The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.)
Author(s):
Lucette Lagnado
Label: Harper Perennial
Publisher(s):
Harper Perennial
Studio: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Binding: Paperback
Format(s): Illustrated
List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $10.17
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Editorial Reviews
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.
Customer Reviews
Elektra in Nasser's Egypt
I enjoyed this book but wish the author had toned her Oedipal romanticism concerning her father and his playboy lifestyle during the years when they lived in Cairo. Glamorizing his adulterous and selfish behavior during the early years of his marriage was overdone. That part of the book would have benefitted from judicious editing. There is too much repetition, especially about the rumor that he had once had an affair with a popular Egyptian entertainer.The daughter is obviously imagining a father; this part gets out-of-control. Once the family leaves Nasser's Egypt and the father turns his affections towards the narrator,his daughter, the story takes on a new honesty and from there on through their years in New York, the book is totally absorbing and quite believable. I have read many immigrant sagas and this is one of the best.
Wow -- so well written and interesting
I could barely put this book down. Not only are the events of the author's life interesting, but the details and descriptions are so breathtaking, emotionally real; I learned to much about a country I find fascinating, but also about a peoples who though "oriental" Jews, are of the same ethnic background of myself, a child of Ashkenazi Jews. So much of the story, though different than mine, appeals to the human side of life, my life anyway. You find yourself loving these people, knowing them, understanding them, feeling for them. The final chapters caused me to cry. This is one of my favorite books, and I will purchase it! I've already recommend this book to several Egyptian Muslim friends, to Jewish friends (some of whom, like myself, harken from Brooklyn).
A wonderful experience
A very moving real story, typical and representative of new immigrants experience. I learned a lot about the life of Jews in Egypt. Highly recommended.
The Man in the White Shark Skin Suit
This book is a very compelling read. It mostly told through the eyes of a child living through her families heart wrenching need to leave their home that they loved. They lived in Cairo when Jews were only tolerated there. But due to the father's smarts and savy they were able to live well and enjoy the best possible life in Cairo. You learn all about their family trials and tribulations. The family relationships and tolerance in this story are very captivating. I do not wish to spoil this story for anyone that would like to read this memoir. This is a must read.
Reads like a screenplay
This is a well written book. It is a family history, portrayed through the eyes of a litle girl who ages as the story progresses. She worships her father--the Man in the White Sharkskin Suit--, yet is not blind to his lapses and frailties as a human being.
Every family has a history, and a cast of characters. The tragic relative; the family member who died young, the braggart, the ne'er do well, the one about whom we do not speak, the patriarch, the rich uncle, the apostate--all comprise our individual families. We all have a story, but here the author makes hers come alive. It is easy to visualize her family's migration and trials as a screenplay or movie.
We learn about the author's parents' post-war courtship in Cairo, and the relative prosperity and freedom they enjoyed in the country ruled by King Farouk. We see the upheaval following the Suez Crisis and Nassar's ascendency, and the family's reaction and adaptation. We are witnesses to their daily triumphs and tragedies in the face of rising anti-semitism. Leon's reliance on his faith, his wife's coping skills and issues of illness, and death.
This is one family's journey from Cairo to Paris to Brooklyn, the constancy of their faith and culture and the rise and fall of their fortunes. It is a human story. The locale may change, but it is a story that is part of all of us.
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