It was never just a novel with some events that take place in a house full of characters with unique characteristics, and it was not a love story centered around that kind young neighbor and what was going on around her, all of them longing, lust, flirtation, and contradiction. Rather, it was this novel written by the pioneer of romance, “Tawfiq Al-Hakim.” It was the story of an entire people, represented by the members of that family that was brought together by the same scene at its beginning and end, a people united on one thing, gathered around it and enveloped in the spirit of unity until it became one individual, indivisible and inseparable from each other. It was also the novel “A Family” in which the characteristics of the Egyptian people were represented when they went through an ordeal, just as the people go through a stage of labor that they experienced in the year 1919 AD. It gave birth to a single body to which the soul returned and permeated all its members without exception. As the family united, it joined the people and everyone gathered around one idol, as has been the norm since the dawn of history. As we have seen in several scenes that span history across history and across life. Starting from the words and lines of the ancient Egyptians’ Book of the Dead, and in the image of the peasants with their blue robes like the sky around the ears of wheat, to the faces of the Egyptians wrapped around their leader, Saad Zaghloul, always and in all the scenes they become all in one, the ordeal brings them together and the spirit comes back to possess them again when they find the idol. It is wonderful. Tawfiq Al-Hakim, who inhabits the pages of this book, takes us to that historical period with her feelings, flying us into skies that are much more welcoming than just reading it as a historical event and about it as a memory of days. Rather, it presents us in its lines with a deep depiction of the Egyptian human being, represented by an individual, a family, and a people.