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.