Product Description

Lucette Lagnado's father, Leon, is a successful Egyptian businessman and boulevardier who, dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit, makes deals and trades at Shepherd's Hotel and at the dark bar of the Nile Hilton. After the fall of King Farouk and the rise of the Nasser dictatorship, Leon loses everything and his family is forced to flee, abandoning a life once marked by beauty and luxury to plunge into hardship and poverty, as they take flight for any country that would have them.

A vivid, heartbreaking, and powerful inversion of the American dream, Lucette Lagnado's unforgettable memoir is a sweeping story of family, faith, tradition, tragedy, and triumph set against the stunning backdrop of Cairo, Paris, and New York.

Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and hailed by the New York Times Book Review as a "brilliant, crushing book" and the New Yorker as a memoir of ruin "told without melodrama by its youngest survivor," The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit recounts the exile of the author's Jewish Egyptian family from Cairo in 1963 and her father's heroic and tragic struggle to survive his "riches to rags" trajectory.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23095 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-01
• Released on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From The New Yorker
This memoir of an Egyptian Jewish family’s gradual ruin is told without melodrama by its youngest survivor, now a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Lagnado’s story hinges on her father, "the Captain," who cut a dashing figure in mid-century Cairo, consorting with British officers and Egyptian royalty at French cafés while his family, neglected, stayed home. At first refusing to join the tide of Jews fleeing Egypt under the Nasser regime, the Captain finally yields, in 1963, when the family escapes to Paris and then Brooklyn. Deprived of wealth, status, and any means of coping, Lagnado’s father fades, but he never loses his air of chivalry, manifested in a regular outflow of tiny checks to charitable causes—orphanages, vocational schools, and dowry funds for poor girls—overseas. "As if the Captain were capable of rescuing anyone," his daughter writes.
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* Lagnado's captivating account of her family's life in cosmopolitan Cairo and painful relocation to America centers on her beloved father. Dashing man-about-town Leon Lagnado, who kept to his carousing ways even after marrying a beautiful women 22 years his junior, was enraptured at the age of 55 by the author, his fourth child; affectionately called Loulou, she became her father's companion, even at temple services and the Nile Hilton bar. But the Suez war in 1956 and the Nasser regime's cultural holocaust began forcing Jews from their native Egypt. Leon's injury in a fall and Loulou's mysterious illness (first diagnosed as cat scratch fever, eventually found to be something far worse) delayed the Lagnados' departure until 1963, when they arrived in New York with $212, the maximum they were allowed to take out of Egypt; and Leon, once a prosperous, independent businessman and investor, was reduced to selling ties on the street. In Lagnado's accomplished hands, this personal account illuminates its places and times, providing indelible individual portraits and illustrating the difficulty of assimilation. An exceptional memoir. Leber, Michele
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Review
“Lagnado gets to the heart of the modern exodus in a way only those who lived it can.” (Miami Sun Post )

“Lagnado’s richly textured memoir is a loving tribute to a lost man and a lost culture.” (Reform Judaism )

“It succeeds especially as a... heartfelt elegy to the long-lost Cairo community of her youth.” (Library Journal )

“Lagnado spares nothing in the retelling…in this tender and captivating memoir.” (The Oregonian (Portland) )

“[A] crushing, brilliant book…one final kiss from the Lagnados to their beloved city.” (New York Times Book Review )

“Like André Aciman...she conjures a vanished world with elegiac ardor and uncommon grace.” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times )

“This memoir of an Egyptian Jewish family’s gradual ruin is told without melodrama by its youngest survivor.” (The New Yorker )

“Excellent new memoir… One could praise Ms. Lagnado’s book for many things.” (New York Sun )

“Nostalgic but objectively tempered portrait of a family at the heart of social and cultural upheaval.” (Kirkus Reviews )

“The resilient dignity of Lucette’s family transcends the fiercest of obstacles.” (Los Angeles Times Book Review )

“Beautifully written.... A great personalized telling of Egypt’s complicated history in the last half of the 20th century.” (Fareed Zakaria )

“A subtle and eloquent description of fatherly love and a mesmerizing portrait of a man shattered by the immigration experience.” (Marianne Pearl, author of A MIGHTY HEART )

“A stunning achievement.” (Andre Aciman, author of OUT OF EGYPT and CALL ME BY YOUR NAME )

“Beautifully written . . . rich with history and insight. Wonderful.” (Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE )

“Full of emotion and longing, yet never sentimental, this lyrical memoir evokes a cosmopolitan Cairo.” (Jewish Woman )

“Captivating…illuminates its places and times, providing indelible individual portraits...An exceptional memoir.” (Booklist (starred review) )