I just fin­ished read­ing The Man in the White Sharksin Suit: My Family’s Exo­dus from Old Cairo to the New World, by Lucette Lagnado, a reporter for The Wall Street Jour­nal whom we have invited to read as part of Nas­sau Com­mu­nity College’s Lit­er­a­ture, Live! read­ing series, spon­sored by The Cre­ative Writ­ing Project (CWP). A mem­oir that is at once a love let­ter to her father, Leon, and also her mother, Edith, as well as to the city of Cairo and its way of life in the days of King Farouk, The Man in the White Sharksin Suit chron­i­cles the dif­fi­cul­ties Lagnado’s fam­ily faced as they nav­i­gated the often tor­tu­ous path they were forced to travel from the priv­i­leged life they enjoyed in Egypt to the dif­fi­cult and, espe­cially for her father, often humil­i­at­ing exis­tence that life as exiles forced them into. The book has a lot to say about the arro­gance with which Euro­pean and Amer­i­can Jews – as indi­vid­u­als and as work­ers in agen­cies that were sup­posed to help fam­i­lies such as Lagnado’s – treated their Mizrachi core­li­gion­ists, who fled or were forced to leave their home coun­tries in the years fol­low­ing Israel’s found­ing; and when she tells the story of Sylvia Kirschner, the New York Asso­ci­a­tion for New Amer­i­cans (NYANA) case­worker assigned to the Lagnado fam­ily, and how Kirschner refused to find any com­pro­mise between her pro­gres­sive val­ues relat­ing to women and Lagnado’s father’s deeply patri­ar­chal old world val­ues, it is hard not to sym­pa­thize with Leon. Not because there is any­thing defen­si­ble in his desire com­pletely to rule the lives of the women in his fam­ily, but because Lagnado makes it so clear that Sylvia Kirschner’s intol­er­ance only served to accel­er­ate the unrav­el­ing of the Lagnado fam­ily by encour­ag­ing the inde­pen­dence of Lagando’s older sis­ter Suzette. I’m not sug­gest­ing that Suzette should have allowed her­self to remain firmly held in place beneath her father’s patri­ar­chal thumb, but surely there were gen­tler ways of intro­duc­ing Leon and Suzette to the greater inde­pen­dence of women in the United States than Kirschner’s dis­missal of and dis­re­spect for the val­ues Leon had brought with him from an older gen­er­a­tion in a far more tra­di­tional part of the world.

There are many other moments in this mem­oir that are wor­thy of note – the Ital­ian Catholic friend Lagnado found and lost because of a hous­ing dis­pute between their par­ents and the neighborhood’s anti­se­mitic response to that dis­pute; the con­trast Lagnado draws between her expe­ri­ence being treated for Hodgkin’s dis­ease by a pri­vate physi­cian in New York City and her father’s dis­mal treat­ment at the Jew­ish Home and Hos­pi­tal, and then at Mt. Sinai Hos­pi­tal, in the last years of his life (and each of these con­trasted with the med­ical treat­ment the fam­ily had been able to com­mand when they lived in Egypt, and Leon could sum­mon the best doc­tors in Cairo to look after him and his fam­ily); Lagnado’s meet­ing with the woman whose father-in-law and uncle had nego­ti­ated the pur­chase of the Lagnado fam­ily home when Leon finally, reluc­tantly, real­ized he and his fam­ily could no longer remain in Egypt – but what struck me most as I read this book was how much it hinted at things I didn’t know about Mizrachi Jews. Leon’s fam­ily was from Aleppo, in Syria, and Lagnado’s dis­cus­sion of that culture’s fam­ily tra­di­tions left me frus­trated that I had never learned about them when I was in Hebrew School, or later when I was in yeshiva, and it was ham­mered into us that kol yis­rael are­vim zeh lazeh, all Jews are respon­si­ble for each other. That lofty sen­ti­ment notwith­stand­ing, the cur­ricu­lum we were taught cer­tainly made it seem like the only Jews in the world, or at least the only Jews in the world that mat­tered, were those of Euro­pean, and espe­cially east­ern Euro­pean, descent.

It’s not that I didn’t know Mizrachi Jews existed, and I cer­tainly can­not blame my con­tem­po­rary igno­rance on the faulty edu­ca­tion of my youth. After all, noth­ing has stopped me from edu­cat­ing myself other than the way I have set the pri­or­i­ties of my life (and it’s entirely pos­si­ble that I would not have picked Lagnado’s book up except that the CWP has cho­sen to invite her), but so much of my early Jew­ish edu­ca­tion was focused on Israel – the need for Israel, the value of Israel, the strug­gle to found Israel – that it’s sur­pris­ing I remem­ber no atten­tion being paid to the fact that, after Israel’s inde­pen­dence was declared in 1948, nearly a mil­lion Mizrachi Jews were either forced to leave their coun­tries or chose to leave because the con­di­tions there had become unten­able. Surely learn­ing about Israel ought to have meant learn­ing some­thing about the cul­ture of the mil­lions of Mizrachi Jews who chose to set­tle there. Equally sur­pris­ing to me is that nowhere in Lagnado’s mem­oir is Israel men­tioned except as either a pri­mary cause of the prob­lems the Jews of Egypt were start­ing to have after 1948 or as one the places where the Jews of Egypt could go that would accept them with­out fail. Lagnado does not laud Israel as the Jew­ish home­land, nor is there any sense from her book that the Jews of Egypt saw Israel in that way at all; even when she talks about the Egypt­ian Jews who chose to go to Israel, she presents the choice as matter-of-fact, even as des­per­ate, not as one that might con­tain within it some small part of the hope with which the Euro­pean Zion­ists clearly embraced the idea of a Jew­ish home­land there.

The Man in the White Shark­skin Suit, how­ever, is a mem­oir, not a his­tory. I am sure that there were Mizrachi Jews who embraced the found­ing of Israel as fer­vently and hope­fully as the Euro­pean Zion­ists did. More, I am sure that the feel­ing I had after read­ing Lagnado’s book, that the Jews of Egypt were far bet­ter off in Egypt than in any of the places to which they fled, has more to do with the priv­i­leged life her fam­ily lived there than with the real­ity of the lives of all Egypt­ian Jews. I am fully aware, in other words, that the story of the Mizrachi Jews is, has got to be, far more com­plex than any­thing I could learn from read­ing Lagnado’s mem­oir; and yet read­ing the book, espe­cially the chap­ter called “The Last Days of Tar­boosh,” brought me back to a trans­la­tion con­fer­ence panel I was on with Ammiel Alcalay and Sami Chetrit, a Mizrachi Jew (Moroc­can, if I remem­ber cor­rectly). Dur­ing his talk Chetrit spoke of how – and I am para­phras­ing here; I wish I could remem­ber his exact words – the Euro­pean Zion­ist Jews col­o­nized the Mizrachi Jews, replac­ing the Mizrachi nar­ra­tive with the Euro­pean Jew­ish nar­ra­tive, even to the point of usurp­ing the language(s) Mizrachi Jews had been speak­ing for cen­turies, if not mil­lenia, before Israel was founded. (I am not sure if this was a ref­er­ence to the European-based revival of Hebrew as the Jew­ish national lan­guage or to some other con­flict over lan­guage.) His state­ments sur­prised me in much the same way that read­ing Lagnado’s books did, because they hinted at a story I did not know, that felt like I should have known it.

Like Lagnado, Chetrit obvi­ously has a per­spec­tive, and a bias, and I am in no way informed enough to judge the accu­racy of what he said. What I can say is that any Jew­ish edu­ca­tion worth its salt should have as one of its goals mak­ing its stu­dents that informed, or at least teach­ing them that they should feel respon­si­ble for inform­ing them­selves; and that most cer­tainly is not the Jew­ish edu­ca­tion I received. Indeed, the Jew­ish edu­ca­tion I received ren­dered both Chetrit’s per­spec­tive and Lagnado’s story entirely invis­i­ble, and it did so not only in the inter­est of mak­ing Israel cen­tral to Jewish-American iden­tity, but also to estab­lish­ing the Zion­ist nar­ra­tive of the found­ing of Israel as the uni­ver­sal Jew­ish nar­ra­tive of the found­ing of Israel. Sto­ries like Chetrit’s and Lagnado’s demon­strate that such uni­ver­sal­ity is a myth. Con­fronting that myth is impor­tant not because it calls into ques­tion Israel’s right to exist (it makes me angry that I feel I even have to say that) but because com­ing to terms with the full com­plex­ity of the nar­ra­tive of Israel’s found­ing is the only way I know to come to terms with the fact that I, as a Jew – and maybe this applies to con­cerned peo­ple who aren’t Jew­ish as well – can­not not take a posi­tion regard­ing Israel’s exis­tence as a Jew­ish state.

(I’ve writ­ten more about this issue in the series I wrote called What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) anti­semitism and Israel. The link will take you to part 4 of the series; there is a list of the other posts in the series at the bot­tom of that post.)

Lucette Lagnado’s read­ing at Nas­sau Com­mu­nity Col­lege is sched­uled for March 2010, date and time to be announced. For more infor­ma­tion, please visit the Cre­ative Writ­ing Project web­site.