André Albert Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on January 2, 1951. He left Egypt for Italy in 1965 and settled in New York with his family in 1969. A professor of literature, Proust scholar, and writer, Aciman achieved relative notoriety with his first book, Out of Egypt: A Memoir (New York, 1994), which won the Whiting Foundation Award. The memoir is an aesthetic transposition of what it was like growing up Jewish in Alexandria during the 1950s and 1960s. It is a tour de force combining factual description and personal vision. The Alexandria Aciman evokes is as elusive as t…