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Book details
  • Genre:BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
  • SubGenre:Personal Memoirs
  • Language:English
  • Pages:244
  • Paperback ISBN:9781543914092

In the Afternoon Sun: My Alexandria

by Julie Hill

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Overview
Experienced author and traveler, Julie Hill, an Alexandrian Greek, takes us back to her native city in this colorful and poignant memoir. She paints a picture of a childhood in a cosmopolitan city in the first half of the 20th century evoking the life and customs of a Greek family within Alexandria’s foreign community until 1956, when she departs for a new life in America. She returns decades later to note the changes, the lost landmarks and the inevitable transformation of the city of her most cherished memories. The material is timeless. It is not so much an individual life that is represented but that of a Greek community from time and place that soon very few will remember.
Description
In her memoirs, Julie Hill paints the picture of a childhood in cosmopolitan Alexandria of the early twentieth century. Her family came as refugees from regions of the Ottoman empire and were privileged to find in Alexandria, and become part of, a more prosperous middle class than the one they left behind. Julie evokes the life of a Greek family and community with its traditions and customs blending with other communities and local Egyptians. Cosmopolitan Alexandria has never been in modern times a melting pot of nationalities. Each community insisted in keeping its own identity, its own self-sufficient way of life, customs, language, schools, even its own athletic institutions. The Europeans met and socialized in restaurants, movie houses, the famous and popular beaches, they went on excursions, hunted, fished and celebrated Sham el Nessim, the Monday following Orthodox Easter. Julie takes us by hand and walks with us of her childhood days, the private French school, the markets, the pastry shops all intermingled with memories of the nightly raids, the listening of the radio in the dark as the Germans are in the city gate and the allies victory. Few years later a stepping stone in her life she describes the tribulations of entering an Egyptian University, a rarity for a foreigner. She witnessed the 1952 revolution with the expulsion of King Farouk and later with Nasser on the helm, after the Suez Canal crisis, the ex-patriation of foreigners; the world turns upside down. The great private estates are nationalized, property and tax laws are revised and Egypt would never be the same again. Her parents are ruined. She departs for graduate studies in America. With deep nostalgia, she looks back to those years of her early youth, which it so happened that for the city’s cosmopolitan style of life were the last. Decades later she returns to find the city of her childhood totally transformed. As she visits old haunts, vanishing landmarks, she discovers a changed city oblivious of its past. It is not the same city anymore much in it has changed, but she has changed too. Remembering is a way of belonging, one could say.
About the author
Julie Hill, an Alexandria Greek, author of three travel books, A Promise to Keep: From Athens to Afghanistan (2003), The Silk Road Revisited: Markets, Merchants and Minarets (2006), and Privileged Witness: Journeys of Rediscovery (2014). Speaking six languages, she worked as an international telecommunications executive, before retiring in Southern California.