We are reading The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit; A Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World, by Lucette Lagnado. Winner of the Sami Rohr prize for Jewish Literature.

Lucette’s father Leon is a successful Egyptian businessman and boulevardier who, dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit, makes deals and trades at the Shepherd Hotel and at the dark bar of the Nile Hilton. After the fall of King Farouk and the rise of the Nasser dictatorship, Leon loses everything and his family is forced to flee, abandoning a life once marked by beauty and luxury, to plunge into hardship and poverty, as they take flight for any country that would have them.