Wind at My Back Volume I

Some of Elisa B. Chalem's most effective results as a sculptor combine elegance of line with great visual imagery and compositional strength. This book-the first of two volumes of her memoirs-does the same in words. the writing is suave, informed, and deeply European in sensibility; it also rests on a solid sense of reality, of observation and assessment, that clarifies other people's lives as well as her own. Her life during the period covered in "Sand Dunes and Snow Caps" was, if not unique, certainly uncommon and exotic. She grows up in Cairo in the most pampered of circumstances, as a Sephardic Jew of Greek extraction. she travels extensively in Europe and spends her high school years in Swiss boarding schools. Though she endures the early loss of a beloved father, she falls for the man of her dreams in a fairy-tale romance, has her first child, and seems to be leading a charmed life-until, with the rise of a nationalist Egyptian government, her whole world collapses. having become persona non grata in the country she has called home, she leaves to begin a new life elsewhere.