A riveting and revealing tale of an Egypt caught between tradition and modernity, multiculturalism and nationalism, oppression and freedom.

Cairo 1925, Haret al-Yahud, the old Jewish Quarter. Esther, a beautiful young woman believed to be possessed by demons, longs to give birth after seven blissful years of marriage. Her husband, blind since childhood, does not object when, in her effort to conceive, she participates in Muslim zar rituals. Zohar, the novel’s narrator, comes into the world, but because his mother’s breasts are dry, he is nursed by a Muslim peasant—also believed to be possessed—who has just given birth to a girl, Masreya. Suckled at the same breasts and united by a rabbi’s amulet, the milk-twins will be consumed by a passionate, earth-shaking love. 
 
Part fantastical fable, part realistic history, A Land Like You draws on ethno-psychiatrist Tobie Nathan’s deep knowledge of North African folk beliefs to create a glittering tapestry in which spirit possession and religious mysticism exist side by side with sober facts about the British occupation of Egypt and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Free Officers’ Movement. Historical figures such as Gamel Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and King Farouk mingle with Nathan’s fictional characters in this engaging story.
 

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.