Memoir Wins Jewish Book Award

By Staff Reporter of the Sun | February 13, 2008

Lucette Lagnado has won the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for "The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World," published by Ecco Press. In the celebrated memoir, Ms. Lagnado, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, retraces the journey that brought her family out of Egypt, briefly to Paris, and finally to Brooklyn.

"One could praise Ms. Lagnado's book for many things," Albert Fayngold wrote in a July 2 review of the book for The New York Sun. "But her innermost achievement is to embody the nostalgia and pain of exile."

The Sami Rohr Prize, which is administered by the Jewish Book Council, is the largest annual literary prize dedicated to Jewish literature. The award was established in 2006 by the family of real estate developer and philanthropist Sami Rohr, and the inaugural prize was given last year to the novelist Tamar Yellin for "The Genizah at the House of Shepher," published by Toby Press.