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The Leonard Lopate Show / August 03, 2007 / From Old Cairo to New York

From Old Cairo to New York

Friday, August 03, 2007

Jewish communities have lived in Egypt since Biblical times, but political changes in the 1950s forced many to flee the once-cosmopolitan country. Lucette Lagnado's family lost everything when they escaped first to Paris and then to New York, and her once-glamorous father was never quite the same.

Her memoir The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World is available for purchase at amazon.com.



Event: Lucette Lagnado will be signing books
Saturday, August 11 at 5:30 pm
The East Hampton Library
159 Main Street
East Hampton, New York
For more information, visit the library’s website.

Weigh in: Do you remember Old Cairo?


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  • [1] elle from New Jersey August 03, 2007 - 08:15AM

    Also listeners might also read Andre Aciman on his family's life in Alexandria during that time period in Out of Egypt: A Memoir (1994)
  • [2] Magda Aboulfadl from Brooklyn August 03, 2007 - 12:01PM

    I don't, but my father, who grew up in Cairo in the 40's and 50s, does. He loves to talk about how the Egyptian cinema was the 4th biggest in the world, how people wore formal dress to go to the movies and how beautiful the villas were (most were torn down for high rises). He still lives in Cairo but can barely tolerate going outside because it's so different from his youth.
  • [3] William Hall from Queens August 03, 2007 - 12:54PM

    I wonder if the author has read Lawrence Durrell's Alexandrian Quartet, which talks so extensively about old multi-cultural Egypt and its hold on the European imagination. Fascinating stuff.

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