Description: This poignant and breathtaking memoir from an award-winning "Wall Street Journal" reporter recounts the exile of her family from Egypt and her father's heroic and tragic struggle to survive his riches-to-rags trajectory.
Brief description:
Born in Cairo, Lucette Lagnado and her family were forced to flee Egypt as refugees when she was a small child, eventually coming to New York. She was the author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, for which she received the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2008, and is the coauthor of Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz, which has been translated into nearly a dozen foreign languages. Joining the Wall Street Journal in 1996, she received numerous awards and was a senior special writer and investigative reporter. She died in 2019.
Review Quotes:
"Nostalgic but objectively tempered portrait of a family at the heart of social and cultural upheaval." - Kirkus Reviews
"It succeeds especially as a... heartfelt elegy to the long-lost Cairo community of her youth." - Library Journal
"This memoir of an Egyptian Jewish family's gradual ruin is told without melodrama by its youngest survivor." - The New Yorker
"[A] crushing, brilliant book...one final kiss from the Lagnados to their beloved city." - New York Times Book Review
"Beautifully written.... A great personalized telling of Egypt's complicated history in the last half of the 20th century." - Fareed Zakaria
"A stunning achievement." - Andre Aciman, author of OUT OF EGYPT and CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
"Beautifully written . . . rich with history and insight. Wonderful." - Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of THE MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE
"Lagnado's richly textured memoir is a loving tribute to a lost man and a lost culture." - Reform Judaism
"Lagnado spares nothing in the retelling...in this tender and captivating memoir." - The Oregonian (Portland)
"A subtle and eloquent description of fatherly love and a mesmerizing portrait of a man shattered by the immigration experience." - Marianne Pearl, author of A MIGHTY HEART
"[E]xcellent . . . the sheer beauty of her remembrance of Cairo . . . embod[ies] the nostalgia and pain of exile . . . " - New York Sun
"Captivating...illuminates its places and times, providing indelible individual portraits...An exceptional memoir." - Booklist (starred review)
"Lagnado gets to the heart of the modern exodus in a way only those who lived it can." - Miami Sun Post
"Like André Aciman...she conjures a vanished world with elegiac ardor and uncommon grace." - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"Excellent new memoir... One could praise Ms. Lagnado's book for many things." - New York Sun
"Full of emotion and longing, yet never sentimental, this lyrical memoir evokes a cosmopolitan Cairo." - Jewish Woman
"The resilient dignity of Lucette's family transcends the fiercest of obstacles." - Los Angeles Times Book Review