Three faces from the blue box. [Names to confirm]
Cairo, 1942
The Secrets of the Blue Box
Cairo 1942 — My Search for Sol, her Spies and her People
The day she buried her mother, Patricia opened the box Sol had hidden on the top shelf of her wardrobe. Inside was a cache of family secrets – and an early romance she had never known about. From that box come three interlocking stories: Amaury's, Max's and Sol's. They run from a jeep in Cairo and a secret mission to Naples to the Green Phone, and through five uprootings and five exiles, tracing the Nahum family through Israel, Spain, the Ottoman centuries, Egypt and Australia.
At the centre of it all is the apartment at 19 rue Hawayati, Cairo, where, Patricia suggests, three empires met.
“This is a magnificent doctorate. I was hooked reading it and couldn't put it down.”Prof. Bill Schwartz, University of London, examiner
Read the opening, and how the story unfolds
“The day I buried my mother I finally opened the box she had hidden on the top shelf of her wardrobe, and for the first time I understood who she had been.”
Prof. Bill Schwartz, examining the doctorate on which the book is based, described what follows:
“It tells a fabulous story, or rather three interlocking stories, all of which derive from the discovery of a cache of hidden family secrets, deposited by the author's mother, which tells of an early romance which remained entirely unknown to the author. It is a compelling start, allowing wonderful stories to unfold.”
“The opening section sets out to identify and tell the story of a figure who appeared in the photographs: Zaccaria. The second takes a considerably longer duration, tracking the Jewish world from Jerusalem to Spain until 1492, and then onward to the Middle East and Cairo . . . The third part concerns the background of a second lover who appeared in Cairo, an Englishman, Donovan, who took her mother to Sydney.”
