July 14, 2023
WoEgpt
American Egyptian author Lucette Lagnado died on July 12th, 2019 in New York at the age of 63. Lagnado is known in Egypt for her family’s memoir “The Man in White Sharkskin Suit; My Family’s Exodus from Cairo to the New World.” The book was published in 2007 and translated to Arabic in 2010. Lagando came to Egypt for her book signing event at Diwan Bookstore.
Image by Courtesy Cesar Lagnado Family Archives
Lucette Lagnado or Lulu, as her parents called her, was born to a Jewish family in Cairo in 1958. At the age of six, her family had to leave Egypt and move to America. The book “The Man in White Sharkskin Suit” chronicles the life of her Egyptian Jewish family in Cairo between the 1940s and 60s. She recounts her parents’ lives growing up in Cairo and her childhood memories living in the neighborhood of Shubra, in the city that witnessed her beautiful childhood. The book also tells the story of her family’s deportation in 1963 to France and then to the United States of America.
In the book she writes, “Despite all these years, I still remember how devastated my father was when we left Egypt in the sixties of the last century, how he cried on the deck of the boat that took off from Alexandria, Ragaouna Masr” (“Take us back to Cairo”). I think he realized then that his life was coming to an end. He must have known deep inside that he would not be able to cope with life post-Cairo.
Lagando graduated from Vassar College and worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. In 2011 she wrote her second family chronicle, “The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn”, focusing on the story of her mother, Edith.
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