The Child Who Dared: Glimpses of a Future Jew, My Childhood
Mother’s Oxygen, Father’s Grenade: The Cairo Childhood That Forged a Jew
The Child Who Dared: Glimpses of a Future Jew
I often wonder why the path chose me. Born to Muslim parents in a Cairo steeped in call to prayer and communal conformity, my divergence feels less like choice than destiny whispering through cracks in the ordinary. My childhood—sun-drenched and sheltered—was a paradox: a cocoon of maternal love that somehow nurtured wings sharp enough to cut familial and religious tethers.
Mother: The Unlikely Architect
My mother, a woman whose own childhood was rationed in hardship, poured into me what history denied her. Where her father’s fists had silenced curiosity, her hands moulded mine into instruments of questioning. "Why?" became my birthright. She sold gold bangles to fund my private education, trading security for Shakespeare and German verbs. While Cairo’s streets simmered with anti-Western slogans, our flat hummed with American sitcoms—Friends, NCIS, Hulk Hogan’s films—beaming in a world where Jews cracked jokes, fell in love, and simply existed. Not demons. Not legends. People.
My mother gave me the oxygen to breathe beyond borders. But oxygen is flammable.
Father: Shadows and Sparks
My father—a German-speaking tour guide whose livelihood crumbled with tourism after Luxor ’97—was a man of contradictions. He was a fan of Hitler (hence the VW keyring for his Fiat). When my questions frayed his patience, he’d laugh: "Khalas ya Cohen! Enough!" The nickname was Egyptian slang for a shrewd bargainer, or occasionally an insult for someone being mean or sly, tossed like a pebble. Neither of us knew it was a grenade. Cohen. A Jewish name. A placeholder for the "other" I’d one day become.
His death in 2017 left a silence heavier than disapproval. We’d been estranged since the divorce—a rupture that exiled me from my English-language oasis to a government school opposite Cairo’s ancient Jewish cemetery.
A recent photo of school, you can locate here via Google Maps!
The Cemetery: Where Ghosts Turned Real
The school was punishment (albeit thankfully only for a year as my mother eventually convinced my father to send me back to my old school). The cemetery, revelation.
For years, Jews had been theoretical—the faces of Ross and Monica Geller on my TV screen. But here, behind rusted gates, lay proof: Star of David engravings. Hebrew epitaphs. Bones of people who’d loved this city as I did.
Then came the boys.
Children from tin-roofed slums, kicking footballs made of rags. They’d scale the cemetery walls (or what’s left of them), urinating on graves, shouting "Take this, David!" as if the dead could flinch. I watched, sickened (largely because these were low-class children behaving like beasts), as their laughter echoed off neglected stones. This wasn’t mischief; it was inheritance. A hatred so casual, so banal, it needed no reason beyond existing.
In that moment, something split:
The child who devoured American dreams
The teen confronting Egyptian reality
The future Jew bearing witness
Mother gave me audacity.
Father gave me labels that outlived him.
The cemetery gave me truth: If they could desecrate the dead, what might they do to the living?
Mother’s gift wasn’t indulgence. It was the match. That cemetery? The tinder. And Cohen—the name thrown in jest? A prophecy.
you are an inspiration.