Her arrival and upbringing in Bensonhurst may have been tragic and chaotic, but Lucette Lagnado’s story of her family’s journey from Cairo to Brooklyn is now winning awards. The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from old Cairo to the New World (Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2007, 340 pp.) has received the prestigious 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. An investigative journalist for the Wall Street Journal, Lucette discussed how the $100,000 prize has changed her life, the strange welcome Egypt gave her upon revisiting her birthplace, and when Bensonhurst will be chic.

To start, can I get a loan?

(laughs) It’s amazing! If it were up to me I’d have spent the money already. I’m already buying a ticket for relatives to come from Israel. But, can you get a loan? Can I think about that?

Sure. My second question: Where can I find a white sharkskin suit?

Now that is a terrific question. I have never seen or felt sharkskin. It has really become this object of mythology in my mind. But here’s what’s wonderful, ever since the book came out at the end of June, I’ve been speaking a lot, like I’ve done scores and scores of lectures, over 100 I think. In almost every audience someone will raise their hands – we’re getting very interesting people, textile brokers are reading this book, refugees from Egypt who went into business – and they’ll say, ‘I have sharkskin, I can get you white sharkskin!’ And I’m still waiting. I haven’t seen it yet, so it remains in my mind in all its perfection and grandeur.

For readers’ understanding that suit, which is part of the title of your book, it was your father’s favorite outfit in Egypt, his identity, really.

Absolutely, in the way it would shimmer, the fabric itself has a kind of mythological, larger than life quality, as my father did, for me at least.

How you arrived in Brooklyn is no secret now. From Cairo to Paris then Bensonhurst. Talk about that journey.

I’m actually obsessed with Bensonhurst, but the journey was as follows: I was born in Cairo to a Jewish-Egyptian family and a father who had a very strong and passionate Egyptian and Jewish identity — He is the man in the white sharkskin suit.

I don’t know what you know about the history but once upon a time there were 80,000 Jews in Egypt and about a million Europeans. In a space of 19 years, the 80,000 left, so that today, officially, there are about 100 Jews in Egypt. Unofficially I would say it’s closer to 20-40 people, and they are mostly old people, and I don’t know how many Europeans are left but not many. It was an amazing, cosmopolitan society; glittering in so many ways. And then it was over. And my dad hung on and hung on until we had to leave, away, everybody did. We were stateless, we were refugees, so we went through Paris, where we stayed in some crummy, two-bit hotel for a little less than a year, and then we were able to come to America — and not easily, they didn’t want us, they didn’t want my dad. But they finally decided that they would accept us and we came here on the Queen Mary. We stayed in the old Broadway Central Hotel, and then we found an apartment in a sort of a refugee enclave; it’s a strip of 10, 15 blocks, maybe more, where all the Jews from the Levant sort of fetched up, or many did. I turned seven in Paris, so I was seven when I came to America.

What year did you arrive?

I arrived in late December 1963, and we moved to Bensonhurst in 1964, early.

So this was during and after the ascent of Nasser, the deposing of King Farouk and the Suez War of 1956. This was a modern-day Exodus; the streets of Cairo were renamed, all evidence of a Jewish presence erased. Have you been back?

I have. I went back for the book two years ago. I’d never been back and, when you think about Camp David and modernity kicking in, people did go back, Jews went back, but my family didn’t. My brother went back briefly and I recall he got really depressed and left. But the rest of us didn’t go, and my dad, who wanted the most to go, didn’t.

But for the book I went back. It was amazing; it’s sort of nice to be an investigative reporter because I was greeted by delegations at the airport. (laughs) And they acted really puzzled that I had ever left. I say in the book that they acted like it was “some sort of terrific misunderstanding.� It became the epilogue to my book, and I recall when I came back I was in a frenzy and I wrote and wrote, and the epilogue was over 80 pages long. We cut it to 29; I couldn’t stop writing, I was very emotional about the experience. And, by the way, not unpleasantly so. I loved Cairo.

From your book it sounds like your father could never let Cairo go – He went from being a successful businessman there to a tie salesman in Brooklyn.

It was an extraordinary downward trajectory. I always talk about my book as the American dream in reverse. You’re supposed to come here as a typical immigrant and struggle and struggle and then you do well. You prevail. The problem in my mind while working on this book is: What if you don’t want to? What if you can’t assimilate? He never could; he never wanted to. He wasn’t willing to say that the old values of Cairo were inferior to this new society. He was sort of shattered. We all were to some degree.

While this story centers on your father, this is very much about your mother, who became a clerk at the Brooklyn Public Library. Wasn’t that a success?

Yes! The great love of my mother’s life is the Grand Army Plaza branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. I can never pass it without feeling sad and emotional and wanting to rush in there. I’m still waiting — and I’m not kidding you — everyone and their brother has asked me to speak, and the one place I’d love to read at has yet to invite me.

Maybe this interview will get that for you.

That would be lovely. That was the love of my mother’s life, that place.

Ocean Parkway really comes alive in your book. How were you able to combine the research with your many early memories to recreate that era with objectivity?

It was an absolute combination between a memoir and ... (pause) I’m an investigative journalist, and at the Journal the standards for this are almost insanely rigorous. You have to have double, quadruple sources; you have to have documents. You can never make a single assertion without it being buttressed somehow.

Objectivity is almost the enemy of a memoir.

Exactly. And the enemy of me, sometimes. So here I was undertaking a hundred years in the life of family, and trying to recapture what I considered was a lost period, so how do you do that and still stay true to what you’ve been taught and trained? So my solution was I would tell the story in the eyes and voice of a little girl named Lulu and her turmoil. How Lulu views exile, how Lulu views America. Second, I did enormous amounts of research – exactly how I would report a story I reported this book. I have older siblings, anyone who would talk to me, I found relatives, I went everywhere, Milan, Paris, Beverly Hills, Brooklyn, Queens, wherever there were cousins or friends who may have known my father. But, then, at the core of it, the years in Bensonhurst were so central to me that there was no other book I wanted to write. It’s all I would think about.

The little synagogues my dad would pray at, the little synagogues where I went, you know, this block that is so staid but it was our first home after we left. This strange attempt at recreating the Levant. Bensonhurst is the least cool area; every part of Brooklyn becomes chic! You hear young professionals are moving into here and here, but I don’t think anyone has considered Bensonhurst chic.

It’s interesting reading your writings for the Wall Street Journal and coverage of health care and legal issues, and there’s a sense that this story was bubbling up in you, like, ‘This writer has to tell her own story.’ When was that moment?

That’s so interesting. I typically work for the news-side where we do investigations on healthcare, like you described, but I can almost date it to four years ago. I started to write for the back of the book; I started to write for the cultural section, personal pieces. It’s a wondrous page and I wrote a piece about when my dad paid off a loan, that was my first personal piece, maybe my second, after my mom died. It was a life-changing experience because an agent called me and said, “I think you should really write a book about your dad.� It was then I found I could write about this life I left behind.

What do you think your father would think about this book?

That’s the question. Audience members often ask me that. I’ll give you a reverse-non-answer-answer: I spoke at a bookclub, if you believe there’s a bookclub in Scarsdale, and the hostess said ‘Not bad for a tie-peddler’s daughter...’

If at last, somehow in this, there’s a sense of redemption for my father, that’s what I wish he would somehow feel.

What’s next for you?

Well, that’s the other major question, isn’t it? I’m torn in two directions. There’s the investigative path and then there are more books. But there have to be more books; that’s the real purpose of this extraordinary prize. I feel like, in some strange way, in some episode of that show “Millionaire� where some kindly guy has given me a check. But make sure you use it properly. For now, at least, it will very much be along the lines of Lulu and this lost family of hers. And more Bensonhurst, because I can’t get enough of that.

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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