August 17, 2007
Lucette Lagnado: Viewing Old Cairo from the New World
Lucette Lagnado’s eloquent book, “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
He goes from being a successful, cosmopolitan businessman who thrived on the nightlife of Old Cairo to a Brooklynite tie salesman who scraped out a living and never really felt comfortable with life outside Egypt.
Leon Lagnado’s tale mirrors those of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Arab lands who reluctantly left (or were forced to leave) their homes in the years following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. For Leon and his fellow Egyptian Jews, their departure was further hastened by the deposing of King Farouk in 1952 and the Suez War in 1956.
Lagnado’s reporting appears extensive as she filled the book with countless details and descriptions (she’s a former editor at The Forward and currently an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal). On occasion, I found myself wondering whether she’d accepted some of her relatives’ recollections a little too easily. After all, details fade as memories grow old. But, Lagnado does her best to note areas where the truth was difficult to ascertain, such as the rumor of her father’s affair with Om Kalsoum, the legendary Egyptian chanteuse.
The cumulative effect of her reporting renders a richly textured portrait of her family, especially her father.
Once known as “The Captain,” Leon Lagnado absorbed all there was to be had in Old Cairo. In fact, the only thing he seemed to lack was sleep. He worked for himself during the day, finding business opportunities in the vast city where trade thrived. Deals were easy to come by for the sharp-dressed, amiable man who spoke several languages.
But the real fun started in the evening as Leon anticipated what the Cairo nightlife might bring. Here’s how Lucette Lagnado described her father’s nightly preparations:
“Except for Friday nights, he didn’t even bother to stay for supper. If he came back at all after work, it was to go immediately to his room and dress for the evening ahead, an elaborate ritual that he seemed to enjoy almost as much as what the night held in store.
“He was meticulous and more than a little vain. He had assembled a wardrobe made by Cairo’s finest tailors in every possible fabric—linen, Egyptian cotton, English tweed, vicuna, along with shirts made of silk imported from India. There were also the sharkskin suits and jackets he favored above all others, especially to wear at night.”
From there, Leon would put on a white gold diamond encrusted tie clip to go with his diamond ring and then dab eau de cologne on his hands, neck and temple.
He would set off from his apartment, which he shared with his mother and a cousin, and oftentimes would not return until dawn. He’d move from nightclubs to parties to private poker games, chatting with British officers, eying eligible ladies and dancing in luxurious ballrooms until it was time for morning prayers.
The sun would rise and Leon would start the cycle over again.
At age 42, he finally settled down. He married Lucette’s mother, Edith, and they raised a family. However, sometime after their first child was born, Leon succumbed to the city’s temptations once more and resumed his nightly schedule, much to the dismay of Edith.
You know where this story is heading. Leon’s fortunes change with the toppling of King Farouk, and the family begins to feel pressure to leave. They first head to Paris where, after much agonizing, they decide to settle in America rather than Israel.
By this time, Leon had already suffered a bad fall and he underwent a painful surgery that left him with a limp.
Once he’d settled into New York, Leon stuck with what was familiar: the synagogue near their home chanted the prayers in the Old Cairo style and his diet of olives and pita bread remained the same even in Brooklyn.
But, life was not without its struggles in the New World. He couldn’t seem to catch a break from the landlords who sought to evict the family, nor from the social service agencies that wanted to blame the woes of his wife and children on Leon’s patrician ways. In addition, Lucette suffered several maladies over the years, including a frightful bout with Hodgkin’s disease during her teens.
All the while, Leon maintains his dignity even when he’s insulted by one landlord and threatened with bodily harm by another. Lucette also notices that he never showed a hint of “impatience or weariness” when a potential customer rejected his sales pitch. The only time he broke down in tears was when he pleaded with a talented doctor to take over Lucette’s treatment.
But, life in America took its toll in other ways. Leon spent more and more time in synagogue, presumably because he had nothing else to do. He also became more withdrawn at home, preferring to read his beloved red prayer book rather than do anything else around the house.
You can’t say for sure whether Leon ever resigned to accept the fact that he would never again live in Old Cairo. He certainly missed it but he died without letting on any disappointment.
By the book’s end, though, you get the feeling that the person who needs a catharsis from all the Old World nostalgia is the author.
And she gets it, presumably from writing this book. Also, she returned to Cairo after her father’s death and visited the family’s former apartment as well as Leon’s favorite restaurant hangout. Both still exist in name but they’ve changed so much, Lucette can barely recognize them: dust covers the Lagnado’s old apartment building, the apartment itself appears dilapidated and neglected and the shelves at the once-thriving restaurant are almost barren.
After seeing what had become of the city, Lucette appears to have made peace with the idea that Old Cairo would never again be.
Inside the café, she mused, “The shelves, once laden with distinctive pastries, were nearly all barren. The area in the front that once housed a thriving take-out business had a forlorn, abandoned look to it. Someone was manning the old wooden cashier station, but there was nobody in line. Like Cairo—like my family after Cairo—the famed establishment was all about decline and faded splendor.”
Later, as she leaves her old apartment building, Lucette gets into a taxi and looks up one more time at the family’s old home. As the taxi drives away, she imagines her extended family – her grandmothers, cousins, aunts and uncles, her mother and, most of all, her father — all standing on the apartment balcony.
Without a doubt, they would have wanted to stay, if only to try and rediscover some small remnant of their beloved Old Cairo.
“The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit,” is published by Ecco (340 pages, $25.95).