Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies Viterbi Seminar in Mediterranean Jewish Studies
Lukas will be reading from his second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo. A multigenerational novel centered around Cairo’s Ibn Ezra Synagogue, the book knits together the disparate experiences of three different narrators—an eleventh century Muslim watchman, a pair of Victorian-era linguists, and a contemporary Comparative Literature graduate student—as each “discovers” a trove of discarded documents hidden in the attic of the synagogue.
Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and a waiter at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. Translated into more than a dozen languages, his first novel The Oracle of Stamboul was a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. His second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, was published recently by Spiegel & Grau. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Maryland, he is a recipient of scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Elizabeth George Foundation. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, and Georgia Review. He has taught at University of San Francisco, University of the Pacific, 826 Valencia, and San Francisco State University.
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Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, English