The mists of time have obscured the life of Souad Zaki, a largely forgotten Egyptian Jewish entertainer who achieved a measure of fame in her country and the Arab world during the 1940s. Egypt, A Love Story, a bitter-sweet documentary, recounts the trajectory of her relatively short-lived career as an alluring chanteuse and movie actress.
Written and directed by her Israeli granddaughter, Iris Zaki, the daughter of Moshe Zaki, Souad’s son, it is now available on the Izzy streaming platform.
Prior to her death in 2004, Souad never talked about her youth in Egypt, whose Jewish community rapidly dwindled following Israel’s birth and the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. As for Iris, she showed no interest in Souad, who immigrated to Israel in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
Strangely enough, exact dates are conspicuously missing in this highly creative film, a melange of archival footage from old Egyptian movies, vintage photographs of pre-revolutionary Egypt, off-camera interviews with Souad, and reenactments of her days as a siren.
Nor does the film draw connections between Souad and the rise of anti-Zionist sentiment and violence in Egypt after World War II. It appears that Souad lived in a bubble of her own making, oblivious to the political turmoil around her. This glaring omission robs the film of historical roots and resonance.
Be that as it may, the film provides viewers with a fleeting glance of the Jewish-Muslim symbiosis in Egypt before its final dissolution in the 1940s.
Known as Miss S, Souad hailed from a middle-class family in Cairo whose father expressed disappointment when she became a professional singer. Worse still, from his perspective, she married a Muslim, Mohammed Alakkad, a musician who played the qanun, an Arabic instrument, in a popular band.
Before her marriage, Souad performed in clubs in Egypt and at concerts in the Arab world. She also appeared in several Egyptian films, notably Salamah (1945), in which she starred opposite the illustrious Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, who wowed audiences from the 1930s until the 1970s.
Although Souad was not as famous as Layla Mourad, a Jewish singer who converted to Islam to appease her Muslim husband, she had an immense following. Nevertheless, she always feared that she would be judged on the basis of her Jewish background rather than her talents. This tension, however, does not appear in the film.
Souad’s husband immigrated to the United States in the hope of advancing his prospects as America’s first qanun player. Souad was supposed to join him after he had established himself. Much to Souad’s grief, she discovered he had divorced her and had wed an American woman. Her shocking discovery unfolds in a brief black-and-white reenactment that resembles a scene from a melodramatic soap opera.
When Souad’s ex-husband demanded sole custody of their beloved son, Mustafa, who would be renamed Moshe, she fled to Israel as a new immigrant.
She did not fare well in Israel, where she called herself Mazal, a typical Sephardi Jewish name.
Souad landed a gig as a singer on a weekly Arabic program broadcast by the Voice of Israel, but her salary was paltry. In desperation, she cleaned offices to make ends meet and to pay for the boarding school in Jaffa in which Moshe was enrolled. A reenactment shows her at work in an office.
When the Egyptian government learned she had moved to Israel, an enemy state, Soaud’s recordings were summarily erased. Luckily, many of them had been sold abroad and were exempt from that vindictive order.
Moshe, a central figure in the film, claims he never considered himself a Muslim and always identified as an Israeli. But he acknowledges that, while serving in the armed forces, he came under suspicion due to his partial Muslim heritage.
At the age of 17, he met his estranged father in New York City. And while he thought he was a “likeable guy,” he related to him as a stranger.
With the death of Mohammed Alakkad’s wife, the film takes an unexpected twist. Lonely and tormented, he reached out to Saoud, who had always been in love with him and reciprocated his feelings.
By turns intriguing, glitzy and sad, Egypt, A Love Story is an enchanting film about ambition, romance, motherly love and identity. It is well worth the price of admission.