In vivid and graceful prose Lucette Lagnado re-creates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years between World War II and Gamal Abdel Nassers rise to power. Her father Leon was a boulevardier who conducted business on the elegant terrace of Shepheards Hotel and later in the cozy dark bar of the Nile Hilton dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit. But with the fall of King Farouk and Nassers nationalization of Egyptian industry Leon and his family lose everything. As streets are renamed neighborhoods of their fellow Jews disbanded and the city purged of all foreign influence the Lagnados too must make their escape. With all of their belongings packed into twenty-six suitcases their jewels and gold coins hidden in sealed tins of marmalade Leon and his family depart 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 juxta-posed 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 Lagnados memoir offers a grand and sweeping story of faith tradition tragedy and triumph. 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 authors Jewish Egyptian family from Cairo in 1963 and her fathers heroic and tragic struggle to survive his riches to rags trajectory.
