The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

by Michael David Lukas

Michael David Lukas' story, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, unfolds as if he were pulling fragments from an ancient geniza and piecing them together.

It's apt for a book about an ancient synagogue (Ibn Ezra) in Old Cairo. In the world Lukas has created, Jews and others have believed for more than a thousand years that a flawless Torah scroll created by a scribe named Ezra was hidden within the synagogue's geniza.

One fragment of this story is about Joseph al-Raqb, 26, born to an Egyptian Muslim father, Ahmed al-Raqb, and an Egyptian Jewish mother, Claudia Shemarya, who is trying to understand his origins and why his parents never married.

Lukas then lays in stories of how the men of the al-Raqb family became night watchmen at the Ibn Ezra Synagogue.

Lastly, he sets in bits about a pair of Scottish twin sisters, Margaret Gibson and Agnes Lewis, who help Dr. Solomon Schechter, a rabbi and scholar, remove manuscript fragments from an ancient geniza in Old Cairo in 1896 to be preserved and studied at Cambridge University.

Throughout all the stories is the quest to protect -- or to find -- the mythical Ezra scroll.

Ultimately, this book is a rich revelation of family histories and mysteries, woven through time. Beautifully written, it's an easy book to relate to with a touching rendering of family ties and estrangements.

It exposes readers to a fascinating flow of history from times when Jews and Muslims co-existed in Old Cairo to post-colonial days when British citizens could export priceless manuscripts to their own country to the 1956-57 expulsion of the Jews from Egypt by its President Abdul Gamal Nasser.

My only difficulty with this book  was how much the sections about the Cairo Geniza reminded me of Adina Hoffman's and Peter Cole's book, Sacred Trash. While Lukas' did apply imagination to their story, the familiar history pulled me out of his imaginary world.

About the Author: Michael David Lukas (1979 - )

This, Michael David Lukas' second book, won a 2018 National Jewish Book Award for fiction and the 2019 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, which honors emerging writers who explore the Jewish experrience in a specific work of fiction and nonfiction in alternating years. His first book was The Oracle of Stamboul, published in 2011, which was a finalist for the California Book Award.

Born in Berkeley, Lukas was the oldest of five children.  He studied comparative literature at Brown University and earned a master of fine arts degree from the creative writing program at the University of Maryland. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, studied at the American University of Cairo and been a nigh-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv.

He received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe.

He currently lives in Oakland and works at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.