The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.) Review
This is a story about transition from the old, familiar world in which life seemed so comfortable and stable to a new existence across the ocean. In this case the specific cities were Cairo to New York with several complex and unsatisfying stops in Europe. The family was used to a relatively aristocratic existence in Egypt until things became quite unpleasant for Jews as Israel came into existence and then was in active conflict with Egypt. What was once an accepting and welcoming place turned into a sea of rejection and hardship. There was nothing else to do finally except for a painful move. No more independence for this family. Their trials begin with an injury to the father, a rather dramatic, stubborn and religious character who was revered and elegant in his local community at the beginning of the story and who ultimately winds up at the mercy of others at the end of his life.
In a way, though the peculiar characteristics of this family are quite distinct from the average immigrant, this book is a reasonably well told account of the pain of leaving one culture and finding a place in another. The author is the youngest child of a family of four. She details the history of the family well and one can almost taste the beloved but no longer existent Cairo into which she is born. While the family is Jewish and the father is deeply involved in his Egyptian and Jewish communities, this could be a tale that represents many universal aspects of the hardships of displaced persons who ultimately become outsiders and far more helpless than they started out in life.
I enjoyed the book for the most part but it is not a dramatic reading and some of the characters are sketchy. It does do a good job of describing the changes that immigrants endure and that traditional families face as modernism enters their life.
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.) Overview
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.
Available at Amazon Check Price Now!
Related Products
- My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq
- The Septembers of Shiraz: A Novel (P.S.)
- The Yacoubian Building: A Novel
- Out of Egypt: A Memoir
- How This Night Is Different: Stories
Customer Reviews
Poignant, memorable portrait of a modern-day exodus - Judy Gruen - Los Angeles, CA United States
Lucette Lagnado's beautiful, remarkably well documented portrait of her family and their ultimate expulsion from Egypt to the United States in the early 1960s repeats a trope of Jewish history: periods of peace for Jews somewhere in the diaspora, followed by abrupt, cruel expulsion to new lands.
This book gave me an appreciation for the richness the Egyptian Jews enjoyed, not only monetarily (surely not all Jews from Egypt had the wealth that this family once had) but the richness of a shared community and of the distinctive Jewish rituals, foods and practices they shared.
I was particularly moved by the author's portrait of her father, for whom the book is titled, and her love for him. He was a very complex man, deeply flawed and yet with an unbelievable strength and hidden reservoirs of love and dedication that emerged over the decades.
This is one book that deserves the praise and awards it has received.
This is not just a Jewish story. - R. Reed - America
My father was put on a train at 11 years old, alone, by his parents. He was going to be lynched that evening, for not moving out of the way fast enough, in Alabama. He, too, was never able to adjust and reconcile. He did not see his parents again for over 30 years. I am 65 years old, his youngest child. Like LuLu, I was privileged to be "turned over" to him while the rest of my family got on with their lives. I cried when LuLu dad died, because I understood her love for him. I feel the same way about my dad. Judgement I will leave to those of you who had perfect parents.
Man in the Sharkskin Suit - Carol H. Sil - Mariposa, California
One of the better books that I have read in the last couple of years. It detailed life in Cairo during the 1930s through 1960s of the Jewish people who lived in harmony with other cultures in that city. Family life is at the center of the narration with minute details of foods, entertainment, business, clothing, and marriage. Necessity demands the family leave Cairo in the 1960s as a more militant government changes their life drastically. With a stop in France for many months en route to New York, the family members adjust in varying ways to life in America. It is the youngest child who relates this family saga and and who venerates her father and sees him through myriad life adjustments. At the end of the book, the author visits Cairo to see again the home in which the family had lived. She talks with the older woman who now inhabits the old family home. Since most of her family has left to follow their own lives, she invites the author to move into her old childhood home. It is a poignant moment when the author realizes that what her father had missed in all the years away from Cairo, was the concern, compassion, and genuine feeling that was part of life in Cairo in those halcyon days. Carol Kay Sill
*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Aug 27, 2010 22:28:05
No comments:
Post a Comment