The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado

Review by Benjamin Lutz

The Short 

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 of faith, tradition, tragedy, and triumph.

The Long 

In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado re-creates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years before Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. With Nasser’s nationalization of Egyptian industry, her father, Leon, a boulevardier who conducted business in his white sharkskin suit, loses everything, and departs with the family for any land that will take them. The poverty and hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to Paris to New York are strikingly juxtaposed against the beauty and comforts of the lives they left behind.

To read or not to read 

Thoroughly enjoyable! It's a fascinating story of her Egyptian Jewish family's exodus from Egypt, and other Egyptian Jews, after Egypt ceased to be a British colony and gained its independence in 1952. The book is interesting on so many levels. Historically, it describes what Cairo was like in the 1940's and 50's, what it was like during World War 2, and briefly touches on why and how Hitler and Mussolini lost the battlefront of North Africa to the Allied forces. It is so eloquently written, that reading paragraph after paragraph, is like listening to a beautifully composed piece of music. If you love a good book you'll love this one!