The Last Watchman of Old Cairo by Michael David Lukas.

From The Jewish News of North California

Oakland novelist Michael David Lukas fell in love with Cairo during a college semester abroad in 2000. He found the mega-city of 20 million people “humongous, vibrant, amazing, decrepit, friendly, dangerous” — but as a Jew, he was confused about his own relationship to it.

Then he chanced upon the city’s 1,000-year-old Ben Ezra Synagogue, source of the treasure trove of historical Jewish documents known as the Cairo Geniza.

Engaging and vivid, “Watchman” centers on a Muslim family that served as security guards for the Ben Ezra Synagogue for more than 1,000 years. While the synagogue and its famous geniza are real, the generations of watchmen are fictional — “ahistorical in that they never happened,” Lukas says, “but historical in that they could have happened.”

read more here @ The Jewish News of North California

The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

Joseph, a literature student at Berkeley, is the son of a Jewish mother and a Muslim father. One day, a mysterious package arrives on his doorstep, pulling him into a mesmerizing adventure to uncover the tangled history that binds the two sides of his family. For generations, the men of the al-Raqb family have served as watchmen of the storied Ibn Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, built at the site where the infant Moses was taken from the Nile. Joseph learns of his ancestor Ali, a Muslim orphan who nearly a thousand years earlier was entrusted as the first watchman of the synagogue and became enchanted by its legendary—perhaps magical—Ezra Scroll. The story of Joseph’s family is entwined with that of the British twin sisters Agnes and Margaret, who in 1897 depart their hallowed Cambridge halls on a mission to rescue sacred texts that have begun to disappear from the synagogue.