André Aciman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
André Aciman (born January 2, 1951 in Alexandria, Egypt) is an American essayist, memoirist and leading scholar of the works of Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Commentary, and The Harvard Review, as well as several volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award winning memoir Out of Egypt, an account of his childhood as a secular Jew growing up in Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s. He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University and currently teaches at the Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York.
Born André Albert Aciman into a Sephardic Jewish family holding Turkish nationality (his father was originally from Istanbul), Aciman grew up in the cosmopolitan milieu of the multilingual European émigré community in Alexandria. The language spoken at home was French, but Italian, Greek, Arabic, and Ladino were also heard and occasionally spoken. However, Aciman always attended English-language schools, first in Alexandria and later, after his family moved to Italy in 1965, in Rome. In 1969, Aciman's family moved again, this time to New York City, where he attended Lehman College, graduating in 1973.
In addition to his 1996 memoir Out of Egypt, Aciman has published two other books: False Papers (2001), a collection of fourteen essays, and most recently a novel entitled Call Me By Your Name (2007).
Aciman is also the father of three sons, Alexander Aciman, Michael Aciman and Philip Aciman, to whom he dedicated Out of Egypt.
