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.