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The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, is a memoir of ruin, recounting the exile of Lucette Lagnado''s Jewish Egyptian family from Cairo in 1963 and her father''s heroic and tragic struggle to survive his ''riches to rags'' trajectory. Lagando skillfully recreates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years between WWII through Nasser''s rise to power. Set against the stunning portraits of Cairo, Paris, and ultimately New York City, this memoir offers a grand and sweeping story of family, tradition, tragedy and triumph in their epic exodus from paradise. ''Beautifully written. . . . A great personalized telling of Egypt''s complicated history in the last half of the 20th century.''-Fareed Zakaria Freshman Common Read: Drury University
About the author
Born in Cairo, Lucette Lagnado and her family were forced to flee Egypt as refugees when she was a small child, eventually coming to New York. She was the author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, for which she received the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2008, and is the coauthor of Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz, which has been translated into nearly a dozen foreign languages. Joining the Wall Street Journal in 1996, she received numerous awards and was a senior special writer and investigative reporter. She died in 2019.
Summary
“Poignant . . . deeply personal . . . an indelible history of the largely forgotten Jews of Egypt . . . ”
—Miami Herald
In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado re-creates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years before Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. With Nasser’s nationalization of Egyptian industry, her father, Leon, a boulevardier who conducted business in his white sharkskin suit, loses everything, and departs with the family for any land that will take them. The poverty and hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to Paris to New York are strikingly juxtaposed against the beauty and comforts of the lives they left behind.
An inversion of the American dream set against the stunning portraits of three world cities, Lucette Lagnado’s memoir offers a grand and sweeping story of faith, tradition, tragedy, and triumph.
