
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
“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...




















Wonderful and engrossing writing.
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Wonderful book and excellent narrator.
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The end is very touching and shows how when humans know each other they can overcome even the most difficult differences.
Touching
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Story is great but the reading was a real problem for me.
Painful pronunciation of French words
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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.
A Touching Memoir of a Jewish Family in Egypt
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The narrator outdid herself!
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Must have
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Heroism and conquests
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The honesty of the account
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Reality. This was so real to so many families including mine
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