[R-G] Jewish Exodus from the Third World

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

There may be a minor literary genre in the making: Jewish Exodus from
the Third World. -- Yoshie

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/books/review/Newhouse-t.html>
August 12, 2007
Out of Egypt
By ALANA NEWHOUSE

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SHARKSKIN SUIT
My Family's Exodus From Old Cairo to the New World.
By Lucette Lagnado.
Illustrated. 340 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95.

In her new memoir, "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit," Lucette
Lagnado relates how her father, Leon, first reacted upon escaping the
dangerous anti-Semitic environment of Nasser's Egypt in 1962:
"Ragaouna Masr," he cried, as their boat left the Alexandria harbor —
"Take us back to Cairo."

It's a sad moment, but one would be forgiven for finding it
melodramatic. After all, we know how the story ends: the family
settles in America and, judging at least by the ascent of Lucette,
their youngest daughter, as a prize-winning Wall Street Journal
reporter, they presumably enjoy success and happiness. That this
assumption is so far off the mark — that the reality of the Lagnados'
fate is so far from the triumphalism that Americans have come to
expect from immigrant narratives — is one of many reasons to read this
crushing, brilliant book.

Lagnado traces the story of a family so connected to Cairo that they
held on until they were forced out, thankfully alive. "Alas, what no
one could stop was the cultural Holocaust — the hundreds of synagogues
shuttered for lack of attendance, the cemeteries looted of their
headstones, the flourishing Jewish-owned shops abandoned by their
owners, the schools suddenly bereft of any students." Some will blanch
at her use of the word "Holocaust" here, arguing that only the World
War II murders of European Jews are worthy of this term. But the
wholesale destruction of Middle Eastern Jewish life, along with the
even more devastating evisceration of individual lives, was nothing
short of a catastrophe — and not only for the Jews. Leon Lagnado, like
many others, had a love affair with his city, and "The Man in the
White Sharkskin Suit" is a story about what happens when two such
lovers are torn apart.

The man of the title is, of course, Leon. Fluent in seven languages
and full of charisma, he was the consummate man-about-town. He spent
his days immersed in a web of discreet business deals — all conducted
in such privacy that even family members couldn't describe his
profession — and his nights gallivanting at the city's hot spots, like
L'Auberge des Pyramides, where "on a good night, the king was almost
certain to drop by with both an entourage and a determination to
seduce the prettiest woman there, or whoever appealed to him the
most."

But Leon was also a good Jew, as it were, one who went to synagogue
every morning. "It was as if two people resided within one sharkskin
suit," Lagnado writes, "one who was pious and whose vestments
resembled those of the priests at the Great Temple, all white and
sparkling and pure, and the very different creature who led a secret,
intensely thrilling life."

Leon eventually married an innocent waif 20 years his junior, whom he
brought into the home he shared with his mother and teenage nephew —
though he hardly settled down. The two would have four children
together (a fifth died shortly after birth), but throughout, Leon
remained resolutely social, "a broker and middleman between two worlds
— cosmopolitan colonial Cairo and mystical, sensuous Islamic Cairo."

He developed a special relationship with Lucette, known as Loulou, who
became his eager sidekick and kindred spirit. In this book, she so
effortlessly captures the characters in her family, and the Egyptian
metropolis around them, that the reader may fail to notice the
overwhelming research buttressing this story. But then you stumble
upon a wonderfully vivid detail: the kind of stove used by her
grandmother, what her mother was drinking when she met Leon, the exact
menu of the elaborate meals served to a relative struck with pleurisy.

Lagnado is equally adept at maintaining suspense, particularly as the
skies begin to darken for Egypt's Jews after Gamal Abdel Nasser's rise
to power. Leon resisted leaving for a decade and then did so only
after harassment and discrimination extinguished all hope for his
family's future in Cairo. Beaten down, they shuffled weakly through
Alexandria, Athens, Genoa, Naples, Marseilles, Paris, Cherbourg and
Manhattan, before finally landing in Brooklyn.

But an easy union between Leon and America was not to be. Heartbroken
and infirm, he failed to impress the social workers and bureaucrats in
charge of helping new immigrants, leading to a string of humiliations
and failures. The "boulevardier of Cairo" never regained his footing,
and the already thin threads holding his family together frayed
irrevocably. Lagnado recounts the irony of their Passover Seder in
Brooklyn: "No matter how loudly we sang, our holiday had become not a
celebration of the exodus from Egypt but the inverse — a longing to
return to the place we were supposedly glad to have left."

Lagnado did eventually return, decades later, encouraged by an
Egyptian government now "hungry for Western currency and Western
tourism and Western goodwill." She found a city suffering, just like
her own family, from "decline and faded splendor." Cairo and its Jews
should never have been torn asunder. But by this point, the author has
drained herself of anger and instead makes a surprising peace — one
final kiss from the Lagnados to their beloved city.

Alana Newhouse is the arts and culture editor of The Forward.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/books/review/05mess.html>
August 5, 2007
Lost in Tehran
By CLAIRE MESSUD

THE SEPTEMBERS OF SHIRAZ
By Dalia Sofer.
Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95.

A memorable title will surely attract readers, but when a book becomes
a classic, it's hard to say whether the title has been part of its
canonization or has merely become retroactively canonical. Would
"Trimalchio in West Egg," one of Fitzgerald's initial choices, have in
time accrued the same force as "The Great Gatsby"? "The Septembers of
Shiraz," poignant once you've read this first novel by Dalia Sofer,
is, on its own, a title at once overly poetic and misleading. An
American reader might be forgiven for thinking Sofer has written a
romance set in the Napa Valley, "Sideways" with Vaseline on the lens.
And that would be a great shame because "The Septembers of Shiraz" is
a remarkable debut: the richly evocative, powerfully affecting
depiction of a prosperous Jewish family in Tehran shortly after the
revolution. In this fickle literary world, it's impossible to predict
whether Sofer's novel will become a classic, but it certainly stands a
chance.

Told in the third person, largely in the present tense, the
intersecting narratives follow each member of the Amin family over the
course of their most difficult year, from September 1981 to September
1982. Isaac, the paterfamilias, is approaching 60. A successful
jeweler and gem merchant, he has — to his grave discredit and danger —
been patronized by many in the aristocracy, including the wife of the
shah. In the opening chapters, he is arrested by two armed
Revolutionary Guards, taken from his office at lunchtime on a routine
workday: "He looks down at his desk, at the indifferent items
witnessing this event — the scattered files, a metal paperweight, a
box of Dunhill cigarettes, a crystal ashtray and a cup of tea, freshly
brewed, two mint leaves floating inside."