El-Ragol Zul Badla el-Baydaa el-Sharkskin, Waqaea Khoroug Aeila Yahodia Men Misr (‘The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World’) delves into the life of an Egyptian Jewish family deported from Egypt in 1963. Lucette Lagnado writes the memoires of her family based on the very last strings that tie her to the Cairo she once knew, a cosmopolitan hub where people lived in harmony. The Arabic translation of the book, originally published in English by Ecco in 2007, was released this year by Tanany Book Services.
As the writer says in her introduction, the book pays homage to the tortured soul of her father, who died in the United States in 1993 as a broken man longing to return to his native Egypt. He even kept a packed suitcase in his living room, hoping that one day he would go back to his house on Queen Nazli Street in Ghamra, Cairo.
The book is about a greater, more sympathetic and homogeneous Cairo. A city that attracted migrants from countries all over the world: Italy, Greece, Switzerland, Belgium, Syria, the United States, England (Egypt’s fomer colonizer), and many other Arab and non-Arab countries. Zarifa and her son Leon (Lagnado’s father) were among the Jews of Aleppo who came to Egypt looking for safety and security.
Leon worked as a middle man between big food factories and small grocery shops making money on commission, in addition to working the stock market. He was a lively man known for his love of food, women and gambling. He meets his future wife, Edith, at café Parisiana and decides to marry her that same night, with her mother, Alexandra.
Like any middle-class family, Leon, Edith, their daughters Suzette and Loulou (Lucette) and their son Caesar struggle to live comfortably and keep up with the expensive fees from the French school attended by their son and daughters and Leon’s extravagant lifestyle featuring weekly outings to the Nile Hilton bar for drinks.
Then the 1952 revolution happens and society turns, little by little, hostile to all foreign communities, especially Jews, and more so after the tripartite (Britain, France and Israel) invasion of Egypt in 1956 in reaction to the nationalization of the Suez Canal.
Suzette, Leon’s wild daughter, gets mixed up in an activitist network and rumors begin circulating that she is a spy. In 1963, the entire family is deported to Paris, and then to the US, in which a new agonizing episode of Leon’s life begins. The Egyptian Jew rejects the American dream, living in agony until he dies in 1993 in a hospital in Brooklyn, far away from home.
In 2005, American reporter and memoirist Lucette Lagnado visited Egypt to research her book and revisit all the places she remembered as a child. According to Lagnado, the Arabic translation of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit is the realization of her dad’s exhortation on board the France-bound ship: “Take us back to Egypt!”
The book is an old, dusty box of precious memories that Lagnado has wiped clean and opened. It depicts Cairo in the 1940s, a golden age when all races, religions, colors and nationalities intermingled without tension; a time when Egyptians were able to be the most loving and compassionate people; when Egypt was the home for the homeless…a time long gone.
The book is a must-read. It touches lightly on history, religion and politics, but is mainly a story of love–the love of a man for his country.
The Arabic translation is available at Cairo’s Diwan bookstore; the original English version can also be ordered there.
