On the tenth anniversary of his death, Samir Sobhi pays oblique tribute to the late writer Ihsan Abdel-Quddous Up until the mid-20th century, Jews had lived in continuously in Egypt since ancient times, but how often have they been portrayed in Egyptian literature? They were certainly present enough in society to merit some presence. Most Egyptian Jews were poor, belonging to the artisan classes; a few were aristocrats who carried the title of Pasha or Bek. But Jews were remarkably active in cultural and artistic life. Dawood Hosny, Youssef Hosny, Zaki Mourad, Laila Mourad, Mounir Mourad, Victoria Cohen, Nagwa Salem, Camelia, Rakia Ibrahim and Negma Ibrahim are only a few of the musicians, singers and dancers who come to mind in this connection. Jews also had their own newspapers -- Al-Tahzeeb wal Irshad, Misr and Al-Shams -- which appeared in both Arabic and French. Yet none of the major writers came near them in their work: Taha Hussein, Tawfik El-Hakim, Naguib Mahfouz, Yehia Haqqi, Youssef Edris all failed to pay any attention to that indispensable tribe. Only Ihsan Abdel-Quddous (1919-1990), following a trip to Palestine in 1945, found it in him to perform that task. He had gone with the intention of writing about Arab Palestinians, but he also met with and reported on the Zionists operating there at the time, driven by the question of why they wanted Palestine. The piece he came back to write, entitled "Palestine Is Lost", was totally pessimistic, but it was also totally prophetic. Applying his motto, "I write stories while experiencing politics and write about politics while living through stories," Abdel-Quddous created meticulous description of Egypt's middle-class Jewish community, deploying his style of analytical realism to produce politically savvy social history of the highest order, and transcending canonical stereotypes of the Jew. In his recent book on Abdel-Quddous's writing on Jews, the Ain Shams University professor Rashad El-Shami demonstrates just how profoundly Abdel-Quddous understood "the Jewish personality": a character with an unusual degree of control over his thoughts and feelings, whose intelligence os only matched by his ambition, and who is not only remarkably patient and adaptable but able to dissolve wholly in his surroundings without losing his unique identity.
