Last Watchma of Cairo

by Michael David Lukas

The story is about a young American man, born of a Jewish Egyptian mother and Muslim Egyptian father.  His parents never married.  His mother took him to America to raise him, his father remained in Egypt but they had occasional contact.

The man is notified that his father has died.  Shortly after he receives a package in the mail from a friend of his father's.  It is a ancient piece of paper with what looks like Arabic writing on one side and possibly Hebrew on the other.  The man is puzzled as to why this is all he gets sent from his father and takes a leave of absence from his academic career to go to Cairo to try to find out more about his father and the document.

In another tale we learn hundreds of years ago a Jewish Synagogue hired a young Muslim Man to be a night Watchman.  This job was then handed down to his son and other sons over the centuries.

We also learn about some British people, two sisters and a man who convince that Synagogue to let them take he contents of a storage area in the Synagogue to Cambridge for safekeeping.  The women are convinced that someone is stealing from the stash of papers and selling them off in bits on the black market.  They fear this will threaten the opportunities for biblical scholarship and historical analysis that the documents offer.  The synagogue agrees and the papers are sent to Cambridge.

When the young man arrives in Cairo he visit his uncle and the uncle's family and tries to find the man who sent him the package from his father.  After many attempts to find the man's address, there are several similar addresses throughout Cairo, he contacts the synagogue and meets the man.

We learn that the man's family were the one's who were the synagogue watchmen up until the  man's father.  Then a scandal occurred which caused the man's father to lose his job as Watchman.  During the Yom Kippur war Egyptian soldiers come to the synagogue and insist on going through it to look for weapons.  The boy's father insists there are no weapons but is forced to let them in.  The soldiers don't find any weapons but they do take a way a Torah of historical sigificance.  The watchman is ashamed at what he let happen.

The man is given a box of his father's possessions, it contains a number of letters between the man's mother and father so the man is able to piece together some of what happened between his parents.

The man's father had made friends with a young Jewish girl in his youth.  She and her family moved to Paris but she kept corresponding with the Watchman.   After the man's father resigns/is fired, the young lady invites him to Paris.  They have an affair and she gets pregnant.  When his mother discovers she is pregnant she leaves her academic studies in Paris and takes the boy to California.  He sees his father occasionally and his mother marries another man.

The man learns about the documents in Cambridge and decides to give up his academic pursuits to become a clerk preparing documents from this collection for analysis, documentation by scholars.
This book was partly about the young man coming to understand his family's past.  If his father had't resigned because of the scandal, he woud not have been born.  Like the book Less, it seems this character was trying to find something meaningful for his life.... preserving documents his ancestors had guarded for centuries.

The book had interesting descriptions of Cairo, including of the City of the Dead and successfully portrayed the frenetic energy and confusion in that city.