The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World...

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.) | Lucette Lagnado | A Moving Exodus

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The Man in the Whi...

	The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.) Lucette Lagnado Harper Perennial, 2008 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 59 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An Excellent Read

I'd been meaning to read Lucette Lagnado's family memoir for awhile. Learning that the book had won the 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature motivated me to actually pick it up. This past weekend, I finished reading the book. And it's an excellent read.

Given what often seems an unending stream of memoir-related scandals, not to mention the primacy of what I'll charitably call the dysfunction narrative (and of course the interrelationship between the two), reading THE MAN IN THE WHITE SHARKSKIN SUIT is a gift. Not only does the author focus on a story that's truly fresh (in this case, the story of a Jewish family's history in Syria and Egypt and the massive dislocation it experienced in 1962 when emigrating from Egypt, first to France and then to the United States). Not only does she include authentic "evidence," including photographs, documents, and file citations from the social service agencies that worked with her immigrant family in Paris and New York. But she also presents rounded portraits of multiple "characters," especially her parents (her father, Leon, is the eponymous man in the white sharkskin suit) and grandparents (especially her two grandmothers). An exercise in navel-gazing, this is surely not. It's not until late in the book that the author's own life-threatening medical problems--which another writer, especially in this Age of the Misery Memoir, might have chosen to make the subject of an entire book, and which are artfully presaged in earlier chapters--take center stage. Even then, it's the effect of her illness on those around her rather than her own suffering that seems to matter more.

What will you get from reading this book? You'll get a sense of the culture of a Levantine Jewish community, one that I, for one, previously knew only superficially (mostly through stories about the in-laws of one of my mother's close friends). You'll get some history, of World War II and the Suez crisis. You'll get stories of Jewish immigrants in France and Israel and the United States. You'll get the texture of Brooklyn in the 1960s and 1970s. You'll get the almost unimaginably shocking story of what happened to one of Lagnado's maternal uncles at the hands of Lagnado's own grandfather. You'll get the triumphs and the tragedies of her family, and you'll get, in particular, a sense of the deep bond between Lagnado and that extraordinary man in the white sharkskin suit. Don't miss it.

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A Moving Exodus

Lucette Lagnado's moving memoir is subtitled My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World. It is a story of a remarkable father and his family movingly told with the feel of a novel as you share the experiences of this family who traveled half way around the world to settle in America. Lucette Lagnado, who is a senior special writer and investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal, demonstrates both her skill as a writer and an investigator.

The story begins with the marriage of her parents, Leon and Edith, in wartime Cairo. As the family establishes itself after the war, the position of the Jewish community gradually deteriorates until, in the early sixties they flee to Paris en route to their eventual destination. The strength of both parents and the details of the family's difficult journey is a story that this reader found intensely moving. The thought of being "stateless", as they were once they left Egypt, is hard to imagine. That they overcame this and survived is a tribute to their courage. This is a memoir that I will not soon forget.

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A Good Book for A Discussion

There is much to discuss in this story. First there is the lives and attitudes of the nonArabs who lived in Egypt prior to the government of Nasser. For the most part life was good for them . Their diets and some their customs were similar to the Egyptians but they seemed to possess a superior attitutude. Egyptian Jews acted in some ways like the colonial English. The author's mother, grandmother,and some members of her family never learned to speak Arabic.
The author's father continued his all night ramblings even after he was married and only seemed to stop when he had an accident. As he grew older he became more likible to me.
The lives of the Egyptians was very interesting and the descriptions of Jewish Cairo were good.
My heart went out to Alexandra, the maternal grandmother of the author. She sufferered poverty, loss of a child in the most terrible way, and loneliness. She was truly a tragic figure.
The family's life in Paris and their life in Brookyn was very interesting. I was annoyed that the author felt that America owed her more( for example the fact that her brother had to attend college at night).

Anyway, I was fascinated by this story and would recommend it.

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A Second Exodus from Egypt

A very interesting book about a middle class family of six in Egypt who is forced to leave Egypt because they are Jewish and find a new home in a foreign country with $212 allotted to all six of them. It shows the stark contrast between Egypt pre-Nasser and post and the contrast between Egypt and the United States. It also shows the pschological impact of a change in cultures for one of the members at an advanced age with significant health problems.

Good start then...annoying

This book got off to a great start and it was fascinating reading about Cairo and its inhabitants. However, the more I got into the book it soon became clear the father is a selfish, self-centered man and the whole family needs to revolve around him. Once they leave Egypt, the book goes rapidly downhill. When they finally arrive in the States, they become the kind of immigrants nobody wants. Nobody works, everyone is constantly complaining about everything and blaming everyone except themselves but taking what they can from whomever they can and expecting others to take care of them. At one point the author, who is the daughter in the family, complains that her brother is forced to take a job when what she thinks he should do is go to college. Hello? No one prevented him from doing that. They just wanted someone else to pay for it. It is very annoying to read about a family given so many opportunities only to make nothing of themselves. It detriorates into a lot of poor me, poor us and I sure don't enjoy reading that! They should have stayed in Egypt.

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