The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World

Não gostei do valor do frete

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.

"The man in the white sharkskin suit" was written by a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, so it goes without saying that this is a beautifully written piece of work. Drawing together the memories and recollections of members of her family from before she was born, Lagnado conjures up images of a sophisticated and cosmopolitan Cairo that is apparently now largely lost. She then recounts how the Jewish community in Egypt fell on difficult times, forcing them to fan out across the world. Lagnado ended up in the US, a section of the book that is no less interesting than the Cairo chapters. I very much recommend this book, to anybody really but in particular to those interested in Jewish and Egyptian recent history.

This book is a very personal story showcasing the geopolitical impact the WWII and the subsequent Cold War and the Arab Cold War on the lives of Egypt's Jews. Many lost details and lost anecdotes that Lucette Lagnado recounts in her book, as if to remind us all who close this history is to us, and how to find a way to account for exodus and the inhospitable environment created by Egyptian Nationalist politics in the 1950s and 1960s.

A great story and true to life at that time.