge that while the moment is fleeting, there will be many, many returns to the joy of this recollection, and the act of reliving the pleasure will outdo the real-life moment in which it occurs. It is “romanticizing” turned into pure mastery of the craft:

I had never smelled bergamot before, citrusy but more than citrusy. It suggested numberless things without ever arriving at anything precise. I even liked the scent on my hands. Like music, it opened a universe of wonderful things, but I couldn’t name a single one … I fished out the bergamot in my pocket and smelled it, then pierced the rind with a fingernail, just the tiniest gash, that I was reluctant to decide whether I liked or not but which cast a spell all of its own on the morning and the city, as if this is what city smelled like, or this is how I wanted to redefine its smell, and was trapping the memory for who knew how many years.

The romance of pleasure is not all sandwiches and bergamots, but extends to savoring the thinking itself, the impish thrill of ironic social observations, reading, and, above all, the act of remembering. As he has written again and again, Aciman seeks out places where memory and imagination can open up, and not as escapism or whimsy, but as a moment the self can finally surface from the labyrinth. As he put it in his introduction to the essay collection Homo Irrealis, “fantasies—anticipated, imagined, or remembered—don’t necessarily disappear simply because they are unreal. One can, in fact, coddle one’s fantasies, though recollected fantasies are no less lodged in the past than are events that truly happened in that past.”

Reading Roman Year, it occurred to me that Aciman’s writing had become, for me, a similar kind of pleasure. The encounter with the author’s writing overlayed my own 20s and 30s, and as I now encounter it in my 40s, all throughout the reading, I flashed back to moments across time: reading Aciman on the beach; reading Aciman on the airplane; reading Aciman while in love; reading books which Aciman’s characters are reading; reading Aciman’s writing with my teenage students as they imitate his lengthy, Proustian sentences; watching the meteoric rise of Call Me by Your Name a decade after the book’s publication; gifting Aciman’s books to friends who I knew would enjoy them or be scandalized by them; writing about Aciman, and writing more.

What Aciman writes in his memoir about writers he reads at the time, mirrors my experience with his own books: “I learned to read and to love books much as I learned to know and to love Rome not only by intuiting undisclosed passageways, but by seeing more of me in books than there probably was, because everything I read seemed more in me than on the pages themselves. I knew my way of reading might be aberrant, just as I knew that figuring my way around Rome as I did would get me lost each time. I was looking for myself, hoping to run into myself or into me in someone else.”

The magic of André Aciman’s writing is that it can bring us to an encounter with our own dreams and fantasies, those intimate ones that we are composed of. After all, as he memorably put it in Homo Irrealis, “we remember best what has never happened.” We remember what we remembered, what we dreamed and agonized about, what could have been, which is, in truth, who we really were, against the backdrop of historical time.