Gini Alhadeff: Diary of a Writer
Gini Alhadeff is a beautiful writer, adept at prose that is elegant, clear, and honest. There is nothing she could write that I would not believe, for every moment she creates is so vividly presented it is as if I were reading my own diary of a life I am only discovering now, set within the time, feeling, and place she creates. Quiet, steady, and sure, Alhadeff never relies upon sentimentality or generality to convey her scenes or characters or plots. Instead she uses unflinching and sharp observations of human nature to relate original and intelligent stories about the world. The works that result are exquisite, offering a unique perspective on love, family, writing, and purpose.
In her novel Diary of a Djinn, the reader becomes intimately acquainted with a woman born in Egypt but schooled in Italy who now enters the world of adults, working first for a fashion house in Milan and then moving to New York City to pursue her own writing. She shares memories of her past, friendships she formed in her boarding school, lessons she learned from “the master” and his “partner” at the fashion house, and ill-fated love affairs with men both gay and straight; and she observes her on-going life with honesty and insight, offering sharp, sometimes funny and always smart, commentary, anecdotes, and reflections on her efforts to make a place for herself in New York, over-reaching on real estate to live in a “tree house” apartment (having to make the rent serves as a spur to her writing), falling in love with a married man, taking in the gift of a cat, and befriending a very ill older woman, mother of her lover and an Italian matriarch of elegance, wit, and reserve.
Alhadeff’s portrayal of the older woman’s illness is a searing and heartbreaking presentation of the course of cancer: the doctors “let their patients in for a long routine that kills slowly, the body as well as hope itself. They cured their patients of illusion, if nothing else. Cured them of the desire to go on living, of any remaining ability to do so.” The Princess, as the narrator calls her, battles to retain her identity and preserve her dignity and privacy, but the long, debilitating, and ultimately unsuccessful treatment, proves too much. It is the cancer, as well as the cure, that will kill her.
The narrator in Diary of a Djinn is extremely self-conscious but in the very best of ways: she examines herself, her surroundings, and the people in her life with intelligence, curiosity, and a wonderfully understated understanding that life offers so much that is possible and worthwhile and beautiful. When she describes the waning of the older woman’s desire to live, she underscores her own understanding of life’s value, “the promise of [life] itself with its quiet unfolding, its measured surprises, the greatest one being its livability beyond the notion of a future, the day to day existence … taking an interest in her world and in the world at large, its politics, its culture, its minute detail, its grandeur.” Taking an interest, being open to life’s surprises, and observing its beauty: Alhadeff does all this with her writing, and we readers reap the benefits.
In her memoir, The Sun at Midday, Alhadeff tells the fascinating story of her family, Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain during the Inquisition, settling in Italy, and then during the World Wars moving on again, to Alexandria, Cairo, Khartoum, Tokyo, and back to Italy. Raised Catholic, Alhadeff didn’t even know of her Jewish origins until she was in her twenties, when a passing comment on her looks got her asking questions. The memoir ranges from very funny observations on family life, to interesting tales of family facts (including courtships and marriages) and legends, to the heartbreaking and yet inspiring recollections of her uncle Nissim, a doctor who survived the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau, freed finally upon arrival of the allies: “We watched unconscious and disbelieving, and those eyes of ours which had remained dry in the face of death now suddenly wept in the face of life.”
Towards the end of her memoir, Alhadeff explains, with an honesty and acuity that is wonderfully typical of her writing, “That I know who I am is clearly proved by the fact that I have no clear idea what that is, other than the sensation within any given moment. The only course of blood I can honestly say I feel running through my veins is the desire to understand and to make a record of the journey? I see as I write.” And she allows all of us to see, and to understand so much, through the wonder and beauty of all that she writes.
