Investigating a family’s exile from Egypt, life in America

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SHARKSKIN SUIT: MY FAMILY’S EXODUS FROM OLD CAIRO

TO THE NEW WORLD

By Lucette Lagnado

Ecco, $25.95, 340 pages, $25.95, illus.

REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN

There’s just something about the lost world of cosmopolitan, polyglot, multi-ethnic Egypt that ended with the overthrow of the king in 1952 that fascinates us. Writers from abroad like Lawrence Durrell and Nadine Gordimer became so fascinated with that vanishing time and place that they preserved it in the memorable amber of their fiction, Durrell in the “Alexandria Quartet” tetralogy of novels and Ms. Gordimer in some early short stories that are among her finest.

More recently, Andre Aciman celebrated and mourned his lost realm in “Out of Egypt,” which reminded new generations of readers of its decadent, tarnished but nonetheless compelling splendors.

But in Lucette Lagnado, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, we have a writer who looks at old Egypt from a unique point of view that combines the insiderishness and deeply felt insights of the native with the hard-edged realism of the probing, intelligent outsider. Born four years after the overthrow of King Farouk and just before the Anglo-French-Israeli Suez invasion of 1956, Ms. Lagnado left her native land at the age of 6, first, briefly, for France, and then for the United States, where her family settled in New York City.

Old enough to remember the sights, sounds, smells of a society that was rapidly vanishing like bathwater down a drain, she brought with her to her new world a deep attachment to her birthplace. And this connection was strengthened by her closeness to her parents, who were too advanced in years ever to really leave behind what would always remain to them home.

Ms. Lagnado, however, grew up in the United States, was educated at Vassar and became American — an American journalist at that. So her book “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Cairo to the New World” is at once a moving tale of exile and an unflinching quest for understanding that culminated in a return to Egypt in this new millennium proving once again the truth of that old adage: You can’t go home again.

The eponymous man in the white sharkskin suit, her father, Leon, never got the chance to see a changed Cairo again. As the Lagnados’ boat left Alexandria harbor, taking them out of Egypt forever, her father cried out in Arabic, Roagouna Masr, take me back to Cairo, but already the city where he so passionately longed to return was no longer that cosmopolitan mecca where he had been a noted boulevardier, man about town, sometime gambling partner of the king.

As captured by his fond daughter, acknowledged to be his favorite child, Leon was a mass of contradictions, which he somehow managed to reconcile into a way of life in which he was absolutely at ease. A devout Jew who praised God constantly, he observed dietary laws and was a fanatic about attending synagogue services. The nightclubbing, gambling and roaming that occupied his nights and the secretive but lucrative business dealings that filled his days all came to a stop on the Sabbath and on Jewish holidays.

But on the remaining days, he was as much at his ease among British officers, who dubbed him the “Captain” and treated him as one of their own, as among the pashas and beys who constituted the country’s upper crust. Leon even appears to have had an affair with Um Kaltum, the iconic Egyptian singer who was considered the voice of her country.

One of the best things about “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit” is the spotlight it shines on the ruthless way in which Nasserite Egypt rid itself of the ancient communities — Greek, French, Italian, Jewish — that had been settled in that nation for hundreds, in some cases thousands, of years. As befits a good reporter, Ms. Lagnado lays it out starkly:

“As we boarded the boat, an inspector made us sign one last official document.

Story Continues →