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 | plenty of life lessons

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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 Arabic culture oriented Jew

In my opinion, the key sentence in the book is what Leon Lagnado the father of the writer, said to the American social worker Sylvia Kirschner: "We are Arab, madame," Leon liked to listen to the songs of the famous female Arabic singer Om Kalthum and once as a handsome young man was her lover. Leon spoke Arabic with his mother Zarifa from Aleppo as with his siblings, and also was proud to wear the tarbouch like king Farouk, the last king of Egypt. According to Joel Benin's book: The dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, and according to Andre Aciman's book: Out of Egypt, the majority of the Jews of Egypt mainly spoke French at home and used a very rudimentary Arabic language in order to carry out basic communications with the servants and the local population in the markets and shops. Leon Lagnado who prayed in Hebrew, spoke English with a perfect British accent with the British army officers in Cairo during WWII, French with his wife and other Jews, was according to his own defition an Arab Jew because he also spoke fluently Arabic (his mother tongue) without any foreign accent, was also able to absorb the native Egyptian mentality or as we say in Arabic: "Ibn balad Asli" and that's precisely what makes this book so attractive to Jews and Arabs readers alike. This book was written by a woman who is able to describe in amazing accurate details not only the culture and the political history, but also the foods and the fashion of a long ago lost Jewish Egyptian world. The pictures in the book add to its attractiveness. As a Jew born in Egypt this book took me back in time to my childhood, also the few Hebrew words and the many sentences in Arabic and French are very nostalgic to me. This book in a relatively short period since its publication in June 2007, has already acquired lots of positive reader reviews, I think that this success is due to the ability to attract the interest of the American public who is always avid to read about immigration to America. The book does not limit the story on what happened in Cairo Egypt, but also on what happened in America. About half of the book relates the many difficulties and the hard life of the family in Brooklyn New York. Lucette Lagnado should be praised for the colossal research she had made in order to write this book. I highly recommend another moving memoir book about the confortable life of the Egyptian Jews before Nasser and their oppression during the Nasser regime Exodus II The Promised Land

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plenty of life lessons

I was surprised at what a page-turner this book wound up to be.
While every immigrant's story is interesting, I found the author's experiences to be particularly compelling. In my reading of the novel, Ms. Lagnado is the main character, not her father. She lives through turbulent times: her values changed along with changing circumstances. She was drawn first to the religion preached by her father, then she followed her siblings in rejecting his religion and what they perceived as his outdated values. Paradoxically, Ms. Lagnado devoted a chapter to lashing out at the social worker assigned to settling the family in the US. The social worker is the scapegoat for the children's abandonment of the old country values and mores. No gratitude was expressed regarding the agency that fed and housed them, only seething resentment at the way the family was treated.

Ms. Lagnado had further disdain for the health care system in the US. She described herself as a disadvantaged Medicaid patient, her life totally in the hands of a Doctor who deigned to take her case. In fact her life was saved and the bill paid for by the US government. She said that at the end of his life her father would have been better off in a hospital in Cairo than a cold uncaring US hospital. Would she have been better off being treated in an Egyptian hospital? Ridiculous.

An autobiographical novel is by its very nature subjective. My comments regarding the authors portrayal of events do not detract from my opinion that this book is well worth reading. It was surprisingly difficult to put down.

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A powerful emigrant/immigrant story; titanic clash of values, never resolved

This book struck me as a powerful, non-sentimental story of the problems of old world values and the personalities forged in that world meeting new world values. Leon, the father of the family,is a forceful personality. Leon's wife, once a great beauty, falls under Leon's domineering personality. A strong, charming womanizer, a wily businessman, an everyday practicing Jew, Leon meets new realities and cannot change with changing times. Can we blame him? Can we blame the people who look upon his ways with astonishment, trying to pierce his value system to let in oxygen so that his fmaily can also breathe? The core of the story is how the members of the Lagnado family can/cannot find a new HOME, the deeply experienced sense of attachment/loyalty/pleasure that they found in Cairo in the demands of the newer, faster, brasher, survive-or-be-eaten world that they encounter. Enjoy. Nancy Salen

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Superb

The descrption of life in Egypt was so powerful that it made me want to go there for a visit and check out the sights. Life in New York is closer to present reality including the sad visits to Sloan Kettering which only highlight the writer's rise like a phoenix from the tragic ashes of the past. Lucette's life and story are nothing short of a true miracle.Great sad and inspiratioal story. Don't miss!!!

A fascinating story

This book, like a number of other regarding the same subject that have been recently published ( Out of Egypt: A MemoirLast Days in Babylon: The History of a Family, the Story of a Nation ), evokes the `exotic' life of foreigners, Jews, Muslims, Armenians, Copts, Maltese and Arabs in early 20th century Egypt. This story focuses on the Jews and their role in Egypt. The Jews had a long history of Egyptian living, from the perhaps apocryphal time of the exodus, they certainly have lived in Egypt in large numbers since Alexander's conquest of the region in the 4th century B.C. By the 20th century they formed a unique and diverse community in Egypt's largest cities, particularly Alexandria and Cairo. They included local Sephardic Jews as well as Jews from Eastern and Western Europe. They spoke a variety of languages, especially French. A very cultured and wealthy community they were forced to choose between Communism, Egyptian Nationalism and Zionism in the 1940s. It was not a choice most wanted to make. They liked their home country, Egypt. But the departure of the British and the rise of Nasserism in the 1950s brought great discomfort. Furthermore the Germans and Italians had disseminated anti-Semitic literature among the local Arabs in the 1930s and in the 1940s there were a series of anti-Jewish riots, with anti-Zionism being the excuse.

This tells the story of a family from the perspective of a young girl turned young woman. Much of the book takes place in Egypt, but after the family if forced to flee, one of their daughters having been arrested, it tells of their exile and the pining for a return to their homeland. They are the forgotten refugees, a family among 900,000 other Jews forcibly thrown out of Arab countries between 1940 and 1975. Yet as the author tells us this is a book about compassion and memories and it is all about forgiveness. Why Jewish remembrances of their lives in the Muslim world always end with a call for forgiveness may irk some readers, no one ends a book about German Jewry with such a rejoinder.

Seth J. Frantzman

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