The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.)

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.

A gripping story. Once I started to read this book, instantly it caught my interest, I could not let it down until I have finished reading the entire book. A deeply moving biography. This book attracts 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. 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 definition 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. Lucette Lagnado should be praised for the colossal research she had made in order to write this book.

This is a vivid and heartbreaking story of one Jewish family forced to leave the glamour of Cairo, journeying through France and ending up in New York. Their struggle to survive in comparative squalor, whilst desperate to retain their religious and lifestyle beliefs and told through the eyes and memories of the youngest child. A must read.June Finnigan -Writer

I had read Lucette's follow up book about her mother first and enjoyed that. But this had something extra. I read the final pages weeping and I don't normally do this when reading a book. I too left a country in a rush as a child and returned many years later....the sudden exodus does leave a mark. Lucette is honest and humorous and her depiction of her father is amazingly touching yet she does not idealise him. Pauvre Loulou indeed!!!!

Memoirs of the author's Jewish family, spanning approximately 100 years, set on a backdrop of Cairo, Egypt. The book offered an insight of Jewish history that was previously unknown to me. Very well written account that left me with a thirst to find out more. Would recommend.

Very interesting book about how the jews were thrown out of Egypt which I knew little about before reading Sipping From the Nile which peaked my interest in this part of recent history

One of my favourite books EVER! Absolutely beautiful story, moving and I felt like I was living inside the story. Well written and I just wish Lucette had more books as she is an incredibly skilful writer.