The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit cover art

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World

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The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

By: Lucette Lagnado
Narrated by: Joyce Bean
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About this listen

“Poignant...deeply personal...an indelible history of the largely forgotten Jews of Egypt....” (Miami Herald)

In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado recreates 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.

©2007 Lucette Lagnado (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers Egypt Historical Middle East Social Sciences World Africa
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I enjoyed the book as it reminded me also of my childhood in Egypt and our exodus in 1965 for Australia.

What I did not enjoy is that the reader had a very poor command of both French and Arabic which was grating to listen to at times.

A person with an ear for languages and the words they were repeating would have improved enjoyment of the book.

Childhood memories

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