Alhadeff, Gini 1951-

views updated

ALHADEFF, Gini 1951-

PERSONAL: Born September 7, 1951, in Alexandria, Egypt; daughter of Carlo and Nora (Pinto) Alhadeff. Education: Attended Harrow School of Art, Harrow, England; Pratt Institute, graduated.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY; Strada, Chianti, Italy. Agent—Wylie Agency, 250 W. 57th St., Ste. 2114, New York, NY 10107.

CAREER: Journalist. Worked at Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; worked for a designer in Milan, Italy; freelance writer, New York, NY, until c. 1985; Normal (literary magazine), founder; XXIst Century (literary magazine), Miami, FL, founder; Travel and Leisure, New York, NY; contributing editor.

WRITINGS:

The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family (memoir), Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 1997.

Diary of a Djinn (novel), Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor of reviews and articles to journals, including Architectural Digest, House and Garden, Library Journal, New York Times Magazine, Town and Country Monthly, Travel and Leisure, and Vogue.

SIDELIGHTS: Gini Alhadeff was born in Egypt to a wealthy family of Sephardic Jews who fled the country in the atmosphere of anti-Semitism that followed the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. Alhadeff has subsequently lived in Japan, Italy, England, and the United States, where she has worked as a journalist since the mid-1980s. "To come from a family of urbane Sephardic Jews, as Gini Alhadeff does, is to have roots in every Mediterranean port but no place to call home," wrote Amanda Heller in the Boston Sunday Globe. In her book, The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family, Alhadeff, fluent in several languages, reveals that she did not even know that she was born Jewish until reaching adulthood. She writes, "I have swallowed several ethnic identities whole and no single one lords over the others. They are all equal and fully developed. I never feel I am translating 'myself.' There is an 'original me' in every language I speak, though this 'original' is constantly rendered false by the presence of other, just as original 'originals.'" She adds, "I sometimes find it hard to distinguish between identity and mimicry. At this rate, it is easy to see that our origins will soon have become invisible."

Alhadeff's memoir The Sun at Midday presents impressionistic anecdotes and portraits of various family members, including an uncle who was interned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald during World War II, a cousin who was ordained a Roman Catholic priest yet lived extravagantly, and an aunt who established the prominent fashion house Krizia. She relates her discovery of her Jewish roots, kept from her in part due to the Nazi threat of her childhood, but also because of her parents own negative perception of their Jewish roots. Having faced persecution as a Jew from an early age, Alhadeff's father converted to Catholicism and raised his children in that religion. "He converted because the shame of being Jewish was stronger than any pride of being Jewish," writes Alhadeff in her memoir. Also revealed are Alhadeff's grief surrounding an abortion and the breakup of her parents' marriage. In Library Journal, reviewer Rose M. Cichy suggested that the loose narrative structure of The Sun at Midday produces "an uneven, oddly incoherent work," and observed that no resolution came of the author's musings. However, many critics praised the memoir, and a commentator in Publishers Weekly also noted Alhadeff's sense of humor and sharp characterizations of people and places, concluding that "throughout the jumble of her recollections, Alhadeff … searches with integrity and wit for a clear understanding of her own nature."

In a review of the volume in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called The Sun at Midday an "affecting memoir." She added that "Alhadeff's portraits of her relatives are remarkably vivid, drawn with both the emotional insight of a novelist and a journalist's unforgiving eye." New York Times Book Review critic Penelope Lively commented, "This is a deeply personal book that raises a big abstract issue…. [Alhadeff] writes with elegance and panache, serving up word pictures of her more colorful relatives." Wrote Boston Sunday Globe reviewer Heller, "It is from [a] rich and exotic material that Alhadeff creates a lyrical family memoir…. This is a story full of irony and longing, beautifully expressed."

Niloufar Motamed, a reviewer for Bookwire, also commended the book, and said, "The Sun at Midday is more than just Alhadeff's story. It is a universal story of survival. It is a story of family. It is a story of finding identity and peace within yourself…. It is also the story of things that can never be regained." A reviewer for the Jewish Exponent found the testimony of Nissim, the only family member with a first-person narrative and a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, of particular interest and called his words "shattering." Nina Mehta, commenting for Newsday, wrote that Alhadeff's book is "a clever, idiosyncratically organized, entertaining memoir. There are jags of insight, jags of color and shrewd analyses of family members and their various relationships, all beginning and ending in anecdote." A Kirkus Reviews commenta-tor wrote that it is "a lyrical and literary memoir," and added that "Alhadeff tackles complex relationships with humor and wisdom; listening to her reminiscences is an entertaining, frequently surprising and moving experience."

Commented Kim Bendheim in the Los Angeles Times, "The truth of this memoir is that we are prisoners of our past yet contain in ourselves the ability to walk out of the house we were born into, or at least into another room."