The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
Books / Hardcover
Books › Biography & Autobiography › Historical
ISBN: 0060822120 / Publisher: Ecco, June 2007
The daughter of a once-successful Jewish boulevardier traces her youth in post-World War II Cairo before and after Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalization of Egyptian industry, an event that caused her family to lose everything and forced them to flee to America.
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“Poignant . . . deeply personal . . . an indelible history of the largely forgotten Jews of Egypt . . . ”—Miami Herald 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. 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.
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