Dan’s Papers April 13, 2012 danshamptons.com Page 35
BY THE BOOK by Joan Baum
When Lucette Lagnado finished reading from The Arrogant Years, (HarperCollins), a sequel to her award-winning Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, (2007), and turned to the SRO audience gathered at Romany Kramoris’ Sag Harbor Gallery, arguably the most memorable statement of the evening was her prescient response to a question about the immediate future of Cairo. It was the Labor Day weekend. The Arab Spring in Egypt, the 18-day revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak, still held some promise, though it would soon degenerate into a continuing winter of violent discontent. How did Ms. Lagnado, whose book recalled in part happy days for her family and for Levantine Jews in Old Cairo, foresee the next few months in Egypt, as various factions began to contend for power? Her answer was terse and decisive: not good. Why, another questioner asked, were Christians being persecuted? Without missing a beat, the petite, soft-spoken 56-year old author repeated a familiar cynical observation—because the Jews had already left. At its most significant, The Arrogant Years continues to explore, as did Sharkskin, the
Antoinette Notaro,
terrible consequences for her family of the overthrow of Jewish privilege, prestige and cultural assimilation when Nasser came to power in 1956, but the book’s compelling rationale seems to be thanksgiving. Though subtitled “One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn,” The Arrogant Years shifts from being a sharply observed, often humorous and self-critical quest to belong to being a compassionate celebration of the author’s mother, a remarkable woman who transformed herself in the new land from sacrificial lamb into tiger mom. Lucette, who came to America as a child with her parents, Leon and Edith Lagnado, along with her older siblings, focused in Sharkskin on how Nasser’s policies adversely affected her debonair, handsome father, a leader in the Jewish community, making the book, as some have observed, more a biography than a memoir. In Brooklyn, where the family settled, Leon, who ”strode like a colossus through the streets of Cairo in his white sharkskin suits,” fell apart, working fitfully as a tie salesman but no longer able psychologically or financially to provide and suffering increasingly from a bad fall. At first Edith endured in silence. A beautiful but poor, bookish young woman (she had read all of Proust by the time she was 15), she was married off to cosmopolitan Leon, a man 22 years her senior, who rarely stayed at home. In compliance with cultural norms she had had to give up her beloved work as a library researcher and teacher. In America, Edith retreated into herself while her youngest child, Lucette, called Loulou, became a somewhat “contrarian” and questioning child, uncomfortable with both American ways and the orthodoxy of the
md , faad
Board certified dermatologist specializing in nonsurgical facial rejuvenation using Neurotoxins, fillers, facial peels and IPL.
Make Your House A Home With
)BNQUPOT $BSQFU 0OF 'MPPS )PNF
Looking for a better solution to your wrinkles? www.AntoinetteNotaroMD.com 13405 Main Road, Mattituck
631-298-1122
Brooklyn Ashkenazi community. Nonetheless she did well in school, enough so that she refers to that coming-of-age time as “the arrogant years” -- a reference to the feeling of confidence, of being “on top of the world” (the phrase is from F.S. Fitzgerald), of being audacious: “Rabbi, why can’t the Messiah be a woman?” She takes as a role model not a Biblical heroine but the fictional spy Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) in “The Avengers.” This was the heady 60s. Loulou did not know it at the time, but she was also being strongly influenced by her determined and courageous mother. As Leon deteriorated physically and emotionally, Edith, who spoke only French (unobtrusively translated here), slowly emerged from the shadows to assume a dominant role in the family’s life and finances. She got herself a job at The Brooklyn Public Library and began a campaign to advance her younger daughter’s academic life. And then, the summer of 1973, she began another kind of campaign. Lucette Lagnado was 16, barely starting Vassar on scholarship, when she was diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease, Edith became a fierce and indefatigable advocate. Years later it was what Lucette tried to be for her, when Edith had a stroke and became afflicted with Alzheimer’s. Leon was already in a nursing home. Lucette Lagnado writes with grace and candidness. No doubt, some of her investigative pieces for The Wall Street Journal were spurred by her ordeals tending to her parents’ care, not to mention her own traumas earlier dealing with the “sequelae” of her cancer treatments. The Arrogant Years is an engaging and instructive narrative, even if, once again, biography overtakes memoir.
13909
675 North Sea Road, Southamption, NY 11968 (631) 287-1070 www.carpetone.com 12247