Excerpt from Roman Year by Andre Aciman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

What eventually told me that the man standing on the dock could only be Uncle Claude was not his dark, wavy hair or the leering, sinuous smile fluttering across his face in old family albums. These traits had completely disappeared. Instead, it was his sudden and unexpected resemblance to his far older brother Nessim, who had died in Egypt at the age of ninety-two a couple of years earlier. The black, wavy hair of old pictures was totally gone in 1966, and when I watched Uncle Claude repeatedly doffing his hat to salute us from afar, I was immediately reminded that, like his brother, he was completely bald and made the same ugly pout when he wasn't trying to smile, showing an identical protruding nose so curved that he looked like a cross between a bald eagle and an unfledged parrot. Sigmund Freud, minus the beard.

One more thing told me that the man in the trim tweed jacket, felt hat, and maroon cravat standing at the dock surely belonged to my family. When our ship had finally docked and we could see him clearly, we watched him remove a white handkerchief the width of an oversized pennant and start waving it to us in a gesture so uncompromisingly obsolete that it could only have been lifted from vintage Hollywood films: he, too, like my grandmother and her sister, was permanently sealed in a pre–World War I universe where people waved handkerchiefs. It was a subtle and delicate motion, able to communicate hope, welcome, and mirth, yet adaptable to sorrow, subdued despair, and funerals. The Cohène family (with the de rigueur accented è proclaiming their fictitious French descent) always had their way of doing things. No reason for them to comply with what momentarily passed for current chic. The world would have to bend to their terms; it always had.

Their terms, however, were not just dated, they were extinct. They refused to accept this and continued to favor courtesy but seldom candor, good taste but not good morals, always judging people less by what they said or did than by how they held a knife and a fork. All of it decidedly old-world.

When later that morning I told him I'd recently been enrolled in an American school in Egypt, he thought the idea preposterous. I should have gone to Italian schools instead. When I explained that there was a possibility we might move to the United States, Uncle Claude burst out laughing as if I'd uttered the most far-fetched nonsense.

"What? Become Americans! You're in Italy, my little man, you're going to behave and become an Italian like everyone else. None of your savage American claptrap here. America is an unborn country, or didn't you know?"

I had better judgment than to argue or talk back. My brother also kept quiet, though of the two of us he was by far the more enamored with American culture, American films, American songs—anything American. In Egypt, he had managed to buy a pair of used Levi's from an American classmate, loved roasted marshmallows, which he'd discovered as a Cub Scout, and had even managed to obtain a regular supply of Juicy Fruit gum. "What a farce!" my uncle added. "The boys have no character but want to become GIs," he mumbled to himself as we headed to a registry building, though I am sure we were meant to hear each syllable. I stayed quiet, little realizing that silence in Claude's world did not forestall abuse but invited more of it.

* * *

Uncle Claude was, as his sister had warned, impulsive, but it was difficult to see how anyone might prove cruel to blood relatives who'd been expelled and arrived needy, lost, and totally vulnerable, especially a deaf mother with two sons who'd never traveled before. My father's opinion of his uncle was more guarded, in good part because he was reluctant to influence our view of him, which already implied we should expect the worst. Eventually, my father broke down: "Regardless of what Elsa thinks, he can be unequivocally bestial." But my mother was not going to be intimidated. "There is no need to keep scaring us about him," she said. "Not scaring you, just reminding you to beware of him," he argued. My mother was quick with her reply: "If your uncle is so horrible, you should be leaving Egypt with us to protect us, not staying behind." "I'm staying behind because there are loads of things I need to salvage here," he retorted, about ready to lose his own temper. All his property and assets had been nationalized, so, yes, he probably thought he had lots to salvage in the space of his remaining two months in Egypt. But my mother was onto him and couldn't resist complaining to my grandmother: "Salvage, my eye! I know exactly why and for whom he's staying behind," she said, "and everyone knows who she is and where she lives." This was hardly the first time she'd lamented my father's infidelities, to which my grandmother offered the listless, languid answer I'd heard her sigh so many times before. "It's a family curse," she'd say, adding that it ran in all five of her brothers, in her husband, and in every man she'd known, including her own father. My mother hardly found solace in these words. She didn't need to read tea leaves to know what awaited us in Europe: "We'll arrive like paupers in a city we know nothing of while he's going to live it up in Egypt."

Excerpted from Roman Year by Andre Aciman. Copyright © 2024 by Andre Aciman. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.