Zevy Stories

From Publisher's Weekly

Powered by love and written with the can-you-top-this? punchiness of a born dinner-time storyteller, this charming, conversational, and often uproarious collection from Zevy (author of Almost the Truth: Stories and Lies) about his family and upbringing often turns on surprising bits of language. Like thousands of Jews, his parents, an Ashkenazi father and Sephardic mother, were forced out of Egypt in 1956; raising a family in suburban Montreal, they spoke French in the house and spiced the conversation with lively Arabic words and phrases. These include one that—in Zevy’s telling—means something like “leave me alone” but literally translates as “enema.” More telling is a phrase meaning “the story is wearing a bedsheet,” used to say there’s more to a tale than might be readily apparent.

Zevy pares these memories to the bone, their telling here as crisp as well-honed stand-up routines. But all their punchlines and incisive character portraiture they’re also swaddled in bedsheets. Reading these stories—of drinking games at family seders, of trying to land a big client for the family business, of introducing a complex Chinese poker variant to octogenarian Egyptian Jews, of the mystery of snapshots of topless women on a beach in a family photo album—is both a pleasure and an immersion, as close an invitation to imagine this family’s most joyous moments of sharing and laughter.

Some stories Zevy says he’s telling for the first time. Others feel like the best kind of family ritual, with Zevy even acknowledging what details got invented to score bigger laughs in the re-telling. He even carps that the thunder of one doozy, about a blind date, has been stolen, a little, by its vague similarity to a Seinfeld premise. That just makes it funnier, as does his occasional twists, like the marvelous swindle he pulls to make readers think the one about driving a tractor on a kibbutz is going to be sexy.

Takeaway: Hilarious, touching stories of an Egyptian Jewish family’s life in North America.

From Krikus Reviews

Zevy offers episodic reminiscences of his life and family history in this memoir.

The stories with which the author begins this volume look back to his family’s history of membership in the huge Jewish community that existed in Egypt before the 1956 Suez Crisis, which precipitated the emigration of his mother, father, aunts, and uncles to Montreal, Canada. The stories his relatives tell about these years have a resigned quality: “If anything, they all remembered their life in Egypt as halcyon days,” Zevy writes. “It had been a place which was good for the Jews. And then it wasn’t.” From this beginning, the narrative expands in many directions, most of which reflect on some aspect of the author’s Jewishness. Recalling an encounter with a Galilean rabbi, for instance, Zevy writes, “I eat bread on Passover, I do not fast on Yom Kippur, I drive a car and light a fire on shabbat,” adding puckishly, “and I have, more than once, coveted my neighbor’s wife.” There are more generalized stories balancing these Judaism-themed chapters; “I Shall Be Released,” for example, is the story of the Angel of Death visiting the narrator and needing to use the bathroom (“He has the requisite goatee and a cowlick which looks like it is held down by gel. He is wearing khakis and a button-down shirt. If I didn’t know he was the Angel of Death I would have guessed he was an assistant manager at Whole Foods”); the two end up playing chess and talking about music. In “Looking for Maurice,” the author is inspired by the appearance of a picture by the French painter Maurice Utrillo in the background of a family photo to talk about the artist and reflect on the painting.

This kind of mish-mash of autobiographical whimsy and nostalgia is usually as tedious as listening to someone narrate a large family album, but Zevy spares his readers this discomfort. He mainly does so through zestful storytelling and a persistent wry humor that almost always lands (in the story “Straight Sets,” for instance, he writes of his father, “If you closed your eyes, you would think you were listening to the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat,” adding: “If Sadat was the owner of a powder coating company and not the President of Egypt”). The author creates the feeling of a warm story-session in the living room of a funny, charismatic friend skilled at keeping his audience engaged. At almost every point, he’s ready with a sharp observation or a punchy zinger, as in the story “Shesh Besh,” which recounts the narrator’s blind dinner date with an online match (TorontoCityGirl44): “She does not fake-reach for her purse when the bill arrives,” Zevy writes. “Which, to be honest, I appreciate.” Some will enjoy the droll “kids-these-days” notes that the author occasionally strikes (deadpan observations about emojis and the like). Throughout the book, the narrative momentum is sustained—readers will seldom be tempted to stop turning the pages.

A consistently engaging collection of family stories and personal anecdotes.

From Blue Ink Reviews

Prolific humorist Aaron Zevy returns with his latest collection of tales— a mix of truth and imagination—in Schlepping Across the Nile. Many stories are selected from his previous books.

Zevy’s father, an Ashkenazi Jew (of central European descent), and his mother, a Sephardic Jew (of Spanish/Portuguese descent) were once part of an 80,000 strong Jewish-Egyptian community. They were expelled from Egypt after the 1956 Suez Crisis—the “second exodus,” writes Zevy. Immigrating to Canada, “We were the other Jews,” he jests.

Zevy’s preference for Sephardic customs and food provide fodder for some of his humor. His constant complaining about Ashkenazi food at a Passover Seder becomes the cue for a drinking game among the younger participants.

French, Arabic, English, and Hebrew are used interchangeably in most family dialogue. This polyglot of languages results in farcical misunderstandings. Family reminiscing about a favorite bakery, Home Made Cake, becomes “Om Met Kek” in Zevy’s mind. Upon discovering the name was English, not Arabic, the author becomes the butt of many family jokes.

A poignant entry reminiscing about his recently deceased mother highlights Zevy’s versatility. “Because that is my mother.” “And I will miss her,” he writes with heartfelt emotion.

Zevy’s Seinfeld-esque, self-deprecating humor makes him instantly relatable and charming. The author’s trademark staccato sentences, profanities and punchlines are also used to great effect. For example: “I tell people that the ‘schlepping’ in the title is a nod to my father’s Ashkenaz side. But that’s not really true. I never heard him say it. I just think it’s a funny word.”

Zevy is masterful with his craft, and readers of any stripe will find droll humor within these pages.