I remember Magda: A friend’s tribute to a remarkable Shelter Islander

Two Magda Saleh’s graced us here on Shelter Island. There was the public Magda Saleh, Ph.D., fluent in English, Arabic, Russian and French, with passports from the U.K., Egypt, and the U.S., and often in the media — most recently in a 2020 Vogue article.

Then there was the private Magda Saleh, who served coffee, pastry, and conversation each Saturday morning for fascinating discussions over widely different topics.

This is about the second Magda, who could express herself without fear — and she certainly did! — on subjects as varied as naming hummingbirds or the tragedy that America did not do more to help Russia after the Soviet collapse.

She made close friends from maids to mayors. To paraphrase Kipling, she literally walked with kings without losing her common touch.

Her credentials were beyond impressive. Recruited in Cairo by the Bolshoi Ballet, she moved to Moscow and became a principal dancer with the company. When an injury ended her dance career, she became a renowned teacher of dance in Cairo, advocating for western dance and opera, balancing both with equal pride in her Egyptian culture.

Yet Magda, a strong, single woman with Scottish and Egyptian parenting, was hardly a good fit in a culture developing Islamic roots to replace centuries of Egyptian focus, she said. All this came to a rapid and tragic end with a terrorist arson attack of her beloved Opera House before it officially opened. The smoke from that act would drive Magda to the U.S.

Picking up the pieces, she earned a grant to attend UCLA, receiving a Ph.D. in Egyptian studies. The next stop was New York City, where she found the perfect mate in Jack Josephson. He was a recognized Egyptologist, who left a financially successful business career to bring his engineering skills and intelligence to find new theories about ancient Egyptian culture and structures.

Magda and Jack were a remarkable combination — she rubbed shoulders with the elite in Egypt, and brought editing skills to Jack’s analytical genius. Jack and Magda shared many things, but one of the saddest was fighting cancer at precisely the same time, just as COVID released its grip.

Jack and Magda coordinated their chemo appointments to make the four-hour round trips to Stony Brook as efficient as possible. Jack’s battle ended in October 2022.

Magda had to continue with no New York City safety net since they had given up their magnificent Madison Avenue co-op and anticipated ending their days here. While they never considered how short those days would be, they never once regretted their decision to leave Manhattan.

Can you imagine Magda living alone on 10 acres in a house not even visible from the road and too weak to survive the traveling back to her home and family in Cairo? God smiled, and a miracle appeared in the person of Nagla, a former ballet student of hers.

Independently, she had planned to visit Magda, and when she arrived and realized Magda’s distress, she revised her plans to stay “as long as needed,” doing everything and anything to make her friend comfortable. She was an angel spending three months to build up Magda’s strength allowing her to return to Cairo.

Magda never stopped looking for challenges. Before the cancer, she was my tennis student — my one and only. Every time she didn’t return the ball, she let out a staccato “Sorry.”

Now it’s our turn to be sorry, to turn the page to the last chapter: She lost game-set-match in her battle a week ago in Cairo.