The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
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Narrated by:
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Joyce Bean
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By:
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Lucette Lagnado
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 PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
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Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
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Daughter of Fortune
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquín Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen prey to feverish dreams of wealth. Joaquín takes off for San Francisco to seek his fortune, and Eliza, pregnant with his child, decides to follow him.
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An adventure to the California Gold Fields of 1849
- By Jean on 07-20-20
By: Isabel Allende
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A Woman's Story
- By: Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 1 hr and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Upon her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, Annie Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to “capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.” She explores the bond between mother and daughter, tenuous and unshakable at once, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love.
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Beautiful Tribute, Beautiful Writing
- By Amazon Customer on 07-07-23
By: Annie Ernaux, and others
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Inge's War
- A German Woman's Story of Family, Secrets, and Survival Under Hitler
- By: Svenja O'Donnell
- Narrated by: Kristin Atherton
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up in Paris, the daughter of a German mother and an Irish father, Svenja O'Donnell knew little of her family's German past. In this transporting and illuminating audiobook, the award-winning journalist vividly reconstructs the story of her grandmother Inge's life from the rise of the Nazis through the brutal postwar years, from falling in love with a man who was sent to the Eastern Front just after she became pregnant with his child, to spearheading her family's flight as the Red Army closed in, her young daughter in tow.
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Ordinary German Citizens Caught Up
- By Hinterlander on 08-22-23
By: Svenja O'Donnell
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My Friend Anne Frank
- The Inspiring and Heartbreaking True Story of Best Friends Torn Apart and Reunited Against All Odds
- By: Hannah Pick-Goslar, Dina Kraft
- Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1933, Hannah Pick-Goslar and her family fled Nazi Germany to live in Amsterdam, where she struck up a close friendship with her next-door neighbor, an outspoken and fun-loving young girl named Anne Frank. For several years, the inseparable pair enjoyed a carefree childhood of games, sleepovers, and treats with the other children in their neighborhood of Rivierenbuurt. But in 1942, Hannah and Anne's lives abruptly changed forever.
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the missing piece to Anne’s story and the complete picture of Hannah’s
- By Wilson on 07-13-23
By: Hannah Pick-Goslar, and others
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The Secret Life of Sunflowers
- By: Marta Molnar, Dana Marton
- Narrated by: Kendra Murray
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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When Hollywood auctioneer Emsley Wilson finds her famous grandmother's diary while cleaning out her New York brownstone, the pages are full of surprises. The first surprise is, the diary isn't her grandmother's. It belongs to Johanna Bonger, Vincent van Gogh's sister-in-law.
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Nothing like a expected…
- By LOVETOQUILT on 05-06-23
By: Marta Molnar, and others
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The Last Jews in Berlin
- By: Leonard Gross
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, approximately 160,000 Jews called Berlin home. By 1943 less than 5,000 remained in the nation's capital, the epicenter of Nazism, and by the end of the war, that number had dwindled to 1,000. All the others had died in air raids, starved to death, committed suicide, or been shipped off to the death camps. In this captivating and harrowing book, Leonard Gross details the real-life stories of a dozen Jewish men and women who spent the final 27 months of World War II underground, hiding in plain sight.
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Very good WWll Jewish lives in Berlin
- By it.is grat!' on 10-30-24
By: Leonard Gross
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After the Last Border
- Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America
- By: Jessica Goudeau
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees have been central to America's identity for centuries - yet America has periodically turned its back in times of the greatest humanitarian need. After the Last Border is an intimate look at the lives of two women as they struggle for the 21st-century American dream, having won the "golden ticket" to settle as refugees in Austin, Texas.
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Great Content. Odd Structure.
- By Susan Stillings on 02-10-21
By: Jessica Goudeau
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Young Heroes of the Soviet Union
- A Memoir and a Reckoning
- By: Alex Halberstadt
- Narrated by: Alex Halberstadt
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Can trauma be inherited? It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a century-old cycle of estrangement. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family’s formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens’ lives.
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some depth and some historical narration
- By turgan@monomood.com on 09-21-21
By: Alex Halberstadt
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The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna
- A Novel
- By: Juliet Grames
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 16 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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For Stella Fortuna, death has always been a part of life. Stella’s childhood is full of strange, life-threatening incidents - moments where ordinary situations like cooking eggplant or feeding the pigs inexplicably take lethal turns. Even Stella’s own mother is convinced that her daughter is cursed or haunted. When the Fortunas emigrate to America on the cusp of World War II, Stella and her sister, Tina, must come of age side by side in a hostile new world with strict expectations for each of them.
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Misogyny at its worst
- By brenda on 01-15-20
By: Juliet Grames
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The Undocumented Americans
- By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell. So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants—and to find the hidden key to her own.
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Raw, heartbreaking - we can do better by others
- By RapaciousReader on 04-11-20
What listeners say about The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Edward Barck
- 05-01-22
Wonderful and engrossing writing.
I read this novel several years ago from Kindle. It had stayed in my mind and when I found out it was available on Audible, I wanted to repeat it. So much more touching and emotional this time. I shall hold on to it, and listen again sometime. I am 89.
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- Lillian Reichenthal
- 07-23-23
Wonderful book and excellent narrator.
I would highly recommend this book. Engaging story and a piece of history I never knew. The narrator did a wonderful job.
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- Brustar
- 06-10-20
A Touching Memoir of a Jewish Family in Egypt
I have always been a fan of Lucette Lagnado from the time I first read her pieces in the Wall Street Journal reflecting on her childhood and family in Egypt… and how it devolved from dining with Kings to Nasser's anti-Semitism.
The story, well read by the narrator, is emotional without being sentimental and touching without being melodramatic. The author has an amazing ability to allow a personally exhilarating or sad event to speak for itself. Somehow, her love for family and respect for tradition overcome what could otherwise have been a depressing book. Instead, it is simply a lovely story about good times and bad times, but, most of all, memorable times.
At first, I thought it would be a wonderful Netflix movie, but I soon realized that the author painted such a clear picture of her life in - and after - Egypt that a movie would be superfluous. Ms. Lagnado had an amazing story to tell; and it could not have been told better.
If you have any interest at all about the life of Jews in the Levant before they were forced to flee – or what life is presumably like for Christians in the Mideast today, this will be an excellent listen.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Olga
- 10-13-22
The narrator outdid herself!
Thoroughly enjoyed the book and the beautiful story. The narrator impressed me tremendously switching from one language to another with ease and grace. Beautifully done !
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-19-23
Must have
This story touched my heart more than I thought a story could possibly do. A part of history of the Jewish people who lived in the Arab counties such as Egypt, a history never taught in schools, sadly. My dad told me similar stories about the Jewish in my country Iraq and how they forced to leave. I loved how she included a lot of culture in this book, LOVE it!
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- Kindle Customer
- 03-08-24
Heroism and conquests
I liked and admired the determination on everyone never to be defeated no matter the hardships they encontered.
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- Simone
- 05-11-24
The honesty of the account
The reader mispronounces the foreign words in French and Arabic. I didn’t think it would bother me but it did!
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- Marc Nasoff
- 12-19-24
Reality. This was so real to so many families including mine
Descriptive truthful documents a part of history that I too lived. Required reading for all Jews who immigrated to America.
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- Mohamed ElBarbary
- 04-26-21
Touching
When I started listening to the book I didn’t like that much. The author was fascinated by her father to a legendary level. And perhaps being prejudice I thought the novel will continue on the same line. The novel quickly changes into a more human experience of a normal man and family and their ordeal and how they dealt with it.
The end is very touching and shows how when humans know each other they can overcome even the most difficult differences.
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- tobey
- 11-16-22
Painful pronunciation of French words
I really like the reader but,(and this is huge), someone should have told her how to pronounce the French words!!! There is quite a bit of French in this story and she has had no experience on how to pronounce any of the words! It took me out of the story in a jarring manner. It would have been an easy fix and I'm surprised that whoever proof-listens to the book, didn't notice this?
Story is great but the reading was a real problem for me.
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