For Gini Alhadeff, there was rarely a difference between feeling at home and feeling foreign. Born to an Italian family in Alexandria, Egypt, she lived in places as far-flung as Cairo, Khartoum, Florence, and Tokyo; raised Catholic, she did not learn of her Sephardic Jewish roots until she was living in New York in her twenties. In The Sun at Midday , Alhadeff traces her unusual ancestral history, seeking the source of her chameleon-like skills of adaptation. Through the reminiscences of family members—among them cousin Pierre, a worldly priest and celebrity confessor who recalls the sumptuous lives of Alexandrian ex-pats, and her uncle Nissim, now a gynecologist in Queens, who survived the horrors of the Holocaust—she unearths a wealth of rich and strange stories. Woven together with exhilarating prose, they form an uncommonly affecting memoir of a family whose past defies summation, and of Alhadeff’s own life both in it and apart from it.