Journey Back to Old Cairo

"We have barely drifted out of Alexandria's harbor when I heard my father cry, ‘Ragaouna Masr' — Take us back to Cairo." This crie de coeur occurs roughly halfway through Lucette Lagnado's excellent new memoir, "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World." (HarperCollins, 352 pages, $25.95).

One could praise Ms. Lagnado's book for many things: for her careful charting of her family's unlikely survival in the midst of the turmoil engulfing Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt; for her meticulous re-creation of the broader sociopolitical background of the modern-day Jewish exodus, or for the sheer beauty of her remembrance of Cairo, "the land of prophets and mystics." But her innermost achievement is to embody the nostalgia and pain of exile in the figure of her father, Leon, who struggles through his "riches-to-rags" trajectory, from hisearly boulevardier days on the streets of Cairo, to his strained but enduring marriage to the author's mother, Edith, to his leading his family into a reluctant exile to France, and finally, to his gradual decline in New York.

With her sweeping narrative that unfolds around a paternal presence, Ms. Lagnado claims her place in the growing literature of the aesthetic of exile. As a precedent, one might recall André Aciman's acclaimed "Out of Egypt," a haunting invocation of the lives of his eccentric, flamboyant Alexandrian family. But where Mr. Aciman's aesthetic distillation led him to focus exclusively on Alexandria before the expulsion, the lost Eden of his childhood, Ms. Lagnado divides her narrative into the Before and After, documenting the effects of displacement over time. And while the narrator's voice in "Out of Egypt" was at once childlike and adult, lyrical, and wittily urbane, Ms. Lagnado always narrates from her New York present, aiming for maximal chronological consistency.

Those readers familiar with Ms. Lagnado's career might suppose this book is a natural product of her work as an award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter. Ironically, it is in the sentiment-prone form of a memoir — rather than her news reporting — that Ms. Lagnado achieves her due level of detachment.

But perhaps the clear-eyed distance of the book should not come as a surprise. The memoir form calls for restraint: Filtering every vestige of cultural myth, it anchors them to the world of prose. Through the aesthetic sieve, the heroic figures emerge diminished, stripped of their legendary size and endowed with humility. In the charismatic presence of Leon, a Cary Grant-like charmer in his immaculate white suits, who keeps Shabbat scrupulously, we have a hybrid of a heroic past and a mundane present. The Mosaic figure out of ancestral epic peers through the secular presence of a libertine.

In Cairo, Leon was an enigma: "Certainly, Leon approached the world from some godlike elevation, and this was partly due to his extraordinary height and bearing … but also because he had so thoroughly absorbed the fable of our family as told by his mother." For better or worse, Ms. Lagnado suggests, her parents' strained marriage is part and parcel of a Levantine fabric, a way of life that is deeply patriarchal but still infused with shimmering beauty of tradition and faith.

Indeed, the fabric will unravel. Years pass. A brief sojourn in Paris, and then New York, where her parents make reluctant adjustments to its ways they never fully accept. Leon, now old but resolutely old-world, resorts to the same textile schemes he has practiced on the streets of Cairo by selling ties to passers-by on streets and subways of Brooklyn:

‘Monsieur,' he'd say, lightly tapping them on the shoulder. With a ruffle of suspense, he would lift the lid off the brown box to reveal dozensanddozensofties....‘These cravats are one hundred percent silk,' he assured a potential customer, deliberately using the French word for tie. ‘They are all imported from Paris and Rome.'

Ms. Lagnado, whom Leon calls by her French moniker, Loulou (though pronouncing it as Arabic speakers would, with the stress on the first syllable), accompanies her father on these ventures, instilled with a sense of filial pride.

Then one day she has an epiphany. In one of the sweatshops on Delancey Street where they pick up the "cravats" from Paris and Rome, they are asked to wait for the labels to be attached. "That is when I understood," Ms. Lagnado writes:

The ties that I had admired for so long hadn't been imported from Paris or Rome. They were made here, in this small dusty sweatshop somewhere between Essex and Delancey, then had phony labels proclaiming their exotic provenance attached by one of those women bent over their Singer sewing machines.

So unconditional is Loulou's affection though, she does not let her father know that she knows his secret. "Instead, I pressed my father about what I should do with my own life." As if compensating for his downfall, she wants "to be a detective, a secret agent, a master spy. I wanted to travel around the world and return to all the cities we had fled." She certainly does these things in her book.

Mr. Fayngold is a New York-based painter and a lecturer in Russian and Comparative Literature at Baruch College.