Nostalgic but objectively tempered portrait of a family at the heart of social and cultural upheaval.
Bittersweet memoir unveils a nearly forgotten era of Jewish-Muslim affinity in the streets of Egypt’s capital.
“The Jews of Aleppo were a breed apart,” writes Wall Street Journal reporter Lagnado of her father’s origins, “intensely Jewish, intensely Arab.” The author documents her almost fairy-tale upbringing in a Syrian family that fled to Egypt at the turn of the 20th century. Her father Leon was himself a contradiction, she recalls: a French speaker in the bosom of his family, fluent in street Arabic, yet charmingly conversant in English with the British officers with whom he socialized. While a devout attendee at morning prayers and Friday synagogue, he remained an energetic nocturnal boulevardier even after marriage to the much younger Edith. King Farouk’s almost bizarrely cosmopolitan Cairo served as Leon’s carefree adult playground throughout World War II and the following decade. The author, born in 1956 into a marriage strained to the breaking point, developed a bond with her father that enabled her to experience through his sad eyes the gradual dissolution of cultural harmony among Cairo’s Arabs, Jews and leftover colonials. One of her cherished icons was Groppi’s, an incomparable French patisserie in the heart of the city. But the 1956 Nasser coup was followed by war with the still-new State of Israel, and migration became the inevitable fate of Cairo’s Jews. The Lagnados eventually departed for New York, where Leon, his world exploded, was finally forced to face the 20th century.
Nostalgic but objectively tempered portrait of a family at the heart of social and cultural upheaval.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-082212-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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