Finally, my gratitude goes to Douglas Feiden, my husband, for his incredible dedication to me and to the realization of this book. Though often struggling with deadlines of his own, Feiden readily gave up his Sundays to hear me read a chapter, to which he offered his remarkably insightful remarks and suggested edits. This book benefited from his sensitivity and sensibility. I would have been lost without his guidance and fine-tuned ear listening to me read passage after passage. He is an extraordinary person.
· ABOUT THE AUTHOR ·
Born in Cairo, LUCETTE LAGNADO and her family were forced to flee Egypt as refugees when she was a small child, eventually coming to New York. She is the author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, for which she received the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2008, and is the coauthor of Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz, which has been translated into nearly a dozen foreign languages. Joining the Wall Street Journal in 1996, she has received numerous awards and is currently a senior special writer and investigative reporter. She and her husband, Douglas Feiden, reside in Sag Harbor and New York City.
WWW.HARPERCOLLINS.COM/LUCETTELAGNADO
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· PRAISE ·
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE ARROGANT YEARS
“The poet-philosopher Jews of medieval Spain, the loyal and comfortable Jews of bourgeois Berlin, the dashingly cosmopolitan Jews of … Cairo? King Farouk’s Egypt as yet another lost and shattered Golden Age? In Lucette Lagnado’s startling account of her family’s trials, all the old Diaspora images and expectations are subverted and reversed: Jews thrive in the land of the pharaohs and languish in the workaday neighborhoods of New York. And yet finally New York does fulfill its promise, in the radiant presence of Lucette Lagnado herself—and in The Arrogant Years, her moving and unsparingly revelatory second memoir. Here we have honesty as purity of style, and lucidity as burning emotion, and history as an enduring hymn to resilience.”
—CYNTHIA OZICK
“Lagnado traces her mother’s heartbreaking trajectory from the pasha’s library in King Farouk’s Cairo to the confines of a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, where she tries to reconstruct her vanished home. If doing so proved impossible for the persevering Edith, Lagnado’s memoir—at once an elegy to a parent and to a country—comes close.”
—DALIA SOFAR
“You don’t have to be Jewish to take this entrancing literary ride. It begins peacefully in exotic Egypt, but political turmoil and savage anti-Semitism uproots the family to find refuge in America. Here the author, Lucette Lagnado—slim little kid, with a vivid imagination and adventurous spirit—confronts dull male orthodoxy and vapidity, which she overcomes with her own outrageous theology. The Arrogant Years is a lovely book, sad and hilarious by turn, written with love of life and an enormous affection for language. You will love it too.”
—MALACHY MCCOURT
PRAISE FOR THE MAN IN THE WHITE SHARKSKIN SUIT
“Beautifully written… A great personalized story of Egypt’s complicated history in the last half of the twentieth century.”
—FAREED ZAKARIA
“Stunning memoir… A deeply affecting portrait of her family and its journey from wartime Cairo to the New World. Like André Aciman in his now classic memoir, Out of Egypt, she conjures a vanished world with elegiac ardor and uncommon grace, and like Mr. Aciman she calculates the emotional costs of exile with an unsentimental but forgiving eye… Writing in crystalline yet melodious prose, Ms. Lagnado gives us an indelible gallery of family portraits.”
—MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New York Times
· OTHER WORKS ·
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit:
A Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz (with Sheila Cohn Dekel)
· CREDITS ·
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reproduce the photographs on the following pages: Page 9: courtesy of the Garzon family. Pages 23, 29, and 54: courtesy of Maria Cattaui, Cattaui Family Archives. Page 31: courtesy of His Royal Majesty, Ahmed Fouad II, from his family archives, Switzerland. Page 32: courtesy of Nimet Cattaui and Michel Alexane. Page 57: courtesy of Lucette Lagnado, Lagnado Family Archives. Pages 72, 79, 102, 104, 161, and 210: courtesy of César Lagnado, Lagnado Family Archives. Page 93: courtesy of Isaac Lagnado. Pages 94 and 96: courtesy of Rachel and Pico Hakim. Pages 142, 153, 204, 237, and 250: courtesy of Lagnado Family Archives. Pages 206, 207, and 228: courtesy of Ed and Maureen Kozdrajski. Page 212: courtesy of Betsy Raze. Page 284: courtesy of Laurie and Eli Bryk. Page 286: courtesy of Laurie Wolf Bryk and family. Pages 308 and 332: courtesy of César and Monica Lagnado, Lagnado Family Archives. Page 323: courtesy of Lagnado-Feiden Family Archives. Page 375: courtesy of Abdel-Hamed Osman.
· COPYRIGHT ·
THE ARROGANT YEARS. Copyright © 2011 by Lucette Lagnado. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-180367-3
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062092564
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