A Call from Egypt: A Jewish Woman's Search for Her Muslim Family

In February 1975, Joan Kadri Zald received a phone call that propelled her on a five-year odyssey to reconcile the divisions within her broken family. A Jewish woman with an estranged Egyptian Muslim father, Zald faced a new urgency to come to peace with the opposing forces in her divergent Jewish and Muslim bloodlines. A Call from Egypt: A Jewish Woman's Search for Her Muslim family is her thought-provoking story of this singular journey and is certain to enthrall anyone who seeks insight into the process of transcending dysfunctional family patterns. During that momentous call, Zald learned that her father had recently died in Cairo and that his second wife was now destitute. This prompted the author to revisit childhood memories, letters and family accounts to understand the nature of her parents' relationship and how her father fit into her mother's extended Jewish family in New York City. Zald's quest, which culminated in her visit to the small, tradition-laden, rural Egyptian village of her father's childhood, enabled her to forge a new perspective on her father, his family, and herself. As questions of family, religion and nationality emerge through her search, A Call from Egypt offers a unique vantage of the rifts that form in many marriages and divide cultures around the world. With courage and candor, this poignant memoir is at once deeply personal and surprisingly universal in its exploration of the differences that alienate us from one another and the ties that transcend them to connect us again.