The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.) | 
| Author: Lucette Lagnado
Publisher: Harper Perennial
List Price: $14.95
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Rating:  59 reviews
Sales Rank: 3001
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 368
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1
ISBN: 006082218X
Dewey Decimal Number: 900
EAN: 9780060822187
ASIN: 006082218X
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 54 more reviews...
 Heartbreakingly beautiful June 29, 2007
Peter Bloch (New York, NY United States)
33 out of 34 found this review helpful
I was at that reading also, and purchased another copy of the book (my third!) for my daughter. Lagnado's story of her family's incredible history in Egypt and then the heartbreaking exile they endured, ending in Brooklyn where her father, old and seemingly defeated, probably saves her life with one last almost magical invocation of his old powers of persuasion is inspiring and tragic at once. After reading this beautiful book, it's clear where Lagnado's passion as an investigative reporter to expose corruption and the indignities we too often heap upon the elderly was born.
Captain July 23, 2007
Christian Schlect (Yakima, Washington/USA)
23 out of 27 found this review helpful
A nicely written and powerful story of a daughter's close relationship with her father set against a wrenching departure from a beloved Arab city. The family travels in exile from a once openly friendly culture to the coldness of New York City, via Paris. And, from a comfortable life somewhere up the economic ladder down to a rung of great financial need.
A deep Jewish faith, undoubted love, and the will to persist are gifts bestowed upon the author by her flawed but quietly heroic father.
Griping Family Sage and wonderful slice of history July 10, 2007
J. Smart (New Rochelle, NY)
22 out of 22 found this review helpful
The Man in the White Sharkskin suite is a stunning work, in it's emotional depth against a period of history I knew little about. The author/narrator tells the story of her family, particularly her father, as they thrive in Egypt under King Farouk, then, literally overnight, lose their material possisions, family and promience but not their humanity and dignity when Nassar comes to power. Their 'before' life was vibrant and full materially, but emotionally fraught with tensions of all sort especially between the husband, Leon and the wife, Edith. The author uses the point of view of the youngest member of the family, Loulou who can barely understand what's happening but acts bravely for her father's sake and for his love. The author writes beautifully, and with such poignancy, but never with self pity or malicious anger regarding the family's fall. By the time the family arrives in America, they are completely lost as they stand on the dock watching the big cars go down the West Side Highway. The great symbol of American prosperity, yet the cars and the dream they represent pass the family by. They never regain the life they longed for, except in the success of Loulou who becomes an award winning journalist and now author. I feel that Leon would be thrilled that, against his advice to this daughter to find a 'little job', she found her calling and restored the family legacy and told the greater story, through the Lagnado saga, of the history of Egyptian Jews of that time.
A wonderful read.
 Ingrates October 16, 2007
English Teacher (New York)
19 out of 28 found this review helpful
I enjoyed reading this at the beginning, but found myself extremely annoyed and disappointed as the book continued. It was interesting to learn of the plight of the Egyptian Jews; however, the central character of the book is revealed, inadvertently, to be a very selfish man.
First the father breaks his mother's heart, then his wife's, then one of his daughter's, all because he insists on staying out all night, no matter who at home is suffering over him. The author is a late in life child who seems to have been spoiled by her father, and she alone whitewashes many of his faults.
When the father decides that they must move, he chooses to forego moving to Israel and they move to America. All we hear for the rest of the book is how unfavorably the family compares America to Cairo. Well, then they should have stayed in Cairo. America gave them a home, health care, financial aid, free schooling etc. but they are all complaining. The author sees her father as a brave and suave man, but we see that he spends the little they have on whatever whims he has. How does he try to bring in income? By peddling cheap ties that he illegally sells as silk European imports. He interrupts rabbis during prayer, he argues with doctors, he ignores his family, he refuses to move when his house his sold, but the author sticks up for him relentlessly.
The author even complains about the cancer treatment she received at Maimonides Hospital, which she says is an imposter next to the Maimonides shrine she went to in Egypt, but where did she receive a correct diagnosis and medical care that saved her life? In Brooklyn, not in Egypt.
Very disappointing.
beautiful, unique, and deeply touching September 6, 2007
Stephanie Cowell (New York, New York United States)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
There are very few memoirs as deep and beautiful, as compassionate and tender, as this one of a young girl born to a loving, devout, but old world Jewish patriarch in the last decades of elegant Cairo in the 1950's. Shortly after all the Jews would flee and be scattered in exile: from an elegant, ordered life, they would face hunger and poverty first in Paris and then in New York where the father, now old and sick, would try to reestablish himself in a business and the children would find their own way in this strange new country.
An extraordinary memoir. There are only a few I have read ever which come near it.
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