Emigres who write about their childhood : Nabokov and others

There's a solid tradition of emigres writing about their childhood in native land, often with very tender recollections of parents (deeply affectionate mother, severe father is often the trope) and even more so of servants who were either surrogate parents or surrogate siblings - these recollections, either memoirs or memoir thinly disguised as fiction - written in the adopted language - which I think adds a particularly poignancy to the writing and to the material. Current New Yorker story, Naimi, by H. Matar, is in this worthy tradition - the lineage being from Nabokov to, more recently, Aciman and the Russian emigre to France who wrote Dreams of My Russian Summer, to cite some notable examples. Matar maybe not at those levels, but his is a beautifully written story that, alas!, like so many in the New Yorker these days has no particular shape or direction and feels inevitably like an excerpt from a longer piece. The heart of the story concerns the way in which his father essentially conspired to keep from the young man any news or information about his mother's mortal condition. After the mother dies, the father tries fitfully to establish a relation with the young man, but a huge emotional gap lies between them. The family has settled in Egypt, and there are references to their native land, where the father was a top adviser to the king, then fled from a revolution - the native land is never named, so it's anyone's guess. One striking feature is the section on the family's summer vacation in Norway: Matar describes a lot of different cultures in this story, but I think he needs more space in order to develop this material and give us our bearings.