The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917-1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of World War II in New York City, where she launched her writing career with publications in prominent American journals. Kahanoff later settled in Israel, where she became a noted cultural and literary critic. Mongrels or Marvels offers Kahanoff's most influential and engaging writings, selected from essays and works of fiction that...

This memoir is a continuation of the author s previous volume, which told of Sasson Somekh s boyhood and the circumstances under which his family decided to forsake Iraq, a land in which they were rooted for centuries, and move to Israel. A noted student of modern Arabic culture, Somekh relates his life as a university professor and writer, taking the readers to Oxford, Princeton, and Cairo, and introduces the scholars and writers he befriended along the way, including S. D. Goitein, Mustafa Badawi, and Haim Blanc. Somekh also devotes a major section to the Nobel Prize winning author Naguib...