“The One Significant Work About Egypt's Levantine World ...
Why did we have an attitude at once so touchy and denigrating toward ourselves? I think we considered ourselves too inferior — or, as we say in Israel, too “Levantine” — to dare express ourselves in writing. Gide and Malraux were our standard, but it didn’t occur to us that the point was not to emulate them, but to tell our own story, in our own words. Once we had left Egypt, it broke our hearts to think that practically nobody had done this; that a whole community, one of the most complex and interesting, disappeared...