The Arrogant Years

June 6, 2011
Lagnado's tenacious, long-suffering Cairene mother, Edith, is the focus of this lyrical if long-winded second family memoir, after The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit. Raised mainly by her own mother in the close-knit yet diverse Jewish neighborhood of Sakakini in Cairo when her father deserted them in the late 1920s, Edith was educated rigorously in a French-speaking school patronized by the pasha Cattaui and his wife, infused by a passion for literature early on, then became a well-respected teacherâa rare achievement for girls in Egypt at the time. Edith's beauty attracted a wealthy older man about town, Leon, prompting illusions of aristocracy and romance in both Edith and her mother, which were sadly not realized. Indeed, the "evil eye" seemed to have dogged the family from Cairo to New York, where they were forced to migrate after the Egyptian revolution in 1952; displaced to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, by 1964, the family disintegrated amid straitened circumstances. The youngest, the author, nicknamed Loulou, exercised her incipient sense of injustice by testing the sexist boundaries of her neighborhood synagogue, the Shield of Young David. She modeled herself on the daring, beautiful Emma Peel in The Avengers and managed to attend Vassar and Columbia, and became an investigative journalist. Her memoir is a fully fleshed, moving re-creation of once-vibrant Jewish communities.

April 15, 2011

In The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, a memoir of her Jewish family's flight from Cairo after Nasser came to power, award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Lagnado focused on her boulevardier father, Leon. Here she compares her mother's coming of age in sleepy, sunlit Cairo to her own youth in immigrant-packed Brooklyn, NY, where she tries to fit in and must fight cancer at age 16. Lagnado's affecting first memoir took us far beyond the borders of standard 'fess-up memoirs, and I believe this one will, too. Really anticipating.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2011

Investigative reporter Lagnado (The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World, 2007, etc.) compares her mother's upbringing in Cairo to her own coming-of-age in Brooklyn.

The author is a gifted storyteller who spins ordinary family experiences into enchanting fairy tales, complete with magical backdrops (the streets of Cairo, New York, and Montreal), nasty villains and dashing heroes. For the most part, Lagnado's storybook style is both inviting and endearing. By the end, though, it wears thin. Many human experiences are too complex to be reduced to happy or sad, and Lagnado's determination to cast everyone she encounters as either friend or foe grows irksome. Her descriptions of places, particularly in Egypt, are vivid and evocative, but her perspective is simplistic and her adjectives are limited; people who intimidate her are "formidable," while those she likes are "friendly" and "down-to-earth." Often her tone is unsuited to the situation or event she is describing, rendering the narrative unintentionally funny. Her decision about whether to buy Pappagallo shoes before beginning college at Vassar and whether to withdraw from Vassar sound, in her telling, equally wrenching. Although she and her family suffered genuine tragedy, Lagnado writes as if every choice, no matter how trivial or mundane, were difficult, painful and heavy with significance. It's a delight to read about the author as an impish, spirited child; her eventual transformation into a somber, self-serious adult is an unwelcome surprise. A catatonic stroke victim by the last chapter, Lagnado's brave and brilliant mother emerges as the book's true hero.

Often heavy-handed, but also tender and heartfelt.

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Starred review from August 1, 2011
Journalist Lagnado's best-selling The Man in the Sharkskin Suit (2007), winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, portrayed her father, Leon, in his playboy heyday in Cairo. In her second work of family history, a frank and searching chronicle of lost and found dreams, Lagnado tells her mother, Edith's, story and her own. Admired for both her beauty and her intellect, fatherless Edith took immense pride and pleasure in supporting her book-loving mother as a teacher and librarian during a golden age for Egyptian Jews. Marriage put an end to that, then the prosperous family was forced to flee Nasser's Egypt for an embattled Arab Jewish enclave in Brooklyn. By the time budding contrarian Lagnado turned 10 and instigated a feminist rebellion in their modest synagogue, inspired by Emma Peel of the TV series The Avengers, they were poor, her father cruelly diminished, and her mother fearful until she went to work for the New York Public Library. Lagnado's turbulent arrogant years, that brief, precious interlude during which we feel invincible, were halted by Hodgkin's lymphoma, but she became a reporter and avenged her mother's horrific, late-life struggles with a callous health-care system. Lagnado is spellbinding and profoundly elucidating in this vividly detailed and far-reaching family memoir of epic adversity and hard-won selfhood.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)