Lucette Lagnado gives London talk

The journalist and author Lucette Lagnado, in London for Jewish Book Week, addressed an audience of 120 at the Sephardi Centre last week.

Whatever happened to Egypt's 80,000 Jews? Answer: They're all busy emailing Lucette Lagnado.

The prize-winning author of The man in the white sharkskin suit has received messages from all corners of the globe, expressing an extraordinary sense of longing for the vanished life they led in Egypt. "We had no chance to say goodbye,' wrote one correspondent from Philadelphia. An exiled Copt told how he could not even visit his home, now the Egyptian ministry of the interior. Another emailer from Alsace-Lorraine told how his parents had wished never to be buried there. Both parents were buried in Alsace-Lorraine.

Also buried has been the history of Egypt's Jews and the million Europeans who once made Egypt a shining example of sophistiscated multiculturalism. Most were brutally expelled, their passports stamped, 'one-way- no return'.

Bombarded by requests to die in Egypt, one diplomat could only apologise for what had befallen the exiles. Yet such is the amnesia and ignorance of the causes of this mass exodus that, the Egyptian government representative greeting Lucette Lagnado in 2005 on her return to the land of her birth after an absence of over 30 years, asked uncomprehendingly:" why did you leave?"

Lucette Lagnado's book centres on her father Leon, with whom she was especially close. The stately Leon, known as the Captain, would stride through the boulevards of Cairo in his white sharksin suit. An observant Jew, he would attend synagogue every morning without fail. Equally unfailingly, he would stay up all hours to play poker and flirt with women - a uniquely Sephardi blend of religious devotion and wordliness.

As the Nasser regime deposed the Jewish community's last guardian, King Farouk, so the Jewish way of life in Cairo, Alexandria and Port Said disintegrated. Twenty-five thousand Jews and hundreds of thousands of foreigners were forced out after the 1956 Suez crisis, but Leon hung on until 1963, when his wayward daughter Suzette's escapades landed her in jail and forced the family to plan their escape.

When they finally did, Lucette's abiding memory is of her father standing on the deck of the ship taking them from Alexandria to Marseille, crying out,'Ragaouna al-Masr' - 'take us back to Egypt'.

Leon never recovered from his uprooting. The impoverished family resettled in Brooklyn, New York, but Leon was never able to reconcile his oriental values with those required for assimilation in America, as personified by the 'social worker from hell' assigned to their case - Sylvia Kirshner.

Addressing an audience of 120 recently at the Sephardi Centre in London, Lucette confessed that she had never seen or felt white sharkskin, though the audiences she had addressed since her book had come out invariably contained a textile broker from Brooklyn or Queens who promised to send her a sample. (Members of the London audience attested to their fathers also possessing white sharkskin suits, worn on the High Holydays).

What Lucette missed most about Egypt was its sense of mysticism. As a six-year old child suffering from a mystery ailment she was taken to Maimonides' synagogue. Falling asleep in the crypt would guarantee a cure, it was said. In rational America, nobody believed in miracles.

In addition to her day job as a Wall Street Journal reporter, Lucette Lagnado is working on a sequel to 'Sharkskin', 'The Arrogant Years'. But it would be nice if Lucette's wayward sister Suzette - whose arrest for consorting with foreigners was the event which finally made the family flee their beloved Egypt - also told her story in print.

Hear interview on BBC radio (Outlook - 27 February, World Service)