This is one of the best books I have ever read! There are too few stories about Sephardic Jews from the Middle East. I had no idea about Cairo being so cosmopolitan in the 1920s to 1940s. As an Ashkenazi Jew the Jewish stories I'm familiar with are mostly of Jews from Europe and Russia. This is extremely well-written and compelling. The characters are intimately portrayed, and the story moves along quickly. I couldn't put it down. This is a book that I'm recommending to all my friends and family.

This is a wonderful and tragic story of a Jewish family who lived in Egypt until the early 1960's when conditions made it very difficult for them to stay. The author tells the story of her grandparents and her parents in wonderful detail, and takes the reader with her on their exodus from Egypt to become refugees in France and then new immigrants to the United States. This book is a must for anyone who wants to learn about the story of Jewish life in Egypt in the 20th century, which came to a sad end as a result of the hostility of Egyptian government towards Israel. The author focuses on the personal story and avoids politics, and shows a graceful attitude without any bitterness towards the country which made her family leave.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have not read the book but purchased it on the raves of a few special friends that have similar reading tastes...

This is a decent book in all respects. The author was born to an Egyptian Jewish family. They lived in relative peace prior to Farouk's coup, after which Nasser (described as a modern pharoah)took over and made life a little tough for those he considered "foreigners". The book is filled with some interesting facts about Egypt, which the author prefers to call "the Levant". For example, I had not known that Germany had advanced so further south during WWII to even cause a flurry in Egypt. Her father was a businessman of sorts, a Cairene "boulevardier", and Lagnado gives a vivid description of life in their household. The Egypt of this time has a thriving Jewish community living peacefully with their Arab neighbors. Lagnado paints a fair picture of Egypt in the 40's and beyond.

As life changes and as companies and businesses are nationalized under Nasser, the Lagnados find themselves in an exodus first to France, then later on to the US. Life does not prove to be easy in either of those nations. More than the exodus itself, the migrant experience roused more sensibilities in me. At the end, she makes a trip back to her home in Egypt and describes a nation she once knew, and all the changes that have occurred in their absence.

All in all the book is a decent one, but Lagnado does tend to be condescending to those she doesn't feel particularly close to. The book could also have turned out better if it had been abridged a little bit. She describes her father as a "boulevardier" more than ten times in this book. Was that necessary?

This is a decent book in all respects. The author was born to an Egyptian Jewish family. They lived in relative peace prior to Farouk's coup, after which Nasser (described as a modern pharoah)took over and made life a little tough for those he considered "foreigners". The book is filled with some interesting facts about Egypt, which the author prefers to call "the Levant". Her father was a businessman of sorts, a Cairene "boulevardier", and Lagnado gives a vivid description of life in their household. The Egypt of this time has a thriving Jewish community living peacefully with their Arab neighbors. Lagnado paints a fair picture of Egypt in the 40's and beyond.

As life changes and as companies and businesses are nationalized under Nasser, the Lagnados find themselves in an exodus first to France, then later on to the US. Life does not prove to be easy in either of those nations. More than the exodus itself, the migrant experience roused more sensibilities in me. At the end, she makes a trip back to her home in Egypt and describes a nation she once knew, and all the changes that have occurred in their absence.

All in all the book is a decent one, but Lagnado does tend to be condescending to those she doesn't feel particularly close to. The book could also have turned out better if it had been abridged a little bit. She describes her father as a "boulevardier" more than ten times in this book. Was that necessary?

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I found Lagnado's engaging portrayal of Egyptian Jewish life very poignant - I was deeply moved, and, at times, heartbroken as her description of halcyon days ending in bitterness were also described to me by my parents and my grandparents. My heart grew heavy with sadness as her words allowed me to envision my lovely grandparents (particularly my grandmother) shepherding their young family, rudderless and rootless to an unknown destiny. I could not put the book down.

As a first generation Canadian, the book served to open a kind of door for me to my parents, provoking a depth and level of discussion not often reached between us. I suppose one could say that the writing helped me continue bridging the immigration/generation gap that I suspect is somewhat common among new immigrants and their children. I have forwarded a copy of the book to both of my sisters and my young niece hoping that their perspectives will also be shaped by Lagnado's work, that they become inquisitive with my parents, and that they too will enjoy a deeper appreciation of our common history.

Lagnado - your book was wonderful.

After just completing Ms. Lagnado's eloquent, treasure of a book about her father, her family, Cairo and the family's challenging transition to the U.S., I spent part of the day reading articles she has written for the Wall Street Journal including a beautiful Father's Day article in 2004. Sharkskin was a sheer pleasure.

Having recently experienced a rather challenging health problem, reading about Ms. Lagnado's own challenges and adjustment to a serious medical problem as well as her parents' physical ailments and each of their adjustments to transitioning was, for me, very cathartic.

This is a book to treasure and to share.

Lagnado has accomplished something remarkable here. This book of family history never falls into a mawkishly sentimental vein, and also avoids a drearily expository tone. Her research was clearly prodigious, but this book reads like a novel. This memoir tells us a great deal about how the Jews were treated in Arab countries both before and after the twentieth-century wave of Arab nationalism. Yet it is never preachy and never political.

The author does not idealize her father. She points out his flaws: he was a poor husband and, much of his life, a poor father. He had his quirks and his bursts of self-importance. But he was a real multi-dimensional human being, as Lagnado makes clear. He was never the same after his forced exile from Cairo.

I highly recommend this book.

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.

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

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 Arabic singer Om Kalsum, and 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 the British officers, French with his wife, was according to his own defition an Arab Jew because he also spoke fluently Arabic (his mother tongue) and absorbed 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, the fashion of a lost 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. 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

In my opinion, the key sentence in the book is what Leon Lagnado said to Sylvia Kirchner: "We are Arab, madame," Leon liked to listen to the songs of Om Kalsum, and spoke Arabic with his mother Zarifa from Aleppo and his siblings and also was proud to wear the tarbouch like king Farouk. According to Joel Benin book and Andre Aciman book, the majority of the Jews of Egypt mainly spoke French at home and used a very rudimentary Arabic language in order to carry on basic communication with the servants and the local population in the markets and shops. Leon Lagnado was an Arab Jew 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, the fashion of a lost 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. Lucette Lagnado should be praised for the colossal research she had made in order to write this book.

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

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!!!

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

Lucette Lagnado, The Man in the White Sharksin Suit, Ecco, 2007
Book review by Racheline Barda

In this sensitively written and meticulously researched book, Lucette Lagnado reconstructed the vanished and largely forgotten world of the Jews of Egypt. Like so many of their coreligionists in Arab countries, they were forced out of their country after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and particularly in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez crisis.

Through the palpable and vivid memories of Lagnado as a six-year old `Loulou', the story, set in Cairo in its cosmopolitan heyday, unfolds around the charismatic figure of the father she adored, `the Captain', `the man in the white sharkskin suit'. This man was larger than life, full of extremes and contradictions: a devout Jew, attending synagogue every day while haunting nightclubs and gambling tables every night and leaving his young wife alone at home. The perfect `boulevardier', his reputation as a womaniser was such that even the adulated Egyptian diva Om Kalsoum supposedly succumbed to his charms. Originally from Aleppo and thus deeply rooted in Oriental culture, he navigated smoothly between the religious and the secular, the conservative and the hedonistic, fluent in a variety of languages, typical of thousands of Levantine Jews that settled in Egypt towards the mid-nineteenth century from other parts of the old Ottoman Empire. They formed a vibrant, diverse and multi-ethnic community.

Just as one Egyptian ruler, Mohammed Ali, invited the Jews in, around the 1830s, another ruler, Gamal Abdel Nasser, threw them out in the 1950s and 60s. In 1963, the Lagnado family left their mythical home on Malaka Nazli Street, abandoning all their possessions and privileges, facing a precarious and impoverished future, separated from their extended family. For the first time, Loulou's proud father, Leon, could not provide for his wife and four children, while waiting in a dingy Paris hotel for a visa to the United States. For the first time, he had to depend on charity from Jewish relief agencies to survive. Their voyage to New York was paid by HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), which Leon reimbursed painstakingly over many years.

Unfortunately, the family's exodus to the `Golden Medina' proved to be a source of deep pain and disappointment for Lagnado's parents, financially as well as socially. The only work her ageing and disoriented father could find was selling fake silk ties in the streets of New York. Always longing for Cairo, he could never abandon the patriarchal mentality and conservatism of his Levantine world. He could never relate to the pragmatic American way and missed the warmth and compassion of Egyptian society. `He was by no means convinced the values of New York trumped those of Cairo' and preferred `being an old Egyptian to a new American', says Lagnado. Increasingly, he found refuge in religion. Because of his refusal to change, he witnessed the dislocation of his family, with his children gone, and his wife estranged, except for his unique relationship with Loulou, the child of his latter years. He patiently nursed her back to health after she was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease. Desperately ill, `stripped of any identity', he was eventually admitted to a nursing home and died in hospital in 1992.

Lagnado went back to Cairo in 2005, revisiting her old home on Malaka Nazli, always sensing her father's presence at her side. She remembered her long-suffering mother telling her again and again when she was a little girl: `Loulou, il faut reconstruire le foyer' (we must rebuild the hearth):

Eventually, I came to understand that I was the chosen one, entrusted with the impossible task of taking our shattered family and our lost home and restoring them.

It seems that, in her book, Lagnado has fulfilled that `impossible task', lovingly and honestly. It is a poignant testimony to the anguish of her uprooted parents but it also pays tribute to a long lost world of tolerant and harmonious coexistence between Muslims, Jews and Christians.

I recommended it to all my friends. It was a great look at the life of Cairo Jews during the WWII and after. I couldn't put it down.

This book glitters and is attractive from a number of different perspectives. The details of the story seem exotic and unfamiliar, but the structure has near universal appeal. This is a story about how one Egyptian Jewish family was uprooted and ended up making the inevitably rocky adjustment to American life. At its core, it is the story of Jews in America and, indeed, of many non-Jewish immigrant Americans.

It is a story about how responsibility shifts from parents to children and how perceptions between the generations changes, without ever challenging the ongoing loving attachments. No one in the family purports to be a superhero. Rather they are people who muddle through and make their peace when the rules that govern their lives are suddenly and arbitrarily changed. In short, they are wonderfully human.

The author writes with a beautiful passion as she generously shares her life with us.

I enjoyed reading this at the beginning, but found myself extremely annoyed and disappointed as the book continued. It was interesting to learn of the plight of the Egyptian Jews; however, the central character of the book is revealed, inadvertently, to be a very selfish man.
First the father breaks his mother's heart, then his wife's, then one of his daughter's, all because he insists on staying out all night, no matter who at home is suffering over him. The author is a late in life child who seems to have been spoiled by her father, and she alone whitewashes many of his faults.
When the father decides that they must move, he chooses to forego moving to Israel and they move to America. All we hear for the rest of the book is how unfavorably the family compares America to Cairo. Well, then they should have stayed in Cairo. America gave them a home, health care, financial aid, free schooling etc. but they are all complaining. The author sees her father as a brave and suave man, but we see that he spends the little they have on whatever whims he has. How does he try to bring in income? By peddling cheap ties that he illegally sells as silk European imports. He interrupts rabbis during prayer, he argues with doctors, he ignores his family, he refuses to move when his house his sold, but the author sticks up for him relentlessly.
The author even complains about the cancer treatment she received at Maimonides Hospital, which she says is an imposter next to the Maimonides shrine she went to in Egypt, but where did she receive a correct diagnosis and medical care that saved her life? In Brooklyn, not in Egypt.
Very disappointing.

I have heard so much about my family's history, but could not picture it very clearly. The way Lucette Lagnado wrote her book gave me a better picture of what went on during the time of my family's exodus from Egypt.

While the story of this family is very touching, I can't understand the almost blind love and admiration the author has for her father.

The man was a self-centered, self indulgent, pleasure seeking individual with little regard toward his wife and even his family.

While Egypt took away everything from him and this family, like a child he pines away for the good old days when he would dance all night, leaving his wife at home to care for the children. Yet the country which gave him refuge he seems to disdain. America not only gave him and his family refuge, but the taxpayers picked up the bills.

This book has left me with a feeling of agitation at the ungratefulness that both the author and her father exhibit toward America. Her "homecoming" to Egypt is somewhat melodramatic as she almost swoons because one person shows her some kindness, yet expresses discontent and unhappiness for all the financial care her family received over all these long years from the country that gave them refuge

This is a Jewel of a book. I am so amazed how the experiences of the Egyptian Jews can be so varied yet so similar. It is an eye opener as well as an education for people unfamiliar with the forgotten refugees from Arab lands. Similarly, I have documented my life's story in the newly released book: "EXODUS II The Promised Land." It is for the reader who is seeking information on the History of Egypt and the resident Jews from 1945 to 1964.
Bravo Lou Lou for a well-written and exciting book.

Lucette Lagnado's love and respect for her father is felt on each page. It must have been wonderful to live in old Cairo where different nationalities and religions could exist peacefully. This book tugged at my heart for her father, Leon, who was a prominent businessman that lived the cosmopolitan life and was free to practice his religion. When everything is stripped away from him with the fall of King Farouk and Nasser's nationalization politics, the reader doesn't have to imagine how rampant anti-Semitism is all over the world, America is not what is advertised. I think this book is timely since it appears we Americans have recently lost many civil liberties and thus our intergrity.

This book was much more than I expected. In reading the other reviews, I knew that it had high marks, I knew that it was a book about fleeing one country and ending in another, I knew it was about Anti- Semitism, I knew it was about an old world family and Cairo at a time when it was the Middle East version of Paris etc., However, I was floored by the authors description of her relationship with her father. I think the book is more about that relationship while the leaving Cairo theme is 2nd. The authors description of that relationship was heartwarming and I was so emotionally touched. This book is indeed a tribute to her father.

On a personal note, and I do hope the author reads this, her description of her intimate and wonderful relationship with her father was very similar to my relationship with my father. The pride, determination etc., were traits that my father possessed as well. My father lost a long battle with cancer 4/07. This book helped me remember those good times we had, the walks, the "going to work with my Dad", the holding hands etc., I truly thank the author very much. This book was right on time for me. Thanks again!!

A wonderful insight into a glorious time in Egypt. It is written with a great eye and a heavy heart. Another tale of how the Jews had to flee a country they thought was home.

This is the story of Lucette Lagnado and her family...in recounting the odissey of her family emigrating to America, she touches on the greater story of the egyptian jewry. Their rites, their customes, their rigid set of morals that regulated the community...It is the story of a bygone era and the people that died bringing the last bit of those values with them.

I can't stop enough to praise Mrs. Lagando for making me feel part of her family...in reading her book I got to know all members of her family on first name basis...the more I progressed in reading it the more I started to feel I intimately knew the charactes...one almost starts to worry along for their tribulations, hoping desperately that the eventually a miracle would occur...and that the family would reunite back in Cairo, where Leon would wear his signature white sharkskin suits and the cat would lounge on the balcony of their first floor apartment...Alas! "Dieu est grand" but not grand enough to grant all of our wishes...

An amazing read...i heartly recommend it

Lucette Lagnado in "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit" sprinkles words that magically create drama, poignancy, sadness,and joy in what must be the fall's finest memoir. It is a timeless story of family, fidelity, and fate. Enormously appealing, the book a moving account of hearts and souls in exodus.

This memoir captures the time period (1940's to present) perfectly. The author evokes the sounds and spirit of the Middle East and gives the reader great insight into a family as it moves from belonging to feeling alienated and as outsiders in Egypt. She also creates the atmosphere one can touch and feel once they immigrate to the US in the 1960's.

Lucette Lagnado in "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit" sprinkles drama, poignancy, sadness, and joy in what must be the fall's finest memoir. It is a timeless story of family, fidelity, and fate. It is enormously appealing,a moving account of hearts and souls in exodus.

I couldn't put this book down. There's a lot of history as well as the personal story of a family's experiences.

Although I was aware of the diasopora of Arab Jews after the establishment of the State of Israel in Palestine , I personally did not know any who actually suffered. I only experienced the suffering of Palestinians because of the same event. This is simply because I was borne in Amman in East Jordan where very few if any Jews lived then or now. This book opened my eyes to the life of Egyptian Jews and other Jews who lived peacefully with their Arab Moslem and Christian neighbors for hundreds of years till the establishement of the State of Israel when it became politically unacceptable for the failed politicians of the Arab states to show courage and protect them. I am not here to incriminate any side in this long saga of Palestine/Israel. I am here to state that Leon the Arab Jew in the White Sharkskin Suit could have been my own father or older brother. He reminded so much of my own people. This story is full of sadness, love and affection and no incrimination. Leon was a casuality of horrible circumstances and like every man of honor tried to manage as much as he can. He kept his pride and spirituality. The story as written by Lou Lou his beloved daughter is also very kind to every one inculding the Arab people who her father was proud to be one of. Congratualtions to Ms Lagnado for a well written story and a very kind account.

This book is not one that stuck with me after reading it. I found the author to be repetitive. Where else but in America can one find free medical treatment. And who paid for the education at Vassar? Too bad Papa didn't decide to immigrate to Israel.

There are very few memoirs as deep and beautiful, as compassionate and tender, as this one of a young girl born to a loving, devout, but old world Jewish patriarch in the last decades of elegant Cairo in the 1950's. Shortly after all the Jews would flee and be scattered in exile: from an elegant, ordered life, they would face hunger and poverty first in Paris and then in New York where the father, now old and sick, would try to reestablish himself in a business and the children would find their own way in this strange new country.

An extraordinary memoir. There are only a few I have read ever which come near it.

Lucette Lagnado writes movingly and with genuine affection for the life her family knew in "Old Cairo", especially for the common humanity strangers had for each other. As she says, when her father fell in the street early in the morning on his way to synagogue, he was immediately surrounded by a swarm of people- no one kept on walking if you fell in the street in Cairo. That was the Cairo I knew, when I left in 1970.
I confess I bought the book originally because friends, relatives, even near-strangers who had read "The Cairo House," urged me to read "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit," and they were right, even though our backgrounds were so different.
I found the book eye-opening and disturbing to many of my assumptions. I didn't realize there were Egyptian Jews, like her father and grandmother, who felt disoriented in Brooklyn or Israel. When I was young, I thought the reason my father, an Egyptian Muslim, never considered emigrating, even if he had been allowed, was that only in Egypt would people know who he was. Later I realized that it was only in Egypt that he himself would know who he was. Perhaps it was the same for the sixty-year-old Leon Lagnado, who had never traveled outside of Egypt before, in spite of his Anglophilia and his francophonia and his boulevardier airs.
Neither did I realize that there were Jewish families who were allowed to take only 200 pounds with them when they left after the socialist decrees of 1961. I remember an aunt of mine, severely ill, who had to wait for months for the government to give her permission to travel to England for treatment in the sixties, and then she was allowed only 50 pounds, and was mortified to have to admit to her husband's former agent in London, who had booked her into a fine hotel, that she could not afford to spend even one night there.
Lagnado's book is written from the heart, a saga of collected family anecdotes, and there are fuzzy areas where elucidation would have been welcome, but these omissions do not detract from this compelling, touching memoir. At the very end, she returns to Cairo and finds her few points of reference- the flat in Ghamra, the synagogue, Groppi's- dilapidated in dingy downtown Cairo. My old Cairo is gone, as well, my Garden City choking in the overcrowding and noise and traffic and pollution and ugly construction. So I can understand Lagnado's disillusionment.
The book left me with a powerful nostalgia to turn back the clock to Cairo's heyday as a diverse, vibrant, open-hearted city, and as Lagnado remarks, in Cairo, in the midst of despair, there is always hope, so as we say, Inshallah.

Lucette Lagnado's beautifully told story of her father and family illuminated for me the factors necessary for group and individual survival. This is the story of her father's decline in a foreign environment, whereas he and his family prospered in their native Cairo. She points to the coldness of New York versus the warmth and fellow feeling in Cairo. The denial of a $2000 loan to her father to open a candy store by the Jewish resettlement agency, is one example. And yet a generous (non-Jewish) American doctor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering treated the author as a teenager without pay and saved her life when she had Hodgkin's Disease. I think the moral of the book, one moral, is that without kindness one cannot survive. The immigrant agencies that tended to the refugees were peopled by petty bureaucrats, especially one Sylvia Kirschner, who looked down on the author's father as culturally backward and religiously fanatic. The cultural gap between New York and Cairo was ultimately unbridgeable, except by a young child who could understand both cultures. This is a lesson to America in its dealings with Islam.

This is a must-read for psychologists, educators, historians, politicians -- anyone who wants to understand this vastly under-reported period which caused so many to suffer trauma and dislocation.

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SHARKSKIN SUIT is a story about one family exile and one man's downfall -- it is in fact the story of the tragic exile of the entire Jewish community of Egypt.

Written in graceful, simple, easy-to-read prose, Lucette Lagnado makes you relive her past and your own as she takes you step by step through her family's bitter journey

As 3rd and 4th generation descendants of Eastern European Jews raised in the New York area we were amazed and puzzled when in the 60's a large population of Syrian Jews settled in our area. They looked different from us, ate different foods, spoke different languages and prayed very differently. There culture was very similar to that of non-Jewish Arab people and pretty much kept to themselves. We found it very difficult to relate to them as Jews and there was often an atmosphere of suspicion and conflict between our two groups. Even though I am now a senior citizen grandma this beautiful book was the first time I got an insight into the fascinating and beautiful culture of Syrian Jews--who they are, how and why they got to be my neighbors. I am grateful to this talented author for opening my eyes and heart!!!

Lagnado, Lucette. "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Cairo to the New World", HarperCollins, 2007.

Leaving Egypt...Again

Amos Lassen and Literary Pride

Perhaps the most significant event in the course of Jewish history is the exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land. It was during this exodus that what we know today as the Jewish religion was formulated. It was then that the Mosaic code was given to the world and the basis for all modern law was established. That was over 2000 years ago. Along comes a new memoir of a different kind of exodus--same starting location, same basic reason for beginning the trek. What is different is the destination. Lucette Lagnado in "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit" tells how her father, Leon, reacted early on after escaping the anti-Semitic thrust of the government of Egypt under Gamal Nasser and this was just 45 years ago.
The ending of the story is not so happy. Leon comes to America and enjoys a successful and happy life. But it is not that clear-cut. The reality is that the fate of the Lagnado family lay far away from a victory that we all expect the narratives of immigrants to be. This is not a pretty story and it paints an entirely different picture of America--one that we rarely, if ever, see.
The Lagnado family had close ties with Cairo, having lived there for generations until they were blatantly forced out by the anti-Semitism of the Nasser government. Lagnado describes this experience as a "cultural Holocaust". Synagogues closed because no one went, cemeteries were looted and Jewish merchants closed their shops. There was a complete shut-down of Jewish life all over Egypt but especially in Cairo. It was a catastrophe for Egypt as so many intellectual lives were shuttered. This book is the story of what happened and it is indeed a holocaust.
Leon Lagnado was a renaissance man. He spoke seven languages and was charismatic and loved by all who knew him. He conduced secret business which was so private that members f his own family knew nothing about it. At night he was a man about town and visited he "in" places--places where the king of Egypt himself would visit. He was also a good Jew who prayed at the synagogue every day.
He married a girl who was twenty years younger than him and they bought a house where they lived together with his mother) a Middle-Eastern tradition) and a nephew and he and his wife had five children (one died right after birth). Leon was a man between two worlds--religious and secular.
Leon developed a very special relationship with his daughter Lucette (Loulou). She was his kindred spirit. She wrote this book in which she manages to bring us the characters in her family with such clarity and vivacity that they seem to become members of our own families. Likewise Cairo becomes our home town. The detail in the book is quite amazing and obviously a great deal of research went into the writing. Every little fact is elaborated upon.
There are sections of the book that read like a thriller--the suspense is that sharp. When she writes of Nasser's rise to power, Lagnado is incredible. The beauty of her prose builds an atmosphere that takes you right to the scene.
Leon managed to stay in Egypt for ten years after Nasser became head of the government and would have probably stayed if he had not been harassed into leaving. He felt his family was no longer safe in Cairo and they began a long journey through Europe ultimately landing in New York.
Life in America was not easy for Leon; he was not well and his heart had been broken by his homeland. He had a rough time with the social workers who worked with new immigrants and he did not adjust to America well. He never bounced back and his family began to fall apart. They all missed Cairo desperately and wanted to return to the place that they were glad to have left.
When Lagnado was invited to return by the Egyptian government many years later what she found was not the Cairo that her family had left. Cairo was no longer the beautiful star of Africa and the situation of the Jews of the city was not good. But Lagnado gives us a view of Cairo that s rich and beautiful and the book is a monument to a time that was.

A nicely written and powerful story of a daughter's close relationship with her father set against a wrenching departure from a beloved Arab city. The family travels in exile from a once openly friendly culture to the coldness of New York City, via Paris. And, from a comfortable life somewhere up the economic ladder down to a rung of great financial need.

A deep Jewish faith, undoubted love, and the will to persist are gifts bestowed upon the author by her flawed but quietly heroic father.

This is a dazzling memoir of a lost and haunting world that the author recaptures in magnificent and restrained prose that calls to mind Marcel Prost and some of the great European memoirists. She takes the reader by the hand and guides him/her through the irretreivably vanished Jewish quarters of Cairo and into the rough-and-tumble of the New World (Brooklyn, actually) by way of Paris, with lots of heart-stopping and heart-breaking and heart-soaring stops along her voyage. Delightful. Bravo! A must-read.

Anyone who loves Cairo will be enthralled with this personal account of life in the charmed city in the 1940s and 1950s. It is a deeply personal story by a young woman with unbelievable powers of observation. She is a good reporter but more than that a fine recorder of her family's trials and tribulations moving from gentle, bustling Cairo to the brutal Booklyn of the 1960s. Will keep you up all night...

The Man in the White Sharkskin suite is a stunning work, in it's emotional depth against a period of history I knew little about. The author/narrator tells the story of her family, particularly her father, as they thrive in Egypt under King Farouk, then, literally overnight, lose their material possisions, family and promience but not their humanity and dignity when Nassar comes to power. Their 'before' life was vibrant and full materially, but emotionally fraught with tensions of all sort especially between the husband, Leon and the wife, Edith. The author uses the point of view of the youngest member of the family, Loulou who can barely understand what's happening but acts bravely for her father's sake and for his love. The author writes beautifully, and with such poignancy, but never with self pity or malicious anger regarding the family's fall. By the time the family arrives in America, they are completely lost as they stand on the dock watching the big cars go down the West Side Highway. The great symbol of American prosperity, yet the cars and the dream they represent pass the family by. They never regain the life they longed for, except in the success of Loulou who becomes an award winning journalist and now author. I feel that Leon would be thrilled that, against his advice to this daughter to find a 'little job', she found her calling and restored the family legacy and told the greater story, through the Lagnado saga, of the history of Egyptian Jews of that time.

A wonderful read.

Lucette or Loulou wrote a very emotional, truthful, and touching book about her father, her family, and herself. Thanks to her sincerity we relived a disappearing period in the life of many Egyptians. I found myself shedding tears for this dignified man and his suffering and the love he had for a country that sadly does not exist anymore. I highly recommend this book for all those who left their homelands. I could not put it down until I finished it. Thank you Loulou.

I was at that reading also, and purchased another copy of the book (my third!) for my daughter. Lagnado's story of her family's incredible history in Egypt and then the heartbreaking exile they endured, ending in Brooklyn where her father, old and seemingly defeated, probably saves her life with one last almost magical invocation of his old powers of persuasion is inspiring and tragic at once. After reading this beautiful book, it's clear where Lagnado's passion as an investigative reporter to expose corruption and the indignities we too often heap upon the elderly was born.

Wow, this is an absolute must-read. It is foremost a family saga with an array of captivating characters... but it is also about an overlooked piece of history -- the flight of tens of thousands of Jews from Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s. From Cairo to Paris to Brooklyn... from riches to rags.... I loved this book. I heard the author speak at Barnes & Noble in New York last night and she told a story that was at once personal, moving and mesmerizing. After the reading, the line to buy her book extended around the block -- and I noticed that a lot of people were buying several copies.