Lucette lagnado man in the sharkskin suit

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • In The Man in the Sharkskin Suit, Lucette Lagnado regales us about Jewish life in Cairo prior to the Suez revolution.

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    The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus From Old Cairo to the New World | Jewish Book Council

    1. Author Lagna­do ded­i­cates her book in part to the mem­o­ry of her par­ents yet does Leon emerge as a sym­pa­thet­ic char­ac­ter at the end — in spite of his flaws — or are his tres­pass­es and lib­er­tine ways — not to men­tion his ill­treat­ment of his wife — sim­ply unfor­giv­able to any enlight­ened reader? 

    2. Loulou seems wist­ful about the life she left behind, and she casts a sen­ti­men­tal eye on the rela­tions between Jews and Moslems in this cor­ner of the Arab world, cer­tain­ly as they co-exist­ed in her par­ents’ era; and even when she returns, while she notes the phys­i­cal decay in Egypt, she sees only love and sweet­ness in the Egyp­tians that she meets. Is this a cred­i­ble por­trait of Arab-Jew­ish rela­tions in post‑9/​11 world and also why is she not acknowl­edg­ing the bit­ter­ness and anger that her fam­i­ly almost sure­ly fel

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    The Man in the vit Sharkskin kostym, by Lucette Lagnado

    About the Book

    Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Lucette Lagnado chronicles the story of her family from the early decades of the twentieth century in Cairo, Egypt, to their traumatic emigration to New York in the early 1960s. Along the way, the family must contend with the death of a child, womanizing habits of the patriarch, illness, and a revolution.

    About the Author

    Lucette Lagnado was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1956, the daughter of Leon Lagnado, a Jew originally from Aleppo, Syria, and Edith Matalon, a Jew whose family migrated from Alexandria, Egypt. When Lagnado was a six year old, her family fled Egypt. After a year-long sojourn in Paris, the family settled in Brooklyn. She is a graduate of Vassar College and a former editor for The Forward. She fryst vatten the author of Children of the Flames: Dr. Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz (1991). In late 1995 Lagnado

  • lucette lagnado man in the sharkskin suit

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    Some time ago — certainly more than a year — a good friend suggested I read The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado. My friend Tom has impeccable taste in books, music and… well just about anything. So, I immediately bought the book and put it on one of my shelves among the many other to-be-read books in my library.

    Let’s face it; one of the facts of a bibliophile’s life is that her library contains an inordinate number of books she is looking forward to reading. (And, of course, she has a library rather than a home, where every spare wall is covered with bookshelves, and scores of overflow books are piled next to her bed, on her kitchen table, in her bathroom and just about everywhere else.)

    I’m delighted to say I finally got around to reading Lagnado’s memoir this week. Tom was right; it’s an elegant and eloquent work that absorbed me with its personal poignancy and fascinating universality. 

    Depending on where