R.F. Georgy was born in Cairo in 1964. In 1974, his father, who worked as an electrical engineer for Egypt Air, decided to emigrate to the United States. Upon completing high school in Los Angeles, he went on to the University of California at San Diego where he spent a year and a half and then transferred to the University of California at Berkeley where he studied philosophy.
While at Berkeley, he became friends with Noam Chomsky's daughter, Avi, who was studying history. This lead to a decades long friendship with Chomsky. He also knew Edward Said well. Both Chomsky and Said will be in his next novel "Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story" about the Palestinian Israeli conflict.
Notes from the Cafe Paperback
by R.F. Georgy
"R.F. Georgy's Notes from the Cafe is one of those rare books that come along to force us to stop and reflect upon our world. As a retired professor of comparative literature (Cambridge University), I have taught Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground for over 40 years . Goery brings back the Underground man to observe the digital age and what he has to say is powerful, compelling, and brilliant. In one of the most memorable lines in the book, Georgy declares, "Information paints no picture, sings no song, and writes no poem." From this grand metaphor, Georgy proceeds, to debunk science and tehcnology, the information age, he takes on agnosticism, and examines such writers as Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Kundera, and many others ..." David Braunstein.
Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story
Absolution is a love story unlike any other. It is a love that transcends the oceanic chasms that have come to define one of the most intractable conflicts in modern history. It is the year 2018 and Israel's Prime Minister, Avi Eban, is in Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. One year earlier, on the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Israel and the Palestinians forged a peace that resulted in the creation of Palestine. What the world did not know was the story behind the peace- a story of hope and redemptive possibilities.
"This book is not what I expected. Yes, it is a love story, but it is so much more. In a way, I got a crash course on the Palestinian Israeli conflict. While it is impossible to get a balanced perspective on this conflict, Georgy does an excellent job of presenting both sides with an honest and human perspective. There is a fictional debate between two intellectual heavy weights that I truly enjoyed. In reality, the Palestinian scholar, Edward Said and one of Israel’s founding fathers, Abba Eban never debated or even met, but Georgy does a masterful job of imagining what the debate would have been like. .... Absolution is a compelling book that would fascinate readers with a desire to explore this conflict." Mary Ray.
"He presents Jewish suffering with such compassion and care that I was moved to tears. He presents the Palestinian struggle, their dispossession, their suffering with great humanity. He presents the Zionist case and Palestinian nationalism with intellectual honesty. I can honestly say that I never read a novel about the conflict quite like his." David Braunstein
Georgy is married with three children who are all in college. He has two girls at UCLA and a son is at USC. He is currently working on his next novel, which will be about Nietzsche's "God is dead declaration."
