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I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir
Rafi Zabor
Memoir from the 60s
Aporia
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2005
480 pages
ISBN: 0865475830
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Some time ago Rafi Zabor sat down to write a brief narrative
of the year 1986. That was the year he set out across two
continents in a used Mercedes--"Wabenzi" is the Swahili word
for a member of the Mercedes-owning class--to buy a grave
stone for his friend Mahmoud Rauf and to outrun the shadow
of his own parents' recent death. But like a boat against the current, the writer was drawn
back into the past: his father's escape from the Nazis,
Rafi's own Brooklyn boyhood surrounded by the fractious,
Zabors and Zaborovskys, and the anguished--sometimes
farcical--spiritual journey that led Zabor from Brooklyn to
Turkey by way of Coltrane, the thirteenth-century mystic
Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi, the McGovern campaign, Gurdjieff, a
shoe salesman named Gogol, and the cataclysmic months Zabor
spent studying (and whirling) amid a band of Sufis in rural
England. The result--the first of a projected four
volumes--is one of the most original, capacious, and vivid
narratives of the last few decades, a real-life
Bildungsroman dealing with an expanded range of human
experience, from matters of life and death to a piece of
what lies beyond them. Straight from the unchartered territory between Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Tristram Shandy, I,
Wabenzi lifts a corner of the known world as if it were the
edge of a curtain, and begins to show a reality new to our
literature gleaming on the other side.
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