The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

November 1, 2017

In this follow-up to Lukas's multi-award-finalist, internationally best-selling debut, The Oracle of Stamboul, Berkeley literature student Joseph--born of a Jewish mother and a Muslim father--discovers a remarkable family history that opens with the al-Raqb family having served for a millennium as watchmen of the Ibn Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo. The synagogue's treasure: the celebrated and perhaps magical Ezra Scroll.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2018
An American student with a Jewish mother and Muslim father explores his family's tangled roots in the history of Cairo's ancient synagogue.When he receives the bequest of an ancient document fragment after the death of his Egyptian father, Berkeley grad student Joseph al-Raqb embarks on a search to discover its provenance. His journey unfolds, for the most part, in an extended visit to Cairo, where he learns more details of his family's nearly 1,000 years of continuous service as night watchmen for the city's Ibn Ezra Synagogue. In a dusty attic space, the synagogue once contained a geniza, a storeroom filled with hundreds of years of discarded documents, from records of mundane commercial transactions and routine legal disputes to sacred texts. It was a treasure trove that shed light on a broad swath of life in Cairo's once-thriving Jewish community. Blending his fictional creations with real characters--including Rabbi Solomon Schechter, the scholar who persuaded the leaders of the remnant of the Cairo Jewish community and Egyptian authorities to allow him to export a substantial portion of the contents of the geniza to Cambridge University in 1897, where most of it remains to this day, and Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, the British Presbyterian twins and antiquarians who inspired his effort--Lukas creates a thoroughly credible mystery, centering on the whereabouts of an apocryphal text of the Torah known as the Ezra Scroll, without sacrificing any of the complexity and subtlety of a work of character-centered literary fiction. In Joseph's voice, Lukas (The Oracle of Stamboul, 2011) also reveals, through quietly moving scenes, the challenges of identity posed by the ambiguity of his protagonist's own heritage, as the son of a Muslim father and a Jewish mother who never married each other. And in his exploration of some 10 centuries of Cairo's history, including times when the city's Jews and Muslims lived side by side in relative harmony, Lukas at least hints that another era of peaceful coexistence is not beyond imagining.An appealing family drama illuminates the fascinating story of a famous repository of Jewish documents, the Cairo Geniza.

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February 12, 2018
In this evocative novel, Lukas takes readers to Cairo at three different points in its history. One thousand years ago, Ali ibn al-Marwani, a Muslim orphan, becomes the night watchman at the Ibn Ezra Synagogue. In 1897, English twin sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, arrive in Cairo to assist Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter in acquiring the ancient scrolls held in the synagogue’s storage area. And in the present, Joseph, a Berkeley graduate student who is half-Jewish, half-Muslim, receives a mysterious package from his recently deceased father, which sends him to Cairo to unravel the secret behind the unusual bequest. What binds all three stories is the legendary 2,000-year-old Ezra scroll, purported
to be the most perfect Torah scroll ever created and supposedly stored at the
synagogue. Over the centuries, Ali finds that love and duty don’t mix, Agnes and Margaret traverse a bureaucratic labyrinth to arrive at the Jewish Holy of Holies, and Joseph goes from clue to clue to unlock his father’s past and his own future. Like a contemporary Lawrence Durrell, Lukas (The Oracle of Stamboul) turns the Egyptian city into a tantalizingly seductive place of mystery. And although the story is dramatically diffuse, it is redeemed by the author’s vision of
a more hopeful world where Jews and Muslims come together over a shared cultural heritage. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc.

January 1, 2018

A package arrives at Joseph's apartment in Berkeley three months after his father's death in Cairo, unleashing a torrent of memories from his youthful visit to Egypt, including his father's fantastical tale of a perfect Torah, the mystical Ezra Scroll, protected by Muslim men for over 1,000 years. Drawing on the true story of the Geniza documents uncovered in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, California Book Award finalist Lukas (The Oracle of Stamboul) entrances readers with an account that spans generations, beginning with Ali al Raqb, a Muslim orphan trusted by rabbinical leaders to be the first watchman of the temple and its contents, a sacred duty accepted by Ali's descendants down to Joseph's father. We meet the adventurous scholars Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, twin sisters who traveled to Cairo in 1897 on a quest to search the synagogue's attic storeroom for the ancient scroll. With their friend Solomon Schechter and help from another al Raqb watchman, they ultimately forward trunks full of valuable papers to Cambridge University for safekeeping. VERDICT Lukas enlivens a fascinating epoch when Jews and Muslims bridged cultural divides for a common cause. Part mystery, part character study, yet historically accurate, this book should appeal to a broad swath of readers. [See Prepub Alert, 10/5/17.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.