ROMAN YEAR | annotated by David

Nonfiction

Recounting the time his family spent in a former Italian brothel, André Aciman’s new memoir, “Roman Year,” picks up where 1994’s “Out of Egypt” left off.

By Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna’s most recent book is “The Window Seat: Notes From a Life in Motion.”

Oct. 21, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

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ROMAN YEAR: A Memoir, by André Aciman

About a third of the way through André Aciman’s “Roman Year” — an account of the time his family spent there when he was 16, exiled from his native Egypt for being Jewish — an uncle visits from New York, looks around the former brothel that is the Acimans’ new apartment and immediately urges them to move to America. “I wonder why it had never occurred to me,” Aciman writes, “or for that matter to either of my parents, that ours was not a life.” At its heart, this memoir is a search for that life from the limbo of dislocation.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser set about expelling Jews and confiscating their property, including Aciman’s father’s fabric-dyeing factory. Arriving in Naples by ship in 1966, Aciman, his mother and brother are saved from the refugee camp by the ill-tempered and miserly Uncle Claude, who rents them the space he once ran as a “home for prostitutes.” (Aciman’s father remains in Alexandria, and their already fraught marriage soon dissolves.) The family’s geographical shift comes with a corresponding class one: from wealthy elite to poor refugees.

“Roman Year” picks up where Aciman’s 1994 memoir, “Out of Egypt,” left off: That book chronicled his family’s life in Alexandria before their exile, interweaving personal history with the postwar political climate. Here Aciman, the author of “Call Me by Your Name,” describes the emotional toll of adapting to a new place while having to plan for the future you haven’t begun to imagine: “I knew huge changes had occurred but I couldn’t quantify them, much less fathom their reach.”

Central to this adaptation, and to Aciman’s evolving identity, is language. His family has fled so many wars and pogroms, has rebuilt their lives so many times, that between them they speak French, Arabic, Greek, Turkish, German, Italian and Ladino (the language of Sephardic Jews). His Aunt Flora, who was displaced from Germany first and then from Egypt, and lost her worldly goods each time, “taught me to see that we didn’t have one lifetime, or only one identity; and not only two, but three, four, five simultaneous ones.”

Raised speaking French in Alexandria, Aciman feels a sense of belonging when he visits his father in Paris, where he has settled after finally leaving Egypt. But the boy’s comfort is quickly shattered when a stranger comments on the foreign accent he did not know he had. “As a young man who thought he was French and was finally in his language, in his homeland, and savoring budding manhood in, of all places, Paris, I was hurled into a universe of domestics.”

For his deaf mother, language is both a barrier and an entryway: “Italians, being a people whose language is sketched on their faces and hands, were easy to understand, as she was for them.” In Rome she finds a new independence, while Aciman’s outgoing and pragmatic brother also adapts to their new reality. Meanwhile a listless Aciman loses himself in books and films, feeling that both he and his father have lost not just their country but “our trust in the world.”

Aciman evokes the passing of time in rich, meandering prose, rebuilding 1960s Rome in sentences suffused with light and sound and memories — the taste of an artichoke, the smell of bergamot and of Crêpe de Chine perfume. From the bewilderment of arrival, the young Aciman moves through denial toward a gradual acceptance of his new life. “Roman Year” is both an affecting coming-of-age story and a timely, distinctive description of the haunted lives of refugees.

ROMAN YEAR: A Memoir | By André Aciman | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 354 pp. | $30