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The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World | Lucette Lagnado
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Lucette Lagnado's father, Leon, is a successful Egyptian businessman and boulevardier who, dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit, makes deals and trades at Shepherd's Hotel and at the dark bar of the Nile Hilton. After the fall of King Farouk and the rise of the Nasser dictatorship, Leon loses everything and his family is forced to flee, abandoning a life once marked by beauty and luxury to plunge into hardship and poverty, as they take flight for any country that would have them. A vivid, heartbreaking, and powerful inversion of the American dream, Lucette Lagnado's unforgettable memoir is a sweeping story of family, faith, tradition, tragedy, and triumph set against the stunning backdrop of Cairo, Paris, and New York. Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and hailed by the New York Times Book Review as a "brilliant, crushing book" and the New Yorker as a memoir of ruin "told without melodrama by its youngest survivor," The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit recounts the exile of the author's Jewish Egyptian family from Cairo in 1963 and her father's heroic and tragic struggle to survive his "riches to rags" trajectory.
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Amiable
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Pickpick

A memoir by a woman whose family, who were wealthy and prominent members of the Jewish community in Cairo, are forced to flee Egypt in the early 1960s after the fall of King Farouk and Gamal Abdel Nasser's rise to power. The book chronicles the family‘s sudden poverty and the hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to New York, where they try to assimilate into a country and culture that is foreign to them. A decent read. 3 stars

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chavalah
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I've started reading for nonfiction in the Sami Rohr Prize for emerging Jewish authors! #JewLit. Though this memoir is so rich and textured that it feels like fiction. Great characters and setting underwrite the lost community of Egyptian Jews. I review this, another memoir and some social history on #booktube. https://youtu.be/h-W-CwH6HJk

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mrldg
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Loved this memoir. It's about a Jewish family's exodus from Cairo to the New World--can't remember when the pain of exile has been so well described.

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