The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

by Lucette Lagnado

  But now, in the early 1960s, it was so down-at-the-heels it catered mostly to needy low-income families and stray out-of-towners and refugees like us who couldn’t afford any better—a forerunner of the welfare hotels that would become commonplace.

  Though we were given a suite, our accommodations were, if possible, even more squalid than at the Violet Hotel. We had a small kitchenette and two large drafty rooms, where beds were lined up one next to the other as in a hospital ward. There were only five beds for the six of us, so I doubled up with my mom in a small bed, close to a wall with a large gaping hole.

  We were used to balmy winters, and even Paris had been mild the year we were there, but here it was freezing cold. I went to bed every night in my street clothes—a pair of gray wool slacks from Cairo and a turtleneck sweater.

  My mother thought I was being silly, as did the rest of the family. No one could understand why I insisted on sleeping in scratchy woolen street clothes instead of the soft and toasty flannel pajamas they had managed to retrieve from one of the suitcases, and I am not sure I understood myself.

  We fell back into the nerve-racking rituals of people with nothing to do. I took walks with various members of my family—slow walks with my father, who was in constant pain, aggravated by the frigid temperatures; brisk walks with César, who was curious about America but not in love with it the way he had been in love with Paris; anxious walks with my mom, who seemed bewildered by the Village and New York in general; quiet walks with my sister, who took me again and again to Washington Square Park.

  On the benches were people clad entirely in black, who looked like no one I had ever seen before. I couldn’t help staring at these strange creatures seated amid the snowy white splendor of Washington Square Park. “Ce sont des bohémiens, des ‘beatniks,’” my sister explained. We’d sit in one of the benches and stare at them, hoping they would approach us. They had eyes only for each other, and neither I nor my sister, all bundled up in our layers of Mediterranean garb, could possibly be part of any group. We were still outsiders, even to the beatniks, the quintessential outsiders.

  When she walked alone, Suzette would occasionally find herself accosted by a beatnik, asking her for a handout. She’d shake her head no and continue walking. But she felt strangely guilty about turning them down, though she had even less than they did.

  More inviting even than Washington Square Park was our local supermarket. I’d never been inside a supermarket before, and I found it dazzling, especially the fruits and vegetables, which I was used to buying loose by the pound, in outdoor stalls or from the vendors who roamed around Malaka Nazli. Here, they came packaged in green paper cartons, tightly wrapped in a layer of cellophane, so that even ordinary grapes or pears seemed remote and shiny and untouchable. I wondered why anyone would take the trouble to cover bananas or green beans in plastic, when anywhere else in the world, it was possible to simply reach for some. That must be America, I decided: a country where even commonplace items like apples sparkled and looked expensive and desirable beneath their plastic sheathing.

  Bread was another mystery. I was used to tall thin golden baguettes purchased fresh from bakeries all over Paris, and in Cairo, we enjoyed hot round pita bread that came from the oven. But here, the package of white bread looked nothing like the bread I knew. It was all dough with practically no crust, while I was used to crust and very little dough. We eyed the packages of Wonder suspiciously, inspecting them closely.

  I was anxious to sample some, but my father seemed horrified: “Loulou, ce n’est pas du pain, ça,” he said; This is not bread. We never bought white bread from the supermarket near the Broadway Central and rarely, if ever, later on.

  A few days after we’d arrived, the resettlement agency called, asking to see us. HIAS had discharged us from its files; our only remaining contact involved the debt we had incurred for the tickets to sail aboard the Queen Mary, and which my father had agreed to repay over time. Now we were in the care of NYANA, the New York Association for New Americans. Mom, who loved to Frenchify every English name, promptly dubbed it la Nyana.

  My father and César made their way to the agency’s lower Manhattan office to meet with the social worker in charge of our Americanization. Sylvia Kirschner, a tough-talking veteran, seemed from the start to take an active, almost visceral dislike to my father. She offered so much advice it was dizzying. Our stay at the Broadway Central had to be as brief as possible. The family needed to find a place to live. My dad, my older siblings, and even my mom all had to go out and find work. We had to master English and meet people and make friends and lead normal lives again.

  The initial meeting had the feel of a police interrogation. Why hadn’t we begun to look for an apartment? Where were my mother and the other children? Why hadn’t they come, too? Had we made any contact with relatives who could help us find work or a place to live? We had been in America all of five days; Mrs. Kirschner seemed in an awful hurry.

  My father sat there, listening politely, talking only when she lobbed questions his way. He was so quiet and deferential that the social worker misunderstood—the way that she would consistently misunderstand him. She mistook his silence for contempt, and decided he was being obsequious when he was simply trying to be gentlemanly, more so than usual because he knew that this woman held our fate in her hands.

  Unwittingly, Dad had incurred the wrath of Sylvia Kirschner.

  It wasn’t that Mrs. Kirschner was blind to my father’s frailties—his advancing age, his deepening infirmities, his growing dependency. On the contrary, in page after page of notes that read almost like a diary, she chronicled my dad’s failing strength, observing that he “looks considerably older than his age, walks with a pronounced limp and also very slowly due to his leg fracture,” and “was obviously in pain.” Even in the relative comfort of her office, she noticed that he could barely sit still without shifting his leg or grimacing, and he was so “very tired.”

  Yet, faced with a man clearly in decline, Mrs. Kirschner seemed unmoved. She found him troubling. Though skilled and vastly experienced, a professional who’d helped thousands of immigrants make the transition from the old world, making that transition had been based on the act of letting go—abandoning belief systems that were quaint and out of date in favor of the modern, the new, the progressive ideas that were so uniquely American.

  That is what assimilation was all about, yet the overly polite gentleman with the vaguely British accent and the severe limp rejected the notion out of hand.

  My father was by no means convinced the values of New York trumped those of Cairo. He couldn’t see abandoning a culture he loved and trusted in favor of one he barely knew, and which he instinctively disliked. He preferred being an old Egyptian to a new American. He had, in short, no desire whatsoever to assimilate. “We are Arab, madame,” he told Mrs. Kirschner.

  It was a tragic clash of cultures and personalities. Both strong-willed people, my father and Sylvia Kirschner were set in their ways, and adhered to belief systems that were worlds apart and could never, ever be reconciled. Like boxers in a ring, they stood in their respective corners, determined to fight to the final bell for the principles they cherished.

  And in a way, the test of wills between Sylvia Kirschner and Leon Lagnado in a small refugee agency in early 1964 presaged the conflicts my family would face for years to come in America, where our values and feelings about the importance of God and family and the role of women would constantly collide with those of our American friends. It also hinted at the larger, more terrifying and far deadlier conflict that would break out between the United States and the Muslim world decades later, when the United States would seek to spread its belief in freedom and equality only to find itself spurned at every turn by cultures that viewed America as a godless and profoundly immoral society.

  Leon could have been a criminal, a jewel thief, a philanderer, a swindler: nothing could have offended our social worker more than his refusal to conform and change an
d cast aside those values she clearly viewed as virtually un-American and utterly repugnant.

  In her eyes, my father was a patriarch in a land where there were no patriarchs. He wanted to rule over his wife and children—perhaps even his social worker—even though men weren’t supposed to do that anymore. “He is an extremely rigid person, with limited horizons, has an Oriental psychology, covered up by a veneer of manners,” she wrote. My dad and his views were hopelessly at odds with the enlightened society he had been fortunate to enter.

  Or maybe not so fortunate. In one of her more insightful moments, Mrs. Kirschner remarked that my father “regards the immigration as a calamity rather than as an opportunity.”

  Barely a week later, the six of us trooped down to the tip of Lower Manhattan to meet with the redoubtable Mrs. Kirschner.

  She looked us up and down, taking notes, then came to me, peered closely my way, and took more notes. The only one she approved of unreservedly was Suzette. From the start, the two laughed and chatted as if they were old friends. My sister turned on the charm. “A very attractive, articulate young lady,” Mrs. Kirschner raved in her case files.

  Not all of us fared as well.

  César seemed to annoy her almost as much as my father. She didn’t accuse my teenage brother of being old-world; she simply resented a sense of ambition she felt went beyond his natural abilities. Mrs. Kirschner seemed troubled by my older brother’s outsize dreams, the fact he resisted taking an entry-level job as a messenger or a clerk. She stressed the need for him to be practical and start working.

  Over the years, my brother would blame Sylvia Kirschner and la Nyana for the path he had taken, for the fact he had gone to work at eighteen, stuck in a series of menial and low-paying jobs, when he should have been attending school and building his career.

  Instead, because of the fateful decree that he land a job, any job, the college degree that César could have earned in four years took him a decade to complete. He had no choice but to attend night school, where most students were immigrants like himself, which only underscored his feelings of apartness and alienation. His master’s degree, which should have taken two years, took five instead. By the time he was done, César was thirty-five.

  Mrs. Kirschner was deeply sympathetic to my mother and anxious to help her, to change her, to help her take advantage of the opportunities that had been denied to her as a woman in Egypt.

  Mrs. Kirschner became obsessed with my mother’s appearance, the fact that she was toothless and looked older than she was. The idea that a forty-two-year-old woman would walk around without any teeth struck her as almost barbaric. In the social worker’s eyes, Edith was timid, quiet, anxious, and clearly under my father’s spell. Mom “gave the impression of a frightened person,” the social worker wrote, “emphasized by her enormous black eyes which stare almost childlike for protection.” Leon was to blame. All the conflicts and problems and pathology she saw in my family were largely the result of his impossibly domineering personality.

  What could America do for such a woman? It might not be able to give back her self-esteem, but it could at least provide her with a set of false teeth.

  After grilling both my parents on why Mom hadn’t seen a dentist in Egypt, she ordered her to go immediately to a dental clinic to be fitted for a set of dentures; the agency would foot the bill, Mrs. Kirschner grandly decreed, along with her edict that we had to leave the Broadway Central.

  Most of the other refugees from the Levant had landed in one small corner of southern Brooklyn. My family was so unmoored, it made eminent sense for us to rejoin our lost community. César and my father journeyed daily to Bensonhurst, the ten-block area where refugees from Cairo and Alexandria had fetched up in an urban encampment of low-lying redbrick tenement buildings and simple two-family homes. They walked in the bitter cold, searching and searching for signs in the window proclaiming “Apartment to Let.”

  Early on, they stumbled on one promising prospect—a small apartment on the second floor of a house owned by a dentist, Dr. Cohen. My father engaged the dentist in conversation, hoping to negotiate a more affordable rent by stressing his deep commitment to Judaism, his habit of attending services every morning. Only at the end did Dr. Cohen blurt out that he wasn’t Jewish. Dad, stunned and confused, left, bewildered by this land where nothing was what it seemed, not even a doctor named Cohen.

  My mother and I also tried our luck. We ventured out to Brooklyn and wandered around, on the lookout for To Let signs. Most were beyond our means. Exhausted, we decided to pay a call on my mom’s relatives and the stepsister she hadn’t seen in five years, not since Tante Rosée and her brood had left Egypt.

  I had never met Rosée, but my mom had spoken worshipfully of this older woman who had been like a mother to her. She loved to recall her engagement, when Rosée took it upon herself to sew her bridal gown. At the end, Rosée had tucked strands of her own hair inside the hem for good luck. My mother could never part with it, and there it was, lying in one of the twenty-six suitcases that had followed us to America.

  My aunt lived on a staid two-way street of shops with apartments upstairs. It was the Christmas season, and the area glistened with holiday decorations. What astonished me most wasn’t the abundance of trees and lights and plastic reindeers but the lone Hanukkah menorahs with their soft orange glow on display in so many windows. I had never seen an electric menorah before; at home, we lit small wicks that floated in a pool of oil and water.

  I was used to a culture where religion was practiced discreetly, behind the closed doors of one’s house or synagogue, yet here were Jews observing their holiday as openly and assertively as their Catholic neighbors with their wreaths and garlands and Merry Christmas signs.

  Tante Rosée and my mother embraced, and the obligatory café Turque was brought out on a tray, but later, Rosée began to lecture Mom on the etiquette of visiting in America.

  New York wasn’t like Cairo, she declared. The custom of dropping in on friends or even relatives without prior arrangements simply wouldn’t do. “Here, in America, you have to call first,” she told my mom. I noticed my mother freeze, then smile blankly.

  We wandered back into the street, but suddenly, the glimmer of the holiday lights seemed a lot less hopeful. We felt far away from Malaka Nazli and the stream of relatives and friends who dropped in on us constantly, and on the long trip back to Manhattan, we were both silent. It had begun to dawn on us that this culture we were being asked to embrace, with its promise of riches and opportunity, could be as savage as the December night air that pierced our flimsy Cicurel garb.

  The tough, forbidding woman we had met this evening bore little resemblance to the Tante Rosée my mom remembered from Egypt. She preferred to think of the last exchange as an aberration, a mistake, and remember her stepsister as the person who had taken it upon herself to sew her a magnificent wedding dress and had brought her back to life as she struggled with typhoid and the loss of her blue-eyed baby girl.

  IT WAS CERTAINLY THE coldest winter we had ever known, but it was also one of the coldest winters New York had ever known.

  Every day, César and my father trudged arm in arm through the streets of Brooklyn, humbled by the snowdrifts that were several feet high. My dad’s limp grew worse, aggravated by the perilous walks on snow and ice. My brother wasn’t faring well either. He was so thin—nearly six feet tall, he weighed only 140 pounds and suffered from a terrible cough, the result of the frigid weather and his habit of smoking several packs of cigarettes a day.

  Mrs. Kirschner suggested he and my father go immediately to the Northern Dispensary, a clinic in the Village.

  To help César recover, the agency also approved the purchase of a winter coat. Together with my dad—the two had become inseparable—my brother set out for S. Klein’s, the discount department store in Union Square. There was a sale, and out of a combination of prudence and panic and confusion, my brother selected an overcoat that was nearly ten sizes too big.


  The days of the sleek, fitted black leather blouson were over. The dark woolen coat on sale for $17.50 was size 46—suitable for a man several inches taller and many pounds heavier. It reached past his knees, the sleeves were way too long, and the shoulders drooped, so that its style was raglan.

  When César modeled his new coat, my father nodded his approval and remarked that my brother would grow into it. It would surely help him survive his first American winter. Alas, the opposite proved to be true. The coat was so large it shielded him far less effectively than one his own size.

  It was as if, marooned in America, we had lost our perspective, our sense of proportion. My brother, who had always liked well-tailored, fashionable clothing, ended up purchasing a coat that was neither. My father, who had paid such meticulous attention to cut and style, was now unable to look at a garment his eldest son was buying and point out its obvious flaws.

  Worse still, Dad had become oblivious to his own appearance. For the first time in his life, he was dressing sloppily, and paying almost no attention to the way he looked. Mrs. Kirschner was struck by my father’s battered, impoverished garb. Once the essence of style as he ambled through Cairo in his immaculate white suits, he was described in her notes as “shabbily dressed.” What about all the clothes in the twenty-six suitcases? she wondered.

  My father was silent, both when he sat in Sylvia Kirschner’s office and back at the Broadway Central. He had always kept his own counsel, and he wasn’t about to start confiding in her or us or anyone his despair over finding himself stranded in a hotel room in Greenwich Village in winter, with no means and no prospects and a little girl asking for white bread and fruit wrapped in cellophane.

  And so the only sign of his inner struggle was in his clothes—frayed, careworn, slightly askew.

  One morning, we woke up to the sound of clanging bells. We could hear people shuffling in the hallway, then more bells. It was barely five o’clock—we had no idea what was going on. We were only days before Christmas, yet my mother sat up and cried out delightedly, “Ce sont les cloches de Pâques”; They must be Easter bells. There was furious banging outside our room, and then the cry, “Fire!”