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Something about Jean

About the Author:

Jean Naggar's poetry has appeared in The Listener and Athanor and she has been published in The New York Times, the Village Voice, Publishers Weekly, and Writers Digest.
Before establishing the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, Inc., in New York City in 1978 (www.jvnla.com) she worked as a book reviewer, writer, translator and editor. Naggar is the agent for Jean Auel's Earth's Children series as well as the works of Mary McGarry Morris, Phillip Margolin, Nancy Willard, Sarah Waters, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Carl Safina, Linda Pastan and others.
Naggar is a former president of the AAR (Association of Authors Representatives), and has been the keynote speaker at many writers conferences throughout the US.
She lives in Manhattan with her husband Serge. She has three children, two children-in-law, and seven grandchildren.



SOME EARLY REVIEWS:

Praise for Jean Naggar's
SIPPING FROM THE NILE: My Exodus from Egypt
To purchase, please visit the website www.sippingfromthenile.com
and click anywhere on the jacket.

Jane Isay
Author: Walking On Eggshells
Every once in a while, a book comes along that opens a world the reader has never imagined. Sipping from the Nile is such
a book. I read it some months ago, and I still can't get it out of my mind. It tells, with clarity and love, the story of a young
girl growing up in Egypt, in a wealthy and influential Sephardic Jewish family. It's a world I never thought existed: a big
family with international ties, a cosseted childhood, a different kind of religious observance, and a modern Exodus. From
power to exile in the life of one brilliant and sensitive young woman. Wow!

Chronogram Magazine
In prose as densely woven and vivid as an oriental carpet . . .
this poignant tale of loss and renewal evokes a vanished world.

Anne LaFarge
8 Taconic newspapers: The Constant Reader
The nicest thing parents and grandparents can do for future generations is to tell the family story. If you're lucky, granny is a
writer and can tell the family story with eloquence, as New York literary agent Jean Naggar has done in her memoir....her
book is a gift to her children and theirs...and to all of us as well.

Sybil Steinberg
former senior editor of Publishers Weekly
Fascinating Memories of a Vanished World
Memoirs of people who have been expelled from their homelands tend to be anguished recollections of severed lives. The
magic of Jean Naggar's vivid and lyrical memoir of her family's life in Egypt before their expulsion during the 1956 Suez
crisis lies in her loving evocation of a privileged childhood in a halcyon time. Sipping From the Nile [offers] beautifully
detailed descriptions of a sun blessed world.... The history of Naggar's ancestors in Europe and the Middle East is
fascinating, a modern day account of the Diaspora as experienced by Jews who cleaved to ancient ways even as they were
model citizens of alien cultures in which they prospered and to which they were loyal. When the blow falls, it is as swift and
disorienting as the actual events that swept the author's family to the four winds of Europe and America, but she does not
dwell on painful details. Instead, she celebrates the bonds of family traditions, religious rituals and close knit
relationships that were her legacy from her forebears and that she will leave to her own children and grandchildren. Readers will take from this beguiling book a sense of lives well lived, challenges faced and an inbred strength to surmount life's
difficulties.

Jana McBurneyLin
Author, My Half of the Sky
Naggar grew up in Egypt in the kind of fairytale existence we only dream of: surrounded by caring extended family, living
in a mansion with cooks and servants and dressmakers, constantly hearing a handful of languages and understanding them
all, never wanting for anything. Naggar's "ivory tower" started crumbling in 1956 with the nationalization of the Suez Canal.
Jews were suddenly the target of hate. All they wanted now, after centuries of building a successful livelihood in Cairo, were
exit visas to someplace safe. A fascinating and poignant peek into a past we don't hear much about...

Paul Preuss
Author, Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime series, Secret Passages, and Core
Sipping from the Nile is a richly evocative memoir .....It brings to life an astonishing cast of reallife
characters and a centuries-old culture . . . [A] perspective not only personal but deeply empathetic . . . Jean Naggar['s]...skills as a writer funny, powerfully descriptive, able to recreate a setting or a character in a few precisely chosen details were a revelation.
Illustrated with vivid photographs, this is a memoir, and a historical record, unlike any other.

Marilyn Baer
I highly recommend Sipping from the Nile. It is a book I could not put down. Beautifully written, it reflects the life of a
young Jewish girl brought up in Egypt.The traditions and atmosphere of that time are carefully and accurately described and
it is the most incisive picture of Egypt since the Laurence Durrell books.
Helene E. Awad
Sipping from the Nile ... recreates beautifully the peaceful and grandiose lifestyle that few Egyptians enjoyed before the
Revolution. Mrs. Naggar manages through a very personal and sophisticated style to transport us eagerly in a world that
could have been otherwise too personal to include the reader. Thank you for a wonderful read that echoed a lost past.

Linda L. Shuler
Author of She Who Remembers, The Voice of the Eagle, and Let the Drum Speak
Fascinating. Compelling. Lush language and imagery, a vivid picture of place and time and experiences far beyond anything
I've known, yet I was there, in the moment, entranced. It drew me into the pages and wouldn't let go. Sipping from the Nile
is more than a memoir; it's a celebration of life, a song of of courage and hope, an example of the true meaning and
power of family.
I loved it!

Sarah Laurence
Literary agent Jean Naggar has written a beautiful memoir. Her story is of a lost world of Sephardic Jews in Egypt. Biblical
history repeated itself when the Jews once more had to flee Egypt. She was eighteen when shots rang out in Cairo. Before
expulsion, Naggar and her extended family lived in a palatial home overlooking the silvery Nile River.... Her childhood
tasted of ripe mangoes, smelled of jasmine and sounded like the U.N. [With] ... rich detail, Naggar spins a soothing tale of a
happy childhood in a loving family. Her words flower and bloom like the lush gardens.

Gerald Bregman
Marvelous Family Reminiscence of Another Place