Lucette Lagnado's "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Journey from Old Cairo to the New World"

Evania Margolis: Não gostei do valor do frete

Brazil on Sep 27, 2022

Amazon Kunde: 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.

Germany on Dec 30, 2021

Fred Arshoff: Lucette Lagado- The Man In The White Sharkskin Suit
22nd book read in 2020

I purchased this book used as I saw several excellent reveiws of it in book groups as well on Goodreads. I also do like historical books and felt this would be a book I would like and it certainly was. There are some photos in the book.
This is a older book published in 2007.

In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado re-creates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years between World War II and Gamal Abdel Nasser's rise to power. Her father, Leon, was a boulevardier who conducted business on the elegant terrace of Shepheard's Hotel, and later, in the cozy, dark bar of the Nile Hilton, dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit. But with the fall of King Farouk and Nasser's nationalization of Egyptian industry, Leon and his family lose everything. As streets are renamed, neighborhoods of their fellow Jews disbanded, and the city purged of all foreign influence, the Lagnados, too, must make their escape. With all of their belongings packed into twenty-six suitcases, their jewels and gold coins hidden in sealed tins of marmalade, Leon and his family depart for any land...

Canada on Feb 04, 2020

BJ: This book was about the life of the author and her family during a very difficult time for Jews in Cairo. It was very interesting to read about the culture and splendor of Cairo in the 1940's. The author describes her life with her family, and the devastating effect of the forced move out of Cairo. The proud man, who was her father becomes a shadow of his former self as the family suffers the consequences of their exile. Well written.

Canada on Jun 01, 2014

legalpen: "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.

United Kingdom on Jan 24, 2011

A Reader: 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...

United States on Dec 07, 2007

Samia Serageldin: 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...

United States on Aug 30, 2007