ABOUT THIS BOOK

A stirring memoir of exile and self-discovery by a central figure in ethno-psychiatry.

In To Sit on the Earth, pioneering ethno-psychiatrist Tobie Nathan charts his intellectual and emotional journey, from his youthful infatuation with Freud and Wilhelm Reich to his mature adoption of anthropologist Georges Devereux’s ethnographic approach to psychoanalysis.

Expelled from Egypt as a Jew in 1956 when he was just a boy, Nathan spent his formative years on the outskirts of Paris. Caught up in situationist and Marxist politics, he enthusiastically participated in the revolutionary Events of May 1968. He then settled into a distinguished career as a writer, professor, and founding director of a free ethno-psychiatry clinic serving migrant populations in the French capital. Along the way, Nathan’s field research and practice took him to Benin, Burundi, and Brazil, where he sought out sorcerers, shamans, and other indigenous healers. As he did so, he encountered telling echoes of his ancestors’ age-old practices in Judeo-Arab Cairo.

Combining case histories and theoretical reflections with personal and familial anecdotes, while engaging with contemporary thinkers—including Sartre, Lacan, Bourdieu, and Foucault—this multi-layered, genre-defying memoir invites us to reconsider the beliefs that connect us to others and ourselves. To Sit on the Earth lays out a subtle, compelling case for the theological and cultural diversity essential to a thriving modernity.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Tobie Nathan is professor emeritus of psychology at Université–Paris VIII in France. He is the author of a dozen novels and numerous psychoanalytic studies. Joyce Zonana is a writer, literary translator, and professor emerita of English at the City University of New York. Janet Lee is a translator, essayist, and editor from rural Nevada currently based in Brooklyn. She is the host of Another Way to Say, a reading series in translation, and a communications coordinator for the Wildenstein Plattner Institute and the Fonds WPI.

REVIEWS

Praise for A Land Like You:
‘Focused on Cairo’s poor Jewish alley (hara) and Muslim delta villages, this hypnotic novel shows how Egypt came to sever its ancient bond between Muslim and Jew, intertwined cultures that call humans “Children of Adam.” . . . Chronicling the fate of Egypt’s Jews, Joyce Zonana’s vibrant yet nuanced translation renders A Land Like You a gorgeous feast for the senses and the spirit.’—Michele Levy, World Literature Today.

Praise for A Land Like You:
‘The novel, which was nominated for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2015, features a large and colorful cast of characters that come together in a panoramic vision of a lost place and time. . . . Joyce Zonana’s superb translation from the French, for which she received a PEN Translation Fund Award, manages to convey the music and flavor of Arabic speech. . . . There is something heartbreaking in the way Nathan depicts the end of a community that existed for millenniums, watching the rise and fall of civilizations, even as it clung to its rhythms, texts and traditions.’—Reading Jewish Fiction

Praise for A Land Like You:
‘[T]he book opens a door to a world different from what we expect but fundamental to the modern predicament, nonetheless.’—Historical Novel Society

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.My Name Is Tobie Nathan
2.To Sit on the Earth
3.Weissmuller
4.Feast Day
5.Dobó and Ayató
6.Tyrone Power
7.Natacha and Louisa
8.George Sand
9.Anthony Perkins
10.Ouedraogo
11.Prudence
12.Amokrane in Parliament