The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.) (006082218X) - Reviews and Prices
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The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.) (006082218X) - Customer Reviews, Information, Ratings, and Prices
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (P.S.) (006082218X) - Reviews and Prices
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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
This is not just a Jewish story.:
My father was put on a train at 11 years old, alone, by his parents. He was going to be lynched that evening, for not moving out of the way fast enough, in Alabama. He, too, was never able to adjust and reconcile. He did not see his parents again for over 30 years. I am 65 years old, his youngest child. Like LuLu, I was privileged to be "turned over" to him while the rest of my family got on with their lives. I cried when LuLu dad died, because I understood her love for him. I feel the same way about my... more info
Man in the Sharkskin Suit:
One of the better books that I have read in the last couple of years. It detailed life in Cairo during the 1930s through 1960s of the Jewish people who lived in harmony with other cultures in that city. Family life is at the center of the narration with minute details of foods, entertainment, business, clothing, and marriage. Necessity demands the family leave Cairo in the 1960s as a more militant government changes their life drastically. With a stop in France for many months en route to New York, the... more info
What Started As An Article, Should Have Remained One:
The Lagnados family, like thousands of other Jewish families, were basically forced to leave Egypt after Nasser became president. The plight of the Jews is a compelling story. The story of Loulou and her father isn't.
The author's father Leon was an insufferable man who, after leaving Cairo in 1963, longed to return to Egypt for the rest of his life. His greatest solace was his relationship to a prayer book, and to his daughter. How many times must we read how he held her hand as he limped, clearly in... more info
Brilliant:
I bought eight copies of this book for all the family members who claim this is the story of our lives. Born in Egypt, we left in 1966 (I was 8). The alienation, the humiliation and the isolation we felt not only in Egypt, but in the lands where we ended up are so clearly expressed in this book that it is if the author had written our story. My mom cried as she read the book twice, and wished she did not have to read the last page. It is heart breaking but true. I am in the process of writing our story, our... more info
