In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt

Ms. Gornick, noted as a Women's Libber (she coedited Woman in Sexist Society) made this trip on account of a man -- Ali Mahmoud, a Harvard grad and Arab who played Romeo to her Jewish-American Juliet. Ali's family in Cairo, hosting her in his absence, advised concealment of her ethnic origins which she did for the most part, sleeping with one of his many cousins, until she let that cat out of the bag inopportunely. This particular international affair faltered, but there were others as well as other opportunities; ""Have you come here to make a sexual study of the men of Egypt?"" one of them asks, and Gornick does not deny that there were Arabs in her sexual fantasies. The book is intended as a people-tour of Cairo and environs; despite a lack of Arabic and the suspicions of a quasi-police state in a perennial attitude of semi-war, she was able to get around. One finds, however, too many mentions of her accolades ("I love your journalism. I love your womanness... We will be good friends, ya-Vivian?") and suspects, at the end, that she's really on an ego-trip in search of a "lost innocence" and happiness in which she would be hanging clothes on the line, just like her mother did. In the throes of an unfinished revolution, Egypt emerges as a bureaucratic, inefficient and poverty-stricken society; its discontented elite has copied the West of 30 years ago.