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Last update - 17:54 21/05/2008 Questions & Answers A conversation with Lucette Lagnado By David B. Green Tags: David B. Green  Wall Street Journal reporter Lucette Lagnado will be in Israel later this month to pick up the 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, an honor that is accompanied by a check for $100,000. Although her field of expertise in her day job is the health-care industry, Lagnado is being awarded the prize for her family memoir, "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World" (Ecco Press, 340 pages, $25.95). Lagnado was only 6 in 1963, when her father belatedly capitulated to the hostile climate toward Jews in Egypt, and agreed to move with his family to the United States. But unlike the stories of so many Jewish (and other) immigrants, the tale of Leon Lagnado -- the author's father, and the main focus of her narrative -- is of a proud and successful man who was crushed by his relocation to the New World, as he was both unable and unwilling to adjust to a new way of life in New York. Before he married Lucette's mother, Edith Matalon, Leon (who was born in Aleppo, Syria), would spend his nights gambling and womanizing (he was rumored to have been one of the many lovers of the legendary singer Umm Kulthum), and then rise at dawn to attend morning services at his local Cairo synagogue. Although Jewish aid organizations such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA) provided the family with social assistance in their new homes, first during a year-long sojourn in Paris, and then in New York, once they settled there, Leon inevitably would alienate the professionals assigned to the family, who resented his lack of enthusiasm about life in the West, and his "backward" views about the roles of men and women in a Jewish family. The Sami Rohr Prize, which is administered by the Jewish Book Council in the U.S., is bestowed in alternating years on fiction and non-fiction authors, respectively. The prize is intended to identify and encourage "emerging" writers, and to that end, will bring together winners and finalists annually, along with the contest's judges, to create a literary community whose members will continue to discuss issues connected to the writing of Jewish literature. Haaretz spoke with Lucette Lagnado by phone from New York. *** Q: Were you surprised to win Rohr Prize? A: The only way I can regard the award is as nothing short of miraculous. It's magnificent and amazing. When they called me to tell me, I very literally didn't believe them, and as the evening went on, I became convinced I had made a mistake. And then the next morning, when I saw a press release online, I had to believe. They underscored the importance of this prize: They want the author to go on and create a body of work that embodies themes that are near and dear to Jews. In my case, I am passionate about this lost world of Egyptian Jewry, and other vanished communities of the Levant, which once flourished and are now essentially extinct. It is so heartrending to me how little is known about my world -- the lost Jews of the Middle East. Yet, these were extraordinary cultures, that are gone, erased from the face of the earth. Q: Did you have to have a personal interview for the prize? A: Each of the five finalists had to appear before a panel of nine judges, whose identity you didn't know beforehand. I was helped by fact that I had done over 100 lectures about the book, and when I came to them I said, let me tell you a little about what's happened since the publication [last June]. I explained that what I had wanted to do was tell the story of the downfall of my father, his fall from grace -- between Cairo and Paris and New York. When the book was excerpted on the front page of the [Wall Street] Journal, I had immediately begun to receive mail from the dispersed community of exiles. Egypt had once had a million Europeans and 80,000 Jews, and there were 800,000 Jews around the Middle East who had to leave their homes too. Every day I would open my e-mail and find letters from places like the Isle of Wight, London, Geneva, Toronto, Adelaide, Brazil, Rome, and Brooklyn and New Jersey. I described the poignancy of what I had unwittingly unleashed. These were people who had lost their community and yet gone on with their lives, wherever destiny had landed them. Suddenly they heard about this book, and they related very personally to it. That was for me the greatest surprise of the book. Q: Your parents weren't successful in going on with their lives. Do you ever think how it might have turned out differently? A: That's the overarching question: Could we have made a better choice, when we were stuck in that hotel room in Paris? If we had decided on Israel [instead of New York], would we have found a less crushing environment? I harbored that fantasy for years. But then, just recently, I saw the Israeli film "Three Mothers" [about a Jewish family from Alexandria forced to leave Egypt and come to Israel, where they have a difficult time adjusting], and I felt like I was witnessing the work of an emotional twin. They were in Israel, along the shore of the same Mediterranean Sea. But even Israel, an hour away -- it wasn't the Egypt you had left. Still, it's possible that it might have been easier in Israel, which was a more loving culture. In America, that was lost. There's no redemptive ending. I wanted to do the anti-American Dream book. Immigration as an American tragedy. I felt my parents were absolutely destroyed by coming here. Q: Even after you were in New York, the family seemed to make the wrong choices, remaining in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn after most of the other Syrian- and Egyptian-Jewish families had moved out. A: Why did we get left behind when the rest of the community moved to Ocean Parkway, where they did a good job of reproducing their former world? Why was my dad stuck in Bensonhurst looking for a minyan every morning? The universal aspect of this story is that there are people who can't be part of the group, something stops them from being part of the rest of the crowd. My family didn't do what the other the families did. I'm not sure why. I've spent a book trying to figure it out. Millions of immigrants come to America. That's the American dream: They work hard, and they succeed and they assimilate. But what if you don't want to assimilate? My dad and my mom weren't able or willing to assimilate. My dad would tell [the social worker] Mrs. Kirschner, "We are Arabs, Madame." He was deeply religious and traditional. He didn't think women should work. He loved to say "God is great," and she hated him for it. It didn't play well with a secular pre-feminist social worker. I told the story through the eyes of Loulou [Lagnado's nickname as a child], no longer being able to go to her favorite Cairo patisserie, or to accompany her father to the bar at the Nile Hilton. People could identify with Loulou's pain, with her child's view of exile and loss. I've always been haunted. I was the youngest and my parents were pretty broken down when I was growing up. My siblings were 6, 10 and 12 years older than me, so I grew up like an only child, listening and listening to the adults' stories. The story of the little boy that my grandfather gave away in the souk, my lost uncle. I carried these memories within me. The best sources for me were 80 and older. An extraordinary cousin in Milan, named Salomone Silvera, whom I had met, who had spent time with my dad during World War II; cousins in Beverly Hills and in France, and other relatives in Brooklyn. And then there were my siblings. Also records. I got our HIAS files, and from the New York Association for New Americans. I also went to Paris and persuaded the agency that had cared for us there for nearly a year, to give me their records. Q: I have to admit I had a bad reaction to the character of your father, who, although you describe him with great love, you portray as chauvinistic toward women, and disloyal to your mother. A: You're not the first person to have responded that way to my father. One of the judges for the Rohr Prize said that she was a feminist, and that she was surprised that I did judge my father in depicting him as womanizer. I laughed, and I said that I tried to approach my subject like a reporter. In fact, to understand my father better, I interviewed womanizers. We have a second home in the Hamptons, and I know a lot of worldly men there, and even at my shul in Southampton, which I love and which was very supportive of my book. I would walk out of shul with them on Shabbat, and say, tell me about the soul of womanizers, help me understand my father. They were intrigued and sympathetic to my request, and helped me a great deal. I learned to approach my father and his dalliances clinically, with an odd remove. Within weeks or months of his marriage, he started going after women. Men have reacted in an amazing way. I think that many of them identify with Leon very personally. Some women get angry at him. But I say, look at the whole arc of the story. Look at the way he ended. He was in my eyes an utterly tragic figure. Q: Where did the book's title come from? A: The book began for me over a dozen years ago, when my father died, and I found a synagogue in Manhattan that was Sephardic, where I would feel comfortable praying -- I thought it was the kind of synagogue that would remind me of my dad. I heard that it drew a Levantine congregation: Moroccans and Tunisians and Yemenites, and maybe some Egyptians. After I attended services the first time, an old woman came over and said she was from Cairo, and that she had known my father. She said that her mother ran a nightly poker game that my father would attend. She recalled watching him from her balcony, and he was a very tall man, who always wore white -- white sharkskin. She began to tell me about this extraordinary world, during and after the war. Always with this image of white sharkskin. I would go to see her every couple of nights. When you're reporting on health care, you always think that a CEO will be the best source. But sometimes it's the nurse. This woman, who made me promise not to use her name, would get up and do a belly dance, the Dance of the Candelabras. She could conjure up this lost world so magnificently. Then she would would get so emotional, and would say: "We lacked for nothing." It was an amazing world, Old Cairo, an urbane, glamorous, multi-cultural all-night cafe society. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Fear of extinction The state of over 20 species of birds in Israel has worsened considerably. Taking advantage Jerusalem police probe possible gang rape of disabled woman.

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