Everybody has a story to tell. BMCC English Professor Joyce Zonana shares her personal life story in her recently-released book, Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile’s Journey, published by CUNY Feminist Press, 2008.
“My book is about my life,” says Zonana. “It’s about my family and me and our experience as immigrants to the United States from Cairo, from Egypt. We’re Egyptian Jewish. And we have—I think—a fairly unique story.”
The Impact of Family
Born in Cairo, Zonana chronicles her life story in Dream Homes, introducing readers to the many relatives who have impacted her life in many ways. Zonana vividly recalls collecting stamps with her grandfather in Brazil, picking up her grandmother “Nonna” at the airport in New York at a young age, and watching her father pray every single morning in their Brooklyn apartment.
She also has special memories of food shopping with her mother at Arabic markets on Atlantic Avenue where her mother was welcomed warmly as an exiled Egyptian Jew.
Although she is close to her mother Nelly today, a young Zonana wondered why her mother had a hesitancy to talk about life back in Cairo—her birthplace. Zonana herself was just an infant when her family fled Cairo after the Arab-Israeli war, so she has no memories of Egypt.
This fuels Zonana’s curiosity about the city her parents left. In one poignant chapter of Dream Homes, Zonana returns to Cairo and with the help of a friend and visits a hidden Jewish synagogue, The Rambam, which cannot be found on any tourists maps. The Rambam was a place of healing for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and Zonana later learns that her mother went there, hoping for a pregnancy.
Personal photographs of Zonana and her family introduce each chapter, allowing readers to put a face to a name when family members are introduced. More than just a memoir, Dream Homes also contains recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation in the Zonana family.
According to Zonana, the book’s title was the hardest thing to come up with, and the book was not written in sequence. The chapters came to her in response to different events in her adult life.
Personal Commitment to Truth
While writing her story, Zonana was aware that family members might have been concerned about content, for some anecdotes are quite personal.”I feel a real commitment to telling the truth, and I also feel a real commitment to being kind and being loving to myself and to other people,” says Zonana.
After writing down the stories, Zonana asked herself, “Does this really need to be in the book?” If it did, even if it was risky, she left it in, even if it had the potential to hurt other people or herself.
Zonana says her mother Nelly was surprised by some of the content, but encouraging, wanting to know when she’d write another book. In Dream Homes, Zonana’s stories are so vivid, readers feel as if they are traveling with Zonana throughout New York City, Cairo, Philadelphia, and even New Orleans, searching for a real place to call home.
“Everything is transitory. We can lose everything in an instant, and we do lose everything in an instant. We have to find home in ourselves,” says Zonana. “That’s really the theme of the book.”
The book concludes with Zonana fleeing New Orleans, where she taught college English for fifteen years, because of Hurricane Katrina. Her mother had been living in a New Orleans assisted living facility at the time, and Zonana brought her back to New York.
“We came back to New York to be with friends and family while New Orleans was flooded, and then we decided to stay,” says Zonana about returning to New York, the city where she was raised. “Getting a job at BMCC was a fulfillment of a longtime dream of returning to teach at CUNY, where I earned my B.A., and having a chance to work with students like myself—immigrant New Yorkers, graduates of public high schools, eager to get ahead.”
Zonana will be reading from—and signing copies of—her book at BMCC on Thursday, September 25 from 4 to 6 p.m., in the Hudson Room.
